As a massive fan of Age of Empires since the first one, I still cannot believe they re-released them as “Definitive” editions, and then have proceeded to add new DLC to them.
I love the support and attention they’re getting, and the new content they never had before. But I cannot get over adding paid DLC’s to a DEFINITIVE EDITION OF SOMETHING!!!
Normally I would take this as a joke but they shut off concord after 10 days and that was worth 200mil. I’m surprised they didn’t give it 2 weeks at least.
The first time I heard about concord was when they shut it off. I don’t know how they expect a game to do well when they did absolutely zero advertising.
That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.
Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?
Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.
My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel.
To me this feels like perfectly within the scope of what should be the realm of “remaster”, it’s just that history teaches us to expect less.
Redoing animations? To me, that’s definitely more than a re-master. The musical equivalent would probably be something in the mixing phase- adding or adjusting effects, changing pan, level, EQ, automation, etc.
The templated auto face animations during dialogue along with the low enthusiasm VO from half of the cast is really the only factor that keeps OG horizon from being perfect.
I’m confused, isn’t this already available on PC and PS5? Why does it need to be remastered? I thought remastering a game meant making it work on a new platform.
A “remaster” is traditionally more focused on a rerelease with improved graphic fidelity - details, resolution, possibly lower-effort improvements to models and geometry, but basically the same game, slightly modernised with better modern compatibility.
A “remake” would be a complete overhaul of the modelling, QoL improvements, or reimagining some systems potentially including game engine. Eg, the FF7 remake.
Its not the graphics that need a rework, its their quest syatem.
The side quests were tied to your overall level, meaning if you were overleveled, you could unlock quests to battles that were only explained way later in the main quest line. Also the Frozen Wilds expansion made more sense if you did them BEFORE the final quarter of the main story line, but the missions themselves were of a higher level than the endgame boss.
Regarding the main quest line, while its quality is noticibly much higher in Zero Dawn than the later game Forbidden West, the way they were structured meant that f you unlocked the extra dialogue (from talking to certain NPCs) out of order, the whole script felt a little jarring.
Tldr: the quest system of Zero Fawn needs a fuckton of polish, not the graphics
Agreed. HZD always felt like a game that was built around a story premise first and foremost, which sort of makes sense as that studio had never done a game like that before.
I remember an interview where they were struggling to shift gears from Killzone and looking for new ideas from among their staff when one of their devs pitched HZD’s premise. As a result, they approached making an open world action adventure game as complete noobs. This doesn’t excuse any of the poor design decisions. I was hoping they’d learn from their mistakes in FW, but they instead made the open world part somewhat better and then forgot to keep the focus on the main quest and characters in the process.
Also, the one incharge of side quests needs a bloody promotion. The side quests quality in Forbidden West was overall as good as the MAIN quest quality in Zero Dawn.
The quest themselves (minus a few misses), the voice acting and mocap, the POLISH. swoon
I’ll be honest, I played through HZD and liked it a lot, but I came away with a list of minor improvements that could have made the game better.
If anything, Forbidden West had all of those same problems and more, and it had a less interesting story. Just to talk about the quests, for instance, I found myself running in boring laps trying to get a particular resource to upgrade a particular weapon, repeating the same battle so many times that it became truly tiresome.
Then I finally upgraded the weapon… and found that by the end of the story I had a bunch of incompletely-upgraded weapons and armor that nevertheless left me so overpowered that the final boss fight was hilariously trivial. If I’d invested the enormous amount of grind to actually max out all the top-tier equipment, then the fight would have been even easier than that.
The franchise has a lot going for it, but they need to figure out their pacing.
Edit: Also, I definitely don’t need a pointless little board game. “Hey, you want to play Strike?” “Fuck no! I’m out here trying to save the fucking world! Fuck off with your minis!”
Hard agree on the weqpon upgrades. Getting the perfect one, upgrading it to the nines and FEEL like it was worth it was one of the fun parts in HZD. Not so much here (Wildmaws shudders)
Regarding Strike, if they had slowed down the pace of the game, like death of the world in a few years instead of months (with hard timeskips you could gree to), and set the Strike tables in out-of-the-way corners you never have to go to without good reason, I MIGHT have felt like playing it. Deff interesting, just not part of the overall tone of the game.
With as much as they talked about the irrevocable destruction of the global ecosystem coming up in a matter of months, and then the constantly rotating day-night cycle, I imagine it would be possible to find out if your in-game time played actually was more or less than that deadline. It would be hilarious if the world was going to end in six months but then the math showed that you actually spent more than a year running around shooting the fins off of robo-pterodactyls.
They missed a single letter in a single word on a page that wasn’t meant to be public-facing, what a bunch of losers
It’s pretty easy to tell that this guy spends at least half of his waking hours on reddit. He also completely glossed over the fact that it’ll be open source, so we can just fork it and cut out the icky parts
NFTs are objectively a scam, and unsurprisingly, 1208 – these developers – proudly and prominently display Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort on their homepage.
They just say “open-source” without stating a license, and coming from people willing to put a pyramid scheme in their no-effort mobile game, that sends up red flags for openwashing.
If it is open-source, that isn’t god’s gift to mankind or anything. There are plenty of existing open-source Flappy Bird clones that mimic it – as best I can tell – one-to-one because Flappy Bird isn’t a complex game. And I’m somehow doubting a game designed to hawk shitty-ass NFTs has a lot of detail put into it either.
You call them scammers, then say their right to scam should be protected by licenses? I say we scam the scammers by forking it and doing whatever the fuck we want with it 🙂
Whether something is open-source or not is dependent on what license if any its creator chooses to put it under. a) This comment confuses me more than anything, and b) if you want to make a better Flappy Bird game, you’ll probably have a better shot forking one of the existing clones than waiting for whatever steaming, uninspired pile of shit comes out of Belfort’s wallet.
One small but important correction. NFTs are not a scam, it’s an amazing technology that has the potential to revolutionize lots of stuff, that became popular when people used it for stupid shit.
Saying NFT is a scam because people have used it to scam others is like saying phones are a scam because people call others over the phone to scam them.
NFTs are essentially a decentralized token. This means that they can be used to represent anything you might want to represent with a token, e.g. ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital asset, such as a website or game; some predetermined amount of something, similar to a stock or bonds; etc. The fact that some people used it to mean ownership of random pictures and people thought buying random pictures on the internet for a ridiculous amount of money was a good idea tells you more about people than about the technology.
That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a blockchain has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of NFTs isn’t as a scam, NFTs remain a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.
The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:
That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a piece of paper has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of paper isn’t as a scam, paper remains a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.
The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.
Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they’re usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn’t need to consume that amount of energy, that’s just the current implementation, but there’s a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.
Ok, I was in agreement with you (the concept of NFTs is great, what people do with it is dumb) until the environment part
Crypto, even proof of stake, isn’t energy efficient and never will be, the banking sector uses more energy but it also manages quadrillion in funds and transactions, crypto’s value as a whole is orders of magnitude less than that and there’s more energy spent per transaction than in the traditional financial sector. Crypto replacing banks and cash would be an environmental disaster.
Next, even if mining is done using green energy, it means that this energy isn’t used to reduce emissions in other, actually essential, sectors. There’s an environmental cost to green energy (what do you think was under the dam’s reservoir?) so having to produce more infrastructure just for crypto is wasteful.
exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesn’t mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.
There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.
I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.
Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes. Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.
Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes.
That’s wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it’s only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.
But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.
Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.
Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
That’s what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn’t be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that’s a difficult thought to grasp, it’s like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn’t mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.
You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.
I’m not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.
The more people mine, the more decentralized it is, the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased. The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required, the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions. The more it’s used, the higher the value, the more people mine.
There’s a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can’t just say “1 or 1000 it’s the same”.
Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.
Crypto uses 1% of the world’s energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can’t scale to that without a huge environmental impact.
Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.
Did you read the link you sent? It clearly states that only the amount of miners matter like I said before, the amount of transactions has nothing to do with it, you’re mixing the two.
The more people mine, the more decentralized it is
Wrong, decentralization is hard to measure, one person with a mining farm is centralized, while hundreds of people with their personal computer are decentralized but both produce the same amount of hash power. So you can have one person investing more and more in mining rigs increasing the total amount of mining power in the pool but decreasing it’s decentralization.
the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased.
