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ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

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ampersandrew,
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I haven’t seen confirmation that this is what Ubisoft has been doing, but given how many studios they have and how quickly they turn games around, it wouldn’t surprise me if they used the “chase the sun” method of development, where as one team signs off, they hand development over to the next team, where it’s morning, and their work day is just starting. So it would just be very likely that every Ubisoft studio touches many games that Ubisoft works on. From the credits on their games, this is certainly what it appears to be. This is the same development method that Larian used to make a game as large as Baldur’s Gate 3 in only 6 years.

ampersandrew,
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I haven’t played the PC version, but I expect it’s the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there’s another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you’re looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that’s a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I’d also highly recommend the first Crackdown.

ampersandrew,
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I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You’re super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you’re throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

ampersandrew,
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I hear very good things about Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed, and there’s a new one coming.

ampersandrew,
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My running theory has been that the official release date is tied up in Microsoft marketing deals still. So I’m guessing we’ll hear the date from Microsoft during summer game fest.

ampersandrew,
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It’s also launching day 1 on Game Pass, so Microsoft paid a pretty penny for it.

ampersandrew,
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$449, $499 with Mario Kart digital.

ampersandrew,
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For $50 less, you get a similarly capable machine in terms of specs but more comfortable to hold, with an immensely larger library, and an operating system far more respectful of your authority to do what you want with the machine you bought.

ampersandrew,
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You can sideload a program called Heroic Games Launcher that lets you easily manage your GOG games, as well as Amazon and Epic.

ampersandrew,
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I’d encourage you to utilize those limited funds legally by buying games on deep discounts, if you were implying piracy, but even legitimately, being able to sideload all the old PC games you have is a massive plus. GOG and Epic give away great games for free on the regular, and an Amazon Prime subscription has recently been filled with some bangers that you get to keep via both of them.

ampersandrew,
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Digital Foundry has been looking at what tech could feasibly be in this thing for a long time now. They’re going to be very comparable in performance.

ampersandrew,
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It’s the successor to one of the most successful consoles ever, and word is Nintendo’s had a lot of games that were done for some time now, but they’ve been holding them back to better position this launch. An hour-long Direct is about twice the usual length, and basically the entire industry is basing its plans around the Switch 2 and GTA6 right now.

ampersandrew,
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I was talking about this with some friends. Anecdotally, almost everyone we know who plays games has a Switch, but very few of them seem to care about a Switch 2, for one reason or another. What will undoubtedly still move units are their marquis franchises, not the least of which is expected to be a new 3D Super Mario game. Mario Kart does extremely well for them, but I’ll bet some amount of its success is tied to very cheap console hardware, which the Switch 2 will not be out of the gate, so that parents can buy each of their kids a handheld to play with each other in the car, at the laundromat, at their siblings’ soccer practice, etc., and as the hardware gets cheaper, that probably contributes to its “long tail” of sales.

But yeah, for people who live and breathe video games, consoles have lost their luster. Games take longer to make now, which means there are fewer first party titles, which means we have fewer reasons to buy another machine that plays the same games as some other piece of hardware we already own. That will be especially true for the Switch 2, since they don’t have a Wii U library to plunder for titles that they can port cheaply for people who’ve never played them.

All that to say, my expectations as an armchair analyst whose word isn’t worth anything on the matter and whose predictions may as well be a dice roll are that the Switch 2 will do very well, but I’d be surprised if it did better than the first Switch, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see a console do as well as the Switch, or the PS2 for that matter, ever again.

ampersandrew,
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I think that’s the name of Nintendo’s legal department.

ampersandrew,
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The industry is full of dead studios that made good games. Marketing does work and is necessary, but I’m not sure much you can say this marketing campaign was successful given the heavy lifting Assassin’s Creed as a brand was already doing.

ampersandrew,
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I haven’t found a source for this number when I looked for it. The best I got was a finance blog saying “experts say” without saying that they were progenitors of the reporting or not. Valhalla had a budget about half of this, so it would surprise me if Shadows was that much more expensive.

ampersandrew,
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I’ve been playing another lap through the old Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and just got my party kitted out with +1/+2 weapons and better armor, so this ought to be the point where the rest of the game gets way easier.

I’m coming up on the end of the base game of Borderlands 2, as I try to make my way through the series before the fourth game launches this fall. There’s a lot of Borderlands 2 DLC to get through after this, but it’s scratching an itch that the FPS genre hasn’t really been doing for me with new releases in years.

And I’ve also been making my way through the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance (this one on GOG). It’s sort of flip flopping on how important the simulation aspects of the game are to its whole deal. I too found them frustrating, but I know from Red Dead Redemption II that, when done right, they’re there to make you make choices that that character would make in that setting. However, sometimes the game hops over them in the interest of time, and other times it makes you go through them to the point of tedium. It’s still early going in the grand scheme of things, and the political intrigue has surely grabbed me if nothing else.

With a name like Perfect Dark, what are your expectations for the new one? The demo they showed was vague enough that it could be just about anything, and I get the sense that it won’t launch with split screen multiplayer or even a deathmatch mode, because no one does those anymore.

ampersandrew,
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I’m definitely keeping an eye on Selaco, but I’ll wait until it leaves early access.

ampersandrew,
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I got the same survey. The ones that they definitely do not want to do, if they value their reputation, are things like “increased cloud save storage (that’s still probably less than what Steam offers)” and things that they took away, like 1.0 installers. But some of the other options look to be more squarely aimed at the enthusiasts of the preservation program that this subscription is designed to financially support, as well as one or two actually good features like legal account sharing. Hopefully they go down that route instead.

ampersandrew,
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Do you not have to update that script every time you play a new game? Cloud saves are pretty automatic, and regardless of platform, they’ve been pretty reliable too. It also fits that use case that you go to a friend’s place and want to show them something in your save file on a whim.

ampersandrew,
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Yes, that’s what I use when I need it for GOG saves. But typically, every game puts their save file in a different spot, so you do need to do a one-time setup for each individual game.

ampersandrew,
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They might have to grease some wheels somehow then. Some kind of incentive structure to make sure they do it.

ampersandrew,
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They do that already. They’re partnered with Heroic. If you buy GOG games through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut of that sale using a referral code program like you’d see in other stores. It gives Heroic some cash, and it gives GOG a line of sight into exactly how much revenue they’re missing out on by not building the Linux launcher themselves. This is what got me to start buying from GOG again.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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I would also support paying for online servers for games that have multiplayer components. That takes money to maintain.

If the developers were interested in allowing people to keep the servers running, they’d just give us the server code like they used to. If I was in charge of a GOG that was a little more flush with capital, I might fund an easy drop-in replacement library for Steam’s multiplayer APIs so that developers can easily port their games to GOG and be playable, in multiplayer, offline.

ampersandrew,
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The previous versions of a game thing is something they took away, IIRC. They only keep the latest version and a patch to get up to it available for download, and you can only roll back to previous versions that you had already installed over time, or something like that. This is them seeing if you want to pay money to get a feature back that they used to offer, which is kinda lousy.

ampersandrew,
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github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/…/v2.13.0

We also started a partnership with GOG and now every game you buy from the GOG store inside Heroic will give us a commission, so it is another way of supporting the project. :)

The link is also available at heroicgameslauncher.com/donate if you prefer to purchase games in your web browser.

ampersandrew,
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The best you’ll get is Heroic Games Launcher. It’s got most of the features I’d want at this point.

ampersandrew,
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I’m not sure, but years ago, at least. Likely to save on server hosting fees. If you go to download the installer now, you only see the latest version, but you used to see every version.

ampersandrew,
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With regards to the Dreamlist, this is so that they have ammunition to bring to rights holders. They just started bringing previously console exclusive games to GOG as well, so that barrier has been broken down. If there’s money in it, any game could be done.

