Optimization is extremely complex and the game engine, while factoring into the equation, doesn’t determine if something is optimized or not inherently.
Yes, this is all a horrible post, game engines can’t really be compared directly. There is no one size fits all.
EA thought that and tried to apply Frostbite to their entire catalogue. What worked amazingly for Battlefield/Battlefront was a disaster for Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, and let’s not forget Anthem. Engine was optimized for small maps and quick gameplay, but was horrible for large open worlds and RPG elements.
The reason Unreal requires such heavy hardware is because they’re trying to be a one tool fits all, but that requires making sacrifices.
OP’s entire post here is incredibly naive. It’s apples to oranges.
Story mode / Infinite lives / invincibility modes.
Difficulty should not be a barrier for entry. I like how Insomniac games like Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser extent Spiderman, offer a really easy mode for those who just want to blast away or swing around New York.
One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that’s great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.
But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it’s real nice even if it’s not the traditional rogue like.
I think that part of the problem in the case of Caves of Qud is that traditionally, the roguelike genre was aimed at having relatively-quick runs. So losing a run isn’t such a big deal. Your current character is expendable. But many roguelike games – like Caves of Qud – have, as they’ve gotten ever-bigger and gotten ever-more-extensive late games, had much, much longer runs. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead can have a character easily last for weeks or even months of real time. If you sink that much time into a character, having them die becomes, I think, less-palatable to most players. So there’s an incentive to shift towards the RPG model of “death is not permanent; it just throws you back to the last save”.
Just as some roguelikes have had longer runs, some games in the genre have intentionally headed in the direction of shorter runs – the “coffee break roguelike”. The problem there is that roguelikes have also historically had a lot of interacting game mechanics in building out a character, and if you put a ten-minute cap or so on a run, that sharply limits the degree of complexity that can come up over any given run for a character.
I bought FFXVI on launch day and decided to go the story difficulty. Best decision ever, and such an interesting way to do it. You basically get these special rings that make aspects of the game easier, like dodging and attack timing. You can always unequip them if you want to try the game with harder mechanics. The rings also take accessory slots, which you only have 3 of, so you have have to consider things like “Do I want this agility boost? Or my time-stop dodges?” Interesting to trade out game nerfs for stats or other effects.
But yeah. Story modes are great. I played Horizon on easy. Had a blast and didn’t get frustrated.
Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I’m trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.
Everyone I know that’s gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn’t get ANY better with it
This is from someone who’s pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I’m not just bad at the games themselves
Splatoon doesn't give you as much control over it as a Steam controller does. It's only the Y axis, and it's always on. It's much better when you can hold a grip button to toggle it. Then you can use the right track pad or analog stick for big movements and the gyro for fine tuned precision while holding a grip button.
That sounds like exactly what my issue was with learning: it always being on, any teeny hand movement ever would fuck with the camera, the steam controller sounds much closer to what my mind expected from gyro
With that in mind I just might have to try it out, though now I’m scared of getting good with it and needing to hack gyro into games to play, much like getting good with MKB killed me playing FPS on controller lol
I'll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There's even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn't enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.
Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.
One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.
Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn’t have gyro.
My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.
I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.
A new Mario game blew the critics away? Who could have predicted this?
sarcasm aside, i’ve been sort of skeptical of scores on reviews of Mario games ever since the New Super Mario Bros series. Critics seem to be physically incapable of giving a Mario game a low score, as best immortalized by this videogamedunkey video.
totally. I’m sure that if you’re a reviewer reviewing the 3rd New Super Mario Bros game, and you come out of it feeling like the game was pretty mid, it can feel scary to post a review with the lowest score. It’s easy with something like an Ubisoft game, where the quality of their games has been in question for years now. But with a Mario game? We all know the internet is full of assholes that will tear you apart for giving a bad score to bad game from a beloved franchise.
I swear i watch more videos than just dunkey, but this recent vid of his actually captured this other side of the coin pretty well.
It's not even a Nintendo Curve (They might have a stronger curve), but the vast majority of the time these large review sites are all in the pockets of publishers (event invites, interviews, exclusive first looks, review copies etc) and in order to keep that gravy train going so their review company doesn't fold means to not bite the hand that feeds too much, even if you have to lie.
