While I’m sure there will be a lot of false starts with this tech and it will take a while to iron out the kinks, I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time. This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds. It’s going to be a massive boost to immersion and will probably lead to some hilarious bugs/unexpected behaviours. Can’t wait!
It will be interesting for sure, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing that NPCs with AI behaviours will be better in all cases like modern game players seem to with open world game design.
Not every game needs an open world, and in some cases open world game design can end up doing more harm than good. This will be something that developers should look at on a game by game basis, and not a default plugin that everyone uses for every NPC in their game.
This will probably be similar to the switch from small, limited world maps in games to expansive open-worlds.
Interesting comparison, because I'd argue that that switch has, lately, been worse more often than it's been better, and that a lot of games would have been far better off if they stuck to the more limited equivalent.
I agree, huge open worlds are often exhausting for me, and the developer need to fill it often ends up with cheap copy and past Ubisoft methods (collectibles, etc)
If Skyrim was the size of say, Assassins Creed Odyssey, it would’ve honestly suffered horribly, largely because one of Skyrims best features was the fact that their map was handcrafted and full of detail and secrets.
Sure you can add secrets to a procgen map, but that developer process that lead to the best ones are largely gone.
On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.
That is actually an excellent point! I’m imagining a Lydia from Skyrim who would actually comment on your actual quest progression without just resorting to canned responses.
Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.
Stardew Valley expanded?? What is that? Is it something that is available to us long-term SV users? I bought Stardew Valley when it first came out and people looked at me like I was crazy for buying such an obviously casual and pixelated game.
If you’re playing on pc, just look up the mod and try the additional mod “grandpas map” as well! After around 1,500h in SV it feels like a new game with those two mods installed. Cannot recommend it enough!
Shoutout to Chris Perkins! I got to help playtest parts of 5E back in the day and he was the DM. Getting paid to play D&D is nice work if you can get it!
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
I also remember when people would constantly say that games were too short. I didn't play them at the time, but there was a period when everyone was complaining about waiting for a long time for games - paying a lot for a game, and then finishing it in 5-7 hours and never playing it again.
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
I've never had that problem myself either. I took a break there for quite some time with my gaming but I did grow up with it, and I have returned to it. I can't think of a time when I have played a game - even a story based one, and liked it and haven't returned to it at least once more. I think I've noticed though, I am kind of a gaming minority. I think the funniest thing I can say about games is that back when I played with a big rowdy group of guys a game would last however long it lasted because the guys would fight and swap for whoever was controlling the character and we'd play that shit into the ground regardless of how long a game was. The last system I had was a PS2, so idk but I knew a lot of complaints started coming out PS3 era. Snap even was a game that we played like crazy. I had a friend who had a N64, and Pokemon was so hot! And we'd all just sit there and see if we could do "perfect" runs even though it was pretty much the same game over and over again.
Speaking of trends, I mean I guess these things have always existed but I think the PS3 began the genre my girlfriend lovingly describes as "penis games" which have hyper-masculine protagonist smashing the shit out of everything with dynamic lighting. I don't mean to offend anyone with this, but the trend is still here (I am just guessing it's Unreal graphics). I know it existed before the PS3, but it really took off then and was part of what actually turned me off of gaming as a whole.
I’ll admit: I play games that are sexualized in a cringey way. But I don’t want those themes aggravating people that just want a fun zombie apocalypse, forced to play as a hero that randomly reverts to a horndog at random times.
That said, saying it now I wonder about Snake’s personality in the MGS3 remake, since every bit of that game is classic…
I never really considered how weird some of this stuff really was until remakes changed it. Like the voice line for looking up Ashley’s skirt in RE4. Lots of weird stuff like this in games where it kind of doesn’t fit, although I did think the erotic bonus in dead rising was funny in a kind of campy B movie way. Sexualized zombies are kind of a staple of the culture in a way, I think.
Now, I hear they’re making a Lollipop Chainsaw remake and I hope they don’t change anything there, as an achievement of shame for looking up the characters skirt was pretty funny and fit the general aesthetic of the game well.
Something that I think is a good criteria is whether an inclusion negatively affects the experience of someone who’s, let’s say, “normal”.
Ex: A female streamer plays Resident Evil 4, really enjoys the characters for Leon and Ashley. Then, Leon for some reason tries to peek under her skirt in a cutscene. Even if some people find it funny, it makes the streamer feel uncomfortable - both for a character she likes getting violated, and for making it clear “Even if you like fighting zombies, this game was made for horny BOYS. Not for YOU.”
Contrast that with players, in gameplay, spending time at a ladder with a sniper rifle to set up a curious angle. That requires specific player intention, and once it’s clear the player is involving themselves with that stupidity, it’s perhaps more appropriate to quickly lampshade it.
That said, I’m glad the remake had enough creativity it wasn’t invested in remaking tired jokes like that. You could say Lollipop Chainsaw is perhaps more ready to keep those elements given that the intention is clear from its cover art.
