Admittedly, most of the “Mostly Negative” Steam reviews seem to be reacting to the fact they exist at all, without considering whether they’re actually critical to your progress in the game or not (for clarity, they are not).
I didn’t know we were only allowed to write reviews based on things critical to your progress. I didn’t know how many companions you have or what your character looks like weren’t critical. I bet if we searched even a little we’d find a RockPaperShotgun review of “non critical” game features.
You can get the items for free by finding them or pay barbers in the villages for it instead. Similar to the first game, the first one was just niche so didn’t have a huge crowd throwing fits instead of reading or even playing the game
I get what they mean. A lot of the MTX seems to be items that you genuinely would find very readily in the game. Paying simply gives you a type of “very easy” mode if you’re for some reason inclined.
It’s a…. Strange decision, as it makes the game look bad. But by all accounts it doesn’t really impact the gameplay of the game. It’s just like giving you the option buy Phoenix Downs in Final Fantasy with real money. You… can. You really don’t need to, 98% of players won’t.
It’s goofy more than anything. I guess I’d rather have it rather than day 1 expansion packs like Mass Effect had.
Especially ones like Minotaur who just started commenting on Lemmy 3 days ago…
What timing.
Edit: don’t forget that sometimes people post in defederated instances and sometimes app developers for your lemmy app are so behind that shit isn’t even loading for you properly anymore
I again, never said anything about conspiracy, was just pointing out what I was able to see. Like I said in my other comment, I can only see shit you’ve been commenting up to a day ago. So either the app I’m using is busted as fuck, your instance is busted as fuck, or some other option - but I’ve only ever commented on what I was able to see.
Hopefully you understand where I’m coming from here.
Gamers throw a fit when content is locked behind a paywall because it is somehow unfair. Gamers are currently throwing a fit about content not being locked behind a paywall because that is also somehow unfair. Does that make sense to you?
It seems to me that this publisher heard the complaints about the way microtransactions were being implemented and decided to give people what they were asking for and now they’re getting crucified for it. Gamers got what they wanted. If that wasn’t what they really wanted they should have been asking for something else.
I don’t own this game nor have I ever completed a microtransaction in a major title. My spending habits don’t support the concept in any form. You know what my point is and you’re trying to high-horse your way past it. If you want to take a stand refund the game and vote with your wallet. No one wants to hear complaints about the price of cosmetics and getting in game currency quicker. It’s the most first world problem imaginable.
I dont buy these games, nor do I verbally defend such practices in them. I understand your point, but the real issue is them existing, not the form in which they exist in this case.
The whole "first world problem" is always hilarious when brought up. You can discuss or argue over anything you want, everyone experiences life differently. Just because there's people starving, that doesnt mean you cant talk about capitalist issues either. Its such a shitty dismissal everytime.
You’re free to call it what you wish. Complaining about voluntary purchases in a video game you also don’t need to buy is a vapid pursuit only engaged in by those with an excess of time and money and a lack of real world problems. If you want to waste your time debating the ethics of such a system existing then be my guest but don’t pretend you’re engaging in some lofty moral exercise. You’re just bored and looking for something to occupy your time so you chose to bitch about something inconsequential on the internet.
Making up something dumb to complain about is not the same as telling you to shut up about said dumb thing but I know you don’t really believe that anyway. You’re just trying to get a smug jab in and that’s the best you can come up with.
You are complaining about people complaining, talking down on people to get a feeling of superiority. If you dont like a conversation just move on with your life. Or is it that you have nothing better to do, so you choose to bitch about something inconsequential on the internet?
Upvoting your own comments too :)
I wont engage any further with this, its just gonna go in circles. Have a good one.
I don’t have anything better to do. I happily acknowledge that. My life is going pretty great all things considered, but then I’m not the one pretending to be an oppressed victim fighting a corrupt system via complaints about stuff I don’t need to buy. That’s what you’re doing.
Also, Lemmy defaults to upvoting posts you make. That’s something you should probably know before you criticize people for not going out of their way to downvote themselves. It makes you look kind of dumb to say stuff like that since you could have figured that out for yourself if you thought about it for more than two seconds, which now that I think about it is a pretty good summary of the rest of the things that you’ve said in this conversation.
I agree that the way they’ve been implemented in many other titles is annoying so I choose not to engage with them in that form. This implementation doesn’t impact anything so why would you be annoyed by it much less take the time to complain about it?
The thing is they made these features as part of the core gameplay then charged for them. It isn’t like you’re paying for a boost or game mode or special companion or something. You’re given the option to earn these features through playing a single player game or pay money and get them faster.
Literally carving out chunks of the base game and offering them up for money as if it is added value. The only value is saving time IN A SINGLE PLAYER GAME. If your single player game has elements that are so tedious or cumbersome that people will literally PAY MORE MONEY to get them on their terms you purposefully built a worse game than you could have.
