ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

The new normal for what?

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Live service, sure, since that’s the entire point of live service, but we’re spoiled for choice of fantastic games across different scopes and scales that don’t have any microtransactions at all.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

As an alternate perspective, early access isn’t some sad, new state of gaming. Done right, it’s a way to hone in on perfecting a systems-driven game that probably doesn’t really have an end. It’s been used to great effect in roguelikes, Kerbal Space Program, and Baldur’s Gate 3. If anything, the problem with the program now is that there are so many finished games to choose from that it’s a harder sell to try out an early access game.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

FF7 remake is cool for a lot of reasons, but we’ve got countless reasons to support the idea that turn-based combat isn’t the barrier to playing those old games.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

From Jeff Grubb:

To clarify, I’ve been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year’s February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don’t know the exact number.

But yeah, I’m sure continuing to chase live service as though you’ll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.

EDIT: furthermore, he says:

Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

In chasing infinite growth (of the same game), you have potentially infinite spend as well.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren’t as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

League is too.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

They sold 1 million copies in a couple of days on top of a Game Pass deal, and their team is leaner than most. They’re surely financially successful.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

And that trend will continue, which is why console sales are well behind where they were last generation, and it’s why the next Xbox will just run Windows.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

They ought to patch out the need for Ubisoft’s launcher. Same goes for EA’s back catalog, for that matter. At least EA’s newest releases don’t come with the launcher.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Even when you buy their games on Steam, there’s an EA launcher there in addition to Steam. This is the case for It Takes Two, for instance, but not for Split Fiction. Split Fiction only uses Steam if you bought it on Steam.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Jedi Fallen Order says right on the Steam page that it incorporates EA DRM.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Only the newest ones. They haven’t gone back to remove the requirement from their back catalog, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Split Fiction don’t require it now. Meanwhile, Madden 26 still requires it, so I guess it isn’t universal.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I believe it was added after launch. I distinctly remember trying to play this game on the Steam Deck on a train with no internet, and the EA app complained about it and wouldn’t let me launch the game. It’s quite possible that this can be sidestepped by specifically putting the Steam Deck in offline mode, rather than just severing the internet connection, but I didn’t know to try that at the time, and it’s definitely DRM.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Split Fiction is definitely a game people care about, and disappointing numbers for a Dragon Age title is still several million people.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Right, but that extra launcher causes problems, so I tend to avoid games that still have it. It’s why I still haven’t played A Way Out but played Split Fiction.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

It’s my thought as well, but Ghost of Yotei was scheduled for October already, and Sony would surely know when GTA comes out, so maybe it’s a November game? Borderlands will likely be enough of a time sink that you might want a few months after it before releasing a GTA.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Does BL3 still have respec stations like the earlier games?

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

This isn’t a “do you guys not have phones” moment. This is a “Diablo Immortal made a boatload of money” moment.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I play Fantasy Critic with some friends. We allow remakes in our league but not remasters. This one counts as a remake for purposes of this site, with a flag on it to note that it was contentious. This game definitely blurs some lines on some definitions.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.

I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper’s head to steal things.

There’s nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

We both know tariffs have little to do with this game, but it was very possible to see them coming 2-3 years ago if you listened to that man speak.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s only searchable for the current calendar year, and we can view games we had on our roster in the same league in previous years. No one had any of those games on their roster. The site differentiates between remasters, remakes, and reimaginings, with a reimagining being something like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII Remake. We used to not allow remakes, but we changed the rules for our league starting last year (personally, I voted against it, but I was outvoted). The league commissioner can always override a decision that the site makes when categorizing a game.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Yes, it is fantasy sports but with video games. You draft games, and your points are determined by their score on Open Critic. Over 70 gains points, under 70 loses points. Every point over 90 is worth double. The way my friends and I structure our league, we have one counter pick during the draft, and the counter picker gets the inverse of the points of that game; so if I have a friend who drafts Kirby Air Riders, and I counter pick it, and it scores 67, my friend loses 3 points and I gain 3 points. If I counter pick a game that scores positive points, I lose those points instead.

The only game on my roster that has released so far is Knights in Tight Spaces, which only got me 6 points (I aim for about 13 points per game), because it scored a 76 on Open Critic, and I was perhaps a bit too risky when I drafted Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, because I got counter picked on it, and it doesn’t have a release date, so I might be stuck with a game that scores 0 points due to not releasing this year.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Correct, you don’t know that. You can speculate on releases, like I did with Pony Island 2, and get counter picked as a punishment for the risk. As long as it’s in the site’s database, it’s fair game. I drafted “Unannounced 3D Mario Game” this year, but then I picked up “Unannounced 3D Donkey Kong Game” after the draft for 1 in-game dollar (no one else put in a bid for it), as a hedge, since the rumor was that either a Mario or a Donkey Kong game would be made by the Mario Odyssey team for the Switch 2 launch. No one counter-picked Mario, so I’m allowed to drop it, and the Donkey Kong entry automatically updated to Bananza. The “season” is a calendar year. We do our draft early in January, and typically the first release of the year will be like halfway through the month, and the score that each game earns is whatever score it has at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.

Because we don’t know every release a year in advance, A) this game got a lot harder starting back in 2022, because that’s when game marketing cycles got way shorter, and B) some of the best reviewing games of 2025 probably won’t even be announced until this coming June.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

They have their own database. If there’s a release or a rumor they don’t know about, you can suggest one, but they ask you to cite your sources. If it’s got a Steam page and you provide that link, they’ll basically add it right away, which is what happened when I got Total Chaos added. Fantasy Critic also gives league commissioners a lot of power to house rule just about anything.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I’m no professional, I just love gaming news

Judging by how these posts are taken here, I think once you’re done vacationing, you could look into doing this professionally.

It’s cool that Breath of Fire IV has that tag saying that the game was picked up due to the dream list, but I’ve got some concerns about what GOG will or won’t touch. Someone here on Lemmy pointed out correctly that these are always the PC versions of games in the Good Old Games program. Several of the games they’ve picked up recently are games that I only ever thought of as console games and didn’t know that they had PC versions. The problem with that is that up until approximately a few years into the life of the Xbox 360, it was quite common to have a PC version that didn’t resemble the console versions of the same title at all. For instance, the Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter games on PC have the same stories and voice lines, but the levels and gameplay mechanics are totally different. Spider-Man 2, based on the movie, is immensely important in video game history, but only the console version; the PC version is widely considered to be garbage. 007: Nightfire is on the dream list, but everyone there is sure to mention that the one people want is the console version. Anyway, I hope they can figure this out and start getting some classic console games saved just as well as the PC versions, and I hope that the PC versions they’re choosing aren’t compromised compared to the ones that are so fondly remembered.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Nor me either, but I’m going to start packing my parachute now. You probably said the same about Reddit a few times before you ended up here, too.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Including in this interview, but not in my summary.

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

Nah, don’t try to pass this off as, “I was only joking, bro”. People get real death threats when this kind of shit happens in forums. I remember the Jennifer Hepler stuff, and there was just as much expert analysis that went into her witch hunt back then.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Oh, I’ve seen the “criticism”, and you can’t point it all at one person, hence the problem. You make a target out of someone without understanding it.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

The first person who attributed issues at BioWare to Jennifer Hepler, without understanding how any of it works, only called for her to be fired too.

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

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.