It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that’s a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there’s a chance right?)
I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted....
The reality is that it’s a lot of fuss for a game development company to switch engines but for an experienced individual developer it’s not a huge deal to switch engines. If you learn game development and design today using Unity then 100% of the game design knowledge is exactly transferable and 80-99% of the game development knowledge (depending on exactly what you’re doing) will transfer to Unreal or Godot or whatever else you might need to use later.
It’s like a musician switching from one audio production suite to another. The musical theory stays the same and while the exact details of how to make each bit of software do stuff is different, the actual stuff you’re making it do is broadly the same.
I think the game “development” industry is run by people who don’t understand the difference between a game designer and a game developer. As such there’s lots of people who only know as much about game design as the average developer does being tasked to do game design work and vice versa.
I’m not so sure about that. Godot is fantastic for making the sorts of projects they are describing. But if the relatively minor difference between Unity and Unreal’s workflow are a turn off for them, then the consciously different workflow in Godot is probably going to be a significant barrier. Personally, whilst I love Godot because it’s FOSS and lightweight and a great platform for building smaller scale games: a big part of the appeal for me is that I find the Unreal and Unity ways of doing things stupid, confusing and clumsy and the Godot way clever, clear and elegant. I know lots of people feel the exact opposite.
Unreal is good if you want to work on big expensive projects at big companies. Godot is good if you want to work on your own projects today and potentially but not definitly work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized at small to middle-sized companies in the future. Unity is fine if you want to work on small to middle-sized projects at small to middle-sized companies now and potentially in the future.
Which sucks. There ought to be a clear and unambiguous path to chose for someone moving into game development today but since Unity keeps making weird choices that are hostile to developers whilst not continuing to improve at a good pace, it’s hard to say for sure which engine will fill in the not-Unreal Engine part of the market unless you have a crystal ball.
Realistically the best thing is to have as strong a foundation in programming generally as you can so that switching engines is minimally disruptive (as there will always be a need to do so eventually. There’s very little chance one single engine will continue to be the standard over the 40+ years of a career.)
In my eyes it’s no different than a publisher selling a book that is in the public domain. You’re not paying them for their copyright, you’re paying them for everything else that goes into putting a physical copy of that text into your hands.
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
Everyone in this thread is failing to understand that “developers” in this context can mean both “people who develop videogames” and “businesses that develop videogames.” As the people who develop videogames are not always the ones who make decisions like this at businesses that develop videogames those two different things that everyone is using the same word for often have opposing positions on the matter.
In the comment you replied to they meant video game development companies by “developers” not the individual employees at those companies who do the actual work of developing games. Typically the actions of video game development companies are driven by the MBAs who have most of the big picture decision making power rather than the individual employees who develop the games.
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
Think of the game as Vampire Survivors, but instead of you having to move and all the skills are passively activated, now you just stay in one place, but you must actively use the skills. That makes sense because the game has tower defense theme, as the name suggested. There is another difference though, it’s how players...
The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there’s an unfun thing to do that wasn’t the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn’t have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So… Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
Iirc they are working to integrate it into the Steam client on desktop wherever possible (and to try to allow for cloud syncing the game state between devices.) Not sure how it’s been going but iirc it was never going to be made available until after the UI update (which came out quite recently.)
That can be overcome by handling save and exit and continuing from those saves differently to normal saves (is have normal saves be possible whilst continuing to play and be loadable as many times as you wish until it is overwritten, but have “save and exit” create a seperate save file that is deleted after successfully loaded.) One type of save allows you to undo in game events, the other only allows you to end your session an resume it at another time.
Does mean more work to do to make it work properly though.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it’s rarely the thing the players think is what’s wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard “There’s not enough content!” when in fact, as you’ve observed, there actually is plenty of content, it’s just (seemingly, I’ve not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product…)
Alternatively… If they’d caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick’s of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are…
I definitely lean this way too, though I’ve become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic’s title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I’m playing something like that if I feel like I’m at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn’t really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it’s a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you’ve challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
I got a Quest 2 a while back and played around with it a bit. There were some entertaining games like “I expect you to die” and the first portion of “Lone Echo”, but mostly they just felt like proof of concept demos and I quickly lost interest....
Depends what exactly your after. I suspect you’re looking for something to parallel flatscreen AAA titles in which case there’s only a handful and I think they’ve all been mentioned already.
On the other hand, Pistol Whip is one of the best games I’ve ever played. But it’s more the equivalent of a flatscreen hit indie genre title than a AAA blockbuster.
Also much more engaging than BeatSaber IMO, never been a fan of flailing my arms to slash blocks on beat. But shooting and dodging? Give me more!
Personally I’m more interested in flailing my arms than shooting and dodging.
Pistol Whip is just a much better execution of its concept than Beatsaber is of it’s own. Though Beatsaber is a pretty decent execution of Beatsaber. It just falls slightly short of its potential. Whereas Pistol Whip shoots straight past any expectations you’d have for it and finds new ways to be better than it strictly needs to be.
Players usually want a good story in their games. I can enjoy a good story too, but sometimes I just want to get going and do stuff without listening to several minutes of dialog in-between action....
Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky...
Itch.io had a big game jam on the theme of bees a little while ago so I’m sure if you poke around on there for a while you’ll find stuff that scratches your itch.
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK (news.xbox.com)
Penny Arcade sums up the Unity debacle in the first panel. (www.penny-arcade.com) angielski
Today’s Penny Arcade is a near perfect commentary on the Unity debacle....
The Death of Unity - Opinion (www.gamedeveloper.com)
I can say, unequivocally, if you’re starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it’s worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted....
Facebook marketplace in my country is wild. (lemmy.ca) angielski
Legendary PC developer says Denuvo is “a punishment to the consumer” (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
What game mechanics do you love and hate? angielski
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
After many weekends and sleepless nights later, here's the first gameplay trailer for my personal project (www.youtube.com)
Think of the game as Vampire Survivors, but instead of you having to move and all the skills are passively activated, now you just stay in one place, but you must actively use the skills. That makes sense because the game has tower defense theme, as the name suggested. There is another difference though, it’s how players...
Pet peeve, games that won't let you save
I wish all games would just let you save whenever you want to! Why is using checkpoints and auto saves so common?...
Are there any good VR games yet?
I got a Quest 2 a while back and played around with it a bit. There were some entertaining games like “I expect you to die” and the first portion of “Lone Echo”, but mostly they just felt like proof of concept demos and I quickly lost interest....
Good singleplayer games without any story?
Players usually want a good story in their games. I can enjoy a good story too, but sometimes I just want to get going and do stuff without listening to several minutes of dialog in-between action....
What type of game do you want to play that doesn't really exist?
Have you ever played a game and wondered what if you could do something that it doesn’t really allow you to do, for example being able to move around blocks in Minecraft fluidly instead of in sectors, edit the world in Hogwarts legacy with spells, be able to fly in a world like Elden Ring or Elder Scrolls with epic sky...
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