ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 22 godziny temu

To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.

ampersandrew, 18 godzin temu

Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.

ampersandrew, 14 godzin temu

We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.

ampersandrew, 13 godzin temu

It’s only empty if you haven’t been paying attention.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

In case you care about the things I care about:

What is the end-of-life plan?

Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

I am not an Avatar fan, but I will caution Avatar fans that Nickelodeon games are historically made for shoestring budgets; basically whatever they find in the couch cushions. As a fighting game fan, there’s enough left to the imagination here that this game could be literally anything, and the developer has no other games to its name on Steam.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

Pretty par for the course for a fighting game though, no?

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

What would you prefer instead?

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

I’d rather people get paid when they work hard to add stuff to a video game.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Could you name a few that are almost exactly like Battlefield, came out in the last decade, and let me host my own servers?

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

We have very different definitions of “almost exactly like Battlefield”.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

This is crazy, because the competitive audience is pretty much done with this game, and the last few big patches didn’t help.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Yeah, I get the sense that the old pros are just as sick of the game as most of the rest of the audience, so I’m not sure how much money they threw at these folks to make it happen. The other thing about it is that the game just takes long as hell to run, more than any other fighting game I know of. Grand Finals alone took over a half hour.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

It’s a fighting game from Riot featuring League of Legends characters that just had a soft launch.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

That’s what I keep seeing people say in comments. The devs say they got access to all of the voice talent from the show, and I’m not familiar enough with Walton Goggins’ voice to say that is or isn’t him.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

I think I got fed up with how feast or famine the combat was. They wear FromSoft inspirations on their sleeves, but in those games, you can safely hang back and observe behaviors and patterns before you go in and try to dodge and parry and take them down. The wider normal dodge window did not seem to serve this purpose in this game, unless there’s some crucial mechanic that I completely missed. Often times, trying to dodge while learning the patterns, I’d lose a character to a single attack with intentionally tricky timing, and it would be easier to throw the fight and restart than it was to try to get them back in the fight and get my strategy up and running to deal damage. Then, of course, once I know the patterns, the fight is over in like 3 turns, and I take no damage at all.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

I was on normal, spent basically every skill point I had on defense and HP starting around halfway through Act 2, since my damage was just about capped by that point. The combat feels great after you’ve already learned an enemy’s patterns, but the later game enemies (I basically only did the main story) were where they started one-shotting characters and this problem sunk in. Having to go through this huge discrepancy every time you find a new enemy just started to become annoying.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

Yeah, this isn’t him getting cast in a bunch of CRPGs; it’s him getting cast in a bunch of everything.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu (edited 10 dni temu)

The worse casting choice was who they replaced

Tap for spoilerSarevok

with.

EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

I never encountered her in my playthroughs of 1 and 2, so I couldn’t say. The guy I spoilered was fine, and I’d say Larian showed a ton of reverence for those original games throughout. The entire format of the game is one BioWare made famous via Baldur’s Gate II, after all.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

The other point to setting the game 100 years later is that they’re not beholden to the same exact geography, architecture, or, most importantly, the choices the player made in the previous game. And it allows people to step into this one without feeling like the previous two were mandatory. They did still choose a canon, and they can handwave others away as hearsay told in legends where multiple conflicting things are true, but the game was unmistakably made by enormous fans of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons. It is still a story that revolves around the city of Baldur’s Gate and Bhaal. It is the most authentic D&D game made since those old infinity engine games and arguably more so, given the ways their games are made to allow you to get more creative with systems, like the tabletop experience.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

We can chalk this one up right next to the hyperloop and just move on.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

Yeah, I’ve had this experience, too. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II communicated ahead of launch that the GOG release would come only a few months later (I did get the sense this was a publisher decision). Great! I can wait a few months. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made no such mention, and despite waiting several months to see how it would shake out, I bought it in the summer, and the GOG version came out right after I finished it. The developer behind Knights in Tight Spaces, when asked directly, said they were only focusing on the Steam release. Likewise, the GOG version came out shortly after I finished the game. From here on out, of the games on my radar, I’m playing the ones on GOG first, and maybe the other ones will get GOG releases in the meantime.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

