I mean, it definitely helps. The production quality is insane. But the fact that the choices (or mistakes) have actual real impacts on the game going forward are as big as far as I'm concerned. I ended up with my hand being forced into combat early that made an encounter with a potential party member immediately hostile. That sucks, especially since I wasn't trying to do what happened in the earlier encounter. But in terms of a world feeling alive, having it actually react to what you do is pretty damn significant (unless "you're small and irrelevant" is intentional).
It's time developers come to grips with the fact that making choices matter is what makes it a successful game. I'm tired of storylines that don't make any sense except to give you a world to kill people in. Sorry folks, lore is important and that takes writers.
It definitely depends on the game, I’m perfectly happy with a game that has a story to tell, and tells it well. Not everything needs to have branching options and 50+ hour playtime. Some of the best stories I’ve played are short and railroady, WaW and BO1 campaing’s are fantastically interesting and you don’t make a single choice in them.
I don’t think the lack of choices is necessarily a bad thing. The original Doom had no story choices (it barely even had a story) and it’s still pretty good even by today’s standards. Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much had no story choices as well (there was 1 at the end of the first game) and the first one in particular is considered revolutionizing how stories are presented in games.
What I do think is an issue is when the game presents you with a choice that doesn’t matter. Bioshock Infinite is the first that comes to mind as the game puts quite a few options front and center, but really none of them matter (except the very last one) and the game even implies that the choices deliberately don’t matter because “constants and variables”. Thus those choices, at least for me, detracted from the story because there was never no need to make me make a choice.
In that sense I agree that choices should matter, but I think a better wording is that if you’re going to have choices make them matter or don’t have choices in the first place.
Remnant 2 is brilliant at this and bad at this at the same time! The in-world stories that are told along with the environments are absolutely STUNNING! Everything clicks together so well and a slightly different story is told when re-rolling the map!
Main story cutscenes tell the worst story I’ve ever seen executed. (Worse than Monster Hunter World’s Handler story stuff) I’m glad they’re skippable on another run. Because literally everything is is some of the most classic gaming experience one could have.
There was so much promise in their lore!! I liked N'Erud the best but the rest didn't really lead anywhere other than that you visited, you did something notable, and then you left. Nothing really changed.
I would say if it is all about the gameplay, like Serious Sam or Doom, then the story doesn't need to be that important and dexisions don't need to matter. But if the story is front and center, like Baldur's Gate and most similar RPGs, the story and how choices impact the story need to be well done so it doesn't feel on rails and replaying it is enjoyable.
It gets super confusing when you do stuff in the wrong order though. Missing a clue because you didn’t read the right book or something but then randomly finding the end of the quest and everyone is talking like we know all about it.
Usually it recognizes it. Sometimes it doesn’t though. I’d hope those instances get patches eventually. Even worse though is when something triggers for something you didn’t even do. I’ve had a party member get angry at me for something that I did the opposite of. It’s a pretty solid game, but it’s not totally bug free, which is expected with so much complexity. Who knows, it could have just been a cosmic ray that flipped a bit and not even their fault (though I doubt it).
I doubt that they’re referring to Minthara; you have to make an intentional series of decisions to >!murder a bunch of people!< in order to get her in your party. It’s relatively easy to miss several origin companions if you’re not the type that explores the whole map. And one of the origin characters starts with >!a quest to kill one of the others!<.
I have like zero hype for this game, and absolute bangers of games have dropped recently. I’m definitely going to put this on the “maybe” list and let other people test it out for me, I’m in no rush.
I still don’t really know what it is. Because it seems to have random generation so that makes me think it’s just going to be another no man’s sky.
The big problem with randomly generating a bazillion planets is they’re all boring. Random terrain generation will always result in dull terrain because an algorithm isn’t creative, it’s not even AI level aware, it’s just maths.
I’m excited for it because Bethesda. I’ve always put hundreds of hours into their games despite all the ranting and raving.
I’m definitely a bit worried for the same reason as you are though. I think those are likely filler exploration radiant quest type stuff. I’m cautiously hopeful that the story is good and long and deep enough to keep me playing though.