ampersandrew,
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You know, I just checked the ones I was confident on, and it turns out they each had an obscure Windows port back in the day that I never heard of. Still, the other popular trend going on right now for porting old console games like Tomba and Mega Man is to run them through tools that emulate the game and then output native code, and I wouldn’t consider it a waste of time to show where the demand is. For old sports games, it may be difficult or impossible to acquire the old rights, but if it’s at all possible, and these are customers that aren’t making them money on the modern iterations, that’s still worth it too.

ampersandrew,
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There is, if the money is there. Nintendo’s also under new management these days, and if the old strategies don’t work, they could pivot, just like Microsoft and Sony have.

ampersandrew,
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I agree, but it’ll be the only way they get my money. Everyone can see that PC line going up and that console line going down, so we’ll see how long they hold their ground; probably one generation longer than Sony does.

ampersandrew,
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Consoles won’t go away, but they’re in the process of transforming. Peak spending on consoles was all the way back in 2009 and has dropped ever since. There are perhaps dozens of reasons for the change, but one of them might be that the average consumer picked up on the air quotes around the ways consoles are cheaper. As for non-DRM, as long as piracy remains better than the official option, there’s money being left on the table, and I have confidence that a lot of that will change too, though it will be far slower than I’d like.

ampersandrew,
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WB Interactive was always such a missed opportunity. Monolith shut down because the studio lost its best talent when they weren’t allowed to work on a new IP, where their creativity took them. Even back during the MOBA fad era (Remember that one? It was after MMOs and before hero shooters and battle royales.), during the development and promotional period for DC’s Infinite Crisis, I spoke to one of the developers from Turbine, asking what the pitch process was under WB. Even back then, this guy told me, “Well, it’s WB, so whatever your idea is, they’ll say, ‘Cool, now make it Batman,’ or ‘Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.’”

If it doesn’t naturally fit with that IP, that’s all backwards. Even in the most capitalistic view I can take on it, the best way forward sounds a lot like keeping an eye on a budding new idea and steering it toward a direction where it can become a good movie or an HBO show, in the event that the game is successful. Because what was obviously always going to happen when WB tried to sell its Interactive component is that their video game division is worthless when their games are all tied to WB intellectual property. It would be like Disney buying Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm so that they could only make Mickey Mouse comics and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.

ampersandrew,
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Reports were they took 8 years because they spent almost 3 of them making a game in a new IP, knowing that WB wouldn’t be happy about it, but it’s what they wanted to make. When that got shut down and forcibly changed into Wonder Woman, most of the talent that had been there the longest decided to just leave.

ampersandrew,
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According to Jason Schreier, most did go on to form a new studio at EA.

ampersandrew,
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The article didn’t speculate, but that may have been the point. “We’re miserable only making games out of WB movie properties, so you’ll let this next one through, or we’re gone, and someone else will surely have us instead.”

ampersandrew,
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It’s a long video, so I guess you’re sitting down with a book. For the record, the visual aides contributed quite a bit, and a lot of it is him contextualizing something that’s already a book: Playing at the World by Jon Peterson.

ampersandrew,
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I’ve got my issues with RDR2, but definitely not with the writing and performances.

ampersandrew,
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10 characters, in my experience, is about as small as a roster can be in a fighting game before it feels like you’re seeing the same matchups over and over again. That might be a bit worse in a 2v2 game, but there are other reasons, like Vanguard, that I’d argue are more compelling reasons to avoid 2XKO.

ampersandrew,
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People generally downvote assholes.

ampersandrew,
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He’s not interested in answering them. I live rent free in his head from a previous thread.

ampersandrew,
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For the record, I didn’t skip the dialogue; I accidentally chose one option too quickly and then was not presented with the option to choose the other one the next time I spoke to the same NPC. The kind of quality of life I’m looking for is the stuff that makes it clear to me, a person in the modern world, what Henry would know. Or at least to be able to jump over a shin-high chain without hitting a collision box that tells me I can’t.

ampersandrew,
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Would you say that the game cleaned up some of conveyance of information from the first game? Or have you not played the first game to compare it against? Maybe I just have to get used to what the game does and doesn’t tell me.

ampersandrew,
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Gotcha, thanks. That’s a bit of a bummer, but I guess I’ll try to enjoy the game for what it’s good at.

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