Phoenix was the best place I’d ever worked until they came along. Fucking bitcoin bros destroyed everything because they didn’t understand the games industry.
You can blame crypto bros but the original owners sold out. Once a studio has been swallowed up by a conglomerate it is only a matter of time before it turns to shit.
The owners might have had no choice though because they took a ton of venture capital funding.
I’ve realized that it’s best to just avoid any company that takes VC because they will inevitably fuck everyone over.
I wish I could get more into this, but yes there were some major missteps during the covid/post-covid “stocks are crazy high, money is free!” period. After that there just wasn’t really a way to recover.
Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to avoid VC money, the tech industry runs on it.
If you worked on Dauntless, just want to say I appreciate your part! Only played it for a while at release because the grind turned me off but it’s been sad seeing news pop up of how it has been going downhill. Was such a fun game.
Sucks that good game devs get laid off because the leaders are asleep at the wheel unless it involves monetization.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only).
Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
I don’t find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense. It aims to solve a problem that affects many individuals and a significant part of human culture.
What I do find suspicious is the sudden emergence of criticism now that it looks like it might succeed. I smell astroturfing and media manipulation.
Man, for a console gamer coming over this thread has a bunch of pretty terrible recommendations. I can't imagine a better way to send somebody back to console gaming than immediately dumping a bunch of fiddly mods and janky old stuff on them so they can play their OS for a while before having any fun.
I mean, if they're into competitive, hardcore console stuff they probably will want to decide if they want to go down the rabbit hole of competitive PC gaming. Checking out a couple MOBAs or fast mouse and keyboard shooters is probably a good way to start (for Steam ease of use I suppose DOTA2 and CS2 are the obvious choices). That's the fighting game equivalent stuff they're unlikely to have played already. I'd say if they aren't feeling it, it's fine to step away, though.
Depending on how beefy their gaming PC is, it may be fun to go for crazy console-crushing visuals. Path traced games like Indiana Jones or Cyberpunk may be fun to check out even if they've played the console versions, if they have a current-gen expensive GPU in there.
There are a couple of genres that are also cross-over but play best on PC, like survival sims and the like. I'm a PC controller player, but I'll switch to mouse and keyboard for, say, Satisfactory, although that's less action-packed and timing-based.
And of course there's upcoming stuff. VF 5 REVO is coming out in January, and that seems like a good chance to jump into a new thing on a gaming PC instead.
I agree. People keep suggesting Factorio, which leads me to believe that they have not actually read the post since his friend is into souls-likes and heavy combat games. Factorio is the antithesis of that! I don’t personally play those games (Factorio is one of my most played games), so I can’t make suggestions aside from Monster Hunter.
Yeah, that's why Satisfactory is probably a better choice (I mean, it's mostly "what if Factorio didn't look like a 1999 Flash game").
Honestly in 2025 (hey, happy new year!) things are platform-agnostic enough that the biggest thing to do when you switch to PC gaming is go check how all the games you know play when you run them at 200 fps or whatever. But even if you're an action game guy I do think it's work taking a few minutes to decide if you're going to be a sweaty mouse and keyboard guy and it's time to start browsing online stores for mice with ten grams shaved off the mouse wheel or whatever.
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I don’t actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
I’d come to enjoy several creators who simply could not tolerate the negative attention of bigots. People’s desire to compel conformity, against the very nature of their subjects, creates a society that is not only deleterious to them and their subject, but mentally taxing to the rest of us. Literally not a single soul directly involved in this comes out ahead. It’s just a game designed to promote infighting and tertiary power grabs.
And that’s why I love lemmy. The general absence of []-phobes is fantastic. It’s the only reason I can tolerate the general inability to read sarcasm here.
I’ve been spending a fairly sizable amount of time lately with the Android emulation scene, and the amount of times the public goes nuclear over the tiniest inconsequential things is…just unbelievable. From the []-phobes to death threats. I wish that people would learn some social skills.
The dev of Lazarus didn’t have this kind of reaction to Seaglass, so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.
so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.
I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.
When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?
