bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn’t good, then the modders won’t bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.
because of that i don’t think there’s any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn’t getting forced to work without pay - they’re passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too
Defending amateurism in amateur fields is reasonable. Especially when amateurism is a legal defense of the practice such as modding. Professional mods without official license are copyright violations.
This is similar to fanfic communities. The amateurism of the field gives it part of its charm and community, and it also makes it easier for people to come in, develop these skills, and move into creating and selling original works if they’d like to move in that direction.
Copyleft “fanfics” are what we call the entire SCP universe. CC-BY-SA is just like the GPL. Notice it’s not CC-BY-SA-NC (NonCommercial). Labor, even if it’s “mods” or “fanfics” is still labor. What, suddenly your work grew in value because it was based off of a different license agreement? The hard work didn’t change, yet it suddenly legitimately grew in value?
If i ever made a game, im making sure everything is released cc by sa and a FLOSS software license for the source code. Because fuck the mentality that says your work isn’t valuable simply because I didn’t give you a license to “my stuff”
Labor is labor, and copyleft is great. Hell copyright has massive issues. But also if youre going to participate in amateur labor where it would be illegal to profit, something wonderful and fulfilling for many people, then you don’t get mad when you don’t get paid. If you decide you’d like to make it something you get compensated for you can file the serial numbers off as has become a common practice for fanfic writers who achieve a certain level of popularity.
But also, the exchange of money changes the nature of labor. Labor done out of love and a desire to create and act and give to one’s community is deeply human and quite satisfying and it’s why amateur communities develop culture of amateurism. And it’s why many people who don’t want to do these things for a living choose to do them for a hobby
I don’t either. But if they’re joining an intramural league, I oppose it. Because its a league defined by amateurism in which nobody’s really seeking to profit.
When we talk NCAA or Olympics then I think that as people are starting to profit off of it the athletes should profit. Though I ask why we’re endorsing the everyone profit model rather than the “college sports teams should more resemble high school ones and we create a minor league instead” model.
Lets go to a form of labor I’ve done: open mic nights. Comedians should be able to make money off their craft, but open mic nights shouldn’t pay because that creates conditions that ruin the point. It’s a space where anyone can go up, try their hand, and with minimal judgment perform. You being good is a nice surprise to the audience, unlike when you’re being paid where they have reason to expect it. It’s a different environment, one more focused on the human desire to create and perform and share it and on the development of skills to a level that they can be sold.
That’s what amateurism is about. It’s about keeping it low key, keeping the expectations reasonable, and keeping the vibe of “people are selling their stuff here” out. It’s the same reason that as a former nudes poster who has dated nudes sellers I’ve wanted to keep those communities separated.
So yeah, it kills the vibes and for us supporters of amateurism we know we’re losing out on highly skilled people’s contributions to our communities when we say we’d rather them not engage in commercial works in those realms. Thats OK.
And I’d like to add that I do purchase art from former amateurs when they move into professional realms. Tamsyn Muir is my favorite author and her writing drips of her fanfic history. But her fanfic is for her and under a name idk if shes even released, and I wouldn’t buy it if she were to sell it wholecloth, because that kills the vibes.
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.
The pressure applied by the need for video games to act as investments is not aligned with artistic expressiveness, innovation or quality.
This is why games from smaller Companies or indie developers continue to be the huge, genre-changing breakout hits. They’re still being made with the intention of making a game that’s fun, weird, or interesting as a primary concern, rather than just being a vehicle for profit.
Playing Subnautica after the first playthrough isn’t nearly as scary, but still so much fun. I’d suggest playing it first on normal flatscreen, and then playing it a 2nd time in VR.
Edit: make sure to grab the vr fix mods off nexus mods if playing in vr. There is one to fix audio and one to fix controls. These are basically mandatory for a good experience.
Imma need at least 6 new testicle types to explode! Listen to your playerbase! Every damn nazi has the same balls?! Get your heads in the game Rebellion.
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).
Since most of Elder Scrolls nostalgia today is around Morrowind, it’s always interesting (and a bit funny) to find people (involved or not) who think the series started to derail with Morrowind.
I am not mocking them at all, I get it, Daggerfall and Morrowind are very different games with a different scale and focus. Daggerfall is also… quite overwhelming, and rather impersonal for 99% of its gameplay. I really don’t know what a “modern” Daggerfall would look like.
Honestly I have played only a little of Arena (very late, around the time Bethesda started to give it for free on their site). I think the farthest I went was the second staff piece dungeon.
yeah its just that the race or class or whatever that did not regenerate mana but could get so much mana from items. I was levitating with a forceshield and blasting things before long right into the end. I was like gene grey or magneto just tearing up the place.
Oh, kind of like the Sorcerer default class in Daggerfall and the Atronach sign in Morrowind and Oblivion then (and sort of Atronach stone in Skyrim too, though this one is just less regen, not no regen at all).
Yeah, those are fun. You’re basically a magic sponge.
