ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

It means that the publisher needs to provide the player with the server executable, which is a one time expense for them to prepare, rather than continually paying for humans and machines to keep a server running on their end.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

This does not include the multiplayer. I’m sure it wasn’t the selling point for most, but I hate how the multiplayer use case isn’t well taken care of on GOG. I don’t want Galaxy required; I just want developers to put a bit of work into putting LAN into their games again.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Also it opens up the ability to play network multiplayer regardless of the presence of someone else’s server on the other end. The lack of LAN or direct IP connections is just DRM by another name.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Cool, then give me the server code to run it myself.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I meant binaries. Open source would be great, but it’s a tough sell for some reason, even though Doom’s been open source for decades and still sells copies to this day.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.

A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.

That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Personally, I’m at the point of “fuck walled garden ecosystems”, not to mention all the legal work they’re doing to ruin video games.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Consoles just have a dwindling list of use cases, so trying to create problems that furthers their use is going to have much the same effect as cable companies trying to pretend that streaming video services don’t exist.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Nintendo does not have a monopoly on fun video games without “aggressive enshitification”, which I’m guessing you mean microtransactions and battle passes. I’m drowning in a deluge of great stuff to play, and none of it is Nintendo lately.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Yes, the two hour limit affects game design. Based on what I’ve read about Blue Prince, it probably didn’t affect that one much at all. The business model always affects the game design. When games were expecting to be rentals, the first few levels would be front loaded with the best that the game had to offer, and then later levels would be more phoned in. In the arcades, games would be louder to catch more attention, they’d be harder to make you put in another quarter, they’d reduce downtime to get the next person on the machine, etc.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I think a lot of these are going to be placeholder for a while until more generalized communities like this one see more growth. It’ll be a while before we even hit 100k subscribers here, and you need to have a subset of those people who are looking to talk about an even more specific interest in more depth.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Oh, things are trending in the right direction, but we’re still a long ways away from needing smaller sub communities.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I wish you the best of luck. I don’t know what that threshold is where the smaller communities make sense, but for me, we haven’t met it yet.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.

For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I gave it a chance, and I remember the objective design being different for the sake of it to the point of being worse. They had a capture the flag mode involving charging a battery, but it could be charged to 99% at one base and then scored at the other base at the last second, making everything except the final play meaningless. It had a point control mode, but the points were only active in certain intervals, creating a real stop and go feeling that made the inactive periods as meaningless as the aforementioned first 99% of CTF.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Video game marketing changed dramatically about 2 years ago. No one likes long marketing cycles anymore. There are too many opportunities for delays or “puddlegates”.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

That game only really went into production after Starfield shipped.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

No, they contracted this game out to another developer, and it’s in Unreal. It’s been in the works for a long time. If they’re smart, it’s a testbed for getting future games off of their usual Creation engine.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I wasn’t a fan of a number of choices they made in their RPG systems in the Original Sin games, so until we see what their next game is, I’ll wonder how much of the heavy lifting done in BG3 was due to D&D rather than their designers. Still, BG3 knocked basically everything out of the park, so even a lesser RPG from this team will still likely be great. It would be nice to have the CRPG equivalent of Starfield from Larian, since most sci-fi RPGs tend to stick to the post-apocalypse.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I haven’t played it, but it’s on my list. A very long list. And Rogue Trader is 40k, right? Meaning fantasy trappings but in space? That can also be fine, but I appreciated Starfield’s setting for sticking to harder sci-fi tropes, like its obvious inspiration of Interstellar.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I watched two Jobst videos, and the second one didn’t sit right with me, so it’s no surprise he played fast and loose with facts that might see him lose a court case.

As for what I’ve been playing, I just beat Borderlands 2 the other day, and now I’m working my way through the DLC before I move on to the Pre-Sequel and 3. It’s mostly a huge improvement over the first game, but they definitely unflattened the progression compared to the first game, which is something a lot of RPGs and adjacent games do. It’s never been my preference, and it comes with its own design problems, like how the game refused to give me some decent guns toward the end of the game and then suddenly gave me guns that trivialized the next part of the game.

I’m still in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well, but I’ve only inched forward in it since the last of these posts.

And I’m always playing fighting games like Skullgirls, so that’s the free space on my Bingo card.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

You have to go specifically to the giveaway section.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

a backdrop of a challenging economic environment, including high inflation and fluctuating exchange rates

I think that’s all you’re going to get.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

When I build a new computer sometime in the next year or so, I’ll probably end up buying the second-best AMD card available at the time, because that’s where there tends to be the best bang for my buck. But in reality, I’ll be using the full power of that card for only a handful of games over the lifetime of that machine, and I’ll spend most of my time playing a 2D game that came out in 2012. Yeah, you can absolutely get away with cheaper cards and have a great time.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I built my last PC in 2021 just accepting that graphics card prices would never come down anytime soon, and I paid about $1400 for one. They did come down, not long after. I can wait more patiently this time.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I doubt it. Maybe Grand Theft Auto and Mario Kart can get away with charging more, but a lot of games asking $70 aren’t finding many customers willing to pay that price right now.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

That’s what happened to that cancelled TimeSplitters reboot, too.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

That’s going to happen in only a few years, with the next Xbox.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

No one can predict the future, especially not now, but things are clearly changing. Microsoft is getting messaging out there right now to let you know the ways that they’re rolling with the punches. The next Xbox, and corresponding handhelds, will in all likelihood just be thinly disguised PCs that absolutely let you just install Steam, Epic, etc. on them if you so choose. So in that world, when you can buy an Xbox that also plays PlayStation games that have released on PC, how does Sony compete with that? That’s very up in the air.

And for all the ways that Nintendo has historically handled consoles, they’re under new management now that may be open to doing things differently. The way they’re trying to press their market advantage at the moment, which was already going to result in fewer units sold, could be even further undone at the worst possible time for them by a stupid trade war. How will they choose to respond to that? Because bleeding money by sticking to their old ways isn’t going to be what happens. If they did burn to the ground, the insurance company that owns their intellectual property would dig them out of the ashes and sell them where they can make money again.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

By sheer compatibility, we’re well more than halfway there.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Yes, they charged for it years ago on the last gen system. This type of rerelease usually includes the DLC in the package so that they can go back to charging full price for a game that’s no longer in the zeitgeist and not worth as much as a brand new game.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

My friend loves quoting a line from that show where HyperScape was uttered in the same breath as games like Call of Duty as a “mega franchise” to try to will its success into existence. That episode is only a few years old, but HyperScape is already shut down forever.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Mad Max is WB.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Even MMOs have been run by amateurs. If you make the servers available, someone will figure out how to run it.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

E3 may be dead, but the “E3 walk” lives on! Seriously though, this looks good. I loved that last one.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I can’t make you like it if you didn’t enjoy it the first time, but I thought it was a great FPS and RPG that didn’t waste enough time, like its contemporaries might, to become boring. If you gave it a few hours, you’ve probably seen the cut of its jib.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

You should not put your time or money into anything doing something that you don’t like in the marketplace, because that’s the only way it changes.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

You might not like my answer, but I haven’t really played new FPS games in years, because basically none of them are doing what I want. I’m well served in basically every other genre right now, but these things are cyclical. We’re just getting through the era of indie FPS games inspired by Doom/Quake and other more maze-like shooters, and we may soon be entering the era where FPS games are inspired by my favorites. My multiplayer these days is usually fighting games, and the only ones that will give you trouble on Linux are Dragon Ball FighterZ and the upcoming 2XKO, both due to anti cheat.

As an aside, I’ll also say that where you put your time shouldn’t matter, if the product is free, for instance, but it does matter in online video games. Your presence in matchmaking is adding value for someone else who might spend money in the game, so you’d still be helping the causes of CS2 and TF2 just by playing on the official servers. For TF2, I think the code just went open source and there’s a revitalization project to bring it back to what it was like at launch? If so, that might be pre-loot-box, and playing that version of the game would help send the message you want to send. The same might apply to old versions of Counter-Strike.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

They shouldn’t, but Valve didn’t invent it, and they’re definitely not the most profitable business in the US.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Most profitable per employee is a different metric, and yes, they may very well be that, but that’s not what you said before. Boycotting all of Steam because some of Valve’s games do the thing they don’t like is a tough sell, rather than just not playing or paying into the offending games. I certainly don’t take issue with them taking a cut of every game sold on Steam, given all that they’ve built with those proceeds.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Even when deep discounted to a dollar, I have a hard time calling Due Process pro consumer when it doesn’t let you host the server yourself.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

We already know it’s going to be on Switch 2 and Xbox, including Game Pass day 1. It’s not going to be exclusive, but at the very least, Microsoft paid handsomely for it.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Microsoft is bringing their own games to PlayStation at this point. It’s possible it’s kept off PlayStation, but I doubt it. Team Cherry knows what their game is worth, and that would be a massive buyout.