Stovetop

Stovetop, 2 dni temu

I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/bb16954e-5f9e-4db8-8f08-6e62a7ee6a73.jpeg

But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

And don’t forget to do your dailies!

If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

Stovetop, 3 dni temu

In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

Stovetop, 4 dni temu

Filed before, updated and approved after.

Stovetop, 8 dni temu

I’ve seen a few valid criticisms, which I get. It’s hard to make a choice-driven narrative in the post-BG3 market and not get held to a higher standard. “Written by committee” is one such descriptor I’ve heard.

For me, as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, I also can’t say I prefer the dip into the actiony, grindy sort of combat mechanics the game appears to have now.

Stovetop, 9 dni temu

Gotta get that daily login bonus in [insert live service game here].

Stovetop, 9 dni temu

I bought a PS4 pro back in the day but am giving this one a pass.

I’m all for incremental mid-gen upgrades, but not at that price point. If it can’t be priced competitively with the prices people have been paying, then it should not be made until the hardware they want meets that price point.

Should have made it $499 and drop the base price of the PS5 to $399.

Stovetop, 9 dni temu

There’s probably a reason why people apparently like her. Or two, actually.

Stovetop, 11 dni temu

Surprised it’s not higher. I would have thought more than 2% of people on Steam were using Steam Deck.

Stovetop, 11 dni temu

Agreed. I remember there being some controversy around including figures in the game like Poundmaker, whose major mark in history was advocating against the colonial practices his people were submitted to.

Forcing anti-colonial figures to compete in the colonial model of success just doesn’t seem right.

Stovetop, 12 dni temu

Surely this will be the movie to break Lionsgate’s streak of complete flops.

Stovetop, 20 dni temu

While I don’t believe the PS5 has any feature that is up to snuff with quick resume, just wanted to mention that I think this feature was a bit different in function. It was more like a shortcut to specific things within a game, such as if you wanted to just go straight into a multiplayer match or to a specific level of a game, you’d use one of these activity cards, the game boots up, and there’d be minimal to no menus to navigate through. Just launch direct to gameplay or as close to it as possible.

I don’t believe many games used it, though. Not even all of Sony’s own offerings.

Stovetop, 20 dni temu

But the Sony implementation wasn’t really meant to take you back to where you were previously, it was meant to take you to specific predefined starting points, is all. Both meant to be “time savers” of a sort but different strategies were used. One clearly didn’t work as well as the other.

Stovetop, 20 dni temu

The BioShock logo (and the art of the game itself) uses an art deco style that was relatively commonplace around the early 1900’s.

Whether this game’s usage of that style is a deliberate move or if it’s just borrowing from a shared aesthetic, who can say.

Stovetop, 21 dni temu

Super Mario Wonder was also a big one. Critically acclaimed, too.

Stovetop, 21 dni temu

You joke but I would kill for a new Kirby Air Ride game.

You wouldn’t believe my disappointment when they had a Nintendo Direct years ago and threw a “one more thing” at the end which opened with Kirby Air Ride music and Kirby riding in on the warp star, only for it to be a Smash Bros character reveal. The video they put on YouTube after the fact opened with the Smash logo, but it didn’t during the Nintendo Direct.

Stovetop, 28 dni temu

WoW players not spew hateful bullshit they know nothing about? Who would even be left at that point?

Stovetop, 28 dni temu

Shit, Ben Starr? I’m in.

Stovetop, 29 dni temu

The first game I remember doing this is The Witcher 2. Not sure if that’s the first game to come up with the idea, but it’s the earliest example I can remember.

Stovetop, 28 dni temu

It’s a Christmas gift item. Everything “new” this time of year is targeted towards holiday shopping

Stovetop, 28 dni temu

Well, €/$100 is about how much people are paying for some new games these days, to put it in context. If someone is a Nintendo fan or a collector it’s not necessarily a hard sell at that price given that they probably have disposable income.

Stovetop, 29 dni temu

ITT: people think emulators are only the ones you can download

Stovetop, 30 dni temu

I get that the content isn’t for everyone, but could always block OP or just keyword filter depending on what frontend/app you use to hide the content if you don’t want to see it.

Stovetop, 29 dni temu

Depends. Echo chambers are also created by upvote/downvote ratios. If the majority are upvoting a lot of content you have no interest in, filtering that content is also a way to avoid an echo chamber from dominating your feed.

I browse a lot by Everything because my limited list of subscribed communities don’t yet publish enough content to really fill a day’s worth of browsing, so there are a lot of things I’ve blocked just because it’s not interesting to me, or if I am not really the intended audience (e.g. a lot of sports communities for teams I don’t follow, german-speaking communities from feddit.org, etc).

I don’t often have to resort to blocking specific users, but there’s a very small handful of names who post a large volume of content I want to filter but also don’t use consistent communities or keywords that I can cleanly filter instead.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

They keep one-upping themselves with every new title.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

It’s not a spiritual successor, just a normal successor. It’s the latest entry in the “Mario & Luigi” series.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

I’m assuming it’s to make sure there’s not long waits to try them. Giving a set number of tokens to visitors means they can roughly control the amount of time someone spends with those games. One person can’t just buy 100 coins and spend all day on the same game.

Could have just done a ticketing system reserved in advance with fixed time blocks, though. But then your museum tour is on a schedule.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

I am trying to think of scenarios where this will screw with normal users because companies never do moves like this unless they’re after some sort of grift.

But I am not seeing it at present. Maybe I’m just too tired and my brain isn’t working, but if a game is downloaded digitally and the license comes with it, there’s effectively no difference. Take it offline, you still have the license, no issues.

The only potential impact I can think of is if you have two users on a console that is the home console for neither person, and both of them bought the same game digitally. User 1 downloads the game, the license comes with it, and they take the console offline. User 2 then uses the console, tries to play the game they own, and gets a license error because the console is offline and doesn’t know they own it and therefore it can only be played by the person who downloaded it. But I think that’s how it works already, since User 2 would still need the console to be online to import their licenses.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

That’s the same conclusion I arrived at, but wasn’t 100% sure. Since the act of downloading a game and the act of obtaining/transferring licenses both require the console to be online, I couldn’t see what difference there would be to the user experience compared to before, even if the order it does those steps in is switched.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

And only if the PS5 isn’t user 1’s home console, which if it is, the license extends to any other user on that console.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

Hard to know if the patent is expired when they haven’t even officially announced which ones they plan to bring forward in the suit.

The only info I was aware of so far is that there were multiple claims they were making.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

Definitely not a Valve W though.

I have no idea how some people can worship a corporation so strongly, though.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

It really is like a feudal system. There’s a reason why the HBO series Succession is framed like the politics between a lord, his heirs, and his vassals.

Stovetop, miesiąc temu

Apologies for the Xitter link, but it looks like the main character Atsu is being portrayed by Erika Ishii.

x.com/suckerpunchprod/status/1838715791228964978?…

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.

I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don’t think it’s $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.

I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have “Made for PS5” exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:

• The Last of Us Part 2
• God of War: Ragnarok
• Ghost of Tsushima
• Horizon: Forbidden West
• Control

All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the “better” experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

My memory may be hazy, but I recall the mainstream acceptance of the digital distribution model on PC as more of an early 2010’s thing. People hated Steam at launch, having yet another launcher you had to download which was basically just DRM for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike.

It wasn’t until their marketplace opened up and they offered very attractive sales that people came around to it eventually.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

Chasing the “best version” is a fool’s errand, though. Unless you’re buying top-of-the-line hardware every cycle, you’ll never have the best. And even then, there are games that seem to target future hardware by having settings so high not even top-end PCs can max them out comfortably, and other games that are just so badly optimized they’ll randomly decide they hate some feature of your setup and tank the performance, too.

Everyone has their threshold for what looks good enough, and they upgrade when they reach that point. I used my last PC for 10 years before finally upgrading to a newer build, and I’m hoping to use my current one as long as well.

But just based on the displayed difference in performance between the base PS5 and the PS5 Pro, it doesn’t seem like a good investment for what benefits you get. It’s like paying Apple prices for marginally better hardware, and with overpriced wheels disc drive sold separately.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

Now that’s a hot take.

Trying to be the Adobe of game engines is fine, but their online service is the line in the sand?

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

I’d say Mario Kart 8 deserves recognition, but agree with the other ones.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

The DNA example might be a bad comparison to make, though, when hereditary illnesses are also a comparison you could make to an engine that has the same flaws as it’s predecessors.

Hopefully whatever they do next with their engine moves away from the cells and worldspaces model of their previous engines. After all of Starfield’s criticisms, they need to move away from loadscreen triggers as much as possible.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

None of their games are as good as Morrowind, yet that hasn’t stopped them from selling like hotcakes.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

They want to pay less than they were to whoever was in that spot before.

That or it’s one of the essential positions they didn’t want to downsize but the previous person left for other reasons.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

I think there is some merit to using it in a critical sense, just based on what happened that one time it was used.

To me, AAAA means a game that was given way too much budget for its scope, to its own detriment. Take what should be a niche, mid-budget game and pump it full of cash. The game becomes too big to fail and needs to use every “play it safe” strategy the MBAs demand in order to recoup its budget. So it aims for broad appeal, which makes it fail at being the niche game it was supposed to be, and it ends up flopping.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

RIP this dev team, they can join Campo Santo in the “doing shit all” club.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

To me that just looks like adulthood.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

Hot take: WoW never had a good story in any expansion. Just a few good moments scattered around like islands in a sea of grind.

The closest they got to a good cohesive story was Legion, but that was only if you were playing from the beginning and got to see everything develop live before they just started shoving people into catch up points that made no sense without context.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

Having switched to FF14 a while ago, I always thought that game’s early access model for preordering was unnecessary. Since you could still “preorder” during the EA window and start playing right away, why not just call it what it is, the official launch of the expansion? Never liked the taste of FOMO, even when it’s artificial/unimpactful.

But having a separate paid EA window on top of the game’s subscription cost and cost of buying the expansion? That just doesn’t sit right at all. I can’t even complain about FF14 now.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Between last generation and this one, though, we’re at the point where consoles are more like prebuilts. Games have performance targets, it’s up to users to decide when they feel like an upgrade. The only difference is that games (usually) won’t release for models that can’t run them well, compared to some people who try to squeeze out every frame they can from their 10-year-old potato PCs, though every now and then you still get a Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles.

But there’s a reason why some games still target the PS4 in 2024, because if you’re a small-budget indie game that doesn’t need the full hardware of the PS5, why not? Since you don’t get locked out of older stuff when you upgrade anymore, which enables newer stuff to keep releasing on older systems, anyone can hold on to a console until they run into a game worth upgrading for.

Stovetop, 2 miesiące temu

I don’t think it’s a texture bug, I think they just took the same model they use for the enemy unit, put them in poses, and then stuck a burn shader on there.