Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc, 8 days ago

Eh I’m pretty happy with the upscaling. I did several tests and upscaling won out for me personally as a happy middle ground to render Hunt Showdown at 4k vs running at 2k with great FPA and no upscaling or 4k with no upscaling but bad FPS.

Dark_Arc, 8 days ago

I mean this is FSR upscaling that I’m referring to. I did several comparisons and determined that it looked significantly better to upscaling using FSR from 2K -> 4k than it did to run at 2k.

Hunt has other ghosting issues but they’re related to CryEngine’s fake ray tracing technology (unrelated to the Nvidia/AMD ray tracing) and they happen without any upscaling applied.

Dark_Arc, 21 days ago

I’m in like the opposite camp… But I’ve never been able to get past the initial learning curve of the game. Something has never clicked with this one for me

Dark_Arc, 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

People blame the sunsetting decision, but most people stuck around. Honestly I don’t think the stuff they sunset was all that good. The original planet designs were feeling tired. They have brought missions back as well… But it’s been too long since I played to remember exactly how they brought them back.

The actual issue in my mind is they’ve decided making things hard means giving it a lot of health and make it take almost all of yours in one hit. So the only things that are viable are people’s cracked builds.

Basically without a full team of good shooter players, even easy mode dungeons are out of reach. Things just do so much damage and have so much health, it’s just not fun. Everything feels like a slog unless you go look up a cracked build someone made.

Actually, not everything feels like a slog. The content that doesn’t, everything just dies without any challenge.

So the options to play are roughly:

• comically easy
• this will take forever
• this will take forever + 1 and hit like a truck
• this will take forever + 2 and you instantly die

With some content having only the last 3 options.

They added some new enemy types recently, but it just hasn’t been enough to really make the game feel refreshed. Like, Remnant II showed how to do this well, different enemies, different ways that they attack you, different ways to ideally kill the enemy (i.e. lots of weak spot variety), lots of different attacks for the bosses (and death is a matter of avoiding the attacks not being in a 12 hour fight), every bullet takes a significant chunk of their health bar, etc

The locations have also felt a bit underwhelming, but that would be okay if the fights felt challenging and rewarding … not just like various reskins of the same enemies with either no or way too much health.

Dark_Arc, 24 days ago

I do not understand why companies are choosing to make their own streaming services when they are just money pits that provide minimal benefit.

Because everyone thought they could save money by doing it themselves. It’s rarely that easy.

Dark_Arc, 26 days ago

Brighter Shores! It’s a new game by Andrew Gower on his new game engine (just came out last month).

It’s a point and click game similar to RuneScape that’s mostly a second screen game. It’s in early access and a lot will probably change in the coming months based on feedback (they’ve already confirmed they’re rethinking some of their combat design and adding action queuing).

Unlike RuneScape it’s been designed out of the gate to provide people with a way to engage without sinking a ton of time. You can do fully offline training in this game, so you can be gaining XP while you sleep.

The game runs like a dream, has a very well done sound track, tastefully simplistic graphics, and just generally is a cozy/feel good MMO with light humor and puns.

No micro transactions, generous amount of free to play content, and a $6/mo subscription for all content.

Dark_Arc, 25 days ago

If you’re interested, now is a good time to start playing. There are some limited edition hats being dropped for the holiday!

Dark_Arc, 1 month ago

There’s also github.com/OpenTournament/OpenTournament for those looking for something more modern (RIP UT4).

Dark_Arc, 1 month ago

Yes, they did give that exact example just with the opposite political framing.

Dark_Arc, 1 month ago

You should try Brighter Shores.

The original RuneScape developers and owners (i.e. Andrew Gower and his brothers) are back with a new game, at a new company, with an industry shattering $5.99/mo subscription price for all content.

No micro transactions, no pay to win, no outrageous DLC pricing, no bull shit … just a fun game with many similarities to OSRS but also modernizations, formula improvements, and lessons learned.

Dark_Arc, 1 month ago

I mean, fishing is more comparable to mining in RS2, there are other skills (typically refinement oriented skills) that have more down time between clicks.

