There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
Even just modding I’ve noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that’s equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.
The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the ‘alpha wolf’. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I’ve heard both) is an ‘alpha’ wolf that’s stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.
And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you’ve been actively developing mods for it.
Piracy is literally the only method by which a lot of media is preserved in the era of subscription services and abandoned properties. It’s a public service that ensures that some of the most significant art of the last century isn’t lost.
The archives of pirates are a digital museum for a culture that can’t be bothered to preserve its own legacy.
Yeah, exactly. They’ve created a viable ecosystem for themselves. They have a highly moddable engine and they tend to leave a lot of abandoned code in the game that modders find and make use of. People eat it up and they use it as a starting point to get into development.
I’m on exactly that track right now. For me it’s been all about very open ended kinda buggy games that you can mod the hell out of. Wanting to change or tweak a little something here and there leads to wanting to implement more elaborate ideas. Eventually it starts looking appealing to make something of your own, or to make a bigger contribution to other projects. Personally, I don’t really want to work for a big company (or anyone other than myself), but a modding portfolio can certainly be a foot in the door.
My first mod for a game was a thing to shut up the Longs in Fallout 4. Super simple, literally just broke the link to their idle audio files. That was ages ago, and my own journey has been more related to getting DayZ to do what I want and now using Conan to further explore game design and more involved elaborate systems, but Bethesda was still that first step.
They’re not perfect, and their IP in some cases has certainly been watered down a little, but they make great games and have a workable business model that isn’t as toxic as some others. They’ve done a good job fostering creativity and innovation.
I don’t really get the complaints by people who’ve never made anything even remotely approaching a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls acting like the developers are trash and they know better. Let’s see your blockbuster open world rpg.
I could understand putting this kind of time in for a passion project of your own, but for like, a job for somebody else? Worse, a salaried job? That’s way too much.
We had a few cartridges for our Colecovision that I could never figure out how to get to do anything very game-like. I don’t really remember the names of the bad ones. I’d be hard pressed to remember the names of the good ones other than like Donkey Kong. They were pretty hit or miss in general and the controller was really weird, but it made a memorable introduction to gaming and a great starting point to watch it all grow from.
I think the worst game I’ve ever played was the Dragonlance game for NES. There are other equally bad games that are even bad in largely the same way, but I’m a big Dragonlance fan and when I finally got a copy of this I was very excited for about 5 minutes. It’s just bad. I have vague memories of throwing Tass into a hole a bunch of times and like maybe a little bit after that, but it was a mess. Maybe if I’d been able to get past the controls I’d have found a gem in there somewhere, but it just wasn’t there. I feel like if a pizza company can knock out a class A platformer, TSR should have been able to manage.
It’s odd, because D&D crpgs have usually been innovative for their time, using the D&D rules and hitting the ball out of the park. The Dragonlance game didn’t come that long before the Black Sun game they made, and I’m pretty sure they had been making similar crpgs previously. I feel like I remember playing another early one on our 8088. But they decided to make some half assed platformer instead. Huh?
But Dragonlance always seems to get shafted on adaptations. I remember Tracy Hickman talking on Palace in the late 90s about making a live action Dragonlance movie with Aaron Eisenberg as Tasslehoff, but it seemed to just evaporate and instead we got that kinda weird but cool to see very stylized cartoon. I do like that it looked like the book covers, but it was a long way from what we’d initially expected to see.
Some day Dragonlance will get some real love. Maybe Baldur’s Gate 3 will help.
I loved the dialogue system in Shadowrun for SNES. It was pretty simple, didn’t really have any branches or anything, but it feels autonomous in a way that’s hard to match.
Basically, wherever you talk to someone, certain words in their lines will be in bold. Once you’ve seen one of the bolded keywords, you can ask any other character about those words. Most of them will spit out a canned response specific to that NPC unless you ask about something relevant to them, but the list of keywords is long. It makes it more than possible to play the game several times through and miss certain things. There are runners you can only hire if you get the right keywords, even parts in the main story where it takes a little wandering around trying different things to get the keywords you need or figure out where to use them. Some keywords are basically dead ends, only mentioned one or two times, maybe only in the conversation they’re found in, but others will come up again and again.
Shadowrun in general felt very open as a game. Even though it had some barriers to progress before being able to go everywhere, there’s a huge amount of freedom in general.
For its time the amount of freedom and depth in the same package was not at all the norm.
Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.
What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.
Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.
That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.
Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.