I got AC:Odyssey during one of the sale cause I dig Greek mythology, had to get cheat engine and spare me the grind for upgrading gears and ship. Like sure you can just keep picking up randomly dropped Epic/Rare and replacement them when you leveling up(there are even player quest that put in specific spot to give you resource for those upgrades, just so other players can farm it) But I ain’t get any time for that, I just cheat engine in max out resource and upgrade my Legendary gears I found through out the game. And you know what? By the end of the game(and I didn’t find every Legendary, like maybe 60~70% of them) it would take me setting the resource to max twice to fully upgrade all my legendary + epic(with perks I like) gears. It would take probably months of my gaming time should I got it on console and can not use cheat engine.
No, upgrade gear is not required to finish the game. But after this experience I decides to never get another Ubisoft AC game nor any RPG on console or with always online feature(which means all transaction are done and authenticated to prevent cheating. ) I’ve done plenty open world, RPG, Monster Hunters without having to cheat. But the recent single player grinding + selling time saver booster pack make me whip out the cheat engine again. And I only cheat those stupid resource gating game that are designed to pad hours in to your play through.
Yeah, they know they are doing though, they are aiming for those that work 9-5 have life and kids and some spare changes and milk them hard. Like this game would take 200 hours to complete fully with X hundreds of hours of post game content that was designed to make your grind, but you can also pay for this [xp booster, resource pack, legendary set, etc] to make sure you can enjoy the post game content if you don’t have the time to grind the game how it’s “meant to be played”.
In my AC:Odessey example, I think at one point the designer might be doing a heavy zelda influenced where you just pick up stuff enemies dropped and the blacksmiths are there for you to repair items broken as resource dump. (which make sense and very fitting of that era and how resource would work) But once that MTX department put their finger in now you have a derailed system. There is a spread sheet that list the hours required to upgrade a legendary piece to which level, and recommended level to get them(as their starting level is fixed and not like the enemy droppped item that matches your level), I saw the numbers and downloaded the cheat engine table the next hour.
I saw this same thing with games like Dead Space 3. They included a cash shop, very likely hard-pushed by some asinine executive. But, you could tell by playing the game, the majority of developers likely tested with that feature off. Was it a fun game? No, but resource starvation was not the reason for that.
Basically it feels like the hands trying to microtransact for singleplayer games are not the same as the ones designing those games to begin with. It still deserves negative attention, just nuance.
You are basically betting on the developers being bad at their jobs and not being able to do what they are clearly trying to do, which is making people but microtransactions.
“They” is far, far, far too encompassing a word. If you’ve worked in any organization such as this, especially these days, they involve so many different companies (yes, more than one studio works on a game now) with so many different teams all under a publishing studio whose head may never have even played any of this genre of game.
So, a developer in one studio is often just trying to make a good RPG in their debug build (and insists no/light fast travel for world-immersion reasons), and only hears over the grapevine “Wait…they took the complaints about no fast-travel and made it a DLC? That sounds terrible, gamers will hate that.” Multiple people across the credits can have varying intentions.
Why? Is there some kind of real cost to changing appearance or fast travel that it needs to be limited? Or is that there solely so they can sell MTX?
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 right now and you can do both at any time for free. It’s literally a standard UI thing across games with large maps and character creators.
Hey, why even have to buy dyes? The game should give them all to you for free. And supplies can be gathered, you should just get infinite supply packs too
??? Renting companions of your level has always been free, they only cost rift crystals if they are higher than you. Killing strong monsters and getting your pawn rented give plenty resources.
The character creation tome is easy to get, idk what to tell you.
If you want to throw horseshit to a wall, not this one please. If you had played the game you wouldn’t have even mentioned half of what you did.
“They only cost rift crystals if they’re a higher level than you”
Ah yes this is additional value and content that you should pay money for, right? It’s not core gameplay to recruit companions regardless of their level like in almost every fucking game I’ve ever played right?
Imagine licking boot so hard that you actually believe this
Rift crystals are an in game currency, you don’t need to pay money for it! I’ve been recruiting companions 1-4 lvls above me all the time, I’m lvls 30 now, with the in game currency. The higher the pawn is you get less exp so it’s not something that you should do anyway.
Imagine thinking that renting a LVL 200 companion is core gameplay. Geez…
This game is an improvement over the first one in almost all sides, with great content. It’s stupid reading all this takes from people that clearly have not played it, let alone the original.
And before you mention the eternal ferrystone from the original, that came with the expansion, not the release.
It’s ok that I can buy in game currency for my singer player game! It’s fine! It’s good actually! Recruiting high level companions, a THING THEY BUILT INTO THE BASE GAME DELIBERATELY THEN LET YOU PAY EXTRA FOR, using in game currency I can buy isn’t pay2win. Recruiting companions isn’t even core gameplay if they’re strong enough, bro.
It’s ok that Capcom sent reviewers a game without micro transactions that were in retail! That’s fine, it’s fine! The microtransactions were paying for now were expansions before so it’s uh…it’s better, yeah. I actually prefer my $70 USD single player games to have gameplay benefitting microtransactions.
You sound like you’ve swallowed the boot my guy. You’re so far gone you can’t see the way back. Glad you’re enjoying the game, though. Sounds like it was worth it to you.
