The first I came to even know about the game was checking out a brand new game store with a more D&D-centric name and them currently hosting a game night for 40k so there were like 5 big tables with these gnarly modeled maps with hills and buildings while people were rolling dice, then pulling out tape measures and moving their units.
Shit looked like Risk but cooler. Then I noticed how expensive it would be to play and just never got into it lol
There are cheaper miniature games out there. Gaslands is Mad Max/ Death Race inspired and you use standard toy cars to play. There’s also Turnip28 that’s pretty much post apocalyptic Napoleonic Wars. There are cheap Napoleon era miniatures people modify for it, but I’ve also seen some goofier builds, like using toys and actual vegetables. I will say I haven’t really played either, but they are the two miniature games I often consider getting into.
I believe the kits are still entirely made in the UK rather than Asia like so many things.
The quality and designs are arguably the best in the world with techniques far more advanced than most rivals can compete with.
This doesn’t mean they don’t get greedy and stick on a huge profit, I believe they heavily rely on staff who love the hobby to run their stores too and pay very poorly.
It is like risk but cooler! And honestly you don’t need a 2k point meta army to start with. For the price of two or three $60 video games (guess I have to preface that now) you can have enough models for you and a friend to have an absolute blast.
Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
They honestly should have expected this given peoples visceral reaction to anything AI. Personally, I have huge problems with AI and refuse to play most games that have used it. I think it’s poisoning every creative industry and replacing important jobs while using vague the excuse that it makes things “easier” while making the game soulless in the process. I’m willing to give Larian the benefit of the doubt simply because of their previous games being amazing, but imma wait for the reviews on this one. This game is still going to be in development for another 4 years and none of us will no what’ll happen between then and now, but for now I’ll remain hopefully optimistic
Most people—even obsessive gamers—don’t give two shits about AI. There’s a very loud minority that gets in everyone’s face saying all AI is evil like we’re John Connor or something. They are so obsessive and extreme about it, it often makes the news (like this article).
The market has already determined that if a game is fun, people will play it. How much AI was used to make it is irrelevant.
Except it’s not a small minority anymore, which is understandable given how pervasive chatbot enshittification is becoming. Maybe the ‘made with AI’ label isn’t enough to deter everyone, but it’s enough to kill social media momentum, which is largely how games sell these days.
I’ve been arrested several times putting a crowbar onto anything AI for a while now. From those waiter bots to my now ex-company’s AI servers. A non-relevant game made by a non-relevant dev is an easy skip/boycott from me.
You can sit back and let this stuff collapse under its own weight, you know.
TBH a violent reaction feels like is just going to help politicize this LLM mania (and therefore present an excuse to cement the enshittification). Let people see how awful and annoying it is all by itself.
You can break Meta glasses though. That’s totally warranted.
I’ve yet to meet a single person in real life who isn’t turned off by AI, and there are fewer and fewer of you grifters in the comments these days trying to defend it.
Fuck LLMs and dispersion models, its not art and it’s not even AI.
I don‘t like to admit it but you‘re likely right. And there are very cool use cases for machine learning if done right. And some of these concepts are already in successful games.
Of course there absolutely is slop that I‘m refusing to buy and companies do face backlash over it. No doubt about it, but that really doesn‘t mean every single use case for AI is bad or makes for a terrible product at all.
But it is interesting to see how much pushback you‘re facing for this comment while most people seem cool with it when Larian does it for some reason. Consumers are hypocrites sometimes.
Just putting this out there: wouldn’t a multiplayer-focused game like Borderlands be relatively shielded from the lads out on the high seas? Sure fitgirl could hook you up for a single-player campaign, but who tf wants to play Borderlands solo?
Makes sense, but if it’s only $10 it should just be free. $10 isn’t worth the bad PR and they should want this tour thing in as many hands as possible.
I have no problem with someone getting paid for their work. In fact, I encourage people to get paid for their work. But if you decide to sabotage your own product for the sake of attacking people who refuse to pay for it, you just make your product worse for everyone who did pay for it and you do nothing to actually solve the piracy issue. In that case, you’re reaping what you sow.
