For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up “turtling”, dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible....
Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...
The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.
I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.
I’ve been playing it for a good couple months and I’m still nowhere near tired of it, I’ll actually replay the whole game once I beat it because it’s so much fun. Love the story and voice acting too. This game goes on sale a lot so I’d highly suggest getting jt for cheap and trying it out
I got the impression the writers had read a bunch of niche Marvel comics and wanted to impress with that knowledge. Maybe some fans of those characters actually enjoy that, but it didn’t flow well. I barely had any context for who this Hunter is, who Lilith is, and why they matter.
If someone says one thing and does another…people tend to trust the action, not the words. If sales numbers indicate one thing, it doesn’t matter what people say on social media.
Information originally from MinnMax’s Ben Hanson. There is an existing game used to describe this new game to Hanson as a point of reference, and all we know is that that game is not Hitman.
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
I feel like when developers have a good pedigree, they can apply their concepts elsewhere.
Blizzard hadn’t made a shooter before Overwatch, but definitely got it right in so many respects. Bloober team had some mediocre horror games, but was steadily getting better before they made the Silent Hill 2 remake. Valve made just shooters before Portal and then DOTA 2. Heck, easy to forget The Talos Principle, an existential puzzle game is made by the people who made “Uber DUMB MACHO SHOOTER Serious Sam”.
Oh yeah, and survival horror team Tango Gameworks making cartoon rhythm combat game Hi-Fi Rush.
I’d say even PC, in terms of hardware, has plateaued. Many PC gamers are staying on Nvidia 1080 and 1070 cards, because gaming just hasn’t moved up past that graphical level - and it really shouldn’t, because quite a few human eyes just can’t see much detail beyond then - and developer budgets quite often don’t catch up to make use of all that excess hardware.
This might mean we effectively stay with the PS5, or even the PS4 generation, for quite a long time, while still generating ideas with what we do in that level. Probably the biggest thing we have to do now is control gaming budgets better. Try watching the credits of any Ubisoft game, and think “Someone approved all of these hires.” Meanwhile, rewind to Half-Life 2 and they played through the entire credits of the game during the opening sections without it taking a half hour.
I’ve found that Steam reviews are especially useless for visual novels and games with anime girls. I am open to the concept of a visual novel, and really enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but maintain 99.9% of them are trash, with none of their excess dialog trimmed down. They all have reviews saying Overwhelmingly Positive though, because anyone who would take the chance to try that genre - a small segment of people - will enjoy it.
I also really wish Steam would implement a Helpfulness system for Guides, since most games have Guide pages that are just filled with meme posts, eg; “How 2 win: Pick OP character, enjoy victory”.
There’s no exact point in time at which “the aggregated reviews” are one finished article of news. One bootlicking review site will have its review of a game out in the first 3 hours to be the first place people read. Then, another detailed reviewer will spend a week investigating the game’s systems before providing a more nuanced review.
You can’t really gauge its Steam reviews because there are only 13(!) total so far, reflective of a game that has launched with just a few hundred players. 224, as I’m writing this article. Sub-Concord levels. Yes. Concord is a unit of measurement now....
Sorry, folks. We’re still working on the browser plugin that automatically hides/downvotes all social media content that raises the topic of Sweet Baby Inc. You’ll just have to do it manually for now.
Thing is, it is the same requirement as EA, Ubisoft, and to some extent, Valve.
Granted, I think those others have spread their legal agreements to more countries, which has been the main complaint. But they all get to track player data; I’m sure Sony only got into PC wanting that too.
How about the one at the end of Zelda: Ocarina of Time?
Having effects that shatter the framerate is, of course, a very undesirable thing for gamers. But something about it in the context of a sudden final boss fight against Ganon, placing his large figure against the thundering background, made him much more imposing in a way that might not really even be represented when playing the game in 4K on an emulator.
I’m reminded of a required minigame near the end of Star Fox Adventures based purely around button mashing. The requirement needed some dozen attempts when I was a kid and lead to strats involving rubbing a spoon on the controller.
I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.
It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.
And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.
I love that game and it’s the best RTS I’ve played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age....
While I am not an RTS buff, depending on your internet connection from this Mac’s location, Geforce Now could greatly expand your options (basically most Windows games). You would be playing the games on a cloud server (and could switch to local saves if you ever get a Windows PC)
I’ve been pretty vocal about my annoyance with the roguelike genre. I even have the tag blocked on Steam so they’re never recommended to me - my hope is that Steam shares metrics on tag-blocking statistics.
But, I would guess there are enough fans of them to keep being made.
I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.
That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.
What exactly would that entail? I “own” Hades, thus I can depict Zagreus in my own works, as his likeness is my property? I’m allowed to copy the game to a dozen thumb drives and sell them on the street?
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
I’m able to keep these games around because I’m pretty good at ignoring FOMO and microtransactions. I don’t need everything. One fun skin that I like when I’ve already enjoyed the game more than I’ve paid? I’ll consider it. But I don’t need everything from events - sometimes they’re just a good reason to play it together with friends at that time, like when the carnival is in town.
Still, there’s enough games out there that no one really needs to consider those types of baited experiences, especially if you know you’re susceptible.
So I just read this book on history of games called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” and was fascinated by the chapter on The Witcher 3 and mostly how the team put in so much thought and care in every single side quest. And seems that there are a lot of moral decision to be made on each adventure. So I finally decided to give it a...
I’ve been playing a bunch of Rusted Moss lately. It’s a Twin Stick Shooter Metroidvania, which is appreciably different from the Hack and Slash type I normally play. Getting used to mouse-and-keyboarding a platform heavy game took a bit. And boy are there platforms....
Funny thing is, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Metroidvanias, but…never enjoyed Symphony of the Night. There’s so much forceful encounter repetition, so many dead end items that don’t actually help you “unlock any doors”, and it’s so easy to get into a rut of wandering the castle unsure where you can go next.
That’s the thing. I even remember trying to use a guide, but it’s difficult to work past all the “Here are 18 secrets that don’t do anything you can get from the beginning” as well as all the bits you can do out of order. Locating the part of the guide that gives you just enough to keep playing on your own is really difficult.
Many other Metroidvanias are sort of more clearly delineated between story beats, or major powerups you’re meant to get in order, all of which allow you to go places you couldn’t before.
I’m really frustrated with how almost every new game these days is being forced into this “live service” model. It seems like no matter what type of game you want to play—whether it’s an RPG, shooter, or even something traditionally single-player—you’re stuck with always-online requirements. And for what? It adds...
I genuinely fault gamers for some of this too, though.
There’s a very small indie game out called “Liar’s Bar”. It’s simple and fun. But, there were still people in forums savagely complaining that the game’s pointless XP system didn’t save correctly after a match - and that it didn’t have skins/emotes to earn for investing time into it.
There’s also MP games I play that I find fun, where I see popular, level-headed streamers complain that there’s been “nothing new” in its past two months. For most players, this wouldn’t even matter because they’re not able to play it nearly as often.
Then there’s games like Back 4 Blood, the late-grown attempt to reinvigorate Left 4 Dead’s magic. For those who don’t know; the game is still fully playable right now. It’s still fun. The developers just don’t add more to it anymore. Yet, as soon as they made this announcement that they were moving on to other games, there were conclusive, prophetic statements out about “Why Back 4 Blood DIED” as though the game is completely gone.
It’s wrong to claim that publishers moved to the constant-update, live-service model forcefully in their own decision-making vacuum. People (maybe not even the people in this thread) asked for this.
Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.
Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.
I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.
Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.
It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.
Battlefield 2042 is $60 right now. One of my friends on Steam plays Battlefield 2042 and I thought hey, that would be pretty cool to play with him. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much because that game came out a long time ago and was extremely poorly received and like, I’m sure it would be really easy to buy that game or...
As well as OP’s problems getting dud keys, I would warn that key resellers often contribute to the pickpocketing industry.
Tourist gets lost in Indonesia, kid grabs his wallet. In the time between then and when the tourist calls their bank, the kid buys as many legitimate keys of Game XYZ as he can using the tourist’s credit card, and sells them to G2A.
