ampersandrew

ampersandrew, rok temu

In what way is streaming not a sustainable business on its own? You mean game streaming isn't sustainable on its own?

ampersandrew, rok temu

Enough people have left Overwatch 2 that they've resorted to putting it on Steam. Perhaps it's not happening on the timeline we would like, but people do seem to be tiring of live service nonsense.

ampersandrew, rok temu

The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.

There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn't need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I know I'm preaching to the choir, BlahajEnjoyer, but for anyone else reading this, this is why it's important to also not play these sorts of games in addition to not spending money on them, if stopping any of this is important to you.

ampersandrew, rok temu

It hasn't stopped the game from being in the top 25 most played on Steam though. And I'll bet that number is disappointing to Blizzard too, but I'm going to guess a large number of those people leaving negative reviews are still playing the game, which doesn't help.

ampersandrew, rok temu

What do you mean by format? I played it at PAX.

ampersandrew, rok temu

It's modern enough but old school. I had barely sampled C&C back in the day (this game, I'm told, is a lot like C&C3), but I played a ton of StarCraft, and the mission they gave on the show floor was definitely great for showing off the unit escalation and rock paper scissors of it all. If you're looking for another one of those, there's a good chance they nailed it. For me, however, I think I'd like to see a different take on the genre, at least for multiplayer. The fog of war would instill a sense of dread in me that no amount of scouting could ever alleviate, and while winning a game of an RTS is super empowering, losing felt so awful that I'm not sure I want to do it again. They're seemingly not changing anything drastic and just making another one of those, which is fine, because there aren't a lot of those. I'm much less interested in playing games with a mouse these days, but somehow this game has full controller support listed on the store page. I know AOE2 got updated with clever controller options, but like I said; they're not rocking the boat with this game, so it's surprising that they somehow have controller inputs working. When I played the demo, it was on a mouse and keyboard.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I'm also not familiar enough with C&C to know what this game is doing different from C&C. But a lot of old designs aren't broken and could just use modernization. Look at the last few games Mimimi has made, modernizing Commandos and Desperados. At this point, I'm desperate for "boomer shooters" to catch up to the 00s in design, because no one really makes FPS games like that anymore. A friend of mine was playing some TimeSplitters: Future Perfect on Discord, and I never played those games in their heyday, but I would absolutely be into them. There just aren't games made like that anymore, and I miss them. This game could be that for RTS or C&C fans.

Side note. There are allegedly TimeSplitters and Perfect Dark games on the way. I fully expect Perfect Dark's campaign to not resemble that first game at all and for its multiplayer to be a live service extraction shooter, because that's what these big companies think people want. To be clear, this is based on nothing but feelings, conjecture, and cynicism, and I'm usually not very cynical. And if TimeSplitters ever does come back like they say it is, I expect it to be exactly what I want because they can't afford to build the thing that's going to ruin Perfect Dark.

As for BG3, the way Larian makes those games systems driven, such that you can say, "I wonder if this works" and it usually does, is doing more than just playing on nostalgia, and it is doing things that video games excel at, even if it's still doing things outlined in the tabletop game.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I played but did not get very far into Divinity: Original Sin, mostly because I tried twice to play them co-op, and coordinating adults' schedules is hard. I love how systemic those games are, but the presentation is limited to what you'd expect from an old-school CRPG. Shortly before release, I saw that this game retains all of that creativity while upping the presentation to the level of something like a Mass Effect, which makes it much more appealing. I hear that Ralph of SkillUp had exactly the same reaction to BG3. So, deep systems + finally catching up in production value and presentation.

ampersandrew, rok temu

That's fine, because there aren't many of them anymore.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I've been playing Baldur's Gate...2. I just beat Baldur's Gate 1 and moved right on to 2. Immediately there was a major noticeable change in the scenario design in a very good way when I got to BG2. Dungeons are now puzzles to be solved rather than just marching through mobs of enemies. Chapter 2 lets you go nuts and achieve an explicit objective by any means you like, and it makes at least three of those options pretty obvious. I'm now in Chapter 3 and hope to have finished the game and moved on to BG3 before the PS5 port of BG3 comes out. I'm really enjoying it overall, but sometimes, even on easy mode, it just feels like bullshit. I just took on a boss of a dungeon who was impervious to basically everything I could throw at him, and I just had to reload a previous save and try different spells until I could finally break through his defenses, which I don't think is the greatest game design in the world, given that there was no foreshadowing that I should be prepared for that. Likewise, in that same dungeon, there were vampires and wraiths that can energy drain me and de-level my characters; there's one specific way out of this situation as well, and I once again had to reload an earlier save and just have those spells ready to go to solve that problem after knowing via save scumming what's around the corner. Not only that, but a negative for this game compared to its predecessor is that it respawns enemies in dungeons. So when your only option for forward progress is to rest so that you can equip or cast absolutely critically necessary spells and then you get bombarded by another mob of enemies, it can be super tedious.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Playing through BG2 now, the interjections are rare and don't really budge the flow of the conversation in any direction. It's a very small amount of color to inform you of their personalities.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.

ampersandrew, rok temu

You voting with your wallet does not mean that your vote wins every time. Madden might still exist even if you don't buy it. But at least you can direct the money you would have spent on it elsewhere, to someone who needs it more.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.

ampersandrew, rok temu

You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur's Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA's own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn't an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make.

