I’m playing through the first one right now, in the early hours, and for anyone who’s played this sequel, did they add any quality of life improvements? In theory, I like a lot of what the game’s doing, but when it tells me I need to find a way out of a castle, and it doesn’t let me jump over a short chain barrier, it can be frustrating. I talked to one NPC who I accidentally quickly buttoned through a dialogue with without clicking on the option that clearly would have given me a hint on what to do next, and without reloading a save, I couldn’t get that dialogue option back. There was also another NPC that I found the first time, before reloading a save, who gave me similar advice for how to progress, but due to the schedule system and the lack of any sort of notation built in to the map, I couldn’t find her again, because she wasn’t in the same spot. Things like that are why Avowed was built to be “static”, as much as it got criticism for it, despite most RPGs being built that way to avoid exactly this problem I had with KC:D. (I have since made my way out of the castle, after looking up a walkthrough and save scumming a chest that I had to lockpick, because the tutorial was very bad at teaching me how lockpicking actually worked.)
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.
These are some strange criticisms. Yes, there was a focus on games being “cinematic”. Yes, there was also a counter-culture to that, because there’s a counter-culture for every popular culture. No, Half-Life didn’t invent it; it iterated on existing ideas. Yes, others copied it, because iteration is far easier and more likely to be financially sustainable than outright invention. Likewise, others in the counter-culture didn’t copy it. There are pros and cons to that sort of design. If my friends and I both play through a game like that, we can reminisce and “hell yeah” and high five over our favorite moments. A more immersive sim “lite” design like Indiana Jones can easily lead to me getting the intended experience where Indy has to improvise his way out of a blunder by punching Nazis and my friend ending up in what he perceived to be automatic fail states (true story). The “detour” through Half-Life inspired games came coupled with those same years being littered with games that didn’t stick to its ethos.
The one thing I’ll agree with the author on is that we’re definitely currently living through the stark aftermath of this peak FPS era. It’s so rare now that a new FPS is made for me anymore. Maybe it’ll be Mouse: P.I. for Hire, but it won’t come with a split-screen deathmatch like the good old days.
Ubisoft Entertainment SA will carve out a unit including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Sixinto a subsidiary with an enterprise value of about €4 billion ($4.3 billion)....
Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
Hey, I’m sure it solves a problem for people, but the easier solution is still just the absence of DRM, as much as Nintendo would not like to do it, and it introduces exactly the kind of complexity that Sony mocked 12 years ago.
I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, both in preparation for their sequels this year. What I played tonight of the latter was a bit obtuse, and I’m hoping it picks up.
It’s real, and it’s happening, but I wouldn’t count on hearing about it again until the next Microsoft presentation. I’d like to see some Mina the Hollower at this Direct though.
Last we saw Silksong, it was part of an Xbox marketing deal; that’s all I’m basing my hunch on. I doubt that deal is easily broken, and Silksong can write its own ticket with any marketing partner.
Say what you will about the white savior trope, but wasn’t there a historical reason for Tom Cruise’s character to be there? Japan was accepting foreign influence and modernization at that time, from what I know of history.
Are you telling me The Last Samurai wasn’t skillfully made or imaginative? Nah, it was no masterpiece, but I liked it just fine. Having some westerners in Japan training their military on modern weaponry as the samurai are fading from relevance passes my threshold for “remotely historical”, and it’s definitely not a requirement for me that Tom Cruise’s character needs to have an American historical analog to meet that criteria. Any historical fiction will inherently have to change things about what actually happened in that era, after all.
I think you missed the sarcasm in the rhetorical question, but yes. It’s one of at least three or four movies I’ve seen utilizing the Dances With Wolves trope, though I’ve never seen Dances With Wolves itself, and that’s okay. It was entertaining.
I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later...
I’m trying to see some stuff in BG1 and 2 that I missed as I take another lap through the entire series, and I remember BG1 being a fairly easy, straight-forward game, but now that I’m replaying it, I remember that’s only the tail end of the game. Early in the game, when you’re stuck at level 1 for hours, lots of attacks just one-shot you, and it takes so long to get level 2. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you’re barely out of the tutorial area before you get level 2, so you just don’t have that problem with low HP.
I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of 2e, but I think first level HP might be set in stone by class, and the Enhanced Editions of BG1 and 2 give you a max HP per level option, which doesn’t really help at level 1. Dynaheir keeps getting smoked with her mere 6HP, and she can’t get to level 2 fast enough.
Pelting the enemy with slings and arrows still works, but now and then they’ll still target me at range and land a hit. I don’t have a summoner in my party either, so I doubt I’d see a difference, especially at level 1.
As the article says, it’s history repeating itself. This one made more foundational changes to the formula than 6 did over 5, and once again, if you’re looking to play a Civ game, the old game is still going to be cheaper. I loved 6 when it came out, but when friends were curious about dipping their toes in, I just referred them to 5 because it was almost as good and far cheaper to try out. Civ 6 charts compared to 5 around the same time period are similar. I haven’t picked up 7 yet just because I’m still trying to get through other games, but I’m looking forward to it.
On a technical level, it functioned better. On an artistic level, I liked the look a lot better. On a gameplay level, they were pretty similar, but I liked what they did with city tiles in 6.
They actively harm the emulation scene, despite themselves being responsible for making it necessary. They don’t want to make their old games available for sale where those potential customers are; they want you to buy their hardware and rent those old games from them in perpetuity. We’re also now at a point, at least temporarily, where their latest games often play better if you emulate them than play them in the only way Nintendo makes them available legally, so buying games and playing them “the right way” is worse. Then there’s the whole thing where they actively stand in the way of competitive Super Smash Bros.