Damn, I hate how often I look at a situation like that and just think… what a waste. Some morons came in and ruined the message most of us were trying to send to EA by making them the “Worst Company in America”. Now these gross bigots get a “win”, and EA gets to sidestep all the legitimate anti-consumer issues most people were railing against. What a waste. And it feels like that’s everything these days, someone gross is always “on your side” looking to claim your victories for their own narratives.
I still have my doubts that was the majority of the issue, at least the first time they “won” that award in 2012. That poll happened 1 month after Mass Effect 3’s release, when emotions were still raw over people’s disappointment with the game’s ending. That’s not to defend those who were voting for EA over, say, Nestle or any number of other awful companies. But most of what I saw was immature lashing out to punish anyone perceived as responsible for the writing. I remember people cheering they’d managed to harass EA’s tech support Twitter account into closing, like they’d made some great moral victory. It was all pretty gross, just for different reasons than EA claimed.
I’m not saying it was a majority issue, I’m saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.
Lemmy appears to have a lot of autistic users on it, which explains the struggles to understand sarcasm. But autistic people tend to be open-minded and we’re often targeted by the same bigots that you’re lamenting about. So while the sarcasm thing is an issue, it’s also a sign of an open-minded user base.
Dang Ive been wrestling with the realization that I might be neurodivergent in some way, I’m on Lemmy but I do understand sarcasm. This hasn’t helped at all
We actually fairly recently had a severe mental event, and since then, frequently read sarcasm as serious on the first pass and sometimes for some time after.
It fucking sucks from this side, too. We just go charging at someone and then have to be like, oh, uh, sorry, guess I was socially stupid!
We can at least take some solace in knowing we all hate the situation together?
Sorry, I think I misinterpreted your comment. Are you using something like the “royal we”? I initially read it as referring to Lemmy as a collective, figuring you were talking about something that happened here.
They only had their comments removed for “being rude”. They did not get banned.
Studies are being done to look for treatment and prevention of various issues historically treated with primarely weight loss. This research is finding positive results, and for some things like prediabetes it can be treated even while the person is gaining more weight. This is extremely imlortant research, because weight loss is not something everyone can and wants to do.
A comment attacked the research as useless as “the fatties” should just lose weight. After I responded with the importance for everyone of any size for this type of research being done, death in horrible and gruesome ways was wished on me and all other fat people and was even extremely proud of it too doubling down after being called out.
Outside of this one case, talking about body positivity and body liberation here on Lemmy feels like a minefield that will blow off any moment at any time. Either due to some crazy dude just attacking me or someone arguing it is all invalid because they don’t agree me and people in general can also not feel miserable in their bodies.
Disco Elysium is a fantastic one. There are an insane amount of choices that shape how you go about the investigation of the hanged man and ultimately what happens beyond that investigation. Choices of who to side with, how to side (openly or playing multiple sides, etc.), choices that ultimately define what kind of detective you are (by-the-book boring, superstar douchebag, violent tough guy, Sherlock Holmes-esque genius, etc., including my favorite: Twin Peaks Lynchian detective that bases their decisions off of dreams, intuition and imaginary conversations with the dead body), and even how failing or succeeding at something can lead to progress in very different ways. If you fail to hit that person you tried to punch, or miss that shot with your gun, or utterly fail to convince someone to help you, you progress through in very different ways so that failing your way to the truth is just as satisfying and entertaining as succeeding your checks to get there.
And of course Fallout: New Vegas. Whether you choose to support the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House, or a truly independent New Vegas, none of them are perfect. Each succeeds in an ideal society in some ways but completely fails at others, leaving you to decide which imperfect system you feel is the right one for the world instead of shoving an obvious answer in your face.
Lol, YDI. When asked to provide the identifiable information, you just say “Stop and do the thing I want.” You seriously expect them to just hand over an account to someone who can’t provide basic information about it? You owned yourself, pal.
I misread the order of the interaction, which painted a much more antagonistic view of OP. Sorry about that. That said, the actual interaction plus their further reaction here is still not good. “Brainstorming how to automate the requests” is not an appropriate response to any of this.
