One of the best ways to drain people's energy nowadays, is via video game design.
I like to open my games with a long segment of walking while your character is injured, so they really just kind of slog along at a slow pace. Having them be injured at the start is good, because they can really get used to pressing a single button to move forward without having to worry about any other buttons. Since they're stuck going slow this is also a good time to have a narrator or other npc explain convoluted lore of the world that you won't really care about, but it'll be mildly important if you put in over 100 hours into the game, so we can include that unskippable dialogue here.
Then after 8 or 9 minutes of injured walking, we'll have a 3 minute unskippable cutscene in which our character gets healed, but then also gets thrown into their first combat. And me, I like a challenge, so the first enemy is a boss fight, but since the player probably doesn't know the buttons yet, it should probably take most players at least 3 tries. The fun part is, you can't save until after beating that first boss, so if you fail, you have to go through the 9 minute slow walking segment and 3 minute unskippable cutscene again.
At this point a lot of gamers go onto the internet to complain about stuff like this, and I just respond that all that stuff is unskippable to protect the narrative vision of our game. Even though really most of the story is just lifted from "A Good Day to Die Hard."
It's not as powerful a drain as you can get in person, but you can get little bits from a lot of angry nerds on the internet at once.
I actually enjoyed that game, was the first and only mafia game I played. I really like the cars and music of that era, the racial tensions also added a lot to the story and gameplay.
My vote for worst energy vampire game would be AC Valhalla, just barely fun enough to keep me playing for over 150 hours just to see how the story concludes. Wow what a waste of time that was, story made almost no sense on the ISU side and the conflict building with your brother ends with him just giving his clan to you.
Yeah Valhalla was the last AC I’m probably ever gonna play because of that. I mean, I guess I kind of enjoyed some of it? I liked the proto-halloween story with the Welsh girl the blacksmith falls in love with, and no one understands as fucking word she says.
There were a few things I liked, but the alliance missions got really stale. I feel like if the writing was even 10% of what the witcher had, I would have cared about these dozens of side characters, that you only see again at the end of the game. Just blew me away how lazily the cut scenes and scripted portions were made, really gave me the quantity over quality vibe early on in the game.
NZXT has posted a statement which not only misrepresents facts, but distorts the reality of their predatory rental computer program. The statement ignores major points and introduces several new concerns. GamersNexus has become aware of deeper elements connected to this story that GN has begun independently investigating. While we will put together coverage of NZXT’s inadequate and manipulative response in short order, we are also actively beginning work on a longer form investigation that could take weeks or months to finalize, depending on the depth of the rabbit hole. We will have more for you as it becomes available, starting with a deconstruction of NZXT’s statement.
Steam forums and groups have become a place to organize far right raiding groups that have harassing people and bullying women and minorities or straight up nazism glorification as their sole objective and Steam just does not care.
Of course they don’t, companies only care when Pepsi Co and P&G take away their ad revenue for serving extremist content and catering to extremists. Valve has no ad revenue and is the only real PC game store on the block, so no one can make them “care” the way YouTube and Twitch, and other platforms are made to “care”.
I think the thing that's the most confusing about this is why did they wait??
"The timing is particularly baffling: Nintendo did not strike when the iron was hot and everyone was talking about Palworld and Pokémon, and at this late date, why bother? The greatest heights of Palworld's success were clearly driven by the memetic catchiness of its Pokémon parody, now it's just another survival crafting game with a stable enough core community—see also Valheim or Sons of the Forest. Palword has faded into the background, a brief curiosity overshadowed by 2024's far more enduring megahit, Helldivers 2. Just in time for everyone to have largely forgotten about Palworld and moved on, Nintendo has swooped in to announce: "In case you've forgotten, they're the little guy, and we are huge, awful bullies."
Palworld has reportedly made nearly $500 million now (source - Simon Carless). Even if Nintendo win in some way won't it cost them so much more to take Pocket Pair down now?
To maximize profits and costs they can go after, and to be a bit less on the radar of the public eye. Now that palworld is essentially done making money, Nintendo can go after that amount.
Say it is the throwing spheres that Nintendo is basing the suit off of. If Nintendo tried suing in the midst of its popularity, palworld could have just switched the capture system to like a special gun or cubes or something. Nintendo wanted to wait in order to financially crush them into dust.
They waited until they could file a few new patents, namely the catching and mounting mechanisms. Now they have a bit more legal standing it seems, although I’m not sure how this is all gonna shake out
I remember reading that Japan is very weird in regards to patent law, there’s almost no oversight whatsoever even for incredibly basic concepts like a title screen but there’s kind of a general agreement not to sue eachother. Assuming thats true Nintendo is currently burning a lot of face right now by breaking that precident.
They aren’t “new” patents. They’re divisional patents, essentially splitting an older patent into two different patents that retain the date of the parent patent.
Either way this is a pretty scummy move on Nintendo’s part.
Like if you push a button in the direction your character is facing you move in that direction. I’m going to patent that shit.
Then I’m going to patent that if you push button and the opposite direction of your character, if it’s a 3D game you turn around. And then I have ab separate patent with having the character walk backwards.
I’ll just take the absolute piss out of the most basic things and absolutely everything I can find. And then throw a bunch of frivolous patent lawsuits at Nintendo.
I know it’s petty. But maybe Nintendo, like many other corporations in the gaming industry, have just been around maybe a little too long and have lost the vision and the purpose. Cuz at this point Nintendo’s not even trying. But they are heavily relying on nostalgia for sales. They’re more known for being a litigious company than a gaming company.
Do people still play palworld or did it end up dying out after all the hype? I know a guy that bought it because of the hype, played it for a few hours saying how cool it was and hasn’t played it sense.
I’ve been having trouble putting my finger on what it is about it like that. I waited a little bit past the hype to play, and when I started I was completely hooked. Then I got busy for a few days and couldn’t play it, but never really felt like picking it up again
I wonder if it’s because it has a lot of different mechanics, but they aren’t particularly deep? So it’s addicting as you keep discovering new ones and how they interact, but then dies off?
I knew this would be the case when my friend insisted I buy to play with him. Hes an unfortunate barometer for games that will either lose hype quickly or get shut down soon after release. You name a game that had a hard fall off and he was its biggest proponent during its honeymoon period. Game had its servers shut down? He played the shit out of it.
Such a shame because your friend sounds like a cool person. I think it’s just that the gaming industry has become so bloated and mismanaged that a lot of new products are hyped to hell, then face plant hard.
He is, and I spent a lot of money buying and playing some of these games against my better judgement, but I can’t do it anymore. Especially not if they’re gonna charge a $70 fee just to start.
That’s how most games are lol. Of course you have your fanatics who have to play the new game and nothing but the new game (looking at the Abiotic Factor discord server), but once I finish the current content I’ll move on to something else until a new update.
I’m cycling through Abiotic Factor, Selaco, and Going Medieval right now.
I’m kind of an early access freak, but I put in about 80 hours and enjoyed it. There were definitely problems early, and I don’t plan on going back to it for at least a year, enough for them to release substantially more and it feels fresh.
I’ve heard that this Sakurajima update (wild name, btw) is pretty huge, bringing an entire building system overhaul, new pieces, as well as new pals and an entire new map.
One of the reason why seamless coop is so good is you can play with mods without having to go offline and disable anti-cheat. I fully expect their implementation of this won’t allow for that.
The fact that I can’t do something as simple as turning off that god-awful chromatic aberration without anti-cheat banning me for cheating is so ridiculous. It’s so bad that I only play offline and at the moment, Seamless Coop is the only way I can play multiplayer.
It’s so good for more reasons than just being able to use other mods safely! It’s really nice being able to transition between areas without having to resummon, how some progression/unlocks are shared, and that all connected players get to use Torrent and spirit ashes.
The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.
I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.
I’m talking about offline/online generically here, not whether it’s using the official servers. I know it’s not using the official servers which is why you can play with mods
Their anti-cheat implementation could definitely use some work. Either that, or just give players the option to disable chromatic aberration, use ultrawide etc. I played the entire game offline, with the exception of a few specific spots. Sucks.
The ultimate solution is to allow for P2P online with official servers as the default, and just warn people that you might encounter cheaters if you use P2P. Can even go a step further and separate the player pools between unmodded and modded clients. So you can play online with mods, but run the risk of encountering cheaters. P2P should mean you can ban certain people from invading you due to hacks or high ping similar to DSCM back in the day, but in-game.
“I talked to at least five small teams, like 35 [members] and under, during GDC, and they’re like: Cuts, cuts, cuts, funding canceled, talks that were going on for a year, canceled,” said Casey Yano, the co-founder of Slay the Spire studio Mega Crit. “It sounds like it’s shit. We’re definitely very privileged to be able to self-fund. [Otherwise] I’d be very, very, very scared right now.”
If these deals didn’t exist, lots of games simply wouldn’t get made. You can hate on the platforms all you like but the deals are one of the only sources of funding for small & solo developers.
You do realize those are usually exclusive for only a year, right? So EGS pays them out for a year of exclusivity and then the devs are free to launch on steam and others.
The thing is, often if they don’t get that first infusion of cash from a deal with EGS (or another investor) they don’t get to complete or even launch the game at all. So it never would make it to the other markets.
Usually by the time they’ve made it off EGS, I’ve forgotten they exist. There’s been many sequels to games I loved that I forgot existed because of this.
The phrase “AAA game/developer” has lost all meaning for me over the years. I just can’t drop the clichéd $60+ on these titles anymore, especially with quality and support waning. I don’t see this game being any different; the writing’s on the wall.
Well, see, with Star Citizen, you buy it to have an unreleased game that will allow you to buy a ship for 8000 dollars that you can… stand around inside of and look at.
