NuXCOM_90Percent, wczoraj

800-1200 for a low end “gaming laptop” isn’t super out of the realm.

Figuring out (meaningful) specs on the Z2s is… hard but pcgamer.com/…/amds-baffling-new-ryzen-z2-apus-for… seems to be the best comparison out there and it sounds like it is within the realm of the Steam Deck plus AI Magic NPU. Which is potentially incredibly good in a handheld for upscaling/framegen purposes if you roll that way (I don’t care if you do or don’t).

And the ROG Ally 2023s seem to be at the 650-900 range. So new chip gen combined with pre-pricing for tariffs and those are “reasonable” if you like the rest of the ROG specs. Personally? I think a 120 Hz 1080p display on a handheld is idiotic but if it is your only device there might be an argument. I forget if those support VRR.

But yeah. Definitely feels like another increasingly common MS fail which is becoming increasingly the case as they devote all of their competency toward enabling genocide (friendly reminder that BDS encourages boycotting of MS)

But with the Switch 2 just launching and being the perfect device that will give you a handy while you play? And the Steam Deck still kind of the best all arounder for closer to half the price than not? Really feels like this is being sent out to die.

NuXCOM_90Percent, wczoraj

All signs are that is the “next xbox”

Migrating the Series to Windows would end horribly. Theoretically there can be a path from xbox OS to windows but it is going to be a pretty large update and will be prone to erroring out. And it also feels like a REAL good way to accidentally jailbreak your own consoles. And people already (rightfully) lose their shit when MS change the dashboard every year to add even more ads and make it even harder to find your god damned games.

I forget what The Leakers are saying but this console generation more or less started in 2020 and we are coming up on the 5th year. Assuming a 7 to 8 year cycle, the XBOX 2 Pi would be coming out as early as Fall of 2027. So massive software/firmware hell combined with support burden versus potentially breaking their lockstep with Sony and trying to pivot more toward the Nintendo “We are your second console” mindset. Except that your “second console” is also your netflix box and your MS word box and how you watch pornhub and so forth. Especially if said “XBOX 2 Pi” is more just branding and HTPCs from existing vendors.

So… Steam Boxes. And those totally weren’t a horrible failure.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 2 dni temu

GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don’t remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.

GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so… mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.

I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 4 dni temu

I want to like Rimworld but every time I even think of giving it another go it is like a massive wave of fans come out of the woodwork to scream about how they are all cannibals with slaves locked up to make pleasure farms and just… yeah.

Also I am not a fan of the storyteller system. It is nice that you get some variety but it mostly just boils down to tedium (and I think most players just switch to Random Ricky or whatever so it won’t actively destroy their colonies?). And, overall, I don’t like that you can go from success to wipe in like ten days. I am not saying everything needs to be Dwarf Fortress “Oh… we have been in a fail state for ten years…” but I do prefer there to be a long enough time period to actually realize I done fucked up.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 3 dni temu

Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.

Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.

Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 5 dni temu

Financing can actually be an incredibly good idea if you expect inflation to increase at a greater rate than the interest. It literally saves you effective money.

That said, it also tends to involve a credit pull (which hurts said interest rates) and becomes a monthly bill.

So if you can afford the monthly bill AND it is a meaningfully large purchase AND you have every reason to expect inflation to increase more than the interest rate? It is actually a pretty good idea.

For even a 200 dollar battle pass: no, it is not.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 6 dni temu

That would actually be awesome.

I like Kenshi a lot. But it really feels like Gothic in that the start of any given character more or less feels identical. Same steps to get to the point where you can start doing the stuff that actually makes the game really fun. A lot of CRPGs in the 00s/early 10s had that problem and Kenshi ramps it up to 16.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 7 dni temu

Strong disagree. If anything, it was the opposite.

The Steam Controller was AMAZING for playing games that did not have gamepad support. And I still think it is the best way to play Stardew Valley. But it also came out at a time when PC ports to console were more or less expected and even RTSes had gamepad support out of the box.

At which point you have a controller that only makes sense for a very limited subset of games.

