Where tf the anti trust at? It’s an easy solution to a trivial problem. How do we stop a few companies from controlling everything??? Uhhh… make it illegal???
I don’t understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I’m watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don’t bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that’s probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I’ll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he’s a really good barometer for sound and graphics.
If kotaku or whatever releases a review it’s really hard for me to understand whose voice I’m getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.
You’d start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.
Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again…
I bet you'd complain about your new car having roll up windows or no ac. Times have changed and we can do better. Especially with their budget and 6 years. It's pathetic.
This shows you've missed the point and haven't researched the game.
It's all the animation transitions between space and ground. No Man's Sky had fifteen developers and accomplished this years ago. Bethesda is pathetically incompetent.
no mans sky had deep quests and deep conversations with unique characters? and they also used creation engine? i had no idea no mans sky was so brilliant! youve changed my mind!
Bethesda doesn't have deep quests either. The creation engine is a weight around the devs necks. I'm not sure what you're trying to say but you're making my points for me.
Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don’t write or produce proper “reviews” anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot… I don’t know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5
Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer’s tilt.
If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?
I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.
That surprises me… each BGS game is extraordinary iteritive over the previous one ever since Morriwind. They’re like 20 years into iteritive design and arguably each iteration, while doing some interesting new things also takes a step or two back. Very obvious looking back over their history. They’re really a one-note-studio.
To all of a sudden expect Starfield would manage to be that revolutionary (to their formula) seems shortsighted. Even the concept of having a fully-realized BGS RPG with a near infinitely open space exploration system seems like an impossible feat. On a technical level, sure, but the space between planets would be empty and desolate… and even expecting an interesting procedurally generated continent is a big ask today, let alone a planet, let alone a solar system, let alone a quarter of a galaxy.
I wasn't expecting it to be revolutionary. I expect Bioware RPGs to be on dozens of finite maps, and I expect BGS games, other than interiors, to be seamless maps. I was expecting procedural generation to cover the difference, and I expected that if No Man's Sky could do it with maybe two dozen employees, BGS probably could too, especially given when the game went into full production. I was not, and still am not, expecting the vast majority of their planets to have something interesting on them just due to how many there are.
I can understand the link between seamless exteriors and the equivalent of what that would mean in the context of a space game for Bethesda, but the technological implications of having a galactic system flight mode and seamless planet to space transitions are both completely new ideas to Bethesda and are also technically complex to implement in a game already knee deep in new tech and systems only from what we'd been shown.
There's a reason things like seamless planet transitions are only something you might be able to expect in recent years. While Bethesda could totally make that happen, it's not where I'd expect them to put their money, or they'd have probably dropped a line showing it off in the pre release footage.
At once, I understand why you might've expected that, but expecting anything not explicitly shown is never a good idea when it comes to tempering expectations.
They showed so much of the game that I was bored before I could sift through anywhere near all of it (not to say I wouldn't enjoy the game, but I know what I'm getting with a Bethesda RPG). I'm not knocking it for having a load screen between space and landing on the planet, but because we've seen that done a handful of times in recent years, as well as expectations set up from their previous games' maps, it makes perfect sense to me to expect that to be in the game.
I think it does make sense to expect that up until you realize how much of a technical undertaking it'd be to do so and whether that payoff seems worth it to them. Seamless transitions seem to me to still be in a category to show off if you have it, so that they didn't should be a red flag, but if you didn't watch all the footage then you wouldn't realize that, which I get, and I dont expect everybody to watch both the showcases like I did, thats probably over an hour of footage.
I can see why you'd expect a similar seamless experience due to their previous maps, but implementing that is completely different due to the style of game and requires new engine features to do so unlike their previous games which were already capable of it since Morrowind. You could expect them to consider doing it, but it wouldn't be a given
Having played the game some last night, the load screens haven’t been what’s bothering me but if I had to complain it’d be for the menu diving. Tab goes back a page and there are 3-4 levels of map, the city you’re in, the planet that’s in, the {system?} that’s in and the galaxy it all resides in. You can travel to any of them so you can directly land in a city on a planet in its galaxy, or just outside one.
For a little while it was telling me to press R to bring up a system map but I think that’s only in certain situations, so I’ve been pressing tab and selecting map (galaxy) or M for local map (then tab to pull back a menu).
So far there have been other little quirks, like F in scan mode prevents M, L, I, (map, quests, inv) it gets tedious but it’s again, trying to nitpick something that stood out as annoying but doesn’t actually matter? Like, it minorly affects me but then I press F and continue on my way lol.