I don't know where you got that figure, but it sounds very outdated. I expect each iteration of Madden to cost several times that to produce. Video games are also a very scalable product to sell, so your margin comparison to a product sold on Amazon is not apt. Avengers and Forspoken had negative profit margins, for instance, because the economics of selling those things is very different than a product on Amazon.

And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts.

The business model has always affected the game design at every step in the medium's history. We used to have quarter-guzzling arcade games as the primary way games were made. Crypto and NFTs aren't taking; it was a bubble that burst just like tulip bulbs and beanie babies. Other business models have come and gone in games before, like subscription MMOs and "project $10" online passes.

Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on.

That is, in fact, a choice that everyone has.

ampersandrew, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Fine. I don't play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don't expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you'd recognize no matter how into football you are.

EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I can't speak for every reviewer, but a good number of them do watch football every week. Plenty of games have advanced simulations and don't have texture bugs and T posing. I'm glad you enjoy the games, but the reviews are what they are for a reason. I'm also not sure how you went from, "Anyone saying these games are buggy is lying" to "Of course it will have bugs!"

ampersandrew, rok temu

They may or may not have the requirement anymore, but they definitely used to have this parity clause as well. Then if it came to other platforms first and Xbox later, the Xbox version had to have bonus content beyond the original release.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I remember it coming up on podcasts back during the 360 era, so that was long enough ago that things may have changed.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I don't know, you may as well say the same thing about the Switch and every port it gets. The S has its strengths and shockingly few weaknesses given those strengths.

ampersandrew, rok temu

The Xbox Series S is a cheap lower-resolution Xbox, and the ports it gets are for that reason. The parity scales well for most games and reduces consumer confusion.

BG3 really isn't all that demanding for a next gen open world game

Most games these days, regrettably, don't bother with split-screen multiplayer, and definitely not with the worst-case scenarios of how far apart the two players can be in that world, which is their hurdle right now.

ampersandrew, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Microsoft wouldn't have nearly the install base without the Series S, and developers can either target that platform or not, just like the Switch, because people bought it for its own strengths. If they want to scale their games up to a spec such that it runs on PlayStation but not Xbox, they're welcome to, but they lose access to a large pool of customers, like those who can stomach paying $300 for a console but not $500. There are plenty of other next gen open world games that work on Xbox.

Also, your analysis on how it should perform isn't really based in reality. We can go to interviews where the Swen Vincke calls out the way their game does split-screen specifically. And besides, at this point, Xbox engineers are involved, and BG3 will run on Xbox, though likely just next year.

ampersandrew, rok temu

$300, access to Game Pass, and playing nearly every new game that comes out for far cheaper are its strengths.

There is no "the way they do split screen".

This is just a strange argument to make in the face of interviews and contradictory evidence of other modern games running on the Series S.

ampersandrew, rok temu

We already saw through court documents that Pro-or-similar consoles are expected. The difference with Microsoft is if they stick to generations like they implied they wouldn't. You could get creative with you how you count Xbox consoles and say, "Here's the Xbox 6X and Xbox 6S", where 6 is a larger number than the PlayStation's 5, which we know is a strategy that works. Out of the gate, very few games would require that larger hardware, and unlike PlayStation, purchasing an Xbox game once gets you the upgraded version on new hardware. I imagined this is the direction they were headed in when this generation was designed, but 2020 sure did change the trajectory of all sorts of things even if I'm right. I also seriously doubt they're interested in leaving the console space given the acquisitions they've made in the past few years.

maybe enough generations of trailing marketshare

The 360/PS3 generation was extremely close, and they had the lead for most of it.

ampersandrew, rok temu

I don't want the lesson to be learned that devs should only make single player games either. Baldur's Gate 3 itself is co-op, for instance, and Elden Ring has substantial online components for multiplayer and otherwise.

ampersandrew, rok temu

The reason cosmetic microtransactions are so prolific is that their fixed costs are low and the return on investment is high. It wouldn't have affected Elden Ring's development much.

ampersandrew, rok temu

No, I would think the proper response is to stop playing this game and giving it attention rather than continuing to play it but leaving a negative review. Whatever, we're all free to do as we please, but the decision making doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's also clearly not the worst game on Steam, because people still want to play it.

ampersandrew, rok temu

The reviews don't get removed, they're just hidden by default. And it's considered off topic if the content of the reviews is about something that a team at Valve determines to be unlikely to help a new player decide if they want to play the game.

ampersandrew, rok temu

But like...the real guy isn't a cowboy. They renamed him. You'd remove an entire character from the game? Renaming him seems like the appropriate response.

ampersandrew, rok temu

If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Loot boxes are so 2017. It's all about battle passes, engagement, and player retention now.

ampersandrew, rok temu

The companies we're all complaining about stopped making 10 games per year a long time ago.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Sorry, but the other methods are demonstrably better at it. We didn't arrive at them by accident. There are outliers like Civilization keeping people hooked for years; the people still playing Skullgirls all these years later sure aren't doing it for any type of reward system. But the fast track to keeping people playing your game is to use all the scummy bullshit.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Counter point: Baldur's Gate is selling well within capitalism because it satisfies what the customer wants, which capitalism rewards in an environment with lots of competition, and video games have lots of competition. As big publishers like Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Take Two have scaled back their offerings of lots of different types of games, including the type of RPG that Larian makes, it's no surprise that the likes of Larian are rewarded for making that type of game. It's why companies like Embracer, Anna Purna, Devolver, and Paradox are going to be growing a ton over the next decade.

ampersandrew, rok temu

They bring funding when you have none. Also marketing. How likely are we to have heard of The Plucky Squire without it being featured alongside several other Devolver games?

ampersandrew, rok temu

I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.

I think that's exactly what Fortnite and Destiny 2 do, even though I object to the way they do it for so many reasons.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Making a good product is an incentive of capitalism too. Microtransactions, battle passes, loot boxes, and other "live service" trappings dilute once-good products because people are often too attached to brands. As people tire of bad products, good ones can come along and thrive, which is what Battlebit appears to be doing for Battlefield fans, what Baldur's Gate 3 appears to be doing for RPGs, and what Elden Ring and the last two Zelda games are doing for open world games; what Cities: Skylines did for SimCity fans and maybe what Life By You could do for Sims fans. There's money to be made for making a good version of something that the reigning champs screwed up, abandoned, couldn't think of, or didn't bother to bring to market; that's capitalism.

ampersandrew, rok temu

How hypothetical are we getting here? Somehow we live in a world where everyone has infinite resources? Capitalism just distributes the finite ones we have to things that people buy. A government can do that as well, but we don't have a great track record of them being able to buck the realities of where those resources need to go. If there's a UBI, you could end up with more games of the scope of Stardew Valley, or once tools and game engines get to be good enough, you could end up with more games that are feasible to be made by one or two people in a handful of years like that one was. But Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Zelda...no, probably not. I can't predict the future, but they seem to be impossible to be made by small teams even with magical game engines that automate a lot of work that went in to make them.

Once you get beyond the profit motive, you're now at this point where you need to hire more people. Anything beyond really small teams are going to have a hard time sticking to someone else's vision unless one person is the boss calling the shots; otherwise known as the one with capital, paying those other talented people to work toward that goal. Of the 600 people making Baldur's Gate 3, I'll bet 550 of them disagreed on lots of directions that it went in, and it just becomes an insurmountable problem to wrangle that many people otherwise and keep them on track. If you don't need the money and you disagree with what the boss is doing, you'll just do your own project instead.

Meanwhile, we just got a Titan Quest II announcement, which I'll bet is a reaction to the general direction Blizzard has been going in since Diablo Immortal was announced, much like I was saying earlier. There's also another perspective I'd like to add on here, which proves both of our points. Ryan Clark of Brace Yourself Games, makers of Crypt of the NecroDancer, used to do a YouTube show called Clark Tank, similar to Shark Tank, talking about how to make indie games that make money. Creatives have tons of passion projects they want to make, and you'll never get through all of them in a lifetime. However, you know types of games that you would like to make, that you can observe are also making money, that you're confident you can deliver while they're still popular, so that you can profit, expand, and repeat the cycle. In a sense, passion projects and what the market is asking for via where they're spending their money.

ampersandrew, rok temu

Someone could make the best game of all time according to one random guy, but if it's not a game I want, I'm not playing it, and there are games I'd like to be made so that I can play them. Great games that people want to play create profit. Exploitative games also profit, but I'd lay that at the feet of poor regulation. If you want to profit, generally, you're making a game that as many people as possible will want to play, or a game that enough want to play but that itch hasn't been scratched by your competitors. How do you make money with Baldur's Gate 3? You make a really good Baldur's Gate game, and then people buy it. Even the exploitative games are desirable to their audience for one reason or another before they get to the exploitative parts.

ampersandrew, rok temu

8 player split screen is a very welcome addition! Has anyone done that with a shooter before?

ampersandrew, rok temu

You can see their profit and loss statement every quarter with a quick Google.

ampersandrew, rok temu

No, I thought you were saying that a game was incomplete just because they added an expansion pack to it at any point, ever, which is a definition I find to be pretty absurd but plenty of people use. In this case it sounds like you're saying that some games are incomplete just because you prefer a modded, remixed version of the game rather than the one they actually made, which is a definition I'd also disagree with. Large swaths of empty space, particularly in Elder Scrolls and Fallout, is an aesthetic and design choice, among other things, and more or less reactivity may or may not mean that there isn't as much depth in the story, but those games have other strengths, like build variety, exploration, and such.

ampersandrew, rok temu

None of what you said makes those games incomplete though. It's just something about it that you didn't care for. The systems are hardly a first pass; they've been making that game for about 15-20 years before Skyrim, and they're not going to deviate too far from the formula for Starfield either, I'll wager. It doesn't mean they didn't finish making it. They've finished making games that way over and over again.