I mostly play new games, but I respect admiration for old games. It’s fun to see people speedrun old SNES games - but it’s disturbing to think an entire generation will just become inaccessible to history, even if a lot of the games in question were kind of bad.
I actually agree with you in the case of online multiplayer games - I don’t think the devs can keep them available forever. But when a game is singleplayer, like The Crew, it feels like planned obsolescence.
I’m going to agree with you, but only in the sense they hired more people than they should’ve, not that they should be firing people.
I really blame Telltale Games as one studio that demonstrated this issue in a microcosm. They had some successful games. Then they hired enough extra hands that they MUST make excellent games. Their next few games were not excellent. Then, everybody gets fired.
It’s hard to tell if this would have been the case in past generations. I think this only became true once we crested the graphical plateau where all games look “good enough” in HD.
I was very close to getting a digital PS5, but I still need the drive for my old PS4 games and movies. If I were just getting into Sony now though, I imagine the story would be different.
They can still kind of kill physical games with good service. The whole “honey rather than vinegar” argument.
That’s what happened with the PSVita. While overpriced game cartridges existed, most of its lifespan people were buying its games digitally which worked great for indie developers that didn’t have a budget for physical releases.
If a PC GPU is only slightly better than a console counterpart, typically its games will run slightly worse - since it loses the benefit of devs spending time optimizing for that profile.
Myself, I count the catalog of PS+ as an “exclusive feature”, plus it’s nice to play some of the PS4 games that struggled on a better machine. I loaded my God of War save and went from 30 to 60fps, which was great (sad that it was one of few games to offer PS5 enhancements in the PS4 version)
They do exist; but also constantly debate with stores like Steam about what can be allowed since Steam is ultimately much more visible. They make it murky with the occasional VN that’s “90% cryptic folk mystery, 5% romance, 5% visuals of non-consenting animated minors in the nude being victimized by a tentacle”.
Steam, for very understandable reasons, has waffled back and forth on whether to allow those games.
Much as I’ve come to hate Xbox, this could be the beginning of signs of monopoly - they don’t have so much competition anymore, so they can do what they want. Certainly doesn’t help that unofficial controllers have never been good.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
It is September now which means my wife has decided it is fall and time to celebrate 2 months of Halloween. Anyone have and spooky game recommendations?
After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that...
It feels like new games are just more of the same, with no real meaning. However I recently started playing “Return of the Obra Dihn” and love open ended deduction in it. It feels like I’m actually figuring things out by myself without being handheld through it. Are there any other games that don’t coddle the player that...
I remember distinctly Danganronpa’s problem with shock value.
I finished the first case of the third game, and thought “Wow! That was incredible! I hadn’t anticipated that ending at all!”
And then, once the dust on the case had settled, because of the effects of that change in circumstance, I had no interest in playing the rest of the game.
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.
The only Chinese game I’ve spent money on is a mystery game by an indie studio. And, in a bit of cultural irony, its premise is based on a famous Japanese franchise.
Don’t really intend to consider Chinese games much, or spend money on the F2P ones.
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
Funny thing is, I mostly agree with you, but in Epic’s case, it’s a launcher written by a company that’s 40% owned by a Chinese corporation. I can sometimes stomach running their executables while playing something, but not having it constantly running.
The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.
I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.
…Great, so you’re going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?
There’s an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?
It makes me wonder how it would feel as a game dev getting this deal taken to the extreme.
“Hello, human. I’ve come from the pits of Tartarus to offer a deal. You’ve just finished making a video game. My request is: Do not release it anywhere for 2 years. In exchange, I will give you 5 million dollars.”
I’ve been watching Falcom drill down on sexual harassment as a form of humor in the Trails series. Now that they’re remaking Sky, I’m curious how well they’ll handle having a female lead for once in a long time.
Put short, feminism is an important value in games for me - and shouldn’t be a high goal to achieve.
I’m certainly not expecting this game is amazing, but in terms of bringing a playable slice of a popular fictional world to life, I have a lot of respect for it. What I’ve watched doesn’t even fall too hard into the worst of Ubisoft formulas - and I would argue a lot of people can’t even identify what those are.
