LouNeko

LouNeko, 4 godziny temu

Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make. I bet my soul on that Concord was quickly thrown together in the last couple years by temp diversity hires and 3rd party contractors, or at least the version of Concord that we got now. I love that one of the devs said that “a lot of talented people worked on it”. If it really took them 8 years to make that is the oppsotite of talent. In 8 years I could probably get get a double masters in programming and game development and make a better game myself.

LouNeko, 3 dni temu

I would love to get a code break down and see how Bethesda spaghetti recoded the Skyrim horse mechanic into a vehicle.

LouNeko, miesiąc temu

I disagree. The rule is “sex sells”, always has, always will be, period.

The people that complain about “wokeness” in games are a small but loud minority. The majority doesn’t care, hells seeing the steam achievements for some games the majority doesn’t even care to finish a game past the tutorial yet alone care about story or characters.

The problem is the approach to game design has changed. In the earlier stages of gaming, you would take a fun concept (finding perfect fits for boxes) and make it into a game (Tetris), that was all there was, Super Mario was literally called “Jump & Run Man” at one point. It was the essence of fun presented in a replayable form. Now games have to have a story, morals, relatable characters or some sort of overlaying message. This together with good gameplay can create a very good game no doubt. But each aspect has to be good on its own.
Take away the story from Last of Us and it’s essentially a 3rd person arena shooter, but it’s a good one at that. This alone would be a good selling point, add on top the story and you have an objectively good game.
But take Saint Row 5 as an example, take away the story and it’s a less than mediocre 3rd Person sandbox game, the fact that the story isn’t compelling either makes it objectively bad.
Rember the Hot/Crazy scale from His I Met Your Mother? Well there is also a Hot/Boring scale for games. If your game is boring it has to compensate by having hotter characters, if it’s fun it can get away with uglier ones. I can name countless examples where this is true.

Studios often overlook this connection. I’m all for diversification of the actual development environment but not the games themselves. It should always be fun first.
Never in my life have I heard anybody say “Are you going to get new game …? I’ve heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool.”
Studios then get upset because their model “Here diversity. Where money?” isn’t paying off.
It’s like not wanting to buy a cheaply made plastic valve for a boiler over a solid metal one and the company asks “Why are you not buying it? We made it blue.”

The fanbase is never going to change, because at some point we all realize that we want value for our money and often times studios spend so much time and effort making a game diverse, they forget to make it fun.

LouNeko, miesiąc temu

I can only speculate on why but speaking from over a decade of experience, leave it to the respective gaming communities to always pick the worst, most uninspired maps every time.

I think it has something to do with the saying in game development “Given enough time players will distill the fun out if every game.”.

If a map gets you kills fast it will be always picked above anything else. It doesn’t even have to be a guarantee, the prospect alone for getting a high kill count is enough. This results in either very small maps being favored (Nuketown, Shipment) or maps with critical chokepoints (Operation Locker (BF4), Metro (BF3,BF4)), Fort de Vaux (BF1)). Also maps that allow for cheap non-counterable tactics to get kills like Base Rape (Suez (BF1)), Vehicle Camping (Golmund (BF4)), Spawn Camping (Piccadilly, (MW2019)), etc…

Generally, every map that rewards unsportsmanlike behavior will be a community favorite.

If I ever were to release a video game I would never allow for map voting. As a player, I’d rather play maps that I dislike every once in a while instead the same 5 maps every time. And as a developer, why should I bother to invests tens of thousands of dollars to make a DLC with maps, if they are never going to be played anyway. The cherry on top is, the community still has the audacity to complain if a DLC has less maps than the last one, but then never play them anyway.

LouNeko, miesiąc temu

I don’t think you understand what chaos in terms of gameplay means. Chaos comes from unpredictability. On maps like shipment unpredictably goes out the window.

“What’s gonna happen if I round this corner?” “Prefiring” “What’s gonna happen if I stay in this spot?” “Grenades.” “What’s gonna happen if I rush?” “Spawnflip”

That’s it, there’s all there is to this map. That’s no chaos that’s pretty much as deterministic as it gets. What people mean by chaos is “If I 5 kills, I chain killstreak and big number on scoreboard.”

LouNeko, 5 miesięcy temu

Capcom seems to pump out absolute bangers lately. They have multiple rock solid franchises (Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Street Fighter, Monster Hunter) and their buisness model is still, make good game, sell good game, profit from sales. They don’t shove half-assed life service attempts down you throat and most importantly they don’t fuck fans over. It says a lot when your least acclaimed game over the past 5 years is RE3 Remake with “Very Positive” Steam reviews. I’m really looking forward to RE5 Remake and Monster Hunter Wilds.

