Ok let me Sheldon it for you: Yes, deals existed “back in the day” as the saying goes, but fans were not aware of (or reactive to) the business aspects of gaming enough for the deals to be the subject of headlines or controversy.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, just pointing out your example was a bit wild. I fully agree with your other point. Although I would also point out that the early exclusives were that simply because it just didn’t occur to devs to release a game on more than one console.
They are objectively less popular with the newer stuff.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderland is at 25% for recent reviews, 70% overall. That’s not glowing. And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott. I don’t think Borderlands has the pull it once did.
Tiny Tina is a spin-off, and I doubt the EULA changes will result in much more than the Modern Warfare 2 boycott. Borderlands 3 still sold multiple millions of copies before it even had its first discount, and over 15 million copies total. It was still in high enough demand after an Epic exclusivity period to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players when it eventually launched on Steam. It’s one of very few multi-billion dollar franchises in video games.
Also Tiny Tina was actually a fuckin blast to play through. It doesn’t drag like some of the main games do, the humor is actually fun because you’re basically playing a game within a game and it works as far as D&D stuff goes imo.
Also I actually liked being able to customize my character for once. I don’t know about the other voices, but I actually really liked the douchey/cocky voice I ended up going with. There are some fun lines for different quests and such.
That’s a fair call on Tiny Tina being a spin off, but with it and the movie kinda tarnishing the name it seems like a bit of an uphill battle.
3 did well, but the game before and after it didn’t. Add in people having less money to throw at this stuff and it being “a real fans” price, possible exclusive deals, etc. I just think it’s putting up it’s own road blocks constantly. The franchise isn’t hot and it’s fresh off the Borderlands movie joke.
IMO They should fire this wide and fast, keep the price low and sell it everywhere, earn back that trust and good will. Make people fall in love with BL again.
Fresh off the Borderlands movie, they sold tons of their Pandora collection, and concurrent players shot up. It may not have been the movie they wanted it to be, but it mostly achieved the same goal.
And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott.
I hope so, but i was expecting more people to boycott Nintendo, and yet the switch 2 was the fastest selling console of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone does the old “I’m sure it’s fine if I get a copy”
I think people on the internet vastly overestimate the support these boycott movements actually have. For every person here or wherever else saying they’re not buying a switch, there’s 10,000 parents buying one for their kids, or people that just wanna play mario kart with their friends.
And typically the boycotters weren’t even the sort of people who were buying a switch 2 to begin with. Maybe there’s a subsection of them that will result in some loss of sales but it would be in the fraction of a percent. There’s no surprise to me when gamer boycotts fail.
With that said, the sales were unexpectedly high. Maybe people trying to get ahead of potential future tariffs were the reason. I thought cost of living was fucked and nobody could afford anything.
I’ll be waiting for the inevitable OLED refresh anyway.
There’s also just a substantial number of people that were just astroturfers, I think.
There’s been a LOT of crazy attacks on the switch 2 to try to ‘justify’ a boycott. I think my two favorite was that the gamechat button noise when you hit is actually saying saying a slur, or maybe that the rumble turns off after a while not to protect your hands from the rumble (which has been found to be bad for you), but because Nintendo cheaped out on a rumble motor that overheated too easily.
The switch 2 joycons don’t have a rumble motor. Like, it’s a whole thing they’re super proud of, because it’s so precise they just use the rumble really fast to play music instead of having a speaker.
Honestly, the whole idea of trying to boycott nintendo has pretty much always been over astroturfed bullshit, or just outright bullshit.
Nintendo gives us so many legitimate reasons to not want to give them money. Who do you think would be behind astroturfing? To my knowledge, it doesn’t usually come in the form of being against one company but in being against a piece of legislation or regulation. People on Lemmy are probably just predisposed to being willing to go against the mainstream when it starts turning shit, or else we’d still be on reddit.
They put their money towards suing the shit out of emulation projects and removing ROM sites.
This is compounded by the fact that they won’t even sell you those ROMs anymore. They only make them available to rent in perpetuity. People are rightly skeptical of a future where Microsoft only makes their games available via Game Pass rather than it just being an economical option, but Nintendo is already doing the thing that people are afraid of.
They’re the last holdout that won’t put their games on PC in an era where console exclusivity doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no reason to play Zelda at 20 FPS and 360p when, at the time of release, my PC was already quite capable of running the game at acceptable resolutions and frame rates. This is just willfully selling people an inferior product when they have the ability to deliver a better one. Then they have the gall to charge their customers, who already paid $70, even more for an upgrade to finally run those games at acceptable performance on their next console. And in case you think this is me justifying piracy, I didn’t pirate the game; I didn’t play it at all.