I’m gonna ignore all that stuff you extrapolated from my strawman.
Anyway, of course I’m enjoying it! I loved the original and this is the same and more. This is a great game with BS corporate microtransactions sprinkled in. I agree that the MTXs are BS, but saying that the game was designed around baiting the player into using them outs you as someone that wouldn’t enjoy the first one nor the intended gameplay, so it’s kinda pointless dosucssing further.
Have fun lying to yourself about the intended mechanics I guess.
Rift crystals are earned by playing just like the first game. Their only purpose is to hire higher level pawns, but you earn them when people pay for your pawn or you complete their quests. It’s part of the interplay of players exchange pawns.
Recent Capcom games have all done this where it’s a great game and right on release they stuff a bunch of micro transactions in for in-game currency but you would have to be an absolute chud to buy any of it because it’s so trivial to earn.
DMCV did the same thing with trying to sell red orbs, the primary upgrade currency, but if you didn’t see people complain about it online, you wouldn’t even notice it in game.
Yeah that’s like the whole problem, not a triviality. I’m sure DD2 is fun. Ive watched a lot of it streamed. Seems cool. I’m not gonna buy it because they did this shit, same reason I didn’t buy DMCV and haven’t bought a Capcom game in years. Stop rewarding scummy companies.
Full price games with microtransactions are negative, end of story. Everybody saying otherwise grew up after they where implemented in every other game so they don’t know better.
They got trained, like animals, to swallow that shit.
I grew up after them. I think they’re fine in certain circumstances. If the game is supposed to have free content updates for weeks and months and whatever else after launch then yeah sure, why not
“Of course they don’t stop progress… you’ll just be stuck grinding for way way longer with our patented unfun^tm^ systems unless you pay, peasant valued consumer”
I love how in your example “perfect” is not having moneygrubbing microtransactions and the “good” compromise we’re supposed to accept is the microtransactions the chose to put in for no purpose other than money
It’s pretty amusing that this game went from over hyped to an absolute dumpster fire to probably one of the best space games ever made. One hell of a comeback story.
Honestly to me it’s more promising to see a game studio stick behind their game like this rather than having the initial game be good. A good studio will still have bad games, but knowing that a studio will stand behind their bad game and work on it until it’s good means a lot.
I got it off GamePass back in November 2020 for my One S and played it a lot. Work has kept me busy so I’ve had less time but I have bought it twice since then - once for PS5 and then when I bought my Series X.
It’s been worth it. I don’t play multiplayer much and I’ve missed most of the Expeditions but I enjoy it a lot every time I play.
You can follow the quests or not. I honestly enjoy exploring the different planets. The graphics are good. On my PS5 save, my home base is on a planet where the grass glows when the wind sweeps across it at night.
I’ll sit and just watch it throughout the game night.
I don’t see why it’s suddenly the best space game… The core mechanic seems to be the same as the original. Mine materials that are the same on every planet, so you can build space ships and better miners that take more materials and do it over and over again.
When I was playing on launch day, I had a really good first impression but it turned into disappointment, since all the planets had the same minerals. May as well stay on the first planet forever.
I think a lot of people are just very, very pleased with how well it’s being supported compared to its initial launch and how this game company has become an outlier in the industry. They conflate their love for the company’s business practices with the game’s mechanics. So while the game may be great, many subconsciously give it a boost because of its legacy.
Every planet doesn’t have every material you need for crafting everything. But a single solar system likely has most of it. There are key elements on every planet that are meant to make sure a player never gets stranded. I guess one could argue for that to be a game mode though if it isn’t already where you very well could end up on a planet and have no way to survive.
A lot of people like the gameplay loop from day one but the initial lies about how multiplayer worked was a driving force behind the unhappiness. Once that was fixed it was a shallow experience but a lot of people would have been content with it. Instead Hello Games keeps supporting it and putting out new content updates. There are still a lot of features and improvements people would like for the game and those very well may see the light of day with the passion Hello Games has shown for improving it. That’s why so many people think favorably of them. There are a ton of other bigger studios that would never show this level of dedication and community support.
I agree, they did the right thing and much more. But the game still doesn’t feel very fun. It’s missing a reason to do things beyond just exploration and seeing new randomly generated animals and colors.
I was hoping for it to have some Elite qualities where you would travel with rare cargo to make money, but it doesn’t even have any rare cargo or any demand for unique minerals on planets…
It’s not fun, which is the main problem. The devs have built a universe to explore but hasn’t accounted for that humans don’t think different shapes and colors are very interesting when it’s the same otherwise.
The popularity speaks to the contrary; a lot of people want to exist in a universe they get to see neat things. There are quest lines to help push players forward if they want, they just aren’t required and are easy to ignore. I don’t think resource scarcity is meant to be a major aspect of the game but I can see why someone might want it to be.
It was genuinely fun when i started and had to hunt for materials and actually had the threat of death, i hid in a cave to recover heat protection and had to do that a few times before i entered space and then the game all but ended
That is pretty reductive. Like, it’s a sim. You could describe just about any sim the same way. “You just do this thing to do that thing”. How is this any different from any other game?
