conciselyverbose

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

Wishlist vs purchase is already a signal that maybe you’d benefit from a sale. Seems like it’s enough. “Suggested prices” from gamers would be way too noisy to mean anything.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

Yep, fuck all that.

Ignoring the stuff I paid for, I don’t find any of the content they replaced it with (mostly if you buy more shit) satisfying at all. The original enemies were incredibly well designed and enjoyable. The taken weren’t bad. Most of the rest very clearly didn’t have the time put into designing them. They suck, and I don’t want to play them.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s not the same thing.

It’s downgraded.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t care visually, necessarily, though that sucks too.

I’m talking about the behavior. The fallen’s tools were built to play together to make encounters play one way, the hive a different way, the vex different, the cabal different. Each set was well balanced inside itself to work, but they also worked well allying with other races.

Their evolution over time has been into gimmicks and spam that don’t make encounters compelling at all.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

The problem is that there’s a formula.

Games are supposed to progress over time, not just feel like annual copy pastes covered with RNG map spam.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

“Don’t buy a game that ships with malware” is a perfectly correct decision, but it doesn’t address the fact that games are shipping with fucking malware.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

Because their market share is so bad that they can’t make their money back on their own hardware.

conciselyverbose, 6 miesięcy temu

They did it on Funko’s behalf, at their direction.

It’s perfectly fine to also blame the partner, but Funko ultimately bears 100% of the responsibility for the actions they instigated.

conciselyverbose, 7 miesięcy temu

I like this one.https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/017235ba-230c-44ab-9390-f54bba7c3173.jpeg

conciselyverbose, 7 miesięcy temu

lol the problem with Destiny is they turned it into a treadmill and stopped putting the work into character and level design.

Elden Ring can easily take more than 100 hours on your first playthrough, and different builds significantly change your play style.

BG3, similar deal. Subsequent playthroughs are probably going to be accelerated, but there are a bunch of different story choices you can make that feel different, the party members have their own story lines, there’s a special custom character called Dark Urge that’s intended for a later playthrough that has it’s own twist, and you can change the strategy of encounters a lot with different party constructions.

Rimworld calls itself a story generator because you’re going to fail and have people die and whatever, but every game plays out different, there are a good couple scenarios, and there’s expansions and mods you can add on top of that for variety.

Just the first couple that come to mind. I’m not near 1000 hours on any of them, but they all have a lot of content.

conciselyverbose, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

Adding kernel malware after the fact should entitle every single owner who requests one to a full refund no matter how long has passed.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

It runs with higher priveleges than you have and can see anything that happens on your computer.

It also creates a giant additional attack vector.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

Don’t be pieces of shit and you won’t owe refunds.

In a just world people would be going to prison for it.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

They definitely should be treated as super sketchy, because they are, but abandoning a project that doesn’t get anywhere near goals is part of the idea of kickstarter. It’s “this idea takes some minimum investment to make happen, and you (the funder) are willing to spend $X to make that happen if the critical mass is reached”. Abandoning failed campaigns is the core concept.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

One random one that jumps to mind is a game I routinely see bundled on fanatical dirt cheap.

Ugly starts a little slow, and I think the writing is just weird, but the some of the puzzles are really cool, and there’s a good blend between pure puzzles and puzzles that require platformer execution.

I don’t know that I would have paid $20, and I paid less than the $7 it’s available for there now (it says for 10 hours), but I enjoyed what I played of it.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

You used to unlock cool stuff by playing the game.

They removed that whole loop of discovering cool stuff by doing cool things and replaced it with cash grubbing.

conciselyverbose, 8 miesięcy temu

The game is learning.

There’s some reaction element, but the core loop is learning how to be optimally positioned to use your weapon, how to optimally pace your attacks, when your attacks leave you vulnerable. Then once you get that, you do the same with enemies. You learn where they hit hardest, what you can avoid, what their tells are, and when they’re vulnerable.

If you’re willing to learn and approach the game with learning as a goal, and understanding that you’ll die as part of that learning process, they’re great, because they do a really good job of creating difficulty in a way that almost all damage is predictable and avoidable if you know what you’re looking at and approach it the right way.

If you just want to button mash you’re going to have a bad time.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.

Full quoteI rarely post on social media, but today I am sad. Ashamed and sad. > >The gaming industry is rough at the moment, we all know it. > >But seeing how “gamers” react on social medias, wishing ill-fate to companies and people alike is sad. (And not only towards Ubisoft) > >Even though it is always the vocal minority that express themselves on social media, I was hurt, hurt and ashamed to be a part of this community. > >What is even more revolting, is coming on Linkedin and seeing the same comments from people within the industry. > >On top of exposing yourself as a clearly non-decent human being, you are affecting thousands of employees that are already impacted by all the hate despite doing their best to deliver incredible experiences. > >How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me. > >We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.

I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

lol the inflammatory bullshit title already decided it.

My habit of collapsing long sections so it’s less annoying to scroll probably doesn’t help either, but whatever.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

Good luck with that.

They didn’t do anything more than a handful of idiots no one wants to deal with is going to be bothered by.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.

Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

The optimization problems are the game. Figuring out builds you like is the point.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I really liked the mechanics of the “first” game.

It felt like most non-fromsoft clones in terms of the map, though. No one else manages the feel of opening up the map like they do. Elden Ring is much more focused on the open world, so it approaches the use of space differently, but the way you can look back over some areas and see what you just spent hours battling through gives a similar feel of intentionality to the map design.

Lords of the Fallen not giving that feel is part of why I didn’t spend as much time with it as the combat quality would imply.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.

Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

I know the first one was only ever intended to be a tech demo, and it did a really good job for that, but does this one feel like an actual full-fledged game?

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.

And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

To be fair they did that because law firms were seeking out frivolous arbitration bullshit to try to extort them into settlements.

But their market dominance is definitely primarily about how much better they are than anything else.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

This is about consoles.

I don’t think it’s really that bad, because it enables them to sell the upgrade for $10 without just being a steep discount path for new purchases.

I’d much rather previous owners be able to upgrade for $10 than new buyers be able to get it for $20. Funding a remaster on new customers instead of double dipping is way more fair, and price conscious customers can still likely find used physical copies cheap.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

The triggers are why I’m paying to upgrade. They make a big difference to the feel of combat.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

Maybe.

But until there’s an alternative that isn’t outright disrespectful with how complete and utter dogshit it is it’s hard to say that for sure.

Inertia matters. But so does the fact that no one has bothered putting the work in to not be a trainwreck.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy temu

They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It’s a handheld.

The fact that there are still very few games it can’t run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.

Hell, the whole reason for “deck verified” is because their default assumption is that a game won’t work.

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s what I’m scared of.

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

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy 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 miesięcy temu

This is a joke right?

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy temu

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

conciselyverbose, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy temu

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, 9 miesięcy temu

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, 9 miesięcy 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, 9 miesięcy 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.