The bank refunds the fraudulent transactions, but even if the key retailer (eg, Greenmangaming) reports the transactions to the game dev, the dev is often pressured to not revoke the keys since it just leads to poor press off later customers that believe themselves “legitimate” for spending money on the game.
Sites like isthereanydeal.com give more legitimate tracking info and avoid key-sharing sites; the copies sold were obtained directly from publishers. They can also give price history to give you an idea of whether the game will go on sale again soon.
There’s still a bit of market force, but it comes in the form of other game developers.
Imagine you went to the grocery store, and saw Hardin McCombsky’s Super-Premium Dry Seasoned Cheese was $1000 a wedge. How ridiculous! How do they expect us to pay that much for that cheese?
Only…Shaw’s Bargain Dry Cheese is $4. And it’s not the same thing - but it’s still pretty good.
Basically, this kind of thing works out in many other industries. Sometimes on rare occasion, one producer makes things MUCH better than competitors and can demand a much higher price because no one else comes close.
To give a more game-relevant example, BattleBit is $15 and compared favorably to Battlefield. In other cases where there’s no competitor and the developer hasn’t lowered their price for sales, it may be because they’re confident they did good work and made a good game. Factorio is famous for this.
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.
To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.
I’m always surprised Ubisoft gets so much flak when other developers are doing much the same thing.
That said, my main annoyance with Tsushima is: You’re not a hero. 99% of side quests end with the people you were helping ending up dead, and possibly some other nameless NPCs rescued. It just feels tragic.
It’s a perpetual issue where it’s easier to code in 20 more enemies than 2 or 3 more innocent, living people to have conversations with.
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all....
I feel like the anime art style can make women of any age look pretty cute - which makes it hard for me to understand why they choose to make all of their combat-experienced, leader-professionals just entering high school or even earlier.
Dana is some sort of friggin leader-priest, and hasn’t even hit puberty. Japan is so weird sometimes.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, Volume 1. Mostly played streaming to my TV via Steam Link, but also played a bit on Steam Deck. I think this is an English dub of the MSX version. This isn’t the NES version. It was an excellent game for its time....
If you like the random irrelevant conversations of Metal Gear, you might like Tales of Berseria. It’s basically a band of pirates, lead by an edgelord but with many people that are very world-traveled, so you get a lot of encyclopedic explanations of why the world is the way it is, or what kind of pet they’d prefer. Certainly much less happy-go-lucky conversation than the rest of the Tales games.
If nothing else, it is kind of fun that they’ve merged universes a bit.
In Watch Dogs Legion, DedSec is contacted by the Assassin Order who needs their help taking down Templars that are working with Albion - basically merging protagonists/villains of both series.
Ghost Recon has also previously guest starred Sam Fisher and operators from Siege.
The Lutris launcher has helped me successfully play purchased Ubisoft games well. It sucks to rely on third party tools, but that’s much of what Linux is based around.
Easy to forget both Sony and Microsoft had nothing to do with gaming previously. Even MS had terrible inroads in spite of games for PC being written in DirectX.
I felt like Amazon and Google had pretty good chances. It was only due to terrible direction both managed to screw it up.
Same for me. I enjoy the Hitman games, but they have a bit more guidance towards suggesting possibilities for you.
I’d almost like it if I could investigate just as a master hacker that can skip the breaking in portion to try checking XYZ company’s records while sitting at the crime scene, instead of going down a 2 hour rabbit hole at risk of being caught to realize “Oh, that was the victim’s ID, not the killer’s, so nothing I’m investigating has anything to do with the case.”
The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.
It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.
I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.
But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.
I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.
Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression angielski
For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up “turtling”, dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible....
Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? angielski
Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...
World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store (lemmy.world) angielski
I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...
Marvel's Midnight Suns is criminally underrated angielski
I’ve been playing it for a good couple months and I’m still nowhere near tired of it, I’ll actually replay the whole game once I beat it because it’s so much fun. Love the story and voice acting too. This game goes on sale a lot so I’d highly suggest getting jt for cheap and trying it out
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Team Disbanded After Critically Lauded Platformer Fails to Meet Expectations - Report (www.ign.com) angielski
Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’ | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Information originally from MinnMax’s Ben Hanson. There is an existing game used to describe this new game to Hanson as a point of reference, and all we know is that that game is not Hitman.