I’m just imagining their pure rage when reaching out to a Bitcoin Dev/maintainer whatever with something like „I don’t know what my Wallets name was, idk my 10 phrase password, but give me back my 10$ in Btc right now”
And then pasting this again with the Title DONT BUY BTC THEY SCAM YOU
Dude, treat every service like your wallet.
You have an Email, you have a password. If you forget these, consider everything the Support does as an extra service and not the bare minimum.
Social Club is the kind of account you use a throwaway email for, and just use whatever random nickname isn’t taken yet. I, personally, have no idea what the email or nickname to my Social Club account are. I also have bought GTA V through Steam back in 2015 and haven’t lived into Social Club since. I think it’s perfectly fair to expect that your Steam account shouldn’t be hijacked by Rockstar upon linking it to one Social Club account once.
At the very least, if they’re gonna have a Rockstar launcher, it should allow you to unlink your Steam account through it, using your Steam credentials, and free it up to link to a new Social Club account.
Look at the timestamps, the conversation is from top to bottom. So technically I guess he tried to answer, but he probably missed the answer and instead had a tone that happened to match exactly how a scammy email would sound.
If legitimate, it’s probably better that they didn’t get to successfully automating spamming the support system. Nothing screams legitimate requests like bot spamming… Don’t know the tone of his follow ups, but best to take a breath and reset their tone and try again, asking what other details aside from nickname can be used, given their steam access.
Ah, yeah, I totally misread those screenshots. My mistake. Still not good, though. I take back that YDI, but yeah, not surprised they’re getting ghosted after all that.
While you can argue that nothing happened and we still have loot boxes, I’d argue that my life is greatly enriched for not feeling any motivation to play in those looty skinner box games.
I remember playing Dota 1 and 2 in parallel for a while because so few heroes were in the beta and I wanted to play new hotness like Ember Spirit. Fun times.
Quitting Dota has been great for my mental health, though. But I guess I’m at least curious enough about what the frog is cooking to risk getting addicted to something new.
Exactly. Right now developers get good deals when adding their games to game pass and the game pass is pretty cheap, but after game passes become “the thing” and developers have to be in a game pass, it will get worse for developers and consumers.
True; a lot of cheats are now found as Accessibility Options. Like a lot of action games have a god mode option in the same place you’d turn text to speech on and select colorblind modes.
Just did a second play through of Alan Wake 2, but I didn’t want to grind, just get the story, so I turned on one shot kill in accessibility. I was worth it.
The amount of times I’ve had to use a trainer to make gameplay possible when my hand is acting up (and one time when I was cat sitting, and the goblin demanded a hand just for him) is enormous.
It is literally the difference between being able to play a game or not. I really appreciate the options being under accessibility in newer games!
This goes for single player though. Multiplayer is reserved for days when my hand is functioning enough to allow it without trainer assistance.
I like how Hades did god mode, or at least how i remember it. When you turn it on, it didnt hardly do anything, but every time you died, you got -2% damage reduction, cumulative. So god mode was still tiered to your skill level, in a sense because the more you failed, the more help itd provide
There was a game recently on a huge discount that had some great accessibility options. You could change how hard combat was, exploration, and resource scarcity. At least it would have been great if they did anything meaningful. Instead the base game was ridiculously hard, to the point that combat was nearly impossible, and even the easiest options only made it slightly possible. I guess the point was to force you into a certain stealth/no combat play style, but it was just done in a very unfun way. One of the few times I’ve actually refunded a game.
Man I really wanted to like this game but I found the goddamn mazes on the sand planet too frustrating. Stumble around, get lost, the window closes, die, respawn and start completely over.
Panic gets the best of most players. If you take time and patience to observe the patterns, you realize it is all very logical and well structured. Super predictable and the designers created clear paths that become obvious once you get it. Also, part of the message of the game is that you cannot and actually are not required to be everywhere or do everything. You can finish the game in a single loop right from start. But that’s not what the game is about.
Thank you. I found the time limit really frustrating as I like to take my time with things and could never really get anywhere because I kept dying before I could make any progress.
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