GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.
Tbf, I don’t think Apex Legends was completely new either. It refined and combined a lot of good ideas in other games into a battle royale. I think they’re trying to do that with this type of hero shooter vibe, having taken some ideas from Rainbow 6 Siege and a few other games. Doesn’t seem to have worked as well this time.
I’ve found the same thing with survival games camera controls. The originals were made with odd camera angles in mind for scenic purposes for better or worse. Tank controls mean that your direction doesn’t change when the camera suddenly shifts.
Fatal Frame had a median scheme that was tricky to work out but useful. You move relative to the camera. If the camera changed, but you didn’t change your thumbstick direction past a few degrees, your character would keep moving in a straight line.
For a few years now, a team including myself headed by CheeseyBurrito has been working on a decompilation of Fatal Frame 1 (PS2) With the eventual goal of porting it to PC....
Ichiban walks into the Abandoned Replacement Protagonists bar, and sits down despondently alongside Apollo Justice, Raiden, and Nero.
It’s saddest that this is a repeating pattern. We get a great sequel where the beloved protagonist gives a sendoff like “This is the new generation’s story now”. And then the next game is a remake of one of their past games.
There’s a gacha I have a lot of fun with, thanks to some very detailed animation work and visuals, but I haven’t spent a penny on it and don’t intend to. You really do have to be acutely aware of every effort to get you to spend, and how much those efforts can inflate. Gambling fallacies, sudden power creep, etc.
I’m still sad this is my one game that doesn’t run well on Proton. With development winding down, I can only hope for some modder to work out what the occasional slowdowns are.
I’m going to guess that decision was based on the failures of the recent 2.5D PoP games, which were well reviewed but barely advertised (and oft compared to indie games)
I appreciate that the other games, even if they’re 90% power fantasy, retain a tiny bit of that nihilism in the story of each game.
3: Jason becomes totally disconnected from society and almost feels like he can’t come back from the killing. 4: Help the rebels, and they become despots just like Pagan Min. Give up on the rebellion at the beginning of the game, and even Min admits he’s tired of the cycle. 5 I won’t even spoil, definitely a bit less of an artistic message even if it’s a huge twist.
Alright, I’m guessing there’s going to be some ready conspiracy theories; but the article suggests this was likely caused by a malfunctioning boiler. That’s bizarre and unfortunate, but hopefully didn’t lead to anyone getting hurt.
Remember when Apex Legends was shadow dropped? It’s a risky move for such a high-profile game to skip all the pre-release marketing hype entirely, but it paid off, and it’s clear why Respawn went that route—“photoreal PvP hero shooter” was an eyeroll-inducing prospect even back in 2019, so letting the game speak for...
I’m ambivalent on it, but definitely not negative. I hate that everyone watching big game shows is hoping to see “Ratchet & Kratos 7” or “Dark Lore 5” or “Metal Gear Sonic 11”. Especially since, as you know, every decent mid level game developer these days has been fired at least once by morons with MBAs, and so the industry must make new IPs from the scattered devs.
Its art doesn’t speak for itself, I think on multiplayer it usually doesn’t. We’ll have to see how it feels later.
I think the pistol and SMG are intended to feel weak, to push you into other weapons that take more interesting use. For instance, half an SMG clip into a soldier could instead be one launch of a barrel from the gravity gun. Notably, you only see those soldiers after getting the gravity gun.
If you’re referring to the early cops, about half of them are around some tricky environmental kill, like an explosive barrel. But, I’ll grant there are times you’d desperately spend a magazine to land headshots with the pistol. So, I guess you’re not wrong.
I will say that even then, it was missing a bit of “acknowledgment”. Kleiner and Alyx don’t even question where you came from or what you should be doing now you’ve suddenly arrived.
Some of that could be as simple as, if Gordon was non-silent, have him wonder questions while wandering C17: “What the…how long have I been gone? What the hell happened to Earth?”
I still like its facial animation more than most Danes. They had tools that even set up random NPCs to have full lipsync and expressions for minor lines, without a mocap studio. Most AAA work these days doesn’t have that, or they dedicate such animation to when you’re in a zoomed in view to receive quests.
It tends not to give you enough to last an entire fight with the ammo you have on hand, but usually if you’re pushed into an arena, it will have ammo and health laying around - and not the light stuff, either. The game was coming from a Doom 3 era when ammo searching was not just a known habit, but could be done during a fight to keep you moving, so it’s perhaps an implied assumption they made from the time. But, teaching players anything while they’re under fire is going to be a very uphill battle I suppose.
