For me, the visuals are a huge part of gaming, i simply don’t like the style of most indie games go for. The “artsy” stylistic graphics, the 80’s inspired pixel graphics, the simple polygon graphic is all indie games seem to choose between these days, and in personally hate looking at it.
I agree, I’m looking for immersion and story. That said, I’m also willing to wait a few months for devs to fix all the bugs they should have removed before the rushed release dates.
"Choose" isn't really an accurate term to use in your comment though, is it? Obviously high-realism AAA game graphics are going to come with a high budget outside the realm of possibility for the average indie dev, unless they have some super talented people with a passion for the project working for cheap.
A lot of us are willing to make this concession or adjust expectations for an experience that has great gameplay, soundtrack, story, etc. as easily as reading subtitles to enjoy a foreign film. The imagination can do plenty of the heavy lifting.
There’s a few indie titles that are developed by one person and maybe a handful of part timers or freelance people. Turbo Overkill and HROT(Single dev working is Pascal). Most of the time, the retro art style works to the design of the game. Ion Fury uses a opensource fork of the Build Engine(Duke Nuken 3d) and leans heavily into the 90’s idea of Cyberpunk and 90’s pop culture in general. Dusk is a Quake-like, but I had more immersion in the smooth gameplay then I would in a HD game where the hardware can’t keep up with the optimized graphics engine.
Meh. Today’s realistic graphics is tomorrow’s retro graphics. If a game was fun ten years ago, it’s fun today. If it was only playable ten years ago because of the graphics, but isn’t it playable today, it wasn’t fun in the first place.
This I do not understand. I am sure a ton of people pre-ordered Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty even though we know how it launched. (And I love the game, I followed all the news, but even I could wait for a fckin day to wait for the reviews)
The strategy to this is to buy so much crap on Steam and Humble Bundle that you don’t have time to pre-order AAA games.
For example, I love Borderlands series, and I have so many games to play that I could easily wait for TTW to be on sale - lo and behold, 10 bucks in a Humble Monthly with all the DLCs, and extra 7 games with it aswell. Banger.
It baffles me how anyone can stand to preorder any game with the market being so oversaturated. There are SO MANY great games on a constant $20 or less sale rotation you'll probably never have a chance to play if you're a full-time working adult. I'm worried about grabbing a highly acclaimed title that's been out for 5 years before it fades into obscurity, and I have to stumble upon a shout-out 3 years later to be reminded of its existence. Not about some stupid launch skin bonus, or OST mp3s you'll never click open.
Larian is an unusual case. It's indie but it's huge. They aren't funded by or marketing through a bigger publishing company so IMO that's still indie. But they're hundreds of people so not really small, and BG3 can by all means be considered a AAA game because the difference in quality and scale is indistinguishable from AAA published games.
I still play AAA games occasionally, but I’ve enjoyed gaming so much more since I got more selective with them.
ToTK was worthwhile, but even for the newest entry in my favorite series since childhood, (from a developer with a pretty good track record for their games) I still waited a week to see if any launch bugs needed to be ironed out.
I can’t even remember the last AAA game I bought before that.
Imo it currently plays like shit. Cs has a feel to it and to me, this doesn’t quite feel like cs. The gunplay hasa very specific feel and I just don’t get the same feedback when shooting on it.
Spraying feels awful as well. Meta at the moment seems to be burst, strafe, burst strafe… Performance is pretty dogsshit on my 5800X3D and 6700XT, get 3 seconds freezes randomly.
What are you on about? It’s exactly like it was in CSGO. What specifically is this “feel” you think is so different that it’s gone to shit now?
The only tangible difference is that the netcode is different so the peeking or response of processing hits can be off when up against someone with a different latency but that’s minor in the grand scheme of gameplay, and not enough to make it not “feel” like CS anymore.
This is going to come off as ‘non technical’, because well, it’s my personal opinion of course… Anyway, as someone who’s been playing this game since Action: Quake, the gameplay just feels different to me.
The two things I can think of offhand with the limited play I’ve had so far (about 3 days now) 1) things feel zoomed out (I’m not quite sure how to describe it). I’m sure this has something to do with the vision/perspective of the new engine. 2) the gunplay itself, while having hints of CSGO/counterstrike, feels inherently different. Spray feels different, burst feels different. I’m finding single fire to be way more prevelent then before and headshots feeling different as well.
Again, my personal opinion and feeling of the game. Maybe it’ll grow on me with time, but similar to CS: Source, it just doesn’t feel the same currently.
To put it into perspective I guess, I felt that CSGO felt more like counterstrike (minus the guys and other technical issues of course) then CSGO did at launch.
The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is removing CSGO from steam. Especially when CSGO had more features, it’s just a weird move. Why is Valve copying blizzard?
Also, the CSGO reviews now show up under CS2? Is it a new game or not? They shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.
