I really want this for a lot of games. GTA5 became this absolutely beautiful spectacle of a game once I had the ability to control the flow of time. Something beautiful about launching a rocket and watching it crawl to its destination under the twinkling sunlight, past the unsuspecting bypassers who barely have time to register that something is up. Breathtaking game.
I think the only way that could possibly work is if all manufacturers followed the same specs. That way games can be developed for all platforms equally.
3DO tried this, and failed spectacularly. Any other way would stifle competition though, which is bad for everyone.
I’m confident there’s a way to make it work. 3D Printers operate with this model for the most part (thanks Jeff Prusa!)
Effectively, console manufacturers should agree on some kind of standard architecture, which, to be very realistic and blunt (apologies as this isn’t necessarily the tone of the post, but I like trying to make things work in some way), as long as Nintendo is in the console game, it’s gonna be a bit difficult (unless we just let them do whatever they want console-wise and have the others create some kind of standard home console arch). As someone who is dipping their toes into game development, that is something I would love to see.
Xbox One/Series S/SeriesX and PS4/5 are x86 PCs, Switch is an ARM phone.
So, in the lowest level they are pretty out of the shelf hardware. Electronics are getting way to complicated to invest in the development of custom hardware architectures for a single product.
You take a commonly used architecture, fork an Operating System that you have access to, bundle as many libraries as makes sense and call it a day. No one is going to use weird quirks of the hardware except if you make some deal with Unity or Unreal.
Certainly, I myself am on a Linux machine with a 1070Ti and a Xeon 1650 processor that’s never left it’s socket since it was placed in there in some factory. I would guess it’s somewhat rare to have a machine such as this because it was originally meant as a workstation (I can tell because the door has handles on the inside that make it an effective shield), and I would guess anyone who does have this set up will have Windows installed on it.
That being said, differences in software between Windows and Linux is slowly becoming irrelevant with the continued development of proton and the various FOSS alternatives (i.e. GIMP replacing Photoshop). For the most part, the only differences these days are certain games from certain studios that for whatever reason decided not to check a box that says “Yes, I want this to work on Linux.” This of course disregards any specialist software that was only ever developed for Windows, which I’ve read numerous examples of.
It’s a different model entirely, most copies of windows sold will never have a game installed on them bar the pack-ins. No one is buying a console to do spreadsheets.
I’m amazed everyone seems to have forgotten the open nature was an Achilles heel for the 3DO model, then it occured to me that the console is 30 years old and I’m even older lol.
The fact is that the console market works how it does, advanced tach at reasonable prices, because the platform holders make money on an ongoing basis from each user. Getting rid of that model will mean consoles selling for the same price as equivilent specced PCs at launch.
Is this a single player game? Then cool, 100%, love it. Co-op? Probably fine, but I’d have some implementation questions.
Pvp? I ate the biggest backlash I’ve had on the Internet on another forum when I argued that players shouldn’t be able to unilaterally make the game easier for just themselves in a competitive game, and I’m still mad about it.
That’s probably fine. Like if you want to play with triple iframes you can play with other people that have triple iframes (or who said they’re ok with that). I just don’t think you should be able to adjust your iframes whenever you want. Like, not in the middle of a match you’re losing.
I don’t know how to solve match making if you have a lot of those settings. Like if you can change iframes, parry frames, max health, max stamina, max incoming damage, min outgoing damage, and so on, that’s an explosive set of variables. You’d be lucky to find someone with your exact settings. Which is maybe fine? Maybe most people would use the defaults.
But the last time I had this conversation, some guy was adamant he should be able to play with me even if he has his settings tweaked to be nigh indestructible.
When did games go from being something fun to do, to people getting so serious about them that they would rather fuck over a bunch of disabled people than lose a game?
Whenever I play competitive games I see people raging in the comments like every game, and it's usually people who aren't doing very good that round because they want to blame everyone else for losing. Idk why y'all are paying $60+ just to be angry the entire time. Fuck around and have fun, it's not that serious.
