ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

One man is not responsible for all of your criticisms of writing in their games for decades. The writing and development processes of games are too opaque for you to be able to attribute anything to one person on teams as large as Bethesda’s.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Many multiplayer games and roguelikes are based on repeating a loop where you start from zero every time.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

That first part is exactly what I’m saying. Many multiplayer games involve starting from zero every time, so that didn’t seem to be what OP is looking for. I wouldn’t recommend Vagante, for instance. It has a small handful of unlocks, but the lack of other progression is a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, a loot game like Borderlands will have you continually upgrading your character and gear over many sessions, and that’s likely what OP is asking for.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Often times they’re the same thing. The money comes from the owner of the IP, who contracted out the project; owner of the IP decides they don’t want to do it anymore; no more money coming in to fund the people working on it.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I would hope, but it is becoming less and less common.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

This is a date you pick when you want to be nominated for the Game Awards, and also when you’re confident that Grand Theft Auto won’t interfere with your sales.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

In 2024 almost 19.000 games were released on Steam. I have yet to find a single title from 2024 worth playing.

Oh man, there’s so much. My top 10 from last year would be:

1. The Rise of the Golden Idol - puzzle/deduction game, sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol
2. Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age - fighting game that gracefully handles 4 players at once and has all the good feels of the Xbox Live Arcade era
3. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - lite immersive sim and action game that captures the spirit of the best parts of those movies
4. Metaphor: ReFantazio - a political metaphor in JRPG form
5. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - a beefy expansion pack to one of the best games ever made
6. Dread Delusion - a lite RPG with fantastic exploration
7. Indika - a very interesting cinematic story game with some puzzles
8. UFO 50 - 50 unique games designed to replicate the 80s
9. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - a giant escape room, and the puzzles are HARD
10. The Thaumaturge - an RPG inspired mostly by Persona and The Witcher, but you almost certainly haven’t seen a setting like this in a game before

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I have fond memories of being the only one I knew with a Virtual Boy. My mom got it on clearance along with games like Teleroboxing and Galactic Pinball.

I’m currently in the last few hours of the DLC of Borderlands 2, trying to wrap it up before moving on to the Pre-Sequel.

My wife and I finished up Split Fiction and have moved on to Blue Prince, which we’re 3 in-game days into. We love a good puzzle game, and we’re told this one will fit the bill.

And besides those, I’ve still been replaying Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the first time. I made it to the titular city in the former and I’m still probably in early hours in the latter, probably about to get an introduction to a major character in the story (“The Prey” is the name of the quest that I’m on right now, if you’re curious).

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I’m pro-paid-mods, but at least the way it was rolled out the first time was pretty shit. The modders were left with a very small cut after Valve and Bethesda each got theirs, and Bethesda did basically no vetting of the content to make sure it wasn’t stolen or malware or what have you.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

$10. I’m not joking. It’s a part of the deluxe edition.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Yeah, but the headline cuts out that part where they’re not growing. I think more customers can do math than console manufacturers are willing to admit, or at least more than Sony and Nintendo are willing to admit. The word’s out about how much that online subscription is going to cost you for multiplayer over the years, and if they were interested in running a console the way that consoles have always been run, the lowest hanging fruit to keep that going and to be competitive would be to remove that cost; they’re making it up in digital sales anyway. My guess is that once the new Xbox is just a disguised Windows PC, that will be when they drop the requirement of Live/Game Pass for online multiplayer.

Also worth noting that sometime in the past week or so, maybe, they’ve changed their messaging on Game Pass. They put so much of their weight behind that thing trying to become the Netflix of video games, as a way of pivoting in a world where they can’t compete with PlayStation by doing what PlayStation does, only to end up with a fraction of the subscriber base that they expected to have. It’s a lucrative base nonetheless, but now that they’re decidedly not the Netflix of video games, they’re just leaning into being the industry’s largest publisher.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

But not to the point that you could load up your Steam account or a random Windows game disc from your shelf. That’s the thing that’s likely to change, which has a profound impact on the library you can play on that machine, not to mention your ability to play online without a subscription fee.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I’m not giving them or Valve any shit. I have a living room PC running Bazzite, and I had a Steam Machine back in the day. That’s a product I want. And Microsoft is reacting to market realities before their competition is, because none of them wanted the gravy train to end, but it is ending.

For what it’s worth, I’ve got a number of friends, all in their 30s, who swear by Game Pass, as at least most of them are the type to bounce around to as many games in a given year as they possibly can without sweating if they finish them or not. Many they don’t even like, but they like to have formed their own opinion on them. It doesn’t make sense for me, as I do value getting to keep the game when I’m done, so that I can revisit it whenever I want.

All of my traditional consoles are collecting dust, and just moments ago before reading your comment, I was evaluating whether or not it makes sense to get rid of my PS4.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I found out a few days ago that my PS4 is no longer accepting Blu Rays, and my basic troubleshooting steps were unsuccessful, which severely diminishes the value I get from that machine, hence my deliberations minutes ago, lol. I have to ask myself how happy I’d be with the PC version of Until Dawn the next time I want to revisit that game, because that’s about the only game on that system I’d want to play that I couldn’t run better on PC. I couldn’t even be bothered to finish Bloodborne at the frame rate it’s got on a legitimate PS4.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I’m seeing reports in the forums that the GOG version of the game still has its LAN multiplayer. I only played a bit of Crysis multiplayer, but I can see why it would have been great. I was mostly on college networks at the time, so online multiplayer was rough for me unless it was peer to peer with someone else at my school, and hardly anyone had a computer that could run the game at the time; mine only got it running on low/medium settings.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I’m still not sure why this is in the games community.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

The fourth movie was written by one of the Wachowskis as a metaphor for their own transition, as a creative outlet during a grieving period after the death of their parents.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

In general, people aren’t returning to the theater for much of anything anymore.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

As I recall them saying, they felt that way maybe in retrospect? They hadn’t transitioned in real life by then, so that’s getting pretty subconscious at that point. At the time, the metaphors that were clear were about dreams, the savior allegory, a sense of not mattering as a cog in the machine, and so forth.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I did. Its cynicism about making another Matrix movie is well-noted and some of the most fascinating things about that movie, but it’s also a protagonist swap between Neo and Trinity, which makes a ton of sense for the trans metaphor. It can be cynical about the realities of making the movie and still not be sabotage. And also it was only written by one of the two Wachowskis.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content

The Borderlands games made billions of dollars, and no one needs to keep them running.

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

What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here. And here’s the video that came along with the launch of the EU petition.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.

ampersandrew, 3 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, 3 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, 3 miesiące temu

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

ampersandrew, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 miesiące temu

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

ampersandrew, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 miesiące temu

That game only really went into production after Starfield shipped.

ampersandrew, 3 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.