Except for Smash Bros., yes, but they created a really shitty vicious cycle. I don’t care if it’s first or third party; I’m not giving Nintendo any more of my money.
Or, as a counter-point, perhaps they are nearly evenly matched, and the slight difference in skill between them is disproportionately reflected in the scoreboard. I’ve seen this happen in fighting games, but admittedly, I haven’t really played a matchmade team game in a long, long time, because they kind of stopped making those games for me.
But maybe the meme loses its humor by having less of that kernel of truth that a good joke relies on? Like, if you don’t think the matchmaking is bullshit, it’s not going to be funny, you know?
Yeah pacman and pong were seminal but so was elite on the BBC, and Populous which I think was on the spectrum. Also unreal tournament, silent hill, vice city, homeworld, doom 2016, beam ng, I enjoyed em all but I can’t decide. Ppl here have done much more gaming than me, I’m wondering what you all think is the best game...
Mario 64 was the first use of the analog stick in a console game. Push it a little bit to walk, push it all the way to run, and several states in between. Maybe you can find a simulator that had analog control, but I’m sure you can see the difference.
Ocarina of Time was a solution to that type of game in 3D space that, as discussed above in things like Tomb Raider, was far more awkward in its predecessors as the industry was figuring out how to make games work in 3D. It’s very similar to how Halo wasn’t the first console FPS, but it was the first one smart enough to put guns, grenades, and melee all on their own buttons, among other innovations.
The link is a livestream, and it was just announced during the Arc World Tour finals. In case you aren’t familiar, the stand-in for ranked mode in the game for the past four years has been this awful tower system that more or less everyone hated since we saw it in the beta, but ArcSys dug their heels in and said it’s...
I don’t think they particularly cared if you bought their headset, but they had the premium offering if you were interested. I think they wanted Alyx to be the Mario 64 of VR.
They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.
It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.
Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.
As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.
A cheaper game captures more customers, yes. It doesn’t mean that Avowed didn’t make its money back. Retention as a metric doesn’t matter at all for an offline game you play and finish, and depending on how Grounded is monetized, it might not matter for that game either, if the intention is that you just play with your friends. The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors, and I don’t know where you got it in your head that these media appearances are a plea to investors. Microsoft is an enormous behemoth operating at much larger scales than any one video game. Their strategy is Game Pass. They’re all in on that strategy. If Avowed seems to provide value for Game Pass and keep people subscribed, then they and their investors are happy. For everyone who isn’t interested in Game Pass, they’re happy to sell it to you for $70. You’re just making shit up as you go instead of admitting what you do and do not know.
Then if and when you revisit it, you can see a reminder here that the problem here all along is that you’re assuming you know it failed off of bonkers reasoning, not that you may have guessed right. You just criticized those dummies over AC Shadows, and here you are doing the same thing.
If you like bigger games, and plenty do, them charging a higher price for it up front makes it more likely that they’re made sustainably. If a game costs $100M to make, the difference between breaking even on $70 versus $60 is hundreds of thousands of additional customers.
“Just make good games” doesn’t really work in the age where we’ve got tens of thousands of game releases per year compared to the age of a few hundred games per year.
The failure of a game doesn’t come hand in hand with it being bad. Lots of studios are struggling right now, because there’s just so much out there, and no one wants to compete with GTA.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Has Released on GOG! (www.gog.com) angielski
Hey, Henry’s come to see us!
The Half-Life Delusion (remapradio.com) angielski
The text of the article, for those who don’t want to sign in:...
Ubisoft Carves Out Top Games Unit; Tencent to Get 25% Stake (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Ubisoft Entertainment SA will carve out a unit including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Sixinto a subsidiary with an enterprise value of about €4 billion ($4.3 billion)....
Nintendo Announce Virtual Game Cards (Digital Game Sharing) (www.youtube.com) angielski
This was way more confusing than it had to be....
Steam Deck / Gaming News #7 angielski
As is now a tradition (this is my 7th of these posts - after rejoining Lemmy just 28 days ago!) you’ll know the drill....
Nintendo Direct Confirmed For Tomorrow, 27th March 2025 (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/34924887...
Ubi, it's $70 and people are vary of your mile wide puddles that drop 75% in price after half a year angielski
What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists? angielski
I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later...
Civilization 7 Outlines Crucial 1.1.1 Update as It Struggles to Compete on Steam Against Civ 6 and Even the 15-Year-Old Civ 5 (www.ign.com) angielski
EXCLUSIVE - Nintendo Switch 2 Will Have a 3-Phase Launch Plan For Its Games (insider-gaming.com) angielski
The struggle is real angielski
Cross posted from !deadlock, but really applies to most games with matchmaking that I’ve played…
Best game ever? angielski
Yeah pacman and pong were seminal but so was elite on the BBC, and Populous which I think was on the spectrum. Also unreal tournament, silent hill, vice city, homeworld, doom 2016, beam ng, I enjoyed em all but I can’t decide. Ppl here have done much more gaming than me, I’m wondering what you all think is the best game...
Guilty Gear Strive to get ranked mode and frame data display in training mode; new character Venom releases tomorrow (www.youtube.com) angielski
The link is a livestream, and it was just announced during the Arc World Tour finals. In case you aren’t familiar, the stand-in for ranked mode in the game for the past four years has been this awful tower system that more or less everyone hated since we saw it in the beta, but ArcSys dug their heels in and said it’s...
Big Rigs, the infamous truck racing game, is coming to Steam this year (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Half Life: Alyx is Five Years Old Today angielski
I genuinely can’t believe Half Life Alyx is five years old....
Fable delayed to 2026 (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Very likely will be a launch game for MS’s new handheld console....
The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: 'Some companies are going to tank' if they guess wrong, says analyst (www.pcgamer.com) angielski