That said, a Steam Controller 2 that is basically the deck minus the display would be amazing.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 6 dni temu

“ahead of its time” to let people play a game from 1999 is kind of my point.

The Steam Controller was very much designed with 90s/VERY early 00s gaming in mind where you might have a closet full of controllers for every game you like. A wheel for racing, a HOTAS for flight sims, a different HOTAS for mech sims, a gamepad, a guitar controller, a spinning knob, etc.

But it came out at almost the exact same time that the entire industry standardized on xinput with different face button labels. AND when xinput was making it trivial to just use that xbox controller on your PC.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 6 dni temu

I mean… if you look at what I bought in the past five years you would think everyone was obsessed with spreadsheets and 100 hour CRPGs. That doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of games are made with cross platform in mind and many historically “M+KB only” games have excellent gamepad support. Sometimes, annoyingly, only in the console build but…

Yes. I do think Steam Input is awesome (even if it was basically just a cleaner interface to xpadder/joy2key). That isn’t the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller is what Valve was using to promote The Steam Machines which was their failed attempt at a console.

Again, just to make this clear: I am not saying the Steam Controller was bad. I am not saying Valve is bad. I AM saying it was not “forward thinking” and was very much rooted in a PC gaming era that was ending as orders were being shipped out.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 6 dni temu

Understand the Steam Controller came out 10 years ago and was meant to be used in the decade or two prior to that when “real PC games” didn’t support gamepads. Contrast that with today where CRPGs and RTSes often have official bindings.

There are two ways to use a trackpad. The first is to swipe (like a laptop trackpad) and the second is press and hold. For the former, the delta between where your thumb is and where it was is used to translate to cursor movement. For the latter, think of it like an analog stick. The center of the trackpad is 0 and your input is the delta between 0 and the location of your thumb at this moment.

So press and hold lets it emulate an analog stick and swiping is very useful for moving a cursor on the screen. And there are/were plenty of ways to switch between the modes on the fly.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 9 dni temu

Its also worth remembering that the people who grew up with and have nostalgia for those “classic games” are late late 30s-mid 40s and have other stuff to do than to sit and watch a stream for five days.

At the end of the day, GDQ is a company that raises money for charities. And they need to focus on what will get the most eyes, and thus wallets, on the product. Watching someone glitch through the ceiling in a 2D sonic that nobody in the audience has any real interest in ain’t gonna do that. Breaking apart the games that the audience IS familiar with will.

I dunno. I fully agree it is the correct thing to do and am glad they do it. But I’ve been pretty sour on GDQ proper since AGDQ 2021. The Show Must Go On and all that but something about the discord mods going completely insane to shut down ANY mention of the violent insurrection just rubbed me the wrong way. And, to my knowledge, there wasn’t even a “Hey… this is really fun and all but maybe just check a few news sites during the break and make sure everyone you know is okay…” on the stream. I’ll watch a VOD if it goes viral but it is just hard to vibe with that looming over it.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 9 dni temu

For a healthy mega publisher/platform with a lot of fingers in the pot? It will increase overall profits and, theoretically, those profits can be redistributed. This is effectively what EA did in the late 00s/early 10s where Madden and The Sims meant games like Mirror’s Edge (or… The Sims) could be created.

The problem being that once a few of the tentpoles collapse? it ALL collapses

Also, this ignores the companies that aren’t part of that megapublisher who now are fighting “just play Halo or Call of Duty, it is free with gamepass”. At best it creates an environment where it doesn’t really matter how well a game sells so long as you sold N licenses to Humble and MS and Sony and so forth. Which effectively incentivizes “streamer bait” games.

Also: We have seen exactly this play out in music and film/TV.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 9 dni temu

Baldurs Gate 3? The game part of one of the bigger franchises in all of gaming (D&D) that is the sequel to one of the most celebrated franchises in all of gaming (Baldurs Gate) that had been in Early Access for years AND which was developed by one of the three best CRPG developers in all of gaming (Larian).

Well, you heard them: just make more Baldurs Gates!

