Katana314

@Katana314@lemmy.world

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Katana314,

I was always grossed/weirded out at all the social media presence wanting this game to fail. I agree it seems to suck out of the gate, but I’m never happy about it. The world needs more good games.

The suspicion I have with 3v3 is they know it feels empty, but had little choice due to performance issues, since effects/CPU usage scale with the number of players. If they keep optimizing, maybe someday we see 12v12 as our Heavy, Engineer, and Pyro gods intended?

What is the definitive way to play certain games? angielski

To clarify, if I was introducing someone to the Diablo series for the first time and told them they'd have to start on the first one. I wouldn't want them playing the bare vanilla version. There is a Bezelbub mod out there that gives the game lots of QoL improvements, you'd be thinking you're playing a build of Diablo 2 before...

Katana314,

In the time since Quake released, common rendering systems and resolution options on monitors have changed. ID’s solution to put it back on Steam was some gargantuan monolith wrapper that might’ve used Unity or something, and ties to an online ID, so that it could release on consoles. The open source community’s solution was to take the original, open-source engine release, and port it upwards. Playing through the recent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a map pack using a set of reinvented weapons and altered enemies, they recommend you use the “ironwail” source port, which even has a native Linux build.

Games you really want to play, but can't or won't? angielski

Diablo IV, for me. I love the Diablo series and just a bit ago, I sank 2 hours down to get my necromancer character up and set in Diablo II Resurrection. I have Diablo III and its expansion too, but they're online only and I almost can't be bothered to go through that. I've beaten it a long time ago....

Katana314,

Not quite the same dillema, but I have a similar issue. I have many singleplayer games I know I want to finish, but when I start my vegout state, it often defaults to a few known multiplayer games, even knowing I’ve had many sessions that leave me infuriated.

Katana314,

I love the story of Final Fantasy XIV, but it can easily categorize as “One of the most expensive singleplayer games of all time”. On top of buying the expansions, you’ll need to pay for each month you play; and unless someone’s really speedrunning, that will start to add up. Worse, for a first timer setting up their account, their website and payment system is really stuck in 1998, making giving them money an obtuse task. And, while the story has its great moments and excellent side content, a depressing amount of it is extensive polite dialog with just simple quests where you move to a location and right-click on someone. I’ve finished Dawntrail, and am glad I experienced it, but I can’t blame anyone who sees it all as beyond them.

Katana314,

My issue was, I did not feel the expected experience of “Each loop, you learn something new.” It was more like, every 7 loops, I might get into the thing I was repeatedly trying to enter; and then it might just be a bunch of random ancient messages that don’t teach me anything. On top of that, I really hated the ship controls, especially when they veer AWAY from the autopilot path to pull me directly into the sun. If the game had been remade without any physics system, and simple direct puzzle mechanics, I might’ve enjoyed it more.

Katana314,

I stopped Nier Automata midway because it felt completely awful. Then I was sternly motivated by someone to give it a full go and finish it all the way, and it got EVEN WORSE.

Stellar Blade, though, made the gameplay very enjoyable; and its writing, while following a very similar theme, didn’t feel nearly so excessively ultra-grimdark. It kept some core reveals for close to the end (I guess unless you were paying attention to what few audio logs amounted to more than just “They’re coming…! Agh! We’re all dead.”) but I liked the dilemma it posed.

Katana314,

I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.

Katana314,

I think Valve does get some say in the amount and timing of sales. It’s something they need to control to arrange the big seasonal sales, and something publishers must agree to, or set an acceptable range, when first signing up.

Katana314,

Sure, you could say that, but Windows is also a general distribution. Much as people say they’d like a “Gaming OS”, it should be usable for everything else too. Bazzite wasn’t necessarily “incapable” of the other things I tried to do with it, but the UI remained a bit obtuse.

Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship (www.polygon.com) angielski

Dispatch’s release on Nintendo platforms today was poised to be another testament to AdHoc’s tremendous success with the point-and-click superhero workplace comedy, but news of a platform-specific difference has overshadowed much of the excitement for fans hoping to play the episodic series on-the-go. Instead of celebrating...

Katana314,

I recently published my novel, and at the last minute I had this panic about what was appropriate. There’s one bigoted character who calls gay people “f***ot” multiple times, as well as many characters that drop F-bombs on numerous occasions. There’s a (semi-magical) event similar to a mass shooting, many references to torture, and someone’s hand is chopped off. To be really safe, I put a content warning on the first page just to make some of that clear. Surely, that puts it a level beyond the Young Adult region, right? But…possibly not, given what I tend to hear offhand of some series.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

Other cases that have happened relate to failure to upkeep services needed to access content. Companies stop supporting devices, close down servers, etc. Many consumer rights orgs fail to protect in those cases, but they could easily defeat any measure to introduce a conscious, intentional, mandatory monthly fee.

Katana314,

On Linux, running an exe isn’t often as simple as “wine frog-fracker.exe”. It’s usually “proton PREFIX=~/steam-proton-10/ TRICKS=b DXIMPL=1.7.8 blah blah … frog-fracker.exe”

As a result, Linux gamers tend to have launchers even for hobby games they downloaded. Arcade launchers for emulated games are especially common now.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

What’s the bribe price for “serious” concern?

Also, the journalist writing the article may wish to wear some armor on their neck.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

As awesome as that is, I’d be excited for FF2. Much like Silent Hill, I think the sequel is where the series was at its best.

Good news is, in this case it seems like FF1/2 weren’t too far apart in basic engine/apperance.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

ChatGPT, generate for me a press release that will excuse the firing of another 10,000 employees.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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)

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

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...

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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?”

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

Autocorrect has been extremely vicious today about anything that’s not in a 20-year-old dictionary.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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!!”

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

I think this still matters in a long term.

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

Most complex: Jimmy, from Mouthwashing
Simplest: Curly, from Mouthwashing

The Monster, and the man that tacitly okayed him because he was scared of confrontation

Katana314,

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.

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...

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

This is why I’d almost rather linear games that teach one core mechanic rather than “Build your character the way you want them”.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Instead we get this Orwellian mess.

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...

Katana314,

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.

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”....

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

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.

Katana314,

This is it, but it’s been long enough it’s likely worth repeating the exercise: lemmy.world/post/19056210

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