Seriously, This is peak gaming… how can you losers not understand how great this is?! /s
This game is 45 dollars. It always has been. Support for it has only increased over time. Also I really don’t look at CIG as a AAA dev, whomever said that forgot what a Kickstarter/self funded game is.
Would be nice if the author had done a bit of research on the specific things that had been done in VR since he tried his DK2 to prevent nausea:
An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and a slightly-too-hot office full of people watching me as I put on the headset. Before I’d completed the second loop-de-loop, it was clear that VR and I were not going to be good friends.
For one, non-persistent displays have become the norm. These only show (strobe) the image for a fraction of the frame time and go black in between. Valve discovered that the full 1/90th of a second an image is displayed is enough to induce nausea if the head is moving during that time. So the Vive (and the Oculus Rift) had non-persistent displays.
The stobing effect is so fast you don’t notice it.
Elimination of artificial movement is another. The reason Valve focused on games with teleport movement and made a big deal of “room scale” early on was to eliminate the nausea triggers you encounter in other types of experiences.
Valve had an early version of Half Life 2 VR during the days of the DK2, but they removed it as the artificial motion made people sick (myself included).
For many, sims work as long as there is a frame in their field of vision to let their brains lock into that non-moving frame of reference (ex car A-pillars, roof line, dash board, outline of view screen on a ship interior, etc). Note the frame still moves when you move your head, so it’s not a static element in your field of view.
Also it helps if your PC can render frames under the critical 11.1ms frame time (for 90Hz displays). Coincidentally, 90Hz is the minimum Valve determined is needed to experience “presence”. Many folks don’t want to turn down graphic options to get to this. It’s doable in most games even if it won’t be as detailed as it would on a flat screen. Shadows is a big offender here.
Resolution isn’t as big of a factor in frametimes as detailed shadows and other effects. I have run games at well over 4k x 2.5k resolution per eye and been able to keep 11.1ms frame times.
Lastly, it has been noted that any movement or vibration to the inner ear can for many stave off nausea. This includes jogging in place while having the game world move forward. For many years we’ve had a free solution that integrates into Steam VR:
Jog in place to make your character move forward in the direction you’re facing. Walk normally to experience 1-to-1 roomscale.
I’ve use the above to play Skyrim VR without any nausea. Good workout too!
For car, flight, spaceflight simulators, a tactile transducer on your chair (looks like a speaker magnet without the cone - or basically a subwoofer without the cone) can transfer the games sound vibrations directly to you and therefore your inner ear and prevent nausea.
I’ve literally played over 1,000 hours of Elite:Dangerous this way as well as Battlezone VR and Vector 36. All games that involve tons of fast artificial movement.
The main issue is too many people tried out VR cardboard or old DK2 demos with low and laggy framerate, persistent displays, and poorly designed VR experiences and simply write off all VR as bad and nausea inducing.
Edit: added links and trailers to the games mentioned so folks can see the motion involved. The “study” wasn’t a proper study. It was a quote from a scientist. No data was given about what headsets or which experiences caused nausea.
I’ve barely even talked to the dude who I assume is the wildshape you can romance. Of course I didn’t know. I’ve been rolling with the boss bitches because all the good fighters are the ladies.
I specifically avoid most gaming sites and forums because I hate this type of casual spoiling. I don’t want to have to avoid beehaw gaming too.
I know a lot of people don’t care about spoilers, and that’s a-okay and a valid way to enjoy games. But surprises are very important to the way I enjoy them. I hardly ever replay games either, for this reason. I totally understand why some people don’t care at all, but nonetheless, spoilers like this do affect my enjoyment of games. This one admittedly probably less so than most, but even so, I’d have rather not known ahead of time.
Edit: ah, apparently this was part of a marketing campaign? That’s more forgiveable, then, for people to be chatting about it, though I still don’t want to know.
Anybody who has ever been unfortunate enough to have to apply for any of these healthcare or food stipend programs would know that it’s not as easy as the government makes it seem. In fact, the amount of bureaucracy, means testing, and highly restrictive income limitations means that most people don’t qualify period and people who do qualify have to spend an inordinate amount of time waiting to hear back from the government to know if they have been accepted or not, all the while hoping and praying they don’t get sick and can manage their money long enough to continue feeding themselves.
Case in point, my fiance is out of work right now and actively seeking work. She applied for both MediCAL and SNAP and was denied for MediCAL because she had earned too much already that year to qualify and the SNAP benefits totaled out to $20/month in food stamps, based on historical income, which is insufficient even for the most frugal of individuals to make work. This is for someone currently earning $0/month and being almost entirely supported by me.
After a certain point, it becomes a massive drain on your time and resources that could be spent looking for a job, so you stop bothering with the system altogether because who wants to spend hours doing paperwork and submitting claims just to get enough spare change to buy a bulk bag of rice to feed yourself a struggle meal?
I don’t want to hear shit about “handouts” from anybody. My fiance paid her taxes faithfully for years without ever having to rely on the program, so where are her benefits? She has undoubtedly paid more into the system than she will ever extract.
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