'It Has Plateaued': Should We Be Worried About Console Gaming's Future? (flip.it) angielski
Honestly the Switch 2 is the only future console I have any excitement for.
OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score (opencritic.com) angielski
‘Unknown 9: Awakening’ Arrives To 200 Steam Players, Poor Reviews (www.forbes.com) angielski
You can’t really gauge its Steam reviews because there are only 13(!) total so far, reflective of a game that has launched with just a few hundred players. 224, as I’m writing this article. Sub-Concord levels. Yes. Concord is a unit of measurement now....
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - PC Announce Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Coming to PC January 30th, 2025.
Expedition 33 Dev Confirms $50 Price Is Correct, '30+ Hours of Main Game' (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
The Mario Party Stigmata (lemmy.world) angielski
Oblivion Horse Armour dev looks back on hated DLC – “We had no idea what we were doing” (www.videogamer.com) angielski
Are there any recent-ish single player, complete games that are similar to Rise of Nations and would work on Mac or at least on WINE? angielski
I love that game and it’s the best RTS I’ve played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age....
It's a Good Time To Be an Indie Game Fan (www.youtube.com) angielski
TIL Stein Gate is also a game angielski
Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase (www.cgmagonline.com) angielski
My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them angielski
After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...
Currently downloading The Witcher 3 for the first time. Got any advice for me? (lemmy.world) angielski
So I just read this book on history of games called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” and was fascinated by the chapter on The Witcher 3 and mostly how the team put in so much thought and care in every single side quest. And seems that there are a lot of moral decision to be made on each adventure. So I finally decided to give it a...
Until Dawn's PS5 debut 28% weaker than Sony’s 2024 disaster Concord (www.truetrophies.com) angielski
Rusted Moss is pretty good (Metroidvania) angielski
I’ve been playing a bunch of Rusted Moss lately. It’s a Twin Stick Shooter Metroidvania, which is appreciably different from the Hack and Slash type I normally play. Getting used to mouse-and-keyboarding a platform heavy game took a bit. And boy are there platforms....
I'm tired of every game being live service angielski
I’m really frustrated with how almost every new game these days is being forced into this “live service” model. It seems like no matter what type of game you want to play—whether it’s an RPG, shooter, or even something traditionally single-player—you’re stuck with always-online requirements. And for what? It adds...
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects (www.ign.com) angielski
Why does the PC gaming industry still use such deceptive pricing? angielski
Battlefield 2042 is $60 right now. One of my friends on Steam plays Battlefield 2042 and I thought hey, that would be pretty cool to play with him. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much because that game came out a long time ago and was extremely poorly received and like, I’m sure it would be really easy to buy that game or...
Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time angielski
Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...
Shower thought, traversal in open world games have turned from game mechanics to loading screens angielski
3 big ones recently, this year was God of War Ragnarok, FF7 Rebirth and Jedi Survivor...
Ghost of Yotei Will Feature a Less Repetitive Open World (wccftech.com) angielski
Good stuff. I didn’t get far in Ghosts of Tsushima because the open world felt very samey, but if they work on that I could probably try the sequel.
Day -10 of posting a screenshot from a game I've been playing until I also forget to post screenshots angielski
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana for PS Vita. Fishing edition. Some random fishing pics I grabbed. I liked the fishing part of the game. It even slightly contributes to the story and progress if you catch them all....
Day 1 of someone finally posting screenshots from a screenshot-worthy game, until I forget to post screenshots (lemmy.world) angielski
Day -8 of posting a screenshot from a game I've been playing until I also forget to post screenshots angielski
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake from the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, Volume 1. Mostly played streaming to my TV via Steam Link, but also played a bit on Steam Deck. I think this is an English dub of the MSX version. This isn’t the NES version. It was an excellent game for its time....
Ubisoft Says That XDefiant Has Fallen Behind Expectations (insider-gaming.com) angielski
"The father of PlayStation" says everyone at Sony thought the PS1 would fail when it was first pitched (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Shadows of Doubt v1.0 is Out Now! (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening angielski