If you take a look at all the loot box mechanics out there honestly theirs is the least bad. STILL BAD and shouldn’t be a thing, but they’re way less in-your-face and also you can sell the boxes that you get for free just by playing and use that to buy games.
I’m not defending lootboxes but I will defend history. They weren’t the first one. The physical implementation of the same concept has been around for decades (gatchapon in the east, baseball cards in the west), the first digital implementation was in Maplestory about half a decade before Valve and the first implementation in a western game was in FIFA (whichever it was that contained the ultimate team) about a year before Valve made their implementation.
There’s plenty of blame to throw at Valve, but some of the lootbox blame, namely the one you’ve brought up, should be thrown at EA because EA was first in the western market and the industry would’ve gone down the lootbox route even if Valve hadn’t done anything.
In Western regions (North America and Europe) around 2009, the video game industry saw the success of Zynga and other large publishers of social-network games that offered the games for free on sites like Facebook but included microtransactions to accelerate one's progress in the game, providing that publishers could depend on revenue from post-sale transactions rather than initial sale.[23] One of the first games to introduce loot box-like mechanics was FIFA 09, made by Electronic Arts (EA), in March 2009 which allowed players to create a team of association football players from in-game card packs they opened using in-game currency earned through regular playing of the game or via microtransactions.[26] Another early game with loot box mechanics was Team Fortress 2 in September 2010, when Valve added the ability to earn random "crates" to be opened with purchased keys.[13] Valve's Robin Walker stated that the intent was to create "network effects" that would draw more players to the game, so that there would be more players to obtain revenue from the keys to unlock crates.[23] Valve later transitioned to a free-to-play model, reporting an increase in player count of over 12 times after the transition,[25] and hired Yanis Varoufakis to research virtual economies.[27] Over the next few years many MMOs and multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) also transitioned to a free-to-play business model to help grow out their player base, many adding loot-box monetisation in the process,[25][28] with the first two being both Star Trek Online[29] and The Lord of the Rings Online[citation needed] in December 2011.
The upshot is that since nobody knows whether they own it or not there is nobody bothering to actively enforce copyright, so you can just download the games for free if you want on NOLFrevival.
Both NOLF 1&2 and Contract JACK are available on the website above, patched and fixed to work on modern machines.
YMMV but when I tried NOLF 1 for the first time earlier this year I sadly found the gameplay so poorly aged I wasn’t having enough fun to make myself finish it - despite the setting, theme and writing being quite fun.
I might give it another shot at some point though, it was a critic’s darling back in the day and I’d like to be able to say I have played it.
I only remembered it was being developed from watching a Nintendo Direct half a year ago, and then only heard about it after launch due to performance issues and Randy opening up twitter again.
The worst part, it’s apparently really good, which I didn’t expect. But I can’t run it on anything and won’t for a while.
I’m a MAN. I’m a MAN who likes to watch MEN play with OTHER MEN. I especially like it when those MEN TOUCH EACH OTHER. It makes me cheer! Sometimes they have to RAM THEIR HOT SWEATY BODIES INTO ONE ANOTHER. Yeah I love that!
i mean that mod does change the game completely though lol, and the graphics are just not the same. i also feel like 90% of the target audience can run 4 instances of mankind divided at once. it ran on the PS4 and XB1, which came out 12 years ago. the remaster is literally getting released on the switch.
most of the complaints ive read have been unfounded remarks about them just using ai to retexture everything, or recommending mods that are in no way equal to the remaster. what would make it better though, in your opinion?
“Support for multi-monitor and ultra-wide displays, auto saves, achievements, cloud saves, and more quality-of-life features are confirmed to be included.” sounds pretty nice to me, and reading over their goals it appears to be a very legitimate remaster.
less jank, better looking (obviously a hot take of mine, reading peoples bitter comments) and the opportunity for millions of people to experience the game for the first time without taking time to learn how to mod the game just to get a subpar experience.
I wouldn’t say no to oblivion remaster treatment. Completely new models and environments in a new engine, while running the old game logic.
Right now it really does look like they remastered it to in 2007 and are releasing it now.
I think its more sad they’re doing a remaster and not putting more effort into it.
yeah i dont get it at all lmao. those graphics look SIGNIFICANTLY better, and they have promised a pretty good list of improvements. all i see is speculation and cynicism. those models look pretty fucking new in comparison to the originals, and their lighting engine is now in existence, just from the 2 screenshots i saw.
It is, but hear me out: There is a difference between failing with a reason and failing silently - and seemingly with no reason. I don’t know this project and I don’t know what happened and how the creators handled this, but I have been on Kickstarter since it came to life and I have seen projects with poor communication fail and everyone was furious and I have seen projects fail who managed to communicate their struggles to their investors very well and they didn’t get overrun with refund requests. I know it is hard to admit problems and finally failure, but it has to be part of the progress.
