ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Hold Start and press A when continuing to continue from the current level.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I could take one look at those models and animations and tell you it wasn’t cheap. Then probably a lot of money went into those CG cut-scenes that were intended to be rolled out weekly.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

They also outsourced a ton to make CG cut-scenes and such, which can rack up a bill very quickly. ProbablyMonsters was an incubator, not a parent company, as I understand it. I too am skeptical of there only being one source in Colin Moriarty, but I trust Jordan Middler to vet the story, even if he isn’t corroborating it, and as others have mentioned, the credits are literally over an hour long, which is evidence that supports the high costs.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

If you were in such a role that you could correct anything in the story, I’d encourage you to reach out to a journalist and do so.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

why would I do what you suggest? So that games journalism can continue to beat a dead horse?

Because the truth is worth knowing, and it sucks that this stuff is obfuscated the way it is compared to something like the movie industry. If true, I’d call it constructive reporting if the message becomes clear that this is an example of what’s ravaging the industry; trend chasing with absurd amounts of money designed to extract some mythical amount of money from people rather than building good products on sane budgets that keep people employed. But the point is moot if you not only don’t agree but also aren’t in a position to refute it.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Unity was the best in my opinion. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all the new design of Assassin’s Creed games that earned their own set of fans, but they’re so different from what came before with their faux RPG design. The fantasy is broken for me when I sneak up behind someone, stab them in the neck, and their health bar only goes down a little bit.

The first Assassin’s Creed game was very repetitive, but they gave you small assassination missions for you to figure out how to get, kill your target, and get out. The next several games in the series were better in every way except for perhaps these missions that mattered most, which they made extremely linear and scripted action missions.

Unity (set in Paris in the late 1700s) was an answer to those frustrations. There was a point in the dialogue where they specifically called it out. “So what’s the plan?” “The plan? Come up with your own plan. I’m not here to hold your hand.” They gave you expansive areas to carry out your mission, and you could find your own way in, kill your target, and get out. The game has some of its own baggage, like the loot system taking any challenge out of the combat later in the game, when the whole idea was that you were squishy that you should avoid combat, but it delivered on the experience the best since the first game.

Then Syndicate came out next, and they highlighted different ways to do your assassination like you were a big dummy, and they made a significant part of the game about street brawling, so I gave it a hard pass. The next game in the series was Origins, which brings us to the modern faux RPG era.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Surely you’ve upgraded your PC in the last ten years since the game came out, right? I’d recommend checking it out on a sale or something sometime.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

So like…no mention of which patents?

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

None of those made hundreds of millions of dollars.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Starting with this one, it’s a requirement on PC, yes. Hopefully they do away with it due to lost sales, but they’re still at least pretending that they’re somehow going to convert PC players into console players.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I think the strategy is so terrible that they can’t believe it, but they’ve publicly stated that’s the goal. I’m not sure what data they’d get out of it that they don’t get out of Steam achievements, but more likely it’s to brag about how many “active PSN users” they have, using a misleading number. Still, all I see when I see that requirement is online DRM.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

You play some more and get better. Nobody starts good at a game unless they spent that time getting good at a similar one. Probably right at launch will be tons of people at your skill level to learn with.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Nah, that’s not some inherent quality you have. I played fighting games regularly for basically my entire life, but it was only about 5 years ago that I started to really learn how they work under the hood and focused on how to improve. You can too! Also, “learning how to get good” is a skill that transcends any one genre, so I recommend you try it on one game or another.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s got other strengths. Particularly the “kill enemy” part of that chain, on higher difficulties, at least.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

The exclusivity deals appear to have been good for no one involved: Epic, Square Enix, Sony, or customers, so I think we’ve seen the last of them outside of things Epic publishes themselves.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Expansion packs are a very old concept. That brand new game came out over a year ago. Also, it’s $25 for both DLCs.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

They paid more for it than they saw back in sales or expected new customers. What they’ve said publicly is that they won’t be using this strategy anymore, because it isn’t working. They claim free game giveaways are working, but I have my doubts as to how valuable those user acquisitions are.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

