ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

This one and FairGame$ are both screwed, and they’ll mark the end of an era for Sony and live service. What’s funny too is that Bungie was purchased in large part for being experts in making successful live service games, but it reminds me of something in investing where those who appear to be very smart after a string of successes are compared to being “expert coin flippers” who just got heads a number of times in a row. As we’ve gotten a peak or two behind the curtain after the purchase, it certainly looks like Bungie was only lucky.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

“Recently” also means something different in a time where BioWare makes one game every 5 years rather two games in the same year.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Yes, but then their lives are often uprooted, since the entire existence of their job was based on a bad bet.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.

There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Allegedly, it’s an improved Windows experience so you get the compatibility without having to use a desktop operating system on a handheld game machine. So, you get Game Pass and kernel level anti cheat games with a UX similar to the Steam Deck (ish). And besides, “everything is an Xbox”. They don’t care how many of these things sell as long as you’re on Game Pass or buying their games.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Every time you buy a PC, you’re buying a platform that Microsoft couldn’t care less if it sells at all, and that’s all this will be. It will be supported by Microsoft as any other Windows PC, for better or worse.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I finished the game already, but the biggest quality of life update is being able to use Soul Pods to dispel illusions so you’re not more or less locked in with Yatzli while exploring in the later Acts. Set your expectations appropriately, and Avowed is a hell of a game, but it’s got more in common with Dark Souls or God of War than it does Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Well, playing through the first KC:D now, I can tell you it was rough to go from Avowed’s combat to KC:D’s, but that’s okay, because KC:D has other strengths. When development gets restarted, it’s not because it was shaping up into a better game than what we ended up with.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Do you think there’s any stopping the industry’s shift to digital at this point? Because we just saw another quarter where we went even harder in that direction.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Are you under the impression that Metal Gear Rising is an Obsidian game?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Rule #6 in the side bar.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

No linking to piracy

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I’m not following your argument. You’re perfectly capable of having the rug pulled out from under you with a native Linux build too.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Negative hundreds of millions of dollars. But the point still stands that they believed this was a rational way to make a boatload of money. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses, but yes, this was a stupid move.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Even the American competitor sources all of their components from outside the US.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

In this case, the anger may or may not be focused at Sony, as tariffs affect far more than just the PlayStations we already weren’t buying.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

If they have to compete, which it looks like they will in some capacity, then it’s totally possible.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I think more and more people have done the math on what your break-even is with a PC up front compared to noncompetitive digital console storefronts, needless forced obsolescence, and subscription fees.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

And the games that really demand the high-end hardware tend to be pretty rare in the grand scheme of things, not to mention less likely to be as good as the low spec games. I always joke with my friends that I might buy a killer new PC in the next year or so, but my most-played game will still be a 2D game from 2012 that absolutely doesn’t need it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Why are people going for Bazzite for desktops? I’ve got it on a mini PC, and it’s great for the living room and travel, but even then the updater still keeps trying to apply an update from April 28th over and over again. Is it a good choice for desktop too? I’m on Kubuntu now but will probably shop around for a new distro with my next PC.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

While SNK devotes most of its efforts toward its King of Fighters series, the Fatal Fury series has remained dormant for 25 years. With the former series already featuring many of Fatal Fury‘s characters, it’s hard to imagine why players familiar with SNK’s niche titles would make the switch.

I’m sorry, but this is terrible analysis. You may as well say no one would play Street Fighter because those characters are in Marvel Vs. Capcom.

The single player offering is weak. The author and I agree that has an impact on sales. The graphics aren’t bad, but the presentation doesn’t really floor you like some other recent fighting games do. SNK has had a rough go of it with the netcode in their games, and people were burned by the non-functional matchmaking in KOFXV for over a year; beta 1 for CotW made it look like history would repeat itself. Ronaldo doesn’t help, but what would have helped is if, like Street Fighter and Tekken, it could have scored a 90 on review aggregators and been called a can’t-miss game, but to do that, they’d have to address the above.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I typically do use my Steam Deck as a Steam Deck and not a GOG Deck, but every time I’m on the go, forgot to explicitly put my Steam Deck in offline mode, and get hit with a license that needs to be reauthenticated, I wish I’d stuck to GOG instead…or that GOG offered the game I’m playing at all. Also, BioShock Infinite is fantastic, and whenever you hear about it now, it tends to be from people who really want you to know that they didn’t like it.

