I have a super weird experience from my childhood.
I played Asheron’s Call for a long time. If you aren’t familiar the game had an interesting guild system where you would have a “patron” and XP would pass up to that patron. So experienced players would help out their vassals to both keep them progressing but also to keep them sworn to them and generating XP.
I had found a cool patron who helped me out a lot. We got talking and it turned out he lived in my town, and his younger brother was actually in my class the next year. I never really hung out with the guy I played AC with but me and his younger brother became friends.
Wow, that’s a crazy coincidence! That “patron” system sounds pretty interesting too, seems like a good way to incentivize veterans to help new players. Interesting that I haven’t really heard of any more recent games having that (as far as I know).
i play guild wars 2 in bursts, and then stop for a while in between. about a year ago i was grinding hard to get the skyscale mount, which was quite a grind at the time, and i normally only play solo, but there was a step that required me to beat a small open world dungeon that was just a bit too difficult for me to get through by myself, so i solicited help from some random guy who was standing outside.
That guy helped me a great deal and i wouldn't have been able to do it without him. after we finished the dungeon he offered for me to join their guild, which, on my own, i would never do, but coming off the high of finishing the dungeon, and feeling like i owed him, i accepted. i ended up doing guild weeklies with them quite a few times and going on discord chat and all, super chill people, it was honestly pretty fun. but alas, i fell off the guild wars 2 train and they removed me due to inactivity, but extended an offer that i could return if i ever got back into the game.
overall an awesome experience, i'm still grateful to that guy, and grateful to that guild for giving me some entertaining guild chat nights where i spent more time shooting the shit with them than actually playing the game.
I’m in my 30’s and I’ve gotten into clans within the past couple of years or so. I started playing games that none of the rest of my friends played, like Hell Let Loose and Squad. Joining a clan for those two games was huge because it gave me a ton of people to play with at pretty much any time of day. For these types of games, at least, clans are still a pretty big thing. All of the clans that I’ve seen use Discord these days.
My Hell Let Loose clan has over 1,000 members and my Squad clan has even more - not entirely sure how many. What’s really interesting is that I know and have played with a ton of those members. Made lots of good memories, too.
Anyway, in my experience clans are totally still a thing. You should seek some out! Maybe you’ll find a good group that you vibe with.
I love a game with a good large settings menu that lets me change as much as possible. If you don’t lock me out of changing all the keybindings then you’re already ahead of the game. I hate when a game has a really badly implemented feature and no way to change it or disable it.
I’m running a slightly older computer, that I need to upgrade my memory and graphics card on. The only reason I am going to try this when it comes out and not just keep playing City Skylines 1 is that it is a day one release on Game Pass. I’m not sure with the performance issues my computer will handle it and I haven’t really seen much conversation about specs required, so I’m concerned. My system was mid tier 4 years ago so if it is running bad on high tier systems today…
I’ve got an RTX 4070 and a 4790K. I’m fully prepared for my CPU to have a really hard time keeping up. I think an upgrade will be coming early next year.
This is just a game I’m really really really excited about.
I definitely am going to upgrade, I want their new life sim which they pushed the early release date back on. So I have been saving to do that. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to have everything in time for the release of this game. Hopefully the bugs will be worked out by the time I’m finished. I’m hoping by the summer.
Less a design choice and more a technical feat, but I’m hoping that we start to see the phase-out of loading screens and more of a push toward seamless gameplay. I was watching a video from the newest Spiderman and it was pretty damn cool. Practical for all games? Maybe not for a while. But I certaintly would like to see more investment in leveraging improvements in disk and memory capabilities going forward.
I would guess that loading screens will never fully go away. Especially on consoles, where everyone has a fixed set of hardware resources, and the developer knows what that is and is aiming at optimizing for that target, being able to fully remove one area from memory before loading the next gives you potentially twice as much memory to work with. That’s a big-enough gain that game developers are not going to want to give that up, since the alternative is being able to only have half (or less, if multiple areas are near each other) the complexity for their areas. If hardware gets more memory, at least some developers are going to want to increase the complexity of the environments they have rather than eliminating load screens. Otherwise, their scenes are going to look significantly-worse than their competitors who have loading screens.
