Have they posted anything about their experiences developing this? I’m curious on their thoughts of Godot vs Unity. This might be the most established studio to ship something in Godot.
Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.
But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.
There can't honestly be a lot of them. I'm sure even folks who donated don't have that much of their personal ego wrapped up in a game engine. Not to say there aren't none, of course, because there's always people who really will cling to anything.
It’s an amazing game! I never felt pressured to collect all the beasts, but at the same time looked forward to trying to level the cassettes up! If they ever do sequels, I hope they figure out an alternative solution to what is now Pokemon’s massive design strength/flaw.
They care because people that haven’t bought it should know that these issues don’t seem to be getting better. They should know that their money would be going to that asshole’s pockets. This shit matters and you wanting to plug your ears to discomfort doesn’t change that.
You know what I would buy? Hitman set in ancient Egypt.
Infiltrating a workgang forced to build a pyramid, putting a spitting cobra into a nasty enforcer’s chamber pot because he owes the Potiphar some serious myrrh?
Honestly, not a bad idea. Synthesizing and iterating, taking things out of context, combining elements you haven’t before - that’s how you get something interesting.
Ubi’s problem is that their gameplay loops are completely stale. There just isn’t enough new and different, the stories are trite, the dialogue is shit, and everything is boring and predictable.
I somewhat enjoyed the first Assassin’s Creed, but was a little bitter it wasn’t the Prince of Persia game they’d intended the engine for. I didn’t find “walking slowly to blend in with a crowd” to be as fun as the intense combat and tight platforming of Sands of Time. But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.
I’m actually playing The Lost Crown now and - not that I’m the first to observe this - but I feel like it’s the best thing Ubi has done since The Two Thrones twenty years ago. This is the kind of risk that Ubi should be taking. Modest games, smaller budgets, new genres. Diversify and let the creatives create. Let small projects succeed and give them a sequel. If small projects fail, it doesn’t break the bank. But for christ’s sake stop releasing the same three giant boring games over and over.
I’m still sad they killed the 2008 Prince of Persia after the DLC, top of my list from them. (Lost Crown isn’t far)
Also TBF, Origins isn’t the best example to blame them for making a stale loop, since that’s precisely the game where they updated the AC formula to make it a lot more RPG.
But I cannot for the life of me understand how the series blew up into a juggernaut of a dozen releases over two decades.
Heavily historical setting fairly accurate about settings that a lot of people are interested about. Nothing easier. You can literally throw a dart at a map and a timeline and make something interesting with a shit story. People will buy a million of them, doesn’t matter if they’re all the same game. It’s a goddamn mystery that no one is doing anything like that with their own engine, absolute lack of imagination.
This is what kills me. There’s so much squandered potential in AC with this kind of thinking. Instead, Ubisoft just wants to be EA by re-selling the same game every year, but doesn’t have the sports licenses to pull it off.
To be fair, at least No Man’s Sky followed thru with all the updates down the line. Should’ve launched like that, but at least they added it all for free after the terrible launch
Games are very difficult software to create. The only reason publishers like EA or Ubisoft can get away with pumping theirs out at an rapid (and unhealthy) pace is because they have a massive team
Hes not praising himself, I was recklessly brave going into the lions den, isnt prasiing yourself, its admonishing yourself, like you took on some insane challenge without thinking
Some lemmy users really love getting mad xD. Can’t believe I thought I would say this but reddit gaming subs are not this bad. Idk if it’s just me but It doesn’t excite me to check the comments anymore.
You have to have a certain amount of bravery and humility to program because failure is with you at every step of the way. I know. I do this shit as a hobby.
Bravery is doing a thing that scares the hell out of you. The reckless part is being brave when it’s foolish. He’s saying he was foolhardy. Probably doesn’t know the word exists.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.”
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.
Gonna have to do it forever until businesses figure out that half of what makes a game good is that it needs to be a literal passion/art project, and not just a checklist of shit that needs to get done.
Exactly. They can charge $200 if they want to but it doesn't mean people are going to buy at that price. The price point needs to be where people are okay paying for it and I don't see it happening at $80. Okay, I lied a bit, I see it happening for some games but not for BL4.
I'm willing to eat my words but I doubt I need to. In a world where Clair Obscur costs $50 I don't how see how BL could be $30 better than one of the best games released this year.
If Ubisoft can convince themselves that Skull and Bones was the first “quadruple A game” and worth $70, then I doubt most studio execs can pull their heads out their ass for long enough to properly ask themselves that. Studios have completely lost touch with what people actually want and are willing to pay.
kind of, it’s more like it starts a geralt’s story, but becomes ciri’s story. the first two books are all geralt. after that it’s about geralt and ciri’s relationship. then by the last book we barely even see geralt.
then after the series was finished he started writing more little stories from earlier in geralt’s life.
as i said in another comment. it’s downright bizarre that ciri doesn’t get mentioned until the third game. she almost makes more sense as the protag anyway.
