Counterpoint: Consolidation in such a fast paced industry with a low barrier to entry isn’t as bad as physical goods consolidation. If Microsoft acts in bad faith, people just won’t buy games from that studio anymore, developers will just leave the company and start a new studio, free lance, or work for another party. It’s not like ABK was lighting the market on fire either. Microsoft is buying a trash heap and hoping to turn the internal culture around to bring back neglected IPs
Counter-counterpoint: When Activision bought and consolidated Blizzard an Blizzard North, they made it worse and people still slave away for them, and enough people buy their objectively inferior products to keep them going on life support to be sold again.
They became a poster child of what’s wrong with the industry (Diablo Immortal) and nobody learned anything. Baulder’s Gate 3 did more to further a healthy ecosystem than any merger has.
And how many dozens of indie games came out that same week whose studios folded afterwards? Or how many devs didn’t even release their first games because they ran out of money during development? Or how many smaller studios who were making fun games got irresistible offers from big studios to buy them out? What about the engines that are becoming increasingly more hostile towards devs?
I get why PS5 players should be upset, but as a PC player, this is also bad news.
Starfield had to run on the Xbox, the base model of which is the least powerful console on the market (leaving out Nintendo). It seems clear that some decisions around Starfield were made to ensure it would still run on that lackluster hardware.
Doubling down on that for ESVI means the same thing. We’ll get less game so that M$ can have an exclusive.
And that’s ignoring general trust issues with Bethesda entirely.
They don’t need to make one; they can use one of the many engines that already exist and can do everything their games try to do, but with far less jank. Unless they somehow manage to insert it in regardless, which I would not put past them.
Yeah, exactly. They’ve created a viable ecosystem for themselves. They have a highly moddable engine and they tend to leave a lot of abandoned code in the game that modders find and make use of. People eat it up and they use it as a starting point to get into development.
I’m on exactly that track right now. For me it’s been all about very open ended kinda buggy games that you can mod the hell out of. Wanting to change or tweak a little something here and there leads to wanting to implement more elaborate ideas. Eventually it starts looking appealing to make something of your own, or to make a bigger contribution to other projects. Personally, I don’t really want to work for a big company (or anyone other than myself), but a modding portfolio can certainly be a foot in the door.
My first mod for a game was a thing to shut up the Longs in Fallout 4. Super simple, literally just broke the link to their idle audio files. That was ages ago, and my own journey has been more related to getting DayZ to do what I want and now using Conan to further explore game design and more involved elaborate systems, but Bethesda was still that first step.
They’re not perfect, and their IP in some cases has certainly been watered down a little, but they make great games and have a workable business model that isn’t as toxic as some others. They’ve done a good job fostering creativity and innovation.
I don’t really get the complaints by people who’ve never made anything even remotely approaching a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls acting like the developers are trash and they know better. Let’s see your blockbuster open world rpg.
No? What I mean is they have a massive more casual audience that doesn’t play a lot of games to compare it to and this is true. Yes most people who regularly play games can enjoy Bethesda games too but they don’t owe their success to that audience cause if they did they would stop selling reskinned skyrim.
Or they can keep using the same engine with the same issues because gamers will definitely buy their next title en-masse despite the previously mentioned issues. Eg. Starfield
They tend to do that by tacking on new jank without removing (much) of the old stuff, though, presumably because they have base assets and scripts that they’re constantly re-using. Or, differently put: As long as Papyrus will still be in the thing I seriously doubt they’re giving any thought to technical debt. Already in Skyrim people rather used the UI to script stuff (because that’s Flash and ActionScript is at least remotely sane and fast) but ultimately it’s SKSE (that is, native dlls) for anything that isn’t a lag fest.
It’s not so much that CreationEngine is easy to mod, it’s that it’s what a gigantic community of modders are used to and have developed tooling for (you can get by with little to no use of CreationKit which is an abomination all on its own). Stockholm Syndrome at its finest or we’d have seen much more content for RedEngine which is far technically superior (and yet CDPR is abandoning it for Unreal).
a wholly new engine would almost certainly break mods or atleast make them harder to make as janky as creation engine can be it’s the best engine for modding there is and bethesda games absolutely need modding and not just cause the glitches
A new engine would just have to have a new mod API. Plenty of engines have mod APIs. Nothing’s really stopping them, but they really love driving creation engine onward for some reason.
bethesda is not making a whole new engine from scratch that just isn’t happening if they switched engine it’d probably just be to a licensed engine like unreal and that sucks for mod support the reality isn’t creation engine vs a from scratch in house engine that supports modding just as well but with less jank it’s creation engine vs unreal or something else maybe but not in house and there’s no other engine out there that currently exists that’s as good for modding
The engine is only half of the issue. Fallout New Vegas is far better than any other in the series. While it still has the engine bugs, it also does what it needs to and does that better games can be made than starfield with the engine stack they have. They are just design limited due to their business choices. Not solely their engine but their design is clearly lacking as well.
Do you mean Xbox Game Pass Ultimate? It can be streamed out of a browser or mobile app.
Why would they need a hardware device when your probably holding a device that supports cloud streaming and they can milk you for a subscription fee?