I can tell you. It would be HUGE absolutely generic open world with AI generated characters and quests, virtually zero human made and interesting quests and gameplay would feel like filling excel spreadsheets. Somewhat like Ubisoft recepe :-D
At least that’s what original Daggerfall 's spirit would be. It was at the time where “the biggest” was simply the catchphrase and Daggerfall was exactly that. The biggest. But also very shallow and empty. Sure there were billions of quests but what for? When for one interesting there were dozens of generic ones? Don’t get me wrong, it was still a great game at the time, because players weren’t as spoiled and something was always better than nothing. At least that’s my impression.
daggerfall is so messed up that the legitimate strategy to beat the game is go in and out of dungeons and waiting for the quest item to randomly appear next to the front door
That’s honestly what I am worrying it would be, and what I meant by a huge part of the game being “impersonal”.
Daggerfall has parts that are fascinating, even long after its time.
Its custom class creator is rather fun. Its magic effect system too… despite some of the most intriguing effects not even working at all. Seriously. You can craft those spells, they just don’t do anything.
Its dungeons are intimidating in scale, and the 3D automap is both a feat and almost no help at all.
There are freaking linguistic skills, plural because there are like 8 different languages or so. They are mostly useless, because they just add a slight chance a monster won’t attack you, but since you don’t know when it works you’ll murder them anyway.
And then there’s the undistinguishable random quests and the grind.
I think, at this point, most of the nostalgia is for Skyrim, despite being the newest one in the series, it is nearly 14 years old now and way more people have played it. It had issues, and lost a lot of what was great in Morrowind, but it’s a beacon of quality compared to what came after.
It’s started to impact their success though, starfield has only sold like 3 million compiles so far, compared to the 12.5 million of fallout 4 on launch day. Hell, Morrowind has sold 4 million copies, albeit over 23 years.
It’s probably to late for Bethesda to turn things around, but, it’s a great example of what not to do for other studios and publishers.
I’d love to see another more standard turn based FF, but people also have to realize that the last pure turn based game was X in 2001. FF changing shit with every game is what FF does.
Final Fantasy X was also the first pure turn-based game in the mainline series since 1990.
I keep hearing people cite Final Fantasy nostalgia with Expedition 33, but pure turn-based combat with realistic graphics happened exactly once in all of Final Fantasy. I don’t get it. It’s much more of a thing in the rest of the genre, including SQEX’s other properties.
I was an extremely casual rts player for years playing mainly aoe3. Beyond all reason captured me instantly with the controls. Basically other rts games control difficulty with limited control scheme so you require high apm. Bar gives players as many quality of life controls as they want and allows for long action queues. I can queue up a unit to operate for 10mins while I focus on other parts of the game.
Bar also has basically no pop limit so you’re only limited by the resources you control it also doesn’t incentivize storing large amounts of resources. So wealthy is income focused. This means if you have more map control you have more wealth but because units drop a %of their cost in wrecks if you’re behind and you win a good fight and can control the wreckage field you can catch up.
There is also so much more like the ability to transfer units, metal, energy to other players at 0 cost means working together is op. Strats involve a lot of “communism” and communication to decide where on the map needs the resources.
Example I might have won my side of the map and I’ll send some metal over to another player who is losing so they can stay in the fight. Or my eco player will make units and sell them to players for their metal costs. Which means front players don’t need to pay the metal and energy cost of building a t2 lab they just pay the unit cost.
This sounds a lot like what Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance has been doing for ages, and that expansion came out in 2007. The only difference is the unit limit but that’s mostly for performance reasons (and is rarely hit in competitive matches anyway).
How are these mechanics next-gen if they’re more than 15 years old?
Ive played faf its a very different feeling game. Faf feels awful. I’d say bar is next gen because a total annihilation style game has never been a huge rts title and I think bar is the one that can reach the mainstream rts audience and beyond.
TLDR: Zero-K and BAR are based on the same FOSS engine. Zero-K is less micro with better unit AI. BAR delivers a more vanilla and micro intensive Total Annihilation experience.
Supreme Commander is proprietary closed source and has some different mechanics. Larger but worse maps.
More modern graphics and less unit types but more micro opportunity. Also zero k has buildable terrain in the form of ramps and walls. Bar has terrain deformation but can’t actively do it with contractors.
Idk I haven’t played Zero K but it’s a good rts as well.
For real. Imo the best RTS out there currently. I feel so much more in control of the camera and the units. Whenever I go back to old RTS games now they feel dated and clunky.
The AI is also surprisingly enjoyable for a more casual player like me. It doesn’t cheat (as far as I’m aware) by getting resources or having vision where it shouldn’t. But it does exploit its high APM and it is very aware of what it can get away with in fights. This results in an AI that never does outright bullshit, but in one that does just sneak past the 2mm space not covered by turrets or units and ruins your entire economy. Give it a large open map and it’ll demolish me, but on smaller maps with choke points it’s easier to handle.
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