That feels like a bit of a hate train on SOMA that’s not really relevant. We often dislike character idiocy, especially when it’s our player. But speaking protagonists can be done well - Dead Space 2 made the move, and even ported it back when they finally did a DS1 remake.
Perhaps the only major issue with using environmental storytelling to give City 17’s base exposition is that the game is both a sequel, and intended as an entry point. I remember as a kid playing HL2 (with very little knowledge of HL1) and as soon as I saw the aliens in gas masks corralling everyone, really wondered what sort of story I missed in the first one. Leaving people to figure things out is definitely cool, I’m just offering ways to point out clearly that you, the player, didn’t miss anything key, because in today’s media deluge, often the reason for that feeling is because a story is slapdash and poorly written - as opposed to simply hiding the details in plain sight for the player to find.
Interestingly, there are some notes in an art book where the G-Man originally gave a longer opening speech to explain what’s happened in your absence, but they removed it. Overall it was probably the right move, but I’m curious how it would have felt.
I mean, Kleiner saying “I had expected more warning!” is a sort of mixed surprise. If he’s been gone for 20+ years, the natural reaction I might expect is “What…? That’s impossible! We all thought you were dead! Or lost in Xen forever!” Heck, even Kleiner’s reaction to the “slow teleport” you and Alyx take late in the game is much grander. “I had…given up hope of ever seeing you again!!”
Something I just realized is that this fits exactly with the “Only happens in production” issues many coders run into.
Anyone in the studio would obviously install all the DLC, since they need to test its contents. They’d also run habitual tests without the DLC to verify it’s not necessary, and that it passes basic checks. But, they wouldn’t do that often. Same with how, say, many webapps run internally without the 80 MB of tracking scripts.
Good games tend to be made by big teams. That’s why when you hear about some auteur recruiting his own random team for a game, it ends up being a failed venture usually.
AI is often an effort to replace large teams with small ones, churning someone’s half-baked thoughts into code and art. The result is rarely human and inventive; and in a lot of ways, it tends to show in the end product.
There’s an unfortunate dilemma there. When someone makes a Darth Vader or Joker character, many people like them, but some like them without a trace of irony, and genuinely feel that the Empire should kill those horrible rebels and that chaos should reign in Gotham. And that gestures America.
I avoided that game based on the name, but from what I gather, it was misleading; pretty much every sect of that school is full of jerks (sadly including the nerds, who often cater to their own victim complex), and your character is just facing the larger of them.
The Quake community regularly performs map jams. While I haven’t tracked the efforts of the previous ones, this jam results in a large, nonsequential set of maps on offer, combined with a full conversion that creates new enemy variants, and remixes Quake’s known weapons into new forms (dual nailguns, a rebar cannon, a...
Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley....
I’d really like to see a set of publishers/creators that take a hard line stance on this, and reject contracts with, eg, Speedtree, if they insist on a dedicated startup video.
Kudos to Arc Raiders. When I boot it up, aside from an EAC launcher logo, it goes straight to Speranza.
Totally agree with this one. I just posted about Quake Brutalist Jam 3, but it still annoys me that any use of the multi-missile launcher cuts into my time with the grenade launcher, and so on.
Dead Space 3 gave me an aneurysm because they just have one resource: “aMmO”.
I don’t even mind the oft-irritating “Ammo full for Pufferfish Launcher” notification, because it’s at least a reminder I should use the Pufferfish Launcher more often.
Something I’d really like a group to be brave enough to address is the fallacy that “DEI” or “Diversity” initiatives stand in direct opposition to games featuring “Adult” or “Sexy” content, or that they encourage censorship.
We’ve had a wave of pretty bad games from AAA spaces recently, many of which have been uninteresting to anyone. Some people sadly latch onto these themes, and the fact that some of these developers promoted diverse spaces, to suggest that it’s a deliberate worsening of the media space.
In fact, tons of indie devs, as well as LGBT game devs, specifically hope to make adult content. They can suggest new ways of making characters attractive in ways that can still be inclusive; those devs even get harmed by censorship actions. Yet so much of the male-isolated booby-go-boing crowd has been cowed into a simple understanding of battle lines, wherein everything related to diversity and fairness stands against their fetishized hobby.
As long as people are able to stay civil, I’m definitely happy to dive into this subject, because it interests me a lot and I’m eager to see if anyone feels they learn something from it.
if the creator wants his characters to look a specific way then so what?
Valid sentiment, but it gets weird when “the creator” is not just one auteur, but a big network of interconnected developers. One may “really want a hot springs scene with detailed looks at the female lead’s boobs”, while much of the rest of the devs are uncomfortable with it, think it will hurt narrative pacing, or even think it could hurt sales.
I do think it’s hard to argue that sex un-sells, but there’s at least some slight data to suggest it. Two games come to mind. One is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the other is Nier Automata. Both games sold well and had dedicated fans - but both also had a decently large number of players that saw what they viewed as “cringey anime hornbait” and decided to ignore it - even if the game would’ve readily contained other features they might have enjoyed - intricate JRPG mechanics and DMC combat. I don’t even view that audience as “prude” - they just generally held the sentiment that the sexiness was so out of place, it was distracting from the core themes of those games. In N:A’s case, it was a much smaller minority, but you could see in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it kind of toned sexualization back.
if you’re upset that there’s an unrealistically attractive male or female in a game, respectfully, go fuck yourself. There’s millions of video games that you can also enjoy without your weird preconceived notions that video game characters need to be as attractive or less attractive than you personally are. Video games are a fantasy for a reason.
THIS, I think, is the biggest misconception. Although this is hard to cite with data, I feel reasonably confident in positing a theorem: Aside from an absolutely tiny, vanishingly small base, many of whom don’t even play games, I don’t think anyone * is upset at game characters being “too attractive”*. I watch quite a few female streamers, and by and large, they’re happy and eager to play games with gorgeous women in them. On many occasions, they don’t even care too much about sexualized outfits.
Where I think there’s the most silent sensitivity, and perhaps game publishers haven’t quite parsed this thought, is in objectification. captainlezbian kind of covered the thought - how sex should be humanizing and treat the sexy characters as people, with agency. When an attractive character is an “award”, or never speaks, or their decisions/actions have no effect on any story events, that can go from losing people’s attention to even making them feel uncomfortable - like their gender is “not allowed” in the medium.
Dead or Alive: Sexy, not always quite objectifying. The large-breasted characters range from master assassins on missions, to secret weapon projects, to girlboss CEOs bent on world control.
Bayonetta: Quite the opposite of objectifying. Bayonetta’s domineering personality, even when she’s stripping nude, evokes control over the characters and space around her.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: VERY objectifying - would be even if Pyra had smaller breasts. Pyra is cute, but she’s incredibly subservient, and basically relies on Rex, the male lead, to take charge as leader and protect her. She’s constantly oblivious to the more pervy characters in the cast. A lot of classic anime at least skirted the latter issue by having female leads highly aware, and beat up the lechers near them (even if the viewer benefited from their exploits). I don’t mind saying this was too much for even me. Again: Agency.
get some massive bodonhonkaroos in there, give that guy a massive bulge and a 18 pack, who fucking cares it’s a video game.
I think where this can get confusing is that, by and large, women aren’t quite seeking the same overtly excessive appearances in games as men. If you want some examples, search on Steam for what “Otome” games look like, and picture your male leads in a superhero game looking like that - complete with open button shirts and pensive, slightly-girly attitudes. Uncomfortable? Yeah - that shows what you said, about how not everything will appeal to everyone.
We’re lucky in that women generally are not sorely offended by women in games having breasts (Le Gasp!) but there’s neat ways of making them attractive for all players that don’t instantly produce an “ICK” from a sizable number of players.
The real silver bullet I’ve seen is customization, which is often a win-win. I often point to Stellar Blade as a good example; the default outfit for Eve fits the sci-fi fantasy very well. Then, you unlock a LOT of extremely sexualized, even objectifying, outfits, as well as other “cute, functional” outfits. I don’t mind saying I dived into the former, while many people less interested in sexualization enjoyed the latter. Generally, all parties involved appreciate Eve’s attractive figure and long hair.
In a world with a bit more trust, I feel like this is what blockchain/certificates would be for. Basically someone would make a signed statement from a lawyer or witness that “This user with email address xyz is over the age of 18.” Contains no other data, and the notary would be trusted not to collect any more than needed. Then, websites could verify the signature against a public key from the firm.
I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles. /s Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA. There is already a switch in my household, but the price along with...
I doubt it’s a common cause, but my impetus for boycotting Nintendo was Garry’s Mod. They sent their lawyers after animators, who actually get people more interested in their games. Their litigious nonsense caught up with them that time.
Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”....
I need to admit that in the past day, I asked an AI to write unit tests for a feature I’d just added. I didn’t trust it to write the feature, and I had to fix the tests afterwards, but it did save time.
I really don’t see any usefulness or good intent in the art world though. Sooo much of those models has been put together through copyright theft of people’s work. Disney made a pretty good case against them, before deciding to team up for a shitty service feature.
It’s sad Clair Obscur lost that indie award, but hopefully the game dev world can take that as a bit of a lesson.
I still haven’t seen anything neat from any models that were certified following only legally permitted content. That said, to my knowledge there’s very few of that variety.
Training off of the work of current artists serves to starve them by negating the chance companies hire them on, and results in circumstances where AI trains off of other AIs, creating terrible work and a complete lack of innovation.
People suggest a brilliant future where no one has to work and AI does everything, but current generations of executives are so cut-throat and greedy to maximize revenue at the top, that will never happen without extreme, rapid political and commercial reform.
Many artists do starve, and many others succeed. Not sure what your point is, or why you want to shift the needle more in the former direction.
AI can’t compete with artists if they are not generating content to serve for the model. Even if the models could achieve consistent art, it would mean we get no new themes or ideas. People who would normally invent those new styles will start by repeating what’s existing, and will be paid for that.
Many nations provide grants for art, because they recognize it’s a world that doesn’t always generate immediate, quantifiable monetary return, but in the long run proves valuable. The base expectation is that companies recognize that value and uniqueness in fostered talent as well, rather than the immediacy of AI prompts giving them “good enough” visuals.
If the models are in fact reading code that’s GPL licensed, I think that’s a fair concern. Lots of code on sites like Stack Overflow is shared with the default assumption that their rights are not protected (that varies for some coding sites). That’s helpful if the whole point is for people to copy paste those solutions into large enterprise apps, especially if there’s no feasible way to write it a different way.
The main reason I don’t pursue that issue is that with so much public documentation, it becomes very hard to prove what was generated from code theft. I’ve worked with AI models that were able to make very functioning apps just off a project’s documentation, without even seeing examples.
The example I gave was more around “context” than “model” - data related to the question, not their learning history. I would ask the AI to design a system that interacts with XYZ, and it would be thoroughly confused and have no idea what to do. Then I would ask again, linking it to the project’s documentation page, as well as granting it explicit access to fetch relevant webpages, and it would give a detailed response. That suggests to me it’s only working off of the documentation.
That said, AIs are not strictly honest, so I think you have a point that the original model training may have grabbed data like that at some point regardless. If most AI models don’t track/cite the details on each source used for generation, be it artwork on Deviantart or licensed Github repos, I think it’s fair to say any of those models should become legally liable; moreso if there’s ways of demonstrating “copying-like” actions from the original.
The only thing I’d ever want analyzed in gaming is the messages that developers convey. And, there should be no “overbearing head agency” be it the government or publisher, that controls that message. Take it just as a suggestion between artists:
We should encourage good morals and themes in the messages our games convey. I know it’s typical for gamers to say they don’t care about story or premise in games, but even if one isn’t laden with cutscenes, they often communicate a concept even just with level and character design, providing objectives like rescuing hostages, collecting loot, or getting stronger.
I don’t necessarily think violence, on its own, makes a message. Showing scenes of World War 2 can convey a lot of things. It can tell you that war is horrible, or it can erroneously tell you it’s fun. I think if you’re expecting maturity from your audience, you can acknowledge that while the game is fun, it’s not trying to foster that feeling in players.
The main thing that leads to violence in the real world is anger. Media can teach us violence is a form of communication, a tool, but anyone using it has a message, one rooted in a lot of hatred. I might even argue there’s some cases where that anger is both deserved and needed, but potentially misdirected; and other cases where both the anger and the action - violence - is 100% needed. A Ukrainian soldier fighting Russian invaders that are trying to kill innocent people does not need to be taught that “violence is bad”.
Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why....
You’re inventing further wording than what’s written. The game is hosted on Steam, and that’s the entity that sent the takedown notice - those are just the facts. Plenty of people blame Visa more than Valve for those actions.
None of that negates anything I said. Everyone is aware of the context of that debacle, you were replying to someone that wasn’t even drawing a conclusion from it.
The wording at the top level was “No one’s saying anything about any of it, which feels like that’s on advice from their legal counsel.” It seems like the main confusion was on the implication of the term “No one”. I inferred from the reference to legal counsel, they’re mainly talking about storefronts, not gamers, being silent. As such, I’m guessing you were eager to show how loud people (gamers) are on the issue; but that probably wasn’t the intended meaning.
In fact, I took the initial claim to mean the opposite; with Github taking action against Adult games in the same form as an attack that took place on Steam, it’s suggesting a common perpetrator. But I could safely assume most commenters here know Steam is not owned by Microsoft; hence that blame automatically goes outside of that domain.
