Well, part of why they want to follow the latest monetisation trends is that the idea of a subscription-based game is a much harder sell these days than it was 20 years ago. The landscape is just different.
Not surprised. I had a friend who was all hyped up about this years ago and I didn’t want to tell him then that it looked like pipe dream that was never going to pan out.
The MMORPG genre is dead, you have the big existing titles that exist simply because they’re too big to fail or already have an entrenched user base, but I just can’t see a new release - especially a new IP - breaking into the market.
Been hearing about this game for years now, even played an early test build of it a year or two ago. Glad to see it’s shaping up, and glad to hear he has a small little team working on it now and is not just a solo developer. What he was doing on his own was impressive, but it still felt like a massively overambitious project for a solo dev, and when I played the previous test build I was left with the feeling that it was a lot of cool gun-related things in a neat setting in search for an actual game.
I’m glad to see the trailer include both some new stuff like seemingly emphasising the survival elements more with hunting and fishing and also developing the setting further and leaning into the post apocalypse thing. Not the most original concept, but at least it’s looking more like there is an idea of what the game wants to actually be now, gameplay wise.
I meant in video games, of course. In films there are a ton of examples. I usually go for Ingrid Bergman’s accent in the Murder on the Orient Express movie, although that one - while accurate - is slightly exaggerated for effect, I think.
(…) complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don’t sound like that here in the Nordics)
If you want a better viking game with much better Nordic sounding accents, Banner Saga is out there. Though there is only like 10 minutes of voice acting per game - but what is there is good! They used an Icelandic VA studio to make sure it’s authentic.
The best swedish accent I ever heard was that one blonde knight in Witcher 3 - Blood & Wine. Which is funny as I don’t think it makes sense for the setting at all, but accent voice direction in that whole expansion is a complete clusterfuck with zero consistency.
Well, that’s the nice thing about using AI for this, she can have unlimited dialogue - as can anyone else in the game. You can talk to anyone and have full conversations with them, and they have a working memory too. Your companions have unique personalities and unique random backstories and even some character development.
Well, I guess Hip is a named character so she will have a fixed, lore-accurate backstory.
I didn’t realise you were an Anomaly enjoyer! I love that game too, between the mood and the atmosphere, the hunger/thirst/sleep system along with the FDDA animations and of course Alife I think Anomaly is one of the most immersive games for me.
I’ve actually been working on a mod lately that uses AI to produce dynamic dialogue for NPCs in Anomaly, which leads to even more immersion.
Immersion is tricky, because it is an incredibly subjective thing. At the end of the day, what immersion means (I think) is that the “veil” separating you from the game is incredibly thin and transparent. Think of it as wearing glasses: if a game is un-immersive the lenses are dirty and scratched. You can still see whatever is in front of you, but you’re constantly aware of the fact that you’re wearing glasses. An immersive game is like wearing perfectly pristine glasses: you forget you’re wearing glasses at all and can just take in what’s in front of you.
An immersive game to me is something that successfully manages to both suspend disbelief and sustain the illusion of a living world, letting you mostly forget that it’s a pre-programmed game you’re interacting with. I always found something like the STALKER games great for this, with their dynamic A-life AI scheduling really selling the whole living world feeling.
They’ve done it forever, it’s been part of their initial concept for ages. Lots of the actual old games on there (as the name Good Old Games is derived from) are pre-patched to work on modern machines without setup, often also including community patches if there are any.
I mean, I agree with you in principle - domain names can matter. I remember people were similarly concerned about lemmy.zip back when it launched since .zip links on the internet can be… not so great.
In this case though I don’t see it, I think indie-ver.se is a great name and super fitting.