Hey y’all! What have you been playing this week? I played a bunch of the recent Talos principle remake. It was cool! The story hits differently with the way the world is with AI but I still thought it was enjoyable. Now I’m starting up the sequel!
At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: “deprofessionalization.” As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios...
A shift is definitely happening, but idk if counting booths at PAX and GDC is representative.
PAX’ audience are primarily comic and board game nerds, they’re historically light on video game booths in their expo hall, usually prioritizing indie booths when they can. GDC’s audience is game developers not players, so the expo is typically a bunch of hardware and backend service companies.
I’m not saying they have no presence, I’m just saying PAX has not historically been a priority for AAA studios compared to things like E3 and Gamescom. On the whole, PAX is like 75% comics, tabletop/board game, and general nerd stuff, and less than 25% game studio presence. Which makes sense because Penny Arcade is a comic and they’ve always had an association with that crowd. Video games just tend to have a lot of overlap with that crowd, so it’s been worth it for studios to have a presence, some years more than others, some years more indie than AAA (ex Indie Megabooth).
Yes, I’ve attended everything you mention. I understand you think that is a large presence, but it amounted to less than 25% of the show. Larian and Nintendo were the exception, not the rule, they made up the bulk of the AAA presence.
It feels to me like the closer we get to the Nintendo Switch 2’s June launch and the, apparently, $80 games associated with it, the more people are fighting with themselves over what is and isn’t worth it. But at least Sony veteran and previous head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida is free from inner turmoil – he...
He’s not wrong, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a steal for the price it is. “Really great games” do exist and they’re worth their price tag, the problem is the number of AAA games of that caliber are like 1 in 30. We’re lucky to get one in any given year. Meanwhile, there are consistently high quality indie games coming out for less than $40.
Yep, this is an old problem with Denuvo, new proton version looks like a new system. I guess if the containerization is perfect, Denuvo won’t be able to solve this and retain the same functionality.
Banning is fine, we’re talking about remote bricking. If I hack my Xbox, I’m fine with not being allowed to use it to join msft’s network, but I am not fine with them identifying my hacked device over the internet and actively sending some sort of backdoor self-destruct instruction to it. To me that’s a violation of the CFAA.
If Valve really wanted to make a splash, they could release a desktop version of SteamOS in October, right when support for Windows 10 ends. For additional damage, they could bundle in Half-Life 3. Just imagine the coverage this would get.
No one is trying to play games on those vista machines, though. Valve pulled steam support for win 7 and 8.1 over a year ago because they were EOL. If they also pull support from win 10 once it’s EOL, then people will need to make a change to keep playing their games. If msft refuse to support existing hardware with win11, then many people will be forced to choose between buying a new laptop/PC, or trying Linux.
Maybe you don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t rely on it. If I said an OS was unusable by 99% of people because it didn’t support multithreading, it doesn’t matter if 99% of people know what multithreading is, that’s clearly a true statement. Similarly, if you’ve ever expected your PC to have the same files on it tomorrow that you put on it today, then you might find it annoying when that’s not the case.
I think that was them drawing a line on eol windows. They cut both 7 and 8.1 at the same time. Could just be the policy now.
Part of me wants them to take the opportunity to push people to switch to Linux, the other part of me thinks that will be perceived no differently from msft’s badgering about win11.
It’s hard to say. I agree, it seems like the MAU data for each of League and Fortnite is roughly the same as MAU for all of Steam (which is nuts). Of course there’s no way to know how much overlap is there. Still, both of these titles would be a hard stop for people deciding whether to switch to Linux.
As for msft themselves though, ironically I don’t know what titles they have that keep players on windows. Battle.net works on Linux, Minecraft Java ed works on Linux (not sure about bedrock ed compatibility or player count, but afaik most of those players are on non-PC platforms), all their zenimax titles are sold through steam and work great on Linux. CoD might be their biggest hold.
I disagree on number of games, but I agree on player count. The number of PC games that are not on steam (or don’t work on linux) is tiny these days. But the number of PC gamers who don’t need steam, or need something that doesn’t run on linux is probably still quite high. Still, even if valve was able to push a few % of PC gamers to Linux, that would be huge. We’re currently at 2% on Linux in steam surveys. I could see a power move by valve around win10 eol bringing that closer to 10%.
As Gaben put it in the recent valve doc, moving the story forward wasn’t a good enough reason to put out a new Half Life. The series has always been about pushing technological innovations, and they just felt stumped on how HL3 was going to do that.
People like to claim valve doesn’t do anything anymore, but I legitimately feel like PC gaming is the best deal for gaming right now, handily beating out console and mobile, and that is in large part due to valve.
Their flat internal structure hasn’t been perfect, but on the bright side it didn’t result in them pumping out what the gaming industry would have viewed in retrospect as yet another obligatory entry in an FPS series. Valve’s intention was to let smart people solve hard problems in the gaming space, and IMO they have always done that, it just so far hasn’t resulted in a HL3.
