PunchingWood

@PunchingWood@lemmy.world

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

PunchingWood,

I saw this title a couple of times during conferences in the past years and I liked the general atmosphere and style, but I had absolutely no clue what kind of gameplay to expect.

Now that I seen it, it reminds me of The Division in a different theme. Was expecting a whole different kind of game for some reason. Can’t say the gameplay looks very interesting though, seems quite basic and bland, especially comparing to the Division games. Might still check it out since I like the style and theme.

PunchingWood,

I thought I was going crazy, because I definitely felt like the impressions I got a couple of years ago definitely seemed more like a Destiny type of game.

Could still be fun but it seemed like a weird shift. But these kind of changes during development barely ever mean anything good for the final product.

PunchingWood,

Feels like the author just wanted to take a jab at game and marketing studios.

Even though I’ve seen artists being credited on social media by big studios quite often in recent years.

PunchingWood, (edited )

Well W7 is practically 15 years old, and already stopped receiving updates itself. It’s not really up to Steam to keep it up and running even especially if Microsoft no longer bothers to update the OS, it would just get more and more problematic, and they also had to let it go at some point.

I don’t think anyone cares about W8 though, even Microsoft itself barely seemed to put effort in making it work.

PunchingWood,

I feel like the best time for mobile games was back around 2009/2010 when touchscreen just became good and most stuff was either free or paid and without intrusive ads and monetization or other predatory bullcrap.

I recently tried Angry Birds 2, and I was baffled it would only take a few levels before I had to buy my way to more “ammunition” to keep playing. The original used to be good, I even wouldn’t have minded if there was like an ad between games, or if it was just buy-to-play, but even that isn’t an alternative option anymore. And they also pulled the original from the stores, I thought they had re-released it before, but couldn’t find it either. And also when I first opened the game there was so much shit on screen that it was even difficult to navigate to just even find the actual game, it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.

PunchingWood,

Yeah, but not thanks to Bethesda though.

PunchingWood,

I’ve said it before, and I believe that Bethesda is going to completely mess up TES6.

There are several issues with Bethesda, the major problem being they seem to have lost all creativity and they’re trying to apply the same old formula to every single game with minimal changes. Then hope that modders will keep it on life support. And sadly that’s how I found myself having to play their games, because without many mods it was often awful to play on PC, and I still didn’t have fun thanks to repetitive content and forgettable story and characters.

Another is that they’re clinging on to that damn dilapidated game engine of theirs like it’s their precious baby. It’s an awful engine, insanely outdated, limited and performs terribly. Starfield is a great example of how awful it is, but every game before that has had major performance issues and limitations as well.

The only redeeming feature might be that TES6 probably won’t be a procedurally generated world. They really showed how repetitive and boring it can get with procedural generation. And a handcrafted world would have so much more character. They could perhaps use the procedural engine for dungeons, and enemies and their bases, or items found through the world, but not the world itself.

But I’m afraid it’s just going to be a near Skyrim carbon-copy. It’ll likely be an okay looking game with an okay looking game world, but I bet gameplay will be mostly unaltered from what they’ve been doing for over 20 years. Same old basic combat, same talking heads with lifeless animations, same sneaking and magic gameplay, etc.

World of Warcraft's monetization seems to be getting way more aggressive angielski

The monetization of World of Warcraft has evolved significantly since I played during Burning Crusade over 10 years ago. Back then, the model was straightforward - you bought the expansion and paid a subscription fee. That was all you needed to access 100% of the game’s content....

PunchingWood,

Yeah and he keeps deleting his posts if they don’t perform well and he gets called out for them.

Honestly should just be banned for botting at this point.

PunchingWood,

The amount you complain about WoW you should probably just quit the game, if you’re even playing it. Also why do you keep making topics and then deleting them? You complained about subscriptions, and now you’re complaining about optional additional cosmetic content.

Like 99% of the community likely doesn’t care about promotional stuff. You can just pay the game and subscription and get access to all gameplay features just fine. If someone spends hundreds of bucks to get some useless promotional item, then let them. It doesn’t affect my gameplay.

Yeah, you can buy a mount from the store that saves you like a 2 minute walk or flight to your closest auction house, ironically I’ve never ever seen anyone even use these mounts outside of the cities that have actual auction houses, they’re usually just next to a mailbox or bank across the street of the auction house.

The fact that these things sell is probably one reason why subscriptions in the past 20 years haven’t rising in the first place.

PunchingWood,

Well he says he “thinks” it hasn’t had a negative impact. It’s not even been a week though lol

I also think it will never negatively impact the console sales. It’s just another product on top of already ongoing console sales.

Whether it’s actually profitable, considering the production cost and all, is something different though. I think for the foreseeable future people will probably buy the older models over the more expensive new ones anyway. Unless you got money to burn there’s little reason to upgrade to the Pro.

PunchingWood,

First you made a post complaining about how expensive game subscriptions are, which you now deleted.

And now you make a post about owning hundreds of games on gaming platforms.

What is it? Are you broke? Or do you just make pointless topics to complain about the way things are? It’s not going to change, your utopian scenario is based on hopes and dreams. But that’s not how the industry, or how the world, works.

Steam developed like this naturally, from being game launcher and library, to a store for their own games, to a store and library for other studios to publish on too. It works, and does its job well. Other companies thought they could do the same, can’t blame them for trying. This is how businesses work, they develop and compete, some make it, some don’t.

Your doomsday nightmare scenarios are based purely on wild assumptions and non-arguments.

PunchingWood, (edited )

I feel like subscriptions are just fine though.

If you can’t afford subscriptions like those, then you should probably have other priorities to really worry about.

That said, I play WoW on and off, I never play 24 months in a row or so until the next expansion. I often total at barely half a year or maybe even less depending on the expansion. Like currently I’ve only paid for one month and have bought game time with lots of gold I had, but I barely played during these times.

If someone would play every month every expansion they probably easily got their money’s worth out of it if they’re that invested in the game, and probably spend far less on other games or hobbies. I think subscriptions for MMO games have changed the least of all too, comparing it to like Netflix that changed prices regularly and easily doubled since it became popular. And they’re most definitely not going to reduce subscription fees because other unrelated things got more expensive.

Same principle for streaming services, you probably don’t watch all of them, so why not just limit yourself to one and swap between each? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy every streaming service, they’re luxury and entertainment products, if you can’t afford it then simply don’t buy it. I do think streaming services get out of hand, but they keep doing it because people keep buying it.

PunchingWood,

And again, like I said, if you can’t afford it then you should rethink your priorities. It’s a luxury product, not a basic needs product.

And like I also said, these game subscriptions have barely changed in price compared to many other things in the past 20 years. They’re not that expensive.

Considering you’re talking about multiple game subscriptions and streaming subscriptions in your post, I don’t think you have it that bad anyway. You’d also require a console or gaming PC or both, a lot of people don’t have all that. Subscriptions are easily the cheapest part of the hobby.

You’re just bad with organising your subscriptions and should change how to get the most out of it.

PunchingWood,

Politics in games isn’t the issue.

It’s the concept of pushing real world politics in games that is the problem.

Sometimes they can overlap, but they needn’t to. Some things are just obviously pushing the agendas of developers, instead of making it feel like a legit part of the game universe.

PunchingWood,

I recently tried it and only got through the first chapter before giving up, it’s just not fun to me.

PunchingWood,

I don’t know, it looks pretty weak and mediocre to me, quite dated too honestly, both visually and gameplay wise.

A while ago I read impressions from people that got to try this game on events and they did not seem to be too impressed.

I don’t think this title will live up to its name.

PunchingWood,

It just looks like a generic 2015 game or something. Gunplay seems very bulletspongy, weapons seem very static and weightless, general atmosphere is dull, AI enemies just run around like imbeciles and spray into the general direction of the player. In a game like this immersion should be a huge priority, but when it comes to shooting it just looks so incredibly generic.

It just makes it look like this game was made for the sake of having a sequel, without really knowing what they could add to it. It just looks like a Fallout game with all the interesting parts stripped out of it.

PunchingWood,

Not sure how to feel about the company behind DayZ getting in on it though. It’s kinda ironic, because they (or the guy that is/was leading them) are quite notorious for abandoning active running projects for something new, and repeatedly doing so. They even did this with DayZ until after a long time they picked it up again (I think), but I’m not sure what state the DayZ is in now.

PunchingWood,

It’s not a myth when it really happens. I specifically remember DayZ being the first game I even reviewed on Steam because they abandoned it to work on a new project before wrapping up DayZ.

It’s just bad business to let projects linger in early access while starting new ones, or even sell loads and loads of DLC for these games. Frankly Steam should do something about it and punish studios abusing the system.

PunchingWood,

Great, now I hope it will actually be well optimised though. I tried the first game again recently, but the performance in the main town is abysmal on high-end hardware.

PunchingWood,

Well, had to give it another try. Before, my 3070 could barely even handle the game at decent settings and higher framerates, now my 4080 Super shouldn’t be an issue at all.

After some testing I had hoped it’d be in a better state now, only shortly tried to load my save from a long time ago but it doesn’t look very promising, was at least hoping 100+ FPS at this point, but I face one side I get 70 FPS, and I turn to a misty valley and it burns down to like 20. Also initially had issues to even get the game running again, it would just freeze when the game window was active, I could hear my buttons having effect, but nothing would show until I took the focus off the game.

After rebooting it a couple of times and fiddling with some settings it seems to now work (still strangely the same settings as I started with), and sometimes it performs well and sometimes it struggles. Very inconsistent. If I turn off my MSI Afterburner undervolt config it feels like the game will melt my rig, the fans go absolutely crazy.

Also there seems to be quite some pop-in textures, terrain, trees and foliage. I don’t really recall this from before, at least not this noticable.

Hope it’s a driver thing or perhaps still more optimisation, because the game seems fun. Combat is still super basic and easy though, but being able to build a lively village makes up for it for me.

PunchingWood,

I personally loved Avatar and Outlaws.

They’re not groundbreaking games, but they’re both very immersive and for fans of both franchises it’s a lot more fun to explore in these games.

PunchingWood,

Pretty much this.

I will likely get downvoted into oblivion for saying this (as usual), and I will prelude by saying that I generally never care if there are gay, trans or whatever stuff in games. But transgenders and pronouns were never ever a thing in the Dragon Age franchise, and now they suddenly feature these so prominently. They just handled this very badly.

The fact that writing is generally just plain bad for this game, these inclusive options also seems to affect the rest of the game as well. And it indeed makes it look like they focused on the wrong narrative so much. The way Skill Up reviewed the game was perfect, his best summary was “it’s as if HR is standing in every room” or something along those lines. Like nobody is allowed to insult, or be insulted, in this franchise that used to be pretty dark and grim.

PunchingWood,

That’s interesting and all, but I still don’t see a reason to upgrade my PS5 to a Pro, and frankly it wouldn’t even be that interesting for the price as a new player either.

Are there like any games that will really make use of the new hardware? Other than perhaps upgraded framerates and better 4K support. The average console player probably isn’t going to care that much, not for the giant price increase over minimal gains.

I feel like all games on this generation will still be limited to the base PS5 anyway, can’t imagine hardware matters much until the next generation consoles.

PunchingWood,

People who don’t have a gaming PC but still want to game would be the next target audience in line, since they wouldn’t have another machine to play third-party games on anyway, so the exclusive would just be a bonus on top.

But I don’t think they’re even interested in paying so much extra for features they don’t even care about. Perhaps a smooth high framerate in casual shooters would be something they’d care for, but that can easily be achieved on base PS5 with at least 60+ FPS. I don’t think they’re the ones that care about true 4K, 120Hz/FPS or slightly better textures.

The only thing I can think of that people are hyped up for is GTA6. I fear that Rockstar might sell out to Sony and deliver a shitty 30FPS locked, low resolution and texture version of the game on older PS5 models on purpose, just to “push the hardware” of the newest model. But then again, they also couldn’t even be arsed to unlock framerate for RDR2 on PS5, not even after so many years.

PunchingWood,

I haven’t read much into GTA 6 so far, only seen the trailer basically.

I do hope the singleplayer will still be as good as previous games, although I definitely would expect them to try and cash in on online even more.

T2 and Rockstar definitely fucked up with GTA 5 too. Originally there were supposed to be singleplayer expansions. Which they of course dropped in favor of how popular online got. And then they even proceeded to ban mods that took multiplayer-only cars to singleplayer, fucking disgusting move.

