Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back
As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:
The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.
Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.
Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.
12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.
Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.
The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.
Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.
This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.
Mmm yess. Recently did a play through, and luckily I played most of it with a fellow pilgrim. IMO Journey will always be gorgeous. The graphics are perfectly balanced between realism, performance and art. To me, it’s a timeless classic.
Hate: disproportionately excessive penalties for falls (usually found in platformers).
If you get shot in the face by an enemy, you lose your shield, lose a life, whatever. In a bad platformer, if you don’t time a difficult jump exactly right, you lose a life, lose everything in your inventory, get sent back to the very beginning of the level, get audited, and have to mow the developers lawn for an entire summer.
Platformers are “guilty until proven innocent” - I won’t play one until I know it won’t destroy my will to live.
I honestly can’t even remember the one that first set me off. It’s been a while. I just remember realizing that gravity was more punishing than any of the enemies, and thinking “oh, to hell with this.”
For platformers, maybe. But for certain genres – like battle royale – the risk of losing it all after one mistake is part of the thrill. It all depends on the game.
An option to choose what controller glyphs I want to use (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, directional) and a option to always use those glyphs even when mouse input is detected, so I can use Gyro without the glyphs constantly flickering ☺️
I prefer the 4 circles glyphs that shows the appropriate face button highlighted. It’s device agnostic and helpful when I’m switching between playing on my Switch and playing on my PC with an Xbox controller.
It’s nice to see the LCD Deck get discounted, if only to relive the old days when consoles got cheaper instead of more expensive as time went on. I almost wanted to buy another one out of principle, even though I don’t have use for more than one.
I lowkey considered getting a second SD, just to keep it plugged into my TV 24/7. I cart mine back and forth from work and home, and the minor inconvenience of packing it into my bag each morning had me considering a second purchase.
What’s crazy is lots of good games don’t take that long. You don’t need an epic sound track, textures, physics, etc to make a good game. There are so many amazing low budget games that are not that technically challenging or that demanding of musicians/graphic artists.
That’s the one thing where I would raise an objection. An epic soundtrack is that one thing that adds to the experience more than fancy graphics or overly complicated game mechanics. Epic doesn’t necessarily mean expensive. Monkey Island had phantastic soundtracks, as well as other older games like The Settlers 2, early Anno games etc. They just set a mood. They supported their narratives. That was good stuff - and I guess you might now be able to extrapolate how old I am.
I’m not saying I don’t like an epic sound track. I have a lot that I’ve even purchased. But think of some games that do not and still sell well.
What I mean is, you can have a good sounding soundtrack that isn’t expensive. Some games record orchestras, for example, and others just make a good tune in FL studio. One is much more expensive than the other.
Bioware used to be able to make good AAA games quickly :
Mass Effect : 2007
Dragon Age : 2009
ME2 : 2010
DA2 : 2011
ME3 : 2012
With epic soundtrack, voice acting, cinematography, …
Even an independant (back then) studio like CD Projekt “only” needed 4 years between each Witcher game (2007, 2011, 2015), while making their own engine for the 2nd and 3rd
I don’t know where the years get lost in game development nowadays, except pre-production (lack of direction/managment) and… “open world”
“Quickly” - the “Bioware magic” used to be years of lack of direction followed by one year of “HOLY SHIT WE NEED TO DELIVER!” crunch
But the former executive producer of Dragon Age, Mark Darrah (…) posted a YouTube video about how the so-called “BioWare magic” really worked. According to Darrah, it referred to a hockey stick graph where most of the progress is nearly unnoticeable. It’s nearly flat, and “if you draw that line out, then your game is shipping in like 30 years.” At a certain point, the developers hit a “pivotal point” when the game would finally shape up and a lot of progress would be made in a short amount of time. According to the developer, that tipping point is what is known as“BioWare magic.”
Half a decade for a subpar product that’s barely out of beta.