NuXCOM_90Percent, 9 dni temu

The “big franchises” that are how people find success in a gamepass world? Or do you still think that Dungeons and Dragons Presents Baldurs Gate 3 By Larian Studios is a tiny indie game?

Also: Maybe you should check out how the music industry is doing as countless artists talk about how hard it is to break out at all and one of the more popular bands on spotify (?) is literally AI slop?

Also

Are you implying that the indie game industry is in any risk at all?

Tell me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs without telling me you have ignored all the endless fucking layoffs.

If you want to discuss this? Either be open to learning or educate yourself ahead of time. But if you are just going to insist on vibes and how everything is going to just work out? You are wasting everyone’s time.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 13 dni temu (edited 13 dni temu)

Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that. People see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.

It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reciting encyclopedia articles to sound smart.

Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 12 dni temu

That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.

All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.

It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 12 dni temu

Because submarines are even more terrifying and even more effective

NuXCOM_90Percent, 12 dni temu

Maybe? Any military presence on a mountain trail would make me break out the wipes and the poop bottle.

My point is more that it is one of those things that goes against “Kojima is a much less neocon version of Tom Clancy” that goes around.

The idea of Metal Gear as a tool to fire undetectable nukes from anywhere on the planet (that a giant walking mech can get to…) completely ignores that submarines are already doing that. And there really isn’t a defense to an ICBM unless you have Trigger themselves in the area of operations when the sub surfaces. The “defense” to an ICBM is to fire off all yours before it hits and make sure everyone dies. MAYBE Rex gives you one or two first strikes before the missiles start launching but… again, see “submarines”. The moment the first hit, President Solidus would say “ah no you di’n’t!” and have the subs surface and fire off their ICBMs and the end result would be exactly the same.

That also doesn’t get into how bad an idea any form of walking tank is (which, to be fair, was briefly acknowledged in MGS3). I love my Gundams and my Battlemechs but unless you have minovsky particle magic you just rapidly recreate the meta that thousands of house rules have failed to stop in Battletech: 1000 points of Atlas goes down REAL fast when you have even 500 points of effectively pickup trucks with gauss guns on the back. Jaburo wouldn’t have panicked and fed themselves to Kamille and Not-Char attacking. They would have grabbed their ATGMs and started leaning out of bolt holes to light those two up.

And if Rex hadn’t been inside of a giant missile silo (hmmm), it would have been lit up by a bombing run the moment someone saw it on satellite imagery.

But that is kind of my point. The MGSes, like Deus Ex, is mostly a hodge podge of conspiracy theories and cool concepts from other media. People see what they want in there and handwave the rest.

Does that mean the story is not political? Of course not (even if DX is inconsistent to the point it might be… Like… that Alex Garland Civil War might be less nonsensical in terms of sides somehow). But you can very much have an author(s) with no political intent make a political statement.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 13 dni temu

The keighleys are a shitshow in a lot of ways.

My understanding is that it is a VERY small subset of judges who bucket the games into categories and then that is sent to the wider range of outlets.

According to the keighleys themselves: thegameawards.com/faq

​​Nominees for most categories of The Game Awards are chosen by an international jury of over 100 global media and influencer outlets, selected for their history of critical video game evaluation.

Specialized juries also convene for other categories including esports, accessibility and best adaptation.

Each voting outlet completes a confidential, unranked ballot based on the collective and diverse opinion of its entire editorial staff, listing out its top five choices in each category.

Ballots are tabulated, and the five games that appear on the most ballots are put forth as nominees. In the event of a tie, six (or more) nominees will be announced in a category.

Game Awards producer Geoff Keighley is not a member of the jury and does not vote on the nominees or winners. Similarly, The Game Awards Advisory Board has no involvement in the awards process and learns of the results at the same time as the general public.

How much you believe that last bit gets messy and is irrelevant to the topic at hand. But more than a few games media folk have openly complained that the pre-sorting into categories is just complete nonsense and all they can really do is pick what they know of once the final ballots go out.

So that is why you have shit like the Simulation (?) category that is a catch all for sports games, flight sims, strategy games, mobile games, rocket league, minecraft, etc. Similarly, you get cases of “… Dave the Diver is not an indie game but I guess it is the best game in the Indie category?”

NuXCOM_90Percent, 13 dni temu

The issue is generally more funding related.

One “indie game” might have a massive budget and multiple support studios. Another might have gotten fifty bucks for giving an investor a blowie and somehow turned that into a game. Sometimes you manage to get those massive upsets but the reality is that money tends to correlate with quality very strongly.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 14 dni temu

Did it?

Checking www.imdb.com/name/nm10804818/ and it doesn’t look like she became particularly more popular than she was prior to BG3

Which is kind of the point. YOU recognize her and so do a lot of gamers. But… that doesn’t translate to getting cast by studios.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 14 dni temu (edited 14 dni temu)

What story do you think her imdb page tells? Because she has consistently done 2-3 roles per year since 2022. And a lot of those are games that have been in dev a long time. Like, that covid stretch is likely what led to consistently getting 2-3 releases each year since '22.

Also… is she major marketing for E33? I don’t watch a lot of commercials these days but mostly if ANY VA is involved it is Cox or Starr. Like, I think Alice Duport-Percier (the singer of Alicia) has gotten more face time across the various youtube ads and what not than anyone else (and rightfully so. That song contributes so much to the Vibes of such a Vibes based game).

But either way: That doesn’t actually change the point. The BG3 VAs pretty much all knocked it out of the park. And that isn’t translating to meaningful increase in roles.

Which has come up a lot over the years. Very few VAs see major success even after bringing EVERYONE to tears with how good of a performance they gave. And the Troy Bakers (and Laura Baileys) of the world are a whole different argument.

---

Just to add on. A twitch streamer I semi-regularly watch is also a pretty successful VA and she has talked about this in the past. People might say that she MADE a game with her performance but that doesn’t translate to future castings. So she can be in mobile trash one year and a GOTY contender the next and still get roughly the same bookings and checks per year.

Which is probably why so much of the BG3 cast were super eager to work with Digital Extremes. Partially because DE and Reb are awesome. But mostly because live service games area potentially a great source of stable income since they’ll need a few lines every year for N years.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 17 dni temu (edited 17 dni temu)

I would very much not trust a 7 year old with a 450 USD device but you do you.

Honestly? If what you want is something to play “nintendo games” with the family? I would just go buy one of the pi-like devices or even go full sicko with an FPGA and then totally obviously legitimately purchase and rip every single game you want.

But in all seriousness, a small raspberry pi-like device running ES-DE (fuck the hateful transphobic shithead behind Retroarch) is probably the genuine best choice for someone who wants to play the games of their youth without thinking much. AliExpress is nowhere near as good as it used to be but Retro Game Corps has reviewed a LOT of these kinds of devices over on youtube.

And if you want the portability? You can buy two (there are plenty of gameboy-like devices in that space) and still come in way under the price of a switch 2. Which, again, seven year olds are stupid and destructive.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 17 dni temu

I mean, that is literally what they did with SS1.

I’m not optimistic though. SS1, even in the EE, was ROUGH. SS2 is not that far off from Deus Ex and immersive sims… really haven’t evolved much past that. That combined with the endless funding faucet shutting off makes me pretty sure they’ll be sticking to more popular franchises and the like (allegedly the next big Nightdive announcement is at Quakecon).

NuXCOM_90Percent, 17 dni temu

I would 100% love a Nightdive (or similar) remaster of Deus Ex. But my point is more that it really doesn’t need it, mechanically. If you were to go boot up DX after having played nu-Prey or Shadows of Doubt or whatever, it would be familiar. Some rough edges but no more than going back to DOOM after… DOOM 2016. And SS2 (and Thief) is maybe one notch further than that.

Contrast that with SS1 where it honestly had more in common with what would become the mechwarrior games than DOOM (see also: CyClones).

As for funding: Plenty of indie devs have talked about it. Xalavier Nelson Jr is always a good listen (he did a few episodes of Remap Radio). Late 2010s/early 2020s, getting funding for a video game was, if not easy, very doable. That is more or less what let Nightdive establish themselves as the weirdos who go REALLY REALLY hard on loving remasters of older games.

