azertyfun

azertyfun, miesiąc temu

There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

azertyfun, miesiąc temu

Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

Tracking consent prompt with only an “Accept all” button

Where’s the button to reject tracking? It doesn’t exist.

For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral’s own website:

Tracking consent prompt with a “Reject all” button next to “Accept all”

First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on “Purposes” and manually deselecting each purpose).

I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it’s missing entirely:

HTML source showing no reject all button

For some reason I don’t get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

Anyways I felt motivated today so I’ve sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.

azertyfun, miesiąc temu

I have uBlock Origin but didn’t bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).

However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn’t get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason… I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.

azertyfun, miesiąc temu

Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.

azertyfun, 2 miesiące temu

… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.

azertyfun, 5 miesięcy temu

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

azertyfun, rok temu

The original didn’t run fine on my then low-mid range desktop when it came out. It’s heavily CPU-bound and I specifically upgraded to an i7 4790K at the time because even in a mid-sized city, the simulation would slow to realtime.

It runs alright on today’s mediocre hardware, but that’s amazing hardware by 2014-2015ish standards.

azertyfun, rok temu

Co-ops are quite rare in Europe as well. I can’t name a single tech co-op.

In fact I’d say it worse over here. In my experience stock options are a very rare kind of remuneration, whereas as far as I understand it’s common in US Big Tech companies like Google or Apple (though of course non-voting shares are a far cry from actual co-ownership of the company).

On the other hand corporate profits are taxed pretty high in many countries (for the smaller tech companies that aren’t based in Ireland). It’s 30 % here in Belgium IIRC. So at least some of the profits make it back to the people, in a more general sense.

azertyfun, rok temu

These games are inherently competitive with an unbelievably steep learning curve, so people git gud, which drives off casual players, repeat ad nauseam. The only people who regularly play CS are either absolute masochists, or very good at clicking heads even if by that game’s standard they’re only silver or gold or whatever.

To be halfway decent at CS means that no singleplayer shooter will ever be a challenge to you again, because there’s no intersection between casual gaming and competitive shooters.

azertyfun, rok temu (edited rok temu)

One hour before that Q&A went live:

PM: Hey Steve! Yes, you from development! How can the, uh, that runtime of yours, tell if it’s a new install or a reinstall?
S: As of right now it can’t, we just have aggregate data. We’d need to update it to support that. We have an item on the backlog already if you –
PM: No need! I have all the information I need!

azertyfun, rok temu

They could have called it Creative Engine 129030129784.32985 for all that it matters. It’s just a name for an engine update, as they do for every new game. They didn’t re-write it from scratch; that would be a billion-dollar venture.

From what I’ve read it’s the exact same engine as FO4 with better lighting (and of course, as with every new game, some improvements locally relevant to the gameplay).
But, fundamentally, underneath the fancy lights, still the same engine. That explains the 2008-esque animations, the bugs, the performance issues, and general flatness of the game. It can’t be more than “Skyrim in Space” because that’s what it technically is.

azertyfun, rok temu

So you both agree that the system fucking sucks. Fundamentally, the hoops you have to jump through to do anything are far worse than the annoyance of bad seeds on public torrents.

The counterpoint is that obscure torrents are better seeded on private trackers. If what you’re looking for is even mildly popular however, private trackers just suck.