It's so bad you're STILL mad about a hypothetical situation that doesn't even exist. Spiderman 2 is single player. If it was competitive, and disabled people being able to play ruins your life sooo much, then don't play it. Crisis averted.
Yes, I do get upset when people act like disabled people needing accommodations is ruining their life. For obvious reasons. Disabled people had no accommodations in games for literal decades and suddenly able bodied people act like it's the end of the world when they start getting introduced. The difference is that some disabled people literally cannot play when you have a choice. And ranting, on multiple forums, about how accommodations will ruin your hypothetical competitive game that doesn't even exist yet!
And games are not the only scenario, I see a similar attitude in every instance where disabled people are granted accomodations.
You want accomodations to not exist in certain scenarios. Your comment was clear.
You’re not engaging with what I’m actually saying. I’m not saying accomodations are ruining my life.
It feels to me like what you’re saying is that “Accommodations” has an unbound scope. Anything and everything can be changed in the name of accommodations. Double your health in street fighter? Fine. See the other players hands in Poker. Sure. Turn on slow-mo in Quake9? Well okay.
And any of those things might be fine and fun if everyone playing agrees. Maybe you’re new at poker and I want to show one of my cards as a boost to you, the rookie. But for you to walk into a game and be like “yo I need to see your cards to play” seems egregious.
Maybe that’s not what you meant.
Maybe for you this is a “for me it was Tuesday.” You’ve possibly spent your whole life arguing with assholes like me who can just take their presumably abled asses and just walk away when it’s no longer interesting to them. I’m sorry for your struggles and injustices. You don’t really owe me anything.
I'm not sure what you're on about but he wasn't complaining about Spider-Man 2. He even said if a game is 1P, then he's fine with any settings a player wants.
His complaint was about competitive games and I think it's a fair complaint (albeit a bit off topic) I don't think it's in your (or anyone else's) purview to tell others what games are or aren't about nor how seriously they should take their games.
We have entire competitive (and, imo, friendly) communities centered around competition and the notion that the rules are the same for everyone.
You could give bullet time to one player while the other moves and controls slowly. Or you could give one player bigger iframes to sort of approximate it.
Like, for one player they’re invulnerable for a full two seconds after pushing dodge, but the other player is only invulnerable for a quarter second.
Lots of ways to try
But as someone else in this thread said, this was kind of me going off topic. Slightly related but not exactly what the article was about.
Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.
This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.
Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).
This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.
The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.
I don’t have problems with control changes, subtitles, HUD stuff, all the things that are typically considered accessibility. I reject the idea that any arbitrary piece of a multiplayer game can be unilaterally changed in the name of accessibility. Which is maybe not a take any reasonable person has., but it’s one I’ve encountered.
But your last paragraph is probably right in that for them it was an emotionally charged “every day I deal with this bullshit” and I was coming off as “yeah but like what if i’m mildly inconvenienced one day?”.
It's been a long time since that was the case though. Now you have to update the console, update the controller firmware, install the game, and update the game.
Sure, but they're approaching a convergence. PCs have gotten easier and consoles have become less streamlined. With something like the Steam Deck, it's even more blurred.
Steam is legitimately easier and faster to get games going on than my PS4 these days IMO. Library is laid out alot better and there's no signing in whenever I turn on a controller. Its still easier to do local multiplayer on PS4, but not by much.
and there’s no signing in whenever I turn on a controller
Can you not sync your account to a specific controller on Playstation? Xbox has that for a while, though the whole software experience has generally been Xbox’s strong suit imho
While only the Steam Deck has achieved massive success, it shows there are ways to reduce the prep time for PC gaming, to almost as little as modern consoles (since you do, ultimately, have to install drivers on console.)
Don't forget RISC-V, it's really the future i think. Anyone who doesn't want to live under the yoke of proprietary architectures, this looks to be the only alternative to the status quo.
If I was seeing RISC-V get widespread adoption in consumer-grade hardware, I’d be thinking about it (granted, having X86-64 and ARM on the market could make room for a third competitor compared to the 15-year x86 hegemony.) But I don’t see a push for that, and there probably won’t be unless RISC-V delivers better results than ARM. Keep in mind that you and I probably care more about CPU architecture than the average gamer.