But between economic uncertainty and the realization that COVID was probably a localized peak for the gaming market, it has gotten a lot harder for basically every studio to get funding. Which is likely why Nightdive seem to be doing every single iD/MS game they can or games that are part of multimedia franchises (e.g. Dark Forces).

So Quake 4 is a no brainer (would love 3 but that is multiplayer first which gets risky). And while Nightdive CLEARLY love System Shock (it is more or less what the company was founded on), getting the funding for a full “game” a la 2023’s SS1 is a much bigger challenge than a ridonkulous source port/patch. There isn’t a company that is really going to be eager to fund that because it isn’t part of a major monetizable franchise (although Dommy Bug Mommy SHODAN as a Disney Princess would be peak dystopic hellscape) and there would be a hard sell in terms of it significantly increasing market share over the remaster.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 18 dni temu (edited 18 dni temu)

Yeah. It has rapidly turned an initiative that was already unnecessarily combative toward devs (fuck the publishers though) and associated it with harassment and review bombing games that are actually Doing It Right just because they worked with the wrong third party studio. Not to mention all the “Well, we don’t agree with everything asmongold says, but let’s call a truce so long as he is gonna let us play our video games”

And… honestly? I have disliked thor since LONG before all y’all realized he isn’t the world’s best WoW player or he has an opinion you don’t like because he was considering things from the perspective of the people who would be doing the work to enact these “simple requirements”.

But it feels REAL fucking everyday normal to watch people immediately go from “the harassment campaign that led to the death of Mikayla Raines was horrible” to “Let’s fucking ruin Pirate Software’s life and attack him and everything he has ever associated with because we are morally righteous”

NuXCOM_90Percent, 20 dni temu

Louis Rossman is, at best, a “free speech absolutionist” libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8

In a nutshell: It doesn’t matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all “He is a fucking prick and he didn’t read the FAQ” does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.

Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 19 dni temu

Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real “okay, let’s go back and reduce our technical debt” for the majority of games.

So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.

But also… how does that change anything? “Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works”?

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

It is not something people could really predict.

Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal

Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.

But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.

Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

Yeah… that is xenophobic nonsense.

You don’t need a major successful live service game to build a honeypot for military secrets. I remember back in the day the arma fansites and the like would be CONSTANTLY filled with “is it real? if so… somebody getting black van’d” style posts. Same with flight sims. Anywhere you have even pseudo-realistic military hardware/tactics you will have people who insist on stuffing files in their pants and scanning them to prove why the thing they work on is better.

It is always hilarious that warthunder can’t go a month without classified information. But that more just speaks to how insanely popular that game is.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu (edited 21 dni temu)

“Legal” is a very strong word here.

A better statement would be that there hasn’t really been a major court case regarding decompiling source for hobby use and most cases where it is used for profit or piracy are no nos for existing reasons. But for education purposes or to develop and interface, it is a grey area. In large part because said education makes you toxic as hell in industry and said interfaces are usually for things that violate the license agreement and TOS because the software didn’t provide an interface for a reason.

And then you run into cases where the act of bypassing protections to get the binaries in the first place put you in further hot water. Sort of like how the (way over simplified) argument that you are legally allowed to have a backup of your video games but the act of making said backup gets REALLY sketchy in a lot of cases.

I would probably phrase it more as “decompiling source code is not illegal. How you use it might be”

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Its also always worth remembering that law comes from precedent. And it is rarely in anyone’s interest for stuff like this to go to trial. So there will be a few landmark cases that cover VERY specific use cases and a LOT of cases of big lawyers saying “Do you really wanna fuck with us?” and getting a C&D and a settlement.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

It was a shitshow start to finish.

First and foremost: it is an inherently adversarial “movement” name which actively shifts the blame toward developers. One of my gaming buddies was a community manager for one of the studios that got gutted over the past year or so (gotta “love” how that doesn’t narrow it down at all) and he definitely had some Thoughts about getting constant social media spam about how they are “killing games” by not releasing offline versions of old games as they were doing layoffs on the regular.

There is a reason the only dev/“dev” who gave any meaningful feedback was thor the shithead. And while it may suck that he didn’t have the same opinion as the people accusing devs of killing the games they spent the better part of a decade on… Yeah, pirate software is a dipshit who was just trying to put himself as a position of authority because his dad worked at Blizzard.

But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective. Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you’ll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn’t pound that out in a week.

But even without starting things off at “its just about ethics in game journalism” levels of discourse: Yes, yes, yes, I know that Ross et al intentionally were vague and shut the fuck up. If you push “We need legislature on X” to a governing body without an actionable plan? Schoolhouse Rock doesn’t start blaring and Aaron Sorkin doesn’t… okay, he still gets a boner but for different reasons. What happens is the lobbyists and Jack Thompsons of the world swoop in and make damned sure that those “details get ironed out” the way they want.

It sucks because treating this as part of a larger effort that included actual Game Preservation efforts and worked with policy groups and developers would actually have been awesome AND gotten widespread support even from the studios themselves. Instead it was a flashy campaign that started off by flipping the bird to people getting fired left and right and reveled in its ignorance of how legislature even works. And then managed to get dragged into a slapfight with some jackass who plays wow and sells mobile games.

It was overly narrow in most cases while positioning itself as speaking for some massive swathe of the industry it was actively antagonizing.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

And that always comes up because it is the truth. It is the same problem as “Well, you worked yourself to death for the past five years but decided you needed to take time off for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, we don’t launch until six months from now so go fuck yourself. Hey, send in Fred on your way out so we can tell him he needs to work 90 hour weeks for the next six months but won’t have been here long enough to get in the credits”.

You know what doesn’t get that? Being told you need to architect your game, from the start, to use listen servers while also being unhackable and controlling all progression in the data center AND scaling near infinitely with no host migration issues (oh Warframe…). Or to know that if things even look slightly bad you will have no runway to fix it and will immediately be told to wrap it up and release the “offline mode” in the next month.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

No. But “stop killing games” is an inherently adversarial statement. Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever. Let alone the devs who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it.

People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating.

And here we get to the crux of things. And the good news is that we already fucking went through all of this.

“Nobody should have to put up with harassment. But, really, it is your job to deal with that and we have our demands. So give me what I want and this all goes away”. Am I talking about “Stop killing games and give us an offline server for your MMO” or am I talking about “Fire that bitch and stop talking about woke games because I care about ethics in games journalism”?

And we saw the exact same responses from the dev side (and the smarter/older influencers). Either completely ignoring it because they don’t want to get doxxed or “Yeah… there are parts of that I really like. But I don’t know enough to really comment too much. Anyway, back to talking about the new Silent Hill game”.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu (edited 21 dni temu)

There is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.

Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).

And then you just have the kind of “spirit of the law” shit that Apple et al love to abuse. Is that game fundamentally unplayable “offline” because it did REALLY cool stuff with sharding so that players can drop in and out of a game seamlessly? Or is it a bunch of phone homes for every single achievement for a fully SP game? Because that would NEVER happen.

thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP.

Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”

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The other aspect this tends to ignore is the use of proprietary software libraries and even having expert consultants come out. My understanding is nVidia have mostly stopped doing it (for gaming) but for decades they would fly out a solution engineer or five to look at the game, help optimize the graphics and physics pipelines, and even document what needs to be added to the drivers on release.

Not all of those contractors who have ever touched the code are going to be okay with it being released. Since this would be the equivalent of having potentially entire mega companies worth of software libraries and the like change their license overnight.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 21 dni temu

Yet again, your response was “if they didn’t want to get harassed by the people who totally aren’t with us, they shouldn’t have crossed us”

Yet again, we lived through all this shit with gamergate.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

Friendly reminder: This is NOT a “W”

Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than… your actual existence.

But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.

This article is basically the equivalent of “In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit”

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu (edited 22 dni temu)

No. This shouldn’t be the norm. How “successful” a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.

It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma for no apparent reason.

But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait… the CEO doesn’t have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.

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I’ll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.

The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year… 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don’t know those initial sales figures, we do know that… 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another “final for reals this time” content drop for Terraria.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so is still say worth celebrating.