Combat I definitely feel needs refinement. Though, I actually do like the fact that combat is not “I have a bow and I’m shooting something 1 tile in front of me and/or safe spotting.”

The skills are only trained in one area, but they have interactions across areas. You use resources gathered in the forest in town and in the mines. The weapons you make in the mines can be tuned to any other location (etc…)

Andrew does a pretty decent job of explaining the thought process here if you’re interested: store.steampowered.com/…/4442331835939160237

A lot of this is to solve the long time MMO issue of “new content is released but it’s only for high level players and long time layers in general have a ton of advantages in the new area.”

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

Or at least the bar should be much much higher. Like if you’ve invented the SHA algorithm… Fine.

However, if you’ve just invented “a way to purchase something over the network via a phone”… That is not patent worthy.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).

“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.

I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.

That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.

That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.

Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.

You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”

Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.

A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

Because graphics still sell games. You can do simplified graphics like Nintendo and still sell games, but lots of people want the photo realistic experience and the bar for that has gone way way up incrementally over the years.

youtu.be/GB20A8CitRU?si=ZN-V-FAnKjnxGHBs

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.

I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.

Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

I use Inoreader on both desktop and mobile (they have a very feature rich app, synchronize your experience up, and have a generous free plan).

Dark_Arc, 2 months ago

I’m happy to say, IMO, you’re still using the meta RSS client haha

Dark_Arc, 3 months ago

Possibly keep an eye on Diabotical Rogue… Definitely not what you want right now, but it has potential.

Dark_Arc, 3 months ago

The latest expansion genuinely did shake up the enemies. They still need to … change something. It seems like maybe they will with the next expansion changing how they present the story. We shall see.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

Typically live service games last a lot longer in terms of new content and updates. There are a lot of recent complete failures of live services though that didn’t make it more than a couple of months … they’re just bad games.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

That’s not really true… No closed source software that isn’t actively developed should be expected to last forever. Eventually the binaries will get to the point where nothing will run them.

You also can’t emulate Windows. Maybe you could virtualize Linux and use wine, but even that is a tall order for “forever”.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that’s very effective at preservation.

Hmm… I’m unaware of this, but I guess it’s theoretically possible. Still it’s a lot harder to emulate x86 + some graphics hardware than it is to emulate a Gameboy.

Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies.

Agreed, but it’s not a silver bullet and A LOT of stuff is going to be shaken up now that x86 is starting to be challenged. For a long time PCs have been entirely operating on x86 (which is arguably part of why Java died … the abstraction just wasn’t necessary). That x86 dominance I think may have given a false sense of security for software longevity.

It’s not even that it’s hard to port the games, but without the source code, it’s just not going to happen.

I kind of wish there were laws where source code had to be released after X years of inactivity, especially for games for the cultural preservation aspect. Like if you have abandoned a game and not released any new content (especially if you haven’t released even any bug fixes/have totally abandoned the game), after 10 years the game code must be released.

I don’t necessarily think it needs to be a release of rights, assets, or anything like that … but being unable to operate a game you’ve bought just because it was built for an older piece of hardware is 👎.

But live service is just purposely killing games that didn’t need to die.

Bad live services are killing (in many cases bad) games that didn’t need to die (and might have been better if less time was spent trying to force something to be a live service that didn’t need to be one).

There’s a big difference between Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League and say… PUBG, Fortnite, Hunt Showdown, WOW, RuneScape, etc

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

I don’t think Fortnite can be meaningfully preserved anymore than say, Cedar Point can personally.

Live services can also certainly transition out of a live service state; or if the source code is disclosed (per my previous statement) they can be transitioned by the community after they seize operation. Building a game like Fortnite or RuneScape just doesn’t work without it being a centralized “destination.” The experience is about the large number of players as much as it’s about the game play.

Live services are more of a destination than a product … and for match made competitive shooters and things of that ilk … I think that’s fine.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

We’ve had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.

Interesting question… What competitive games from the last 10 years would you consider to be not live service games?

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

I’ve never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that’s about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they’re a far more “couch friendly” genre.

