yeah at the time you were forced into it. the won servers were shut down and most peoples computers werent good enough to play CS and have this clunky software running in the background at the same time. it worked but alt-tabbing back then was a gong show and you definitely had the performance hit.
i played CS daily then so the first day was a shit show and I dont think I got much time in that day. mostly just trying to get connected…the servers were overloaded.
I pirated almost any game that required it, only ended up signing up in 2018 I don’t remember why at the time but I don’t think it was to buy games since I didn’t buy any until almost a year after creating the account.
I thought it was great. I got a physical copy of the Orange Box for $20 and didn’t care that I had to install Steam to play it. After I had it set up and realized I didn’t have to physically go to the store to get games anymore, I like it even more.
Considering we’ve already got the one former Larian employee speaking out against this, it’ll be interesting to see how many more show up off the record (or maybe on the record anonymously). I’m sure there was an internal battle over it.
There aren’t many (possibly none) with more goodwill banked among enthusiast gamers than Vincke, so I feel like we’re about to see just how far a popular figure can step into this particular puddle without coming out soaked.
I hope when it’s released you can turn off the MMO features and play solo. I just want to get high, bomb hills, and watch my dude get all of his bones obliterated like the good ol days. I don’t need some clown decked out in a $100 dinosaur costume telling me I suck ass to heighten the experience.
I never played Hi-Fi rush, Redfall, Mighty Doom, or The Evil Within. That said it looks like Tango hit their sales and quality strides. Alpha Dog and their Mighty Doom shit-ware deserves the dust bin and closure.
As cold and callous as this all sounds, I read about the Redfall development and it was leadership start to finish on that disaster. The employees, even at Alpha Dog, don’t deserve this treatment. Dinga Bakaba from Arkane Lyon stated it perfectly
Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
Fuck me, this part hurts the most, and I highly recommend anyone who didn’t read the article at least look at what was said here. Everyone knows damn well that the corporation has the ability to flourish in keeping all the talented workers who got fucked by shitty leadership, instead the leadership will fail upward and keep ruining projects. Companies have so many chances to really disrupt and show the world a better way and they continually take shallow short sighted routes to cheap monetary victory, discarding humanity along the way. Fuck companies.
What the fuck? I understand Arkane Austin since they dropped the ball, but why Tango Gameworks? I was secretly hoping they’d make another game like Hi-Fi Rush…
I am going to pretend you didn’t mean it this way but that REALLY comes across as telling people who lost their jobs that they deserve it because they didn’t meet your requirements (that weren’t even true back in the day of DOS and BBSes…)
Please… fuck right off with that. The devs at Arkane Austin or Tango aren’t making the decision to add a battlepass or to release a game before it is “done”. They are doing what management requires of them. The same management that then fires them to make sure that the overall branch of the company turns a profit.
I agree with your statement. However, what I believe the original comment was saying is that if the developers who have lost their jobs were to get together and make a game as they describe, then they would buy it. The malice was directed at Microsoft and so on.
Which is still a complete load of demonstrable bullshit.
Getting funding for a team is increasingly difficult. Plenty of studios have talked about the horrors of 2023-2024 and how nobody wants to fund even a small team. And this would not be “take it across the finish line” but a solid 3-6 years before even a chance at a return on investment because these devs wouldn’t even have IPs or past releases to leverage.
But also? Listen to folk like Xalavier Nelson Jr who talk about this. They are fighting the good fight to push back against financiers and publishers to make games “the right way” with monetization models that are what people ask for. And they still get shit on endlessly and ignored.
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of “abandonware” back in the day. For those who are too young, for the longest time it was nigh impossible to buy a game that was even five or six years old because it would not be on store shelves. GoG (back when they were Good Old Games) was specifically designed to update and sell these games. And without invasive DRM to boot.
And suddenly all the abandonware torrent sites just started uploading gog installers. And now we almost never hear the term “abandonware” because… people were always full of shit and just wanted to make an excuse to justify their own actions.
It is, in fact, not BS to be mad at a megacorp for cutting valuable and functioning assets, and the fact you do not understand that is hilariously pathetic.
If you’re aware of people and games that do fit, then whining about it and talking about how they get crapped on instead of how cool their sfuff is doesn’t help, either!
You seem to be more willing to paint things negatively than help improve, so why should we listen?
My issue is the people who use this as an excuse to blame the devs who are just doing their jobs while trying to live their dreams.
Again. There are studios out there who are doing exactly what everyone insists they want AND are doing so in ways that make getting funding difficult. And they get shit on because of a “hot take” on twitter or because their game isn’t as pretty as Call of Duty.
When large groups of people get laid off because of corporate bullshit? The answer is not to say “Hey, you should fucking do better next time”. It is “Fuck corporations” or “fuck capitalism”.
Cool but most indie devs don’t have the capital to fund the development. They want to make those games, but they have to partner with publishers so they can afford to buy stuff like food and rent while developing before they make any sales.
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)
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