One thing that really soured my taste with Andromeda was the very clunky, but for some odd reason still necessary platforming. It always ground things to a halt for me and reminded me I was playing a video game, which is not a fun feeling. Like recognizing that actors are on a set in the middle of the movie.
They also did not really explore what different species could look like. It just felt like any group I could’ve seen in the Milky Way when they had given themselves an excuse to do literally whatever they wanted. Like halo 4 choosing to have me fight the not-covenant again after 3 rounded the story out and gave them a mechanism for dropping the chief literally anywhere at any time.
I also found most of the squadmates to not be very memorable. It felt like they were going out of their way to make sure they didn’t resemble any of the previous ensembles.
That being said, I think the game did an incredible job of not falling into the usual paradigm of “this is the good option, this is the bad option.” There was a lot more nuance to some of the decisions and it really had me stopping and thinking about how I wanted to proceed.
Still, I never finished the game. Got several dozen hours and it was enjoyable enough, but a lot of dropped balls.
Much as I am loath to admit it, Diablo IV did amazing beyond its niche. Anecdotally I saw soooo many people who’d never played Diablo or any game like it get onboard.
I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.
Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.
Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.
Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
It is utterly bizarre to me out of all the misnomers and ridiculous (sometimes offensive) terms out there in the media/hobby world, I see “boomer shooter” complained about so much more than any other. This is like the third rant I’ve seen about it in a week.
I thought Twitter and such were making a mountain out of a mole hill with how people responded to the term “Boomer“ in past years but clearly it ruffles peoples feathers way more than it should. Half the time I go through the comment histories and these are the same people that use ableist slurs regularly. I am not suggesting that OP does, I have not looked at their comments. Just a general observation.
I'm feeling a bit better. Starting today, I'll be returning to work as much as possible. This week will likely be spent catching up on tasks, replying to emails, reading overdue comments, etc. I also need to work with Piotr on instance infrastructure. I'll be more actively handling spam as well, but it's clear that we need...
I have worked with loobkoob as a moderator on Reddit, discord, etc. and I just want to say they have the temperament and reliability anyone would want in a moderator.
I stumbled across this comment while browsing and felt the need to endorse haha
I appreciate that earnest made a post yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, saying that he is not dead and hasn't given up on kbin. It's not on this magazine, so I'm not sure where it was since this seems to be the most appropriate one, but in any case....
I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...
It's the same thing that happened in tech. People got used to the near-decade of essentially free money. Interest rates were low for a long time, so easy loans, and demands to endlessly/rapidly grow. Now the free money's gone and none of them know how to exercise discretion, so they "trim the fat" of their rapid growth.
Why spend all those years and all that capital/manpower on R&D for a handheld that is widely touted as a success only to never use any of those lessons ever again? I can't imagine they're just going to one-and-done the Steamdeck. Seems like a massive waste to me.
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Baldur’s gate 3 for me while I waited for the mac release. Valheim before that. I only use it for probably three or four months a year, but I got the founders rate at five dollars a month so it’s more than worth it to keep paying for it.
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
It’s going to get ugly when the chickens come home to roost on this one. They are slowly marching towards $1 billion. They are over $600mill already. And people still donate. It’s baffling.
So far I believe there have only been 3 or 4 pieces of media related to it. The 2008 car breakdown teaser, the gameplay teaser shortly after where she's running along the rooftops, then the 2018 trailer with the monkeys or whatever and like a gameplay overview or something around that time. There hasn't been anything of note since 2018 (i think) and I believe the creative director actually died this year.
It's basically the most cursed project in gaming at this point. Very disappointing too. BG&E was an absolute masterpiece.
The tech debt they have and will incur alone will be a huge mountain to climb. You can't develop a game for that long without having to go back and completely rebuild things with newer tools.
Even their rewards show their age now. CD and DVD collections and such. What's going to happen when it comes time to fulfill all those merch order for backers in 2028 or whenever? What happens when virtually no one uses disc media anymore and they are struggling to even burn all this stuff?
Slogging through the campaign for 40 hours with maybe 5hrs of interesting story/scenes and 10min of worthwhile cut scenes, all so I could do their Season 1 challenges, which had such riveting tasks as "Modify 2 pieces of armor at the blacksmith" and "upgrade your healing potion" to complete it. Again, this is after i finished the campaign and have a high level character utilizing all the resources/merchants/etc. they have. 15-20% of the "quests" belong in an intro tutorial.
Anyone interested in D4 should just wait until it's like $15. It's incredibly dull.
I can't believe it was supposed to last multiple months. By day 3 or 4 my buddies and I were like "well we've seen all there is to see." Probably put 6-8 hours into it. Thanks god BG3 dropped
I brought that up because it means we all need a decent single player experience for when our schedules don’t lineup, which is frequently. When you’re younger this isn’t as big of a problem.
Alot of the time I’ll be playing will be in-between calls at work so being able to pause any time is important. The only one I’ve played is god of war but I never finished it .
Bioshock aged poorly. Controversial take I know. Bioshock 2 has pretty slick combat still but aside from that narratively they aged like milk and BS1 combat is only fun if you do ice wrench build lol
Square has final fantasy, dragon quest, kingdom hearts, octopath traveler, forspoken, and a myriad of smaller games you aren’t familiar with including lots of mobile game sales. They’ve got like 15 2023 releases on their Wikipedia. They’re doing fine and don’t belong on this list lol
Let's discuss: Mass Effect (beehaw.org)
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
Opinion: Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it (www.videogameschronicle.com)
You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
If kbin is going down for planned maintenance can the generic ‘ Over the next few days, there will be a change in server infrastructure…’ text at least be dated (kbin.social) angielski
It’s impossible to tell if there is an actual server upgrade, or they have just gone down, displaying the message from last time.
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
/kbin March update (kbin.social) angielski
I'm feeling a bit better. Starting today, I'll be returning to work as much as possible. This week will likely be spent catching up on tasks, replying to emails, reading overdue comments, etc. I also need to work with Piotr on instance infrastructure. I'll be more actively handling spam as well, but it's clear that we need...
Ernest needs to quickly delegate or this instance will quickly die (kbin.social) angielski
I appreciate that earnest made a post yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, saying that he is not dead and hasn't given up on kbin. It's not on this magazine, so I'm not sure where it was since this seems to be the most appropriate one, but in any case....
RE: Is Ernest still here? (kbin.social) angielski
I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...
Over 5,000 games industry workers have already lost their jobs in 2024 (www.videogameschronicle.com)
The Day Before developer resurfaces to blame failure on "hate campaign" (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
RTR#49 On-site work (kbin.social) angielski
The instance may not be functioning properly for the next few hours. We are working to identify and eliminate the errors. Sorry for that....
Valve says "technology doesn't exist" yet for full Steam Deck 2.0 (www.eurogamer.net)
Starfield group fixing Bethesda's bugs say their job is tough as mods feel an afterthought (www.eurogamer.net)
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002' (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/ajgMB...
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
Diablo® IV is coming to Steam (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Having trouble deciding what game to play next . which one of these games should i try (lemmy.world) angielski
Alot of the time I’ll be playing will be in-between calls at work so being able to pause any time is important. The only one I’ve played is god of war but I never finished it .
Is there an indie games bubble? (roadmapmag.com) angielski
Counter Strike 2 is surprisingly awful on Steam Deck right now (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski