The graphics are great, like you mention. They aren’t particularly high fidelity, so performance is good, but they creative and artistic, which is better. I’m glad they didn’t just go full realism. The first game sometimes felt like they just placed assets around (although that plays into the story of the game, so it’s fine), but this one is >!in the real world!< and I was worried it’d be too realistic.
I think it definitely depends on the sort of game. I don’t mind paying AAA pricing for a game that actually feels like the studio gave a rat’s ass about providing good value. BG3, for example, was very much worth what I paid for it even just with the ~100 hours I got out of my first playthrough.
Of course, there have also been value kings that I’m not sure will ever be beaten for me in terms of price to hours played. Minecraft and Terraria are good examples here. I got Minecraft during either late Infdev or early Alpha, and so I paid fuck all compared to the current price. Considering I’ve probably put tens of thousands of hours into that shitshow in the over 13 years that I’ve played it, and I’d say it’s more than been worth it. The same goes for Terraria. At 1.5k hours of playtime and counting, it’d’ve been worth it to me even at far more than the $10 price tag that I (probably) got it at way back when.
So tl;dr, I’d say that if a game is truly well-made and enjoyable, then I don’t mind paying whatever the devs need to charge to keep their doors open. Bonus points if I can purchase the game DRM-free somehow.
Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance yesterday and it’s pretty good. I only just got out of the tutorial phase of the story and I’m impressed by the realism in the game. It’s like a non-magical recreation of TES 4 Oblivion, and the Bohemia open world feels very alive.
NPCs have schedules. You can see them through the windows as they sit down, do the sign of the cross, then eat their meals. Although a lot of them are generic NPCs, the unique named characters can have speech skill checks (your character vs theirs) to determine outcomes as well as to haggle on prices.
I like the freedom it gives your character when it comes to making money like through thievery. That gameplay loop is pretty well developed, with noise and visibility playing a role in your success. Playing as a thief is almost as satisfying as in the Thief games, which is impressive considering that you don’t have any of the cool gadgets in those games and only have lockpicks.
The one thing I haven’t gotten the hang of yet is combat. I’m flailing around slashing and stabbing but my character isn’t strong enough yet to really hold his own against anything more than one or two bandits. Maybe I’m too used to the simplistic hack and slash style in Oblivion or Skyrim, but I feel like the combat system could be polished a little better (like let me switch focus between enemies a little easier so I won’t as easily get flanked.)
I’ve been trying to progress in Forza Motorsport, but the infinite loading screen bug is stopping me from playing. After almost every second race it doesn’t save my progress and I have to kill the game and lose all the progress because it refuses to save.
Also I got a new controller for PC, can anyone recommend good controller games that are on PC Gamepass?
I’ve been playing a bunch of Street Fighter 6. I just started getting back into fighting games after dropping them early in university. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve managed to climb to p platinum playing as Cammy
BG3 already payed itself off in the first couple of weeks. Subnautica is another. And although I loathe to admit it, I do have about 2000 hours in Dead By Daylight.
Hell, I’ve bought and re-bought the original two Fallout games several times back in the 90’s as I wore out the CD’s over the years. And there plenty of games in between them and the newest that were absolutely worth it. Some aren’t even playable anymore.
And since I got into the Indie scene the numbers went up.
I’m on a continuing multiplayer campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m also playing Atelier Totori.
It’s amazing how much new stuff I’m still seeing in BG3, and I’ve gotta be in hour 350 or something like that. I’m playing with a long-time video gaming partner and I’m just letting her run with it because I’ve already played through the game.
I really started to get into Atelier Totori once it started rolling, but I’m beginning to run out of steam. I’m really missing some of the UI/UX improvements that were in Atelier Rorona DX, and I also feel like the combat isn’t quite as sharp for some reason. I’m genuinely interested in the story at this point, however. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have just jumped to Meruru.
I can’t say I have any sort of standard way to gauge that. Once the money is spent, I don’t really think about it anymore and yeah that’s probably a result of my monetary privilege, but it’s my honest answer to your question. It’s almost impossible to determine about the monetary value of an experience of a piece of art.
Some of my most favorite games were fairly short experiences.
In fact I value when a game doesn’t waste my time and is 100% fun, great content without fillers and stuff to just give you FOMO that ends up being boring and underwhelming when you actually try to do it. Even worse when you can’t tell what is and isn’t the filler.
