Welp, I didn’t say it was a good deal. Nonetheless it’s a better deal then getting ow2 coins for buying rtx 4000 gpus. And some later buyers got Diablo 4…
Man Starfield’s nowhere near as bad as Jedi Survivor, let’s be honest. At least it runs well on my Steam Deck and doesn’t stutter every 3 seconds like it does in Koboh in Jedi Survivor.
I know that's probably rhetorical, but probably a similar problem to modern movies where (as described in the video Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Too Expensive) they are going after spectacle (rather than story or other elements) and due to cost they must make a 'safe' product to stay profitable, where a bland but universally palatable product will sell more tickets/copies than a stellar niche thing.
I'd also add that companies know they can usually ride the success of their own name/brand recognition. Even worse here with games because of pre-ordering, early-access as a product, and crowd-funding (which some wildly successful publishers still do--on top of unpaid self-promotion and all the other things--because people still think of them as indie).
I gave the title of it and I figured that would easily be found (title only because it was something I saw in not-logged-in YT recommendations, figured others may have seen it too).
The main problem is they drop $20mil on effects and star faces and fucking spend $20/hr for a fucking committee to write a story in a week that wouldn't pass a screenwriting 101 course.
The problem with movies and games these days is where the money goes, not how much of it there is.
It’s an issue of time and scalability. Going from 100 employees to 200 employees wont make the game in half the time. And corporate accounting would rather have 2 mediocre games per year than 1 extremely good game every 2 years, even if it sold 4 times as well since revenue is analyzed within fiscal years and financing isn’t free. Capitalism sucks.
All the greatest games ever made were created in capitalistic economies so i cannot see how that is a determining factor. I don’t know what games your thinking of. Tetris?
Without capitalism Tetris would have remained an obscure piece of shareware probably vaguely known outside of ex-soviet nations. It’s only the desire to monitise the IP that saw it on every platform under the sun and packaged with every Gameboy.
Yeah, the creator didn’t profit at the time because of communism and their belief that his creation belonged to the state. If he had been in a capitalist country at the time he could have copyrighted his game asap and exploited it for profit himself.
At the very least a smart creator in the US can go to a solicitor and make sure he isn’t being mugged off before they sign a deal, you didn’t have that that with the Soviet Government.
Yes lots of creators have been screwed by the people that worked for, notably in the comics field. But a lot of the time it’s because they signed a contract having no inkling how big the work would be.
I don’t believe some people were tricked but we’re a victim of their own success. Take Alan Moore and Watchman for example. He signed the deal that he would get the rights to the book back once it went out of print as that’s how the industry model worked at the time. The book was so popular that it’s stayed in print for the last 40 odd years, so the rights didn’t revert. Maybe DC should have renegotiated things in light of that, but I see that he and they went into the deal on good faith based on industry realities at the time.
I think there is a difference between “capitalism” and “capitalism”.
I think a more nuanced argument is that better games come from companies that are not primarily driven by the quarterly revenue cycle of Wall Street, that is defined as “capitalism”.
I think it’s more of a hit-and-miss, and good corporate leadership is the kind that people forget it’s there when good games come out. I mean CDPR had a CEO both when Witcher 3 was the thing, and also when Cyberpunk 2077 was the thing that flopped. Obviously, people were more interested in the beancounters’ influence in the latter case.
I think you’re missing the point. They’re just saying the incentive structure of capitalism doesn’t necessarily encourage the best types of games. We see this with borked EA launches, predatory MTX, loot boxes, battle passes, etc
Trust me, I get it and I agree, #capitalism sucks. Mostly.
But that's not how it works.
You can't just take an arbitrary event and claim it came to be despite the circumstances, not because of them.
Like, that's not how causality works.
Besides, It's a way stronger argument to point at the overwhelming amount of bad games and bad features and say those got produced under capitalism and that's why it's bad full stop.
Counter point: Baldur's Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it's no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It's why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.
We don’t exactly have many non-capitalistic economies.
But we have games that people made outside of the incentives of capitalism. i.e., because they wanted to make the game they wanted to make. This is what has created the absolute best games in existence. Not the incentive of money.
Was terraria made for the purposes of money? Was outer wilds? No. They were passion projects. Of course they had to earn money, because you need to earn money to survive, but that wasn’t their primary goals. Contrary to games such as call of duty or whatever. Which are just incredibly bland in comparison.
I mean see how much microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. Is ruining the atmosphere of games and exploiting the hell out of people and kids. Don’t tell me devs are putting that in because that is what their dream game would contain. No, they put it in purely because of capitalistic incentives. Would you argue that that is good?