I’ll wait and see how the singleplayer is. I never bought GTA5 for its multiplayer, it only got less appealing the more they added to it too. The only part that interested me much later on were the RP servers, it genuinely looked fun on some of the moderated ones, so maybe Rockstar will try to get into that, but if online is just a carbon copy of GTA5 I won’t even bother.

PunchingWood,

I have barely ever bought anything for my Switch, only a couple of big titles for Zelda and Mario. It’s just too expensive and there are hardly ever any sales. And any third-party games I can get much cheaper on PC anyway.

The pricing also made it really difficult to understand which games were newer, like I looked at Pokemon games and the much older ones were also still priced as if they were new.

PunchingWood,

Yeah but the Steam Deck came like 5 years after I bought the Switch lol

Meanwhile I got a Gamesir G8 that I can use with my phone or tablet, and I can just remote to my PC or PS5 to play games.

PunchingWood, (edited )

I don’t know, it just looks like a €50 stand-alone expansion that could’ve been DLC for the first game. But now they get to sell it for more, and add new/more individual smaller DLC for this one.

Not been much of a fan of Frontier ever since Braben left. They started focusing very heavily on paid DLC since, especially back when for Elite Dangerous it was first just cosmetics, but they got greedy and now have paid early access for new ships, after the game was content starved for years. And before that instead of focusing on new content there was a long period where the only thing that got updated was a new microstransaction currency and raised prices of the DLC.

Doesn’t feel much different with the Planet Coaster and Zoo games. They get littered with paid DLC, and it’s almost taking The Sims forms of additional paid content.

PunchingWood,

Well I got the game back when it came out. I did not know the game would be leaning so heavily on paid content after that, so it often felt like missing out on new stuff. It was the same with Elite Dangerous, I backed that from Kickstarter, and then they pull shit like that paid early access content.

I’d say I easily got my money’s worth out of both games for what I paid at the time. But it still feels like being screwed over when they start putting price tags on all new content. And it’s often not even a lot of content that justifies the price tag. Compare this to games like No Man’s Sky, that get free updates quite often.

I think this would’ve bothered me far less had the base games been free to play games, and then charge for DLC. To me Frontier turned into a greedy company so fast, it’s really up there with EA, Blizzard Activision and Epic.

PunchingWood, (edited )

Of course they’re not doing it on Spotify, and instead choose to lock it behind their own subscription service.

Nintendo is such a greedy shitty corporation. I wouldn’t even be surprised if now they are gonna go after people that posted their music elsewhere.

This would’ve actually been a perfect to be included with the alarm clock they recently released.

PunchingWood,

Even if they had put it on Spotify they would’ve gotten royalties from there. Which would be a nice bonus for them, because I can’t imagine anyone paying Nintendo Online just for the music.

PunchingWood,

Well the entire music industry is using it, can’t be that bad.

And like I said, I imagine it would actually bring more money to the table than being a Nintendo Online exclusive.

PunchingWood, (edited )

Would be interesting to know what positions they’re firing.

I bet it’s yet again none of the project and management level staff. Since they’re talking about “saying goodbye to a number of incredibly talented and dedicated team members”, after they said “we made the difficult decision to restructure our studio to ensure our long-term sustainability”.

So you have to fire people, but you fire the “incredibly talented and dedicated” employees. All this tells me is that projects they’re working on aren’t going to improve, if they ever get wrapped up even.

PunchingWood,

There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.

Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.

Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.

PunchingWood,

As long as the delayed time is actually enough to fix fundamental issues, usually a short time of a few weeks, or even months, is hardly enough to fix core issues with a game.

The article says it’s about the network infrastructure. Which frankly seems like something pretty significant for this kind of game. The 3 weeks delay makes it sound like it’s not an easy “just upscale the server capacity” fix, so hopefully it’s nothing too complicated that cannot be fixed within that time.

That said, I would rather that studios would just stop publishing release dates if they don’t even know if they can uphold the deadlines. I know it’s become part of the hype culture and pre-sales and everything else pre-release, but I had much preferred that games would only get announced when they’ve practically gone gold, and worst they’d need to do is to iron out some imperfections.

It’s like moving release dates has become part of the project development and PR in the past decade, just to hit players with that “We wish to deliver the best experience possible, so we decided…” yadda yadda. Some might be genuine, but a lot of games still release in an absolutely garbage state after being delayed (multiple times even). It just gives the impression they do it to drive up pre-orders and hype. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if Rockstar would hit us with that crap sometime next year, and move GTA6 to late 2025 or somewhere 2026 or something.

PunchingWood, (edited )

I’m still gonna wait and see, I think user reviews might turn out very mixed in contrast to the critics reviews. Not that I value user reviews all that much, but I’d like to see a bit more from the game before deciding anyway.

What really put me off from this game was the insanely boring dragon fight they recently showed in the PlayStation presentation, it dragged out so long too and nothing really interesting seemed to happen, it felt like a really outdated kind of boss battle, especially after games like God of War and Horizon. It just did not look that fun honestly, but perhaps story and other parts of the game are more entertaining.

PunchingWood, (edited )

Just watched the first part of his video. It seems to line up perfectly with what I was expecting based on the gameplay we were shown so far, it’s just outright boring. The amount of criticism and the footage in his review does not line up with the high ratings this game got.

Looks llike it’s gonna be a skip. Shame, because visually it looks nice to me and I kinda dig the art style (except for the Qunari), but if story, animations and gameplay are bad and boring it’s gonna be a no from me.

PunchingWood,

I never expected graphics to improve honestly. Plenty of good games out there that have been in development for a long time and look like old games, like Project Zomboid.

PunchingWood,

Not even a new trend in WoW either.

Can’t even blame Blizzard, it’s the people who keep buying this shit that are actually the problem.

If these wouldn’t sell in the store they could’ve been items to obtain through in-game activities (which don’t require eternal grind).

PunchingWood,

Transactions are from two parties, if the product didn’t sell they wouldn’t keep doing it. The product wouldn’t exist if it failed to sell in the first place.

Plenty of shitty products in the world that never get sold, and then stop being produced.

PunchingWood,

That’s no comparison. McDonalds doesn’t sell the infected products intentionally.

Random Screenshots of my Games #31 - Alien: Isolation (lemmy.world) angielski

I was hoping to keep up daily Halloween-themed posts through all of October, but I had way too much on my plate yesterday and didn’t get a moment to myself until almost midnight. Who knew retired life could be so busy? Oh well; at least I never promised to do daily posts. Maybe I’ll make a double post sometime to make up for...

PunchingWood,

I tried getting into horror games a couple of times, but it’s such a mixed bag of good games and just games throwing cheap jumpscares at your face.

I tried Alan Wake 2 recently, but I found nothing enjoyable about the loud flashing jumpscares they constantly throw at the player. Even with reduced visuals and sound options it just feels like such a cheap thing that the game doesn’t really need. Like someone exploding a plastic bag behind you, of course I get startled by it, but it isn’t the same as being scared.

PunchingWood, (edited )

Oh I’ve got no problem with rollercoasters, you know what’s going to happen and you can see ahead to know what you’re in for. That’s more a thrill than scare I’d say, although perhaps for some people that might be a thin line.

I just feel like jumpscares have no place in horror, at least not the way it’s done with loud and flashing images in Alan Wake 2. I wish games like Alan Wake had the option to turn it off entirely or something, would love to experience the story, but not with the cheap jumpscares being thrown in my face. I read about people that don’t mind jumpscares like that got annoyed by the excessiveness of these during gameplay, getting particularly worse further in the game too.

  • Wszystkie
  • Subskrybowane
  • Moderowane
  • Ulubione
  • FromSilesiaToPolesia
  • fediversum
  • Pozytywnie
  • motoryzacja
  • nauka
  • rowery
  • niusy
  • sport
  • slask
  • muzyka
  • informasi
  • Gaming
  • Technologia
  • esport
  • Blogi
  • Psychologia
  • Spoleczenstwo
  • lieratura
  • tech
  • giereczkowo
  • test1
  • ERP
  • krakow
  • antywykop
  • Cyfryzacja
  • zebynieucieklo
  • kino
  • warnersteve
  • Wszystkie magazyny