Like, I’ve bought Outer Wilds for maybe 20€ or so and it is probably my favorite game of all time. I wouldn’t have bought it for 60€ (and it’s especially a hard sell because you can’t really entice anyone to play it without spoiling some part of the game to them which really sucks; like, I’d argue even the Steam description already spoils some of the magic). But it would be 100% worth it even if I 100% the game after maybe 10 hours (and there is no way to replay it, unfortunately).
Similarly, I’ve gotten A Short Hike for free with a Humble Bundle subscription (and not like free to own as part of the monthly bundle but just free in their “trove”) and I also completely loved it - was maybe 5 hours.
Meanwhile I played, say, Cyberpunk 2077 for free, finished it, and I am still kinda disappointed? Like there was good stuff in the game but I’m really glad I didn’t pay for it - it’s enough that I paid by putting the time in it. It left me with a feeling of wasted potential and like “surely there has to be something more” and then I finished the game and there wasn’t more. It’s so hard to explain… Like yeah, I enjoyed many hours of it, I think. But in the end it doesn’t feel good overall.
So yeah, these are the extremes, but I really don’t think you can put value on a game like that. Games by their very nature vary a lot and length isn’t (or shouldn’t) really be the main criteria. And enjoyment varies a lot as well. It can be so good that a few hours of it is enough, and it can be so mild that it’s not really worth playing. Oh and that also completely ignores the fact that some games are made to be played for hundreds of hours by design (Factorio, Rimworld), while purely story games can hardly be stretched for dozens of hours and still be fun/interesting. And games with balanced narrative and gameplay can reach a few dozen hours but even for the larger ones going 50-100 hours is usually a stretch.
Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.
MT framework (which powered several RE’s, DMC, and other Capcom games was also a damn good engine). And Criterion’s Renderware was also an exception back in PS2 days.
Who would have thought that having your own team/colleagues writing/updating their own engine would rely better results (not always) than using something made from someone else…
The problem is bigger than that. Disclaimer: generalization incoming!
Most game developers are just programmers and nothing else. They know how to write high level languages like C# well enough to write the required functions and that’s it.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Yes, there were shitty games made back then , but at least the devs had my admiration. Now, not so much. But this not limited to games, Apps are the same shit. Let’s just use some Chromium framework wrapped as an app and that’s it.
Nah this isn’t true. If you gave the devs a free month I’m sure they could optimize the hell out of things. The issue is there are deadlines and higher priority items. You can technically play cities 2 unoptimized at a lower fps and graphics setting, you’ll have a much worse time playing it if features are incomplete and full of bugs.
They simply didn’t have the time to get to optimization
That’s quite true. A friend told me that the red engine from cdpr is one of the most efficient and we’ll made engine today. It didn’t surprised me because cdpr has been working on it for 2 years after cyberpunk failed to meet the technical requirements they sold it for.
That’s what it takes now for an optimized engine: 2 years on a decade old engine.
Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
Re-using engines has been around for basically as long as game development has existed. This idea of some mythical age when game development was more "pure" is a fantasy. What has changed is that expectations on AAA titles has grown to the point where it's extremely difficult to roll your own engine if you are committed to many, many years of work.
Not to mention, it certainly doesn't guarantee that the engine performs well. Look at Starfield or Baldur's Gate 3. Both have noticeable issues with performance, and both are built on in-house engines by their respective studios.
Yeah, this guy is basically harping on the concept of re-usable code. That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly. Beyond that, everything since 2d has used an engine. Hell, to not use an engine would be wasteful and delay games. What, every game should rewrite an engine?
Even Halo CE, 2002, used an engine. The Blam! engine. Dude’s delusional if he thinks people were drawing individual pixels on the monitor.
That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly.
It’s ironic that we always seem to praise RollerCoaster Tycoon specifically, as that’s one’s based on the Transport Tycoon engine, which was also by Josh Sawyer and also in x86 assembly.
The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.
Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.
These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc… It’s gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren’t in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.
Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you’ll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It’s just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they’re doing it as a hobby with modding instead.
@warroza Z Koraszewskim się niestety coraz bardziej zgadzam. Mówię niestety, bo on kreśli ponury obraz świata. Jakieś 2 lata temu go zwymyślałem, że wyśmiewał i krytykował Gretę Tunberg – podając za przykład pozytywny chłopaka, który wymyślił i wdrożył metodę zbierania śmieci z oceanu – choć wtedy nie wygadywała żadnych dżihadystycznych haseł. Okazuje się, że miał rację. Wiele wolnościowych / demokratycznych ikon czy ideałów zostaje sprowadzonych do parteru.
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