I’m not sure how this is surprising anyone at all, honestly.
The problem (but not for Bethesda) is that we are so used to mods that we seem to forget how absolutely shite a lot of their vanilla UI is. Has everybody forgotten the Skyrim map? Coz I sure as shit have not.
Did they somehow miraculously fix it all in Fallout 4? Genuine question, I kinda gave up on them after Skyrim.
The fallout 4 map is basically the same as the fallout 3 and new vegas map, and now that I think about it oblivion. So this is verry much a two steps forward one step back situation.
…make your own. Destroy it and remake it with a new IP once every few months, use headscale or something to make managing it easier.
I am this petty, absolutely.
(Or just get everything now, I mean. You got a month. Sorry if you didn’t buy a few hard drives when Trump got elected. Some of us saw the writing on the wall.)
Oh believe me I have. 2 HDDs and 1 SSD. I’ve also been snatching up DVDs of shows from second hand places since streaming services will become untenable soon
We as leftists, must organize in ways that match the fascists. Subversion of their goals is our goal. The class and culture war is in full effect and we must not be complacent.
Apologies, I’m not on Lemmy very much, nor the gaming community. I’m an American distraught by Trump right now. I’m no communist. Just an impassioned and anxious progressive American. Thank you for telling me.
Yeah, gamer gate was one of the things that lead to Trump being elected in the first place. Plus the outcry that still happens when BIPOC, LGBT, or women protagonists are used. Hell, just look at any steam discussion board sometime and you’ll see it.
As someone who games, gAmERs are the fucking worst
I kinda missed the gamer gate thing, was distracted by other shit and wasn’t gaming at the time. Am I right in thinking it was some kind of misogynist incel bullshit? Like, girls aren’t allowed to play with the boys’ toys?
But yeah, I’ve seen enough stuff on discussion boards and heard enough anecdotes to see that there’s a lot of bigotry in gaming. The hard right are successfully using it as a recruitment platform for kids. Fuckin appalling, but they are well organised and fascists don’t have to worry so much about sectarianism.
I just don’t get how people can’t see that there’s strength in diversity. Like, in gaming you want a team with different skills, abilities, experiences, and characteristics. It’s the same IRL - a diverse community is a strong community.
It’s a shame. Seeing the bullshit companies have done to games for the sake of profit ought to be a pretty easy on-ramp to anti-capitalism. But just like in the real world, racist shit distracts them from any of that.
Won’t the tariffs incentivise domestic production and give work to more regular folks? There’s also less stuff to be hauled around the world so there’s environmental benefits too. Sounds like a leftist idea to me.
We don’t have infrastructure to produce a lot of the components in the things we buy, and even if we did, it would inherently cost a lot more to produce than in the countries that are about to have tariffs placed on them. That the US ever was a manufacturing powerhouse was, in my understanding, a very “place and time” sort of deal after World War II. Not only were all of our competitors recovering from being bombed, but we also advanced to a services based economy very quickly, raising the standard of living beyond a point that manufacturing jobs can typically afford to support. I’m no economist though; I just watch one on YouTube, and “the middle income trap” is a frequent topic.
Tariffs can serve as a stimuli to build out local manufacturing capacity, which sounds pretty leftist to me. I understand arguments for laissez faire policies but at heart they are liberal and not left. It’s the refusal to accept it that led to far right being as popular as it is.
Anyone promising to return people to previously prosperous economic conditions will be popular, even if people don’t know that the promise can’t possibly be delivered. Coal isn’t coming back either, and there’s no “clean” version of it, but if all you’ve done in your life is coal, you’ll vote for the guy who says he’s bringing coal back.
I’m not here to convince liberals that they should try to care for the poor. I’m here to argue that the jig is up - people are voting for literally anyone, including fascists, that promises to change the course.
That second part is exactly what I just said. Is it caring for the poor to lie to them about economic realities, or to raise the cost on everyday items via tariffs when money is already tight? Again, I’m no expert, but I’d rather vote for promised solutions that I understand to actually work rather than the ones that sound good and don’t work.
Are you arguing that tariffs and other market restrictions are ineffective at incentivising moving of production sites? I guess that’s why Biden lifted tariffs Trump imposed. Oh wait.
Or are you arguing that container ships full of plastic trash are good for the environment?
I’m sorry you’re right, the Republicans have always wanted to tackle that trash and plastic problem. Trump, of course, cares about that. He’s always talked about how much he wants to stop the production and import of plastic junk and pollution, oh wait…
Politicians lie so I’m mostly interested in outcomes, not the narratives that politicians use to make things happen. Why would I care that something I want and is mostly outside of my control happens for the wrong reasons?
If you gave it thirty years and the entire world paused and waited for us, sure,… but, we have a global economy and old people need medications, cars need chips and batteries. We all depend on each other. We can’t charge a toll and pretend everything won’t see any ill effects
If you proposed something else that would uplift lower classes sooner they’d probably vote for it. What Democrats were offering wasn’t credible enough because people have been deceived for too long.
Software parents, specifically game mechanic parents, are fucking insane. You should see the stuff Square Enix has patented following death stranding.
I get the whole “they just reskinned my game mechanics!!!” but also: I don’t. It’s like saying Go, Draughts, Chess, etc. are copies or “infringing” on one another for being a board game set on a grid with black/white pieces.