Making a good product is an incentive of capitalism too. Microtransactions, battle passes, loot boxes, and other "live service" trappings dilute once-good products because people are often too attached to brands. As people tire of bad products, good ones can come along and thrive, which is what Battlebit appears to be doing for Battlefield fans, what Baldur's Gate 3 appears to be doing for RPGs, and what Elden Ring and the last two Zelda games are doing for open world games; what Cities: Skylines did for SimCity fans and maybe what Life By You could do for Sims fans. There's money to be made for making a good version of something that the reigning champs screwed up, abandoned, couldn't think of, or didn't bother to bring to market; that's capitalism.
Do you think those games wouldn’t have been made without capitalism?
All of those examples are driven by people wanting to make a good game because that is their passion.
If they were given infinite resources to make a game, and would gain nothing else beyond just a decent standard of living or whatever, do you think they wouldn’t made them? Because I think they would.
How hypothetical are we getting here? Somehow we live in a world where everyone has infinite resources? Capitalism just distributes the finite ones we have to things that people buy. A government can do that as well, but we don't have a great track record of them being able to buck the realities of where those resources need to go. If there's a UBI, you could end up with more games of the scope of Stardew Valley, or once tools and game engines get to be good enough, you could end up with more games that are feasible to be made by one or two people in a handful of years like that one was. But Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Zelda...no, probably not. I can't predict the future, but they seem to be impossible to be made by small teams even with magical game engines that automate a lot of work that went in to make them.
Once you get beyond the profit motive, you're now at this point where you need to hire more people. Anything beyond really small teams are going to have a hard time sticking to someone else's vision unless one person is the boss calling the shots; otherwise known as the one with capital, paying those other talented people to work toward that goal. Of the 600 people making Baldur's Gate 3, I'll bet 550 of them disagreed on lots of directions that it went in, and it just becomes an insurmountable problem to wrangle that many people otherwise and keep them on track. If you don't need the money and you disagree with what the boss is doing, you'll just do your own project instead.
Meanwhile, we just got a Titan Quest II announcement, which I'll bet is a reaction to the general direction Blizzard has been going in since Diablo Immortal was announced, much like I was saying earlier. There's also another perspective I'd like to add on here, which proves both of our points. Ryan Clark of Brace Yourself Games, makers of Crypt of the NecroDancer, used to do a YouTube show called Clark Tank, similar to Shark Tank, talking about how to make indie games that make money. Creatives have tons of passion projects they want to make, and you'll never get through all of them in a lifetime. However, you know types of games that you would like to make, that you can observe are also making money, that you're confident you can deliver while they're still popular, so that you can profit, expand, and repeat the cycle. In a sense, passion projects and what the market is asking for via where they're spending their money.
My point was that capitalism and its incentives do not create good games.
Capitalism rewards profit at any cost, and nothing more. In the end this allows for cash grabs and terrible working conditions, which the industry is riddled with. Good games would still have gotten made without these incentives.
There’s many assumptions in this text, and it ignores great games that were financial flops (or couldn’t get made in the first place), and terrible ones (like gacha games or basically the whole mobile games ecosystem) which are greatly rewarded and successful. There are so many resources wasted on objectively not good things for players such as how to exploit their psyche to spend money which compromises the game design, or resources spent on stuff like marketing just because that’s what pays back, instead of spending those on making a better game.
I would argue that capitalism’s incentives hampers the creation of good games if anything. Because now instead of thinking what makes a game good, devs are instead forced or incentivized to think what makes money. And they are very much not the same thing.
Someone could make the best game of all time according to one random guy, but if it's not a game I want, I'm not playing it, and there are games I'd like to be made so that I can play them. Great games that people want to play create profit. Exploitative games also profit, but I'd lay that at the feet of poor regulation. If you want to profit, generally, you're making a game that as many people as possible will want to play, or a game that enough want to play but that itch hasn't been scratched by your competitors. How do you make money with Baldur's Gate 3? You make a really good Baldur's Gate game, and then people buy it. Even the exploitative games are desirable to their audience for one reason or another before they get to the exploitative parts.
Usually they don't. Something like Horizon Forbidden West credits almost 3500 people even though Guerilla Game has less than 500 employees, most of the rest is absolutely massive bloat from different outsourced teams and Sony departments - like the "Head of Opportunity Markets Business Operations Tim Stokes from Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.: Global Business Operations" was undoubtedly very important for the development of the game.
As for Baldurs Gate 3, Larian Studios currently has 450 employees in 6 different locations, so they are actually around the same size as Guerilla. I wouldn't be surprised if the credits end up being well above a thousand people (D:OS2 has around 500 credits even though Larian back then had only 130 people).
games are art projects at the end of the day and there are often many non-art people (or just people without the right skills or vision) making executive decisions on direction, deadlines etc.