Yeah that’s a fair take, for sure. Although tbf there was never an explicit cutscene where Leon looks up Ashley’s skirt in the game, it was something that only happened when the player or Leons head in general looked up her skirt. That being said, it still felt weird and out of place regardless. Not to mention it just happened too often in weird ways, like suplexing an enemy near Ashley.
Never played it, but it sounds like the achievement is meant to surprise you. Like, it’s not meant to encourage people looking up skirts, it’s more like the console going “Busted!”
I like that as a framing question, and it helps me to further understand why it is that scenes like the RE4 one feels so weird to me.
I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable in that scenario is the fact that Leon is the hero. I’m a woman who has loved gaming for basically my whole life, so I’m used to playing as someone who doesn’t look like me — there’s a certain amount of abstracting away of gender that’s necessary if I want to be able to participate in some heroic escapism. That’s why scenes like Leon being a creep are so jarring, because he’s the hero. The narrative of the game is endorsing this kind of behaviour because it’s being done by the hero.
Dead Rising is a somewhat more ambiguous example, but still weird overall. I don’t necessarily even mind that the photography intro quest highlights the fact you can take sexy(?) photos, because the NPC in that quest is written in a way where it’s like the game itself is saying “yeah, this guy is a weird creep”. Getting points for “erotic” photos is a bit weird though, because whilst you can choose to not take photos like that, it feels like the mechanics of the game are endorsing the creepy dude’s mentality overall.
So, to be clear: The idea of Leon doing that in a cutscene was theoretical. The only thing the first game had was an Easter egg triggered from looking at Ashley via low angle, which as described takes specific intentions to pull off.
Luis, a sleazy side character, does say something raunchy to her, and that was removed in the remake. It’s a little more fitting because he’s painted as untrustworthy and imperfect; but, I also realize with how many people like Ashley, it’s the sort of line that has no good response to let her be cool. In the original she just pouted “How rude!!”
But I don’t want those themes aggravating people that just want a fun zombie apocalypse, forced to play as a hero that randomly reverts to a horndog at random times.
To be fair, nobody is forcing them to play the game. Zombie game market has a lot of options.
This really feels like a cop-out answer. I understand it’s the same feeling as when difficulty is too high for a game. But I think it’s different when someone has an opinion like “This game feels exactly like what I wanted!…Except for this one big issue.”
Sexualized scenes that make people really uncomfortable (or just un-immersed) can be one of those issues, and high difficulty can often put a barrier on content.
In this case, I genuinely cannot think of too many open-world zombie swarm evasion games that work quite like Dead Rising, complete with its arcadey aesthetics. Having that “one thing” can exclude some people from that exact type of game, even if that doesn’t affect many people. And for those seeking sexualized scenes - the same could be said. No one is outlawing them, just ensuring people get what they’re expecting.
And, to be clear since I brought up difficulty, Dark Souls has so little in the way of direct storytelling, people arguably wouldn’t find much interesting if the game had a story mode that skipped/trivialized gameplay. So in that case, the “one thing” isn’t really a barrier to much other than the credits.
I don’t care that they remove it from the base version of the game, but if you’re going to remake the damn thing I want the full, authentic, experience. If it requires me to download “horndog pack” as a free add on, so be it. Getting anything less is just a subpar product that isn’t worth discussing.
I remember when I was a kid, (around 15 years ago if I had to guess), there was an exhibit at a science museum where they used EEG to make a ball move on a table. Then they set up a game where two people would wear EEG on opposite sides of the table and the ball would roll toward whichever person could get their brainwaves to match a certain pattern better. I think the idea was if you quieted your mind then you would win.
Except Hasbro didn’t get a game of the year, “someone who licenced an insignificant property of theirs” did, and so who cares (other than everyone who made/enjoyed the game, but nobody “important” like Hasbro’s execs or stockholders)
While I also dislike Epic, I feel that their going under would be a bad thing for the industry as a whole. There are only a few game distribution platforms of this size; Steam, Epic, Prime, GOG, and EA/Origin (not including Consoles). So there will be less competition and less innovation. They give out a ton of free games, and people may lose access to those licenses. They also employ(ed) a large number of people who are going to be jobless. I’d prefer they get their act together and be held accountable.
Epic has never been about innovation in the retail space. Sweeney talks a good game but it’s always been consistently out of his ass. He launched the Epic game store framing it as some sort of crusade on behalf of consumers, “Apple bad”, “Steam bad” but the reality is he just didn’t want to split money with others in the stack. I don’t blame him for that but his marketing was disingenuous and it’s quite obvious, now, that his business plan was inherently flawed.
His performative crusade against Apple has now led to 20% of the company looking for new jobs. We all stood by cheering, selling our souls for a bucket load of cheap games that, for the most part, we wouldn’t actually have paid for and will never get around to playing.
I don’t really care about EGS, I’m more concerned about Unreal Engine. If they keep dumping money into EGS exclusives and whatnot, it could impact UE investment, which would be bad for the industry.
