CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they’ve done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
You might wait at least a few weeks before throwing everything down - There’s been a lot of backlash, so much that Unity might walk this back or change it entirely.
The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
It doesn’t seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I’m guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It's really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There's no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it's at your (in this case Unity's) own discretion.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don’t have the option to pick a different vendor for what you’ve already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn’t agree to if you weren’t forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don’t doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
I managed to soft lock the new Pokemon Snap game in the tutorial where they had you take a picture of a Butterfree (I think is the right Pokemon). Somehow when I took a picture, it flapped its wings and turned enough that it was flat in the picture and couldn’t be selected when you were at the next phase of the tutorial selecting the shot to show the Professor Oak stand in. You couldn’t go back to take another picture, so I was effectively unable to continue the game from there. I was pretty proud of my bad picture taking skills.
Yeah but every NBA game gets flooded with negative reviews and these people will buy it again next year. It doesn’t matter how many negative reviews it has if it sells well.
I always have a laugh when half of these reviews are “wow guys this poorly rated game that everyone told me is garbage turned out to be garbage. They’re making the same game every year!”, fast forward to them posting the same review next year.
I got Madden 22 for free and for awhile I was enjoying it. It was my first Madden game since the 360. So I start going to forums for the game, and every single post was about how bad the game is, highlighting ridiculous bugs, shitty AI, missing features.
Then details about Madden 23 started to come out and everyone that was tearing 22 apart was absolutely in love with every little thing that was shown.
Man I remember being on the Gamefaqs forums back in like 2005 or so, and people were complaining about this exact scenario back then. Some things never change
While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda's "good stories" have always been moreso the player's stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion's Imperial City, "casing" the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I'll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I've stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It's incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda's actual character moments that fondly, as they've always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse's personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational "stories" in different fundamental ways, and I think it's neat how each one's best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game's possibilities and the player's motivation and intent. But you're probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
While that’s true, what’s illegitimate is when the idiots set up bots to spam negative reviews, like what happened with Captain Marvel and Last Jedi. A person with a negative opinion is fine. A bot spamming the same negative reviews again and again in order to artificially bring down the score? Not fine.
I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but reviewing bombing generally consists of more than a group of angry people writing honest reviews.
A review bomb is a collective effort to lower the score of something, abusing systems meant to reflect an average opinion by gathering people who would not normally leave a review, often people who haven’t even played the game. It is intentionally creating sampling bias. “Review bomb” is a meaningful term being applied correctly here. I don’t like modern blizz, but Overwatch 2 is not the worst game on steam as its review average would indicate.
Then I’d argue that reviews don’t give a complete picture, if that’s the case. Because it’s hard to argue that Overwatch is really the worst game on Steam.
All game content and story issues aside, what pisses me of the most is that a month after release, we still only had a microscopic amount of bugfixes that don't even address some of the larger issues with the game.
I don't want to bring up BG3 again, but at this timespan after the game release, Larian already fixed THOUSANDS of bugs, big and small and overall, the game was much less obviously buggy than Starfield is. It's issues were more inconsistencies in logic and a handful of quest breakers, but otherwise not even noticeable until you read the patch notes.
It's crazy to me there's so little action from Bethesdas side in fixing this heap. I guess it rolls into their bullshit PR of pushing for Awards (they are literally looking to get a Grammy ...) and saying the game is nigh on perfect.
When has Bethesda ever released patches to fix anything short of game breaking bugs? And even then more often than not they don’t fix those.
I mean, some of the most popular mods for fallout 4 and skyrim were community patches. I’m not saying I agree with that practice, just that this is par for the (shitty) course for Bethesda. Starfield probably won’t be an actually good game until there are thousands of mods for it.
I’d wager technical debt is the reason. It’s no secret that Bethesda’s engine is bad. Bad code makes it harder to do bug-fixes, because it’s harder to find the root cause of things and the risks of having accidental side-effects is far higher. There’s only so many hacks and emergency fixes you can slap into a codebase before it becomes a house of cards that collapses if you breathe on it the wrong way.
