So the CEO makes a shit decision, quits and leaves with his millions of dollars and now a bunch of employees get to lose their job. Capitalism is so disgusting.
Aw, not Beamdog. :( They made all those enhanced editions classic D&D games like Baldur’s Gate 1 + 2 and Planescape Torment. I didn’t realize they were under Aspyr, which has had serious issues itself lately, not to mention the ongoing money issues at Embracer. We’re going to hear a bunch more stories like this over the next year, aren’t we.
Anyone else just getting to a point where, given the writing on the wall, they feel gaming sort of already peaked? Amazon gaming? Netflix gaming? Apple? Yeah. No thanks. None of those companies are game companies. All of their offerings are going to be excessively monetized. All of it is going to be about data gathering instead of engaging fun games. It’s going to be AI driven. Yuck. Good thing I still have Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 to play.
People have been saying that gaming is dying and that its reached its peak for like… decades now. With the advent of game creation being more accessible and more available than ever (still), gaming isn’t going to die.
There are a thousand definitions and mine is just one among many, I’m aware. This is not a “right vs. wrong” matter, it’s how you cut things out.
For me, a roguelike has four rules:
Permadeath—can’t reuse dead chars for new playthrus.
Procedural generation—lots of the game get changed from one to another playthru.
Turn-based—game time is split into turns, and there’s no RL time limit on how long each turn takes.
Simple elements—each action, event, item, stat etc. is by itself simple. Complexity appears through their interaction.
People aware of other definitions (like the Berlin Interpretation) will notice my #4 is not “grid-based”. I think the grid is just a consequence of keeping individual elements simple, in this case movement.
Those rules are not random. They create gameplay where there are limits on how better your character can get; but you, as the player, are consistently getting better. Not by having better reflexes, not by dumb memorisation, but by understanding the game better, and thinking deeper on how its elements interact.
I personally don’t consider games missing any of those elements a “roguelike”. Like The Binding of Isaac; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game (I love it); but since it’s missing #3 (combat is real-timed) and #4 (complex movement and attack patterns, not just for you but your enemies), it relies way more on your reflexes and senses than a roguelike would.
Some might be tempted to use the label “roguelite” for games having at least few of those features, but not all of them. Like… well, Isaac—it does feature permadeath and procedural generation, right? Frankly, I think the definition isn’t useful, and it’s bound to include things completely different from each other. It’s like saying carrots and limes are both “orange-like” (carrots due to colour, limes because they’re citrus); instead of letting those games shine as their own things, you’re dumping them into a “failed to be a roguelike” category.
Slay the Spire: yes. All four rules are there, specially in spirit. It’s also a deck-building game but that’s fine, a game can belong to 2+ genres at the same time.
I’m not sure on Balatro. I didn’t play it, so… maybe?
Hell yeah, Shipbreaker had some cool worldbuilding that I vibed with while tearing shit down. Who knows when it's actually coming, but I'm looking forward to more stuff in that universe.
Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.
While I would love that to be the case, I don’t think it is that simple. Java edition, at least, has been experimenting with shader-like features in resource packs for a while now. It could be that Luanti convinced them it needs to be built in and not an extra pack, but I think it is at best parallel ideas, or at worst, Luanti taking inspiration from those shader-like packs and trying to do better not even knowing they are doing the same process as Minecraft.
Yeah. Luanti following Minecraft is nothing new. Mineclonia was an early pilot game for the engine.
But there hasn’t been much effort on copying Minecraft lately. Mineclonia is done, and it’s great.
We’ve had more mobs, animals, plants, textures, and such than un-modded Minecraft for a long time. (Which is unfair, as Luanti is a mod-first design.) But my point is the core Launti dev team doesn’t have to work on any of that.
The most noticeable recent Luanti updates have been to make the configuration screens much nicer, and add I think to add native support for more graphics tricks?
I’m not paying attention to graphics in Luanti. As others have mentioned, that’s not why I play it. I actually had a conversation recently about the best way to downgrade Luanti default graphics to match un-modded Minecraft.
That said, the Minecraft team taking notice of Luanti would be new, as far as I know.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…
Nothing screams, “I’m a piece of shit”, like basically putting on blast you are a piece of shit. I, too, never fully agreed with DEI as a whole. But I understand and appreciate the context and the point, and the necessity. It’s nothing to be mocked.
I also don’t look at the video game industry for inspiration though. Somehow the video game industry has a more rape-y and toxic culture than even the grimiest hockey dressing room. All that incel rage, I suppose.
The Journalist writes “I’m predictably both intrigued and worried that 11 bit think there’s less interest now in games with a pronounced narrative component.” But then does not detail any attempt at getting a comment from the studio on that… What gives?
Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, "intense scrutiny" from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren't going to see this as a problem.
If the planets are static and its just the ship that has to calculate N-body physics then its a pretty simple summing of vectors. It only becomes a problem when you have multiple non-static bodies that interact with eachother being simulated.
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
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