Feels like most shooter games these days are super fast paced, COD style games with 0.5 second reload times and Olympic sprinter running speeds. What are some games that have weightier gameplay mechanics and don’t make you feel like a superhuman?
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.
The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they’re close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.
The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.
Ah yes, the ol’ ‘ostracize the core fanbase to gain a more ephemeral one’ strategy. A popular choice these days, unfortunately.
Yeah, I put dozens of hours into Hunt with some friends. We would only be able to play every few months. So every time we logged in, they had made new mechanic changes, some of which made the game less of what we liked. I always appreciated that there were no respawns. If you killed someone, they were out, period. If I die, then i wasn’t careful enough.
And then one day we come back to play, and kill someone, only to have them pop back to life behind us. I felt like the gameplay I enjoyed had been betrayed.
Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s...
Yeah, the rest are like “ok sure, but maybe not in that order”. But BG3 and KCD2 are like 90% recency bias. Great games, but probably on par with Witcher 3 or the RDR games.
But they didn’t do any research here, they didn’t have a panel of judges, they just put it up to a vote of the internet. By “influential” they really meant a popularity contest.
To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn’t be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.
Do you believe that the film industry didn’t start until the 40s and 50s? Of course not. The first “films” came out around 1900, but the technology was still improving, and the industry was still figuring itself out. It wasn’t until the 20s that both had progressed enough for real “traditional” films could be made.
Similarly, the gaming industry collapsed and rebounded twice before the 90s because it wasn’t getting off the ground. The tech wasn’t there yet. So yes, if you look at a timeline of the gaming industry, it was objectively in its infancy until “like the late 90s”. The same way the dotcom bubble came and went a decade before the vast majority of people even realized the internet had anything to offer them. I get that maybe you were in a nerdy little bubble of early adopters, but I’m talking about the world outside that bubble.
Note that revenue in ~1975 and ~1990 are basically the same. Industry revenue was mostly sideways for 20 years.
Then the 90s came. People shifted from arcades to handhelds, mobile, PC, the internet.
The number of games published per year increased significantly.
And an explosion of objectively “influential titles” were published in this era. Many of which are featured in Bafta’s list. (Though obviously Rogue should be on there).
To celebrate the enduring influence of video games in the arts and in our wider culture, we’re asking players from around the world to help us decide the Most Influential Video Game of All Time....
I blame the consolidation of sports titles under a limited number of developers and publishers. But maybe I just feel this way because sports games aren’t my thing.
If you never consider more than one possible tactic, then by definition you’re not solving a puzzle, you’re just executing a fixed series of instructions.
You give Hades as an example of a game where you’re doing the same thing every run, but on the contrary the game is specifically designed so that no two runs are alike. It’s trying its best to force you to change tactics each run, that’s the point.
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
I think gamers as a whole, though specifically those in niche communities, need to take a long and hard look at themselves. We should celebrate the volunteers that create wonderful content for us, generally with no financial gain. Instead, commonly, there are communities that criticize and tear down every little thing they can...
I recently put a dozen hours into Witcher 3 while using my steam deck on a couple long flights. I’m pretty sure it synced correctly when I finally got home and connected to wifi. Maybe it didn’t work at one time, but I’d be surprised if it still doesn’t.
So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
I feel like the end goal has always been the incentive for me. I learned to build a PC because, if I wanted to play the games I wanted, there wasn’t another option. I still do always enjoy the process of putting it all together, but I’m always ready to have it all working, booted, and put to use (if not just so I can be relieved that I don’t need to RMA anything, hah).
If the end goal isn’t something that interests you, then maybe it’s just not worth doing it.
Honestly, it’s just a matter of knowing this list:
CPU
RAM
motherboard
GPU
hard drive
case
power supply
And roughly how they should fit together.
But every time I build a PC I have to figure out what the latest versions of these parts are, make sure they’re compatible, and when I get the parts they might have some unique form factor I have to figure out on the fly. Just going to PC Part Picker and picking out each part is 90% of the way there. After that it’s just a matter of getting them, sticking them together, crossing your fingers that it powers on, and installing an OS. If/when it doesn’t power on, THAT’S when you start learning…
But I would say building a PC is not a fraction as difficult as say, knowing how to work on a car.
I can’t fault them for not making such a niche product at a large enough scale to make them readily available and cheap. I know we’ve become accustomed to that from other larger companies, but for a small company, that’s either very risky or just not an option. So they just design cool stuff, make just enough so that they know they can safely sell them all and thus make a predictable ROI, and move onto the next cool thing. No pressure for growth or satisfying every potential customer. Sounds like the dream.
