Right? I see people saying "oh but the violence! the slavery!" as if it wasn't a collective act of childhood goodwill that prevented such associations being made to Pokémon. They talk a lot about friendship, but it's a friendship built on beating up creatures in the wild, which then obey and fight for you unquestioningly. Even some which are human-like and stated to be as intelligent as humans.
I consider myself a Pokémon fan and I defended them often, but it's a concept that gets a little iffy if you think about it for more than a minute.
Sounds like any RPG to me. Except that your party consists of the same creatures that you’re fighting. In that sense it’s maybe more egalitarian than RPGs featuring classical enemy races like orcs or goblins.
In Pokémon the concept of evil comes in the Form of Team Rocket and other shady exploitative organisations. Interestingly Palworld also has a counterpart organisation called Syndicates. But I still don’t know what their crime really is since you’re really doing the same thing of fighting and catching Pals. Nevertheless you have to treat the creatures in your party right, if you want to make progress in the game.
Like any RPG? Nah. C'mon, in most RPGs the characters are brought together by the story. Even the occasional antagonist who is fought and then allied with has a whole discussion where they are convinced of the merits of the protagonists. I could grant that in the Pokémon anime fairly often the creatures are convinced or decide to come along willingly, but in the games that hardly ever happens.
How do you reconcile the idea that the creatures want to come along with the active resistence of fighting them and having them break your pokéballs repeatedly?
Of course if you take the story by its word they'll say that trainers are good and friendly and only these criminal teams really are evil. And for fun I indulge that fantasy while I'm playing it, that these are martial artists pets that just love fighting so much and that pokéballs must be super comfy inside. But if you take a moment to compare what is happening you'll see that it isn't that different from what Palworld is doing.
Okay not like any RPG. It’s a special kind of RPG. And as a game it has many elements that make video game RPGs so addictive.
I agree with you on the ethics. Maybe Palworld in that sense is more honest than Pokémon. In the Pokémon anime however I always had the impression that they try to depict Pokémon as having humanlike character tendencies, e.g. some liking to get into fights and others just working as nurses in the Pokémon center…
I see people saying “oh but the violence! the slavery!” as if it wasn’t a collective act of childhood goodwill that prevented such associations being made to Pokémon.
I think the issue with the slavery (at least for me) is that there is human slavery that has exactly zero consequence. It doesn’t have much to do with the Pals themselves
I heard the game warns you against it and there are police forces that chase you if you commit crimes against humans. Though I don't know if that happens if you capture a human specifically.
Still, distasteful but I wouldn't see it much differently than, say, killing innocent bystanders in Hitman. The game allows you to do it but it doesn't encourage you to do it. It just doesn't block it either. It's not something I do or I'd approve of, but considering it's a more edgy version of the genre I can understand the game not making humans immune to the device that traps and essentially brainwashes living beings. Because, why would they be?
From what I have read about, the only thing that happens when you capture a human is that it tells you it is inhumane and frowned upon. I have not seen anything mentioning actual consequences beyond that, but it may be that people have not encountered them. If that is the case, the consequences might as well not be there.
Imagine buying your freedom from Microsoft only to get acquired by Sony a decade later. I think hindsight being 20/20 they may have just been better off continuing on with Microsoft.
Edit: I’d like to revise my previous position. This is why all devs and studio employees should follow the trend and UNIONIZE IMMEDIATELY.
Under Phil I think they’d be allowed a level of creative freedom but I can’t blame them for wanting to leave under Mattrick; he would have kept them on the Halo hamster wheel forever.
Yeah, I totally understand that. I suppose I am biased because I only played the first Destiny game, and to be honest it just always struck me as the Disney Star Wars version of Halo. It just lacked the compelling story elements and refinement of the early Halo games to me, so even back then I wondered if it was worth it for Bungie to separate from Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out that’s for sure. This smells to me like an attempt to lock Destiny in as a Sony exclusive perhaps. So, the irony is that exactly what Bungie was trying to avoid in large part by splitting from Microsoft may end up happening anyway…
Their fate is even sadder in my view, they’re now the live service aid studio. Hopefully Jim Ryan’s replacement can fix that because churning out live service games sounds like a horrible idea
Unfortunately this is just the norm when a company buys another. I give props to the employees thinking it is still Bungie, but it’s not. The second that deal was finalized they became sony employees, and even if on paper they were still Bungie they were always going to become Sony employees.
But business swallows little business. And big business doesn’t care about the jobs it leaves behind, or the people. Bungie as we knew it is dead
This isn’t a case of Sony just “swallowing” a little business. As the article states Bungie board of directors is 2 people from Sony and 3 people from Bungie, which means that while Sony technically owns Bungie the Bungie leadership still makes decisions about how to run the company. Supposedly there’s an obligation on Bungie’s part to meet certain financial goals. If Bungie meets those goals Sony can’t take over the company.
The problem is that Bungie isn’t doing well financially. The Sony takeover is an outcome of Bungie not being able to stay financially independent. That means if Bungie wasn’t under Sony then under the same conditions Bungie would most likely go bankrupt instead.
Bungie as we know it being dead has nothing to do with Sony. Bungie management has essentially killed Bungie.
Yes on paper that’s how it’s all laid out. However anyone who has been through a buyout knows that no parent company intends for the child company to act separately indefinitely. The shotgun clause in there saying they have to do well financially proves it to me. What company hasn’t gone through hard times before? Sony may be playing the long game but they’ll get control eventually, they always knew they would. It was inevitable that this would happen. Guarantee it was written this way probably with projections on when it would likely happen.
Which is why I say as soon as a buyout occurs the old company is gone. The cool culture you had, the lenient bosses, the small company style benefits? Gone. It may take a bit, but they’re going away. Papa business is here and he only cares about the profit margin, not the people, not even the product. They may say it’ll stay the same, but drip by drip the company will change, and a few years later you’ll realize you aren’t working for that cool smaller company anymore, you’re working for the big corpos conglomerate.
I get being pessimistic especially since we don’t know the details of Sony Bungie deal. But I think you’re not aware how bad it’s going at Bungie. Bungie has a huge burn rate according to Microsoft (they also tried to require Bungie and that was brought up as the biggest risk). Bungie missed their own revenue projections by 45%. When the layoffs happened some of the employees were told that the studio would be in great jeopardy if they were still independent.
Everything we know is pointing at Bungie possibly going bankrupt, if they were still independent. Sony swooping in is just Sony trying to save their 3,6 billion investment.
And I’m not sure why you’re trying to paint a small tight-knit company of Bungie? They have 1000+ employees even after the layoffs. The biggest criticism at Glassdoor is the horrible management. Bungie has been slipping into corporatism well before Sony.
On the one hand I'm always excited for more Witcher. On the other hand Cyberpunk 2077. More seriously, I hope they make a great game and it that lives up to the expectations people are going to have for a new Witcher game, but I'm keeping my expectations in check until I see the finished product.
I’m hoping the initial backlash from cyberpunk actually registered with them. Other than that I’m also worried about what kind of story and characters they’ll use considering the way the last dlc for witcher 3 ended. Not sure I’ll be into Ciri based gameplay. That was my least favorite part of Witcher 3, and I don’t really want them to retcon the end of blood and wine either to continue with Geralt.
I could see them doing interesting things with Ciri’s magic, but there is a good chance they use a different witcher. Or maybe significantly earlier than the existing witcher games? Young Geralt or maybe Vesimir?
They need to go back in time to when all the witcher schools were still going and you can choose which school you’re a part of at the beginning, make your own witcher instead of one playable character.
That sounds really bad on paper, tbh. The cool parts about the player character all stem from how it’s a defined person with an existing personality and place in the world. If it becomes Skyrim: Witcher Edition, we’d probably also inherit the shallow~inexistent storytelling of that.
What if it becomes Baldurs Gate 3: Witcher Edition? BG3 also has a player created character without an existing personality and the storytelling is certainly not shallow in that game.
Yeah but one of the biggest pitfalls is seeing another company catch lightning in a bottle, then thinking that this can be freely recreated. Just that BG3 could do a user-created character with a good story does not at all imply that any other company can do it. Nevermind will. Or even that Larian can do it again.
While I do kinda agree with you, I think CDPR is a lot better at writing interesting quests and characters than Bethesda. Still not as good as larien but I don’t think it would be todd Howard bad.
I’d love that. Sure they’d have to really re-do her combat style since it was only a brief intermission before, but it feels natural to progress to her eventually. And honestly, it’s high time Geralt takes a bow after 3 games as big as they are, and as awesome as those were. Exit before they eventually ruin him. 😅
Cyberpunk’s patching has showed me that ~1-1,5 years after release is a really good time to jump in.
By which time, between patches and mods, the worst stuff is dealt with and the experience can be really nice, if a bit tepid due to bad design decisions that mods cannot fix. Still, enjoyable game after patches and at a discount.
Witcher 3 is probably my favourite game of all time, largely because of the semi-parental storyline with Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri. That said, I think the weakness with the Witcher 1-3 series as a whole is that the plot is too complex. Since most modern AAA RPGs have many, many side quests, I think the main plot of a long RPG should be relatively simple or else risk diluting its dramatic effect.
I feel like CD Projekt Red did a better job with that aspect of story-telling in Cyberpunk, even if the overall emotional arc is less intense than that of Witcher 3. There are lots of cool things to do and interesting side quests in Cyberpunk, but the main arc is pretty simple. You can go off on hours of side quests and still come back to the main plot without forgetting what’s going on.
The last time I played Cyberpunk, it was actually good fun. Game was a bit empty, and it was pretty obvious they'd been forced to cut a lot of stuff, but I played it for several hundred hours without too many bugs. Pretty and ran well on my budget pc too.
That was how I started. I played less than a couple hours and got pulled away by another game. I picked it up months later, made it through the prologue, get invested in the characters, and ended up really loving it.
Ubisoft is a big company. I can see it as the devs saying “it’s not ready” and some exec, high on his if you believe hard enough it’s true bullshit and said either submit it or find another job.
Maybe they thought their checks cleared?
Or, it’s a security violation. Maybe the game accidentally opens a door to allow unsigned software to run.
Best comment here. Either exec (with overconfidence or deadlines), or security violation seem most likely. Surprising that it’s for both platforms though…
I've never played Cyberpunk, but watched my husband play for a lot of hours. I played Xdefiant's beta for a day in June. I'm puzzled by why it didn't pass. Beta was not buggy, had maybe one minor issue with it. My guess is security violation.
Or neither. Platform cert doesn’t directly correlate to how many bugs a game has, it’s a set of very specific test cases that software has to pass to be approved for release: show the correct button prompts for the platform, have correctly-implemented achievements/trophies, show correct error messages, etc.
Some of the tests do include things like ‘don’t crash during normal operation’, but the failures could be almost anything. (Source: am a developer)
Linux was so unable to handle my 3 Monitors (granted, all with different Resolution and refresh-rate, but still) that i had to switch back to Windows today.
gnome-shell started crashing, Firefox and Gnome-Web started crashing for whatever reason. it was a Mess.
Some of that is on GNOME. I had to swap back to KDE after a couple years on GNOME due to lack of VR compatibility. GNOME is good for newbies and productivity, but completely unusable for gaming.
No offence, gnome is great, but there are many inconsistencies on the lover level, I wish it was figured out once and for all. It applies to big DEs like KDE and etc too.
Never had that issue, your experience may vary based on your hardware and software. I use Arch, sway (wayland), AMDGPU, multiple monitors with mixed refresh rates, everything works great.
NixOS with Gnome Wayland, a 4K 60hz TV, a 144hz WQHD and a 60Hz 1080p Monitor
it would often happen that one Screen would just freeze. my Web Browsers would just crash, especially if i was opening a Video.
and the Gnome-Shell itself would crash and put me into the Login Screen.
sometimes the whole Computer would crash and become unresponsive and not even alt+ctrl+n would help anymore
i don't really like XOrg, it just always feels inferior to Wayland or even Windows.
which is why i am currently using windows until [the Problems get fixed | i upgrade my PC (to an AMD GPU)]
Sources from Build a Rocket Boy, developer of MindsEye, say the studio has begun layoffs amid a disastrous launch.
This might hurt every English teacher I ever had, but maybe title format should stop applying to article titles. Unnecessary capitalization hurts legibility.
Not that it would necessarily solve the wording issue, though, as I’m sure the data people for news publishers have some stats showing they get more engagement when the title is front loaded with more keywords, or something to that effect.
Old title format is sensible for the limited space of newspapers. We don’t need it to be quite as concise as it used to be with current digital formats.
Tbf, Microsoft is an American company that is probably looking for ways to address their own rising expenses. Japan is struggling economically as well, so I imagine Ninty & Sony are looking at international markets to offset their own struggles as well.
Their games almost never go on sale and the switch 2 has set off the $80 trend. Nintendo was already expensive, no reason to believe they aren’t going to keep themselves from being more expensive despite the billions.
Oh sorry, I wasn’t defending them. Haha yeah I agree with you completely. They are absolutely going to jack up costs. I just meant I don’t think Nintendo is generally struggling. They seem like a standout in the market
zero competitors are forced to raise prices 10% in europe, though
it’s a console launched 5 years ago with no new revision, it was unattractive for €500 in 2020 and it’s even more unattractive for €600 in 2025, if they want to move more units they should lower the prices, not increase them. With this price people can get a real PC with better performance, where you don’t need to pay a subscription to play online. And there are no cool “must have” exclusives like the ps5 or the switch, so the premium is not justified.
This depends on the markets. For example, if prices in the US raised 50% due to Tariffs, then they might lose one of their largest markets, but if they can raise them 10% globally, then they can potentially limit that loss and still have a chance (as much as possible anyway) in all of their markets.
Either way, they need to raise prices because their costs have gone up. It’s a question of where that money is coming from, and how they can reduce its impact on them as much as possible.
Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.
When you tariff them by over 100% of their value, they tend to cost more to import.
My whole comment was on the tariffs specifically, and there is a 100% chance they affect sales in the US. Even with cost reductions in manufacturing over the total lifetime of the console, there’s no chance they cut costs enough to keep up with the tariffs, and there is no chance they planned for the tariffs to be this high in their planning.
Outside the US? These tariffs aren’t applied, but raising the prices globally limits the impact of them on one of their largest markets since they can amortize the cost across all their markets instead of just one.
If they released it about the same price, backwards compatible, maybe small fee to “upgrade” a switch game to the newer version, I might have been tempted. But seriously meh. I’m playing my physical copy backlog on my steam deck now lol
I think this money grab wouldn’t have gotten as much run in the media if it hadn’t been front and center in the Direct. Feels like a misstep, but then, so does €90 Mario Kart…
Same with Paradox games. 4X in general is just really hard to get right on release because of how many interlinking systems there are, so waiting for balance updates at a minimum is never a bad idea.
Seeing the same news posted two days later is considered terminally online?
How can we have a discussion about news if we pretend whatever we discussed yesterday doesn’t exist anymore?
If there was a new development I wouldn’t speak up. But this is just a different outlet posting the same news story, only two days later compared to the rest.
I don’t care if different people do or don’t post it multiple times across multiple days. I already get to see some cross community duplication, so someone posting because they are late to the game gets lost in the noise.
It isn’t like a discussion can only happen one time and if people miss it then they are out of luck. If someone posts late and nobody wants to engage the repost will fade off into obscurity.
Comment ratio is not an indication of whether someone is online, just whether they feel the need to comment a lot. I tend to spend the same amount of time reading whether I’m commenting or not.
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