Eh, I don’t (Edit: corrected) think the big review sites can survive if they get blacklisted by one or a few publishers. It has happened in the past already. There are so many games getting released, that missing one game or even a whole publisher probably doesn’t really affect them. Same for the publishers, they get more eyes on the game, for pretty cheap probably, so it’s also advantageous to them as well.
From what I’ve heard over the years, the marketing departments on both sides know this as well, so most don’t take a bad review personally.
It’s the small, one or two-man channels that are probably more prone to lying about a game. If JohnNintendoFan69 on Youtube manages to get some early copies for upcoming games (or a sponsorship, whatever), they want to ride that wave for as long as possible, if their livelihoods depend on these things.
Eh, I don’t think the big review sites can survive if they get blacklisted by one or a few publishers.
Then those review sites shouldn't exist. It directly conflicts with their entire business model of "reviewing products objectively" when they can't review products objectively without fear of the hand that feeds getting mad at them for saying the truth
A review site that lies isn't a review site. It's advertising
I agree, which is why I think creating companies around subjective reviews by boiling things down to a score that people are expected to take objectively as a measure of a product's worth is entirely asinine and silly. ESPECIALLY when the general triat of capitalism allows these review companies to have their bias and subjections swayed by not wanting to bite the hand that feeds their comapny's existence
ESPECIALLY when the general triat of capitalism allows these review companies to have their bias and subjections swayed by not wanting to bite the hand that feeds their comapny’s existence
And my argument is, that a site like IGN, Gamespot, whatever, doesn’t care if they don’t get the latest Ubisoft game prior to release anymore. There are so many games coming out, that they are picking and choosing anyway. One less game on the pile, big whoop.
I mean, Kotaku apparently has been blacklisted by Sony, Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Nintendo at some points (not all at the same time), and they still exist.
Also, with how many freelancers run reviews for all of them, you’d have heard something credible over the years, that scores get artificially inflated to keep the publishers happy, but the only thing I remember is the Kane & Lynch thing at Gamespot, which lead to Jeff Gerstmann getting fired, because he didn’t change his score.
Review scores and review sites are dumb
You could argue that scores are outdated, because too many people just look at the number and don’t read the review and how this rating came to be. However, sites dedicated to reviewing games, still have a place out there.
For me I just don't get how anyone can realistically extrapolate a game's score to anything about the game itself. Reviews are fine, and people providng their own experience and interpretations of and pros/cons is fine, but then boiling that perosnal subjective into an interpretive score that somehow is supposed to convey they same information just makes no sense.
I do agree that most people just see a score and don't bother to look further past that, it's very annoying to see comment sections just talk about the score itself and how it might be "right" or "wrong".
That's the part I don't get, when people think that someone giving CoD a 6/10 is "wrong" because another reviewer gave it a 9/10. Like, seriously, who cares what the score is. I don't play games because the score is high, I play games because they sound interesting to me. I don't care that some website gave Death Stranding a 4/10 because they didn't "get it". I still liked the game and their review doesn't tranish that in any way, neither of us is right or wrong because not every game is made for everyone and people's own subjective tastes and stuff will obviously affect the kinds of games they like.
I just overall think people care WAY too much about some arbitary scores that ultimately don't mean shit. IGN giving a game I didn't like a high score doesn't mean I was "wrong" about the game, but too many people want to just use scores to argue with other people. Like bro, just go play the games that interest you, stop caring about scores
Scores are just too engrained in this whole review thing at this point, not even just in video games. There was a small movement a few years ago to get away from scores, but not enough big publications joined in, so it didn’t catch on.
just go play the games that interest you, stop caring about scores
Sometimes it’s not that easy, mainly if you can’t just afford every game that catches your eye.
Sometimes it’s not that easy, mainly if you can’t just afford every game that catches your eye.
I'm not sure how a review score will change that. The entire point of my discussion is that anyone who extrapolates a subjective review score as some objective quality measure is just wasting money.