It’s only the campaign, despite the fact that the competitive multiplayer was just as responsible for this game’s success back in the day. Split-screen is only supported on consoles and not on PC for some reason that I definitely cannot understand. And while it’s got online play, it surely won’t support LAN…in Halo…a game known for LAN parties.
Wow, this is lazy. I wanted FO3 to get a remaster, not this. It doesn’t even look different. FO4 currently runs pretty well on Linux. I played it last year with no issues. I’m generally not against remasters and remakes, but only when there’s obvious improvements or extra stuff. This is just the same game.
Here are some better recommendations for games that aren’t owned by EA.
Operation Harsh Doorstop - free and moddable tactical shooter with big maps and vehicles, vanilla gameplay is fairly realistic but there are mods that totally change up the gameplay like Casualfield. This game has a dedicated group of youtube content creators who hate on this game… I don’t get it… because the gunplay is fantastic and the mechanics are an elegant evolution of Project Reality type squad spawns and player built basic infrastructure. Sniping is also a BLAST. Singleplayer is in heavy development but multiplayer is where it is at now with the game. It is in early access and is definitely rough around the edges, but the core gameplay is just straight up better than 99% of fps games I have played so I don’t really care lol.
Easy Red 2 - Really fantastic WW2 tactical shooter with big maps and LOTS of different period accurate vehicles and a quickly growing population of players. The general interest this game has in portraying WW2 beyond the tired and boring moments that are usually portrayed is very cool and the gameplay is ROCK solid. This game is extremely affordable for the amount of scenarios, weapons vehicles and historical context that is brought into the game design in a clearly thoughtful way and I recommend ALL of the DLC even as an impulse buy when you purchase the base game. It is worth it, Easy Red 2 is an absurdly easy recommendation at its price point.
Angels Fall First - A superb Battlefront-like/Battlefield 2048 that is first person. This game is in early access and has a small playerbase but the core gameplay is polished, locked in and very very fun. Weapons feel great, vehicles are easy to jump in and start using but clearly have a lot of skill depth to them… Overall the menu and UI is FANTASTIC, at the deploy screen the game will prompt you if a vehicle is available to take and let you spawn directly into it, you can also see a cue of vehicles that are going to spawn for your team soon… Check it out! Even with the low playerbase it is a great bot bashing game, the AI is fun to play against and uses vehicles.
Also, for kicks and giggles I am gonna recommend Empires Mod an old source engine multiplayer RTS/FPS team based hybrid that is actually still in development which is super cool. By now the UI has lots and lots of quality of life additions and tooltips and the whole thing is very impressive even if the age of the source engine and various components going into the experience are obviously very dated, Empires Mod is legitimately still an awesome game and it deserves way more players! There is a discord you can check out to find out when games are happening.
Ok I had to add another oldie but goodie that has an open source project around it now!! That game is Enemy Territory and if you know that game you likely have fond memories of spending hours playing it like I do. No vehicles but the teamplay is very objective based a lot like payload in Team Fortress 2 (which is TF2s best mode by far so…).
Some more obscure recommendations that didn’t quite make my main list of team based objective games with a lot of depth to them but also lots of action…
Unvanquished is a spiritual successor to Tremulous, I haven’t played it so I don’t want to recommend it in the main list but the idea of a team of alien monsters and space marines fighting asymmetrically is super cool and riffs on games like Empires Mod in a cool way.
Renegade X is a fan re-make of C&C Renegade a FPS/RTS hybrid game that was quite fun back in the day, the mod is still pretty rough around the edges so I didn’t want to put it on main list with others. The same developers also are making another game called Firestorm which is based on a different time period in the C&C universe. These developers are not employees of EA or making money off this I believe, you can see the developers really had fun making Renegade-X from my brief experience.
Hey, it benefits me when more people play these awesome indie multiplayer games!
It pains me when people put up with insane amounts of nonsense when they just want a battlefield like experience, they don’t want lootcrates, popups that distract you when you open the game… skins… casinos… battlepasses…
If that is your jam, great, but it is alarming how little indie big map multiplayer vehicle shooters there are for the health of the genre as a whole, I have made long rants about how EA fucked over the genre by dropping mod support after Battlefield 2 ughhh.
Because of that I get a lot of joy sharing these games because I know most people like me until fairly recently hadn’t heard of some of these gems and they are the perfect anodyne to all the AAA enshittification nonsense happening in multiplayer big map competitive shooters that actually have good vehicle gameplay.
Did Operation Harsh Doorstop add anti-cheat? I played it when it first was playable on Steam and the amount of cheating was so obnoxious I uninstalled the game.
Its not fun having your entire team have explosions spawned at your location when you spawn because one idiot decided to ruin the game for everyone.