I’m a competitive fighting game player, and the way they fight against their own fans for trying to compete in Smash Bros. is atrocious.
They sue and go after emulation projects/ROM sites for modern content just as much as Microsoft and Sony do, MS/Sony just get a pass for some reason. Probably because people try to pirate current-gen content less for them, but they do the exact same thing every time it happens. Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part. Also, it must be said that several times that emu/ROM sites were shut down and Nintendo was blamed it turned out it wasn’t actually Nintendo. Same thing with that whole streaming copystrike issue- turns out it was some random company taking down gameplay videos, not Nintendo.
Sony already does this too, yet again they pretty much universally get a pass for making you permanently lose almost all (if not all) your stuff if you let your sub lapse. Even if you resub, you don’t get it back.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Entirely fair. My understanding is that they’re getting better at this, but after the shitshow that was brawl that’s a low fucking bar. I could point out that smash bros isn’t actually Nintendo (it was HAL, then Sora, then Bandai) but like… lets be real here, it’s Sakurai running the show, and Sakurai basically is working for Nintendo even if he isn’t employed there lol.
Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part.
They absolutely do. And again, I probably wouldn’t mind if all of the sites they shut down were hosting games that could be legally purchased in a consumer friendly way, but they can’t. Shutting down the Switch emulator built on ill-gotten code is one thing; buying out the legitimate Switch emulator is a super dick move.
Sony already does this too
Thanks for reminding me. I don’t think of Sony much at all, honestly, but they do tend to lock their retro games behind a subscription, some of which can only be played that way. I think they tend to be time-limited and eventually return to sale in most cases? So not quite as bad as what Nintendo does, but still not admirable. I know you went in a different direction with this, but their subscription incentives are theirs to decide; I just hate it when something is only available via subscription when it doesn’t have to be.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Boycott is a strong word. All of the other reasons I don’t buy their stuff is because of what they do with the revenue that I would give them, but in this case in particular, it’s because I don’t buy bad products when I can instead buy good products. I’m certainly not about to spend $530 plus sales tax to play Tears of the Kingdom at acceptable frame rates on a machine that’s going to sit under my TV collecting dust when I’m done with the game. I already have a PC that could run it if they made it available there, and it would still run it better than Switch 2. Of course they’re doing what they’re doing because it’s more lucrative for them, but if that’s not aligned with what matters to me, then I’m not inclined to give them my money. There are so many other games out there worth playing instead that respect me more as a customer.
No, it’s a sad tale that would be amusing if it wasn’t real people, and has occupied a lot of brain time at 4chan and among gamergate-involved persons. If you want to know more, knowyourmeme has a reasonably objective article.
My understanding is the drama from resulted in him leaving before BL3 was written
Borderlands 3 sold over 20 million, that’s pretty significant even if it is less than 2. The overall quality has certainly gone downhill, but sales is all the companies care about. In my experience boycotts by people who know what’s going on behind the scenes never amount to anything - it’s always the potential buyers who don’t know or care about that stuff that ultimately determine whether a game’s successful or not.
Gamers who get mad having to wait for company logos to show while games boot: They have to disclose every piece of software they use to make every game! I want my games 100% hand crafted and bespoke. I want to sense the life people spent meticulously crafting mudsplat_texture_1 - mudsplat_texture_500. Also no crunch (and no bugs, obviously)
It’s just reality. Selecting a bunch of textures nobody has seen before through AI but hand crafting the rest of the game would force them to wear the scarlet letters on their front, and open them up to brigading by the brainwashed NeoLuddite mob. That move by steam to appease the pitchfork masses is pretty heavy handed.
even if I accept your premise of a “brainwashed NeoLuddite mob,” you’re still wrong on the simple principle of arguing against a company properly labeling what their product is or how it was made.
When a company makes a product completely by hand, but uses AI for a few translations it gets the same label as a game pumped out of Grok and uploaded untouched. That label is misleading and punitive, not informative.