The engine is what makes the games so great though, no other engine I know is so flexible and open for mods, while at the same time can keep states for huge numbers of game objects that can be manipulated and moved freely in the whole Game world. Yes it has limitations but I am happy to live with those in exchange for what it enables. It is more then a fair trade in my eyes.
“This is the way it’s always been done” is also the same rhetoric bigots use to justify racism. Just because Bethesda has always sucked ass doesn’t mean anyone likes it or wants them to continue to suck ass.
What the fuck are you on about? I’m not defending Bethesda. I’m saying that if a company makes games with the exact same kind of flaws every time - getting upset when they do it again suggests the issue might be with the inability to make basic inference.
It’s like if you don’t like chocolate, buy a bar of chocolate, and going “Gah! This one has chocolate too!”.
They didn’t rewrite the creation engine. It’s going to have the same feeling and issues as other games made with that engine. It wouldn’t have to be this way if they had done a good job. But, they don’t seem to have to do that for a lot of people to enjoy their games. But being surprised by it? Nah, that’s on you (figuratively)
Being disappointed requires unmet expectation. “Surprised”. Why don’t you pick a word you prefer that conveys unmet expectations? I think you know perfectly well what I mean. And if you don’t, then, well, I’m not here to argue.
Bethesda has a bad reputation and still sells so they don’t need to fix it. Their reputation is to make games with the things you outlined specifically
I’m almost certain most of the team went on vacation after launch. However, that should probably be over by now and there still hasn’t been much of anything as far as I’m aware.
Please explain the larger issues with the game. I have like 50 hours into it and the only things I’ve noticed were 1 glitched quest (Madam Devine won’t progress, which was fixed with 1 command) and some companion bonuses not applying. Also my chameleon-wearing companion’s head would remain invisible sometimes! But largely the game has played well. It’s great to bitch and moan but what actual bugs are you talking about, because personally I haven’t seen them!
Rarely, outposts can become unbuildable. You have to save and reload
The bounty system is slightly more jank than I’m used to. Sometimes I’ll get a 15000 bounty for a stealth kill while unseen - those 15000 bounties never go away from witness death. Other times a 650 bounty that immediately goes away from “last witness died”. I had to save-scum a pirate ship because it happened with some specific folks, and I solved it by chucking a grenade into the bridge. I commented elsewhere, grenades are super-stealth and you usually get away with throwing a grenade in full view in a crowded room if you can hide before it blows up.
I’d like to see #2 fixed/improved, but honestly don’t mind either very much.
I had to use a cheat and kill a achievements because into the unknown was bugged. Where the temple should have spawned there was a mining rig and the scanner never distorted. It’s a pretty common issue reported over and over again on their discord (which is a freaking horrible way to deal with support BTW). And then on the final quest one of the mini bosses clipped through an elevator and I had to wait like 10 mins while he decided to teleport behind me.
If you’re the only reviewer that doesn’t get one then you won’t have a review up for when people read them most, right on release day. So game companies can threaten to exclude you if you write something they don’t like.
Imo they should be an everyone or no one deal, probably even by law.
Fair enough. Still, games used to be vastly cheaper in my country and the asking price for the basic version of Starfield is 80 USD. There is no way any game is worth this much of my income.
Like I said. The price tag on Donkey Kong from 1994 says 799sek which in today’s market is worth 66 usd. I can’t be arsed to follow index and calculate how much that was in -94 but it’s a lot more than Starfield.
My only point here is that games haven’t really increased in price ever. Anyone claiming it has, is wrong. We can discuss the other parameters all day with (un)finished products, mtx, bugs, paid dlc etc. The fact still stands that games in 2023 haven’t vastly increased in price at all. And we have a lot of free options now as well that didn’t exist back in the ninetees.
In 1994 you were buying a physical, manufactured product which you owned.
