If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you’re a game developer in the first place. If it’s not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn’t be a game developer. I’m guessing the developers panicking aren’t the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.
My counter to that is the last 2.5 BioWare games - I say 2.5 because Dreadwolf has been in development for ten years total now and still isn’t out. Andromeda was in development for 5 years. Anthem had money galore thrown at it until it came out. Too many devs, not just BioWare, are wasting years of development time because they haven’t got a clue what they can feasibly make then rush to get things out the door.
Instead of making excuses for why gave dev is the way it is now - a way that isn’t working - maybe look at what Larian did right and ask why more studios aren’t doing that. Early Access is normal used by indies with overinflated budgets? Well, why aren’t larger studios taking advantage of it or using systems like it?
The new normal for a have to be developed is turning into 5+ years, and there’s no excuse for the hot messes that have been coming out lately.
I’d like to ask…why are publishers even required anymore? Games don’t need physical releases anymore. You don’t need a publisher to host a zip file on a web server. Storefronts let indie developers self-publish so why do the big names still fall for the publishers who exist only to enshittify gaming anymore? They bring negative value to the industry.
They bring funding when you have none. Also marketing. How likely are we to have heard of The Plucky Squire without it being featured alongside several other Devolver games?
Because all those things make it possible to release independently, it’s still not easy. Marketing and getting exposure is hard, it’s a totally different skill. With a publisher, you don’t have to worry about any of that - you might even get funding up front.
Personally, I still think it’s worth doing - I’m in that position, and although I’m having a lot of trouble getting off the ground, at least I’m free to follow my visions
But I get why people would do it. A slice of a big pie is worth more than all of a tiny one.
It’s also stressful if it’s not in your skillset - I’ve started using chat gpt to rewrite my announcements and such. Before I’d stress trying to put them together and focused on being clear and honest, but no one was reading them. I find it worse than public speaking, at least when I get on stage I’m too busy to feel self conscious.
The stuff I come up with using chat-gpt is a bit cringe, but at least people read them - sadly corpo speak draws people in
You can see every moment a senior dev went to management and asked for time or money to develop a certain type of interaction and were told no every single time.
I’d even be happy with there being a choice between “either release tools needed to unlock and run services necessary to function OR release all source code to public domain so someone else is able to fix and rebuild the software as necessary”
If I pay for something they shouldn’t be able to disable it
I have a strange feeling about the story for this game. Here’s my prediction:
Lucia breaks out of prison with the help of Jason and an outside character. Lucia and Jason then go on the run turning into a Bonny and Clyde story. Doing heists and robbing people to make some cash to get away from the cops. But then, they rob the wrong person or they were forced to rob the person by the other character and are forced into the drug trade. Maybe the other character was a narco that either Lucia or Jason knew. The FIB or DEA catch wind of this and since Lucia and Jason prove to be very good criminals, they then rope them into taking down the drug trade by robbing and pulling heists.
This goes on until they both eventually find a way out or plan to pull “one last heist” that’ll free them from both the narcos and the FIB or DEA. But then, whoopsie, turns out either Lucia or Jason had some ulterior motive for tagging along with one another. While Lucia or Jason was in prison, they struck a deal with either the narcos or FIB to either escape the country or wipe their record. The catch? They had to bring the other person in, kill them, or just generally betray them.
Then the final act would be one of three options. Lucia kills Jason, Jason kills Lucia, or they both fight the narcos and FIB together Bonnie and Clyde style. Either way, bullets are gonna be flying.
The end game would be only Lucia or Jason are left alive and free of both the narcos and FIB. But, Maybe they became a crime Lord in the drug trade thanks to the other person dying or the FIB unknowingly.
Based on how Rockstar makes their stories, I predict one of the two is gonna bite the bullet by the end.
Best part of GTA V for me was the social satire and Trevor being a total sociopath. The story isn’t anything special, the final mission hits the wrong story beats (it should have ended with the big shootout of government bureaucracy pileup), and the gameplay has some design mistakes (like business income being completely useless, and money in general being a non-issue after the first big heist). It had bugs that prevented story progress without workarounds that were never fixed. It got a lot of praise at the time for having crazy draw distances in an open world game while working on an XBox 360. That’s no longer a big deal.
I don’t think it deserved all the five-star reviews it got back then.
Conversely, if the social satire is on point and the character building is solid, then I’ll be happy.
I think the “escape from prison” part won’t happen, because we see Lucia with an ankle monitor in the promo pic. Implying she’s on parole or something. The rest sounds plausible though.
Not disappointed in the trailer or the game or anything, but I would’ve loved to see a GTA set in a city outside the US. For example in a London-like city or Tokyo or Rome or Paris.
But yeah this new GTA looks sick. They did a great job in capturing the new fucked up Florida vibe.