The issue is, once again, about the difference between buying and licensing games
Two Californian gamers are suing Ubisoft in a proposed class action lawsuit over the developer and publisher’s recent shutdown of racing game The Crew. Ubisoft released The Crew in December 2014 and shut down its servers after a decade due to “server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” After the servers shut down, the game became totally unplayable due to its lack of a single-player, offline mode. When the shutdown was announced on Dec. 14, 2023, Ubisoft did offer refunds to people who “recently” purchased The Crew, but given the age of the game, a lot of players were unable to participate in the offer.
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed,” lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, which was filed Nov. 4 in a California court and reviewed by Polygon. “Turns out the pinball manufacturer decided to come into your home, gut the insides of the pinball machine, and remove your ability to play the game that you bought and thought you owned.”
The lawsuit alleges this is “exactly” what happened when Ubisoft shut down its servers for The Crew in 2024 — suddenly leaving consumers unable to access something they purchased and assumed they owned. The lawsuit says players were duped in two ways: First, by allegedly misleading players into thinking they were buying a game when they were merely licensing it — even if a player bought a physical disk. Second, that Ubisoft “falsely represented” that The Crew’s files were on its physical disks to access freely, and that the disks weren’t simply a key for the game. Ubisoft is violating California consumer protection laws, the lawsuit alleges.
Both plaintiffs purchased the game well into its lifespan, in 2018 and 2020, respectively, on physical discs. The lawsuit says neither would have purchased the game “on the same terms,” i.e., price, knowing the game’s servers could be taken down, rendering The Crew totally unplayable even in an offline mode. The lawsuit also covers the backlash to Ubisoft’s decision to shutdown the servers and not include an offline version of the game; it cites several games that turned servers off but patched in an offline option, like Knockout City and two of Ubisoft’s own games, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed 3. Ubisoft responded to the criticism and vowed to include offline versions of its existing games in The Crew franchise, like The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest — but the lawsuit says this does nothing to amend the problem of The Crew’s server shutdown.
The plaintiffs are looking for the court to approve the lawsuit as a class action, meaning other The Crew players may get involved. They’re looking for monetary relief and damages for those impacted by the server shutdown. The lawsuit follows a campaign from YouTube creator Ross Scott to urge companies to “stop killing games,” a movement that kicked off after The Crew announcement was made. The Stop Killing Games movement is petitioning the European Union to force game companies to keep games in playable states. It currently has more than 379,000 signatures.
As media continues to go more and more digital, the issue of owning vs. licensing — especially in video games — becomes more of a problem. While some people are taking games into their own hands (like with the player-created The Crew Unlimited), the onus is largely on companies and what they do to preserve their games and servers. But in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill into law that requires companies to tell consumers they’re buying licenses, not games themselves, in online storefronts. The law itself, introduced by California assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin, is actually partly inspired by Ubisoft’s shutdown of The Crew. The law, however, doesn’t do anything about the fact that games are licensed and not purchased outright, nor does it stop a company from rendering a game unplayable, but it does, in theory, offer transparency on the issue.
I think we need a very strict regulation, where the wording is never “purchase” or “buy” or “own”. It should always be “rent”. Because that’s what it is.
And like other time-limited services outside entertainment, the duration should be made clear. I’d personally like something as clear and blunt as:
"We guarantee access for at least X months/years after paying the license.
After service is suspended we will release all information and code necessary to set up a private server or otherwise restore function."
And for the worst kind:
"We make no guarantees of access duration, and can revoke your access immediately after paying the license.
After service is suspended we will not release information or code necessary to set up a private server or otherwise restore function."
Ideally the last type dies out completely, or becomes exceedingly rare.
These always online, server-dependent, licence-limited games are very unlike what we used to deal with; Books, DVDs, CDs, and other games on disk/cartridge or with a simple download that you can keep and use for as long as you live as long as they’re still stored and in readable condition.
They’re very different, and should be treated like it.
There should be a very clear visual difference when looking at the box or store page of a game that is made to simply last as long as you keep the code stored, and a game that won’t. A consistent warning design. Maybe two color codes.
Lets be real, while I love the idea of users making informed choices… how big do you think the labels on cigarettes to say “they will give you cancer and kill you”. People aren’t bright, you can warn them until the cows come home, they want to play a game, they will buy it. Very few of them would have listened to any warning no matter how blatent.
People are stupid… for 99.9% of people “we’ll send out the code and let you set up private servers”, is really no different than we’ll shut down the servers and you can never play again. There’s not a huge overlap between people who understand how to create a private server and/or set up their routers to allow incoming connections, and people who actually can convince friends to join their servers.
Now maybe the “the servers are guaranteed to remain until X date”, is a reasonable one. Very least tells people their games have a shelf life and not to buy it after a certain point in time.
Ah, OK 😅. Well, to be fair, we are in the internet, is hard to tell a joke or sarcasm from honest opinions. That’s why i always use “/s.” to not be misinterpreted.
polygon.com
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