While I like the sentiment… most of those are just fuel for “This is why I only buy name brand stuff” and is right up there with “Linux is super easy. Just start from arch and…”.
Operation Harsh Doorstep: Fun as a proof of concept but I would barely call this playable as it is in VERY VERY early beta. And, scale wise, I would actually say it is more like Insurgency than a BF. Yeah, player/bot counts can get high but the actual objectives and mechanics feel a lot more like Insurgency if it embraced PvE.
Angels Fall First: Amazing back in the day. Deader than 2042 these days with a one week peak of 18 players. And the bots… aren’t great
ET Legacy: You are inherently going into a game that the players have been playing for 20 years but it is a REAL good game and I find you can still get a decent server
Of those, the only one I would even consider recommending as a BF Alternative is Easy Red 2. That game is AWESOME and it reminds me a lot of playing the SP campaigns of old Battlefront. I do think there are serious balance issues with AT infantry versus armor but… I also think armor in general is too powerful (it should not take three AP rounds to the engine to disable something…). That said, I can’t speak to it as an actual MP game since I haven’t actually tried.
Honestly? It gets a lot of crap but I would actually say to check out Battlebit Remastered if someone wants a multiplayer Battlefield that isn’t EA. Regularly still hits 750+ concurrents and I still genuinely can’t tell why the entire internet turned on it. I come back maybe once every few months for a couple of games and usually feel like I am contributing which is more than if I play ET Legacy or Tribes 2 online these days.
That’s why the first thing I do when I buy a new game is to turn off the internet and boot the game. If it doesn’t boot or work offline, I refund it. And I just don’t buy games that have Denuvo.
So there is now a C-Button which opens the new Game Chat, which requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. This means if you don’t pay for their subscription, you will have a dedicated button on your controller which will most likely open a popup that tells you to buy their subscription. Great, I love it…
As someone who loves the freedom of games like TES:Morrowind, Fallout: New Vegas and the Outer Worlds this was a great way to make me lose interest in Avowed. That friendly NPCs doesn’t react at all when you steal in front of them or when you shoot them in the face sucks big time.
There are very different goals between these games. This is an action RPG where your whole character sheet is focused on combat, not unlike Dark Souls even in level design. The systems of Bethesda’s games have sounded good to me on paper in the past, but in execution, they’ve always felt like they aspired to be what Larian is doing now and had very few actual benefits. They let you steal anything you want in this game because it was more relevant to this game’s loop.
There is something that feels off about avowed. I only played it for a few hours, and it’s like eating generic brand chocolate.
I can’t quite put my finger on what it is about the game. Now that I think about it, the land seems kind of empty. In Skyrim, there is always something around. Even if it’s just a goat.
This game has little patches of enemies here and there. It also feels a bit linear so far. I’m probably not going to play anymore as everyone I play this, it just makes me want to play Skyrim again.
Maybe I can find a mod that gives me an avowed style want weapon. I really like how the want looks and works.
For the first time in its storied legacy, John Marston’s beloved journey can be experienced on PC in stunning, new detail, with both Red Dead Redemption and its iconic zombie-horror companion story, Undead Nightmare, arriving to PC on October 29.
In collaboration with Double Eleven, this new version adds PC-specific enhancements including native 4K resolution at up to 144hz on compatible hardware, monitor support for both Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9), HDR10 support, and full keyboard and mouse functionality.
There’s also support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.0 upscaling technologies, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation, adjustable draw distances, shadow quality settings, and more.
Check out the new trailer above and stay tuned for more details, including information later this week on how to pre-purchase Red Dead Redemption and Undead Nightmare at the Rockstar Store, Steam, or the Epic Games Store.
Well technically I played it on “PC” years back on PS Now lol. Although it wasn’t a really nice experience with its low resolution and sometimes sluggish response.
I’m currently running through it on a switch. If they can port it to the fucking switch of all things, I don’t see why not PC. Wild that they are finally doing it like a decade n a half later
No idea what their real reason was, but the specific R* studio that made it hadn’t ported a single game to PC in years at that point. Midnight Club II of 2003 was the last one and none of their subsequent releases got PC ports. Which sucks because I really sorta wanted to play Midnight Club LA back then.
Past RDR, they haven’t done any games as a solo studio.
Could just be that someone at R* San Diego REALLY hated PC gaming?
I would wager someone with an MBA got their knickers in a twist about “PC being the most pirated platform,” did that thing like in cartoons where the dollar signs in their eyes turn into cents signs instead, and decided to just 86 the whole thing because they were deathly afraid that a couple hundred people who never in a million years would have paid for it in the first place would download it off of Kazaa or whatever was popular back then instead of giving Rockstar any money.
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