ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.

Well, it’s definitely not what I want.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said. Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles? And does it matter how high the visuals score for Bye, Sweet Carole is if they’re leaving a subpar review for the puzzles? That’s what the content of the review is for.

How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review. Publishers can get slimy around it though and turn the knobs to be more nefarious after the review period, which people can call them out for, but much like how lies spread faster than the truth, updates spread slower than initial reviews. What I’d personally like to see make its way into reviews are how much ownership the game actually grants. So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.

But all of this has only been about reviews, and games media also breaks news. Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies. Sometimes we can actually get real confirmation that absolutely nothing is happening with Bloodborne and no one should get their hopes up for anything anytime soon. All of that is valuable, too.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.

ampersandrew, 10 dni temu

As a sustainable video game entity, WB games would be better suited in just about anyone else’s hands. WB has tried to sell off its games division in the past, but they’ve spent the better part of two decades making sure that their game studios produced nothing except for tie-ins to their movie and comic book businesses. I was told straight to my face at a PAX years ago that the pitch process under WB starts with a game idea and ends with, “Cool, now make it Batman,” or “Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.” Then when they tried to divest themselves of games, not only did they have no IP to sell outside of old Midway properties, they also thought the new buyer would love to keep paying licensing fees to WB for the properties attached to these gaming franchises. Bunch of geniuses over there.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

By the numbers, that demographic appears to be shrinking, not growing. PC has grown while consoles have shrunk.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

When they’re new and “incomplete”, it’s no different than how patches used to work for games before clients like Steam. I bought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and I can get updates through Heroic or Galaxy, or I can use the installers for each patch or DLC.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

Surely someone out there is paranoid enough to be wiresharking constantly. Sony games get hit hard in GOG reviews for telemetry that I’d probably never think twice about.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.

ampersandrew, 14 dni temu

It’s only empty if you haven’t been paying attention.

ampersandrew, 13 dni temu

That’s called survivorship bias.

ampersandrew, 15 dni temu

My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.

ampersandrew, 16 dni temu

It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.

ampersandrew, 16 dni temu

It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.

ampersandrew, 16 dni temu

In case you care about the things I care about:

What is the end-of-life plan?

Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.

ampersandrew, 16 dni temu

I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.

ampersandrew, 16 dni temu

The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.

ampersandrew, 20 dni temu

I am not an Avatar fan, but I will caution Avatar fans that Nickelodeon games are historically made for shoestring budgets; basically whatever they find in the couch cushions. As a fighting game fan, there’s enough left to the imagination here that this game could be literally anything, and the developer has no other games to its name on Steam.

ampersandrew, 20 dni temu

Pretty par for the course for a fighting game though, no?

ampersandrew, 20 dni temu

What would you prefer instead?

ampersandrew, 20 dni temu

I’d rather people get paid when they work hard to add stuff to a video game.

ampersandrew, 21 dni temu

Could you name a few that are almost exactly like Battlefield, came out in the last decade, and let me host my own servers?

ampersandrew, 20 dni temu

We have very different definitions of “almost exactly like Battlefield”.

ampersandrew, 21 dni temu

This is crazy, because the competitive audience is pretty much done with this game, and the last few big patches didn’t help.

ampersandrew, 21 dni temu

Yeah, I get the sense that the old pros are just as sick of the game as most of the rest of the audience, so I’m not sure how much money they threw at these folks to make it happen. The other thing about it is that the game just takes long as hell to run, more than any other fighting game I know of. Grand Finals alone took over a half hour.

ampersandrew, 23 dni temu

It’s a fighting game from Riot featuring League of Legends characters that just had a soft launch.

ampersandrew, 22 dni temu

That’s what I keep seeing people say in comments. The devs say they got access to all of the voice talent from the show, and I’m not familiar enough with Walton Goggins’ voice to say that is or isn’t him.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu

I think I got fed up with how feast or famine the combat was. They wear FromSoft inspirations on their sleeves, but in those games, you can safely hang back and observe behaviors and patterns before you go in and try to dodge and parry and take them down. The wider normal dodge window did not seem to serve this purpose in this game, unless there’s some crucial mechanic that I completely missed. Often times, trying to dodge while learning the patterns, I’d lose a character to a single attack with intentionally tricky timing, and it would be easier to throw the fight and restart than it was to try to get them back in the fight and get my strategy up and running to deal damage. Then, of course, once I know the patterns, the fight is over in like 3 turns, and I take no damage at all.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu

I was on normal, spent basically every skill point I had on defense and HP starting around halfway through Act 2, since my damage was just about capped by that point. The combat feels great after you’ve already learned an enemy’s patterns, but the later game enemies (I basically only did the main story) were where they started one-shotting characters and this problem sunk in. Having to go through this huge discrepancy every time you find a new enemy just started to become annoying.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu

I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.

ampersandrew, 25 dni temu

Yeah, this isn’t him getting cast in a bunch of CRPGs; it’s him getting cast in a bunch of everything.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu (edited 24 dni temu)

The worse casting choice was who they replaced

Tap for spoilerSarevok

with.

EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu

I never encountered her in my playthroughs of 1 and 2, so I couldn’t say. The guy I spoilered was fine, and I’d say Larian showed a ton of reverence for those original games throughout. The entire format of the game is one BioWare made famous via Baldur’s Gate II, after all.

ampersandrew, 24 dni temu

The other point to setting the game 100 years later is that they’re not beholden to the same exact geography, architecture, or, most importantly, the choices the player made in the previous game. And it allows people to step into this one without feeling like the previous two were mandatory. They did still choose a canon, and they can handwave others away as hearsay told in legends where multiple conflicting things are true, but the game was unmistakably made by enormous fans of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons. It is still a story that revolves around the city of Baldur’s Gate and Bhaal. It is the most authentic D&D game made since those old infinity engine games and arguably more so, given the ways their games are made to allow you to get more creative with systems, like the tabletop experience.

ampersandrew, 25 dni temu

We can chalk this one up right next to the hyperloop and just move on.

ampersandrew, 25 dni temu

Yeah, it’s a pretty easy conclusion to come to from the outside looking in, but BG3 can launch on GOG day and date, and KC:D2 can communicate the GOG release ahead of time and still sell multiple millions of copies, so…it’s a practice I’d like to see change regardless.

ampersandrew, 25 dni temu

No, I get that. But likewise, Denuvo doesn’t have access to a second Earth either, and their pitch meeting will never include data of customers you’ve convinced not to buy the game due to the presence of their product. At some point, I don’t think those pirated copies are moving the needle, and that it’s just a cost of doing business like some units of physical goods breaking during shipping. The games that are most pirated are the ones that also sell the best. The anti-piracy case for the consumer is made pretty well these days by being downloaded faster, getting bug fix patches instantly, and keeping cloud saves.