Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.
Let’s say that I’m a game developer, and also a terrible person. After beating my game, it shows a victory screen that says “You know, Hitler might have been right!” Everyone will shit on the game; and that’s just normal player reaction.
Now, it’s easy to predict that no one would be so negative towards giant exposed breasts - except yes, plenty of people are. For all the porn-obsessed pervs out there, tons of people just want to enjoy an action adventure game without cringing distractions.
Don’t believe me? Look at Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The game lost a bunch of its potential sales to players that might enjoy a sweeping JRPG, but couldn’t stand frequent boob/butt shots of its overendowed and subservient female main character.
There’s potentially some cloud-based options for this, if someone doesn’t want to maintain a gaming device.
Basically, it seems like Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games like The Sims 4 and Minecraft using a constant video connection to an Xbox server. If I’m right, these are in fact the mouse/keyboard version of the game. Probably not as moddable though.
It’s not a great option especially considering the subscription, but it sometimes feels more hassle-free depending on the user.
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
No matter how much hobbyists liked selling their games back to GameStop so the store can mark them up 500%, I have always hated that the industry of used games punished releasing fantastic short singleplayer games much much more than perpetual 2000-hour microtransaction live service games.
That crowd of gamers absolutely contributed to the fall. The general distrust of digital is acknowledged, but if people were just paying low/moderate sale prices for each SP game and keeping them, instead of paying used prices, we’d probably have fewer publishers moving this way.
One ethics quandary is AI child porn. It at least provides a non-harmful outlet for an otherwise harmful act, but it could also feed addictions and feel insufficient.
Hello, I guess everyone knows the current state of AAA games in general, so I am looking into other game markets. I have looked into indie games , but while I do like it, I feel the budgetary constraints and dvelopment limitations are a limit to indie games....
Since you mention FPS and open world, you could try some of the Far Cry games. AAA but often fall out of public eye fast. They’re all the same but do what they do pretty well.
Another interesting AA is In Sound Mind. Shooter-puzzler about a psychiatrist trapped in the minds of his patients.
Haven’t played either remakes, but I feel like the brevity (and, at its time, novelty) of the story/scenes in the original made them a bit stronger. Some of the dramatically lengthened scenes have kind of undershot their impact.
Plus, with text speech and tiny gestures from 3D models, your mind was filling in the details your own way, which could actually work well sometimes.
There are some very good games out there that have survived this; including most of Valve’s greatest games - Half Life 1, 2, and Team Fortress 2. Remains to see if the same can happen with this team.
I think my first was Majora’s Mask (I joined the N64 age late) and I’m the same. I wasn’t even committed to buying “new Zelda” until I saw they were upping the difficulty and having players be more self-reliant, and I loved it. I still can’t categorize the exact mode of fun people associate to “dungeons” compared to wide-open exploration.
Worse, it might depend on licensed infrastructure. Maybe a company can stand giving away their proprietary server, but they can’t legally give away a library toolkit they purchased a $300,000 non-transferable license for. That kind of middleware is extremely common in the industry.
It’s been a challenge for devs to find ways to make each weapon pickup rewarding without constantly having ATK number go up.
Division 2: Every spare weapon can be dumped into the Specialization research for that weapon type. If not, it probably has unique weapon mechanics that are interesting if nothing else
Zelda TOTK: All weapons break, so even a duplicate of an old weapon will let you keep swinging that weapon type
People pretty often completely understate the Vita’s popularity/lifespan. Less than the 3DS for sure, but early metrics were stupidly counting hardware sales when it was moving early to digital.
In Japan it stayed popular long after the USA stopped talking about it.
As much as this seems like an obvious ask now, I feel like there’s a lot of tightly pressed popular indie games now where this would be impractical, and require constant maintenance to have a “private server” version ready for the game’s end of life.
Take Helldivers 2. Their lobby system (the ship) is wrapped up around this online representation of the global war effort. Sure, there’s ways to change the game for a simplification with a Join Server By IP system, but that’s UI development you’d have to do while the studio still has money to do it - before some decline towards expiration. Often, it would have to somehow elevate priority above other bugfixes and expectations that are taking charge during the popular phase, especially since it will involve the core networking problems.
So, like anyone, I want this; I found Knockout City fun and it sucks we don’t have it anymore. But realistically, I also understand how this situation can happen.
That’s true; I tend to think of a private server hosting a single game session of 1-4 players, but I haven’t interacted with private reimplementing of large community interactions. Generally, the commercial implementation would involve many connected servers, so it’s perhaps a bit more complicated than giving a separate address in a launcher option, but becomes less of an excuse overall.