It's better to play a game that interests you than play a game because it's scored high. "Scoring high" isn't a metric of what makes a game fun.
What I mean is even if a game looks interesting, but then I see it’s mixed on Steam or has a bunch of 5/10 reviews, I’d probably give that a pass. There might be a chance it’s some hidden gem or totally up my alley, but why risk it? I’d rather play it safe, and give the 9/10 game a chance, even if the premise isn’t that compelling.
Once you are able to just not care about the money, this can definitely shift. If it turns out that interesting game sucks to play, doesn’t matter, just buy something else.
What I mean is even if a game looks interesting, but then I see it’s mixed on Steam or has a bunch of 5/10 reviews, I’d probably give that a pass.
I don't see how letting other people's opinions on something you think looks interesting should matter. I play games for me, so I don't care if someone thinks something is a 1/10. If it seems interesting to me I'm going to play it, because that's what matters. Some of my absolutel favorite games are panned by reviewers and critics alike, and most of the games I can't stand are highly reviewed yearly rehashes. Scores meaning nothing.
There might be a chance it’s some hidden gem or totally up my alley, but why risk it? I’d rather play it safe, and give the 9/10 game a chance, even if the premise isn’t that compelling.
Because you're risking it with either purchase regardless, so why not pick the one that actually sounds interesting to you? Letting review scores bias your decision making on an entirely subjective medium of art expression completely takes the point out of art.
Once a generation you might get a Death Stranding 2 or something, and really enjoy it, but other times you’re stuck with the original Lords of the Fallen, because you like Souls-likes, and that’s your only game this month or quarter.
And yes, of course, just because a game is rated highly doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it. Still, unless you have really specific tastes, the chance that you’re going to enjoy a highly rated game, compared to a mediocre one, is much higher, in my opinion, doesn’t matter if something looks interesting.
I’m also talking about a hypothetical, mainstream consumer here, because those are the ones that a review score is for.
A hypothetical mainstream consumer is the least educated person on the topic and is exactly the kind of person that gets swindled constantly by review scores. They're the ones that need to hear more than ever that following review scores as some objective truth is stupid.
Once a generation you might get a Death Stranding 2 or something, and really enjoy it, but other times you’re stuck with the original Lords of the Fallen, because you like Souls-likes, and that’s your only game this month or quarter.
And sometimes the original Lords of the Fallen is exactly what you want to play, even if everyone else says it's bad. That's entirely my point. General consensus of "good" and "bad" means nothing. Equating popularity and quality is dumb
Since I don’t agree with your initial premise, that review scores are faked or kept high to please the publishers, I also don’t agree that people are being lied to or swindled by them.
And sometimes the original Lords of the Fallen is exactly what you want to play, even if everyone else says it’s bad. That’s entirely my point. General consensus of “good” and “bad” means nothing. Equating popularity and quality is dumb
In a perfect world, where everyone has infinite time and money, sure, just do whatever. However, this world doesn’t exist, so most people probably want to avoid wasting their time or money. That’s why reviews exist.
I also think, most of the time you can equate popularity and quality to some extent. Not that the most popular are the best, but they’re usually at a decently high level. There are always going to be exceptions, of course, and not everyone will like everything.
I have heard (and I forget the source) that it is advantageous for reviewers to give a new game a good score, otherwise they might not be invited to review early-access games in the future. With that in mind, the best reviews might come after launch.
yeah this is an unfortunate part of the modern game review landscape. Probably the reason why many people just watch their favorite influencers for game opinions instead.
Pretty sure this happens a lot with the Madden franchise and their competitors. All of them are terrible American football simulation games, but if you want a free and early copy for your channel, better be nice to them, I guess.
I actually totally sympathize with that critic from your clip and don’t think there’s anything dishonest or otherwise cognitively dissonant about that review. There’s nothing I can spend more time complaining about than something I really enjoy because I naturally fixate on things that stand out about a given experience and the flaws are what stands out in something that’s overall very good.
I would never in a million years rate that particular game a 9.1/10 but that’s just me and the critic valuing different aspects of design different amounts.
thank you for your take! you make a valid point. Also dunkey clearly edited that down to every critical thing he said about the game and none of the positive things. The point stands that I have trouble trusting review scores on Mario games, and this is me speaking as someone that loves Mario games and is hyped for Wonder.
I wish Peertube would be succesful, but i don’t really see it.
I have searched for a gaming focused server in the past and haven’t found one. Seem you were more sucesful than me. But i think finding the best server for youself is kind of harder on peertube
i don’t really see, how peertube server are able to solve the issue, that peertube server need way bigger memory space than lemmy or mastodon. How would they able to fund this in a larger scale?
People will at some point need to realize that they have to donate and not pay a compulsory fee for products that are worth the money. It may not be apparent now but this is where the world is heading. When Youtube Premium also starts having ads and there’s a higher tier for no ads then things will start moving and fast.
I don’t believe you are right with that. If popular websites have more ads, we just see more ad blocker. I donate for my Mastodon and Lemmy server, but the vast majority of people will never pay for something like peertube, i just don’t believe that.
PeerTube makes way, way more sense as a self-hosting platform for small and medium sized creators. That means the creators shoulder the burden of hosting their own content, and recoup those costs from their viewers via such vectors as Patreon. Having Patreon integration, direct one-time donation options, and user access levels for channels and/or videos so that subscriber-only content can be easily managed would go a long way towards this.
The Fediverse’s current model of “donate to your serve admin using a completely disconnected 3rd party payment processor” isn’t going to fly if you want actual popular anndprofrsional video content. Especially when the server admin is not the content creator.
Yes that is the big issue with this video platforms. Video streaming is a demanding task. And I can’t even imagine how much storage would we need to have something remotely similar to YouTube. Google was able to run YouTube because it had free money coming in , now the funds are drying up so more ads coming their way.
Yeah they burned me a few times in the past by acquiring games/studios and breaking their Linux compatibility immediately after getting them. I’ll hold this grudge for decades.
I’ve enjoyed a few of them with my young kids The Lego one was fun, Dodo Peak is another nice introduction puzzle game, and Beyond Blue is educational and beautiful.
There are quite a few more that I might check out at some point. I slightly regret not jumping on the free games bandwagon earlier since I missed some great ones, but I have enough of a games library across many platforms that I never need to buy another game for the rest of my life and I won’t beat them all, so whatever.
I’m in the minority, I know, but I have mostly negative memories of playing Subnautica. I enjoyed exploring new areas, and the progression of the story, but the hours spent looking for one more resource so I could progress just made me mad. I don’t like save-scumming, but after
spoilerlosing my seamoth to a leviathan for the 3rd time, I said fuck it, and save-scummed regularly.
I had just finished playing Outer Wilds and my friends said “oh, then you would love Subnautica!” No, not the same kind of game at all. I say all of this so that anyone thinking of playing it has the right expectations: if you can’t find the one thing you’re looking for, I recommend just looking up a guide on where to find it. I don’t think the game funnels you to the correct areas well enough for you to find everything you need naturally.
When I think of Subnautica, I just remember having to drink water like every 5 minutes or so. I would have loved to explore, but I was busy getting basic resources all the time.
That was another reason, yes. Apparently you’re supposed to find the parts to the water filtration system relatively early in the game, and it will regularly spit out large bottles of water that help a lot. I didn’t. So yeah, for 90% of the game I’m having to periodically chase Bladderfish for 5m so I can spend 2 minutes spam crafting a bunch of waters, so i can carry several around with me, taking up valuable space in my inventory.
You can play on a mode without survival mechanics, or find the water filtration system and grow plants from the islands on your cyclops to trivialize them. Before you get there though they’re kind of a pain.
Yeah, I really liked it but I wish the devs would’ve implemented one more skill mode at a slightly easier level. I was OK with losing whatever inventory I’d collected during the single trip if I died, but I really wanted the “sea moth doesn’t explode you just have to start from base again” mode. Especially since I lost one of them because I couldn’t figure out which key did the electric charge zap thing.
We’ve proven that we can find the blueprints and materials necessary to make the thing in the first place, so having to collect all that metal again (with limited inventory space) just felt like busy work.
Yeah, I think I can only tolerate busy work games when played in a group. Because then you can delegate the work, and at least you’re still hanging out. Like the Forest.
I mostly just follow the nextlander crew and Jeff Gerstmann. They aren’t much more than podcasts, there’s little to no written work produced, and they don’t really consider themselves gaming journalists, but that’s pretty much what we’re left with.
“Influencers” and corporate cash have largely killed games journalism.
Simply going one step down from buying every “halo” product would already do wonders for a significant price/performance increase.
That said, when building a new PC I usually start with the recommendations listed at Logical Increments, which has a neat table sorted by budget. Anything at or above the “Suberb” should give you what you want at 1440p.
I’d also very much recommend a high refresh rate monitor, preferably 1440p, which has either GSYNC or FreeSync with a good variable refresh rate range. It really helps with maintaining a smooth presentation as you aren’t forced to keep your game running at a fixed framerate anymore.
That only helps for shadow libraries whose operators are unknown. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is a registered non-profit organisation, so how would they be able to hide themselves?
It’s not so simple, unfortunately. The sheer amount of data they have - 212 PB as of December 2021 - makes it practically impossible for most people to mirror. Unless they physically hand over all 745 server nodes to another operator, there’s no way of someone
There are some solutions to this - for example Archive-Team has proposed a method of mirroring the Internet Archive using distributed clients, although this method currently only has a fraction of the total dataset. Still, at this point in time, there’s no real solution to resharing IA’s data in the event they go under
It’s literally in the name for a .onion website: hidden service
Tor hides the identity of servers just as much as it does for client users. So as long as the IA hosts in a country where publishers don’t have jurisdiction, I believe they’ll be fine
You can create a Duolingo class which you can then join yourself. This gets you unlimited hearts and no further ads on the mobile version (at least from my experience). Creating a class has no prerequisites so just try it out. If you still want to be able to view the public leaderboard there’s a setting for that in the classroom settings, but it’s disabled by default.
Edit: I’m not sure if there are any other ads besides the premium and family ones, I’m running PiHole so your mileage may vary. I’m only talking about those 2 which PiHole cannot block.
I’ve tried to migrate my account several times in the past. It never works for some reason. Also, I can never seem to untangle the web of deceit known as Microsoft/xbox/Minecraft profiles and family/group settings. About once a year I spend a couple hours trying to sort it out and then give up because it never works. Google can be awful sometimes but at least they figured out “sign in with Google”
I did it last week and always got an error trying to create a new microsoft account during the migration process, even in different browsers and after disabling adblockers. Then I just manually created a microsoft account on the microsoft website and in the minecraft migration process chose to use an existing account instead of creating one. That worked for some reason.
Of course it is. I bought a product I can no longer use without signing away privacy after the fact. Not that I’ve played Minecraft in the last 10 years but still.
It’s a shame Minecraft got bought and put on the windows store and mobile. For a while there kids actually learned what java was and had to move files around to install mods and skins. Now they’re all computer illiterate again.
Marcus Persson left Mojang in 2014. Qanon wasn’t a thing (even as a 4chan meme) back then. He began to spiral back in 2016, which I can’t say I blame him for. A history of mental illness combined with unlimited money and moving countries while being heralded as a god of video games in the media would fuck anyone of us up I think.
I know you bought your car 10 years ago, but you refused to make an account with the company that bought your car dealer out after you bought a car from them, so now we’re repossessing it.
It’s been 10 years since what? Since Microsoft bought Mojang? So you’re saying you’re okay if in 10 years Microsoft takes away your copy of Skyrim or Call of Duty unless you give them your phone number?
Why? I didn’t pay to have a Microsoft account. I can’t make just a Minecraft account, they require my full name and date of birth to make a microsoft account. That’s an entirely different dynamic than the Mojang account that requires literally no personal information. I didn’t agree to give Microsoft my information when I bought the game, and I have no obligation to do so. They, however, have an obligation to allow me to access the game that I’ve paid for in perpetuity.
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