I’d say a much bigger oversight is quest streamlining. Without too much in specifics, I was captured via “trait” (I assume) at level 5 put into a level 12 situation. My ship couldn’t survive the scenario and I had to pull back to the previous auto save (technically it was 2-3 previous, but only because I tried to win). That situation was also made more annoying due to a bad energy distribution and getting attacked pretty immediately jumping out of hyperdrive, if there was a fight advantage number I’d have been at -7 at least lol.
Rolling back the save was fine though, I didn’t continue that quest and will level up some before going back to it. First time I had to do it though and it was a little jarring since you’d expect the game stealing you to put you in relatively level-appropriate scenarios.
Overall I’ve been enjoying the game though. These gripes are pretty minor overall and I think just a little more information and distance between jumps and being attacked and it was hardly have been an issue. Oh, last thing about information I do wish the shops and certain trade areas had more labeling for like weight or details, I’ve been making a point to not overloot the raw world but even just enemy encounters fill up your weight fast and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what is taking it all up.
I played it for the later half of yesterday, so maybe 4-6 hours or so? The main story is a little silly but it’s a fine premise so far. People calling it absurd or ridiculous, I just don’t see what they’d want instead? The character creator was actually pretty fun with seemingly fairly varied possibilities. One encounter I’ve come across is a religious cult who are known to openly attack. Well, you can trait to be one of them so hopefully the game plays into that. If it does, I’d say the game is actually going to be quite great. If it does not, then I’d say it’s a Bethesda game that could have a little more depth but is also pretty fleshed out for the early game. Like I said, I’m only a few hours in and I’ve not visited many planets. I’ve been pleased with the choices I have available, the options I have to complete them, and the results of them even if it didn’t succeed the way I had hoped lol. I’ll have to see non-settled planets more before I comment on those.
Tl;Dr there’s some flow issues that I’ve encountered, mostly with how many menus and how often, could do with a little more information in some spots and a little less in others but overall it feels like a prettier space Bethesda game and I’ve been more pleasantly surprised. It’s ran well on a 5800x3D and a 10gb 3080 with everything but motion blur on ultra/native with RT/med. Some areas do feel less smooth, but not choppy or anything like that. Just feels like 165hz vs 60+ variable. That said, with the hardware it’d be a shame if it ran poorly.
I see what you’re getting at, I could see how someone might assume an seamless outer space based on that. As soon as you realize how much of a technical undertaking that is though, it’s easy to assume they wouldn’t go that route and not have blown that horn 2+ years ago as a huge feature. Something like that combined with a BGS RPG would be massive and I can’t imagine a world where a company like BGS or Microsoft would be wanting to keep that a secret until release.
Expecting anything that particularly in-depth without being shown explicit pre-release footage of it is an expectation trap. Bethesda was never going to make a space sim, any space sim features are a bonus and were far from guaranteed.
For the price of 2 games (or 1 and a half if it goes on sale, and it always did before), you can game all year. I’ve had mine for a year now, and not bought a game for it yet (apart from GoW Ragnarok which came bundled with it, and likely BG3 next week).
The top tier is kind of a bust. I picked it up because I thought I might play those PS1/2 games but I haven’t used that at all. There’s plenty of PS4 and 5 games still to play, and you can emulate up to PS3 on PC quite easily if you want to play old stuff. There’s scant few PS1 games anyway. It’s far from comprehensive. They should have done so much better here.
Yeah my kids don’t have gaming PCs (yet?) but have fun playing through a bunch of the plus stuff when they are not on Minecraft or (shudder) Roblox on their tablets.
I don’t have kids but I still find the random assortment of games a value add as I got a lot of games I would have considered anyway, so this was a much cheaper way of playing those games, best is all the random local multiplayer games that I can install for when I have friends over
Wouldn’t have expected anything else. The two types of people I’ve mostly seen buying the Switch 2 are those who are really into Mario Kart and those who are into Pokemon, for the extra frame rate.
Neither of these groups is known for buying 3rd party games - at least not the ones I know.
those who are into Pokemon, for the extra frame rate
Not just Pokemon, I am sure there are many who where hoping for Switch Pro before Nintendo crushed their hopes and dreams with Switch OLED. People have been testing Switch 1 games on Switch 2 and most of them seem to run on very stable frame-rate on Switch even without an upgrade pack.
This will lead to stronger console sales but not necessarily to game sales at least not in the short run.
