That bit about “every designer or artist has a bunch of shit ideas and just picks their best 5%” is SO TRUE. Remember this when you’re doing something creative and don’t feel great about it. Just keep doing it.
Let’s not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077’s side quests are not that type of C&P’ed filler crap.
They are.
What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They’re incredibly good. That’s just a few ones sadly, but they’re big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.
I get how people didn’t like them. But I had a ton of fun doing the NCPD busywork. The gameplay was engaging enough to entertain me. If you don’t have a lot of time to play video games ut’s sometimes frustrating to watch an hour of cutscenes and only play for a couple minutes. The story was great but it gave me the option to just play.
How hard is it for game devs to organize themselves and start companies that respect them? Worker-owned game studios. Is that hard? Are they unionizing?
The expected profit margin when you try to make a genuinely good passion project is razor thin, if it’s there at all. There are two kinds of games that make money: outliers and whale hunters. When we think of good games proving the games industry wrong, we’re thinking of outliers. The rest of the industry is whale hunters.
In theory you could create some kind of game dev collective where a bunch of indie devs all work on their own thing under the same umbrella, and if any of them make it big, they all split the take to fund the group going forward. But you run into all the same logistical difficulties that normal communism runs into: what does leadership look like? how do you hold members accountable? what does contributing look like when development hell can look like not delivering anything for years, or forever? who pays the lawyers who have to figure that all out?
Silicon valley often had “incubators” which are kind of a middle ground between collectivism and capitalism. An investor funds a shoe string budget to several start up ideas to create minimum viable products. If one looks promising they all switch to shipping that and they’re all part owners.
I’m kinda surprised we don’t see more game dev incubators. Maybe indie outliers are just that rare.
Also, support games made with passion and love (even if technically means supporting a big corporation). Legends of Runeterra is an example of a game that absolutely hit the nail on the head (there are zero predatory systems, despite being a collectible card game!), and now has been punished for it.
Honestly, especially games made by big, publicly traded companies. They make games based on marketing algorithms. Buying good games only improves the algorithm.
We’ll have to wait until it’s out to see. The statement that they want to minimize grind? Hoooooly crap, that’s the exact opposite of what RS was. To get to the higher levels and max a skill, it was basically a mental game of sticking to the best xp/tick strategies, which could still take a month or more to max one skill. That was after they had introduced a bunch of new things. The original days? It was a third job on top of it being the second job to do it in months.
It was also really fun for being so simplistic and had a good mix of self-aware humor, so I have hope for their new game.
RuneScape to me is about having an easy enough game that you always have something to do on.
I’ve got a few 99s, but I still have plenty of others to do, and if I don’t want to do skilling, I can go do some of the plethora of quests I haven’t done yet. If I don’t want to do either of those, I can go find quite a lot of different things to do ranging from very easy to very difficult.
I’m sure most people stick around for the grind, but for me, it was always because there was SOMETHING for you to do. :)
The most misleading statement ever though. It’s only halfway XP-wise. You will have unlocked much better training methods, gear, support skill, possibly more money, than earlier in the skill. Time-wise you’re definitely way over the halfway point.
Thousands of hours on high brightness with a static image and it will start to retain elements of the image.
The torture test is important but what ya boi needs to do now is to create a more realistic test. Using static elements for maybe 6 hours at a time every day. That’s still “torture” as most users are probably not playing the same game for that long, but still within the realm of possibility.
You'll definitely have users gaming on the thing for 8+ hours every day, so I don't see much value in that. Like I said, you might as well just wait for users to report their experiences.
You’ll definitely have users gaming on the thing for 8+ hours every day
Yes, that’s exactly my point. Definitely some but not many.
Like I said, you might as well just wait for users to report their experiences.
Report them to whom, exactly? Not everyone is going to hop onto the internet to publicly report their issues. How are you going to account for the conditions? What if there’s nothing to report?
Not everyone is going to hop onto the internet to publicly report their issues.