It is a “positive step” up from the hellscape that has been used to underpay and screw over devs for decades now.

I get we all want to feel good and not have to give a shit about actual labor issues and compensation of workers. But… this is just the kind of shit that makes it even easier to continue abusing the people who make the games we love and make sure that the golden parachute upper level managers get to have 500 person studios all on the back of having been at a meeting for a successful game.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.

But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn’t do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.

I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play “wrong” for like 16 hours.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

Guess what impacts sales figures and even metacritic scores these days?

Assholes like asmongold. Because getting your game review bombed and having all the twitch streamers checking out your game have their unpaid moderators run triple time because they didn’t sticky a clip of them calling the character generator “woke trash”? That severely impacts sales. And Games Media is in a horrible state and the more corporate outlets (but also even a lot of the independent ones) just aren’t going to want that smoke for daring to say a game was fun if it is the latest “culture war” game.

It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well.

There is a reason that it has increasingly become a good practice to refer to “total compensation”. Because, yeah, everyone loves getting told by the CEO that they are essential and saved the company and are awesome and everybody gets a day off … but only if they give the CEO time to peel out in his new ferrari first. But the reality is that that is baked into the expected salary and you are effectively taking a pay cut any year you don’t meet those arbitrary criteria… which are almost always never something YOU have any control over.

And you know who DOESN’T get a pay cut in the years where half your department got fired on a Thursday?

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

Perfectly fair.

I think Team Ninja screwed the pooch on other aspects of it (basically every single enemy does nothing but delayed attacks…) but I still think Rise of the Ronin set the bar for what a parry should be in the 2020s: Triggerable from block so you have minimal penalty to mistiming it for all but the perilous attacks. And Clair Obscura is similarly awesome for tightly coupling the parry and dodge timings so you can learn a fight with perfect dodging before switching to perfect parries for maximum punishment.

If whiffing a parry means I lose half my health bar (cough Dark Souls cough) I am never going to use it. If whiffing a parry means I take chip damage or if I can practice my timing with a safe defensive mood? I’ll be grinning like a beast as I clown on the heroes/“heroes” of the Bakumatsu.

But yeah. I REALLY enjoyed Lies of P even if I think the last 3 or so bosses are… kind of genuinely bad (two puzzle bosses in a row is also a real bad feeling). Still need to get around to the DLC but I am INCREDIBLY interested in what the next major game from that studio is. But I wouldn’t encourage anyone who doesn’t vibe with LoP to try again (well… maybe with the new rebalance patch?).

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.

That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don’t have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.

And actual salaries and not “incentives”.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

Like I said, the DLC is still on my todo list but assuming it follows the Bloodborne DLC difficulty (it sure as hell is following the Bloodborne DLC concept and narrative…)? Yeah, I would be amazed.

But I did watch a video of someone dodging to beat the real end boss of the core game which I similarly thought was nigh impossible. And it is incredibly brutal with basically a need for fairly perfect play just to do chip damage. So… sickos gonna sicko.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

But from a management perspective

Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren’t tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a “dark maga” hat to the keighelys and the game craters.

And… fuck the managers. They are already doing great.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 22 dni temu

The original Steam Controller was great for games that didn’t support gamepads… and came out within like a year of “hey, we can actually map CRPGs, grand strategies, and RTSes to gamepads pretty well apparently?”

The Steam Deck is awesome because it is a best of both worlds. Sticks for games that map to those and trackpads for navigating the OS/Steam and for games that don’t map well to sticks. And a gamepad form of the Steam Deck would be awesome, if only for letting those of us with fewer brain cells to only learn one scheme for a game rather than two or three.

This… is not that. Mechanically it is there (and it is a good ad for pcbway or whatever) but the ergonomics are just complete trash. The Steam Deck itself has shockingly awesome ergonomics (and is a great isometric exercise because that thing is a brick) because it is like holding a large hardcover book. Shrink that down and you are just straining your wrists . It is why basically every gamepad has flared “wings” these days. It softens the angle of your wrist while you hold it.