There may be specific games that eliminate loading screens, at least other than the initial startup of the game. Loading screens might be shorter, or might just consist of a brief fade. But I don’t think that we’ll ever reach the point that all developers decide that that tradeoff to fully-eliminate loading screens is one that they want to make.
The shift from optical media and rotational drives to SSDs has reduced the relative cost of loading an area. But it hasn’t eliminated it.
I think that a necessary condition for loading screens going away is basically a shift to a memory architecture where only a single type of storage exists – that is, you don’t have fast-but-volatile primary storage and slow-but-nonvolatile secondary storage, but only a single form of non-volatile storage that is fast-enough to run from directly. We don’t have that technology today. Even then, it might not kill loading screens, since you might want to have different representations (more-efficient but less-compact for the area surrounding the character, and less-efficient but more-compact for inactive areas).
See, I figured consoles might actually be more likely to cross that finish line first. My logic is that the controlled platforms would give developers a) potential access to a more bare-metal style of storage medium maybe not practical on PC, and b) a consistent performance target (no needing to account for people using those pesky hard drives!)
I feel like we’re maybe already starting to see this with the PlayStation 5, but it probably also depends on how much work actually goes into optimization for these development teams.
I think the key here is integrating loading into the gameplay. The old Metroid trick of having the player traverse a basic hallway while the game loads the next area in the background is a good, if basic, example.
Most loading screens are just more of a nuisance than anything, but if they don’t remove them, maybe they could get creative in how they work/look?
The main series Danganronpa games did loading screens in a very creative way that made them feel special. The room and all the things inside would start popping up and build the room as it loaded in. More loading screens like that would be lovely if they aren’t able to remove them.
Love it too! One that has been my top listen count for years is The Witcher 3 OST. The use of some slav traditional instruments was nothing I’ve ever heard like before, and it resonated a lot with the story. Special mention to:
The Wolf and The Swallow for giving me the chills everytime I listen to it
Hail To Caranthir also has something special to it.
Although neither tracks are part of the published albums :/
The spin-off Strikers has the absolutely brain-infecting Love te Wonderland
However, I’ve recently finished Cassette Beasts, and it’s a really really strong contender. Imagine creating an OST piece as amazing as Same Old Story, then going back and adding lyrics for it for when you are fused. And then there’s the even more phenomenal Shot in the Dark (only linking the lyrics version here).
If I had to pick one... Katana ZERO. Nice mix of genres, really emotional soundtrack, lots of synthwave type electronic, all of the artists who contributed songs really put work and passion in there, they work excellently for the game, and are awesome to listen to in their own right outside of the game.
Ray tracing isn’t worth how horrible TAA can make some games look, imo. We’re getting close, but it’s been years of this and I’m so tired of choosing between ghosting and jaggies. Or worse, some games that just force the ghosting TAA onto you anyway (cyberpunk you fuck)
RT being a thing + deferred rendering for larger and more complex scenes pcaused rendering engines to change in ways that make AA work less good
Things like MSAA are now basically worthless due to these rendering changes, leading to TAA proliferation as it’s the best AA for it’s cost in modern engines
MSAA is pretty old at this point and the reason it doesn’t work well anymore is also because there’s now a lot of details in games that doesn’t require more geometry and that’s a good thing. That’s why we now have AA that doesn’t rely on the actual geometry. TAA isn’t the only one though, my favorite is SMAA and FXAA is honestly not bad either (even though it seems to depend a lot on the implementation). Both of these don’t have ghosting and they detect edges that aren’t actual geometry.
Yeah, I’m aware MSAA is old but I’m comparing current AA to that because it was an output that matches what I want from games now in looks, if that makes sense
Those games that allow SMAA or FXAA I will 100% use one of those options, even if the implementation is hot dogshit (I seriously hate ghosting), but so many games either force TAA (again, fucking cyberpunk) or only offer TAA or nothing (or TAA and upscaling, which works but isn’t a great solution, imo)
I wish I didn’t notice this shit, my wife thinks I’m insane for being bothered by them and I’m so jealous of her for it
Or at the very least, the option to choose subtitles right away at the very start of the game.
I fucking hate when games have intro scenes or full chapters where you can’t pause or bring up the menu and you cannot turn on subtitles and I just don’t play games without subtitles (when the game has dialogue).
I don’t like when games just throw you into the action without giving you the chance to tweak settings before (or even until completing the tutorial) in the first place. Like, why?
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