Even if you didn’t take that implication, you can just look at the simple statements made; “Hey, this is like that other thing that happened. What’s in common here?”
There’s a bit of merit to that. After a purchase, a lot of people are wary, and likely to magnify any changes that happen immediately. They need a period of stabilization to dissuade fears, and assure that “nothing will change in the long run”. Even this article is highlighting what happened around a month ago over a period of time, because it wasn’t apparent in the moment.
Right, but if you try to follow a more strict definition that mostly follows 2D games developed by a single person, even their publishing framework ends up encompassing dozens if not hundreds of people. It’s become hard to make that definition strict. At the very least, very few notable games are made by the really big labels: Ubisoft, 2K, EA, etc.
I’m pretty stuck on this one. cluesbysam.com/s/help/01c315cae125?state=bEzQ-AAA…The hint has me pointed towards C5, but only based on a hint about edges. There are 5 unknown people on the edges, not counting two in the left corner of which one is innocent and one is guilty. So I have no idea what its clues are trying to say matters here.
Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Highguard | Official Launch Showcase (www.youtube.com) angielski
looks too much like apex legends imo
Congress members voice 'serious concern' over Saudi-led EA buyout (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Why adding modern controls to 1996's Tomb Raider simply doesn't work (arstechnica.com) angielski
Fatal Frame 1 Fan PC Port and reverse engineering effort in the works. angielski
For a few years now, a team including myself headed by CheeseyBurrito has been working on a decompilation of Fatal Frame 1 (PS2) With the eventual goal of porting it to PC....
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties Demo Available Now | RPGFan (www.rpgfan.com) angielski
Ubisoft initiates colossal restructure to become a more 'gamer-centric' company (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Arknights Endfield disables Paypal payments after players report unauthorised transactions | GosuGamers (www.gosugamers.net) angielski
This is a compelling reason for why you don’t buy microtransactions on launch day....
Warhammer 40K: 'Space Marine 2' Unveils The Techmarine set for a free update (www.belloflostsouls.net) angielski
Ubisoft has cancelled 6 games, including the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Ubisoft Randomly Gives Far Cry 3 A 60FPS Current-Gen Upgrade (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Explosion reported at Rockstar North studio as police cordon off GTA 6 development building - Dexerto (www.dexerto.com) angielski
Welp that’ll be another year or so.
Hero shooter Highguard reportedly didn't even pay for the Game Awards slot that's earned it so much preemptive hate—the showrunners thought it deserved the spotlight (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Remember when Apex Legends was shadow dropped? It’s a risky move for such a high-profile game to skip all the pre-release marketing hype entirely, but it paid off, and it’s clear why Respawn went that route—“photoreal PvP hero shooter” was an eyeroll-inducing prospect even back in 2019, so letting the game speak for...
Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game angielski
'More DLC = More FPS' — Monster Hunter Wilds Players Ask Capcom for Answers After Theory Suggests a Backend DLC Check Is Tanking Performance - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
"Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator (www.timeextension.com) angielski
Good to know, but sad that it has to be said.
Who are your most hateable video game characters? angielski
Villains/antagonists or otherwise....
Rockstar baulks as a Charlie Kirk assassination mission is created in GTA Online, bans it and censors his name, but there's more out there (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Quake Brutalist Jam 3 released (Map pack + full conversion) (www.slipseer.com) angielski
The Quake community regularly performs map jams. While I haven’t tracked the efforts of the previous ones, this jam results in a large, nonsequential set of maps on offer, combined with a full conversion that creates new enemy variants, and remixes Quake’s known weapons into new forms (dual nailguns, a rebar cannon, a...
Pet Peeves with Games? angielski
Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley....
Two former Polygon editors say they are launching Mothership, a new game publication, on January 26, to analyze games through the lens of gender and identity (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Facial age checks are now required to chat with anyone on Roblox (corp.roblox.com) angielski
Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
I like how this article does not talk about the anti consumer practices engaged in by Nintendo, that might push some customers away from their consoles. /s Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA. There is already a switch in my household, but the price along with...
Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult" (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”....
'It can be unnecessary - and even too much': Are violent video games like Grand Theft Auto 6 becoming too realistic? (www.bbc.com) angielski
Xbox Developer_Direct Returns January 22: Fable, Forza Horizon 6, and Beast of Reincarnation to be shown (news.xbox.com) angielski
Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why (www.404media.co) angielski
Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why....
Rockstar still hasn't offered a convincing reason for firing over 30 GTA 6 developers (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Clues by Sam (cluesbysam.com) angielski
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