I’m not saying it’s the best space game, but I had fun when I played it and it definitely didn’t just feel like I was mining materials just to mine more materials.
There’s absolutely nothing in no man’s sky that’s meant to be a space sim in any way at all or even has any resemblance. It’s not hyperbolic. The dev has always called it an imagination of the science fiction idea of the 80s which is supposed to capture the feel of something that would be in an arcade.
Not saying it’s a bad game, but it’s not a sim. At all.
The problem is that NMS is very repetitive and bland. Learning alien words takes for-fucking-ever, finding freighter upgrades is one of the worst time sinks in the game, combat feels more tedious and padded out than that of Everquest, looking for “that one cool ship” or “cool looking weapon” is pure RNG and lucking out on it not coming as a C class, upgrading inventory space is either a system jumping time sink or “planetary exploration” time sink.
Nearly nothing you do in the game gives you a sense of accomplishment and, after 4-8 hours or so after first starting playing, you’re unlikely to look forward to any specific activity because “it’s fun”. There’s a lot “to do” but very little motivation to, like why even bother being the mayor of a settlement?
Even on permadeath the game offers no real challenge once you’re off the starting planet.
From what I’ve found online, the “center” of your galaxy is just a portal that sends you to the edge of a different galaxy where it’s different but more of the same.
The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance
Yes, though it’s a cheap “new game plus”, without even feeling like a “new game”. Once you manage to get to the center, you’re thrown in a new galaxy in a random planet and have to get back to your ship, only some upgrades you’ve installed on yourself and your ship might break. Yet you can immediately call your freighter and any exocraft.
There’s also Artemis’ questline, with an interesting concept but overall underwhelming delivery.
Story spoilersArtemis is stuck in a simulation, just like you, player, are stuck in one. The whole universe is a failing simulation created by Atlas.
.
interaction with other players?
From my experience, which pretty much ended around 1 year ago with the game, player interaction could be summed up to:
finding someone else’s buildings during a community expedition
finding someone else’s buildings in a quicksilver quest
someone giving you free stuff while you’re idling in the anomaly
Apparently there are guilds now? In any case, I never saw anyone looking for group, because the game has nothing that only a pair or trio can do, or do faster/better than a solo player, other than base building
Theres no suddenly about it. They took the well deserved heat after launch very much to heart and spend the next 8 odd years crafting it into the best space game out there imo. Best VR game too.
Its version 4.61 and, essentially, at least its own sequal. Its nothing like the launch day game.
What, like Minecraft, still possibly the most popular game on Earth? I mean, all you do in Minecraft is mine the a couple of minerals that are the same on every seed, and use them to make better tools to mine minerals faster, and grow the same crops so you don’t starve, and do it over and over again.
not trying to be cheeky—i wrote up a long part about modding capacity and level of sandbox freedom etc., but i am sure you’re already very aware of that lol
so taking it as just vanilla: at the end of the day mining in minecraft feels relaxing and satisfying to me while in NMS it feels like a chore. i absolutely hate mining out ore deposits with a mining laser.
(breaking plants and minerals is kinda fun though)
like minecraft really nailed game feel
obviously this all depends on personal preference anyway, but if players have to do the same thing over and over again, then it needs to be very enjoyable in and off itself to do so.
Don’t stretch it. Maybe it could be #10 in a top 10, but when you have the likes of Elite Dangerous, Space Engineers, X4, Freelancer, plus little known indies like Empyrion Galactic Survival and Evochron Legends, it’ll hardly be anyone’s top choice.
Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.
I mean, I generally agree with your assessment, but elite dangerous? I love Elite, but it is not a good game. Best thing to come from Elite Dangerous is the community.
Fwiw, you can get deep discounts CCU chaining ships. Ships can also be unofficially “sold” and “bought” after the fact. It’s done through gifting. For example, you can get the Hammerhead at the impound for less then half the price. The impound is also one of the higher priced sites to. There are also unofficial ships sales on reddit to that have even lower prices.
Edit-Looks like a time limited sale, nevertheless, SC-trades on reddit has some Hammerheads for around 500.
I mean sure, but at the end of the day it’s a pretend spaceship, that you don’t own in any meaningful way, in a videogame that could go offline forever at any point that they deem it unprofitable to continue.
I can’t be alone in finding even the “deeply discounted” prices to be somewhat unreasonable. This is horse armour with ideas above its station.
Fair enough. However, if you consider the entertainment value delivered over time, the costs can be very low. If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years. The game and its users have been around much longer then that. It’s a game that can deliver hours and hours of entertainment each weekend. The price per hour would be low, and there are other hobbies much more expensive then this.
Even if the game were to shutter and you were to lose access to your ships, you’d still have that value delivered over time like a bunch of movie tickets. Also, you don’t buy ships. You pledge to support the development of the game. You can also buy a Hammerhead in game quickly if you know what game loops to target.
If you count it is as a 20$ a month movie ticket, you could pledge/buy a Hammerhead in around 2 years.
Jesus Christ lmao
Yeah man, I could enjoy a Blu-ray of my favorite movie for a comparable amount of time but that wouldn’t make me any less of a moron to buy a $400 Blu-ray.
A few hour Blu-ray won’t give you near the entertainment time that a game or comparable hobby will. You’ll watch it once, then maybe once again if you really liked it, then maybe you might watch it again a few years later.Then it’s mostly just collecting dust. In fact more so given the popularity of streaming.
Right. And a single ship in a single game of questionable status isnt gonna give you nearly the entertainment value that the 7-40 games you could buy for the same money are gonna give you.
Look, if you are happy with your purchase, thats cool. But to us this looks like a f-ton of wasted money.
Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.
If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.
You pledge to support the development of the game
Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.
beyond the issue of the price, this isnt comparable to a trip to the pictures once a month as movies change… and if someone spent stupid money on a ingame ship you dont think theyll buy another? these companies dont offer consumer friendly deals they instead hunt wales.
It’s dirt cheap compared to something like horseback riding, shooting sports, cars, or scuba diving.It’s just that this is easy to criticize as you can see the price tag easily vs looking at half a dozen receipts for the other hobbies.
Man the grind is rough in Elite Dangerous if you want to participate in PvP. Material grinding is so painful, i wish they never added engineering, or only had 2 levels of it instead of 5. Im still waiting for ship interiors too.
Right? That kind of money goes toward a component of a PC that would have multiple uses—or, hell, for some people, a whole-ass PC, jesus. Not just one part of a game (pronounced like a gun is in Wayne’s World)
Ahh, reminds me of grinding for reputation so I can get the Cutter and Corvette. I still keep Elite installed and still waiting to get the will to start that game. Odyssey really left a bad taste on my mouth.
Yeah. I liked Odyssey for wandering around my carrier’s interior and really very little else. The combat is absolute dogshit, and that wouldn’t be half as bad if pretty much every on-foot mission type did not inevitably downright require pissing off some faction or another, which then forces you to get involved in combat. The gunplay is pants, and I can’t fathom why there are so few hitscan handheld weapons in a universe that’s all about laser beams and railguns and shit. And then when you’re done with the annoying combat you have a ton of bounties stacked up you have to deal with.
At least the mercenary missions let you just shoot people for the sake of shooting people. But if I wanted to bounce around in low-grav and shot guys with silly weapons I’d just play Borderlands.
That reminds me, I probably need to grind some cash to pay the upkeep on my damn carrier.
Lol great way to tell everyone you think 400 bucks for a video game cosmetic is a reasonable thing to buy, and that everyone who can’t/won’t do that is broke. Its a bad look, this is cringe stuff that someone who’s never worked for their money would say. Real money, old money, doesn’t participate in this kind of behavior. Wastes of air like you usually live off daddy’s money raging on the internet because you never learned how to develop real social connections.
Ha, sure thing, turbo. More like great way to tell everyone I’m better at managing my money than some o’ y’all, doing the bare minimum of not spending hundreds [with an ‘s’!] of dollars on a make-believe spaceship in an unfinished video game.
I really hope you forgot the /s there because, wa-how.
Bring back anti-trust regulations. Microsoft has been trying to acquire anything they can get their hands on, and really should be dismantled on principle.
No it’s good! It’ll give them twice the power to make games and it’ll be better! They totally won’t just sit there with their monopoly, monopolies are good! Plus we still have Sony. Wait they want to buy Sony too? Even better!
I’ve been repeatedly downvoted on here and on Reddit for pointing out that Microsoft clearly just wants to capture the market and wield their disproportionate amount of power (their money, pretty much monopolistic OS position, ever-growing IP, and strength to push DirectX over other standards, etc) as a weapon.
People really love Microsoft and won’t hear criticism of them.
People look at gamepass and think ooooh that’s great, such a good price. I’m sure they won’t ever jack up prices once they capture the market!
I’m sure it’s fine that MS has sole control over the graphics API pretty much all games use!
It’s fine that MS is spending dozens to hundreds of billions on buying publishers, because Sony bought one too (that’s a 15th the size)! And it’s fine that they’re making that stuff exclusive to their platforms!
It’s fine that Microsoft hurts open standards!
Etc.
I’m so damn tired of people carrying water for multi billion trillion dollar companies with immense history of anticompetitive and illegal behaviour.
I get your point. You‘re not the only one schooling peeps on this. It’s highly frustrating.
Make sure to not repeat yourself a lot but make a blog, youtube channel, etc. Make your statements, put sources together to make it easy and logical and then just link to it.
The big problem democracy has is efficiency. People who actually know stuff burn out because they don’t accept that they might be right but not efficient. Don’t be that guy.
I‘m currently trying to build stuff up with mastodon but it’s still a wip.
I was watching this video this morning, and he points out how these leaks show a pattern of Microsoft basically wanting to buy up all of gaming (I also liked how he called Microsoft’s whole way of think about buying Nintendo as a bit of American imperialism). Folks like their Game Pass and don’t like Nintendo not giving a damn about trends or multiplayer or whatever and just going along doing their own thing, and think it would be a great idea for Microsoft to own them, and…no. Just, no.