You don’t play OG deus ex for the graphics or… Combat tbh, but this seems like a half ass coat of paint instead of anything of real substance. You can already play Deus ex on modern hardware so I don’t know what you’re really getting here.
idk all the og graphics look pretty dog ass as someone who didnt play the original, just from the reference they used it looks significantly better. more depth, texture, resolution, shadows, reflections, and contrast. i dont really see it being too “shiny” it just looks like there is now light lmao.
seriously though that original character looks awful and kinda terrifying. what games can you not play on modern hardware though? what more would you want from it?
you can barely see anything in the original and the textures are in like 240p, also the graphic mod they say is better has people complaining about it being dead and incomplete.
i am asking why you think you get nothing from this, or how it is a poor product just because you can play the original still. i also dont understand the “half ass coat of paint” everyone is referencing. i explained everything pretty thouroughly i feel like.
the main thing is i just do not understand all of the hate and cynicism, especially since its not even out yet lmao. they are literally overhauling the graphics and QOL which it the main barrier to entry.
Oh OK. I’m saying you don’t gey much from this because it really doesn’t look much different from what you can play today.
To be fair, it’s not like I’ve seen everything the remaster has to offer, but they’re making a big announcement and showing things off like it’s a big deal, but first impression is that it isn’t.
Deus Ex GOTY edition has been on GoG and Steam for a while, and some folks have touched those up with mods or releases like Deus Ex Revision that I think are worth checking out.
To be clear it’s not hate I’m trying to get across, it’s “so what? I don’t see why I should pay money for this.”
I’m still not convinced the engine is the problem. Maybe it’s not helping, sure, but heavy reliance on upscalers to achieve nominal performance is probably a bigger issue.
That, and shipping before proper optimization passes is probably more profitable in the short term, so publishers will push for that.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it's used for it's out of the box "good" graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or "framerate number" should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I've yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it's entirely reliant on TAA as it's deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it's all about the money...
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing "upgraded" graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It's good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I partly agree with you in that everyone using the same UE5 engine is bad
But I really don’t agree that deferred rendering techniques are inherently bad. Maybe they cause negative incentives for developers that lead to worse games in the long run, but you might as well blame capitalism at that point
I like techniques such as TAA because they do work better as anti-aliasing in my experience. I’ve multiple times had the choice between TAA and traditional AA and I think TAA simply does what it sets out to do better. Upscaling and frame generation are also nice to haves as optional features people can enable. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. But it is bad that companies use these techniques as a crutch, indeed, but I don’t want to see them gone
I really dont mind solutions like upscaling, but it should be for people with older hardware, so they can run newer games better.
Instead it is used as a crutch by developers to gain some "performance" out of their poorly made game (Not blaming devs individually here, they are all probably overworked on titles like this and they wont have much of a say in what tools or timeframe they have). You are right, it's a capitalism issue too.
TAA just looks like I have grease smeared over my monitor... the only acceptable AA for deferred rendering is SMAA honestly, but I still think it's a misused technique in most cases, I have only seen a few games look good with it. Games with it usually have lots of visual flaws, that they hope TAA smears over. But then you just get a blurry game.
I’m becoming more and more convinced it is the engine honestly. It is probably harder to optimize and devs not having enough time to do so if I had to guess.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.
UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.
What? Some systems have worse performance, primarily if you don’t have enough VRAM, but artifacting and blur? What do you mean? Sure, there’s blur with TAA/FSR/DLSS, but that’s always true and cam be toggled.
You cant toggle it, or you get loads of shimmering, you cant use it because you get loads of blur. There's ghosting even without AA. This is the exact problem, there's no good implementation if you are relying on TAA and/or DLSS as anti-aliasing. Squad suffers it, the same as any UE5 game.
It does wound an aweful lot like the whole skate. Situation. We really want to make the best game possible and we really care for customer feedback. Hmm turns out they really didn’t and just try to sell micro transactions
Whatever one thinks of this, I think we can all agree that it’s a bit imprecise to be calling these games “adult”. Witcher 3 is “adult”. Furry Hitler Incest Goblin Lolifuckers 3 is… something else.
There is a valid argument against the DRM being that your ancient air-gapped system should be able to run the game still but can’t run the DRM due to the requirements changing after the point of purchase. Perhaps there is a discussion to be had about whether DRM should be removed once you change the system requirements drastically, but this feels like a rare circumstance.
The simple solution is to get DRM-free copies from GOG where possible. Archive the installers if you’re worried about future compatibility. That way you can have a nostalgic Windows 98 machine or whatever that only plays games and won’t bug you with random unprovoked changes and updates from day to day.
pcgamer.com
Ważne