Back in the day we’ve got subpar products barely out of beta that we had to patch from magazine cds far faster. Oh - and they were more fun because developers had to make something out of nothing. I feel today, where everything is possible as the engine used delivers a toolset for anything, games easily are so overly stuffed with “mechanics” that they just feel like work. I don’t like that.
I feel like given the amount of work required to make the kind of games that triple a represents, and the amount of money in and out, every game becomes a mess of different ideas and motivations with no unifying force. Every game must be everything to justify the price tag, but there’s no unifying passion or vision behind it. Of course the more you stuff in there, the more you can market it as well.
I’ve always been open to adult only games, but for the vast majority there are only two basic types:
Visual Novels - Everything about these is fine. They vary from basically just a graphic novel to a full on RPG.
Nude Puzzles - Various cheap-ass puzzles with nude images as the prize.
I want, like, a real game but with full adult only content. These exist, but are hard to find. And a lot of those I’ve found aren’t finished, never will be finished, and/or just suck. It doesn’t even have to be the focus. Just imagine if when you got a hooker in GTA or some other game where brothels might exist, you got to see more than a fade to black/car bouncing around.
A good H-game with more that 4 hours of content, good porn, and good gameplay are rare finds. Not to mention the pain in the ass of finding the decensor patches or using a non-Steam, non-English site to buy it.
That seems like a fair assessment of the current state of things, but I do want to stress how good Huniepop is as a puzzle game alone. One sparkling jewel in a sea of erotic sliding puzzle and jigsaw crap.
If you removed everything outside the actual gem matching gameplay and soundtrack, I would still play it.
And yeah, I started poking around and saw some of the more ambitious open world projects like you’re talking about, and they all looked like abandoned early access. But if they have the technical ability, why not show my character licking some Asari ladyparts in Mass Effect 5? Adults play a shitload of video games too. Make it an optional DLC if you have to.
The biggest issue with adult content in games is that it limits your market to adults that want that content. Which is already small to begin with. And you often can’t advertise the same way, which limits your audience further. You only find out about them through word of mouth or through places like Lemmy.
From the standpoint of the developer, your ROI is likely to be very small. I think that’s why VN are the most popular form of adult games, since they are easier to make than full games.
Its inherently a gamble. Yes, it limits you to that audience (which is increasingly villified by christofacists and the influencers who “don’t want people to think they are gooners”). But it also makes you the king OF that audience.
Subspace is a great example. It had an incredibly vague and over ambitious crowdfunding campaign and it did gangbusters. Because people are hungry for a horny game that is actually a game. That said, it feels like other devs realized that was a thing and the patreon-style sites are now the main focus and discoverability went to zero.
Which is why I think the next big step is a blogsite that actually covers these without feeling like you are just reading a guy’s wank diary (… which we kind of are but it is nice to not think about that). Its the same problem onlyfans et al have. The biggies keep getting bigger but there is almost zero way to find out about the newbies.
It’s still in development but they’ve done a ton of work on it to, already, be pretty flashed out game and its development hasn’t slowed any over the years.
Alicesoft is one of the major dev studios in this exact space, but their games range from having some non-con to outright featuring it. Not for everyone.
in general, people choose adult games explicitly to get off, so putting a bunch of unrelated activities between them and that is not a recipe for success.
or in other words: good gameplay makes for bad porn, and vice versa.
i understand what you are asking for, and the solution for that is modding;
check out loverslab!
the biggest communities (i know of) for this are:
Skyrim Special Edition
Fallout 4
The Sims 4
RimWorld
all of these have what you’re asking for, with varying levels of integration into the main game!
and since it’s modded content, you even get to decide how much, and what kind of, adult content there is in your game!
and when i say everything is customizable, i mean everything!
Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
I’m pretty sure it’s in the US. I’m in Utah (pretty far western US) and ping times are like 10-15ms, which is consistent w/ a west coast server. I have a VPS in Germany, and pings are more like 100-150ms.
I’m not exactly sure how pings work w/ cloudflare, so maybe it’s hosted somewhere else, but I would imagine they’d get a cloudflare host near their VPS to minimize latency.
bin.pol.social
Ważne