This was before ABK, in fact around Zenimax acquisition time. After the excruciating process of ABK’s acquisition which also brought us highly costly leak, I think they won’t dare to buy a big player for now and no regulator would let that happen given it would be a horizontal acquisition if I understand that correctly.
The recent actiblizz situation has shown that Microsoft can do whatever they want, and no regulator will stop them. No regulator currently has teeth or a want to stop any aspect of big business, especially not tech. Thinking a regulator will say no to anything at this point is wishful at beat.
I mean it’s still stuck and CMA may still block it for all we know. Regulators definitely made them go through hoops for this one and it there’s a next one it’ll probably not go well after this.
So I would like to be on board with this. But if you look at every single regulator who even double taked, it was all about cloud. They don’t care about consolidation of media and they have no intention of stopping it.
I think they cared about it, saw the numbers, and realised the case can’t be made because of the current way market is setup. CMA initially wasn’t convinced but with correct calculations it got resolved. FTC actually didn’t make a big point over cloud but that this could destroy PlayStation, which also wasn’t justifiable with data. EU held similar opinions but felt it also is pro competitive given the number of IPs Sony holds.
But after ABK, I don’t think that case can be made anymore. With ABK the number of IPs and content becomes more competitive with PS and Nintendo, and they all kept saying this is a vertical merger, Nintendo or Sony wouldn’t, and thus wouldn’t be allowed.
The microtransactions are bad enough, but the fact that none of these were present in the build given to reviewers just makes it worse. I mean people would still be complaining about them, but I don't think the backlash would be as bad if Capcom had made it clear from the start that the game was going to be riddled with microtransactions.
I haven’t followed the whole thing as I didn’t have any desire to play the game, but assuming that’s true that’s a seriously shitty move and had to be intentional. Is there not some kind of bait and switch laws that would apply here?
Any reviews released in the first week of a game should be taken with a grain of salt and any reviews released on or before launch day should be completely discarded.
With all the 'day one' patches games have, reviewers should be playing the game from launch, on the same version as everyone else. If they have any integrity.
Sorry, not laughing at you, the idea of game journalism having any integrity. That said, it’s likely an issue with editors pandering to their CEO or other boss, but still.
Wouldn’t that mean the reviewers were starved for fast travel, and would have thus complained about it? That seems to be the narrative a lot of people are suggesting - that the DLC makes the game playable.
Unless I’m misunderstanding and reviewers got infinite fast travel.
From what I understand, fast travel isn't locked behind microtransactions, despite some claims I've seen. You can buy an item that you can place that lets you teleport back to that point, kind of like fast traveling to a map marker. These items are available in game along with fixed fast travel points between major cities. So the reviewers would have had access to fast travel they just wouldn't have been able to use real money buy them whenever they needed them.
Feels a bit like if they had DLC for ammo in a Resident Evil game. The design of those games is very clearly intended to be around partial ammo starvation, to get you to aim better, choose varying weapons, and sometimes run away. But, I can imagine a small team of publishers deciding “People want ammo? Let’s let them buy it!” It’d be very easy for players to presume the base game has been made worse as a whole, and that opinion will become hard to quantify - unless very nuanced reviewers can just pretend the DLC doesn’t exist.
Not only isn’t it locked behind DLC, it’s incredibly cheap, and unlike a lot of titles will take you to places you haven’t even been yet. I’m talking about the ox carts, of course. Not only that, ferrystones are available for only 10k (money is relatively easy to come by). What exactly does the store have in it that is required, or even kinda necessary for convenience?
The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.
Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.
People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.
I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.
Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.
Then why the hell do you release the game? So it's another rushed game and that is you can blame the devs for. That is what upsets me personally the most from all those drama.
They literally said why. Because a lot of players, like myself, don’t care about the performance issues and are happy to play it. That those who wanted to start deserved to get it early, and that by delaying it only punished us. And they’re right, like I said I am enjoying it, there’s a huge discord of people enjoying it. If some people just absolutely can’t handle 30fos then they are welcome to delay it for themselves and not buy it until hardware catches up
They’re “overnight performance experts” because there are similar games that run better.
To me it seems that there was a tight schedule and they couldn’t prioritize performance tweaks over features. I mean, if it’s works it works, refactor later so we can jump to the next requirement.
Sum all that up and you won’t know which part of the chain takes most cycles,
As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable
Not gonna lie, something tells me your opinion would shift within seconds if your computer wasnt working you a little extra magic to make this sentence true.
Willing to throw my hat into the ring here and say that I haven't even bought it yet because I know my pc can't handle it. I will wait for performance patches (or look at finally upgrading my 5 year old pc)
I also think they've done everything right. They called it out BEFORE release, but released anyway for the subset of players who can play, with the promise of improving it for the rest.
The ones who can play it got lucky, the ones who can't and are all pissed about it are the same ones who would be bitching if it got delayed.
Honestly they should have put it behind the beta window under the caveat that the “beta” was just bug fixing.
But Ive kinda noticed a trend where people who say that everyone else is overreacting, and that people are throwing tantrums over nothing, are pretty often people who have a spendy machine that brute forced past all the issues.
Like people who say “minecraft doesnt have a memory leak issue, just install a bit more RAM!” You havent solved the problem, you exist in a situation where you cant notice the problem.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)
That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,
I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (…) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.
Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.
You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”,
No, that just supports my theory. Graphics settings usually scale really well, that’s the reason they are adjustable by the end-user in the first place. Those should not cause any of the issues you are talking about. The problems lie in parts that take advantage of certain architectural differences.
A hypothetical example that highlights a real architectural difference between consoles and PCs:
Say you have a large chunk of data and you need to perform some kind of operation on all this data. Say, adjust the contents of buffer A based on the contents of buffer B. It’s all pretty much the same: read some data from A and B, perform some operation on it, write back the results to A. Just for millions of data points. There are many things you could be doing that follow such a pattern. You know who’s really good at doing a similar operation millions of times? The GPU! It was made specifically to perform such operations. So as a smart console game developer you decide to leverage the GPU for this task instead of doing it on the CPU. You write a small compute kernel, some lines in your CPU code to invoke it. Boom, super fast operation.
Now imagine you’re tasked with porting this code to the PC. Now, suddenly this super fast operation is dog slow. Why? Because it’s data generated by the CPU, and the result is needed by the CPU. The console developer was just using the GPU for this one operation that’s part of a larger piece of code to take advantage of the parallel performance of the GPU. On PC, however, this won’t fly. The GPU cannot access this data because it’s on a separate card with it’s own RAM. The only way to get to the CPU is through the (relatively slow) PCIe bus. So now you have to copy the data to the GPU, perform the operation, and then copy the data back to system RAM. All over the limited bandwidth of the PCIe bus, that’s already being used for graphics-related tasks as well. On a console this is completely free, the GPU and CPU share the same memory so handing data back and forth is a zero-cost operation. On PC this may take so much time that it’s actually faster to do on the CPU, even though the CPU takes much more time to perform the operation, simply to avoid the overhead of copying the data back and forth.
If an engine uses such an optimisation this will never run well on the PC, regardless of how fast your GPU is. You’d need a lot of years of ‘hardware inflation’ before either doing it on the CPU or doing it on the GPU + 2 times the copy overhead is faster than just doing it on the GPU of the console with zero overhead.
In fact, things like this is why Apple moved away from dedicated GPUs in favour of a unified memory model. If you design your engine around such an architecture you can reach impressive performance gains. A good example of this is how Affinity Photo designed their app around the ‘ideal GPU’ that didn’t exist yet at the time, but which they were expecting to in the future. One with unified memory. When Apple finally released it’s M-series SoCs they finally had a GPU architecture that matched their predictions and when benchmarked with their code the M1 Max beat the crap out of a $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X. Note that the AMD part is still much faster if you measure raw performance, it’s just that the system architecture doesn’t allow you to leverage that power in this particular use-case.
It’s not just how fast the individual components are, it’s how well the are integrated and with a modular system like a PC this is always going to cause a performance bottleneck.
There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
I don't think the issue is with people deducing something is wrong with the game. The issue is people sayings "It's definitely the fuel pump - why didn't you give it a larger pipe?" because the windscreen wipers aren't working.
Recognising an issue vs diagnosing it vs. figuring out a treatment. You can notice chest pains and shortness of breath, perhaps make an educated guess that it could be a heart attack, but it’s going to take an expert to diagnose whether that’s actually the case and what course of action to take.
Even just modding I’ve noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that’s equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.
The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the ‘alpha wolf’. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I’ve heard both) is an ‘alpha’ wolf that’s stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.
And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you’ve been actively developing mods for it.
This is exactly it. It’s more fun to shit on a game release because it gives a sense of superiority. “I know better than everyone else, this game should have been done this way and that way” and bolsters self confidence.
There are without a doubt some really good arguments for things that could be different, but the vast majority of things I read are self aggrandizing people talking about how they all know how it could be better - and that’s the arrogance that really bugs me. That any of us who don’t know anything about the source code could say at all that it should run better.
Saying “I wish it ran faster” is one thing. Saying “I know it could run better” or “Other games run fast, this one should too”, or in regards to this article “lol they did this thing that’s so stupid” and just the self backpatting for figuring it out. Software engineering is hard alone. Gaming engineering on top of that is just ridiculous. I have 14 years of software engineering under my belt and I still know they are doing things in this game that I would not be able to. Anyone who says they know better than the engineers are the same as the people who sat in my CS102 class and told other students they were smarter than the professor. You aren’t. Everyone knows you aren’t. Please stop acting like you are
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
You don’t understand. I watched a YouTube video/took CS102/have a side project I’m totally going to finish. I totally know just as much as these engineers with 10+ years experience who put the last 5+ years into the project.
Yup. I’ve worked with some really great software engineers in the gaming industry, and they don’t have a fucking clue how to optimize a game, and it’s because optimizing the game doesn’t take a clue. It takes legwork, and diagnostics, and digging, and digging, and digging.
It’s never what you think, because if it was, it would have been fixed already.
We shipped well optimized games, and we did so because the games were (relatively) small, and our engineers were absolute pro sleuths.
I largely agree with what you’re saying but I’m going to add… If you get to the point of release and you’re off 300% and not 15% … you screwed up.
There definitely aren’t easy answers to these kinds of problems but there are steps that should be taken along the way to prevent them. Getting to the end and then addressing any and all performance issues is a recipe for disaster.
You don’t want to be making major architectural changes at this point in the process. You want to be dealing with hiccups. Throwing hardware at the problem and “optimization” only go so far.
Reminds me of the Volkswagen boss when their emission cheating leaked. He said he didn’t know. Wow, you earn millions for managing a company that big and then claim to not know about something. The fuck did you do then? So either he was lying or admitting that he didn’t do his damn job. Both cases should have lead to him having to give back whatever he “earned” in his position.
I'm sure he got a bonus instead. The "C" in C-Suite stands for Certifiable. Literally divorced from reality. Needless to say they don't earn their pay at all but all the wannabees on the board keep throwing money at them because they want their shot to be a do-nothing, too.
I used to play EFT, and he would periodically say stupid shit like this regularly. Like reliably 2x a year at least.
He’s extremely out of touch with the fan base, and gets upset at the “toxic community” for complaining that the “early access” game (for what, ~8 years now) has major game breaking bugs still, and most importantly, has been overrun by hackers for many years.
Imagine an MMO where all the epic loot is randomly spawned in a free for all battle ground, and the hackers can see all items on the map, vacuum it up remotely, and leave the lobby before legit players could even sprint there in a straight line.
And then the lead dev says “man, you guys whine so much, get over it”
I believe it. Multiple friends of mine updated to play and see the streets changes when this press cycle hit, a few even shared footage of suspicious noiseless head/eyes deaths while they were in enclosed spaces. If it has been long enough, just the words escape from tarkov will send some fans back, negative experiences suspended.
Successful indies helping out the indie industry is the only way it’ll grow, a big award show that gets people’s eyes is the kind of marketing most developers could only dream of. But they a really going to have to treat each nomination as a commercial, people need to be sold on these games
Assuming they don’t just pick the devs that were already thinking of. If it’s just that then it’s probably pointless
The only way it will grow? Man, the indie scene was pretty much non existent 20 years ago and now it rivals major studios in number of concurrent players
Yeah, and it’s pretty much hit a wall. Both because of massive oversaturation causing people to not be able to find new interesting things amongst the 100 new titles released daily, ans because indy studios can’t find any funding at all anymore.
Oh, it’s always been around. Before the Internet even… It’s always been there, hell as a kid I jailbroke my PSP and loaded it up homebrew games, some of them were quite good.
And before that, there were no AAA studios, there was only indie. Doom was made by an indie studio, Minecraft was indie, flash games were indie, even the original text mmorpgs played over arpanet were indie
They’ve always been there, often pushing the boundaries and trailblazing. It may not have been mainstream, but it’s always been at the forefront of gaming, trying new things and trailblazing
Three things are different now - it’s far easier to advertise and sell indie games, powerful tools are more available to the common person than ever, and modern gaming is getting worse by the day
Which is great, but also a double edged sword. Games (even fairly simple games) take a long time to make - like years if you do it consistently in your free time, or months going full time.
Early Access was great for this - you could put up the prototype, then raise the money and support to quit your job and hire an artist to flesh it out. But if everything is early access, nothing is.
Conversely, if you go into game dev communities (haven’t found any great ones since I left that site), you hear all about people dropping $1500 for marketing that does nothing, because indie gamers tend to like indie style social media, and mainstream gamers you can easily pay to reach don’t really like indie games
Skill with social media is key to a successful indie game, but there’s not a lot of crossover between that and making a good game
So this kind of thing is huge - if piratesoftware recommends a game I’ll at least look at it, because I respect his opinion on game design. If I see an ad, store page, or random clip of a game, I’m unlikely to look at it
Indie gaming doesn’t need this because indie games are rare, it needs it because it’s so difficult to find the hidden gems buried in mountains of mediocre games
It’s an early access game. If you buy it now you are buying promises and the chance to be a beta tester. And that’s okay, if you don’t get emotional if things don’t turn out as expected.
Gawd I can’t find the site! It’s a site that predominately has sexy mods with humans. But I was just interested in the dragons.
It’s EXTREMELY high effort. Bagelgoose’s cock becomes lava rocks when enraged. Insanely detailed. If I find a link, I’ll send it over. It works with Iceborne!
Hahaha they’re not THAT spendy! Let’s see, we have… seven total now. Six EXTREMELY various dildos and one fuckdragon. Absolutely had to get the Meatcanyon model too, though I don’t think I’ll ever use it.
Holy cow, that’s huge. Fables is a very well-beloved universe, good on him for giving it to the public. I hope this opens the door for an adaptation of the comics. Alan Moore would be proud.
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