Showing that even a small non-issue use of AI will be detected is a pretty strong incentive for other games to disclose that willingly. Otherwise, why would they admit to it if no one can tell? Morals??? 😂😂😂
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection https://amzn.to/40kncwB. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Me and the boys being worried for our jobs as automation stretches onwards and just wanting some level of guarantee that good paying jobs will still be available 😭
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
in my late teens/early 20s this game made me aware of more conspiracy theories than i even imagined possible, and i loved it. amazing game. pretty cutting edge at the time, but it aged poorly gameplay-wise. none of the sequels came close for me. i’d buy a well-done faithful remake of this in a heartbeat
I am just curious, what makes you say it has aged poorly in terms of gameplay? I would argue it holds up pretty well, but I am also a PC/KB+M only player. I strongly dislike UI/UX that has been compromised (from my perspective) for consoles/controllers.
Agreed regarding the sequels (haven’t played the fourth one, just the 2nd and 3rd sequel); they are OK, but not that special.
I just finished Mankind Divided earlier this month. I think it has higher highs than Human Revolution but suffers from being the planned “middle game” in the trilogy. It has better gameplay than HR, some great levels and some really good side quests. Also a really well executed apartheid theme that played out really well.
I definitely recommend you playing it. It’s not gonna be OG Deus Ex, but it’s a good game.
I really need to play it. I am sure I would enjoy it. I thought Human Revolution and even Invisible War (with mods) were decent. Invisible War is fundamentally flawed due to the small maps though.
A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.
I played Deus Ex for the first time like, 6 months ago and it didn’t feel particularly clunky. It’s not great, but it’s perfectly okay, and I’m someone who plays with a controller at every possible opportunity and I think BG3 is a better experience on a controller, having tried it both ways
i’m also a KB/M player, and to be honest it’s been several (many…? i don’t remember when) years since i’ve tried OG deus ex 1, and remember thinking damn this seems like a chore.
i might just need to give it another shot, with full awareness i’ll never get the same experience of playing through for the first time on windows 98.
I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.
I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.
I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.
I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.
I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.
It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.
I see. Yes, stealth is in a strange position where it’s difficult to use it full time. There are multiple missions/maps where you will eventually not be able to use stealth.
I can see what you mean regarding guns being clunky. They do get more effective as you level up and get better weapons. Early game gunplay is very iffy.
But I actually like the RPG approach to gunplay and how it forces you to try and avoid direct confrontation and use a mixture of stealth and combat.
That being said, these are all fair points.
I’ve actually never tried Revision. I only use GMDX. Should try it for next play through. i feel like I need to reinstall once I clear out a major deliverable for work. :)
I didn’t mind the RPG elements of the gunplay either, it was how lame all the guns felt to use even with higher skill levels.
The shotguns take way too many rounds to down people, the smgs are pea shooters, and pistols can work ‘okay’ with headshots, but still just feel meh. I assume the sniper rifle is more effective, but I never used it much.
I wish they had made it to where low skill makes reloading and accuracy suffer greatly, but if you do manage to score a hit, it hits hard. That would make shotguns in the early game super valuable, but they could’ve still encouraged stealth and more thoughtful tactics by limiting ammo availability.
Basically the RPG and story elements combined with Tarkov style gunplay and thief-style stealth would be heaven for me.
I’d be curious of your thoughts on revision, if you ever feel like coming back to this comment section by the time you finish it!
Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.
I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”
Yeah, I believe Warren Spector has said before that the premise of Deus Ex was literally “what it every conspiracy theory was true”, and not really anything deeper than that.
I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.
It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).
I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
Maybe? Any military presence on a mountain trail would make me break out the wipes and the poop bottle.
My point is more that it is one of those things that goes against “Kojima is a much less neocon version of Tom Clancy” that goes around.
The idea of Metal Gear as a tool to fire undetectable nukes from anywhere on the planet (that a giant walking mech can get to…) completely ignores that submarines are already doing that. And there really isn’t a defense to an ICBM unless you have Trigger themselves in the area of operations when the sub surfaces. The “defense” to an ICBM is to fire off all yours before it hits and make sure everyone dies. MAYBE Rex gives you one or two first strikes before the missiles start launching but… again, see “submarines”. The moment the first hit, President Solidus would say “ah no you di’n’t!” and have the subs surface and fire off their ICBMs and the end result would be exactly the same.
That also doesn’t get into how bad an idea any form of walking tank is (which, to be fair, was briefly acknowledged in MGS3). I love my Gundams and my Battlemechs but unless you have minovsky particle magic you just rapidly recreate the meta that thousands of house rules have failed to stop in Battletech: 1000 points of Atlas goes down REAL fast when you have even 500 points of effectively pickup trucks with gauss guns on the back. Jaburo wouldn’t have panicked and fed themselves to Kamille and Not-Char attacking. They would have grabbed their ATGMs and started leaning out of bolt holes to light those two up.