Yup! 🙋♂️ I’m only here (having a Switch 2) for the frame rate bump (which I thought I’d get from buying the Switch 2019, or the Switch OLED), as well as the GameCube games and future Mario and Zelda games. Nothing else.
The industry’s effort to be more inclusive and diverse mostly comes from indie games, though. Of course AAA has long realized the potential to boost their image by copying some mechanics and ideas but let’s not pretend any of those CEOs on their high horses actually cares about inclusion. They’ll drop any efforts the very moment it doesn’t benefit them directly. But there will always be passionate indie developers pushing boundaries to actually help more people enjoy games.
I mean, GW2 (by Arenanet, owned by NCSoft) has had a lesbian couple since the first Living World season, and had a non-binary character in the 3rd expansion. They have inclusivity in a way that doesn’t feel hamfisted or marketed; it’s just in there because they feel like their world should have all sorts of people.
I know that the world has changed and these kinds of big conferences aren’t really viable (or necessary) anymore, but my younger self who always wished to go to E3 at some point is sad.
At least it’s not Kotaku but all this consolidation is far from good news. Heaven forbid reporters should get to stay independent, let alone being puppeted by a company that’s little more than a meme.
Honestly they can just go ahead and turn off FM8. What a piece of shit that game is. It’s so bad. Like how can you literally fuck up a slam dunk that badly? They could have issued a slightly reskinned and updated FM7, and it would have been fine. But no.
GT2 and FM2 (and FM4 I guess too) for the forever win!
I have (and still do) use EG for most of my news, but that has taken a slide in quality over the years. In general, they’re not receptive to developmental feedback either - though I’m not prepared to leave the blame at the editorial or mod staff door on that one when you’ve got a company like ReedPop coming in with a clear agenda to make more money, and leaving so soon.
My main concern is for DigitalFoundry - genuinely one of the best, most entertaining, and in-depth spin off channels out there.
We’ll have to see what evidence they submit. I’m skeptical given that this lawsuit is funded by Epic. I have other skepticisms, but learning that Epic is the root of the lawsuit is what makes me doubt any legitimacy the claimants have. I posted a very long series of thoughts just elsewhere in the thread that goes into more detail. It’s mostly nothing though since it’s just my thoughts and we can’t truly know until the case is settled or releases details.
My opinion, it comes down to Steam’s ToS is regarding Steam Keys. Steam Keys sold not on Steam do not get 30% taken by Valve, but Valve still provides its services - cloud saves, forums, per game notes, complete controller remapping support and more. So, for example: A developer sells a game on Epic and generates 1,000 Steam keys - has 500 on Steam and 500 on a 3rd party site. The developer can sell the game on Epic for whatever price they want. $5. $20. $50. Whatever. Steam asks that whatever Steam Key is being sold is priced the same on every store front. No matter what they sell for though, none of that 30% is taken by Valve from the 3rd party sale. The Epic storefront in unaffiliated to the developer since they are not Steam Keys.
500 of those keys are now utilizing Steam’s services without any of that sale revenue going to Valve. I have 20gb of Cloud Storage, if every user has that much and there are how many users on Steam… (120 million active users turns into 2 billion 400 million gigabytes, or far over two hundred thousand Terabytes. I think I mathed it right). They must have some serious cloud storage.
With that in mind, it seems reasonable to me that Valve not want developers to advertise other storefronts, nor does it seem unreasonable that they ask to have equitable pricing between store fronts i.e. if it’s $5 on Itch then at some point it should go on sale for $5 on Steam.
Out of curiosity, what do you think Wolfire is in the right about? From my understanding, Humble Bundle can do whatever they want within the developers wishes regarding sales, and if they want to continue to sell games then they don’t have to sell Steam keys to do it? It seems to me that Humble Bundle is trying to sell games for even cheaper on their storefront, while providing Steam keys which would be actively be putting strain on Valve, while Humble Bundle gets to benefit from the services being provided. What exactly is the issue here? Is it just that Valve is so large? So then at what point have they used their size to prevent games from being sold? I didn’t see them during Control, Metro Exodus, Chiv 2, or Kenna or Mechwarriors 5 or really any of the other ~100+ games this has happened to. Or what about when Epic bought Rocket League or Fall Guys and removed it from Steam’s storefront? Hm. I guess the video game giant that literally makes the Unreal engines doing far more egregious business is exempt from the same critiques.