That said, while the game is alive and well, the only motivating reason for that option’s existence is to support piracy of their game. Depending on how much they care, it’s something they’d have to keep under wraps in a development folder until the day the game dies out.
What would be cringingly terrible, but entirely possible, is if Will DID record lines for his character, but content pipeline faults/laziness or programming errors mean it doesn’t play ingame.
I even feel like that same circumstance has happened before…
I saw this same thing with games like Dead Space 3. They included a cash shop, very likely hard-pushed by some asinine executive. But, you could tell by playing the game, the majority of developers likely tested with that feature off. Was it a fun game? No, but resource starvation was not the reason for that.
Basically it feels like the hands trying to microtransact for singleplayer games are not the same as the ones designing those games to begin with. It still deserves negative attention, just nuance.
Wouldn’t that mean the reviewers were starved for fast travel, and would have thus complained about it? That seems to be the narrative a lot of people are suggesting - that the DLC makes the game playable.
Unless I’m misunderstanding and reviewers got infinite fast travel.
“They” is far, far, far too encompassing a word. If you’ve worked in any organization such as this, especially these days, they involve so many different companies (yes, more than one studio works on a game now) with so many different teams all under a publishing studio whose head may never have even played any of this genre of game.
So, a developer in one studio is often just trying to make a good RPG in their debug build (and insists no/light fast travel for world-immersion reasons), and only hears over the grapevine “Wait…they took the complaints about no fast-travel and made it a DLC? That sounds terrible, gamers will hate that.” Multiple people across the credits can have varying intentions.
Feels a bit like if they had DLC for ammo in a Resident Evil game. The design of those games is very clearly intended to be around partial ammo starvation, to get you to aim better, choose varying weapons, and sometimes run away. But, I can imagine a small team of publishers deciding “People want ammo? Let’s let them buy it!” It’d be very easy for players to presume the base game has been made worse as a whole, and that opinion will become hard to quantify - unless very nuanced reviewers can just pretend the DLC doesn’t exist.
I definitely prefer the world in which we have unions and better worker rights, but I am starting to be aware of that world’s drawbacks.
Take a look at the great pyramids of Egypt. Take a look at classic anime, filled with intensely detailed high-framerate animation. These are fantastic works that, in some way, are made possible by people that are working far, far longer than a healthy work day for probably mediocre compensation. It’s almost lead to a zeitgeist where many games have not reached the height of the 360/PS3 era due to a mass of brain drain in development - thousands of really talented developers focusing on their life plan rather than passions.
In a utopia, one day we’d have high-paying employers that can truly willingly rally the greatest minds, but I think too many studios and publishers are growth/profit-minded to really get there.
There’s awesome art made under fair working conditions, but I can’t imagine how you’d put together the kind that needs ludicrous hours. The kind that involves hundreds of thousands of hand drawn frames all in the same art style.
When it needs both creativity and intense devotion, it no longer becomes a 9-5 thing, even if you’re your own boss. Some people do that voluntarily but end up with carpal tunnel, sleep issues, etc. That has even been the case with a lot of Japanese creators I’ve seen.
I generally agree with that, and yet we have a lot of it around that people lament being “not perfect” or demand more of faster; so there’s societal pressure to keep it up. It also feels terrible to have appreciated something amazing, but then afterwards learn its creation process essentially involved boiling kittens or something.
I don’t really follow what “on the same balance” means; I guess it’s simply that the benefit far, far outweighs the negative? Or, that the negative should never be mentioned because it implies benefits behind something horrible?
I can marginally understand the latter. It’s a bit like trying to praise a piece of artwork on its own (because it’s a really amazing piece, and it could even inspire other people) while trying to set aside that its artist was a terrible person who deserves no recognition.
Part of the reason I bring it up is, I’d like to hear more vocalizations on whether these things should exist. Under a certain forward-thinking mindset, it could be that neither GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6 ever comes out - or they cost $100 and take 10 years, to adequately pay the developers and give them healthy time off. The math is never straightforward, of course, but it’s something of a thought experiment to get people to think about what they care about most.
I got overloaded by the puzzles in the first game, so I didn’t even consider the second. Yes, it iterated on interesting ideas around the blocks, but just after resolving one, I’d feel exhausted from the enormous sequence of movements and actions I’d need to do to get through the exit - and just be thrown into another mess of them. I really preferred something like Portal, where it’s just small executions of simple ideas that may require one act of ingenuity to use them right.
I also can’t really bring myself to care much about story in any game that’s so far post-apocalypse.
I don’t follow. Some games do come out as irreparable buggy garbage, get terrible reviews, and nobody of sound mind buys them. Other games come out with a genuinely fun product, and as a result of player engagement, the developer decides to add more - and nobody of sound mind is then claiming they “released it half finished”. Meanwhile, early leaks are always buggy because the bugfixing and polish phases come late in development.
So what does any of that have to do with justifying leaking?
While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.
Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.
I get the impression Amazon just rightly avoided overselling it and growing too far too fast. I see it advertised for a few specific cases where people don’t own consoles and might try it, but not overblown in showcases the way Google did.
Why do people react so negatively to cloud options? (Emphasis on that last word)
It’s dumb for a lot of cases, but there’s plenty of niche occasions it’s very cool. I had an extended period of time I was away from my gaming PC, and sad that I couldn’t play my home games - but GFN let me do so easily.
Nobody working on this tech (with any sense) is claiming ALL games will come from the cloud in 10-20 years. Nobody will accept that level of lost control. But having it as an extra way to access games, in a situation where you’d be reliant on the internet more than hardware anyway, is very useful. It was even how I recommended people play Cyberpunk on release if they had a mediocre PC.
I get that there’s constant worries about how close we are to the EA-managed dystopian control of their library, I just don’t see the logical sequence of events there when it’s an option on a generally open and consumer-friendly store.
You talked about console hardware, but then mentioned distribution. I’m going to guess you mostly mean servers - as these days people don’t really need any special local hardware aside from any controller.
The major cities generally already have those servers distributed and working. It’s true certain edges of the world don’t have a good experience, but that sort of just fits in the 70% of scenarios where you wouldn’t want a cloud game.
There’s still this weird expectation it would replace your home den where you have lots of space and disposable income for multiple consoles - it doesn’t. It’s really more for the convenience of getting your games from a web browser.
Y’know, I distinctly remember the friendly fire being the thing I didn’t like about the first one. It was initially very “Oh haha you killed me!” but then something kept you from getting to play again for a long time, and so it was hard to just shrug it off. I’m assuming it’s something somewhat different now.
Looking at the 34GB install, I’m guessing it’s some kind of massive emulation layer; it’s scary to say but I feel like we’ve just run out of game developers that can genuinely code against the machine itself to optimize install size and performance.
When you look back on the meager specs of old consoles and what they got running there, it now feels more and more impressive.
To me, this is actually why I’d want a Team Fortress 3 rather than more updates. The wave of cosmetics in some way turned the previous game a bit unplayable.
The article’s right about the conversation turning needlessly toxic. There’s people out there that are fanatics about accuracy for no good reason, even cases where I’ve seen a “TRASH localizer!” video that convinced me the localization was good in that it avoided repeat words, when they were attempting to state the opposite.
These people seriously need to either learn Japanese to play the game how they prefer, or just be silent and stop harassing game devs.
I’ve never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice....
I’ll admit, it’s probably not disingenuous to the original for it to be crammed with minigames, whether or not they changed it up with new ones. When the original was one game, leaving Midgar was very much a moment of freedom they wanted to capitalize on, so it was the perfect checkpoint to start giving the player optional activities.
That said, the “Towers” subject in particular (what I believe prompted the “Ubisoft style” comment) is something I feel like gamers need to cool down on. As much as people habitually throw shade on Ubisoft for starting them, they make sense, and can be done in an interesting way. If you have an open world environment, you want players to rely on the ugly minimap as little as possible; that often means both a focus on vertical movement that allows you chances to see the space in front of you, as well as tall buildings that encourage distant exploration. I really think towers get unfair criticism, even if a few games have done them in less fun ways (I could be biased - I think even in their initial appearances in Far Cry 3, they were actually fun to climb)
I prefer not to devote myself to any one storefront, and while Valve is very altruistic I think healthy competition is one of the things that keeps PC gaming storefronts at their best.
Even on consoles, I prefer to go digital; saves bookcase space.
“I may have stolen your wallet, but it’s okay - I gave it back. Surely it wasn’t because several police officers were walking over with curious expressions.”
I imagine what makes it more of a grumble-fest for developers is that these days, a high majority of players will be coming from consoles. While cheaters do exist on consoles, they’re far less common, meaning that a majority of your playerbase is using game clients they can’t plausibly modify - meaning MOST of the clients can be trusted. So, signing on with something like EAC is really only resolving a cheating gap for a smaller percent of players.
There have even been situations with cheat-heavy games when console players will request the option to disable crossplay in order to assure they aren’t matched with cheaters, who are often on PC. Sea of Thieves may have been one such instance.
While I’m very much on board with the equality quote for the white-male thing (If you’re privileged, you shouldn’t be making comments about welfare and employment), I don’t know if that has so much equivalence to being a game dev. In the end, a small team of people are the ones with the control to make and update the popular game, and that power will never be spread among its playerbase.
The thing is, as obvious as it sounds to say “never act like an ass”, conversational spontaneity is unpredictable, and the simplest and fastest way to achieve that is with the directive “Never speak”. I’ve even seen that issue with coding standards - the best way to never be blamed for a bug is to just never put up any code changes. In social settings, if people try to act in ‘honest’ ways, that can involve sometimes speaking in slightly inflammatory ways towards concepts that they think the group should agree are bad. In this very comment chain, for instance, we’ve made metaphors to oppressive patriarchy from controlling white men. (I’m a white guy with above-average income, by the way, and I’m very okay with that comparison)
So, these developers decided to be more vocal than others in the past (think of every publisher that responds with stock “We recognize your concerns and appreciate your feedback”) and, this unfortunately can be the consequence of that. I know it seems plausible to expect them to be perfect, but they’re human - not much different from all other internet commenters. I’d even question whether everyone here knows the full context of the comments that are receiving complaints. Quite often, when people are putting attention on you, they can selectively quote you to make you seem terrible. (“I KILLED EARL MILFORD.”)
If your position is simply “Devs shouldn’t speak outside of patch notes and press releases”, that’s kind of a fair stance, I just want to make sure that’s what you intend.
Controversy and Censorship angielski
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 - Release Date Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Taboo Question
I have a question about… Gaming on Mac. I know, I know. It’s for my wife, though. Lol!...
How Greed Ruined Gaming (www.youtube.com) angielski
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
World of Warcraft boss says Microsoft is happy to 'let Blizzard be Blizzard,' but I'm not sure that's entirely true (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Good AA single player games?
Hello, I guess everyone knows the current state of AAA games in general, so I am looking into other game markets. I have looked into indie games , but while I do like it, I feel the budgetary constraints and dvelopment limitations are a limit to indie games....
SteamWorld Heist 2 - Official Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Why there are 861 roguelike deckbuilders on Steam all of a sudden (arstechnica.com) angielski
Been playing FF7 Rebirth (35 hours in) and really not enjoying it. Does anyone else feel this way? angielski
No spoilers...
"The remake has been...remade from scratch" (cafe.everythingbagel.me) angielski
Such funny, who remembers 2020 reveal? Such backlash causes Ubisoft to restart development for Sands of Time just like Nintendo did for Metroid 4....
Legend of Zelda angielski
What is your favourite LOZ game? My fave is twilight princess as it was the first zelda game I played. Being it on the Wii....
Forget Ubisoft's AAAA Games, CD Projekt Is Making 'AAAAA' Games (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Finally, a push to end the practice of killing games when a dev decides they don't wanna support them (youtu.be)
This is why god invented transmog (lemmy.world) angielski
A handheld Xbox? Microsoft’s gaming chief can’t stop thinking about it (www.polygon.com) angielski
'Make a private hosted version of your game': Knockout City dev's top tip for studios shutting down a live service game is to give players the keys (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Will Smith Zombie Game No One Has Heard Of Bombs (kotaku.com) angielski
Critically acclaimed Dragon's Dogma 2 hits "mostly negative" on Steam after players raze it for microtransactions (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
GTA 6 Production Reportedly Falling Behind, Rockstar Urges Staff To Return To Office To Avoid Delay (kotaku.com) angielski
The Talos Principle II: The Most Underrated Video Game of the Last Decade (www.youtube.com) angielski
Denuvo Unveils New Tech That Will Make It Easier for Devs to Track Down Leakers (www.ign.com) angielski
Steam :: Introducing Steam Families (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta....
GOG adding cloud gaming support via Amazon Luna "soon" (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Helldivers 2 has "performed well ahead of expectations" and topped more than 8m sales (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Launch Is a Disaster - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
After Payday 3 Flops, Starbreeze Removes CEO And Looks For 'Different Leadership' (kotaku.com) angielski
Final Fantasy XVI PC Version In 'Final Stages Of Optimization,' Expect A Demo Before Release (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
Final Fantasy Tactics Creator Reacts to Unicorn Overlord Localization Debate and Shares His Own Stories (www.ign.com) angielski
Can we talk about FF7 - Rebirth? angielski
I’ve never played the OG FF7 but I loved Remake. Beautiful environments, great music, story, and characters. I rarely pick games back up after finishing them, but I finished remake twice....
Physical or Digital? angielski
Title says it all lads....
EU says it’s investigating why Apple terminated Epic’s developer account (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Honestly, both these companies can kind of get bent with their anti-consumer practices.
Helldivers 2 boss apologizes for 'horrible' dev comments, says Arrowhead has 'taken action internally to educate our developers' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski