Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don’t like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it’s doing laps around all 3.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
I think even if they did, we’d still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they’re not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they’re maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they’re outliers.
not too suprised, given the game runs fairly poorly on the base PS4, and I believe with Natlan, they made the decision to increase the quality of certain elements of the game, and its not going to get any lighter.
I just hope they don’t get burned out and there is no crunch. The only other company that did so much in short time I can think of is Insomniac Games. It’s actually how it was used to be with how frequent we got games from single studios. But since they are so big and expensive nowadays, it seems a bit unreal for how fast some companies are able to pump out so many high quality games in relatively short time.
I always worry about that with From, and Japanese studios in general. They are often black boxes, and the only reason we don’t talk about them as much is because they do a good job of “keeping it in the family”. Maybe From is way bigger than we realize, or maybe they are just grinding entry level devs into dust. We truly just do not know.
I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.
My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.
The difficulty is not a problem for me so much as the very slow movements. It takes like 2 seconds to swing a sword. Meanwhile the opponent is still attacking. Just can’t figure these games out, myself 😮💨
have you swung a melee weapon before in real life, like maybe a baseball bat? Does swinging the bat happen instantaneously, or do you have to wind up the swing for momentum? Would a bigger, heavier bat be faster or slower to swing?
Souls games have slow melee attacks compared to something like Devil May Cry, but the speed is intended to be more realistic compared to those kinds of speedy action games. Just apply real life logic to it, and it should make more sense. If the weapon you are using is too slow for you, find a smaller, lighter one that would be easier to swing in real life. If starting out as a regular dude and then becoming more powerful is not appealing to you, or if realistic fights are not exciting to you, then maybe the Souls games just aren’t your bag.
That is a really odd comparison because in real life, even 2 handed longswords are very fast and souls like games slow them down a lot. They are not meant for realism at all. A baseball bat is also not made for fighting but for putting as much force as possible into the ball and is very top heavy whereas a sword is balanced close to the guard and very quick, meant to outmanoeuvre the opponent
in souls, the 2-handed longswords that are a realistic size are realistically fast when you wield them in 2-handed mode. the ones that are slow are more anime sized.
baseball bat was not the best metaphor, i went with that because most people (including souls fans) haven’t swung an actual sword in their lives.
Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.
I still disagree. I’ve done longsword fighting for multiple years and in the time a souls character does two hits with a bastard sword i probably do about 6 and that’s fine. Souls games are designed so that you can react to attacks and not for realism. A falchion in souls is about as fast as a longsword meant for 2 handed irl if not still a bit slower
interesting. I was watching some videos comparing the two yesterday, and honestly i came away still feeling like Souls combat speed is fairly realistic. This bloke makes fair points about the true practicality of a huge greatsword, and swings at a speed that is maybe two swings per second. A DS1 claymore has similar swing speed, particularly in two-handed mode. The DS1 Zweihander is right on that line between “realistically-sized” and “anime-size”, and I would agree that they make that thing look heavier than a real zwei.
On the flip side, the longsword is barely any faster than the claymore, so I could see that feeling unrealistic. I guess my brain just likes to rationalize that sort of thing away, like “yeah that seems slow but maybe I would fight carefully like that too if I was fighting multiple people that were actually trying to actually kill me”. Do you disagree with that? Do you feel like you would still swing a longsword at two or three swings a second if you were in a life-or-death fight?
Especially then. What souls gets realistic is the sizing up the enemy before clashing. Our flights usually were: pace back and forth together waiting for an opportunity/bait with an opportunity. Then execution of each person’s plan was over in a flash and either one landed a hit or you separated again, going back to pacing. But a plan of a person usually was not a single hit unless you were just probing for their reaction.
For example my favourite thing to do, was lowering the point of my sword (you usually start with tips touching uwu), baiting the opponent to attack the opposite side of were my tip was moving, the snapping the tip back up to hit the opponents incoming sword close to the handle, transferring a lot of kinetic energy into a fairly static part of their blade, thus moving their hands and influencing their whole arc such that their blade passes over me. Now i have to be very quick to attack them while repositioning into a new defensible line towards them to not get hit by their hit after recovery. This whole interaction would take about a second or less maybe.
Then there’s also the thing not really represented in souls at all which is driving your opponent through the hall. So if you attack and your opponent does only manage to block, you sometimes keep going to not give them the time to counter attack, and each swing carries you quite far which causes them to have to walk backwards very fast, to keep in blocking distance and not get into grapple range. This phrase usually has 3-4 hits a second and is quite tiring but being the one attacking usually is the winning move while the defending person has to get creative to get back into the attacking position.
I now realize that talking about sword fighting in English is quite tiring as i don’t know the terminology outside of German
And the opponents wait for 2 seconds after finishing their attacks. Soulslikes are all about learning the patterns and finding the opportunities to hit between dodges, not about mindlessly hack-n-slashing your way to victory.
And different weapons work for different people, I have some I’m absolutely useless with because I just can’t work with their movesets.
Honestly, if these versions have the complete up-to-date game printed on them that do not require servers to validate or update in order for me to play the game in the future, I do see the value in this. Doom the Dark Ages 85 megabytes news the other day was harrowing. Physical media hasn’t had the full game on it for a lot of games for quite a while now. If your disc doesn’t have the full game on it, then I don’t believe you own a physical copy of the game.
exactly! it’s a way to own a complete copy on disc, independent from the servers. I know there are other companies offering that specific thing, but more players in the space is a good thing imo
I am absolutely on the voice actors’ side here, but isn’t this a less than ideal argument? It seems to presume a right to be employed. If epic don’t want to use voice actors, why would they have to? I’m genuinely asking because isn’t this just a form of automation? Again, on the side of real voice actors, anti gen AI, I’m trying to understand.
This is the point of collective bargaining contracts. A union negotiates the rules by which their members and companies interact, sign a contract, and then both are bound by that contract for the term.
The union is claiming the contract they have in place prevents the automation of voice by the bound company unless they get agreement from the union first.
Oh I know how unions work, they’re quite important and do mostly very good work where I live. I just always assume any unions that manage to even exist in the US are little more than begrudgingly tolerated by employers. I didn’t realise they were referring to actual contractual obligations, I see. Thank you for clarifying.
videogameschronicle.com
Ważne