What kinds of games are they making that cost 71569457046263802294811533723186532165584657342365752577109445058227039255480148842668944867280814080000000000000000000 USD and who is paying for them?
Are you kidding? This has been a growing issue since the 00s. Even back when Total Biscuit was still alive (rip), he was fighting it with tooth and nail. Microsoft and some other companies have AGGRESSIVELY attacked consumers and now, it’s entirely broken in almost every industry.
Finding real reviews on things is INSANELY difficult to find, not only because influencers are all heavily biased and censored or even blacklisted when they aren’t positive, but most normal people couldn’t give a decent review if they tried. Hype is everywhere, and colors everything.
TB called it years ago: the trick is to find a journalist that you know what they like, dislike, and are honest and with integrity, able to be brutal and fair, but have ethics and a strong sense of responsibility to the future of gaming. This requires a uniquely difficult and rare combination of intelligence, novel ideas, and sound judgement, along with consistency. And production, a refreshing articulation, and some brevity doesn’t hurt.
Find that source and support them, and help them grow. Get to know their tastes, and they should serve us all well.
But, until that person who can unite gamers appears again, and holds those important and knowledgeable discussions… Influencers will be just that: influencers - not journalists. And be unreliable shills.
Honestly I’ve thought about doing it more than once, but fear and risk of the wrath of sensitive gamers and corporate hr entities angry for me shitting on their games and decisions and suing me is a real thing. I could be a gaming journalist, one that gives my all and tries to serve the good of gamers and the future of society to the best of my ability. But I also seriously doubt anybody would want to listen to me.
But, until that person who can unite gamers appears again, and holds those important and knowledgeable discussions… Influencers will be just that: influencers - not journalists. And be unreliable shills.
Given past events, the more likely outcome is yet another gamergate, where actual criticism of the lack of honesty in games reporting gets drowned in a sea of misogyny, personal attacks and hate based on disinformation
It’s not finished yet but OpenXray Gunslinger is probably going to be a better STALKER: Call of Pripyat remaster than the official one that just got announced.
I’m just at the beginning of Act 3 of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’ve dragged my feet doing a lot of side content and playing slowly because I sort of don’t want this game to end. For once I wish this was a standard 100-hour JRPG fare and not as relatively short as it is at probably half that.
The game is very good. What else can be said at this point. There are minor niggles and nitpicks and occasionally some AA-ness rears its head but it’s overall one of the best games I’ve ever played so far. The story is amazing, the presentation is beautiful and the turn-based combat with QTEs and parries is super fun. The boss fights are cinematic and challenging in an almost Souls-like fashion. All the characters have distinct play styles and fun synergies.
It’s also an unabashedly French game and I’m really enjoying immersing myself in that to the max by using the French VAs.
Both are absolutely excellent, I ended up preferring some voices in French and some in English. For me French feels more immersive, but I grew up in a country that always used subtitles over dubs so I’m used to reading.
I’ve also just always loved french and speak and read a bit of it still so I was always going to go for that in a french game.
Brain hack: Go stare at a wall for 5-10 minutes and try again, repeat until the game/activity seems fun. Your brain will start to crave any stimulation when faced with unbearable boredom.
Note: This may cause emotions you were suppressing to surface in the absence of stimulation, which will likely be uncomfortable, but also might be the reason you were struggling to enjoy things in the first place.
my understanding is that games like this have to track your location and store that location history for obvious reasons. I think Pokémon go was bought by Saudi Arabia or something like that, and that made me wary. what is your plan for protecting and anonimizing this data, and are you planning to sell it to third parties?
otherwise, I’m a huge fan of games like mindustry on android
I’m a big privacy advocate, and my personal devices and home network reflect that. Which really brings me to a difficult crossroads here.
I don’t have a good answer for you right now, the best I have are the problems I’m trying to balance:
Anticheat: How do detect and build better detection for location spoofing? This, intrinsically, requires the recording of directly associated location data. And the collection of mass anonymized data in order to determine “what looks normal”, to spot abnormal (spoofing) behavior. How can I balance this against privacy concerns? It’s a rough one for sure.
This is the toughest one here. Likely I’ll need a combination of data retention periods and anonymization. At the very least sensitive data is separated from the rest of the game data, and is encrypted at rest. Likely there are clever protocols and solutions already out there I just don’t know about yet that can improve protections here.
Audit Logs: When a player performs an action that interacts with a location-based feature, where they where when that action was performed it is stored alongside the audit log of that action. This ties in closely with Anticheat, and also enables pattern matching to try and find oddities (exploits, cheating, bugs, and other problems).
Right now these stay around forever, and can be used to simulate the global game state at any point in the past (really REALLY useful for debugging problems, especially when you don’t have a good repro). Eventually such state should make granular rollbacks possible in case of exploits or rampant cheating. (A game where you have to physically go somewhere to capture a mine means rollbacks have a crazy high cost, making them granular is pretty important)
Analytics and Telemetry: Location data isn’t in use here right now. And I don’t see how it would be while also respecting privacy.
Selling the data: 😂😂😂 I’d rather light my servers on fire than stoop to that level.
At least they added the rematch feature at the end of a battle. I often find myself stuck on a particularly hard fight for many attempts till I get it right.
Even a SATA SSD is gonna cut that down almost as much as an MVMe! I have both types in my machines and basically… as long as it’s not a hard drive hahaha
Decent speed storage and hardware to match, remove all splash screen bullshit and loading vids etc, kill any other pre menu misc they might have, and yeah … ???
Idk about the whole corporation vibe. I’d personally go for “pure” industry. All players are working to grow a huge factory because we all know t̳̖̮͕͙h͈̪ͪ͊̈̿̍̐͢ĕ̪͖͔̃̃͛̄͌̚ ͉̙͈̩̩̬̪̓̉f̘̈ͭá҉̟c͔͖͌̚͡t̨͙̖̖̹͚̬͐ͧ͛̀̈́ò̻̼̙r̢̙͒́̂y̔ͫ͛̆ͥ̍͏̲̯͍̫͚̣͚ ͎̽̾̓̋͋̇m̹̣̙ͦ̿̑͡ȕ̝͕̑̿͒s̛̀̓̔̊t̗͈̦̽̀̆̃ ̠̯͕̀͒̃g̿̾̾̅͑͟ȑ̠̃ͨ̿͌̿̉o̿̽͂̐̒ͫ҉͔̲͚̺̲w̧͗͑͆̄̆ͦ̾
I’m an avid player of Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program. Those really scratch the pure factory itch.
I’m aiming to scratch a different itch here. Persistent empire building in competition with others over finite resources is an itch that’s REALLY hard to scratch. And that’s what I’m aiming for here.
That sense that you have built something that feels more tangible than other games you’re accustomed to. There’s a real world element, you control something that someone else cannot, with that comes that empire building feeling I personally live, and want to build a game around.
A few more honorable mentions that are not exact re-implementations with compatibility with the original datafiles, but more spiritual followups:
Total Annihilation - TA Spring > Spring Engine > Recoil Engine > Beyond All Reason github.com/beyond-all-reason (I think there are mods that make it “Basically TA”)
bin.pol.social
Aktywne