I don’t even expect to love it myself if I ever get it, but some of the hate towards the game seems so poorly formed and weird - stuff like “Looks like a mobile game” or “The main character is so ugly”. I can even get worries about it being a Ubisoft game, but just like EA, it seems like they do put out a game low on microtransactions every so often. I want to be sure they’re recognized for efforts when the game is decent.
The funniest part of Ubisoft hate is when every other open world game uses “towers” (a logical high-altitude system to increase map coverage), for instance in Zelda, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, etc, while every Ubisoft game is banned from using them now.
They honestly weren’t even a bad system in Far Cry. They designed the climb to use different mechanics each time.
It can be hard to encourage people to only do this for the obscure - and can sometimes lead to moments of “Witcher 3 / Factorio Unknown Indie Darling” moments. The dream is for threads like this to not contribute to successes that are already basically “lightning in a bottle”, but focus attention where developers haven’t seen so much of it.
Occult Crime Police is a fantastic free offering for those looking for a bit more Ace Attorney. It mostly follows the gameplay of Ace Attorney games, in which you investigate murder scenes involving strange, paranormal phenomena, and then discover contradictions in people’s witness accounts to uncover the culprit. It’s a bit easy, but maintains some great humor and charming animation production value.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
It did pop up in my feed when it was in development. I think the time travel is neat in concept but just becomes too hard to wrap one’s head around - and from what I remember, the core RTS elements were a bit lacking.
Surprised to see the downvotes (by which I mean, I’m surprised so many people know this, I’d never heard of it at all).
“Roguelike co-op game requiring close coordination” seems like a mega-fail by concept since I tend to think of co-op games as more relaxed. But, looking at gameplay videos, it reminds me of FFXIV raid mechanics in a simplified game format. I can see how that would appeal to some people.
Continuing this in the same thread as it’s a bit topical:
Are you a fan of Love Live! School Idol? Me neither! I basically knew nothing about it at all. Regardless, Gyakuten Live is an incredibly detailed cutesy Ace Attorney style game, in which the characters of the show gather for “school trials”. Though you may need to put up with a cutesier all-girl cast, and the stakes are much lighter and involve things like stolen possessions rather than murder, the mysteries end up having a surprising number of twists and even some heartfelt motives at the end. Features a fully custom soundtrack and LOTS of custom artwork, matched with some traditionally silly Ace Attorney humor.
So far, THREE cases are available, and each features a different prosecutor. The game’s page lists plans to continue up to 6 episodes.
In ItchIO’s standard, the game is “name your own price” - so you can choose to download it for free. It’s unlikely to come to Steam since it technically infringes on an anime/manga without permission.
One more coming if my AA recommendations are well received.
The worst part is, there are certain ways a top down spritework game can look unique, and even put some personality on the characters. But the classic NES RPG look just seems so arcadey and wrong to me.
I did mention in the rules, if it was good enough to actually be your game of the year, you can make an exception. (I’m trusting that doesn’t mean we see Baldur’s Gate 3 on top or something)
Adding one more to the Ace Attorney spinoff block:
Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane is a well-written fan spinoff of the AA formula, taking place in a fantasy universe where magic is real, but mostly the domain of the nobility. Trials are a form of theatre, where the nobility knows how to tip the scale, but your mentor knows how to tip them back.
It introduces some very enjoyable mechanics, in which knowledge of each spell’s effects and conditions constitutes its own evidence. Tyrion bears his own magical ability that lets him view the thoughts of witnesses. He is also accompanied by the defendant of his first case, a mercenary-mage named Celeste, who gets a lot of investigation banter with Tyrion, much like Maya and Phoenix.
Five cases in all, and none of them are shortened crapshoot cases, nor is there a downer ending; all the major threads conclude with satisfying endings, and the developer hopes to make a sequel from the world they’ve built.
Oh, and as is common for AA games, take a listen to “Eye of Horus”, the game’s equivalent of the “Objection!” theme when Tyrion nails a contradiction. The game’s soundtrack as a whole has some real bangers, for both the high points and the emotional pulls.
The indie scene has focused on a lot of SNES/NES-style retro franchises, but I’d definitely like to see a return to PS2 aesthetic, especially now that we can render those scenes at 60fps.
I recently played Psuedoregalia, and it was a lot of fun.
I own Deception 4 on PS4, didn’t know what the original was like. I think there’s a lot of cartoony appeal in luring people into elaborate multi-stage death traps, but it’s tricky to garner appeal out of more than just a lot of animation work for each variety of trap.
I’d really like to see another time-based drama similar to The Last Express. It had a lot of time-based events where you could run into particular passengers of the train in the hallways, and gained a strong sense of physical “presence” as people pushed past you in the halls using detailed rotoscope animations.
The Invisible Hours comes close - it’s non-interactive, basically letting you play as a ghost cameraman watching the mystery.
Not sure where the official announcement of this happened, but videos and discussions of the game are now finally allowed. The game is still invite-only, but expect to start seeing it all over the place now. Popular streamers are already jumping into it....
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.
Absolutely bizarre that a 1st party title doesn’t seem optimized for the console they’re developing for. This makes me skeptical the PC version will be optimized too.
I’m aware that the PS5 is low on “exclusives”. A big part of the reason I got it was for simple things like being able to run old PS4 games at higher framerates.
We’re past the diminishing returns on visuals for games; not to say games can’t look ugly, but with a decent art direction, the capabilities of current consoles are more than enough. That’s why Nintendo was still able to sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60.
True - I think I meant to refer to it more as a generational issue; many people haven’t upgraded to either current-gen console yet because they don’t technically need them. PS5 might have few exclusives, but Xbox has basically none. (Many of their heavy-hitters like Sea of Thieves still run on Xbox One)
After 350,000 signatures in an EU consumer rights campaign, Ubisoft is adding offline modes to The Crew games - but not the now-dead original (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Video Game Developers Are Leaving The Industry And Doing Something, Anything Else (aftermath.site) angielski
75% of all PS5 owners prefer Performance Mode according to PlayStation (www.kitguru.net) angielski
Demystifying the rumors that most console players only care about graphics.
Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling (www.theverge.com) angielski
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
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Sony Increases PS5 Controller Prices in US, Europe, and More (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
archive link
"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy" angielski
Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
Spooky Games angielski
It is September now which means my wife has decided it is fall and time to celebrate 2 months of Halloween. Anyone have and spooky game recommendations?
Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to fail? I can't see how it will work angielski
After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that...
Any good games that break the mold angielski
It feels like new games are just more of the same, with no real meaning. However I recently started playing “Return of the Obra Dihn” and love open ended deduction in it. It feels like I’m actually figuring things out by myself without being handheld through it. Are there any other games that don’t coddle the player that...
An important update on Concord - Being taken offline September 6th, refunds to be issued (blog.playstation.com) angielski
‘Be your own hero’: why video games are a battleground in the US–China tech war. (theconversation.com) angielski
Failing Manufacturers Are Pushing the Narrative That Consoles Are Dying, Says Ex-Xbox Exec (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
Civilization 7 dev on Ages system and series shakeup: "It's going to be the hardest thing for fans to get adjusted to" (www.ggrecon.com) angielski
Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 (www.remedygames.com) angielski
Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2 and bringing Control and Alan Wake to film and television
Classic Ubisoft: PS5 players to install an update and restart their save files from scratch due to game-breaking bugs for Star Wars Outlaws (nitter.poast.org) angielski
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Steam reaches 37 million concurrent-player record with help from Black Myth: Wukong (www.techspot.com) angielski
Star Wars Outlaws - Review Thread angielski
Game Information...
Star Wars Outlaws: Reviews are coming in (opencritic.com) angielski
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before angielski
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? angielski
For example, for me, I would love a new Populous game based from what was done in Populous 3. That, and a new SimCity based on SimCity 4!
Valve lifts NDA on Deadlock, streaming and talking about the game is now allowed. angielski
Not sure where the official announcement of this happened, but videos and discussions of the game are now finally allowed. The game is still invite-only, but expect to start seeing it all over the place now. Popular streamers are already jumping into it....
Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” (arstechnica.com) angielski
Avowed Runs at 30fps on Xbox Series X and S, Obsidian Confirms (nordic.ign.com) angielski
Absolutely bizarre that a 1st party title doesn’t seem optimized for the console they’re developing for. This makes me skeptical the PC version will be optimized too.