They also don’t tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where “it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map” and server costs of “it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match” that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.

Live Service:

• steamcharts.com/app/578080
• steamcharts.com/app/1172470
• steamcharts.com/app/359550
• steamcharts.com/app/440
• steamcharts.com/app/230410
• steamcharts.com/app/2357570
• steamcharts.com/app/594650

Never adopted a live service (but a big name):

• steamcharts.com/app/1517290
• steamcharts.com/app/1238810
• steamcharts.com/app/1238840
• steamcharts.com/app/1238860

Live service is worse for the shooter genre on “eventual death” … but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven’t and are still trying to compete with the “buy the new game for a premium price tag” (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can’t be charted because they reorganized their game as “everything is under ‘Call of Duty’”.

The fighting games on steam don’t even come close to any of the shooter numbers.

Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or “play with a well known group of friends”), e.g., steamcharts.com/app/289070 and steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost “live service-like” levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).

Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy … but there genuinely is something to them when they’re done well. They’re often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.

Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this … They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made “extreme changes” vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA’s best chance is “try again next year” at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.

If you’re frugal you could’ve played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would’ve needed to spent $180 minimum.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

It’s not really beta quality. I hopped on with my brother just to see if I was interested in the game (we both played black ops, the original back on the PS3). It was actually extremely stable and pretty fun. He noticed a UI glitch but … it’s not like there was even a feedback or bug report button.

It’s just early access with the disclaimer there might be something wrong… Which isn’t that different from buying a release day game anymore unfortunately.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

For me, I couldn’t get behind the battle royale thing… It’s just too much pressure. Don’t get me wrong, I like intense gunfights, but for a win to be only when you’re the last team standing of everyone on the server using only the random loot you found … that’s a lot of pressure.

On the graphics front, things have changed a lot over the years:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JvbebYIorcA/sddefault.jpg

I actually think it looks pretty decent personally and it keeps getting better. It’s not Hunt Showdown: 1896, but it’s still pretty nice visually (just more of an animation than photorealism focus).

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

but the performance just keeps getting worse

That’s just the nature of PC gaming; as time goes on games look prettier but run worse.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

No it’s literally how software works. New hardware comes out, you do more with the hardware, old hardware can’t do the new things and runs worse.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

I firmly believe that publishers, in an attempt to cut costs, tell the game studio to not prioritize performance

So, I agree there’s some amount of that. You also have things like Dice (the studio that makes Battlefield) where they lost their veteran development team to poor internal management.

There are also some (now fairly large) studios that are just absolutely terrible at game performance like Studio Wildcard (makers of the Ark games).

while trying to rely on software like super resolution algorithms, to make their games run.

There’s definitely some of this too. I believe the bigger issue is that games have gotten so much bigger and more expensive to develop. Making and shipping a game that runs with 4k textures, dynamic (possibly ray traced) lighting, variable rate shading (instead of manual level-of-detail systems), etc is a lot to get right.

A common thing with any software development is to take advantage of newer abstractions that make your life easier. For instance, I’m fairly confident Hunt Showdown 1896 has moved to some form of variable rate shading instead of level-of-detail (in pre-1986 when you zoomed in on some of the trees they’d literally change shape when they flipped between the models in the worst case; I’ve yet to see that post-1896). Not having to make a bunch of models and having the software “just figure out” good lower-poly models for things that are sufficiently far away is presumably a huge productivity boost. Similarly, when ray-traced lighting becomes the standard a lot of game development will get easier because setting up lighting won’t (per my understanding) require as many tricks. In both cases, it’s both less work for developers and a better result for players with the hardware to run it.

In some instances they reused old game Engines for a new and bigger game, for example with Cyberpunk, Stellaris and Elden Ring.

Old engines aren’t necessarily a bad thing (if they’re appropriately updated) and I think people focus too much on the engine vs the game play. Take Starfield, I’ve heard a lot of people complain about it on forums for copying a similar formula as some of Bethesda’s past titles.

The issue almost certainly isn’t the engine used, but the design choices associated with using that engine (and the decision to not make new things work).