Came here to say this. Anyone that’s played Witcher 3 should have already known that Ciri was going to be the protagonist in the next game. I can’t wait. Ciri is badass.
Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.
anyone who has read the books was likely surprised that ciri wasn’t the main character of any of the games when they first started coming out :::especially since geralt dies at the end of the books :::
ciri was more the mc than geralt for most of the books. she’s the child of destiny. she’s the young character that grows up as we follow their journey. she’s the one that finds herself and shows major character development throughout the books. the only character development geralt goes through is accepting his bond with ciri.
the first two games never mentioning ciri was outright bizarre tbh. only even remotely possibly because geralt lost his memory. like, with where geralt as at by the end of the books the only thing you could possibly expect him to do on regaining his memory is frantically search for signs of his adopted daughter
to a longtime book reader my reaction to ciri being the protag of the next game was “FINALLY”
my only curiosity at this point is how much she’ll be like book ciri. does she know magic? in the books ciri goes to sorceress school and then gets trained in primal magic by unicorns and immortal space elves. can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
tangent: sapkowski’s politics occasionally bleed through in weird ways in the books. like three’s a scene where a woman finds out she’s pregnant mid way through a literal war that our band wades through on their journey to save the world. the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it. it was so randomly out of character for everyone involved. but hey, that’s catholics for you i guess… /tangent
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise. ooh, i wonder if she’ll make quips about cyberpunk and/or other worlds she’s traveled to. like, she spent Decent bit of time in Arthurian legend. she shows up briefly in Victorian London.
also, what will the world at large look like? they can’t do it like the last time where your previous save could alter the new game based on your decisions. you were simply able to do too much. they’d need to make like 3 entirely separate stories at the very least. like, who rules the north? are you the empress of nilfguard? is the church burning all the nonhumans at record pace? you can basically decide the entire fate of the northern realms and all of its people in multiple ways… unless it just takes place elsewhere. maybe we’ll be in zerrikania this time or some shit. there are many distant lands that the games never take us. it would be much more doable that way. then you’d just have to change dialogue and maybe swap out a few characters.
aaaanyway… yeah, anyone mad about her being the mc is a dumbass that doesn’t know shit about the story.
I was under the impression that it wasn’t Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started. It was one of those “oh shit, yes, that explains everything” moments for me when I first read the books.
She does also extremely briefly travel to Edwardian or Victorian London (I forget exactly what year it was). It’s mostly depicted through a newspaper clipping from The Sun and a rebuttle from another newspaper calling out their quoted witness for trespassing and strongly implying he was inebriated at the time and being an unreliable source. It’s quite comically written really
no, but she kind of wanted to… but it’s also way more fucked than that. please don’t make me type it out here. I’ll just say it involves violent rape while she’s still under age. it could be construed as a trauma response, but it’s debatable… I’m not convinced that sapkowski would have known what a trauma response was when he wrote that scene in the… 90s?
can’t actuality remember which book that happened in.
By thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world’s description I know what scene they’re talking about. It’s not great but it’s not as bad as they make out. Basically she ends up traveling for a bit with this really smarmy dude. Think incel used car salesman. He’s described as having greasy hair, he’s clearly not trustworthy and acts only in his own best interest, and is constantly trying to get into Ciri’s pants. But, he’s riding this incredible horse the likes of which Ciri has never seen before (and it turns out to in fact be a magical horse) and Ciri is just entranced by this incredible and majestic horse, and smarmy dude can tell, so he makes sure to use the horse to get Ciri to interact with him even though they both know she wants nothing to do with him and only gives him the light of day to see his horse.
Anyways smarmy dude and Ciri end up running from some bandits, smarmy dude is injured but plays down how badly, and basically uses this plus gifting her the horse she’s so entranced by to manipulate and guilt her into agreeing to sleep with him (from her perspective it’s been made clear how curious but nervous she is about sex, so she’s not entirely opposed, but it’s also implied up to this point that she’s far more into women than men) and then just as she’s starting to potentially enjoy the pity sex with the asshole but before either of them can actually get their pants off, he fucking dies!
can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
Uhhh which book is that? If it’s the section I’m thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she’s entranced by its beauty and it’s rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don’t believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.
the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it
The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she’s presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can’t ride, shouldn’t travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can’t exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they’re actively crossing. It’s one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva’s decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.
Also it wasn’t rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.
She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the “Frying Pan” desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn’t yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.
Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress’ powers.
If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva’s winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn’t outshine the others
Edit: Cahir’s attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it’s written, but that might be intentional, since that’s at a point where she’s coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.
I mean, I prayed to the nether gods that we’d get a Letho game. He’s the perfect protagonist if they wanted to move away from the books and more firmly into their own OC. Always had huge main character energy, and would be perfectly suited for exploring the morally grey areas of the Witcher world.
If anything, Ciri's the character whose story is wrapped up by the end of Witcher 3, she saved the world and fulfilled her destiny. Unlike Geralt or the sorceresses, she does get old too.
It's definitely understandable that a lot of players would feel betrayed at having Ciri becoming the MC after 3 games of Geralt. People would riot if you made someone else than Lara Croft the MC of tomb raider. A better solution would probably be a character creator for a new generation of witchers. Ciri is too powerful to be the MC.
Isn’t the good ending geralt giving her a Witcher blade and calling her an official witcher? That to me sets up part 4. End of the day im glad geralt gets a rest. Besides they’re remaking 1 and 2 so the geralt fix will come
There's plenty of different endings, but yeah that's probably the one they'll make canon.
The thing is Geralt is The Witcher, making Ciri the protagonist is a bastardization of the saga. Imagine that J.K rowling came up with a new book, titled it Harry Potter 8, and made the protagonist Hermione. To me this shows a real lack of understanding of their audience, people play The Witcher for the fantasy of being Geralt, of being a monster killer, of hooking up with every sorceress. But obviously IP sells, and they aren't gonna change the title of the saga to something like "child of the elder blood".
I wish them the best of luck, maybe they'll pull off a fallout 3 and reinvent themselves. But I personally will be passing on this spinoff.
100% this. The whole process of creation and critique goes way back to the dawn of film and probably before. The entire construction of positions and job titles (creative director, design lead, etc) all draw from these theories. This requires the critique to be separate from the process of creation.
I contend that the next great Deus Ex game will not come out of Ubi, and it won’t be under the name Deus Ex, but it will be a new kind of immersive sim made with love by developers who grew up on the originals.
I contend this for a lot of the classic franchises tbh
What I didn’t like about Eternal was being forced to use specific weapons to kill certain enemies. For me this kind of shooters are all about use “the right tool for the job”. If I fancy using the two barrels shotgun from start to finish, just let me do so.
For me Doom 2016 was a hugely more enjoyable experience than Eternal. 2016 is arguably one of the greatest linear single player shooters ever made. Eternal felt like a chore once you had all the tools unlocked and I lost interest shortly after. I could have lowered the difficulty so weapon selection didn’t matter, but that was clearly not the design intent.
Ultrakill does the “swap between weapons quickly for interesting combos” much better IMO – it’s not necessary but it’s a value add and it’s super fun to pull off.
I lowered the difficulty, and I were able to kill bigger enemies with the weapon of my choice. But they became bullet sponges. There’s no fun in that. I too prefer 2016, I like my shotgun.
Sounds more like an “easy mode” thing. Have certain enemies immune to certain guns on the harder difficulties. Want to just use the shotgun? Play easy mode. Want to be more strategic? Play a harder difficulty.
Okay, so while you can’t literally use nothing but the SSG for the entirety of Doom II (especially since you don’t get it until MAP02), you can comfortably use it at least 90% of the time on UV. Shells are plentiful throughout the game.
That isn’t the point. The point is you shouldn’t feel shoehorned into playing a specific intended route. Doom is about turning off your brain and slaying.
It’s a license to play the game, so when you pirate it is like sneaking into the movie theater. There’s no additional cost to the producer, but theoretically a loss of revenue from the license (movie ticket) you didn’t buy.
All that ignores the fact that they sure do pretend they are SELLING the game when it’s convenient.
I think a better comparison would be a “Drive-In Theater”, because with pirating you’re just seeing the film, not using their seats/venue (servers) so it’s like you’re sitting in the neighbors yard watching it from their porch. Still costing them what would be considered a “viewing purchase” for the data but you’re really not putting a strain on the theater itself by “attending or sneaking in”.
I agree with this point, and it’s also why I think the class action suit makes sense. Some of the people who bought The Crew got a physical copy, which is now just a useless disc. It’s still just a license like you said, and I agree that it feels like they’re selling the game.
It’s like if the movie theater sold a DVD for a movie, but the disc will only work while you’re in the theatre. Pirating might still be a crime legally but I don’t think anyone should feel bad about doing it here, Ubisoft absolutely does not deserve your money over slimy business practices like this.
the fact is, that most people who pirate, wouldn’t pay for it if they couldn’t pirate. It’s not a loss of revenue in most cases. I sure as shit wouldn’t pay for media if i couldn’t pirate. I’m poor as fuck.
