MudMan

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.

Making games is expensive, you guys.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Did you miss the "no spoilers, please" bit in the OP? That's a dick move.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Alternately, videogames now: I have a farm and it's the nicest farm of them all, and all the chickens have names and are demonstrably happy. Also I moonlight as an interior decorator for all my friends with whom I have deep personal relationships.

Just saying, we may be playing different types of games here.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, man, screw Nintendo.

Brand perception is a universal mystery.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.

It's a fine line to walk, that.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

To be clear, it's not less DRM-y, it's straight up DRM-free.

They had a poll at one point asking the community whether they were fine with DRM-enabled games and/or modern releases. As I understand it, the community said yea to modern games, nay to DRM, so now they do games of all ages but only if they're willing to give up on DRM.

I'm amazed they haven't turned back on that, because a couple years ago they were bleeding money and you can tell they really need to cut costs or increase revenue somewhere. But hey, at least you can back up your library.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the "good guys" of gaming, and it's super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam's quasi-monopoly.

I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they're objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Well, that's cultivating an image.

I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn't react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.

They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It's kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don't say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just... shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.

By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the "we had kids gambling on gun skins" guys. It's kinda nuts.

I mean, good for them. I don't know why they aren't more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It's kind of amazing.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Sony have very, very few straight exclusivity deals these days, they have a super robust first party network. Nintendo and them are very comparable, in fact. Especially in that Nintendo works with more third parties or partially owned "second parties" than you'd think, since people presume anything using their IP is their game, even when it's not.

In any case, they're both as not-comparable, in that Epic games run on the same hardware and platform as Steam games, Linux compatibility aside. You don't have to pay any extra money to switch back and forth.

Epic legitimately hasn't done anything Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft haven't done on the regular. In fact, the current "boo, we hate non-Steam PC launchers" trend overlaps with the old "boo, we're pissed that former console exclusive X is going multiplatform", which was a surreal few years there.

Also, hell yeah, it's morally superior to give more of the money to the dev while charging the same up front to consumers. 100%. Every time. Epic is not doing it because they're nice, they're doing it to attract talent to their platform, which is exactly why you want competition between multiple storefronts instead of a monopoly. But that doesn't take it away from them, that's the better answer.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?

For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.

They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.

And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.

All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.

For the record, Steam actively suggests using multiple online features and multiple layers of DRM to minimize piracy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Hah. Fair enough.

I mean, I'd say that's probably true of most companies making videogames. People are really hyperbolic about this stuff.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Oh, there's a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that's precisely why they're a good counterexample to Steam when you're talking about branding associations.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.

But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going "hell no" at seeing the "Steam mandatory" sticker on it and putting it back.

You're technically right that I wasn't always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.

I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don't know how long it took me to relent, because I don't have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I'm still a bit testy about it.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.

And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.

But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.

But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.

Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.

And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.

And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.

I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?

I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.

Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).

But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.

That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.

None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?

Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.

Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.

So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?

EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.

Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

No, you're not listening to me.

Epic. Took the lootboxes. Out of Fortnite.

Altogether. No loot boxes. None. They're gone.

So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.

But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?

That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.

Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.

That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Hey! Somebody brought up the "leaked" employee manual, I think I have bingo now.

The guys they have doing dev relations aren't talking development, they're talking business.

And just so I'm clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries...

...with zero sales/PR/community management staff.

Am I getting that wrong?

Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.

EDIT: To be clear, it's hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don't work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I'm not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don't also... I don't know go build 3D models or code store features when they're not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly "shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box". Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I think you're misunderstanding what sorts of roles a brand, sales, PR and community management teams actually have, beyond... I'm guessing you're thinking traditional advertising stuff. But also what sort of role they would have under Valve's extremely opaque strategy.

At the absolute least Valve has a ton of third party relations to handle, which I know for a fact they do because I've physically seen the people doing it. So there's that.

They also run one of the biggest esports organizations in the business, or at least they manage it, which is effectively its own standalone thing on the side. They fully run The International, as far as I can tell, and they at the very least fund and organize the CS majors circuit.

They run one of the world's biggest digital service platforms, with an absolutely insane amount of third parties involved worldwide. They have comarketing deals all over the place. Every time you see a game show up on a Steam banner somebody had to have a conversation about that, sign deals, source art, get it cleared... it's a whole mess.

They run everry bit of branding, marketing and community management on Steam. Every sale, every ad, every bit of written copy you see on Steam that is not uploaded directly by a game maker? Somebody made those.

They ship and sell games and hardware. All those Steam Deck OLED reviews and previews you saw? Somebody went and set those up, signed NDAs and embargos, shipped test units, provided review guides, handled questions from the press, got the right info to the right places.

Every campaign, loot box, piece of cosmetics, seasonal event in CS2 or DOTA 2 or any other Valve game? Somebody put those together. Not just the content, the in-store materials, copy, go-to-market plan, the whole deal.

Valve are intentionally obtuse about what they do. They don't put roles next to names on credits. They don't put in credits at all, sometimes. They don't advertise job positions or share what the jobs actually are. They don't easily provide points of contact or names or have roles or tell anybody what they do or how, with very few exceptions. Because it helps their image. It helps sell that one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world (we're talking Netflix big. Amazon big) is somehow an upstart of engineers coming up with ideas on the spot. And that is what we call "a carefully cultivated image".

I absolutely believe that they run lean and flexible. I have no question. But I'd be less suprised to find out that Valve has no cleaning staff than to find they have nobody working on brand, comms or event organization.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

"Godsend" is a bit of an exaggeration, considering how many ways there are to get the same result without even going into emulation and stuff, but alright. It's still a fun bit of history and behind the scenes info.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Alien Resurrection came out in 2000. We had known about hot swapping PSX disks and other softmods for years by that point. So yeah, this would have been a fun quirk even when it happened. Still fun, though.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

For as much as I engaged with the PSX I was an early adopter (I'm talking keep it upside down because overheating early), so swaps were trivial.

Maybe this is the reason why the guy bothered with it as late as 2000, get some later models on equal ground there. Although by that time it was also trivial to get some hard mods, also.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

It depends on what type of hardware. On the right console you could do this in real time with nothing but a jammed opening mechanism. I've personally swapped disks on a launch PSX just by learning the right timing and made it work 9/10 times. By 2000 I also knew of multiple places to just get hard mods, but honestly, Bleem came out in 99, so... that would have been my go-to. And now... well, now you can get a MiSTer to run those games if what you want is OG I/O.

I'm gonna say if you're a "OG hardware" kinda person, and I'm one, so I should know, you're also a OG software kind of person. I'll play a real PSX game on a real PSX for shits and giggles, but if I'm gonna burn a CD I have better ways to get that game to run if I am using bootlegs on any part of that chain. Also, if you're a OG hardware kinda person, you may be in the same boat I am and have such restricted shelf space that your default PSX vessel is a PS2 because if you can consolidate two consoles into one that's way more useful than a way to run copied CDs, although that may be a me thing.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

The actual article here gets to a great, very accurate conclusion: that information about unfinished, upcoming games is really not that valuable for users and an entirely artificial hype machine that insists on only paying attention to games before they exist. This is true.

There is very little genuine value in exploring a game in development, that is mostly a commercial concern. Which is fine, this is an entertainment industry. All parties here (publishers, journalists and audiences) are willingly engaging in a bit of a commercial transaction.

But journalistically and in terms of art criticism, the moment that coverage matters is after a game exists, not before. Really, leaking publishing plans or greenlit projects shouldn't be a big deal because publishing plans and business deals should be insider stuff that end users don't give a crap about. The relevant Insomniac game now is at most Spider-Man 2, not Wolverine or any later games they may or may not have deals to make. Mostly because there's no guarantee those games will ever exist or in what form.

But also, screw leaking personal info of game developers.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.

So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.

Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

There is no obligation for publishers to send early copies, although when you don't do it selectively you're sending a bad message that you have something to hide or an axe to grind, so it's pretty bad PR to handle things that way.

Plus nothing stops an outlet from still getting a copy and reviewing the game day one. With so much of today's content being live video the kind of thing you're describing is... pretty inefectual? I get that it's the stuff people remember from the old days when there were more gatekeepers and print media could be reliably delayed by months by doing that, but... yeah, that's pretty anecdotal these days. It's mostly messing with critics' free time, which isn't the best way to get them to be nice to your game, if that's what you're trying to do.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Heh. It's a LOT more complicated than that. Especially post-covid, with everybody ready to support working from home.

Hey, good luck getting hundreds to thousands of people, ranging from engineers to a bunch of kids doing QA to technically illiterate administrative positions and office workers to keep rigid, government-level security standards when each and every one of them has some degree of remote access and mostly are just... you know, going about their lives and going to work every day. You sound like you'd love doing IT for a game studio.

And hey, guess what, all of their work hardware and accounts are probably connected to their personal hardware and accounts. Or are, in fact, the same hardware and accounts. Nobody has time or money to equip every single employee with a second phone and laptop overnight and all of them had to work remotely during the pandemic, just as much as everybody else. It's kind of chilling to know that the games industry is under this level of harassment and these leaks keep happening, because I guarantee any other non-tech industry that has shifted to remote work the past few years is doing much worse at this. Gaming was already weirdly secretive, even when compared to movies and TV or other similar cultural industries.

For the record, games are full of open source software (and closed source as well). Go check out the list of OSS on any game's credits. They still have to comply by disclosures required by most licenses, so it'll be in there somewhere.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Huh. Normally, you'd think when somebody takes longer to rephrase a post than it'd take to read the original they're trying to straw man the hell out of it...

...but no, you mostly got it.

Define "investigative journalism" when it comes to television. Radio? Maybe movies.

At best it's generalist journalism looking into a major issue, like the Ronan Farrow work that resulted in the whole MeToo movement. Other times it's straight-up business journalism, like the mainstream coverage of mergers or tech regulations. There is no reason why gaming can't be treated the same way, and in fact it is, as we saw through the whole Activision/Microsoft merger.

The idea that gaming needs a specific brand of "investigative journalism" as a matter for the daily gaming trades, such as they are, is based on this weird, antagonistic perspective that gaming fandom has about game development and it is, very much, part of the same problem as the hype cycle.

Sometimes, "investigative" journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier's brand of "I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff" coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn't clear that bar for me.

What I do care about, though, is good journalism, and there are definitely people doing that, including those in-depth, after-the-fact analysis and historical documentaries. If those don't qualify for what you want to see in games journalism, then we just disagree about what is needed.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Honestly, my response to everything you said is on my first post. Including the "you'd love doing IT for a game studio" part.

MudMan, 10 miesięcy temu

Schreier has not published any of his gossipy pieces because he had a deal with anyone, at least that I know of. If what you mean is that he publishes the gossip because that's the red meat what keeps him employed at Bloomberg so he can write more thorough coverage of the really interesting stuff.... well, you have a worse opinion of Schreier than I do.

Honestly, you guys are doing little to get me on board with that sort of thing. From the way you talk about it I'm getting the distinct impression that this sort of "investigative journalism", which often boils down to "game development went poorly for reasons", is only feeding into the antagonistic relationship and not, as I'd hoped, creating more awareness of how the process goes so people can have more informed opinions.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

I don't love how this is phrased, but it's not wrong.

The harsh reality of creative industries is that people are gonna be uninformed, dickish smartasses on social media (and... you know, traditional media, too), but they don't owe the creators anything, so if they don't like a thing they don't need to be right about why they like it.

But hey, I also don't resent any creator for venting reasonably on social media about this stuff every now and then. I think it's a dumb, potentially career-ending thing to do, but I get it.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

Dead Space, which has come up a lot, does have a hud, it's just all diegetic. Whether that fits or not is up for debate.

For true zero hud stuff the first one I think of is Inside, for instance. If you're going for immersion that counts, but of course it's a very light, focused game. Journey and Flower are in that space, too. So is Mirror's Edge, technically, but it feels more intricate due to being first person, for some reason.

There's a bunch of minimal HUD games from that period, too. There's a thing here and there, but not a full HUD. There's the Portal games, which technically show which portals are up on the reticle, but nothing else. There's the Metro series, which will pop up some HUD but mostly relies on other visual cues. There's The Order 1886, which at the time was one of the standard bearers for minimal HUDs but I think now it's just slightly lighter than average, because that game is super underrated in how ahead of its time it was in terms of setting triple-A standards.

Does The Witness count as diegetic HUD or just no HUD? It's borderline. I think the Talos Principle has some light HUD elements, but they may be optional.

And hey, let me call out the times when a super dense HUD is actually immersion-creating, especially when it comes to representing tech or machinery. There's Metroid Prime, making the HUD part of the suit and placing you inside it. There's Armored Core, where the mech stuff is such a part of the fiction. There's the new Robocop, which I don't like but does a lot with its HUD. HUDs can be cool and immersive.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

Immersion is a bit overused and misunderstood.

It maybe works better as "suspension of disbelief", like in other fiction. You sustain it and you can go very abstract. You break it and things get weird.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

No worries. Paradoxically I feel like a pedant now for using the big word.

Anyway, that question is weirdly different from the "no HUD" one, I agree. Some of the games that make me look more at the world instead of at the pointers and indicators are full of HUD stuff. Somebody mentioned Zelda, which is fine. PUBG is a weird example, because yeah, it looks like a (messy, cheap, poorly designed) HUD, but the whole proximity audio and high stakes gameplay makes you stare at things like a hawk. We take it for granted because Battle Royale games became such a huge deal, but that was a neat trick.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

Sure looks like GTA.

I mean, I'm good, but I'm sure the 100 million people playing GTA Online for some reason are into it.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

Looks a bit cosplay-y, honestly.

But also I've never been into Bethesda Fallout, so I'm already not as much of a target for this one, I suppose.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

I mean... you may have missed how episodic television works. Ironic horror antologies have been a thing on TV since the 50s.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.

I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

I thought the community had come around on it after some updates. I wouldn't know, I haven't been into TT Games Workshop stuff in ages.

In any case, the core of the tabletop game has nothing to do with whether a game adaptation is good or not.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.

I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?

The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.

For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.

I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.

It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu (edited 11 miesięcy temu)

Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and think everybody else is a dick. And they're right.

But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.

MudMan, 11 miesięcy temu

Those are even after my time. From the outside it looked like them starting to step away from "fantasy races in space", but it didn't intrigue me enough to pay attention and they never really became the core of the videogames because space marines everywhere, so...