Aw, not Beamdog. :( They made all those enhanced editions classic D&D games like Baldur’s Gate 1 + 2 and Planescape Torment. I didn’t realize they were under Aspyr, which has had serious issues itself lately, not to mention the ongoing money issues at Embracer. We’re going to hear a bunch more stories like this over the next year, aren’t we.
Anyone else just getting to a point where, given the writing on the wall, they feel gaming sort of already peaked? Amazon gaming? Netflix gaming? Apple? Yeah. No thanks. None of those companies are game companies. All of their offerings are going to be excessively monetized. All of it is going to be about data gathering instead of engaging fun games. It’s going to be AI driven. Yuck. Good thing I still have Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 to play.
People have been saying that gaming is dying and that its reached its peak for like… decades now. With the advent of game creation being more accessible and more available than ever (still), gaming isn’t going to die.
Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs…? It’s a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.
While I would love that to be the case, I don’t think it is that simple. Java edition, at least, has been experimenting with shader-like features in resource packs for a while now. It could be that Luanti convinced them it needs to be built in and not an extra pack, but I think it is at best parallel ideas, or at worst, Luanti taking inspiration from those shader-like packs and trying to do better not even knowing they are doing the same process as Minecraft.
Yeah. Luanti following Minecraft is nothing new. Mineclonia was an early pilot game for the engine.
But there hasn’t been much effort on copying Minecraft lately. Mineclonia is done, and it’s great.
We’ve had more mobs, animals, plants, textures, and such than un-modded Minecraft for a long time. (Which is unfair, as Luanti is a mod-first design.) But my point is the core Launti dev team doesn’t have to work on any of that.
The most noticeable recent Luanti updates have been to make the configuration screens much nicer, and add I think to add native support for more graphics tricks?
I’m not paying attention to graphics in Luanti. As others have mentioned, that’s not why I play it. I actually had a conversation recently about the best way to downgrade Luanti default graphics to match un-modded Minecraft.
That said, the Minecraft team taking notice of Luanti would be new, as far as I know.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There’s been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already…
Nothing screams, “I’m a piece of shit”, like basically putting on blast you are a piece of shit. I, too, never fully agreed with DEI as a whole. But I understand and appreciate the context and the point, and the necessity. It’s nothing to be mocked.
I also don’t look at the video game industry for inspiration though. Somehow the video game industry has a more rape-y and toxic culture than even the grimiest hockey dressing room. All that incel rage, I suppose.
The Journalist writes “I’m predictably both intrigued and worried that 11 bit think there’s less interest now in games with a pronounced narrative component.” But then does not detail any attempt at getting a comment from the studio on that… What gives?
Curious what industry standard Senator Warner is judging Valve against because a social media site, which Warner is comparing Valve to, being filled with Nazis and the far right feels like the standard, even if some sites at better at quarantining them than others. Also, "intense scrutiny" from Congress is kind of an empty threat at the best of times, but especially when Congress is about to be run by the sort of people who aren't going to see this as a problem.
If the planets are static and its just the ship that has to calculate N-body physics then its a pretty simple summing of vectors. It only becomes a problem when you have multiple non-static bodies that interact with eachother being simulated.
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
I’m not sure why you think every interaction in an open world game is supposed to be completely hand crafted from scratch.
The scale is part of the point, and Elden Ring nailed the sense of exploration of a huge, open world that maybe hasn’t happened since Skyrim. It’s that rare to capture that sense of awe.
Because when I explore I want to go see something new and interesting. Half the time in Elden Ring I’d just run into something I’ve seen before. It made it not feel good to explore.
I don’t blame them for this, but this is the reality of making a project this big in scope. You can’t possibly fill it with good content. They made one of the like top 3-5 best open world games, but it’s still stuck with all the same drawbacks as open world games.
I just want them to go back to making more focused content.
The world is jam packed full of new and interesting. It quite possibly has more new and interesting than any other game ever made.
Enemies similar to previous enemies you’ve encountered but with different twists and in different situations are part of enemy design. It’s supposed to happen. It’s what real worlds look like.
If you don’t like open world period, fine, but there’s a reason it’s by far the most successful game they’ve ever made, and it’s because nothing matches the feel of open world done right, and they did it right.
I think Elden Ring has much greater variety than any other open world game. I agree there’s quite a bit of copy pasting, but even after playing for more than 50 hours, I’m surprised with new enemy types and environments (especially now with the DLC). I think it’s exciting to explore every corner of Elden Ring.
Compare it with Tears of the Kingdom. It felt like I’ve seen most the game had to offer after 10 hours. I lost the excitement of exploring rather quickly.
Shrines in BOTW were the worst. The engine was genuinely interesting. Everything being legitimately traversable and designed around stamina was great, and I’d love to see more games utilize the premise that everything you see is accessible. But all that traversal just never got you anywhere interesting. Eventually you’d find a shrine, take longer to load it than beat it, then load back into the world.
TOTK I just never got far enough to feel if it improved.
After some 200+ hours in the game, this alleged issue hasn’t even crossed my mind once. The world is absolutely gorgeous, and the sense of exploration is unreal
I played this a few years ago on GamePass and disliked it. But that was before I understood how survival games worked thanks to Valheim, Raft and Grounded.
This is probably in my top five games of all time. I think it really works if you try hard not to compare it to other games, and just play it on its own merit. It can definitely be janky, but that’s part of the charm.
I played Valheim and Raft, and 7 days will keep you entertained for much longer. The blood moon mechanic is great, there is a nice skill and crafting system and going for a “loot” is very varied. I had 3 playthroughs with 1-2 friends the last 3 years, where one is around 70 hours for us before it get’s boring.
Been coming back to it since the early days when it was blocky like Minecraft. Each big update we’d spin up a new world and dump 100+ hrs into it easily. Def worth giving it another shot
I don’t care for it. It does some interesting things, in base building. But having played it a lot mostly because my friend group likes it, it’s very janky. It does not feel close to 1.0. And, while there’s some fun to be had, everything outside the horde nights just feels like busywork in a way I didn’t feel with Valheim or Grounded.
It’s fun and I enjoyed my time with it, but once you understand how the zombie waves work it’s very, very easy to build a cheez defense against them, and then there’s no difficulty anymore.
As long as you don’t look up guides on how to build the cheese bases you’ll enjoy yourself.
The big thing to differentiate 7D2D is every seventh night you’ll be besieged by a zombie horde. You spend the week reinforcing your defenses, stockpiling ammo, and upgrading your gear, then you’re tested. If you’re interested in this kind of game loop, it’s worth a in-game week or two. Like many of these games, they’re more fun with friends.
I’d personally say its like a 7 or 8/10. Its probably the most mechanically varied and deep PvE focused survival game, but at the same time, it does really feel incomplete. Building lacks options, end-game content is often finicky or tideous, and performance issues can make the game near unplayable in enemy-dense regions.
The console versions were published by tell tale. And then tell tale died. So they couldn’t update the console games at all. It’s a night and day difference on PC to ps4.
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