As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Curious to see what that would do to the industry as a whole. But this is not entirely our of line with what countries like Korea, China, and Japan have already been fiddling with.
Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.
The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.
There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?
Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.
The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.
That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.
But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.
That’s crazy. The campaign was one of the best computerized D&D adventures I’ve seen published to date.
Neverwinter 1 & 2 lived on for a long time because of this.
I enjoyed the Neverwinter toolkit, but the graphics were still so blocky and clunky. There’s a polish to BG3 that, I think, will draw in a bigger audience.
Also, a big beautiful modding toolkit can have so many knock-on effects. Half-Life gave us a rich basket of spin-offs, from Team Fortress to Counterstrike. Starcraft and Warcraft popularized us a slew of new game styles, like Tower Defense and DOTA. Fingers crossed that we get something similar from BG3.
Its proof-of-concept. They’re trying to get a movie out that’s entirely tied to the brand, without spending a meaningful amount of money on scripting, art direction, location scouting, or talent. This is the future of AI Movies in a nutshell.
One of the more pure-to-form sandbox games of the last generation? I’ll spot you all the shitty DLC and cosmetics have soured it considerably. But the baseline game is genuinely good. Same with classics like Fortnight.
They were quality products that got deluged with marketing gimmicks. But there are plenty of people running “Vanilla” Minecraft servers who are having a ton of fun.
Not just the costumes. They green screened the fuck out of that scene. Wonder if they shot the whole thing on a sound stage and tried to AI in the entirety of the background? This has all the earmarks of a “Are you piggies willing to pay $20 a ticket for entrance to the slop show?”
In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.
Genuinely sad to hear, as WotC has a ton of rich properties that a studio like Larian could have brought to vivid life. Would love to have a Larian treatment of the MtG Multiverse or a rendition of the Dragonlance series or setting.
Excited to see what they do next, but its a shame to see these companies part ways.
Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.
Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.
They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.
The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.
Some of it is pure hubris. But some of it is American IP law, which will punish you if you don’t zealously prosecute people in defense of your patents. Its sort of like laws on squatting. If someone is openly and notoriously using your IP and you don’t try to sue them for a long enough time, they can claim the property as functionally abandoned.
For Nintendo, which hasn’t had a particularly good new idea in 20 years, the idea of losing Mario or Link or Pikachu to a legal loophole like this would be devastating.
Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community
What IP does Sony hang its hat on? I’m hard pressed to name a uniquely Sony-esque title or franchise. They partner with Square Enix on the reg, but Square is also horrifyingly litigious.
Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this.
No. There are proven effective ways to monetizing the modding community and exploit them for their free labor. And that’s not part of the Nintendo business strategy, possibly because their creative directors’ egos can’t handle it or possibly because some bean counter thinks it’ll hurt profits long term or maybe possibly even because Nintendo has a better-than-average work culture and the staff doesn’t like the idea of being undercut at their jobs by hobbyists.
Idk. But I also just don’t get the desire to bang your heads against this wall over and over again, on the modder side of the equation. There are other franchises and platforms to mod on. At this point, it feels more like a battle of wills than a rational strategy on either end.
Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.
They’ve all got their own boutique developers and were simply published by Sony at one point or another (not even exclusively). Insomniac Games seems to be the real owner of the IP for a bunch of them. Hell, most of these are just knock offs of other franchises. Sackboy is a very obvious Mario/Sonic analog that simply never got popular in the same way.
If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly
There are definitely some publishers more open to modding than others. Early on, you could accuse Nintendo of being a sleeping giant who failed to give modders warning or opportunity to compromise. But now modders are just trying to hug a very large hedgehog with it’s spikes out.
After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play “Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston’s Urban Planning Team?” Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
100% they’re going to try to do AI NPCs and you’re going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
Bethesda execs don’t want any of that shit. They want a big button that says “MAKE NEW GAME” that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.
I’ve heard some philosophical musings on the dominant species of life on Earth being wheat, based on how much time and energy the global ecosystem spends cultivating and spreading it.
I don’t know if I’m excited about the idea of gamifying atrocities.
On the one hand, you’re going to have the inevitable “What’s the most/worst number of crimes I can commit in the game?” reactionary freak streamer.
On the other, you’re going to have the Model UN Liberal insisting that NATO couldn’t be committing any war crimes, because he already played the Liberation of Rafa mission on War Crimes Simulator 4 using the same tactics outlined in the press briefing and got a perfect score.
This is originally why anti trust legislation was created
If you look at the history of anti-trust legislation, some of its first uses and biggest targets were labor organizers. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, one of the first and most notable cases was the US lawsuit against the Workingmen’s Amalgamated Council (also known as the “Triple Alliance” of teamsters, scalesmen, and packers) over what was then the largest labor action in US history.
It wasn’t until the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act that unions were granted safe harbor from anti-trust provisions. And it took until 1941 for the courts to finally fully decriminalize labor actions - a process that was ultimately reversed starting in the 1960s under Nixon, and extended under Ford, Carter, and then Reagan.
High taxes exist to reduce accumulation of assets and slow down the snowballing effect of huge investors.
That’s the Keynesian approach, certainly. But the Chicago School that came to dominate US economics during the Volcker Era suggested instead that we can adjust the Federal Funds rate to keep malinvestment from derailing an economy. And that this strategy means asset accumulation is now safe and profitable for large corporate interests.
Large investment banks are actually good, because they give us a steady and constant flow of price information on a private market. And since price discovery is the real goal of regulation, the advent of these mega-banks means we can let the institutions regulate themselves without any conceivable downsi- sound of the 2008 market crash
It would be very funny to go back to a 2000s era California college campus and explain to a bunch of up-and-coming game developers that the future of the industry would be located in Poland.
The biggest cost Uber has is recruitment. And as the cost of vehicles has risen, the efforts they have to go through to get and keep productive drivers has climbed with it.
This is less about Uber market share than the real cost of operating an automobile between 2008 and 2024.
Cost of living in Poland isn’t as low as people abroad think it is.
So much of “its cheap to live here” comes down to food and rent. When you’re living somewhere that charges $2000/mo for a 600ft loft and you can’t eat out for less than $20/meal, every place else feels practically free by comparison.
No no no. I want a bunch of little tiny plastic and cardboard pieces that take forever to arrange and pack up when I’m done. I want text that’s too small to read. I want a rules book that I need a degree in to properly interpret. And only ever want to play during the handful of times a year I can get everyone around the table together.
It doesn’t feel practical to enforce, save in so far as it lets them put you on a list of people not to extend future early-release games to. But you have to assume they were already doing that, as any marketing department worth its salt is going to have a boutique set of insider streamers who are effectively just contracted media flaks plugging your product.
On today’s episode of “This shouldn’t be legal”…
Think about it this way. The same guys who stream video game reviews to make money are paid by the advertisers who sponsor their streams. And the sponsor won’t pay for a stream if its disparaging of their content. So the streamer is being paid to cut an ad.
Imagine if you hired someone to go door-to-door selling people your sandwiches. And in the middle of each sales call the guys you hired would take a big bite, spit out the sandwich, and say “This is awful! I hate it!” What are you paying these asshole for?
Just stop pretending streamers are these independent objective observers and recognize them for what they are - online door-to-door sales guys. These early releases are just their sales kits. And why am I going to extend a sales kit to a guy who isn’t going to sell my shit?
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.
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Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening angielski
Ubisoft Cancels Press Previews of Assassin's Creed Shadows (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Something must be going on at Ubisoft. They cancelled their Tokyo Game Show stream without any explanation as well.
Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread angielski
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Baldur's Gate 3 level editor is cracked open by modders, bringing homebrew campaigns one step closer (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Kotaku being Kotaku (lemmy.today) angielski
At this point I’m going to Ladbrokes and betting against everything Kotaku promotes. They are like Jim Cramer of the gaming industry.
The worst of both worlds angielski
One Year Later, Larian Reflects On Baldur's Gate 3's Success, Future Plans, And Canceling DLC: "Ever Since, We've Felt Better" (www.ign.com) angielski
I wonder when Elder Scrolls VII is coming out (lemmy.world) angielski
Size Comparison: Pluto and Australia
Source
Xbox Console Sales Continue To Crater With Massive 42% Revenue Drop - Slashdot (games.slashdot.org) angielski
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Nintendo Issues Multiple DMCAs On The Modding Site 'GameBanana' (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser (www.youtube.com) angielski
Metal Slug Tactics - New trailer | Coming Fall 2024 (www.youtube.com) angielski
What a frightening suggestion... (lemmy.world) angielski
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell (aftermath.site) angielski
Welp, this didn’t take long....
Larian Studios has two major games in development and opens new studio in Warsaw (files.catbox.moe) angielski
Source: x.com/larianstudios/status/1792495491256664211
I'll be sad when they're 100% gone one day (lemmy.world) angielski
Don't make me turn this car around! (files.catbox.moe) angielski
Marvels Rivals requires creators to sign a contract that removes your right to give a negative review in order to access the playtest (files.catbox.moe) angielski
On today’s episode of “This shouldn’t be legal”…...
How times change (lemmy.world) angielski
How Greed Ruined Gaming (www.youtube.com) angielski
To most of us, this is probably just a summary of events over the past year or so. But, it’s good to know that this sort of news is reaching non-gaming channels.