But enough people are. People are talking about every small thing they did, what happened, whatever.
Also, with all the different plugins or stats available on this thing to track everything, you can probably create a pretty detailed breakdown of what someone did with their Steam Deck.
Y’all have been burned too much, so when you see someone creating something bright and exciting, all you see is fire. Stop reading clickbait headlines, stop taking the word of tinfoil hat loonies just because it satisfies your irrationalinal desire to hate this game. They get so much wrong and manipulate the rest you’ll feel like a fool when you see for yourself. Try the next ree fly, face the cognitive dissonance and make up your own mind. Then get frustrated with the manufactured outrage that tricked you from having fun with us this whole time.
Gaming journalism is about generating clicks for shareholders, full stop, but you’ll believe them over an independent studio run by a guy whose career is full of beloved, well made space games. You have fallen into an enshittification trap and are missing out because of it.
Look at the number of comments on posts about hating star citizen. If you were an unscrupulous gaming news company, generating Star Citizen drama equals clicks and money. Go watch the weekly Inside Star Citizen episodes or dev livestreams, read the massive monthly reports, use the dev tracker to communicate with one of their thousand employees on the forums. This is a game being made in good faith. How is a constantly growing playerbase and financial success somehow considered a sign this game is bad? How does spending that money on development , pushing out massive quarterly updates and inventing new gaming tech mean this project is dead? How does the most openly developed game out there mean they are clandestine fraudsters? It’s the shareholders of gaming news who are trustworthy here? Think critically, don’t just feed your initial reaction.
People don’t make fun of starcitizen because “games journalism”. They laugh because it’s development hell is funny. Even if a satisfactory product come out the other end, it’ll still be an internet legend.
Star citizen exploits its userbase with a never-ending drip feed of bite-sized consumables, just as long as you keep feeding the machine.
This is not some poor little indie dev. They have taken over 600 million from they’re users, and have nothing finished to show for it. I treat them with the same distain that I do companies that trive on lootboxes and live services, as they all work from the same base template. At least the live service people made a game before squeezing every penny out of people.
This is all just stuff they’re porting over from Squadron 42 now that they were able to move those devs back to SC. I have no idea why this deserves it’s own article.
They should be bragging about the 400 player single shard test they just finished.
400 on a single shard (server) that actually quite a lot. It is far far easier to just throw a bajillion different servers at the problem and only have a relatively small player count per server. Having 400 running smoothly on a single server is a very impressive optimization achievement
Correct and eve has been very impressive with its per server player counts as well. It’s a completely different type of Beast mind you, trying to keep that many players synchronized over something like a first person perspective real-time movement game is a completely different ball game from keeping spreadsheet simulators synchronized.
Still a very good achievement of optimization regardless but definitely a completely different ball game from synchronizing a first person type content where the players are free to just move in whatever fucking weird ways they want rather than linear vector paths
Yeah eve handles it by slowing down time in-game. So each player has less actions for the server to handle per cycle.
Every game has their way of handling it. Cig is doing it via the replication layer and dynamic meshing. IE multiple servers talking to a “boss” server that scales based on needed load without Eve’s crutch of time scaling. Totally different technologies.
Eve’s solution worked based on what they had and needed at the time, but it’s old hat now.
Oh shit. I think it was literally 10 years ago I ‘pledged’ the base game (Aurora Mr). It still has less hours than Microsoft minesweeper, which let’s face it is a banging game.
I liked the game, when it was advertised as a moddable singleplayer game with drop-in drop-out co-op. As well as moddable multiplayer you can host yourself.
Now, I don’t have any interest it whatever that cluster fuck has become.
Sure its playable but the game is still (and i think always will be) lacking the VAST majority of features they’ve been talking about for more than 10 years.
Like what? What features specifically have they been talking about (for more than 10 years) which have yet to be implemented? Most of the core systems seem to be there, just seems like they’re polishing up what’s already in the game.
The last one that’s missing is IIRC Jump-points and they’re adding that within 3 months. They’re still fleshing out salvage and the dynamic economy stuff, but the initial implementation is there.
I could have sworn when I pledged in 2014-2016 (can’t recall at the moment) I pledged cause Squadron 42 was hyped to be released in a much shorter time. I’m not complaining, I spent some more cash on it, but I thought I was going to get a fancier single player space game before now. I loved Wing Commander as a kid, even had to get a tech to figure out the highmem.sys and possibly other optimization in the windows .bat files to even play so wanted to play the newest of Chris Rpberts.
Of course maybe I misunderstood at the time and it wasn’t supposed to be coming that soon, which is why I’m not bothered even if it passed, I think they are trying but got into feature creep. I haven’t logged on in over a year now but I keep an eye on things to try when it seems interesting and get use out of my HOTAS.
Since you’re replying to every comment I’ve made - Alpha still doesn’t have a set meaning. It changes between people who use it.
Logging in and doing the content you couldn’t do when you originally bought it still means it’s progressing and yes, it qualifies as a game no matter how mad that makes you.
What part of “it’s still being fucking developed” keeps getting past you bud? “It’s just a tech demo, it’s not a complete game” - no fucking shit. You being pissy that it’s not done as fast as you want it is entitlement and you should really grow the fuck up.
In its initial debut on Kickstarter, Star Citizen was marketed as “everything that made Wing Commander and Privateer / Freelancer special.” The proposed game was claimed to include a single-player story driven mode called Squadron 42 that would include drop in/drop out co-op, a company-hosted persistent universe mode, a self-hosted, mod friendly multiplayer mode, no subscriptions, and no pay-to-win mechanics. The initial estimated target release date was stated to be November 2014, with all proposed features available at launch. Additional promised features included virtual reality support, flight stick support, and a focus on high-end PC hardware.[3] While the initial release would be targeted for Windows, Roberts stated that Linux support was a goal for the project after its official release.
Cool, too bad it’s one of the worst pay to win games. Last time I checked you had to pay real money to buy in-game stuff and the prices were by no means pocket change.
It really isn’t though. For one you don’t “have” to buy anything except a starter package for $45, everything else is optional if you want to support development. There also isn’t really a “win condition,” there’s PvP, but it’s not like ranked matches or whatever.
Also those people buying the largest most expensive ships are going to be in for a rude awakening. You will have costs for managing ships that currently isn’t in the game, but when it is I imagine the big spenders will bankrupt themselves (in game currency). There’s also the fact that ships larger than a one seater will need crew so you can’t really do much with them on your own.
The prices of ships can be absurd, but I think the people that buy them are just shooting themselves in the foot. I’ve been a backer since 2014 and aside from the starter ship I only bought one “extra” cheap shuttle because I love having access to it through any wipe even though I could earn it in game fairly quickly.
Damn, as of years ago you’ve been able to buy new ships with in-game currency. You’re not even keeping up on the game you’re bitching about. Sure you can always buy better ships with real money, you can have whatever reservations you want about that, but calling it pay to win seems like a stretch. Elite Dangerous has long proved space battles are often a skill issue.
Chris Roberts has always had the ambition for a space sim where you could truly do anything, but never had the resources to actually create it.
So what is Star Citizen supposed to be?
An open world sandbox where you, a citizen of the stars, can choose to be Whst you want. A space trucker? A pirate? A bounty hunter? A smuggler? These aren’t new things in the space sim genre, but Star Citizen wants to make these aspect less like a game and more like a life sim.
So instead of clicking a few buttons to fly your spaceship, your character wakes up in bed, has to manually walk over to the ship hangar (maybe take the train there, if you’re on the city planet. Yes, the train runs on a schedule), manually access the hangar via elevator, climb into the ship, activate the ship, request take-off from control, wait for the hangar doors to open, and then you fly your spaceship.
This level of granular detail is meant for every aspect of the game and is the reason why Star Citizen will never get done!
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