Now you are temporarily licensing access to something that doesn’t exist, can’t be transferred or resold or backed up or modified, has unlimited reproduction potential for no cost, and sells at scales unimaginable in 1994 dwarfing all other consumer markets in total revenue.
The expense was probably quite considerable. Not only do you have to have the game ROM on a chip, you would also need Nintendo's lockout chip too. If your game had a battery save system (DKC did) you would also need to buy a RAM chip and watch battery too. That's ignoring any enhancement chips as DKC didn't use any (but many other late generation games did).
And all that before you get to the fact that the only who could officially make these boards was Nintendo. Meaning there isn't exactly much competition driving prices down. Sure, Nintendo couldn't quite take the piss the way they could in the NES days, as Sega was all too eager to try and attract new games for its console, but unless you wanted to completely remake your game, you're dealing with the big N's bullshit.
The boards could probably have been made much cheaper today than in the 90s, as ROM memory was expensive AF, even the couple-of-MB ones used in the consoles of the day.
There's a reason PS1 and Saturn games were massively cheaper to buy than N64 games.
If you buy a game today, does it come with a free SSD to install it in? Does it have a paper manual and a nice box? Is it even finished? Games aren’t cheaper, you’re just getting scammed.
Isn't this insider trading? If I owned a company and sold all my stock and then tanked my company with stupid news, that'd be illegal.
Though I'm surprised they sold it before the news. This kind of fund-raising tactics piss off customers but investors usually love it, the short-sighted creatures they are.
The guy who owns the company knows what it means for the long term stock price: a plummet. He knows that’ll come eventually if these changes go through.
Investors may react positively to the news, but when they see the damage it actually does, they’ll pull out too.
The guy running the company has shares that are valued way higher than when he earned them, he is sitting so high right now it’s far worth selling here instead of gambling on the response to the news. It’s just simple “quit while you’re ahead”.
No it’s not. If he unloaded a huge bunch out of nowhere just before the announcement then sure, it probably is, but that’s not what happened - he has been consistently selling stock the whole year, buying none.
What likely happens is he is paid partly, or was at some stage, in stock. To convert it to cash you need to sell it.
Seriously. If they were changing the terms going forward, that’d at least be defensible, but trying to make it apply to everything that’s ever been made is just nonsensical.
Even then it would be pretty bad for a lot of devs. If you’ve been developing a game in unity for years, you can’t just easily change engines just because they’ve changed the rules of using their engine.
I agree with you; they’d have to give plenty of notice that the changes were coming and maybe even offer exemptions for developers who can show they were working on something significantly before the announcement… I don’t think there’s any way they could reasonably do it that would avoid all backlash, but this just seems like the absolute worst way to handle it.
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.
If they can change the terms of games already released and ask for a % per install, what’s stopping them from just asking for 100% and saying suck it bitches.
The way I see it, there are enough quality indie games, retro emulators, and titles on the average Steam backlog (to the point that it’s a tired joke) that gamers can afford to only pay for unmissable quality. People know what they like, and they talk.
Economically, money is scarce. So is free time, for a lot of us. We don’t care what you tell us to “expect” from you, game publishers with hot takes on BG3. If you can’t release finished games at game prices, maybe you’re not the beating heart of the game industry.
That might be the way it works in your head, but the reality looks different.
AAA games make the most money on PC. And even those games despite micro transactions, DLCs and so on are easily overshadowed by mobile games.
My favorite games are indie games, but indie is simply not feasible in some genres. Take MMOs for example, every stab at it has burned to the ground or was abandoned (or a scam).
Criticizing the big publishers is the only thing we have, because obviously voting with your wallet doesn’t work. You might not buy it, but several million other people who saw a shiny cinematic trailer did. And they will continue to do so, even when Call of Duty 23 sucks they’ll go and buy 24 next year.
I wanted to stick to my I Statements a little more than I did. I cede mostly to your points but reserve that it’s bullshit to tell me not to expect quality just because someone proved it can still be done. It tells me the bigger gaming industry has gotten too large and dreary to be much use to me.
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