SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

It really depends.

Some games are so old that the technology needs to be sorely updated for modern gamers to be able to understand the controls, and “upating (the controls) for modern audiences” can be good.

Further, older games often have some pretty awful stereotypes in them that don’t need to be preserved so we can remember them.

I know Disney’s Bambi isn’t a video game, but I’ll use it as an example that’s being re-made. Bambi was made in 1942, and a massive amount of cultural references and ideas just don’t make as much sense in the modern era. There are literally things young people today would be like “what now?” in films that old. Sometimes “updating for modern audiences” is removing stuff that just doesn’t make sense anymore, or people don’t recognize or understand.

Even further, it used to be that “getting updated for modern audiences” was the norm. Anyone remember that hokey fucking Romeo & Juliet with Leonoard DiCaprio in the 90’s? Yeah, that was “updated for modern audiences” and it was a smash fucking hit. Back then, updating for modern audiences meant setting it in Verona instead of Venice and swapping swords for guns.

Like if you’re dealing with games that were always meant to frustrate and offend like Postal 2 or Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Redneck Rampage, you’re probably not gonna have a lot of people happy to “update for modern audiences” but there’s not much to update about campy schlock humor anyway.

So yeah, sometimes its not great, but I think the worries about it are overblown.

In movies there used to be a joke about how “the black guy always dies first” in action/horror movies because it held true for a long time. Black characters were given bit-roles that were quickly written out of movies. That is no longer the case, but you don’t see movies that don’t kill off black characters right away as being advertised as “updated for modern audiences” because that’s just silly.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

But something like the first 2 Fallouts on the other hand can really use a controls overhaul.

Those were literally on my mind! I know Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II got some updated control schemes more recently, including gamepad support, but it seems my favorite Fallouts are still stuck in the past.

God damn it what I would give for a modern Fallout in the style of Baldur’s Gate 3. It breaks me how Bethesda has ruined that series.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you’re actually trying to learn something from what you’re looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you’re willing to learn from them, that’s great, but here’s the thing.

Not everybody is taking away the same things.

What you take away from it isn’t what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there’s a lot of people who are.

My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.

However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren’t learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.

And that’s where I begin to worry, because while like, I’m in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, like… It’s hard to feel real “glee” at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go “awwww” inside, but I tell myself “I can’t get caught up in that if it’s an evil playthrough.” And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.

But the reality also is that a lot of people don’t care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.

while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.

You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn’t inspire confidence that you see that.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.

This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.

A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.

Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.

And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.

…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

I like the Wasteland games, but something about being alone in the wasteland felt so much more dangerous…

Part of why I liked Fallout is that it (for the most part) dispensed with the party and had you running on your own.

They had a handful of companions you could pick up in 1 & 2, but it was mostly lone gunning.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

Balmer needs them dividends, bruh! /s

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

…businessinsider.com/…/steve-ballmer-annual-micro…

You don’t gotta be working there to own stock and get dividends.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

You know, these companies share mountains of data with each other before mergers or buyouts.

The idea that they don’t know these “areas of overlap” as they call them before the deal is done is a joke.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

Of course they know them.

I know, that’s why I called it a joke. They always post these bullshit PR statements after the fact as if everyone didn’t know this was coming.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

No problem I’m not upset, I was just clarifying. We’re obviously both on the same page with this haha.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

copro euphemisms going around trying to hide that they’re firing people.

Like Return to Office? Never has the corporate C-Suite ever had an easier excuse to shitcan people for no good fucking reason.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

Makes me wonder if Valve has actual plans for TF2

Don’t break the community’s heart anymore, I don’t think they can take it.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Riot is a trash company.

I feel for the employees who lost their jobs.

Its always grating when CEOs say they “take responsibility” but they’re not taking a demotion and paycut. No, somehow, the idiots who made the shitty decisions get to keep making them. Apparently that’s “responsibility.”

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-g…

washingtonpost.com/…/riot-discrimination-100-mill…

When your culture of sexism results in a class action lawsuit from former and current employees, and you pay out to the tune of 100 million and keep all the same executives who were accused of harassment and discrimination, and you have to have a third party watch over your company for years to make sure you’re not still doing this stuff: you’re a trash company.

so it’s good pr at least .

I couldn’t roll my eyes any harder. That’s literally all it is.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m not your Buddy, Pal!

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

Starship Titanic is similarly incredibly under-rated, as is the companion novel written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

1. It was announced way way way too early.
2. Announced “It will be finished when it’s finished” on that way too early reveal.
3. Years later, it’s not finished, but tough shit, the studio is out of money and the shareholders are pushing for release.
4. It was released unfinished. Oops.
5. Years later, it is now closer to the original expectations.
6. Still no wall-running, so a lot of things they hyped and were expected are still unmet.
7. The Flathead was supposed to be a thing you kept throughout the game, but they never got the AI pathing right with it, so they dropped it.

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Well you’re mostly right in your original post, game was a solid 7/10 on release, but the studio just did so much disservice to themselves by hyping it up for nearly a decade before release, and especially hyping a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final product, and on top of all that breaking their own promise to not release until it’s finished.

The whole reason people liked The Witcher 3 was people were convinced the multiple delays to release “made it a better game.” It was at that moment that CDPR built the image that they won’t release a game “until it’s done.” They now had their own studio history working against them when they made the promise of “It’s finished when it’s finished” and people were expecting that. People loved that CDPR was so dedicated to the gamers that they wouldn’t let pesky things like money-men push a game out too early when it’s half-baked. Oops, they did exactly that with their next game, which absolutely shot all that goodwill from the players right through the heart, especially after already waiting nearly a decade for it.

In the end, are the expectations really unreasonable if the studio themselves were the people who built the hype those expectations were based on?

SnotFlickerman, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m not really pissed off, I’m just listing off things that were unmet based on the studios own desires and their own promotional materials leading up to release.

There’s still videos out there from when they were hyping wall-running and the Ghostrunner class. *shrugs

I really don’t think it’s unfairly maligned when those expectations were set by the studios themselves.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Maybe they need to listen to the name and fucking end it already.

Try something new.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

I mean “new” as in “Not Final Fantasy.”

Not something “new” as in “New Stuff in Final Fantasy.”

No, scrap the fucker. It’s well past done.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Next you’ll tell me Game Genie is still around!

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Company with market cap of $2.75 trillion can’t even plan a fucking feature properly and then blames the gamers for their own fucking stupidity.

Also, I’ll honestly be shocked if MS views this as “bad press” since it was only a few years ago that they ignored all the bad press when it come to banning Minecraft players for things they said in their own private servers.

arstechnica.com/…/microsoft-will-start-banning-pl…

That still happens, the bad press stopped happening, but people still lose access to Minecraft for what they do in private worlds that are “friends only.”

I think people wanting to say horrible stuff on their own server is disgusting, but what’s more disgusting is the weird Microsoft Nanny State that says you can be banned permanently for that…

I expect Microsoft to stand firm that they don’t give a shit about bad press.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

“Star Wars Outlaws, the open world Star Wars game, is set to release late this year,” the post reads (thanks, IGN). "The game lets you explore distinct planets across the galaxy,

Desperately not trying to fall prey to the Starfield curse of too many fucking loading screens.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Welp, it’s officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.

But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.

Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.

Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.

They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.

So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.

Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.

Data, they were also interested in that sweet, sweet, data harvesting. Previously only Valve was grabbing all that via Steam.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Or you can get it for less than $7 dollars from a reputable game service, unlike the fucking joke that is Epic Games Store.

I mean, it’s not like you’re actually going to play it, either way.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

“The last laugh is mine, I don’t have any dignity!”

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

EDIT: RE: Valve and Darwinia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software#Finan…

Darwinia was eventually released in March 2005, but despite a strong opening weekend, sales soon slipped too low to sustain the company. Within six months, the developers were back on UK government benefits until November, when they contacted Valve “on a whim”[10] to try to set up a digital distribution deal on their Steam platform. Valve responded enthusiastically and, following a 14 December 2005 online launch, digital sales, which exposed the game to a new, global audience, kept the company going through to the release of their third game, DEFCON.

Valve didn’t reach out to Introversion to make demands, they actually saved the company. For a game basically no one had ever heard of and abysmal sales for were about to make the company go bankrupt. Valve didn’t pay for this exclusivity. It is however true that 18 years ago, they had an exclusive game.

This is a big difference compared to Epic paying 2K for exclusive access to Borderlands 3 so they can secure the profits of a huge franchise. Epic pays big companies big money to secure early profits to exclusive titles. Valve may have technically had an exclusive game, but Epic’s business model is literally paying for exclusive access to the biggest games they can get, so they can get the biggest cut of the sales at the highest price point, before discounts.

Only one of these two companies is trying to “Pay 2 Win.”

---

There really isn’t. This is personal opinion.

Some of us just have issues with Epic Games. Some others have issues with Valve.

No private company is really “good.”

