setsneedtofeed

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

I don’t think anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price out of customers by using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.

For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.

Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.

Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

‘Architectcracy.’ Which is more or less, “rule by architects.”

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1a141418-4247-4a77-af91-f6c6791b9cf6.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

This was built inside of Unity.

setsneedtofeed, miesiąc temu

I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

My Steam recents:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c7527e31-24ac-484c-b507-abcf69cac78f.jpeg

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

I often agree with this, though for Death Trash given the slow pace of major updates I figured I’d just jump in. It only took me about 10 hours to beat the main content, and a few more hours poking around to feel finished with the game. This isn’t something like Zomboid with a big sandbox element to sink hours and hours into.

Honestly, at the pace it’s being updated I don’t know if it will get a huge proper ending.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

setsneedtofeed, 2 miesiące temu

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dc2398d5-bd36-4d81-95f6-158b0a7b88ab.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

I blame the Tylenol.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

And then it goes into a sewer.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.

It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.

After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

Yes, it was in the CE PC multiplayer. And, to refer back to the post:

It adds new weapons to the CE campaign

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

In videos he has mentioned both reducing the damage from the sniper rifles so they aren’t one-hit kills, and allowing jackels to use carbines which will replace some sniper jackels.

setsneedtofeed, 3 miesiące temu

It is tedious, with repeated samey layout and a limited selection of flood enemy types. The mod mixes up the environment and adds more flood enemy types for variety.