Lately I’ve been playing the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance still, and this one is via GOG. I got to a point where I can do some side quests, so the main story is taking a back seat for a little while. I am enjoying the story and characters, but I do wish they’d made different choices in things like the combat and some of the “realism”-related tedium.

I just beat the base game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel last night, before moving on to its DLC in my attempt to play through this entire series ahead of Borderlands 4. There are some good levels and bosses, and I liked how my class that I selected works, but the writing is just atrocious. It definitely tried to be funny but rarely had anything that could even be classified as a punchline, as though they’d never actually heard a joke before but heard about jokes.

And then my wife and I are still playing through Blue Prince. We’re making good progress, but I do find myself agreeing with the criticism that the RNG is bringing down the experience. I think if you could draft from 5 rooms at a time instead of 3, it would do wonders for the experience.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Click on her profile, hit the Posts link. Then I’ve got a button there that’s the RSS feed icon.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It’s weird, because even though I support the idea of modding as you the customer doing what you want with the product you bought, I also usually refuse to do it for a first playthrough, because I want to evaluate the thing that the developer actually delivered when I have an opinion on it. So even if some mod out there removes the tedium, I want to see what the game is like, start to finish, with the tedium included.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Fighting games have been doing this since the beginning in one sense or another though.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

And GamesBeat, and Aftermath, and NextLander. I think this is the only way game media survives. The corporate ownership doesn’t appear to work for anything other than the IGNs of the world.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

For IGN, probably indefinitely. They do real journalism and real criticism over there, but their site is also a horrendous challenge to navigate due to ads, and there’s more Star Wars and Marvel on the front page than there are video games. Gamespot follows a similar model, and they’re still under Fandom, and that will probably work out…fine…ish…compared to trying to make Giant Bomb work under that banner.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Kinda Funny did exactly that, and IGN still stands taller. But I think that just speaks to how many competitors can possibly follow that same model, because they’re driven by ad revenue and SEO.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Which Jeff? Jeff, Jeff, or Jeff? Jeff and Jeff are now co-owners, and Jeff has his own solo thing, being a family man, which seems to be how he wants to live his life these days.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

A boss several steps up the chain decided to make changes to how the site operates that were incompatible with what Giant Bomb is, namely that they wanted an advertiser-friendly, “brand-safe” image with less swearing and streaming. This led to a number of key people leaving, at which point, the name Giant Bomb isn’t really worth anything to anyone. It’s been covered in tons of gaming circles this week alongside the similar destruction of Polygon, so I didn’t think it needed to be stated yet again as I was summarizing bullet points from a live stream.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Grubb’s got an excellent morning news show that he’ll be back to doing this coming week if you wanted to poke your head in and check it out. They’ve also got a number of shows that are a good laugh, like Blight Club, where they take turns playing awful video games all the way to credits.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The sale is also hours old, and the new owners are all out of town.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Very true. Though at the same time, you probably could have found that context you were looking for by typing a couple of those words into your favorite search engine or Wikipedia.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

You wouldn’t know what to search for, but in this case you would.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I once paid $140 (just pre-pandemic inflation) for a meal with two drinks at a fancy restaurant for a friend’s bachelor party. It was delicious. At the same time, I realized that no one meal, no matter how good, was worth that price. I don’t know what the threshold is for how much I’ll pay for a single video game, but $80 is more palatable to me when the game asking for it isn’t Mario Kart.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I wish we lived in a world close to that one, and maybe someday we’ll get there. Guilty Gear Strive’s source code just got leaked in its entirety, so complete that it can just be loaded as is into the Unreal editor, and a lot of people see this as a bad thing rather than the game ascending to immortality.