And if Rex hadn’t been inside of a giant missile silo (hmmm), it would have been lit up by a bombing run the moment someone saw it on satellite imagery.
But that is kind of my point. The MGSes, like Deus Ex, is mostly a hodge podge of conspiracy theories and cool concepts from other media. People see what they want in there and handwave the rest.
Does that mean the story is not political? Of course not (even if DX is inconsistent to the point it might be… Like… that Alex Garland Civil War might be less nonsensical in terms of sides somehow). But you can very much have an author(s) with no political intent make a political statement.
Well lets see, you are coming out of one of the biggest tanks ever for the gaming movie franchise. The online mentions are far more jokes about your IP than any kind of nostalgia.
Sure, go exclusive! And make sure you code 60% of your next project with AI - the gamers will love it!
Why are people taking this even remotely seriously? This is Pitchford doing marketing for BL4. BL3 already showed people don't want Epic exclusivity and there's no such thing as Steam exclusivity. They can choose to release exclusively on Steam but that's just artificial exclusivity because nothing about Steam prevents them from releasing on Epic or GOG.
It's a pointless poll made by Pitchford either to keep BL4 in the media cycle or to just shit stir, possibly both.
That's what I mean by artificial exclusivity. There are games where the developer or publisher decided it's the only platform they will release on but that kind of "exclusivity" is not at all the same as Epic paying developers or publishers to not release on Steam. Valve/Steam doesn't prevent those games being released elsewhere, the developers/publishers themselves don't want to.
I could understand smaller (I'm talking literal solo devs or studios with less than 10 people) choosing to be exclusively on Steam. Supporting other platforms can have huge overhead costs for them. But for a studio the size of Gearbox there's no benefit to being exclusively on Steam. They have enough support staff to manage multiple stores. There maybe be suits wondering if it's worth being exclusively on Epic but there are no suits sitting around wondering whether to be exclusively on Steam or not, the answer is obviously not.
Any chance he’s putting the question on social media to convince other stakeholders above him?
It’s possible he was in a board meeting when some novice shareholder suggested “What if you take an exclusivity deal”? And he just didn’t have clear evidence on hand of that being vastly unpopular. Obviously that could be me being overgenerous to him.
There is a chance but what is he convincing them of? That they should take a non-existent exclusivity deal with Steam? They already have the data that exclusivity with Epic does not work and Steam doesn't do exclusivity deals.
Pitchford is a cunt when he wakes up, and when he goes to bed he reviews a checklist to make sure he still retains the appropriate level of cunt in his daily routine.
He’s not doing anything unless it makes Randy Pitchford more rich, or alternatively, makes sure he’s still a cunting waste of life.
In my experience LLM get vastly better results that traditional translation software.
Also google translate is not traditionally suited for long coherent text. One particular issue is tone, proper translation takes into account not only the worlds but the tone and the subject is being treated. Google translate cannot take that into account, with an llm the user can tweak the tone to match the tone of the original text with better accuracy.
And, anyway google translate if it’s not already using llm for translation will soon. Results are just better. It’s one of the tasks that language models are actually good for.
Anyhow, what’s the issue if an automatic translation is done using one software or other? Just use whatever gives best results and it’s more convenient for the developer.
I don’t have an issue, it was just a question.
I don’t ever translate anything but a few words myself.
My assumption was that a dedicated tool would have done a better job, but you have good points about tone and coherence of long text (and possibly even across many promps of the translation).
I remember watching a film online that had AI generated subtitles. it was shit because the subtitles said vaguely the same thing but were still very different to what was actually said. and both the film and the subtitles were in English. can’t imagine how bad AI translations will be. also what’s wrong with getting a translator, who can understand context?
It, like most games of the era, followed the rule of cool. As such, it references a ton of similarly themed media. A lot of which was cyberpunk, conspiracy theories, and general sci-fi. All the unique ideas in the game are really just in the game part. The story and all that is almost all entirely lifted from other sources. So it makes sense to me that they didn’t project their own message into the game. It doesn’t say anything the media that inspired it hadn’t already said.
My take is that Borderlands 1 was boring, Borderlands 2 had decent game play but was held up by excellent writing and characterization and every Borderlands game since has been trying to recapture the magic of the second game but just feels hollow. They aren’t terrible, but they aren’t amazing either.
I feel like borderlands 1 was boring but had some high points, but the dlc really started to capture what the series would become. The general Knox dlc is still one of my favorites.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne