So its due to sync rights. Oof. I wonder if some of the song licenses (looking at you, Experience Hendrix) are the culprit.
The Line really is an example of a painfully average game held up by its narrative, and hot damn, how well it held up. I adore some of the moments of this game, especially for their vicissitude.
The licenses referenced likely have to do with the game’s music. During the The Line’s menu screen, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” can be heard while the game’s soundtrack includes Martha and The Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.”
The same thing happened to the first Alan Wake before they worked something out to get it back (even though it took almost a decade). Consequently, that's also one of the reasons they wrote original songs for the sequel. It's very much a gamble these days to license music for games. More or less puts it on a timeline to be removed at some point.
If you have time for some reading, here's a really great article from a few years ago that talks about licensing in video games and how complicated it can be (the first half of the article is really the only relevant part). Depending on what exactly you want to do with the music in/with the game, a developer could be looking at having to deal with more than one license. I imagine it could get expensive very easily.
Pyrocynical used Midge Ure’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” in a video covering Half-Life 2 or a mod of it, and that meant Midge needed a cut, the original writer David Bowie, his estate needed a cut, Kobalt Songs, who owns the rights for Midge’s cover needed a cut, Warner Chappal, who owns the Bowie library needed a cut, ASCAP needed a cut, PRS needed a cut…
You only get a small fraction of who owns what off SongView. It’s a removed. Pyro paid $24,000 for the sync rights. That’s the budget for like five of his videos right there.
I wish this process was easier. Contacting a label’s sync office is typically the start of the nightmare.
Perpetual sync rights licenses aren’t unheard of, but typically these require an ongoing revenue split of sales or a big up front. More often than not, limited rights are used to save scratch and because its going to be for a set period, like 30 days (for an ad campaign).
In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if Take Two opted for perpetual, and decided they won’t afford a per unit sale anymore, and pulled the game to stop paying.
So basically music rights owners are too greedy and demand so much money for a reasonable license they have publishers can’t afford it? Sounds about right.
It gets really murky and there is a question of intent but… I think it is truly elevated by how painfully average it is. That is the game that everyone was making and playing, right down to the overhead camera explosives shot with the mortars.
And what made The Line “work” is that… it pointed out how fucked up it is that this is so normalized. We had been trained, arguably indoctrinated, by so many Call of Duty style games that there was zero question about how fucked up what we were doing was.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so. Rather than understanding that “walking away” is… maybe not buying the annual, rather mid, "shoot brown people in the middle east’ simulator.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so.
Do people still like the shambling husk that is Blizzard at this point? I've been playing their games since Rock N' Roll Racing and they're not even close to the same company anymore.
The idea there are zero well designed AAA games is such a narrow outlook.
Indie has its place, but there are experiences that cannot be replicated in the indie sphere at the moment. Consolidation in the AAA space will not make the medium better.
Luckily nobody said there were zero well design AAA games, only that I don't much care if the big studios eat each other. You can always make another studio. It's happened before, it'll happen again. This isn't like car manufacturing where startups face overwhelming costs and regulatory burdens to begin work. Get some capital, hire some good devs, come up with a thoughtful concept, and people will pay for it. Shit, they'll pay for virtual goods with no expectation of seeing a finished game (coughStarCitizencough).
but there are experiences that cannot be replicated in the indie sphere at the moment
The key phrase there being "at the moment." And frankly the reverse is a lot more true for more enduring reasons. AAA development is entirely too invested in graphical fidelity at the expense of everything else and entirely too beholden to shareholders to take meaningful risks.
I do not give one tiny, insignificant shit what corpo entertainment goons do to each other or what hats they wear and neither should you. Blizzard as you knew it has been dead for years. This acquisition means nothing. The people that made the Blizzard you knew great can make their own company and probably will if they're still working. Stop caring about companies and start caring about the human beings that make good games. Remember their names, look at who they work for.
Game dev has to grow up just like Film did and you can expect the same market driven patterns to emerge. Indies take risks, the big boys iterate on the formulas they establish, and occasionally they stumble into something legitimately good. So it goes.
But for every big budget film that's good, you'll have a dozen Michael Bay style 'splosion and lens flare fests. That's the expected pattern.
Embracer is currently the one killing half the companies they acquired a year ago. If embracer is even around a year from now it’s far more likely that they are selling ips rather than developing them
Yes indeed, fuck saints row, this is the real loss.
Ah well. We’ll always have the fact that the freespace community was the first community which got pissed of by the great Derek whatshisname. That was fun.
We were never getting Freespace 3. And, arguably, wouldn’t have “wanted” it because the vast majority of the people who worked on that left literally decades ago.
But a remaster/remake of 1+2 could have led to a revival of the space dogfighting genre.
Gaming on Linux has already come a long way over recent years, with improvements to Valve’s Proton and more gamers switching to Linux, but the newly-formed Open Gaming Collective (OGC) is aiming to take it even further.
Universal Blue, developer of the gaming-focused Linux distribution Bazzite, announced on Wednesday that its helping to form the OGC with several other groups, which will collaborate on improvements to the Linux gaming ecosystem and “centralize efforts around critical components like kernel patches, input tooling, and essential gaming packages such as gamescope.”
The other founding members of the OGC include Nobara, ChimeraOS, Playtron, Fyra Labs, PikaOS, ShadowBlip, and Asus Linux. Related
<span style="color:#323232;">I replaced Windows with Linux and everything’s going great
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I spent a year on Linux and forgot to miss Windows
</span>
Having a wide range of distros to choose from is one of the best parts of using Linux, but shared efforts around important gaming components should improve the experience across the board, resulting in “better hardware compatibility, fewer duplicated efforts, and a more unified Linux gaming experience.” As Bazzite’s announcement post puts it, “a win for one project becomes a win for everyone.”
It’s worth noting that this will mean some changes to Bazzite, which is switching to the OGC kernel, replacing HHD with InputPlumber as its input framework, and integrating features like RGB and fan control into the Steam UI. Bazzite also added that, “We’ll be sharing patches we’ve made to various Valve packages with the OGC and attempting to upstream everything we can."
They are a billion dollar company because they made decisions like these over the last several decades. They could have gone the easy route and make decisions that fuck over the consumer, and make billions of dollars in more insidious ways, but they didn’t.
Steam Deck and their commitment to Proton are the reason why we can even have a conversation like this, talking about the rise of Linux Gaming in the year of our lord 2026. Without those two components, we would still be talking about how Windows 11 is fucking us over (while still using it), how nobody likes to switch to Linux because they still want to play games, how the whole “Year of the Linux Desktop” is the same tired fucking joke it’s been for the last 30 years.
Instead, we’re in the timeline where we have enough Linux gaming developers to form their own fucking collective! Because of Valve!
They don’t need to be imo. They can still cooperate and have discourse but Valve should be the pace setter while they have this momentum. Should at anytime Valve ever choose the dark side there can be an alternative that’s hopefully keeping up ala this.
Sure, you could say that, but Windows is also a general distribution. Much as people say they’d like a “Gaming OS”, it should be usable for everything else too. Bazzite wasn’t necessarily “incapable” of the other things I tried to do with it, but the UI remained a bit obtuse.
They’re an “optimized for gaming and high speed workloads” distribution as far as I understand. Lots of customizations to GPU drivers and what not for games.
Think I know what happened here. Apple will reject updates if there’s anything broken or outdated in it. ie, support for a new screen aspect ratio, the dynamic island thing, new processor type, new version of Xcode, etc. Square can’t just fix one bug and ship it, they have to also check for and update anything that may have fallen a few years out of date. Sometimes you just recompile and click a few new checkboxes, sometimes it’s more work. If the app’s profits are winding down already, it could make more sense (to bean counters who don’t care about game preservation) to retire the app entirely.
Are they? Genuine question. Some of the FF titles I’ve played in the past were technical marvels on their respective consoles. FFXIII still gives modern games a run for their money on the graphical department, despite being 15 years old at this point. Not sure how they fare up nowadays though.
I’ve never heard of SE being known for bad code except for when they first started doing pc ports. 13-1 and 13-2 were bad but they figured it out by 13-3.
That’s not the developer, that’s a Discord mod, and they said in that message specifically that they haven’t heard anything from the dev. It also says nothing about what “the agreement” is. It could very well be a legal settlement.
He is a developer (github) and in fact had a pull request merged in August. I suppose it’s possible it was a “legal agreement”. It seems implied that it wasn’t, and that was what I remembered when replying
I can’t say I’m surprised to see Gamepass get a price hike; it always seemed like it was in the loss leader stage to try to grow market share.
I wonder what the reasoning was to institute the hike now, though, since I’m not sure how strong their market share actually is on it.
My theory is that either:
Microsoft is tired of footing the bill and expects results now
Microsoft/ Xbox think they have enough market share, so it is time to stop cultivating and time to start harvesting
My understanding is they are still releasing new Series S models, which are basically just Gamepass machines; so I would expect they are not happy with their current market share (though corporations literally never are), which makes me think it’s the former option, not the latter.
All that being said, I wonder how much the price can increase before the value proposition of Gamepass is moot. Right now 20 USD a month doesn’t sound bad as long as you’re playing at least one new game a month, but I wonder how much more room there is in the price before the number of games you would need to play becomes unreasonable.
Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the Gamepass model since I like owning my games physically (it’s the main reason I prefer console to PC), so I don’t have much of a horse in this race; but I will be interested to see what becomes of Gamepass in the long term.
Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see
Literally the only thing I know about it is “pokemon with guns” and “it’s SOOOOOOOO popular! You should try it because it’s popular! READ HOW POPULAR THIS IS!”
i mean the good part about it is the survival aspect. it’s a pretty similar direction as ark except it’s actually playable (unlike ark). and it deviates from some other games like valheim enough for it to feel like a unique experience
the enslavement is just a neat bonus
right now it already feels like it had a lot more player-experience effort put into it than many already popular games (and way more than pokémon if that’s relevant lol), and even though it has some noticeable bugs and doesn’t have as much content as you might want, it definitely is something that feels like it has a lot of growth ahead of it. the mechanics on their own set up a good foundation for new additions ahead
the main thing that bugs me about it is some quality of life things, probably the biggest being storage management/sorting (god damn it this happens in every game i play) & not as much automation as i’d expect. if they made it so you could, i don’t know, link all your chests/storage nodes with some storage interface (maybe that pal computer that is already used for a lot of stuff), allowed you to assign which chests/chest slots pals can put which items in, allowed pals to take items from specific assigned chests to e.g. automatically craft certain proportions of items, etc. it’d make me want to play the game 100x as much. add a “factorio but with slaves” aspect to the game to appeal to a wider range of players, you know, even the minecraft redstoners might get in. basically adding a “storage & task management screen” would be sick
another thing is that i’ve found it really tedious to manage a large number of tasks/pals currently, which is why i mentioned “task management”, it’d be cool if you could easily manipulate priority/necessity to certain tasks and stuff
overall though they just need to focus on ironing out the bugs and then adding more content to the world to make it feel actually rewarding/interesting to explore (i guess this basically just means add more lore to the world, because it is severely lacking in story), and it’ll be an actually really worth-it game
That got to me overtime. That, and the fact that every pal left out overnight would be depressed/weakened and it’s an utter pain in the ass to make medicine, let alone administer it to each and every one individually…
I just feel like what you are saying is “once the game is actually developed it will be good”. It sounds like an early access starfield.
Once the world is fleshed out I will play it, I could care less about an empty open world with vague promises. I could also care less about mediocre mechanics (is anything in pal world as fun as trying to nail a deer with a spear in valheim?).
To be fair Valheim has actual sailboats that sail according to the wind which is my pet peeve that other games don’t ever play around with this (sailboats are magic motorboats usually) so it is going to be hard to beat for me.
Meh, the sailboat part of valheim was the least interesting part for me. The wind would ALWAYS blow against me, seemingly by design, so getting anywhere would take forever. Yeah you get a way to somewhat alleviate that, but it doesn’t last forever, and you have to sail a LOT. I’ll take the magic motorboat any day.
Ok for sure, no judgement if you don’t like sailing but I grew up learning how to sail sunfishes and other derpy small sailboats.
Sailing is fun as shit. Yeah intense racing type sailors are absolutely insufferable but if you have ever had the pleasure of having a sailboat to fuck around in, it is like kayaking except you don’t have to do work. Wonderful. Amazing. Sailing is so god damn underrated in video games.
The basics of sailing are pretty simple and easy to grasp. Yet… 99% of games with sailboats as optional craft never actually make the sailboats behave like sailboats. They are just lame motorboats you drive until you can manage to hijack a speedboat. It sucks.
Or there are pirate/tall ship games where the ships just magically go in any direction you want and it just utterly kills the vibe.
There should be entire genres of sailing games by now that are basically just open world space trading games but with actually interesting vehicle controls and living dynamic universes (the fucking ocean) with regional wind patterns.
WHERE ARE ALL THE SAILING GAMES???
sigh but again no judgement if you hate sailboats but as long as a game implements them like Valheim, than rowing gets you there plenty fast enough i.e. you can just ignore them. Valheim sadly undersells sailing though since if the wind is blowing against you sailing upwind is slower than rowing which robs you of one of the fundamental magical feelings of sailing (how am I rapidly traveling my in the opposite way fronthe force powering me??).
There are so many reasons to love sailing, it connects us with human history, it is fun, and it provides a vehicle piloting experience with lots of mechanical depth.
Dang are you the hypeman for sailing, because i’m feeling the energy haha. I’m sure real life sailing is actually fun. My grandfather had a sailboat back in the day, and while I never got to go sailing on it, I did get to step aboard, and I could imagine the adventures one could go on with it :) But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween. I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅
I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅
Oof I got attacked by a “mosquito” and lost all my stuff way far from home in valheim and it made me temporarily quit. The mosquito was weird though, it was like 100 feet long with a big menacing mouth full of teeth, no wings thankfully.
Also some of the most fun sailing is in the tiniest sailboats you can get like sunfishes, lasers, j20s etc… they are simple, quick to tack (i.e. they keep speed through turns) relatively inexpensive and easy to get in the water and a blast to sail like a fool and capsize. Sometimes there are sailing clubs/classes you can sail these at that are pretty affordable if you live near water.
But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween.
This is true but it is so silly, if you ever get the chance to go out sailing on a windy day on like a 20 foot hobie cat style catamaran with someone who knows how to sail it and you would NOT say the experience was boring or full of long periods of nothing stimulating. Even if the water wasn’t its own unique dynamic environment just the mechanics of keeping the sailboat hiked over with your body weight to get maximum speed without flipping over are complex and stimulating and those things FLY. In a video game there is no reason game developers couldn’t dial up the arcadeyness and speed to make this experience even more fun, but I just don’t think most game developers give a shit about sailing so they don’t even think to try. They just program a motorboat and animate a cosmetic sail on top of it that swings around to whatever direction you are going and call it a day.
Wellinaturally assume any game is shit on release in regards to bugs and stuff so I try to avoid games for a few weeks minimum. I’m more of the Patient Gamer type. I can wait a few years until the game is more or less in final form before getting it.
It sounds like that’s exactly what I should do here. I might toss gamepass a few bucks this month to try it out. it sounds like as is, I would stop playing when I go to build. I absolutely love building things, I used to crash fallout 4 all the time because my cities were so filled with things. Then there’s starfield where I got to s point and realized the entire cargo system was broken, and stopped playing the game entirely. Not like I was playing it for it’s gripping story…
This game might be perfect for others as is, but imma wait a bit and try it Soonish.
The building in this is not great. I kept getting frustrated trying to build around its weird limitations. If you want a game with good building, you may want to give Enshrouded a try. It’s the first game i’ve seen where I can actually build caves and even tunnels! I watched someone on youtube make a whole hobbit house in the ground… pretty cool!
It’s just a well made game in an era of badly made games that hype themselves up bigger than they are.
Palworld is “just” good monster collection, good combat and some good survival crafting. I’m not going to play it, but it’s very easy to see the appeal.
It’s like the newer doom games. They’re “just” good shooters. You “just” get to go through well built levels, nice visuals and good music.
There may be a few catches here and there, but overall the game works, the world is pretty big / big enough and the features are well designed and well paced enough to keep people entertained for several dozens of hours.
That’s what I mean by “well made”. It’s not an actually unfun game with bad explanations.
Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.
This feels like a weird take if you haven’t even played it. Like, how would you know?
The game is flawed, but genuinely super fun, and has a ton going for it outside of “Pokemon with guns”. In a lot of ways it’s what I always wished Pokemon could be, at least in the ways it makes its monsters feel unique and like actual partners instead of battle slaves, which is ironic considering Palworld is the one with actual slavery.
I doubt a no name company would be pulling all this attention out of marketing alone. If it was this easy everyone would do it.
In all fairness, this is not a great game. It’s a very derivative game whose only appeal is that it combines things in a way that hasn’t been done much. Like many other hype trains of questionable quality, it just happened to scratch the right itch for the right people at the right time.
Kind of how Fortnite was a rehash of stolen ideas (originally) of PUBG
The reason people originally hated Fortnite was because not only did they blatantly plagiarise PUBG, Sony also intentionally screwed over PUBG to make Fortnite more popular
It’s been quite a long time but iirc there was originally a deal going on between them that got last second tossed out for Fortnite instead. Sadly I don’t fully remember
You’re getting downvoted, but I think there’s something to this, even if it’s not the whole story. The game had a robust presence unnaturally quickly on Tiktok and among streamers. This studio isn’t big enough to have engineered a big campaign, but it’s quite possible they did some small, targeted marketing and it really paid off.
I’ve been seeing people mention “the game has been in development for 2 years” and all these trailers and stuff but… I didn’t hear a thing until the game released, it exploded and now it’s all I’m seeing.
Yeah but also I think the nature of viral content is just spinning out into chaos with the amount of AI generated content and bots. I am sure palworld deserves its popularity to an extent but it’s the velocity and utter completeness of palworld’s popularity that feels weird. At some level I think algorithms are heavily distorting cultural phenomena like this to be much more “winner takes all” in terms of popularity. It is not only how humans tend to act but it is also the most profitable way to monetize culture.
The studio doesn’t make games for the good ideas, but to make money. Shocker, I know. But get this; the developers are paying for this parser that determines what kind of product will sell well, based on social media.
The developers have admitted to using something like that to decide what kind of games they’ll make.
I had no intention of getting it after finding out it’s less like Pokemon with guns and more like Rust with Pokemon, but a friend got it for me a few days ago.
I am already bored. I never got into shit like Rust or Ark before, either. The loop is the same, except with the addition of capturing critters to use as laborers in your base or to help in combat; not the sole means of combat and relying on them sucks because you don’t command them like you do in Pokemon but like you would in Elder Scrolls with AI about as smart. You level up to learn new tech that ultimately just helps you do higher level areas or lower level areas faster.
I think with most players it is just going to be forgotten in a few months; but the people who really like Rust and Ark and things like that, will keep Palworld going a long time because it is, at least on a technical standpoint, better than those and does have quite a lengthy tech tree to unlock. Plus it’s cuter.
Yeah I definitely think that the whole direct control of pals could be improved. I’d like to see something like holding a trigger to issue direct commands to your pal with face buttons. Would require rearranging the buttons a bit though.
With how the purple elk things (I’m so bad at remembering the names lol) double jump, I immediately thought of Torrent from Elden Ring. You can dodge on him (kinda) and doing it that way would at least feel like you’re not just taking a huge disadvantage by fighting mounted to control the attacks.
It is missing too much to call it like factorio or even rimworld as you cant even set task priority or do much optimization, but it has the foundation and could certainly go that route with some major ai improvements.
It’s surprisingly entertaining, but you might want to wait until it leaves early access if you’re on the fence. It’s very buggy and there’s big aspects of the game that aren’t filled out yet.
Ubisoft can go fuck themselves with their little “accident”. I haven’t bought one of their games in years amd this greedy corpo shit paired with lackluster games is exactly why.
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