conciselyverbose

conciselyverbose, 12 godzin temu

By selling to China.

That doesn’t take away from it or mean it isn’t good, but that market is the difference between it and every other game.

conciselyverbose, 10 godzin temu

That’s what I’m scared of.

Catering to China’s censorship has not been beneficial to other media.

conciselyverbose, 9 godzin temu

There’s a huge difference between a publisher or two censoring their games and the industry as a whole systematically sucking up to their insane restrictions.

conciselyverbose, 9 godzin temu

This is a joke right?

conciselyverbose, 9 godzin temu

Because the article completely ignores the source of the sales volume it keeps mentioning and is pretending the sale is some runaway success in the west instead of acknowledging the reality that it’s doing moderate sales here.

Moderate sales is a good first effort, but ignoring the actual market altering affect it will have to pretend it’s actually a giant outside of China completely undermines the article.

conciselyverbose, 7 godzin temu

Basically Nazi stuff. Which still isn’t awesome, but isn’t comparable at all to China. It’s a small side effect of them trying to prevent actual Nazis from regaining power and not properly recognizing games as art.

It also isn’t comparable because anyone who can’t be bothered with multiple versions is going to ignore Germany, not ruin their game.

conciselyverbose, 6 godzin temu

Yeah, I was pretty sure they fixed that, but couldn’t double check.

conciselyverbose, 5 godzin temu

Because the whole premise of the article is the “global” impact and bringing Chinese culture to a “global audience” when only a small fraction of its sales are outside China.

The actual impact it’s going to have is much less on the development of AAA games by Chinese studios and much more as a demonstration of the Chinese market’s interest in single player games.

conciselyverbose, 2 godziny temu

The “fastest selling” is literally the title of the article, then they make no effort at all to point out that all of that volume is from accessing China, which most games don’t.

There’s no legitimate way to use the title “how game became the fastest selling game” and ignore the only factor that played any meaningful role in that outcome at all.

conciselyverbose, wczoraj

I don’t think it’s worth it, especially if you already own a PS5.

But what did people think it was going to cost?

conciselyverbose, wczoraj

PS4 Pro was still obscenely underpowered. Jaguar was terrible at PS4’s original launch, and the boost on the Pro was marginal because it was still the same terrible underlying design.

Going into the PS5 pro, everyone projected this pricing, because it’s actually modern hardware and their costs have went up instead of down.

conciselyverbose, 3 dni temu

Because the gunplay is really good. I never had a shred of interest in the story.

I don’t still play because the level and enemy design tanked when they went into expansion treadmill mode, but “a path forward” was never something I cared even a little bit about. “The path forward” is what killed my fun.

conciselyverbose, 3 dni temu

I could pop cabal heads with [insert high impact scout, bonus if firefly] for days. Hell, I pretty much did on D1. Then D2, in addition to all the other bad design stuff to satisfy live service, also decided they wanted to try to dictate your gun choice in certain game modes with all the bullshit seasonal modifiers on untouchable enemies without specific perks.

All I want to do is run strikes on the basic races by myself. But they can’t milk me for money like that.

conciselyverbose, 3 dni temu

I played like 900 hours of D1 with the same or mostly the same gear because shooting stuff in the face felt better than anything else I’ve ever played.

The actual gunplay is really good. It’s just killed by all the other shit.

conciselyverbose, 9 dni temu

IMO what it should do is:

A) Increase damage falloff. For precision guns that means non precision shots do less. For short range weapons that means the penalty for working outside the effective range is higher.

B) Add more enemies. Especially if there’s any stealth element, you close windows and change how you approach encounters.

C) Depending on the game, increase the range enemies respond at. If that’s sound based, they have better hearing. If it’s enemies calling for help when alerted, they get assistance/raise alert levels from longer range.

Perfect play should be comparable. Mistakes should be punished harder.

conciselyverbose, 9 dni temu (edited 8 dni temu)

I also agree with all that. That takes more work though.

Bullet sponges are usually companies who can’t be bothered, so I focused on the low cost options. But IMO you should be building for high difficulty, then simplifying by inverting the things I suggested and your removing moves/exposing themselves more, actually slowing movement speed and animations, etc, to make encounters more forgiving at lower levels.

I think even after cutting down, easier difficulties can tell the game is better crafted that way.

conciselyverbose, 11 dni temu

They didn’t invest in features.

They “invested” in paying out the ass for exclusivity and loss leaders thinking that buying users would result in users ignoring how terrible their store was and buying more games there.

conciselyverbose, 15 dni temu

The investigation found that Barrett called lower-level female employees attractive, asked them to play truth-or-dare and made references to his wealth and power within the studio, suggesting that he could help advance their careers, according to two people familiar with the case.

In a statement to Bloomberg News, Barrett said that throughout nearly 25 years at Bungie, “I feel that I have always conducted myself with integrity and been respectful and supportive of my colleagues, many of whom I consider my closest friends. I never understood my communications to be unwanted and I would have never thought they could possibly have made anyone feel uncomfortable. If anyone ever felt that way about their interaction with me, I am truly sorry.”

Uh…

That might hold water if it was just casual flirting (though you should seriously be trained at any company near that scale that even that with anyone in your “chain of command” puts them in a really bad spot). But not for (alleged) open quid pro quo.

conciselyverbose, 19 dni temu (edited 19 dni temu)

OK, but the context matters.

Part of the context is that most of those sales are probably to China, and that despite the big global numbers, it’s probably not not the same level of success in the Western world as the steam sales imply.

Part of the context is that game sales have never meant a game is actually good.

But part of that context is that it’s the first real effort from China at a real AAA, single player game, and the differences in government and culture are part of the conversation.

And part of the context is that China is a huge, largely untapped market for AAA single player games, and publishers are going to notice that and push games to do some of the things other media have done to be more palatable to that market (most think to the detriment of quality by western standards).

I’m not hyper interested in the game (I’d probably try a demo), but it’s being talked about because it actually affects the gaming industry.

conciselyverbose, 19 dni temu

Visuals are more than number of polygons.

conciselyverbose, 20 dni temu

It doesn’t solve most of the problems Steam already solved either.

conciselyverbose, 23 dni temu (edited 23 dni temu)

Meanwhile, in 2024, the video game industry will turn a staggering $282 billion in revenue. Video games worldwide make more than twice the money of all film and all music combined.

OK, but how much did actual game sales make? I’m willing to bet the proportion of that money this is citing that’s hyper-exploitive microtransactions is pretty damn high.

I have no real interest in a library over owning games (I did pay the ~$30 difference in Black Friday sales to add the library for a year on PS5, but I own my games for the most part), and I think everything being day one gamepass on Xbox weakened their already not great first party ecosystem and encourages microtransactions to an extent.

But the biggest existential threat isn’t “pay $x a year to rent a library”. It’s lootboxes and other microtransactions built to milk everyone they can for every penny they can. It fundamentally alters the design of games when “how can we extract more cash” is part of the process, and it’s not something that just happens after the fact. It also, unlike renting games, actually pushes invasive anticheat, always online requirements, and onerous mod restrictions on games that should be single player, because they can’t milk you for cosmetics if fans can make their own for free.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

They abandoned it because they could just build it into TVs.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

I’m talking about the hardware.

They stopped making the hardware because they didn’t need a dedicated device any more.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

Steam link hardware was junk too.

Just get something with android and you’ll have a better experience for all the rest of your TV stuff too.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

Ignoring current gen stuff, it completely changed the experience of last gen games for me, too.

I like games at a difficulty level that’s fair, but punishing. If I make the same mistake 20 times in a row, I want it to get me killed 20 times. There are plenty of games that do this reasonably well, but on PS4, those deaths might take 5 minutes to load back into. On PS5, it doesn’t. There were several games where I wasn’t willing to spend an hour to play 10 minutes because they were on a particularly challenging encounter, but were great experiences with the better loads on PS5.

The triggers are also amazing, especially in combination with the high fidelity vibration. They add a lot of feedback in games that utilize them well, in a way that allows for much tighter precision of controls with a smoother learning curve.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

There’s still a lot more effort just to start a game.

Steam Big Picture mode is pretty much fine, but on SteamOS (or Linux generally) that means compromising on multiplayer games, and on Windows you’re still at the mercy of Windows update breaking the “boot to controller menu” experience.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

I’m not sure why you think every interaction in an open world game is supposed to be completely hand crafted from scratch.

The scale is part of the point, and Elden Ring nailed the sense of exploration of a huge, open world that maybe hasn’t happened since Skyrim. It’s that rare to capture that sense of awe.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

The world is jam packed full of new and interesting. It quite possibly has more new and interesting than any other game ever made.

Enemies similar to previous enemies you’ve encountered but with different twists and in different situations are part of enemy design. It’s supposed to happen. It’s what real worlds look like.

If you don’t like open world period, fine, but there’s a reason it’s by far the most successful game they’ve ever made, and it’s because nothing matches the feel of open world done right, and they did it right.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

Shrines in BOTW were the worst. The engine was genuinely interesting. Everything being legitimately traversable and designed around stamina was great, and I’d love to see more games utilize the premise that everything you see is accessible. But all that traversal just never got you anywhere interesting. Eventually you’d find a shrine, take longer to load it than beat it, then load back into the world.

TOTK I just never got far enough to feel if it improved.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

There are some with finite ammo where you lose the rest of the magazine on a reload.

conciselyverbose, miesiąc temu

That sounds like bad design to me. It’s not realistic at all.

In real life you’d do some kind of mantle. Box jumps are a good workout that no one ever uses for anything else.

conciselyverbose, 2 miesiące temu

Combat also varies heavily between weapon types and equipment weight. You have to approach combat completely differently with different gear, so you can play it again with less of a feel of exploration (probably not none; it’s huge), but completely different battles.

conciselyverbose, 2 miesiące temu

Sniper Elite 4/5 are my favorite stealth game. Huge maps with a lot of ways to approach combat, the way they use noise works really well, and who doesn’t like exploding a grenade on someone’s chest into a truck engine to disable that too?

Hitman (I honestly have no clue what they’re calling it now; it was 3 when I bought it) also has a passable rogue-lite mode now. The missions don’t have the same hand crafted polish as the real missions, but you start light and earn your way up to gear, with varied challenges to unlock currency, and potentially alert future targets on future maps if you’re sloppy. If you like stealth, hitman’s brand is a little different, but it’s solid overall.

conciselyverbose, 2 miesiące temu

The performance (at least on the Pro; I gave my original to my brother) has definitely improved a lot, too. It was a slide show on the original and the pro with and without boost mode enabled for a good while after I bought the PS4 pro, but it’s not bad now. Load times suck though. I basically only made progress once I switched to PS5 and got to take advantage of the SSD. (Note that PS4 games still load way slower than PS5 games on PS5, for the most part.)

conciselyverbose, 2 miesiące temu

But those moves have traditionally come when a game is out and has, by whatever metric, failed. Or, at the other end of the scale, when a game fails to get off the ground earlier in development, and a publisher decides to cut its losses, or as it would probably say, “reallocate resources”. To commit five years of work, to build an entire company around the goal of producing a single game, and then throw it all in the bin just days before it was supposed to come out is a whole new level of ineptitude that’s particularly cruel, even by this industry’s cruel-by-default standards.

Abandoning a project right out of the gate before there’s a real chance to see what it can be is “cruel”.

Recognizing that a product doesn’t deserve to be shipped is a good thing. They gave it a great chance to get to a finished product, evaluated where it was at, and had the decency to not shovel shit out the door and rip people off.

conciselyverbose, 5 miesięcy temu

Everyone knows, the absolute best value add to a power hungry mobile device is the ability to use that power to inefficiently mine some random junk cryptocurrency.

So I hope it’s that. (No I didn’t read the article. There’s no version of this that isn’t a scam.)

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

Do you know how much space I could save (and transfers that could be prevented) if they offered alternate branches that didn’t pack obscenely large textures onto my steam deck for no reason? You already know what textures you load on low, medium, high, ultra texture quality settings. Steam offers branches that are easy for users who care to use. Why not use them?

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

I actually liked the mechanics.

But it crashed constantly and I never went back because I couldn’t play enough to get hooked.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s not a paywall.

But account walls are still gross.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

What a dumb name

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

PS5. Easy. New hardware does shit older hardware can’t. And while there are games older than PS4 I like, there aren’t anywhere near enough to choose them over actually modern shit.

And newer indies often do modernized takes on the stuff older games were limited to.