If anything, purely anecdotally with no data-based analysis, it looks as though GOG is getting more new releases than it used to. So I think as long as we show that DRM-free matters to us by buying there first, the situation will continue to improve.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

Yeah, it’s a pretty easy conclusion to come to from the outside looking in, but BG3 can launch on GOG day and date, and KC:D2 can communicate the GOG release ahead of time and still sell multiple millions of copies, so…it’s a practice I’d like to see change regardless.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

No, I get that. But likewise, Denuvo doesn’t have access to a second Earth either, and their pitch meeting will never include data of customers you’ve convinced not to buy the game due to the presence of their product. At some point, I don’t think those pirated copies are moving the needle, and that it’s just a cost of doing business like some units of physical goods breaking during shipping. The games that are most pirated are the ones that also sell the best. The anti-piracy case for the consumer is made pretty well these days by being downloaded faster, getting bug fix patches instantly, and keeping cloud saves.

ampersandrew, 12 dni temu

Worth noting that the remastered versions have no multiplayer. There’s no bringing back multiplayer for Crysis 2 and 3, but the original Cryis Warhead is still available on GOG, where you can play old-school Crysis Wars multiplayer via LAN.

ampersandrew, 12 dni temu

For a game that old, “possible” is totally acceptable. I tested it on two PCs of mine on a LAN, and it works just fine.

ampersandrew, 12 dni temu

Oh, for me, “online” is playing via VPN or direct IP connection with friends.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

I see you’ve got 007: Nightfire in that list, so let me raise you 007: Agent Under Fire. The single player is not as good as Nightfire, but the multiplayer is spectacular, as it lets you turn on fun modifiers like moon gravity and use gadgets like the Q Claw on any surface instead of just preset spots. They probably toned down the multiplayer in Nightfire because Agent Under Fire’s didn’t feel very Bond-esque, but Bond or not, it was a ton of fun. The multiplayer is up to 4 players split-screen on Gamecube, but I can’t tell if it still retains that on PS2; often times, back then, PS2 games only had 2 player support while Gamecube and Xbox had 4. This was because the PS2 was weaker and also required an extra peripheral called a Multi Tap to hook up more than 2 controllers. Find some friends and play some deathmatch, if you find yourself in a situation where you can dock your Steam Deck or otherwise play on another computer.

There’s also Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, a third person shooter where you play a robot who can take over other robots. It’s quite challenging, it’s got a sense of humor, and it’s probably one of the best games of that era to not get remastered in a modern port. Once again, we’ve got the multiplayer issue rearing its head, but I’d strongly recommend the single player for this one, too. I also played this on Gamecube back in the day, so just play whichever version is rated best for compatibility in your emulator of choice.

You might also want a Burnout game in your library. Most people seem to prefer Burnout 3: Takedown, but my Burnout of choice was Burnout Revenge. Both great. I wish we got more racing games like these today. Local multiplayer is a dying breed in this genre.

You’ve got Tony Hawk’s Underground in that list, but for my money, the best game in the series is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

The first three Ratchet & Clank games on PS2 have not been topped by their later entries, as far as I’m concerned. Ever since the fourth game, Deadlocked, the best they’ve been able to do was to remix ideas they’ve already used.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Can’t believe I left Soul Calibur II off of my own recommendations, perhaps because most of us thought of that as a Gamecube game.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.

The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Through Heroic, while there are some exceptions, you get nearly the same out of the box compatibility. And if you don’t get that compatibility and don’t have the patience to troubleshoot, the refund system for GOG is very generous. I just tried The Alters today, which I knew had issues with Proton outside of Steam Deck, and I got it working just before running out of patience and refunding the game.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

While some of the titles, like Avowed, use Unreal Engine, the artbook is in Unity, hence the takedown.

ampersandrew, 15 dni temu

How do you figure? Everything they’re doing right now shows they’re interested in leaving behind most of the video game industry.