I’ve always dreamed about this one, London 69 updated in their recent style. I think they talked about this before and the problem is the cops in London didn’t carry guns then so it made it difficult to be a GTA game in the typical sense.
GTA Chinatown Wars was great when it released for Nintendo DS and the PSP. It was actually a really well done update to the GTA 2 style of gameplay that a lot of people missed because it was a portable game. It was available on iOS and Android, too, but not sure if it’s still there.
i dunno if they find enough whacky criminal characters. Seems to be the other countries are still too normal or things are too fucked up for the series to work there.
All 2022 Rome had only 16 homicides… And street are too small and traffic is too bad for a grand theft auto… Rome is good for spy stories, thriller or stealth games. GTA wouldn’t really work
In London not even police has guns… Having someone hanging around with a gun is too unrealistic, more than Harry potter
For Rome, grand theft auto in the 70s is absolutely doable. Full of gangs, terrorists, molotovs.
Grand theft auto Rome 2023 would be about some fat guy bribing politicians to get the work for his company of collect garbage and never do it. The lucrative non-fancy side of crime
The Florida vibe is definitely oozing from this trailer. I can almost smell it, and quite frankly I’m disgusted. Bravo. I would’ve preferred the next GTA being somewhere else, but maybe this it exactly where it belongs.
I always assumed GTA to be a broad parody on modern America. From the beginning it was a new York esque mob-gang warfare, and then moved out to add in more usa adjacent scenery. It’s more about keeping with the theme, let IPs like watchdogs take the initial risks.
I’d like it just set in any new city outside of these 3. It’s always been a rotation of Liberty, Vice and San Andreas, even back to GTA 1 (which was the 3 cities in one)
I remember Thor saying that not tying a single player campaign to a server would be bad for developers and Louis barely covered that statement here. How? How would keeping single player and any server-based systems separate hurt the dev? Just plan for this from the beginning. 🤦♂️
Yep. And wtf happened with LAN multiplayer? Even the Beta from Diablo II Ressurected had it, but they REMOVED IT from the release version. I call BS on what this Thor guy is saying.
Blizzard swore off local multiplayer after what happened with StarCraft esports. The Korean leagues ran huge tournaments and made a ton of money off Blizzard’s IP and essentially told them to pound sand. Now everything has to go through their servers so they control the ecosystem.
Same with how Blizzard now owns every custom game you make. They learned their lesson with DOTA/LOL and feel like all that money should be theirs.
All of which seems to indicate that this is a real problem. People can play Brood War forever, but what happens when the SC2 servers go down?
I imagine fans have already found a way to create their own servers for that very instance. Just to ensure this type of stuff cannot happen to those hardcore dedicated fans.
It hurts the developer by impairing the control over the deployed software. This can mean monetization (like microtransactions or some stuff), this can mean “drop-in multiplayer” or whatever it’s called, this can mean a simple friendlist or statistics page, or something along those lines.
It is seldom something different from monetization. Especially in the AAA compartment.
Yeah it’s just generally still way higher powered than the switch 2. But Nintendo has always sold underpowered hardware because of their monopoly on their properties
The Switch 2 is actually decently beefy for what it is—give or take certain specs, it’s about comparable to the PS4, which Elden Ring launched on and ran fine on. But Elden Ring is simply a poorly optimized game overall. It ran like shit on PC after it launched, though they eventually got it into a mostly good state years later (or maybe people just upgraded hardware to the point they could brute force it to be stable).
But I guess trying to port it from x86 to Tegra for Switch 2 is another thing entirely that they apparently weren’t prepared for. If all they did was shove it behind an emulation layer or something (yikes if so), I can see why it’d suck. But given just how held together by duct tape the game is in general, I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply lack the resources or expertise to really optimize for a different architecture, since they barely support one to begin with.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, but at least a port to ARM would also give Mac users access to Elden Ring - and God knows macOS is in dire need of more natively compiled games in order to be taken as even a semi-viable platform.
… The Switch is built out of roughly the same kind of computer components as a PC, as a Deck, as a laptop.
PCs tend to have a distinct CPU and GPU, more modern Consoles and the Deck and Switch tend to use basically an APU, where the CPU and GPU are the same physical thing, and they use a different kind of RAM than a PC, such that it can be shared by the CPU and GPU functions of the APU…
(PC or dedicated GPUs have their own, different kind of RAM)
…but its not like the Switch 2 is some magical kind of completely incomparable thing.
Like … AMD and Nvidia make GPUs for PCs.
The Switch 2 uses an Nvidia APU.
The Deck uses an AMD APU.
They… both use x86_64 architecture. They both use the same general category of LPDDR RAM.
Basically, what you are saying is, is that Elden Ring is poorly optimized for cheap, Nvidia APUs, which Nintendo contracted Nvidia to develop for them, to put into their Switch 2s.
