MentalEdge

MentalEdge, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

They are, Ghost Ship Games.

DRG was never an indie, it was published by Coffee Stain Publishing, which is a subsidiary of Coffee Stain, which in turn is a subsidiary of Embracer.

Ghost Ship got fully acquired by Embracer in 2021, though their publishing deal with Coffee Stain started in 2017, before Embracer had even touched either company.

MentalEdge, 7 miesięcy temu

Katana Zero

MentalEdge, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I’m taking a week off work to drown myself in Forbidden West when it comes out on PC. Again.

I already did it back when it launched on PS. No regrets. So I’m doing it again.

MentalEdge, 7 miesięcy temu

They seemed to be acquiring and funding good things for a while there, and then out of the blue went “oops, spent a bit too much there lol, gotta melt some of these down for cash” and then threw some seriously good shit right into the crucible.

MentalEdge, 7 miesięcy temu

Even if that deal had worked out, it would not have left a nice taste in the mouth.

They really shouldn’t have played as fast and loose as they did.

MentalEdge, 7 miesięcy temu

After the initial trouble with the Zero Dawn port (which they actually put in the work to fix), the ports have been stellar.

The extensive accessibility settings and configurable graphics have been even more accommodating than some PC-only titles.

And sony has been releasing drivers for the PS controllers so that ported PS5 games could still access and use the unique features on the DS5 controller, even when not running on an PS5. And not just on windows, but on Linux too. Sony has been going out of their way to not just bring the games over, but to explicitly support unique features they could have locked down and made exclusive to PS consoles.

Getting to play with the half/full adaptive trigger pull for main/secondary fire in Rift Apart on PC, was really cool.

It almost feels too good to be true in comparison to companies like Apple and Nintendo.

MentalEdge, 8 miesięcy temu

Stop reminding them we used to be able to do better.

MentalEdge, 8 miesięcy temu

But how are we going to emulate proprietary online services for games relying on them?

Games preservation should be legally enshrined, and require client and server source code to be published if a provider decides to stop running the online services required to play.

MentalEdge, 8 miesięcy temu

Preserving an accurate record of human cultural history, isn’t going to be very accurate if we only save the good parts.

MentalEdge, 8 miesięcy temu

Personally I probably miss Battleborn the most. It got so utterly overlooked, it died fast.

And Gearbox in their infinite wisdom developed it so that even the story mode was online-only.

Though there’s some modding happening to maybe bring it back…

MentalEdge, 8 miesięcy temu

Economist: exponential growth, infinitely!

Physicist: uuuuuhhh…

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

I enjoyed the federation reborn as well. I have an opinion.

The writers were so busy patting each other on their backs with how “deep” they were being with symbolism about the importance of communication, that they went and made the whole cause of the burn a child being lonely on some planet somewhere so they could twist the burn into a big symbolic point about how “if only we had been a little better” something like it would never have happened.

It was so fucking telegraphed that I saw it coming episodes away and was rolling eyes every time the show referenced this symbolic circle jerk.

No. Shit happens. The universe doesn’t care, and it WILL fuck your shit up, I would have been far more impressed with the crew rebuilding the federation after an inevitable natural disaster, making a point of life finding a way despite the random crap reality throws at us, and how communication and understanding is one of the things that help us do that.

Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic, not delusional, and as such the core message of that season rings hollow. It’s too hopeful. Instead of “we might not be perfect, and we might not know what’s coming, we know we are enough” it was “we’re nearly there, we just need one more step to be perfect, and nothing bad will ever happen because of this ever again”.

MentalEdge, 9 miesięcy temu

The Expanse was fantastic. I’d love to see the rest of the books adapted some day…

As for other sci-fi, my god there’s so much good shit in literature that will never be seen on a screen.

The Three Body Problem is getting several adaptations, one of which might or might not fix my issues with that series, but it does have conceptual potential.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Apparently any further sales of the game will have a cut going to even the staff that was laid off.

That’s commendable, but overall this is still an unfortunate development. I wonder if microtransactions in big games like apex and genshin are down this year? Is this an overall trend, or are people choosing to spend on one game, foregoing titles like Jumplight Odyssey for bigger spending on one (arguably less deserving) game.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.

The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.

The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.

As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.

Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.

For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.

Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.

Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.

But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.

Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

It’s open source.

No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.

That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.

There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.

Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.

Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.

Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.

If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

Psygnosis, later known as Studio Liverpool.

Sony shut them down a few years ago. Man seeing that old owl logo hits me hard in the nostalgia bone.

MentalEdge, 10 miesięcy temu

They seem to consider only massive franchises like GoW and TLoU and Horizon worth their time… But most gamers need variety outside the mainstream game genres, so I don’t see why they are shutting down anything with a smaller fanbase.

MentalEdge, 11 miesięcy temu

It’s software. I’m pretty sure my linux desktop can do this… It’s not a special feature, exactly, the system state gets saved to RAM, and then the CPU goes to sleep.

On resume the kernel reads the state from RAM and puts everything back where it was and things continue from the exact same point from which they were suspended. Theoretically.

It’s a complex sequence, and windows sleep is famous for getting it wrong on lots of hardware configs. I’ve had trouble with it on linux, as well, almost always relating to the GPU.

Valve very likely put in some work to have it work as well as it does on SteamDeck, but theres no reason it couldn’t work on any given device.

MentalEdge, 11 miesięcy temu

Sleep has almost never worked with games, though. I’m not aware of any games that can survive wakeup without crashing on windows.

One of the ways Valve was able to expand the OS in a manner they could never have if the steamdeck ran windows.

MentalEdge, 11 miesięcy temu

Really liking Endeavour! Finally hopped over from the unstable mess that is Manjaro.

Still not as noob friendly as VanillaOS or some other options. HoloISO or Bazzite are both supposed to be good in that regard, as well.

MentalEdge, 11 miesięcy temu

That’s because it’s not a product. It’s an experiment for figuring out what they as a studio might be able to do with something new and untested. This is a trial run of a new engine, and they simply decided to publish the result for others to see.

This is more like publishing research findings than trying to market and sell something for a profit. Whether the result is good or bad, it’s informative either way.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Except they just got CoD. Playstation is about lose one the mega-franchise cross-platforms games that “everyone” buys.

IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years, but no way MS just keeps releasing their games on PS forever.

MentalEdge, rok temu

More likely, they’ll just buy Ubisoft or EA.

We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.

Not that ABK was small, and for once I’m split because holy hell did it need new management.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Lots of horror! Nice.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Standard tactic when making unpopular changes, and a company would really like to keep them. Sacrificial CEO gets replaced, to make it look like things changed.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Except it needed to be literally perfect for me to give Blizzard Activision another cent.

MentalEdge, rok temu

!huntshowdown

MentalEdge, rok temu

No he’s suggesting the game would be so shit that buzzwords were the only way it could get any runway.

MentalEdge, rok temu

This game in particular, yes, but Molyneux certainly could make non-blockchain games.

MentalEdge, rok temu

TLDR: They can’t afford the greater costs of the new license, so they are sticking with the version of unity their current license is for.

This will block them from releasing a switch port as nintendo version gates unity games to a recent version of the engine.

MentalEdge, rok temu

the company believed they undervalued the games.

Almost definitely true. The type of games that devolver publishes are often fantastic, but they are smaller experiences that a subscription pay model would nigh certainly never pay for fairly.

MentalEdge, rok temu

We remember it with fondness, and yet, it was the lootbox that started it all.

Good riddance.

MentalEdge, rok temu

True enough. But Overwatch was the first big game where they basically got completely ignored as an exploitative mechanic on PC.

Micro-transactions were for a long time mobile only, then it was free-to-play only.

Remember, OW was a full-price title. Yet, it still worked like a free-to-play.

MentalEdge, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I would love to see some other genres covered, tho.

RIP Studio Liverpool.

At the same time I get that GoW and Uncharted sell better than WipEout… but come on, I want at least something more than different flavors of the same game type.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Marketing? If it was any of the same people that did TR marketing when they were with square enix, good riddance.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Ima take a guess that the bigger version comes with the DLCs that add Kasumi and Zaeed.

MentalEdge, rok temu (edited rok temu)

While I don’t mind that Rebirth will be more open world, perhaps like fifteen, I never considered Intergrades linear design an “issue” that needed “solving”.

There’s nothing wrong with linear game design, quite the opposite. It lends itself to a more focused experience. Games often have so much “stuff” to do, half of it ends up irrelevant.

I really enjoyed the tightly paced experience that was Intergrade.

MentalEdge, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I weep for all the talented people working under squenix. They seem determined to squeeze blood from a rock, shattering it into a thousand tiny shards, few of which are worth paying for anymore.

MentalEdge, rok temu

If Echo Arena wasn’t safe, then neither is anything else.

MentalEdge, rok temu

So now it’s just a convoluted way to do revenue share.
FFS, just dump the install fee. Now it’s just an excuse to spy on their users since unity would have to come with telemetry to track installs.

MentalEdge, rok temu

The effect in game rendering is called subsurface scattering. It’s a fairly expensive effect, though in vegetation can usually be done quite cheaply. Most games do tend to try and get away without it.

MentalEdge, rok temu

!titanfall

MentalEdge, rok temu

Zero Dawn on the Deck is damn near perfect.

MentalEdge, rok temu

Oh dear. The only option left will be to pirate it… And in the new model, the dev might have to pay unity even for pirated installs.