The modder, PureDark is talking about putting in anti-theft mines into their mods. Exactly like the Mad Max game where you can’t win and it makes it impossibly difficult if you’re playing a cracked copy. Below is the quote from the article, emphasis mine.
PureDark also responded to how quickly the Starfield mod was cracked.
"It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it’s done its job. So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people.
Wow a day or two of work and you earn probably 200k+ from it, crazy. Guess he is hurting for cash or he see’s the end of the cash train as other people start making equivalent mods. Or maybe he is afraid of bethesda/nividia/amd coming down on him.
It’s a day of work to implement the DRM, not the mod itself, which he did release day 1 for free on Nexus, only the frame gen version is behind the patreon wall, additionally he’s released many such DLSS+FG mods for various games (which all come with the sub) so he has a lot of experience implementing it and has clearly gotten it down pretty well.
Every game has its own challenges but Starfield was particularly easy (according to him) because of how FSR was implemented
That… is not at all specified what kind of “mine” it would be. You’re assuming it’s innocuous, everyone else is assuming it’s malicious. But we’re all making assumptions.
Which has never happened in the history of forever and I’m sure this will go just fine after he spent a whole two days implementing DRM in the first place.
Sorry, I dont mean to laugh, but where have you been?
The bulk of gamers only care about their instant gratification. If they actually were capable of taking a stand then there’d be a lot less awful companies pulling in billion dollar+ game releases.
“We can say that, during his time at Telltale, Zak was one of the most talented, balanced and inclusive game directors we have ever worked with, and that is evident in the games he has delivered.”
That statement doesn’t read as the defense they think it reads as.
It reads as “all of our other game directors are somehow actually worse.”
Yeah, I read the IGN article earlier today and telltales statement actually put me off them if I’m being honest. None of the devs/publishers come out of this looking good.
For those wondering if this is under exaggerated, it’s not. Now my experience is on the Switch.
This issues I saw in my time before I got refunded was as follow. Texture Flickering and Shadow Flickering (hard to see as a screen shot so this is the worse I saw)
Well I’m glad you laying it out for us, I’ve got a better idea what I’m dealing with. And it really does miff me on how unnecessarily wasteful the game is with storage
Ditto, I sadly didn’t go online so no comment there. Well I mean I tried once and I couldn’t connect so I just jumped into instant action. But yeah the storage requirements are a bit unrealistic on Switch. I don’t think you can even play it on OG switch without a Micro SD Card.
But you’re actually probably at least partly right. I’m sure they’ve done at least some upscaling and stored at a higher res which may actually take up more space.
The controls are “fine” for the most part. If you were on an Xbox controller it would work. Space Battles in Battlefront II are an improvement, but the same treatment was never made to Battlefront 1. If I had to complain about anything, it’s that the auto aim needs to be more sensitive and when you blast an enemy it auto locks on them like the console games. Mouse and keyboard this would be annoying but on controller it’s necessary.
Looking at the 34GB install, I’m guessing it’s some kind of massive emulation layer; it’s scary to say but I feel like we’ve just run out of game developers that can genuinely code against the machine itself to optimize install size and performance.
When you look back on the meager specs of old consoles and what they got running there, it now feels more and more impressive.
Other developers have already voiced their opinions on Baldur’s Gate 3. And it’s been “Oh no! Baldur’s Gate 3 is ruining the expectations of gamers about what a game is.”
Meanwhile most people playing BG3 have been saying “Finally, some good fucking food.”
So it's a $10 tutorial? Don't care how expansive and cool it is, that's just fucked. The project scope should've been adjusted to make sure it would be free.
Exactly! What sort of logic are they even trying to apply there? Basically saying “We put a lot of time into our tech demo, and it came out better than expected, so we’re going to charge for it!”
That’s just crazy.
The whole principle is that the intro experience is supposed to be free. It exists to get people pumped about the cool new thing they just bought and excited to play with it.
I guess Nintendo decided that - since you already bought the console - they don’t especially care if you are pumped or not. They already got your money.
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