Even the idea of intellectual property is shaky for me but at least it’s more clear cut whether you’ve directly copied or deceived someone with a similar design of a character.
I always wonder this with these brand crossovers that fortnite has become synonymous with. My guess is that it’s something close to “neither” - there is a contract that is signed, but I think because both parties benefit, very little money actually changes hands between Epic and the IP owner.
Car manufacturers get the last say on how their cars are used on any media; and they typically go with licence agreements of some sorts.
The licencing is typically done on a set time frame (which is why most car games that uses real cars does get taken off of stores like 5-7 years later.).
On Fortnite, revenue sharing is done between the IP owner and Epic Games based on how much the said item sells. Since they can this item launch as a limited time sale; this gives a big playerbase an incentive to buy it.
Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.
For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.
In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:
The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.
Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.
For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:
who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
how much is it going to cost players to get the item
are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
probably a lot more
So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.
Started playing it and I’m liking it so far! The low health regen is very clever. Solves the problem in Half Life 1 where the player is always finishing encounters at 1 HP without the need for excessive health pickups. Now the player is guaranteed to have at least 35 HP.
The immersion is really great as well. Often I forget that all the enemies are just 2D sprites.
Honestly that’s what made me stop playing OG Half-Life until Black Mesa came out. I wanted to do it without cheats or anything, but goddamn do the enemies pack a punch.
This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
I agree with the rest but it’s not just modern gaming it was happening back in the 90s on consoles and earlier in arcades. One of the first games I played was an obvious cash grab by Marvel, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge for the Gameboy. It was barely playable.
Ive commented on this before, as sad as it is if we want innovative, expansive, beautiful AAA titles we have to accept that investors arent going to keep backing the money truck up on maybes. Microtransactions, subscriptions, dlcs… there has to be an ongoing income stream or an absolutely eyewatering launch price OR we get used to safer and safer bets or games with very narrow scopes.
Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.
I think you have to ask yourself if the company is behaving ethically.
If a game is F2P but has microtransactions that arent P2W and the devs are continuing to maintain the game then its hard to be mad that they want to make some money off the basic game you get for free. (Mechwarrior online is a pretty good example of this)
If its a subscription, are you getting regular additional content for the money or is the subscription just allowing you to play the game you paid for? Do you still have to buy DLCs and pay subscription?
If its DLC, is it meaningful storylines/maps/characters? Does it make the prospect of another playthrough different or more interesting? Is it a reasonable price for what it gives you?
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
I personally like to think this trend of enshittification in the gaming industry is geared more towards the triple AAA side of things because a lot of the actual indie devs (not the people putting out low effort mobile games or shovelware or scams or straight up large corporatios masquerading their games as indie titles) are putting out some of the best games I’ve seen in years for single player experiences.
Though I absolutely agree with your assessment of the situation in general.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
I don’t think I can recall something truly novel since I think we’ve pretty much gone past the point of novel concepts in the majority of genres, but there have definitely been standouts in certain genres over the years.
In the deck building and rogue like genre we’ve seen Balatro, the poker based game. In the retro inspired games genre, we’ve got Corn Kidz 64, a shorter game that controls and looks like an N64 title.
Burned all of my rope with the battle.net “2.0” complete with Facebook integration, rmah, “get the game for free with a years subscription to world of Warcraft” and killing deckard Cain in act 2 of D3 (along with ACT 1 being the only ACT with any love put into it, and that being the entirety of the demo, also pretty clear that’s when Activision bought blizzard)
Never played any of the sc2 expansions, never watched another blizzard tournament, never bought a wow expansion (after TBC), I lost a lot of really great memory associations, but the nostalgia isn’t worth supporting the corpse-puppet of blizzard.
“How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?”
The industry should’ve already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW’s success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers’ time and money is a bad idea.
Sadly its also going to steal the position of a lot of people on AA and middle to indie size studios that need to cut costs to actually stay alive. Obviously some studios will stay afloat without cutting people or going deep into AI content but expect that to the exception not the rule.
It’s so dumb. Instead of struggling with AI to do what your employees did you could make your workforce 20% more productive using AI. Go further faster
Those two things are linked. I'm a frequent Economics Explained viewer, and the old comparison is that 1 accountant with a spreadsheet program can do what 5 accounts could do without one. If you only need the amount of productivity that that one accountant with a spreadsheet can output, that means you don't need four of your accountants anymore.
To use the accountant exemple AI right now or at least the way corp seem to use it is like asking someone without any accountant or spreadsheet knowledge to do the job of 5 accountant sure it might work but for how long and how many accountant you gonna need to repair and clear the problem later but that part don't interest them only short sight profit is important
If they want to put out poor quality products in pursuit of short term profit, they can deal with long-term consequences as they lose their customers' trust. This game is reviewing quite well at the moment, and most of the ways we're fearing AI will be used will result in poor quality products. I'd argue Ubisoft has been putting out poor quality products for a long time, and even this game won't be available in a form that I can consume it due to the short-term deal they made with Epic.
I don’t know if you could call this a positive, but I’ve definitely seen signs that the results of these projects will routinely turn out soulless and flop hard. In the past few years we’ve seen some VERY well-funded projects turn out as total flops. If that’s happening even with human creative input and corrective steering, what should we expect from AI following a straight algorithm?
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