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
It’s worth noting that the “scary” parts of the Outer Wilds DLC (are very mild, and) are not mandatory. That is to say, for the most part, if you find solving a part of the game too stressful, try approaching it differently.
I loved the base game and DLC. Should be the top of any backlog IMO.
I highly recommend skipping straight to witcher 3 unless you really love the series and want to consume everything it has. Still, 3 + the dlc has a lot.
TBH my favorite part of W3 was all the side quests. The writing and dialogue are intriguing and give you more of a flavor for the dark fantasy of the world.
[alt text: a photo of a statue of Mario in the process of sliding down a flagpole, as he commonly does at the end of Mario levels. The statue is placed in the video game section of a a supermarket. In front of the statue, there are multiple human hands holding up wads of US dollar bills towards Mario.]
It’s because the devs just aren’t testing their Linux build. If they at least had a steam deck and made sure it ran there, the community would figure everything else out on their own.
narrator told me there’s a star—which might be a stone, which is also a goddess. A goddess of destruction, even! She’s bad, but she was shattered, and some people have pieces of her, which could be good—but maybe only if you’re bad?
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of July 13th
Whatcha all playing?...
11 Years Later And Still Can't Beat The Original (imgflip.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 18th
Hey y’all! What have you been playing this week? I played a bunch of the recent Talos principle remake. It was cool! The story hits differently with the way the world is with AI but I still thought it was enjoyable. Now I’m starting up the sequel!
The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: “deprofessionalization.” As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios...
Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining" (tech.yahoo.com) angielski
It feels to me like the closer we get to the Nintendo Switch 2’s June launch and the, apparently, $80 games associated with it, the more people are fighting with themselves over what is and isn’t worth it. But at least Sony veteran and previous head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida is free from inner turmoil – he...
‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game [404 Media] (www.404media.co) angielski
Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy (arstechnica.com) angielski
One might wonder about the ratio of Nintendo’s legal budget to actual piracy losses....
Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year
If Valve really wanted to make a splash, they could release a desktop version of SteamOS in October, right when support for Windows 10 ends. For additional damage, they could bundle in Half-Life 3. Just imagine the coverage this would get.
Half-Life 3 is reportedly playable in its entirety and could be announced this year (www.engadget.com) angielski
What's a good slow paced shooter game?
Feels like most shooter games these days are super fast paced, COD style games with 0.5 second reload times and Olympic sprinter running speeds. What are some games that have weightier gameplay mechanics and don’t make you feel like a superhuman?
The most influential video game of all time - Bafta (www.bafta.org) angielski
Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s...
The most influential video game of all time - BAFTA (www.bafta.org) angielski
To celebrate the enduring influence of video games in the arts and in our wider culture, we’re asking players from around the world to help us decide the Most Influential Video Game of All Time....
Is Rocket League a sports game? angielski
I blame the consolidation of sports titles under a limited number of developers and publishers. But maybe I just feel this way because sports games aren’t my thing.
Me, having neither somehow angielski
The beatings will continue until the skill improves angielski
Silent but Deadly: I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless. (slate.com) angielski
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
Popular Female Skyrim Modder Has Abandoned Her Work Due to Daily Harrassment (www.gamesradar.com)
I think gamers as a whole, though specifically those in niche communities, need to take a long and hard look at themselves. We should celebrate the volunteers that create wonderful content for us, generally with no financial gain. Instead, commonly, there are communities that criticize and tear down every little thing they can...
malicious backdoor found in widely used game mod by Low Level [YouTube] (youtu.be) angielski
Invidious, an alternative YouTube client in the browser without using YouTube directly (more private): inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=VH_8arwuRz8...
SteamDeck TOP Played list. angielski
SteamDeck TOP Played list....
Games that restore faith in the industry?
I have been in quality the a gaming slump for a while, for various reasons....
need helpbuiltding a PC, not sure where to ask
So, I have a not so unique problem. I want to build a PC with decent power and good Linux support but local parts are hard to get and importing is a mess....
Analogue’s 4K Nintendo 64 launches next year for $249 (www.theverge.com) angielski
Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Which unplayed game in your library are you most looking forward to playing eventually? angielski
when Nintendo finally runs out of ideas (beehaw.org) angielski
[alt text: a photo of a statue of Mario in the process of sliding down a flagpole, as he commonly does at the end of Mario levels. The statue is placed in the video game section of a a supermarket. In front of the statue, there are multiple human hands holding up wads of US dollar bills towards Mario.]
Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] (youtu.be) angielski
YouTube video: youtu.be/uScsmjvdwyo...
'None of this makes any sense': Amazon's latest MMO import is a localization disaster (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I really don’t care about MMOs, especially not Korean MMOs, but this is a very entertaining read.
Godot fork- Redot emerges after recent events within the Godot project. (github.com) angielski
EDIT context from know your meme of all places Apologies :D :...