CS is only good if you’re a cheater or a troll because it’s all “shoot at a random moving blob that you can’t even tell if it’s an enemy because CS decided that giving easily identifiable at a glance (like, you know, different colors or some shit, what a concept) characteristics to different teams is NO REALISM HURR and they want their wannabe war shooter kerfuffle to be gritty grimdark real” trash. CS has never been good.
Nope. All companies started in the 90s as groups of gamerbros. When they started to make loads of money and had to get managers cause they didnt want to do management was when it started to go down.
That’s really not at all what happened. Gaming development goes back to the 70s and gamerbro culture has almost nothing to do with history of game dev, that’s a more recent thing that happened with DOTA and the like.
Blizzard made awesome games and was led by someone who wanted to make awesome games. Eventually they gave upper management to someone who doesnt play games and now we have empty sheels
Alanah is a great creator. She worked for IGN as a reporter for years, then at Funhaus as a host/editor, and finally broke into games writing, which was her goal for a long time. She also hosts an excellent cross discipline gaming podcast with gaming actors/musicians/devs talking about all things gaming.
Shes seen the industry from every angle. Its telling that her conclusion as a whole is “this is fucked.”
I don’t think you need that much insight to see that the whole institution is fucked.
Rampant “frat bro” culture
Frequent cases of sexual harrassment, and assault
Cases of suicide
Cases of burnout
Layoffs like clockwork
Often deliver rubbish products
Frequently employs consumer-hostile and manipulative tactics
What is even the point, really? Maybe I’m an outlier but I don’t feel like the AAA gaming industry provides enough good to warrant all the crap they put their workers through, and the way the sentient wallets customers are treated.
The point is to make as much money as possible while paying the workers as little as is possible. Same as it ever was.
They could always pay us more, but we’re just supposed to be happy they aren’t sending the Pinkertons to shoot our women and children anymore, I guess?
By asking “what’s the point” I meant less “what’s their goals” and more “what benefit do they serve?”
I’d love for some big swoop to just upend the entire industry. Create better conditions for the workers. Stop the companies from stealing from artists. Have actual consequences for nepotism, corruption, and abuse of power. Like crunch and all that BS is just expected as though it is because of the job, but it’s not, it’s because of the system.
I guess the “benefit” they serve is to increase the payout % for the people at the top of the ladder and their goal is to do that until the breaking point that some higher up takes the blame and they fall with a golden parachute before landing at another company exactly the same as the last one.
Rinse and repeat until you’re Summering on a yacht? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Yeah, all that you described? That’s what a union does. points at WGA They did it against some of the biggest multimedia companies. The only people who are going to fix the gaming industry are the workers and that takes a union.
She’s been great for a long time. One of the few people with public comments on the industry that has a really great intuitive grasp on the business side of it.
I mean honestly it makes sense. If we assume that the average game dev is similar to the average “hardcore” gamer, then we can only assume that they’re toxic little shits 😆
She has a great deal of respect for the devs/writers/artists/workers. Its the system itself and the execs that are fucked. The toxic atmosphere they cultivate keeps churn high so profits stay high. They build a bad place that attracts bad people that stay and good people that should leave, and they dont give a fuck as long as “number goes up.”
Give the video a watch. It’s a very candid take from someone immersed in all the layers of the field.
Let’s see how it is received. That game is not modern-gamer friendly.
But the even more important question: Did they keep the In Extremo concert in?
Edit: Read through the YouTube comments. Apparently it’s littered with bugs and the concert is gone. So I guess it’s a little bit true to the original release.
The solution is not for you to show contempt or lack of empathy to these people, it’s for them and you to demand better treatment from the owners and executives.
The system is fucked and it is skewed wildly against anyone who is not at the top.
By your own admission you are punching down or sideways at best. Punch up. You see what you want to see, you aren’t the only person in the world who’s a card carrying union member here nor are you the only person who cares about workers in any non-tech industry here. Class infighting is about the dumbest thing ever.
Me hurt from lack of other people caring about bad things happening to me. Me hate people who care about other people having bad things happen to them.
I don’t think you realize that video game developers and other related jobs are pretty badly compensated for the job they’re doing. Those devs are among the most skilled ones and could probably earn 5 or 10x what they’re getting now by going to work at some FAANG or big banks. They’re working here because they love video games and want to create something fun, so it sucks when you just get fired like that.
Also, it’s not because you’ve had it worse that their situation is okay, it’s fairly easy to always find a worse situation and just dismiss any issue.
They still have not fixed the absolutely terrible dis-occlusion artifacts that were present in FSR 2 and, in fact, it seems to have gotten worse with frame generation. Here’s an example of what the artifacts look like:
It’s nice to see Cyberpunk is in the list of games adding support in the future. DLSS saved that game and is the only thing I miss about NVidia after switching to the 7900xtx…
Both nvidia and amd sees CP2077 as a game to showcase tech now. The only irony is that imo, its actually of the weaker games for specifically DLSS/FSR as its the one game due to it having the most severe ghosting problem, regardless of version
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Aktywne