They’re typically optimizing for fidelity and performance ahead of install size. Multiple LODs can balloon an install size quite quickly, but they’ll give you better bang for your buck in other areas, and storage space is a concern that dissipates more in time, as you upgrade to newer machines.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

It was faster to load the higher resolution data back in the early 2010s on HDDs, so I don’t imagine it got any better for using compression now that we’re on SSDs.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

7 games per year is a pretty good cadence! Most studios are on their way to being 7 years per game.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

The second game even repurposed large parts of the not-particularly-impressive campaign of the first game. They weren’t going to fool me again by making me buy the same game a third time.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

It does rely on a subscription though.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t think that’s a great excuse.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t think it’s singling it out to say that the just-about-required subscription makes it less appealing to purchase, whereas most multiplayer games have the PC version as an option.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

We weren’t per se. Only that a predominantly multiplayer game is a harder sell when the subscription is damn near mandatory, which is why there are so few multiplayer-only games on consoles that cost money up front anymore, and free to play games get an exception to the subscription service on PlayStation and Xbox.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

There are at least two other mobile games in the same genre that did very well, so this one wasn’t a stretch.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The core of lots of games revolve around random chance, and plenty of those exhibit no addictive behavior whatsoever. I’d certainly like to hear a research psychologist’s take on it though.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…

No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don’t think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they’re still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don’t know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you’re so inclined.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling. I don’t know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they’ll “binge” shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you’re doing something else, including a show you’ve seen a million times.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Any game that doesn’t last forever was robbed of doing so arbitrarily. If they never updated Palworld again, in its current form, it will last forever.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that’s very effective at preservation. Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies. But live service is just purposely killing games that didn’t need to die.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The inevitable outcome for every live service game is that it becomes inoperable and unplayable, even the good ones. It doesn’t matter if it’s Suicide Squad or Fortnite. They all should still be preserved. Open source is appreciated but not necessary.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

If someone 50 years from now wants to see what this game Fortnite was all about, they should be able to get a reasonable approximation of it by booting it up and playing with 100 other people. That’s what it means to preserve it. We’ve had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I’m way into fighting games. Even the ones with a battle pass and such can still be played offline (except maybe for 2XKO and Brawlhalla) and quite frankly can’t match the content churn that other genres do in the live service space.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t think it’s a good argument to say that it’s okay for a game to inevitably die because they’re doing better right now. Brink, Overwatch 1, and HyperScape are fully dead, btw. I’d rather be able to pay $60 and have a game I can play forever than save money on a game that’s designed to self destruct.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Uh, this is a huge deal. Terrible news.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

That deal only really made sense because it was with a company that did both things.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, consoles have way better backward compatibility than phones.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Reality does not match that headline. Was this generated by AI to be something people wanted to read?

Yet, the PlayStation 5 Pro gives certain backwards-compatible PS4 games an added boost in resolution and framerate. Gamers on Reddit are hoping that Bloodborne will benefit from a 60fps boost on Sony’s upcoming machine.

“Gamers are hoping” is definitely not what that headline says. It links to a trailer from the original release 9 years ago. There’s no press release about the game being confirmed to run better than 30 FPS on PS5 Pro. This is garbage.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Sharing your games doesn’t lock your entire library when someone is playing a different game than you in the same account.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t know how you got from A to B on the Porsche. Embracer was funded largely by debt that they were expecting to get bailed out of by an investment that didn’t happen; the classic leveraged investment gone wrong. Microsoft absolutely could stomach whatever losses they face, especially since that was the whole idea a few years back when they started Game Pass, so them deciding to not follow through on that and tighten their belts now is a situation unique to them. At large, across the industry, are tons of companies making big bets like Suicide Squad or Concord or Warhaven that follow a live service template that’s been tapped out of customers and don’t work out, and even smaller companies following the traditional publisher model like Mimimi are so exhausted hunting for funding for their next game, just barely making it by on copies sold, that they decide instead to close up shop. That’ll happen when customer dollars are spread out around more games.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

What law does this break?