Linux, Darwin (MacOS), Windows, Chrome, Firefox, etc are all long running software projects (as are Unreal Engine, Unity, Source Engine, CryEngine, etc). Occasionally, someone throws out their current product entirely and replaces it, but normally there are incremental upgrades made to provide the new functionality that’s desired.

Smaller developers are doing everything they can to make a game run smoothly. The best example for this is Factorio.

The performance profile of something like Factorio vs Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, or Hunt Showdown is extremely different.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

Those things normally get shutdown for copyright related claims though, no?

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

We’ve been through a lot.

This was the final straw for me. Asking for feedback about MTX and then leveraging that to raise prices. Even if that’s not what they did, their timing is beyond stupid.

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

Good to know!

Dark_Arc, 4 months ago

but I want to see it implemented before I believe any of it is real

As you should, they’ve let players down many many times before (myself included) making promises for things to come that never happen. A prime example is the player owned house rework that was promised in one of the original Rune Fests.

The tick rate improvements and client side prediction they demoed … they said they may never happen; however, let’s face it, they could happen they’re just unwilling to commit to hiring the developers that would be needed to make that happen.

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago

A problem I’ve personally run into is a lot of reviews focus entirely on MTX/monetization and this can turn into a fun game getting thrown through the floor because the corporate side decided to put in a bunch of optional purchases.

I’m not saying monetization doesn’t matter … but sometimes I really don’t care … like Lego 2K Drive has a bunch of MTX bricks I’m never going to use and the option to grind them out with a lot of play time (another thing I’m not going to bother with). Those reviews almost definitely really hurt the sales of the game (which I did end up getting and it’s actually quite solid in terms of PC kart racing) and probably killed any chance of it ever living up to its potential.

Artifact Classic (the card game by Valve) also got review bombed to hell about monetization (and that one I get a little bit more because you had to buy card packs) … but if you actually play the game (and you can for free now with all cards unlocked)… I found it to be a really fun card game. I and all my friend stopped playing when Valve announced they were just going to redo the whole thing… I suspect a lot of people did the same thing which caused the chain reaction of “nobody’s playing our game… this looks hopeless…” and the eventual abandonment of both the original game and the rework Artifact Foundry (which I … didn’t particularly care for). The people I know that knew about the game that didn’t get the game said the negative reviews basically immediately disqualified the game from consideration for them.

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago

I wish they released the engine like they used to. IdTech whatever version we’re on now has to be epic.

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago

I don’t know if they really do… I mean they’re derived from it, but it’s pretty unlikely any of the quake code is in CS2 or the latest call of duty.

Quake is definitely a legend though just for creating the PvP FPS scene.

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

FPS by far … Most of the time I’m uninterested or minimally interested in a game’s story. If I wanted to read a book or watch a movie… That’s what I’d be doing.

If I’m playing a game it’s normally because I want a challenge or something to do that doesn’t involve being totally idle … and also doesn’t involve a ton of thinking.

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago

I feel like even Valve Anti-Cheat can handle that level of concern though, no?

Dark_Arc, 6 months ago

Old School RuneScape potentially fits this description

Dark_Arc, 6 months ago

Yup… It looked like a really bad attempt at photo realism in 2024. At this point you either need to use cartoon-like graphics or some sort or actually pull off the photo realism.

It was pretty obvious that game was never going to reach either of those marks.

I was definitely excited for the prospect of a Sim’s competitor, but this wasn’t going to be it… I think they did the right thing pulling the plug.

Dark_Arc, 7 months ago

No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.

I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!

Dark_Arc, 5 months ago

I missed this! I just created a community for the game !diaboticalrogue if you want to keep tabs on it.

Dark_Arc, 7 months ago

I mean, the purchasing model was fine. It was like any other game store. It’s just it was a new service and lots of people already had existing libraries they wanted to take with them … which just isn’t how that sort of thing normally works. Particularly with the way Google had it designed so that you could play purchased games without a subscription.

Dark_Arc, 7 months ago

That sounds like a really cool title for a game if nothing else!