I’m okay with this on the condition that that platform is PC.
You want developers to choose a specific set of hardware requirements and only develop games to target and work on that specific set of hardware specifications?
The context appears to be mainly about how having to develop for different consoles/hardware configurations/etc makes development harder. So, choosing PC as the "platform" in this context would be the worst possible option to choose.
Two things i love about accessibility. First more people get to play the games. and second it usually lets you turn off those stupid ass mini puzzles and quicktime events developers love so much for some reason.
Yea I’ll admit I used the skip puzzle mini games thing in the last game. I did a few of the first puzzles, determined I didn’t like them, and turned on the skip feature
I liked them fine enough the first time through the game. But I absolutely loved that I could disable them for my second playthrough. More customization like this is a big step forward.
I played through Spider-Man 1 with the puzzles enabled for a few hours before turning that crap off. I’m very glad they gave the option to do so because they are annoying and tedious at best and downright frustrating at worst. They absolutely grenade the pacing and flow of the gameplay. There are numerous puzzle games out there I could play if I wanted puzzles; I don’t want half-assed, janky, pace-destroying puzzles in my action games.
I agree with your last statement, but I actually really enjoyed the puzzles in Spider-Man 1. The story-based ones were never difficult, and for the optional ones, I just waited until I was in the mood for some puzzles, and then blew through them all in one go.
But if you don’t like puzzles at all, I understand turning them off.
I appreciate that they are continuing to improve the game. I hope they will add some new subclasses, spells, and races eventually. It would give the game some serious staying power.
Hire more staff to do more development/QA in a shorter timespan
Delay release schedule to not be annual releases
Reduce game scope to something the team can accomplish
Gamefreak cannot keep its historically small team size while trying to make large, open world titles that release annually. Tears of the Kingdom tool over 5 years to develop, and that was working with pre-existing assets. Gamefreak's model is not sustainable.
Gamefreak cannot keep its historically small team size while trying to make large, open world titles that release annually
Define "small". For Sword and Shield they had around 1000 workers, according to Ohmori, the game's director.
With 200 being from Game Freak, some from Creatures Inc. (they make the 3D models and send them to Game Freak) Debugging and Quality Control is externalized
So, yeah. The number being close to a thousand, that of course includes all the different functions like marketing and PR and everyone that would be associated with the game ahead of release. But I think at Game Freak, really the core team of people that worked on the game was around 200 people. And of course, Creatures is another partner company that develops 3D models of the Pokémon. There are various teams that handle debugging at our partner companies as well. So there’s a lot of people involved and I think in terms of just the sheer number of the most resources required to make something happen for the development, it was definitely more on the graphical side of things.
What are all of your general expectations for Starfield? I feel like in my corner of the internet, people are generally being very skeptical and pessimistic. I think this is fair, based on the last few years of Bethesda.
I didn't love fallout, but mostly because of the dinky crafted weapons and their handling and the fact that you almost had to use VATS to make it work. They're damn good at making giant worlds worth exploring, and the gunplay looks a lot more fluid than fallout. I like the premise of highly customizable shipbuilding a lot more than fallout's settlements, too. It's far from guaranteed to be great, but "sci-fi Skyrim with enough engine improvements for guns to feel OK" is extremely promising to me. There's a reason Skyrim is still selling copies a decade later when the mechanics are super limited by age, and if they're able to bring the same world building to space exploration I'm all for it.
I'm not going to get it. I just don't like the bethesda style for their recent stuff. I didn't like fallout 4 at all. My favorite bethesda game is tied between daggerfall and morrowind.
Are Steam achievements broken for anyone else? All the ones I've unlocked are showing as "0.1% of players have this," even things like finishing the tutorial. Seems unlikely.
It’s bad when the holding company can’t weather a streak of big budget flops. The Embracer Group has only a market cap of less then $4 billion yet they act like they are a Sony with their crazy buying spree of the last 5 years. They’ve over extended themselves.
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