I see a lot of instances of $$$ gating games, specifically away from Steam, but I feel like I’ve yet to see an example where Valve actively restricted the sale of a game from itch.io or Fanatical or quite literally any kind of exclusive whatsoever? So I’m just really curious what merit someone thinks that this suit actually has? It’s just that none of what I’ve seen anywhere puts Valve in a bad light. Funny, the only actual bad court case I can think of was against AUS and resulted in worldwide refunds across the entire platform. Looking at Apple in the EU, I doubt U.S. will have any of those changes come our way. The other lawsuit I’m familiar with Valve is how Corsair is suing them for the bumpers on the Steam Controller. Patent trolls.
Anyway, like I said I am curious if there is any legitimacy surrounding it, or if there’s an aspect that I’ve been missing. However, I am very skeptical simply because it’s being spearheaded by Epic. He straight up is saying in the blog post that “no cheaper game anywhere, not even if they’re not Steam keys!” Overgrowth is not some hugely popular game, he was literally doing this move to try and sell more copies of the game. I highly doubt that Valve as a company threw their weight against this guy over this. Especially to the extent of which he claims "it’s why all other storefronts have failed*.
I will say, I could understand more an employee mis-speaking or a miscommunication, but then to take what a random employee person allegedly said to court… Furthermore it goes onto say that developers are afraid if they don’t sell on Steam then they will lose a majority of revenue… It has no acknowledgement of why that may be, like say the value of services that are provided by Steam? That whole cabal of devs could happily go to Epic or Itch or the Nintendo Switch. Only a fear of losing revenue for not supporting a platform because of the immense value it provides.
Literally, if it were any other series of storefronts - like if Fanatical, GMG, Itch.io all came together with a civil suit then I’d hear the fuck out of that antitrust case.
But… Humble Bundle complaining and Epic funding it? Hard pass, pass so hard I didn’t even hit it pass. If Humble Bundle has an issue they are in a fine position to no longer sell Steam keys and that solves their problem. I don’t think there is much merit in “I lose revenue because I chose not to sell my game on Steam.”. About as much merit as making that argument for any console.
I mean, seriously! Just think of how many sales were lost by Wolffire just because they chose not to port the game to Switch PS4 and XBOX!
I don’t really see a difference between the two, and I definitely do not see a monopoly or antitrust where Valve meddling in store sale pricing affects the success of competing stores. For one, price parity is standard everywhere - whether that’s wrong or not is irrelevant, it’s the reality that the case is ignoring. For two, as I said it completely ignores the services Steam provides which in my opinion are far more likely reasons for why people continue to use Steam. Steam gets us with the extreme sales and keeps us with the stellar services. Other store fronts are free to have those sales, but if they do not succeed I doubt it’s due to price meddling and has far more to do with the services that are missing.
sigh sorry, I didn’t mean for it to get this long. Especially since I just posted another comment about this length. However, I do feel this one does a better job explaining my understanding of the situation so… lol
From my understanding of the now deleted price parity clause was that any storefront selling your game, regardless of Steam keys being sold, had to have price parity with Steam’s price. This was how it was back in 2015-2016 when I signed the agreement and had discord messages stating that to my team. That said, I recently pulled up the same steam agreement and there is no longer any price parity on the agreement. It seems like Steam is quietly trying to remove it.
Does that change your stance? If price parity doesn’t depend on steam keys?
If it’s $5 on Itch then at some point it should go on sale for $5 on Steam.
Also afaik, no, the wording said price parity to the exact price and time of each platform. So if it was 5 dollars on Itch, then it needed to be 5 dollars on Steam, at that same moment. Regardless of sale times between platforms being different. This is something they loosely enforced because the enforcement of this sort of thing would be insanely difficult.
Regarding your last point, that is not what Steam T.O.S nor the blog post from 2 years ago specify, it said “within a reasonable amount of time” which has been what I’ve been familiar with, releasing a SteamPlay title back in 2012. Fairly, that could have been within the time period of it just being changed (after, I think my time) However…
Yes, it has been about price parity from the beginning. If parity didn’t depend on Steam keys, that doesn’t make sense. For Valve to try and use that pull against Ubisoft/EA, and more recently Epic. They were they only doing it to indie? And that affected these indie stores so heavily they failed? Okay… They still exist and have devs selling on them. Selling… .steam keys… so if it were an issue, don’t use steam keys?
If they were failing, why would they continue to sell on Steam? Until they felt safe enough to be protected by… Epic money? That seems laughable. So Valve has been actively inhibiting sales towards Fanatical, Itch, and Humble Bundle but allowing Ubi/EA/Epic whatever they want? If the evidence shows it, okay sure I’m game. Evidence. Please?
Like I said, if small devs came together with some kind of class action or similar antitrust, but the Wolffire case from the start seems to be pretty much composed of Epic has been-exclusive signers - that is to say more clearly, the nameless “group of devs” Wolffire mentioned in their blog have since yet to have show their support to the case. I’m not sure if I mentioned this here but I genuinely loved Lugaru and the 24-Jam Receiver - but I always was unable to buy Overgrowth because of how highly priced it was. Come to learn that Wolffire then led to HB before being bought out by IGN. I’ve been a HB subscriber from very early on and have had it going for a long, long time as active (only until recently due to personal fund prioritization).
It seems like since that acquisition in 2017 Wolffire’s.existence has been ever so slightly involved in post HB transition and, now seemingly since 2021 about 2 years after that has been trying to make excuses to “lost sales” on their overpriced game (funny how only Overgrowth is the only game ever mentioned) by going after Valve for the… 3rd time now? There was the one filed April 2021 (dismissed afaik), the one in August 2021 (blog post and dismissed) and the recent February 2023. All funded by a certain T.S. of E.G. would you guess??
Why would these devs Wolffire mentioned not actively and vocally boycott Steam? Oh man! Valve totally shut down our only chance, I guess now we’re forever relegated to Steam! …as if GOG and Epic don’t exist?
At this point, I just want some legitimacy behind a Valve lawsuit if they’re going to happen, but from my understanding this ain’t it, nor is Corsairs scuff bullshit. If you’re going to take on a giant , have some merit.
Why go after the platform that is providing so much to its users? Why side with the Epic platform that came out swinging with a whole lot of nothing in 2018 and have since literally been pushing money and litigation while providing gamers with absolutely jack shit? Frankly, I will never understand siding with Epic (though crazier things have happened in my lifetime).
Look - I admit I am pro Valve, but I feel this way because they have proven to me they are pro service when they were the only storefront outside of Mac-specific ones to support OSX (SteamPlay Titles). Did it take a court case to make them more pro-consumer? Yes, unfortunately. And look at where we are, with Steam now known as the storefront that provides a safety net for gamers that until that case nowhere was able to provide, something that happened globally, not just rolled out to a single or small set of countries. In terms of hardware I have gotten replacements for my steam controller and steam link and valve index at the drop of hat free shipping no charge, The first two years after they had stopped officially supporting these devices.
I would feel different if Epic had even attempted a sliver of what Valve delivers. They do not. They have actively shown they care otherwise with their timed exclusives paid off to devs and free games that only pay devs per-install, not per claim, and have actively removed support for games - Paragon and Rocket Linux to name a pair. I am anti-Epic because the CEO is a vocal nutjob who is all too happy to work with Tencent (though I’ll admit, at least it’s in the open - the one good thing) who is all too happy to try and utilize the features of Steam when they can (proton) all while undercutting the actual developers - short term payments are not long term support. We.know this because the 2019-2021 Epic exclusives had no advertising, save for Metro, why would they, Epic paid them for their games.
Tim Sweeny takes any kick at Valve he can and I simply have yet to see any validity to the case to prove this isn’t more of that. I’d be interested in seeing any of the developers Wolffire mentioned and I’ve been following these cases closely. With all this in mind to me it seems this remote deposition is nothing more than an attempt to bring discomfort to Newell who has shown to be not particularly open to public showings outside his will (like his medical showings).
Anyway again, like I said, should any evidence or congregation of devs come to light condemning valve then I am more than on board, I have no love for any corporation that pervas evil but at the moment with the options available, no vocal, no believe. Why not GOG? Why not Epic? No itch? No indiegala or GMG? Not good enough to be bought by EA/Ubi? Hm, that’s a lot of options that don’t provide nearly as many services as Steam and yet are all clearly viable storefronts that aren’t providing the same service.
To me, it seems kind of unfair to generate some ~5000 steam keys then expect that even the half 2,500 utilize Steam services while Valve gets no portion. But maybe to some it’s what Valve deserves for offering so much and subsequently being successful. Surely, they only could make that by being shitty (lootboxes not withstanding here, lol), definitely not by providing a litany of services everywhere else seemingly refuses to.
I don’t think Valve is perfect nor exempt from critique. If anything, I hope this makes them more pro consumer regardless of the outcome. However, none of what I have seen from any of this makes me feel angry at Valve, it only makes me disappointed in a developer I previously believed in.
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