Yes, this is correct, if you have more computers mining you will have a higher energy spending.
The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required,
Wrong, there’s one blonc every 10 minutes, regardless of the amount of transactions that happen. Did you even read the link you sent?
the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions.
Wrong, the energy needed to confirm 1 or 1000 transactions is the same, and it’s related to the hashing difficulty established by the total amount of hash power, again, did you even read the link you sent?
The more it’s used, the higher the value, the more people mine.
Wrong, the value of an asset does not necessarily correlate with it’s use, for example gold is more valuable than dollar, even though dollar is a lot more used.
There’s a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can’t just say “1 or 1000 it’s the same”.
Yes there is, but until that limit is hit the amount of transactions doesn’t matter. Also that limit is artificial and can be easily raised if needed, as it was done on Bitcoin Cash which can do hundreds of transactions per second more than Bitcoin, but because it has less miners uses less energy, thus proving you are wrong and the two are not correlated.
Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.
And ETH2 is theoretically capable of 100k, and that’s just one coin which BTW is PoS so nothing of what we talked about miners applies to it. No miners means less power consumption by the network as a whole.
Crypto uses 1% of the world’s energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can’t scale to that without a huge environmental impact.
Do you have a source for that? But also you’re measuring environmental impact as just energy consumption, and that’s very wrong, by that same standard I could say crypto is green because it produces no plastic, whereas Visa has huge factories to produce plastic for their cards, their card machines, etc. If you only focus on one environmental impact it’s easy to make anyone to be the bad guy, and for some reason people only see the Bitcoin energy usage and completely ignore that the energy consumption there is the whole story, whereas for other things there’s hundreds of factors pilling on top to generate the environmental impact.
Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.
Again, I’m not, I recognize that PoW is an energy hungry method of confirmation, however it’s not the environmental catastrophe that the original comment said and if you take into consideration ALL of the environmental impact of alternatives (not just energy consumption) you will see that it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. Which doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s far from an environmental catastrophe.
Also when you take into consideration that we were originally talking NFTs, and that’s mostly an Ethereum thing, and Ethereum is migrating to PoS, it’s even less of an environmental catastrophe.
Cool, I’ve been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.
NFTs are essentially a decentralized >token. This means that they can be >used to represent anything you might >want to represent with a token, e.g. >ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital >asset, such as a website or game
No.
NFTs are not proof of ownership. At best they are the equivalent to receipts, at worse they are mere url links. They are certainly not title deeds, not proof of copyright ownership or anything of that sort. They are just a ledger that person D paid something to person C who paid something to person B who paid something to person A.
Lets use those NFT monkeys as an example. There is literally no proof anywhere on that NFT chain that person A is the rightful copyright owner or has the rights to sell said image. Furthermore, there is no proof that person A gave the rights to person B to resell said image. Or that anyone down the chain sold the complete rights instead of just selling the link to access monkey.jpg
The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That’s the big breakthrough in technology, it’s the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I’m just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.
NFTs are an extension of that, except they can’t be split or traded by one another, i.e. they’re non-fungible. Therefore you can by definition prove ownership of those tokens, as that’s the whole point of the technology, which again, if you’re curious I can try to explain how it works.
How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that’s an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There’s no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper. Nowadays this is mostly databases and the piece of paper is just generated from the records there, but this is very insecure as anyone with database write access (or access to the physical folder containing the documents in case of old paper deeds) can transfer ownership. NFTs solve this because only the owner of a token can transfer it to someone else, so they’re inherently safer than any of the alternatives.
Again, the technology is great and has millions of excellent applications, but people use it for pyramid schemes and scamming others, but people do that with any piece of technology.
Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn’t understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it’s all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.
The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That’s the big breakthrough in technology, it’s the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I’m just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.
…
How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that’s an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There’s no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper.
So NFTs are not inherently proof of ownership as the person above said. The general concept of owning crypto (which no one is questioning here) is a very different topic than using NFTs as proof of ownership of literally anything else.
Do you consider a deed to be proof of ownership? A stock? The registry of a car? They’re not inherently proof of ownership, they’re just pieces of paper or entries on a database. If you go down the road of what is proof of ownership then no technology we have is able to prove it.
The thing is that NFTs you can prove ownership of the token, if the token correlates with something, e.g. if the DMV stored car ownership in a Blockchain, NFTs could be used to represent car ownership in a secure and decentralized way.
but, why? is there some problem with the way we prove ownership of things now? as far as i know there isn’t an epidemic of car titles or house deeds getting hacked.
No, there isn’t, but there are advantages to it as well, just like how a database has advantages over a paper folder.
An NFT can’t be transferred by anyone other than the owner, and ownership can be verified independently.
Here’s an example of a use that would be very cool and would take advantage of it (even though I know it’s unlikely to happen). Ownership of games, some games are sold on different platforms, to verify the ownership of the game (or DLC, or cosmetics) games have to verify with first party services (like PSN or Steam), which means that for the most part you need to buy games on each platform individually, but if platforms used an NFT for it games would be buy once play anywhere, and they would allow you to sell or even borrow games, and no company could prevent you from doing so. Which is obviously the reason this will never happen, but it’s a nice idea.
That being said there are downsides to it as well, such as a person being the full owner of stuff means that a person can lose the key and therefore lose access to the house, or that scammer can steal everything, whereas making you sign your house to someone else is a lot more beurocratic, which serves to protect you from you.
Just to be clear, I’m not a “we should use NFT for everything” type of person, in fact I don’t think there are many use cases nowadays that are worth using it, but the technology is interesting regardless, and solves the problem of how to prove ownership without a centralized trusted organization.
First of all losing value and being a scam are not correlated, the dollar is losing its value compared to the Euro for the past year but it’s not a scam.
Secondly that would be an association fallacy, “X is a scam, X is an NFT, therefore all NFT are scam”.
The head of bungie spent a shit ton on classic cars, but they’re laying people off… I really want to see wtf happened to bungie internally. It went to shit the past decade.
Bungie’s layoffs have been devastating. 220 jobs were eliminated yesterday, while other jobs had been shifted over to PlayStation Studios.
Sadly it’s all but impossible to show their layoff was because of maternity leave and not just because they were ‘part of the layoff’…
Hope there’s a paper trail adding them to the list of layoffs because of the maternity leave, but I doubt they’d be stupid enough to put it down on paper.
Could be a chat or email trail. People nowadays often forget the difference between talking something over at the urinal, and writing about it in an app.
My work is in the process of hiring someone to replace me since I’m headed to a new job. After a recent interview, a co-worker on the hiring committee made a comment on Teams, “His age seems OK.”
Uhhh, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about age in hiring decisions. Especially on a written medium. Pretty sure that in the US, age discrimination laws starts at like 40yo, including hiring and firing. That interviewee seemed to be over 40yo, which is probably what prompted that comment.
Not that I think the candidate will sue us if we don’t hire him, but it’s just unnecessary risk. And I don’t even work in HR or legal; rather I’m in IT. Surprised HR didn’t say anything about that comment.
That whole mindset is weird to me. I’m in my mid 40s and just got hired on as a team lead for a bunch of kids who are fresh out of college. They’re exactly where I am when I started and I’m excited to share my 20 years of experience and mentor them.
They wanted to hire me on as their supervisor but I made it clear that the extra couple grand a year for that headache didn’t interest me.
It is. Additionally, my co-worker who made the comment is like 33-34. I’m 37. Another person on the committee is 40. HR is like 64. So it’s not like we’re a bunch of young guns ourselves lol. We should want experience, and with experience tends to come age.
But yeah, I getcha on the management thing. I’m technically a manager, but I don’t have any subordinates. Because I told them, they’re going to have pay me way more to become an actual manager with direct reports, especially since I’d lose my non-exempt status. To make me exempt, they’d need to make it worth my while. We’re a non-profit, so we already get paid crap (though benefits are excellent).
pretty sure that’s illegal and they can sue for the maternity leave pay as well as discrimination….
lots of corps(e) don’t want to employ mothers of young children, as there’s lots of legally excused absences and they can’t press them for as much overtime….
Only illegal if the maternity leave was the reason, and it can be shown to be the reason. Over 200 people were also laid off at the same time. I have no doubt bungie added them because of the maternity leave, but it’s gonna be really hard to show in a court of law.
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