[alt text: a semi-surreal meme image on a plain white background. Two characters from Dark Souls are saying, “My lord, we have absolutely ESSENTIAL lore information for the player. Should we make a cutscrene for it?”. They are looking at Hidetaka Miyazaki, who has the From Software logo emblazoned over him, and he is...
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
It was just… bad. The particle effects didn’t make things look good they just made it hard to see anything, the plot was stupid, everything was stupid really.
It’s the same bullshit as return2office, management has its interests which include armies of fungible resources they can track effectively via closure velocity.
It’s why big organizations are less efficient but they’re what we have because of marketing inertia (people assume big companies produce better product).
To preface, this post isn’t a bash on gaming. I’ve been gaming since I was 3 years old on the NES. It was (and still is) a part of my life. That said, while I turned out ok in the end, I would play games every free moment I had. I’ve spent thousands of hours in World of Warcraft during the TBC-WotLK era. My pattern would...
When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note...
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
Totally worth it, they spent unimaginable resources trying to make those architectures programmable, now that’s all almost free, they just compete for published titles and maybe some secondary features.
MSFT was in a better position because they didn’t need to spend those resources, and more importantly the devs didn’t either, they could write windows games then port them over easily. Now it’s just as easy to do that for ps4/5. All that matters is nailing exclusives and looking cool, plus some marketing which msft sucks at.
Exclusives are terrible for the customer, but they’re a way for corporate to control the market, which is a good for them.
We’ll see, but I was on the dev side of that nightmare, Sony would have gotten crushed the next gen, they barely made it out of ps3 with their extended developers in tact, nobody liked programming the cell, everybody loves the current system.
But it does reduce competitive surface area, so we’ll see. Nintendo is winning now because they didn’t follow the same path but they did innovate, more than almost anyone before.
My question is: What innovation do you see that could have been worth a unique architecture to Sony’s developers?
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to use the phone metaphor, every improvement in one phone rapidly spread to others, so even budget phones have features better than the top of the line phones a decade ago.
Now game developers can go back to focusing on games, and console makers can focus on trying to make better consoles without having to blow ludicrous resources on supporting developers or just making the thing work, they just rely on amd making better chips which seems to have worked.
I totally get where you’re going, and I agree we need that macro-innovation as it were, but games were a nightmare of hacks and bullshit for decades, I think a period of consolidation is good right now, then we can start the whole race all over again with crazy new tech.
How China’s first AAA game Wukong Became One of the Fastest Selling Games in History (thedroidguy.com)
850M$ revenue on 70M$ budget sounds a huge success.
the secret recipe (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: a semi-surreal meme image on a plain white background. Two characters from Dark Souls are saying, “My lord, we have absolutely ESSENTIAL lore information for the player. Should we make a cutscrene for it?”. They are looking at Hidetaka Miyazaki, who has the From Software logo emblazoned over him, and he is...
Concord is going offline beginning September 6th (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
Game Dependency Graph of The Curse of Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1997)
Baldur’s Gate 3 just made the future of Xbox Series S a bit more uncertain (www.polygon.com) angielski
Larian’s RPG may have set a tricky precedent for future chats with Microsoft
GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles (www.gamespot.com) angielski
"It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing," says guy who makes money selling the thing.
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Is One Of 2023's Best Games, Don't Turn It Into A Weapon (kotaku.com) angielski
The success of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG has kicked off a fiery debate about game development, AAA costs, and players’ expectations
As a recovering video game addict, what is the best way to avoid 'the jitters' when exposed something that reminds you of gaming?
To preface, this post isn’t a bash on gaming. I’ve been gaming since I was 3 years old on the NES. It was (and still is) a part of my life. That said, while I turned out ok in the end, I would play games every free moment I had. I’ve spent thousands of hours in World of Warcraft during the TBC-WotLK era. My pattern would...
Backwards compatibility is the best feature of Xbox, and I don't understand why Sony is so far behind on this
When I got the XSX recently, it was so I can play Starfield when it comes out. That was basically the only reason. I did not realize the extensive backwards compatibility that this thing has. But since getting it, I’ve been playing FF13 trilogy, Fable games, Dragon Age series, Lost Odyssey, etc. Basically all games of note...