LouNeko, 5 miesięcy temu

How about they bring development time and costs to AAA standards?

LouNeko, 5 miesięcy temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2218052d-94d2-484f-9c71-8b5f2a9273d8.webm

LouNeko, 6 miesięcy temu

Remember when you could force MSAA through Nvidia Control Panel on almost any game without issue? Pepperidge Farm Remembers.

LouNeko, 6 miesięcy temu

I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here’s the skinny.
Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.

LouNeko, 6 miesięcy temu

There’s nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t fit everywhere. There’s a thematic difference between Action platformers, Horror and Milsims, yet they all use the same font and UI. Imagine if most games would use Naughty Dogs “Yellow ledges”. It would get old very quickly.

LouNeko, 6 miesięcy temu

But UE is the common denominator for all those problems. I actually don’t know any positive examples for UE. Satisfactory, maybe, but it still checks most of the issues. They are just less prevalent because the game itself is good.

LouNeko, 9 miesięcy temu

FTL is really good. Usually the first game I installon a new PC. Small size and perfect to kill some time.

LouNeko, 9 miesięcy temu

Nice. Wasn’t that back from the time when Steam had the whole Steam Greenlight project going on?

LouNeko, 11 miesięcy temu

Does it come bundled with some hardware?

LouNeko, 11 miesięcy temu

That’s some good shit.

LouNeko, 11 miesięcy temu

Gamepass usually means unmoddable, which is basically against the whole point of Bethesda games.

LouNeko, rok temu

I actually agree with you. People praise BG3 as if it were the most perfect 10/10 video game in existence. Its far from it. It is riddled with bugs reaching from minor to game breaking. The best example is the very first few seconds of the game. The first thing the players are likely to interact with is the tadpole pool after awekening on the ship.

Minor spoilerIt explodes, knocking you back and causing damage.

As someone who made a few characters and played the intro section a lot, the animation is often times bugged and confusing. And thats the first interaction a player has with the game.
A few seconds later you stand in front of a door. Usually the door opens and you can go through. But sometimes the opening animation doesn’t play. This happened on my very first time playing and I couldn’t figure out where to go, because my first instinct wasn’t to clip through the closed door. Things like this are absolutely unacceptable in the tutorial area.

Even though they already have full controller support it is very clear why the console release is delayed. The console player base is expected to be a lot more casual and unless they iron out all the confusing bugs they run the risk of people being frustrated and dropping the game.

And then there are other major things.

• Why is there no native option for 3rd person WASD movement even though it is fully implemented for controllers?
• Why does only the controller get a search area function but the keyboard doesn’t?
• Why is there no camera sensitivity for controllers?
• Why are there no deadzone settings for controller joysticks?
• Why is there a 1 second delay on movement when using a controller?
• Why can’t I set the text size below 64px when using a controller?
• Why in a game that has been in early access for so long and a world full of magic can’t we change our characters appearance post creation? (I know it’s announced but why just now?)
• Why do we not have advanced difficulty settings? (I’d love the enemies to be smart like “tactitian” but not be unhittable bullet sponges.)
• Why is every adult character so goddamn hot in this game? I need my blood in my brain.
• Why can we select a player voice, if the player isn’t voiced beyond some minor quips?
• Why isn’t there a random name generator for your character?
• Why can’t I shift + click multiple items or containers to queue them up for pickup or search?
• Why do container windows open on top of each other or other inventory windows?
• Why can’t I rename containers in my inventory?
• Why can’t I filter out or hide wares in my inventory?
• Why can’t I sort or filter items during trading or in the party view?
• Why do containers always open in a 5x2 grid instead of trying to fit all the items without scrolling?
• Why can I skip the rolling animation but not the success-continue animation?
• etc.

I know I’m nitpicking here, but for a game that is as highly praised as this, I expect it also to nail all those minor things that other games have already figured out already (some of which were even their own older titles). Especially because it was Early Access and they had a lot of user feedback. I see it times and times again that studios apparently throw out all their previous knowledge of videogames and seemingly start from scratch on every title, making small stupid mistakes that could have been easily avoided. It’s like the research process for video mechanics and UI never consists of actually looking at other games.

So for me, it’s a very pretty game, its a beautifully sounding game and even a very fun game. But nowhere near a 10/10. It’s a 7/10 game. Fix the bugs to bump it up to 8/10 implement some QoL for 9/10 and release modding tools so the community can make it a 10/10.