No one should own an Ubisoft game. Its a company thats at the top of the list with Nintendo as far as the level of hatred and vitriol they have for their own paying customers goes.
Half Life 2 works offline just fine. You can even run the exe directly without Steam open. You just cannot compare the two. But yes, if Steam get shut down you obviously cannot download them again. Same goes for games on GOG. You could archive them, but you can also archive games from Steam, it’s all the same.
I wasn’t saying you can’t play them, just that you don’t own them. This is still true with DRM free games. GOG’s agreement is different to Steam’s in that you own your purchase
You don’t think you own every house with an unlocked front door, do you?
It’s a nice sentiment but seriously - the whole “if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing” thing is both overused and has always annoyed me. How are the two related? You can still be stealing regardless of if you have an option to buy or not. You could still steal an item that isn’t for sale.
What we really should be focusing on is whether pirating in and of itself is stealing, and whether it should be a crime. This overused phrase is distracting from the issue at hand, imo.
A user obtains the game through legitimate means by “buying” the game. However, they do not own the game, and are in fact, just renting something. This is despite decades and decades of game buying, especially pre-Internet, equating to owning the game and being able to play the game forever, even 100 years from now.
By pirating the game, a user has clawed back the implied social construct that existed for decades past: Acquiring a game through piracy means that you own the game. You have it in a static form that cannot be taken away from you. There’s still the case of server shutdowns, like this legal case is arguing. But, unlike the “buyer”, the game cannot suddenly disappear from a game’s store or be forcefully uninstalled from your PC. You own it. You have the files. They cannot take that away from you.
The phrase essentially means: You have removed my means of owning software, therefore piracy is the only choice I have to own this game. It’s not stealing because it’s the only way to hold on to it forever. You know, because that’s what fucking “buying” was supposed to mean.
I think Ubisoft is clearly in the wrong, but you’re not making a good case. You’re conflating very different meanings of the word “own”.
In terms of legal ownership, only the copyright holder owns the intellectual property, including the right to distribute and license it. When a consumer “buys” a piece of media, they’re really just buying a perpetual license for their personal use of it. With physical media, the license is typically tied to whatever physical object (disc, book, ROM, etc.) is used to deliver the content, and you can transfer your license by transferring the physical media, but the license is still the important part that separates legal use from piracy.
When you pirate something, you own the means to access it without the legal right to do so. So, in the case at hand, players still “own” the game in the same sense they would if they had pirated it. Ubisoft hasn’t revoked anyone’s physical access to the bits that comprise the game; what they’ve done is made that kind of access useless because the game relies on a service that Ubisoft used to operate.
The real issue here is that Ubisoft didn’t make it clear what they were selling, and they may even have deliberately misrepresented it. Consumers were either not aware that playing the game required Ubisoft to operate servers for it, or they were misled regarding how long Ubisoft would operate the servers.
Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty, i.e. a promise that what they buy will continue to work for some period of time after they’ve bought it, and an obligation from the manufacturer to provide whatever services are necessary to keep that promise. Game publishers generally don’t offer any kind of warranty, and consumers don’t demand warranties, but consumers also tend to expect punishers to act as if their products come with a warranty. Publishers, of course, don’t want to draw attention to their lack of warranty, and will sometimes actively exploit that false perception that their products come with a perpetual warranty.
I think what’s really needed is a very clear indication, at the point of purchase, of whether a game requires ongoing support from the publisher to be playable, along with a legally binding statement of how long they’ll provide support. And there should be a default warranty if none is clearly specified, like say 10 years from the point of purchase.
I’m not trying to frame this in the context of the lawsuit, even though that’s the point of the original article. The Crew’s nonfunctionality is just a consequence of our lack of ownership.
Perhaps this article would explain things better than I could.
Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty
No. That’s not true. Otherwise people wouldn’t be reciting this phrase over and over again.
Consumers want to fucking own shit again! Renting everything is the entire fucking problem.
Valve says the data proves “Steam isn’t just a storefront—it provides social community, game discoverability, interactive events, and a deep set of game-enhancing features to attract and retain players who will be checking out new games in the future.”
I think it proves that Steam is the largest storefront on PC and that PC is growing and replacing other platforms.
I haven’t seen an interactive event on Steam for, like, a decade. Unless they’re counting sales as interactive events. 🤔
They used to have, like, gamified events where you’re earning things (like maybe trading cards or badges or other Steam profile items) by playing a small little browser game inside the store page. Those were always fun.
one example of a steam onteractive event was when valve was actively giving viewers who were watching the game awards through steam a raffle to get a free one.
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