Carighan

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I actually liked Beyond 2 Souls, too. Didn’t age well at all especially with the naked model allegations and all, but playing it at the time there were some intense moments in there.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Or maybe I am some kind of supercop… 🤔

Disco: Elysium really is an absolutely fantastic game. Hard to describe how much it moved the goal post for these games.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah what I was thinking, too. Someone stripped a bunch of long-deprecated old pipelines, but this is a nasty side-effect of it as the new pipelines all mandate that DRM being added.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Not all games need to be officially supported forever, tbh.

You can easily run your own server for it, so like UT99 or so, fans can form communities and play.

Basically, I’d rather them put effort into a Team Fortress 3, even though I know that’s of course utopian given we never got an HL3 either.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

It’s not like they’ve stopped selling those. This is interesting on a philosophical level though.

This would be clearly illegal as a software. But what if the hardware includes it? How do you even detect that?

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

But it’s your hardware doing this? Are 3D-headphones illegal then, because of the massive benefit to aurally locating your enemy? Are hall-effect analogue keyboards illegal, due to the configurable much much shorter actuation distance? Etc, etc. Once it’s in hardware, it is a really interesting discussion where you place the cut-off.

You can’t even go "Once it has to actually know which game you’re playing, as profiles already work similar in gaming drivers, plus importantly most 3D audio is per-game optimized.

(edit)
And come to think of it, DLSS or FSR are also AI-powered frame-per-frame image analysis to add output to the existing image.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Man, when even IGN drags a game such as this through the mud, you know you didn’t do well. Ouff. 😢

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Why would I wan’t more MS bs, if I don’t need to run 3D Max, MagiCAD or some god awful DRM raped software on my system.

Ignoring your eloquent wording, you want Windows - from the perspective of a device maker - because it ensures the easiest access for your buyers.

That’s a non-trivial point that should not be easily dismissed. Virtually everyone games on Windows. Virtually all PC-bound games are primarily developed for and optimized for Windows. If you make a hardware device, and you do get to pick the main OS you ship with, making it Windows ensures both maximum compatibility and a smooth transition from their desk-bound gaming to their handheld for your users as the UX is the exact same.

Sure, to power users is a downside. But those are also the ones who will figure out how to run whatever OS they like on it, and they’re also a very small number to begin with. While the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs before it were okay as power-user-centric devices, if this device type is going to be truly mainstream in a post-Steam-Deck world, then something like basing them on Windows by default is a quite real considering for a device maker, and a very natural one.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

The Lenovo with its mouse-like input is still the most interesting to me, next ot the Steam Deck with its dual pad inputs.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Imagine if exclusives didn’t exist and people could just access games they would like to play. Siiiigh.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Of course they “reset” the workers.

Not the entire upper and middle management which would save oodles more money if they slim down huge portions of that, nevermind not impact their productivity (much) and actually “reset” the part of the company that is responsible for their current woes.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

The Steam Controller is one of the best pieces of hardware I ever bought. There’s something incredibly chill about playing strategy games not originally meant for controller on the couch. I also genuinely like fiddling with cool setups and radial menus for it.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

So a good year to use a static avatar and a readable user name is what you’re saying?

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Well to any large company, main activity/product X is only an annoying thing they have to deal with. Their true product is share value, just like their true customers are the stock holders.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I wish they’d aggressively apply it to replacing middle-top management. The jobs that don’t add anything except a lot of money being siphoned off, anyways.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah there’s some oddities in how they mark devices compatible or not. For example my Lenovo Tablet seens Oxenfree I but not II.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

It’s the only way they can ensure it works, I suppose. They might need to control specific cookies and reported supposed clients depending on plugins, and so a packaged in-app browser for the login is easiest. Playnite does the same thing.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah after using both Playnite is better but GOG works a bit better as a ready made experience tbh. Both are great!

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah im sad China is so far ahead of curbing predative monetization than my own country is, now.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

And not only AO, if it included the same required gambling-warnings other gambling system have to show every time they so much as mention their name.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.

Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I’ll be honest, this seems… okay?

Like a worse Dead Cells but with a pretty pretty art style? Combat seems so-so, on the one hand it has some interesting mechancis that clearly try to ape fighting games (as they say), but on the other it also seems simplistic compared to, well, again, Dead Cells. Although maybe that’s just the early parts.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah I’m playing that right now, and I’m honestly massively impressed.

It is utterly boring and rote, in a lot of ways. It’s a 95% Far Cry (as in, it’s slightly weaker than Far Cry mechanically, which I didn’t think was even possible) in the world of Pandora. Some of Far Cry’s mechanics like the camps didn’t translate as well as the devs thought they would, plus the enemy AI is just bullshit, but luckily the game is easy overall as your longbow is extremely OP.