But the argument with Epic is things like:

• They brought “exclusives” to PC gaming for the first time. Previously, a PC game was a PC game, and it didn’t matter what storefront you bought it from, because it was available at all storefronts. Epic chose to pay companies to restrict their titles just to Epic, in an attempt to move the market towards them.
• In a similar vein, trying to fight Valve’s dominance, they started giving away free games. They have been firing people left and right because their financials are in the toilet, and yet they’re still pissing away money on free games and exclusives to their store.
• People who care about access to music and paying artists hate them because they have effectively put a death warrant on Bandcamp, buying them for two years, doing nothing with the product, and then selling it to Hedge Fund fuckies who already shitcanned half the staff and the site is officially on life support. They basically killed the last place you could buy music and make sure all the proceeds went to the artist and not a middle man (Bandcamp Fridays).
• During all of this, they refused to spend any money on actually improving their fucking game store. Things that have been staples of Steam for a decade now are still on a waiting list of features to be added. The User Experience for Epic Games Store is just bad, bad, bad, bad. There’s no excuse for it, especially when they chose to piss money away on exclusives and free games instead of paying people to produce a better product than Valve has. They refused to even try to release a better product, believing they could buy their way to dominance.

Do you really want to support a company that doesn’t give a flying fuck about your user experience as a customer and has such bad business plans that they’re letting go tons of staff? It’s bad enough that they had a bad business plan, but it also seems like they’re not very good to their employees, either. Compared to Valve’s “flat” management where there are no managers, or where Newell famously paid the writer for Portal to “be sick” for two years while he had a serious disease. “Your job here at Valve is to get better.” This was before he wrote Portal, no less.

One company clearly cares about the user experience that their users experience, and one clearly cares about using every tool at their disposal to be the top of the market, everything from paying for exclusives and free games to suing in court to try to carve out a niche for yourself where you don’t have to pay vendor fees.

Of course, I also encourage you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Valve offers a better product, better user experience, and treats their employees with more respect, but it doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t made their own share of anti-consumer decisions.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

You have to create an account to get them.

If you don’t think data harvesting to sell the data isn’t part of that equation, you’re just a little bit naive.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, but the argument was “does taking a free game help them or not” not shifting goalposts to whether Valve does it, too.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Literally nobody in this thread told you that you couldn’t. You’re not a fucking victim here. I had an opinion and I expressed it.

If people online telling you that you’re wrong influences you so much, I’d say that’s a personal problem.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

If you really think you’re less clever than an entire industry that has been built up around tracking people and keeping ghost profiles on them, go ahead and keep patting yourself on the back, bud.

They know who you are, that’s not anywhere near as clever as you think.

You realize IP addresses exist, right?

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”

Also:

1. Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
2. This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
3. Epic has no such plans or guarantees.

Make of that what you will.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

I guess things like Speech Pattern Analysis don’t exist then, nor has Big Data ever been known to sift through data to connect data points.

Like unless your job is director of IT Security for Microsoft, I doubt you have the credentials to be as anonymous as you think you are.

On top of the fact that most people know that the more you try to anonymize yourself, the more you actually make yourself unique in terms of data because very few people use obfuscation techniques, and those techniques are well known. Thus, if they think you’re obfuscating your identity, you’re now just thrown in the “people who like anonymity” bag of data, which when connected with previously collected data on “people who like anonymity” can be used to create a profile on you, specifically.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

👍

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

IIRC Bethesda modernized their classic games to run well on modern Windows when they got bought by Microsoft?

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Don’t worry, it’s never enough cash, so he will assuredly be back to fucking shit up in some business capacity soon enough.

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

Oh, so he never matured at all then, huh?

SnotFlickerman, 7 miesięcy temu

I mildly disagree.

First, I think its the first game of this type to have any successful control scheme for a controller at all, so I think it deserves accolades for making it happen at all.

Second, while I still mostly play in traditional mouse and keyboard, I am an old man now, having played the original BG as a teen when it came out. Having the controller as an option is huge for me when I am in pain.

Anecdotally, my partner never played these games growing up and she fucking hates trying to play with mouse and keyboard. She says it feels clunky and slow and confusing.

Is it the best? No. Is it an excellent effort? Yes, because it actually works.

The fact that a game with a ruleset as complex as DnD manages to have a couch co-op option and gamepad controls built-in is an achievement, imho.

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

That would mean something if Ethereum wasn’t effectively dead in a ditch and being pissed on by a vagrant.

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

Ah, the ol “kill literally anyone and everyone you can interact with” playthrough.

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.

Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.

While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.

However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

Everyone loves Scotty Auks, doncha know?

SnotFlickerman, 8 miesięcy temu

Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.