Almost definitely. When they did the initial release, it could have easily been a flop, and if it was a flop, it would have been pointless to have gone in planning to repair and sell refurbished units. Now that sales are showing its a hit, they are taking the time to invest in changes for more long-term support.
Self-tapping screws made sense for a product in an entirely new product category without knowledge if it would be successful or not. Torx screws that slide into metal threads makes a lot more sense for what is expected to be a product with long shelf-life.
The only thing is, the refurb market can’t be that great to pay for this change. You might not think it, but changing to better screws and adding the metal threads is crazy more expensive.
Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.
You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens
Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation
I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan
Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step
Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals
I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version
It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
Yes! I almost always change a few of the buttons when I get the chance. Extra points if the game is nice enough to let you know when your changes conflict with other presets.
A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have “keyboard and mouse mode” or “console mode” if the controller is used.
I’ve got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.
Yeah, but if that’s the only way a game developer implements it, they’re tying themselves to Steam. I mean, if I were a game developer, I wouldn’t want to do that, as it’s a lot of lock-in.
I think that Valve’s service is a pretty good one, but they’re taking a 30% cut for doing a number of things for game developers. If they become the only game in town, it’s possible that they might start taking more than 30% and those developers are going to be kind of stuck with that.
It’s common across games, so it doesn’t make sense for game devs to reimplement the wheel, but I’d think that putting as much as possible in the game engine would be a reasonable place.
Not being able to bind the controller on PC is even more insane to me. Why can I change my entire keyboard layout but not change the controller AT ALL?
I get that you‘re frustrated for more reasons than a freshly released game has bugs but this is literally the first time I hear of bg 3 being not completeable. What specs are you running on?
You just have to use your judgement and laugh at what you find funny on your own, if you need peer pressure (opinions of others) to find something funny then it’s not really funny to you and maybe isn’t even funny for many people to begin with.
This might be controversial but maybe many Sitcoms that do this were never funny in the first place and used laugh tracks because try as they might they had to force people to find it funny via artificial peer pressure, that either constitutes of a crowd being told to laugh on cue, or a recording of them doing so, which is what a laugh track is.
Here’s the key point and why we stopped using them, things aren’t funny, people think certain things are funny, and they also think plenty of things are not funny, and like it or not people are not always going to find the same things funny.
I always thought it was because the earliest stuff was actually filmed infront of a live audience (Like a theatre) who did laugh, so when switching to non-live-audience stuff, the viewing public would be ‘put off’ by no laughter, so they injected it with canned laughter… then as time went on they realised this was rubbish and stopped it.
But maybe I’m just missing the joke in the previous two comments, I dunno.
In the earlier days it was like that but as time went on it became a technique known as sweetening to make the joke seem funnier, sometimes they would even use it to fill in silence or dead air since that was frowned upon (I wonder why people said TV rots your brain for the longest time… can’t be related to any of these practices could it?).
The beginning part is essentially saying that if people need laugh-tracks to find things funny they are dry and humor-less, a joke at their expense but also at the same time it’s 100% sincere, a person who can’t find things funny without others lacks a sense of humor.
Steam Deck is shaping up to be the “Nintendo” of handheld PCs. Not the most powerful thing on the market, but cleverly put together with its own bespoke software that allows users to customise and tweak games at the system level via quick access to its features. Having windows on the other machines makes your access to games better but means you have to dig harder or install extra software to do what the deck does. To paraphrase Sega’s 90s marketing, It Does what Windon’t.
Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.
I think it’s a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand… but there hasn’t been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.
Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It’s got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur’s Gate. And it’s reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn’t get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it’s gotten lots of buzz.
I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of “free” (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.
For me Half Life: Alyx was not even the best VR game but maybe one of the best games i played in my 20+ years gaming experience. It really shows how great VR can be if developers put an immense amount of time, effort and love into a game. Other honorable mentions: Pavlov VR, Blade and Sorcery (especially the Star Wars mods) and War Thunder
Anything turn-based, especially mouse-driven titles. Slay the Spire, Chess, Riichi Mahjong, Balatro, etc.
Puyo Puyo Champions has a one-handed preset in its controller options. Do note that if you want to play online, only Switch is active since that's where Japan is, I can't recommend the game on other platforms.
Kirby Air Ride uses only one button + analog stick, and any button works, so you can use L. Would have to be left hand for the original, but the sequel coming out later this month has a detailed accessibility menu, which I bet will include right-handed settings.
Crypt of the Necrodancer is designed to be playable with just four arrows, in case anyone wanted to play it on a DDR mat. Which also means you can play with arrow keys or WASD.
Rhythm Doctor is actually just one button.
Rhythm Heaven Fever uses only A and B. Rhythm Heaven DS uses only stylus. The rest of the series uses d-pad as well though, so those are less playable.
Come to think of it, any DS game that only uses stylus.
I enjoyed Cadence of Hyrule a lot more than Crypt of the Necrodancer for some reason. Maybe I just love the setting of Hyrule that much more. Probably just the overall polish on the game. But that’s an easy recommendation.