But, on the flipside, fucking hell does this game sell “Pandora”. More so than the movies, even the first one for the time it came out. Walking through and flying over the jungle is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s not just the texture/model designers that deserve a bonus payout: The actual jungle design is superb, too. And the level + sounds designers also created individual setpieces (like the trip up the rookery) that create the perfect feeling in that moment and are really memorable.

It’s in a lot of ways extremely well done. It’s also by Ubisoft and is a Far Cry reskin, which sadly massively limits how good it can be overall. I wish they had let the designers run wild and create their own thing. But it’s still an impressive game and far better than I thought it’d be, even if it’s all show.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Lae’zel and Shadowheart

This feels a lot more like the author is upset by the way these two were done, and is in turn projecting that upon “other gamers”.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Sure, but I’ve also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.

I’ll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it’s still easy to accept “Oh it’s because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!” as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it’s actually happening.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.

And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Of course, I’m not saying that it cannot be the case, but it’s also not something I’d leave just standing.

Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:

• First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren’t just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the “Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they’re unhappy”, it’s difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there’s 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn’t even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
• And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.

Again, totally not saying that it’s not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. “Gamers” is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone at the end of 1, because cheap emotional engagement trick.

Yeah but that’s the other thing, that’s how you get gamers to let somebody from their group go: You force an obvious “One or the other”-pick. I can totally see how we as consumers can more readily accept that than we can accept the very understandable part of Karlach leaving as that was not presented right in the moment you made the choice. It didn’t feel like there should not be any Option C at all.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I played it for a while between stopping EQ1 and starting WoW when that released. Fun game at the time, but the expansions took a lot away from the experience as they naturally muddled the idea behind it.

Still, an important stepping stone in the progression of MMORPGs, in particular to mass PvP.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

I’m genuinely more surprised that it was still being sold. Wow.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Because they don’t have the cult of personality of Mr Kojima.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Interesting that they are still going at it. I had assumed that like many of Amazon’s gaming forays it had been quietly shelved.

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Personally I would love if they made something based on FATE. I would have absolutely no clue how to do it in a CRPG, but I love the system for actual pen&paper.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Well…

• 15 million dollars
• "scale exponentially"

Pick one. 15mil is a brief sizzle in the modern market(s), tbh. Poof and its gone.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

True, although I would guess the central argument still holds water. Most of the “game” looks like an asset flip indeed.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Early Access is just “release”. Only the devs openly admit ahead of time the game is buggy and unfinished, and promise - as always - to fix it up and add the missing parts.

Often they do. Sometimes they don’t.

TBH it’s ultimately nothing but a shitty buggy release, but the honesty of making that known ahead of time buys a whole lot of goodwill. It should be the default, that any publisher releasing a game that is not finished - so most AAA nowadays - marks it as Early Access, openly declaring the unfinished part.

It’s also very different from a beta version, which is usually feature and content complete (otherwise it’s generally called an alpha). Early Access versions are often very early in the development process, they’re feature-complete-ish, but never or rarely content complete, usually just starting out on that. This works exceedingly well for games that need “just more stuff”, but can miss the mark on games that need underlying systems reworked as this ires the existing playerbase and splits it.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I’m talking to you Hello Games (No man’s sky), just don’t mess it up with upcoming ‘Light no fire’.

What messed up NMS was overpromise to a basically criminal degree. If this were a B2B-transaction, they’d have been sued to hell and back. There’s absolutely 0 chance LNF won’t suffer exactly the same fate.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Same, I got little enough gaming time, might as well play it once it’s in its best state and play something else before that.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

and they deserve the hate from the people

No meaningless dev of a meaningless video game is ever worth a witch hunt. As a consumer, you have better things to do with your time. Like in this case, digging around in your nose, watching paint dry, or pouring another coffee. All quality uses of time that aren’t the waste that is getting angry at these devs.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Sadly, legally, it ain’t the same.

That is important because in some jurisdictions “preorder” has legal implications and importantly, obligations for the seller. A kickstarter does not. Not yet at least, over in Germany there’s a discussion about whether crowdfunding is just a form of taking preorders (in the legal sense), which would grant customers the same legal protections then.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

You could cut the “2023” from that, and it’d be no less true.

I mean sure, this year’s ad-centric nature was particularly obvious, but come the fuck on, journalists/readers/whatever: Did you ever have any doubt, seriously, ANY doubt, that this is 100% ad-space? And if yes, how?! What part of this did you watch in what year that wasn’t just ad-space for publishers?

Carighan, 10 miesięcy temu

Playing this now, the game is not bad at all, it’s just… massively disappointing?

It is just a skin over a Far Cry, with a lot of mechanics weakened to make space for the skin.

That being said, on the flipside, fucking hell is it the prettiest skin anyone ever made for any video game to convert it into another IP. Pandora comes to live like even the second movie could not achieve it, and walking between NPCs and through the jungle is utterly magical.

I would argue that if you get this cheap and you like Far Cry and in particular Pandora as a world, go for it. It’s not bad at all. But do not expect anything but a watered down Far Cry (which, granted, is an achievement in itself 😂).