Its… not like Nvidia drivers for Elden Ring have… not been a thing, for years.
People have been playing Elden Ring on all kinds of other devices for years as well.
To use PC terminology, the Switch 2 is what you’d call a potato: technically capable of running software… but just barely.
the switch 2 is ARM based, not x86. idk the intricacies of the switch 2 GPU when compared to mainstream nvidia graphics cards, but I’d guess there are major differences between a mobile APU and a big boy PC GPU
technically capable of running software… but just barely.
Oh well ok you got me, Switch 2 is ARM based, I am wrong there.
As to differences between APU and GPU drivers?
Nah, not really, at least not on linux, from a game-user standpoint, not these days.
That the Switch 2 is ARM based is probably actually significant.
You would basically have to port an 86_64 game over to ARM, potentially redesign a whole bunch of the game’s core inner working systems.
Again though, yes, there are big differences between a full PC GPU and an APU… but there’s far less difference between a laptop GPU and APU, in terms of compute power per physical volume, and many laptops can run Elden Ring just fine.
The Deck and Switch 2 both have APUs… only one of them really struggles with Elden Ring.
And yes, the Switch is a potato compared to even a low-mid tier gaming PC.
It is also a potato compared to a Deck:
I have yet to encounter a Switch 1 game I cannot emulate on my Deck, with worse than a 10% FPS drop from what the Switch itself gets natively on that same game.
Used to be the case that you need a pretty beefy desktop PC or laptop to emulate last gen consoles.
Uh nope, not anymore.
EDIT:
If the Switch 2 is using an ARM chip, probably the closer comparison would then be to a smartphone, as ARM has been dominant in smartphones for some time, due to it basically mazimizing energy efficiency and low cost, at the comparative detriment of overall compute power, when you put it up against x86_64 broadly.
Optimization isn’t necessarily a global thing for software. Often you need to optimize it for different types of hardware. This is often especially necessary for consoles, as they are specific kinds of proprietary hardware that are relatively static. Optimization for the PC (or Steam Deck) is not necessarily optimization for a Switch 2, which may even require optimization between handheld and docked modes.
On the one hand, the ship was one of the most fun parts for me, but on the other, I do wonder if it was a mistake because it makes the game so much more frustrating for anyone who hasn’t been trained on kerbal space program or some other Newtonian space control game to get the hang of it.
It’s like riding a bike, if you know how to do it you have trouble even imaging why it’s hard, but nobody can do it at first, and it takes ages to get the new instincts to actually enjoy it.
The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.
The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.
I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.
And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.
Two more months to go and more than 50% left to reach 1 million signatures. It’s sad to see that with how many people game, this petition has so little reach. I guess we’ll have to wait till Fortnite is shut down, then suddenly many more will care that their childhood game is gone forever.
Unfortunately, I think it was just a lack of awareness that the petition in existed in certain countries where Ross just didn’t have enough reach, possibly due to language barriers. A big push from native speakers of those countries with large audiences, like streamers, could’ve pushed it over the edge.
I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.
I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
The creator of the Stop Killing Games campaign did a segment about the viability of fighting it in the US in a segment here: youtu.be/DAD5iMe0Xj4?t=1097
tl:dr, the motivated lawyer he talked with on it eventually found a court case that set a precedent that would be extremely difficult to fight in such a pro-corporate court system without extreme amounts of legal funds. This is why the Stop Killing Games campaign is focusing on implementing laws in the EU and other non-US countries.
PC building tutorial: free on YT or just follow the instructions of your case and mainboard…
Software not included so people can look up what Windows officially charges them for showing them ads
That makes 741.51€ or $817.57 for a pretty damn good custom pc… And it could be way less if you went for 2nd hand parts / better deals
I would rather build it myself than buying a cheap prebuilt one from a no name bc a friend of mine tried that and got scammed and realized way too late sadly
That’s not a bad build, really. Although I can’t imagine the air cooler will be necessary for a 4500, much rather use the stock and possibly upgrade to 32gb RAM if in budget. My stock 2000 series Wraith cooler has done me well in 40c summers.
Good call, you wouldn’t need the cooler. Wasn’t sure if the CPU comes packaged with one but apparently it does.
Tbh if I wanted to spend a bit more I personally would go for a 4TB HDD too instead of 2TB and maybe a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD alongside the 32GB RAM
I made a build that would have included all of that alongside a Ryzen 7 5800X but that build would have been around 1000$ so quite a stretch from the 800$ mark.
(Tbh it would still fair better than the PS5 Pro if you were to purchase PS+ Essential for more than 3 years - with Extra and Premium it’s even worse and since PC games are usually cheaper the free games & discounts don’t really seal the deal for me)
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