CoH's control scheme requires both hands, so I can't recommend it to OP. But I'll also have to say that I have the opposite opinion, CoH was good for a casual playthrough but wasn't something I could sink several hundred hours into like the original. The overworld made runs much longer and much more repetitive since a lot of it is always the same.
1998 comes up a lot in response to this question, for good reason. Pokemon Red/Blue, Baldur’s Gate, Metal Gear Solid, Thief, Half-Life, Fallout 2, StarCraft, and on and on. Games were made much more quickly back then, and the technological advancements allowed for a lot of these games to do new things that no one had done before, that were quite predictably going to be well-received.
If I’m putting together a pantheon of great years in gaming, it looks like 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023. If I’ve got to pick one, it might be 2004. Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (an odd choice for many, but it’s maybe my favorite in the series), Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, Halo 2, Burnout 3: Takedown, Star Wars: Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Unreal Tournament 2004, The Sims 2, Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Viewtiful Joe 2, Ninja Gaiden, Counter-Strike: Source, etc., etc. This was a magical time in online multiplayer, where it was pretty new for most, and you could do things like proximity chat in a shooter and expect people to actually use it for the video game at hand instead of spewing slurs into the mic. Local multiplayer was abundant. Obtuse game design made to sell strategy guides was just about obsolete, and DLC had yet to be invented (outside of beefier expansions). Midnight launches were exciting, and I have fond memories of, for reasons I can’t explain, playing Halo 2 on launch day in a 12-player LAN using bean bags, projectors, and 3 Xboxes set up in a local college’s racket ball court.
it’s always funny playing RE games and reading notes and you’re like “why would anyone write this down and confess to this?”
“I ate frank in the PD holding cell,he protested,but I consumed him anyways. I don’t feel right, it feels like that wasn’t something I should have done…”
It’s because you’re the type of person who would not. The type not to self incriminate.
Go on WorldStar, LiveLeak, and YouTube and you’ll see all kinds of videos and ask yourself “Why are they filming this?”, and then again “Why did they post this on the Internet?” Same shit.
At least they’re doing everything out in the open so there’s plenty of evidence if we at some point in the future decided to prosecute people like this. Like, after world war 3 or sth
If you want any amount of discoverability, you will have to go to Youtube or Twich since those really are the only platforms that have any amount of viewers. And even then, discoverability is pretty terrible, good luck promoting a new channel from scratch.
If you just want to stream for the sake of streaming and don't mind having zero viewers, you can try PeerTube or Owncast. But do be aware that you will have zero viewers.
I feel like a growing solution would be to simulcast to Twitch as well as other platforms, and hopefully slowly encourage users to view via the other platforms.
Kudos to the OP - I stopped watching Twitch when Bezos went full Nazi, but couldn’t get YouTube off my list.
The original Silent Hill games were created by an internal group within Konami called Team Silent. This team was formed by underperforming Konami staff to work on a Resident Evil competitor that Konami higher-ups wanted to underperform and give them a chance to fire said underperforming staff. Instead, they struck gold with SH1.
Team Silent suddenly had a level of fame to themselves, but they were still Konami’s red-headed stepchild. 2-4 were similarly successful, with 2 being the high point of the series.
After SH3, key staff started to depart from Konami. By the time the 5th game, Homecoming, came out, much of the original team had been replaced with those more aligned with Konami bigwigs that wanted to turn the series into a moneymaker instead of the quiet success it was built as.
An example of this is the Silent Hill HD Collection for PS3 and X360. The ‘remaster’ of SH2 and 3 was anything but. They had to make these remasters with incomplete codebases, no original staff to question, even some of the original voice acting was missing because Konami straight-up deleted the original source code.
There are those that say that SH never recovered from the gutting of Team Silent, and they tend to get louder with each entry into the series. Sometimes they have valid points, but not always.
To add to this, Team Silent members started leaving after SH3 came out primarily because when SH2 released, it wasn’t that well received compared to SH1 (this is mostly to do with the Japanese audience complaining online at the time that SH2 was not a sequel or continuation to SH1). As a result, Konami started forcing Team Silent to make changes to SH3 that Konami executives thought would make it sell and review better in Japan than SH2. In other words, Konami was taking away Team Silent’s autonomy within Konami to develop what they wanted.
Silent Hill 3 was the beginning of the downfall of the series because it was the first game in which the original developer’s vision for the game was edited by Konami executives. This would sadly become a recurring theme for every Silent Hill game released thereafter. Silent Hill 3 was never supposed to feature the cult from Silent Hill 1. Heather was not supposed to be Cheryl. The hospital was not supposed to be reused from SH2, and was only done so because the developers were running out of time.
What’s worse, except for Akira Yamaoka, the original series composer, Homecoming did not have any original Team Silent staff working on it because it was outsourced to an external, Western development studio. Not one member of Team Silent was credited in the game except for Akira Yamaoka, they weren’t even mentioned in the “Special Thanks” portion of Homecoming’s credits.
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