Between their stealing YouTube money from people giving them free advertising and never reducing the price of decades old games, if they make them available at all, and their shitty online experience, I’m amazed Nintendo has any market goodwill left, but reality never ceases to amaze me. Nostalgia is a powerful beast.
I understand they make some of the most fun games ever, but their legal department cancels that out by an order of magnitude.
Good idea waiting on Firebreak. I’ve dabbled thanks to it being included in the PS+ Extra tier and have some thoughts. It’s clearly a Double-A or even Single-A if that exists game that feels like a fun side project while Control 2 is in the works. There is fun to be had in it especially if you can get friends involved but it isn’t a game with staying power. I feel like I’ll keep it installed for a while and play a few rounds every now and again, checking on the patches, and just using it for a fun romp with no commitment. It is certainly light on content and buggy though so a few patches wouldn’t go amiss.
I keep playing it just because it’s something to do, but I feel it really misses the mark of what the Control franchise should be about. The world is interesting. It told interesting stories within the confines of a single player game. Firebreak doesn’t seem to have a story at all, and the action is pretty average with the same mininal enemy variety as Control. It also does not feel like a game from a company like Remedy; it’s half-cooked and janky. It works but it’s not quite polished.
the ability to log in via the Windows lockscreen with your controller
Seems like they’ve finally taken some notes from the Steam Deck, interested to see if they can actually make something decent. It seems unlikely, but I’m still interested!
Personally, I think the Deck is too big for my tastes, but the beauty of the ecosystem is that anyone can make one while still having almost all the Deck features.
I’d love to have a Vita or even PSP sized Steam handheld with a great screen for smaller titles, but that comes with its own problems
Yeah the one big thing Valve probably won’t touch is ARM because unlike WINE, that’s a whole other beast in which the only valid solution is for game devs to compile for ARM, because translation layers like Rossetta and Box64 will always have 20-30% performance losses.
There’s been reports of Valve looking at ARM for Proton actually but x86 chips keep getting better and more efficient. Not to mention Mali and Adreno are laughably bad compared to Radeon and Arc.
Honestly though I love the size of the deck but could even go a little bigger. Agree that as more manufacturers start using SteamOS it will be great to have options.
I think it’s perfectly sized. No need for change. And the OLED model is noticeably more lightweight than the original LCD model, so the newer one isn’t too heavy.
I’m with you, I have large hands but I’m a serious gamer. An hour in and I’m already feeling it’s weight and feeling the fatigue. It’s a very impressive device, but it doesn’t suit me and my needs at all.
Bought an r36s and it’s glorious. Playing all the classic SNES and PSX games I didn’t play back in the day. Can grind in an RPG for hours one handed and it fits in my pocket. Bonus is that it’s so cheap if it breaks or gets lost it’s no big deal.
People think Xbox is shit at the moment. Making things more like xbox isnt received as positively as it used to be. When I was a windows user and I saw anything Xbox related come up I knew I was about to deal with some clunky bullshit that was not wanted and poorly implemented.
Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, conditions which don’t currently exist in the GPU space, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.
Maybe on the initial release, but not for long after.
I’m not so sure. Companies were definitely buying many up, but they typically stick to business purchasing channels like CDW/Dell/HP etc.
Consumer boxed cards sold by retailers might have went to some small businesses/startups and independent developers but largely they were picked up by scalpers or gamers.
I work in IT and have never went to a store to buy a video card unless it was an emergency need to get a system functional again. It’s vastly preferred to buy things through a VAR where warranties and support are much more robust than consumer channels.
Apex was the game I played with my friends to keep in touch long distance. Guess I gotta find something new now. Sure as he’ll ain’t installing Win11 for it.
I guess it’s been a long time coming. The dev decisions and priorities the last few years have really made it feel like I’m the last person they want playing their game.
If you are looking for a semi competitive shooter, I’d highly recommend The Finals. Tons of fun and solid gun play. Game isn’t officially supported but runs great on linux.
I have a love hate with analogue. They undoubtedly make really excellent products, and I absolutely adore my pocket. However they really lean into the fomo of their stuff. They make very few units, and you have to be ready to go when they drop more product most of the time. I will say though the price of this is a lot lower than I expected. And while you shouldn’t count on it, every analogue system has gotten some form of ability to play roms from other systems (whether it’s built into the OS (not happening for the 3D) or a “jailbreak” is released by basically an employee of analogue).
Analogue stuff is good if you have cartridges you want to play, but at this point, with the recent release of Taki Udon’s cheap Mister Pi (retroremake.co/pages/store), I think Mister is the way to go. It’s an open source project as opposed to analogue’s implementation. The issue with Mister was you needed a pretty expensive DE10 Nano board to utilize it. Now you can get one of these new boards for only $100 (if you can get your hands on them. Only 2 batches have been sold so far and they sell out quick). Plus Taki is planning on using this new board to make a handheld Mister which I’m super stoked for.
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
That’s super fair and I agree for the most part. Though it’s hard to be super enthusiastic about it when they focus on a plethora of super limited edition color ways for the pocket instead of keeping the base one in stock and completely abandoning DAC support which they promised a while ago (and recently scrubbed all mention of on their site)
theverge.com
Ważne