Yeah, I have thousands of hours in Bethesda games. Something about sneaking around murdering bandits, mutants, mythical beasts, heavily armored soldiers, etc. especially sniping them with a bow in Skyrim and watching everyone run around like “who shot Steve in the face!?”, that was just… chef’s kiss. That and finding something interesting around every corner, and just the visual aspect of it. It’s hard to explain but there is a certain Bethesda magic that no other game really captures. Plus the modding…
I mean is Bethesda and for what is seen there will main quest and so on… Yes there will be random generation for random planets or sections not designed for those quests, and for random quests like Skyrim random quests… But I wouldn’t say like No Man’s Sky, it should be rpg (at Bethesda way, not like Baldurs Gate of course) with a more defined story and so on, characters, etc. Of course I haven’t touched No Man’s Sky on years… So maybe they have something for that now?
It looks like they’re doing what star citizen does with terrain generation where they hand-make tiles of landforms like mountains/cliffs, hills, etc, then the procedural generation takes over and stitches them all together in ways that “make sense.” So it’s not 100% hand crafted, but it’s also not “strange landform” NMS type nonsense that is entirely made from maths so you only seem to get rounded features. From what I’ve seen the environments look absolutely stunning! As someone who plays NMS too I can say they look 100x better than NMS.
Don’t fall for the investor hype. Current AI aren’t even close to being intelligent or aware. As you said for algorithms, it’s just math, algebraic topology and graph theory to be precise.
It’s funny how it’s “the game’s are not expensive enough” and not “we don’t know how to manage our or money” or “our profit are too high”. Fuck those capitalists.
Oh the stupid shit head “games are 100 times more expensive to make now” but you sell thousands times more and there no physical media anymore is irrelevant I guess… Assholes…
Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.
The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.
If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.
Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.
If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.
This is being reposted everywhere as news but is super misleading. The $60 price tag gets you the universal app, meaning one purchase lets you play the game on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s still a full game just like the Steam version, and if you look at Resident Evil Village, it will surprisingly run super well on M-series Macs.
The distaste comes from mobile apps rarely being over $10, but if you think of it as bonus mobile access alongside a fully fledged macOS game, suddenly nothing is wrong here.
Not to mention a lot of them are still crappy at best: Fallout 4 is ridiculous, Fallout 76 is even more ridiculous, Assassin’s Creed turned into a conveyor joke, Cyberpunk 2077 was just insultingly bad at launch and remained that for a long time (haven’t played 2.0 yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), Starfield is another sandwich full of lies, Redfall is not even worth talking about akin to Deathloop, Diablo 4 is a machine to vacuum money on a schedule, online FPS has been nothing but battle royale for what feels like almost a dozen years and now they’re testing the waters with “extraction shooters” looking at Escape From Tarkov (the extraction aspect alone won’t bring them the same fame), and all of that is coupled with ever-increasing system requirements and prices, making gaming the most expensive it’s ever been for really no good benefit.
The only AAA game that left me satisfied on launch in the recent years, like in the days of buying boxes, was DOOM: Eternal; to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy was good, but the story felt lacking and really took away from the fun.
I personally blame the managers in the AAA gaming for not managing the scope creeps that obviously happen in many of these games, stretching the development resources, yet resulting in another “mile wide, inch deep” discourse time after time. Again, DOOM: Eternal is a great example: no crafting, no open world shenanigans, no multiple choices all leading to the same outcome (while not being a conceptual story-telling instrument) - just a focused game with multiple elements that make up the linear progression and gradually increase the possible complexity of one’s experience, finally culminating in a complete FPS sitting atop impressive optimization and great visuals.
AAA is just not worth it these days and hasn’t been for several years, neither in terms of hardware, nor software.
You make some true points, but it's hard to take them seriously when you blanket dismiss entire games that are enjoyed by many as crappy or entire franchises as a joke.
That can’t be the sole metric. The POSTAL series is widely regarded as one of the worst franchises to ever happen in video games, and yet, I and many others are big fans of the entire series in general and are especially fond of some entries in particular; but it certainly doesn’t make these games less janky and subpar in many regards - at the very least, none of them was advertised as something “for the next gen” or “groundbreaking” or any of the big words the AAA industry likes to throw around when advertising.
entire franchises as a joke
Thanks for that, though, I didn’t meant to call the entire AC series a joke, only multiple of its entries after the first games.
I'm just particularly fond of Assassin's Creed Odyssey due to it being the only open world game that is playable as a stealth game with stealth game specific mechanics and a world designed for stealth traversal, there has not yet been any other game designed that way that isn't just light stealth elements that fall apart when you inevitably get caught in two minutes, until someone shows me another game like that, I honestly feel that game to be pushing the stealth genre, which is honestly not hard to do because of the dire state it's in.
And I'm glad you expand on Postal particularly, it goes to show that even games that are despised by many have their own meaningful aspects to be gleaned with the right mindset and with their flaws in mind. I think that when it comes to games of this size it is very hard to be able to say they are crappy, full stop, especially ones like these, or even Deathloop, which I enjoyed. Not as much as Arkane's Prey or Dishonored, of course, but it was still an enjoyable game with an excellent art style and soundtrack that heavily tapped into my love of the 70s, and featured a very nice multiplayer mode that simply doesnt exist in any other game.
I’m totally fine with you enjoying whatever games you enjoy, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. My opinion is that of the corporations and their practices only, not the consumers that happen to find something dear to them in the final product.
Granted, we, as consumers, have - or at least should have - certain ways to leverage the industry and let it know explicitly what we appreciate and like, and what we absolutely hate, but that’s much easier said than do on the scale of modern gaming in general, let alone the AAA gaming, the massive beast it is and the sizes of its many audiences. I do what I can to influence the industry, whenever I can, and that includes talking about it with my fellow gamers to maybe spark the same tendencies in them - but I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from having fun.
Off the thread topic, yeah Prey and Dishonored are definitely one of the greatest games we’ve seen in 2010s, especially Prey.
I think you do bring up some good points about how a lot of the weakest AAA games now are either extremely over-iterative and lose appeal by virtue of sharing large parts of their design with their past iterations, diluting the novel good bits (Assassin's Creed), and trend chasers (that most popular online FPS games chase battle Royale and extraction shooter genres, though battle Royale seems to be finally dying off.
It takes something like Doom, a game that bucks the trends, but doesn't stumble on the execution of something fresh, but rooted in strong game direction and execution. Or something like Hogwarts Legacy, a rote-on-paper genre of game (open world) kept fresh and interesting because of its long-time-coming incredible choice of setting and the ways that it uses that setting to benefit the gameplay and immersion (the magic combat system, broom riding, and lots of sprinkled bits of lore that reward long time fans of the world)
But even then... imagine ten years down the line if there's a Doom 6, and they let history repeat itself...
Its not AC anymore though, they should have made a new IP instead of using an existing one on games that are completely different to the originals in the franchise.
I would agree with that, but then there's a whole debate to be had about whether Odyssey would receive the same funding if it weren't an AC game, and whether it wouldve been executed as well or has as much content in that alternate reality Odyssey.
I guess. I mean thats why they keep using the AC name though isnt it, they had no faith in their products to stand on their own.
I think all the recent AC games could have been a new franchise, they all are pretty much the same base game. I wouldnt even count AC4 as a AC game personally, I guess I just crave that beautiful AC2/Brotherhood experience again that we will never get.
You can enjoy stuff that’s objectively bad. Like fast food. The problem is less the individual games and more the state of gaming as a whole.
It’s not that one game launches as an unfinished buggy mess, despite having a paid for early access period. It’s not that one game increases the cost of entry, and further augments that with season passes, microtransactions, preorder bonuses, always-online requirements and all other bullshit that is modern AAA gaming.
The problem is that it’s the norm. If someone who doesn’t play a lot of games picks up a copy of the Ubisoft game they will probably have a blast. The systems in the game were fun when they were novel fifteen years ago. It’s when you see the same games released year after year, with the same issues, and the same predatory monetisation schemes that it gets trite.
It’s perfectly fine to enjoy Starfield. I hope those who waited so long for it do. For me personally there’s just nothing to get excited about because it’s just another version of the Bethesda game. I have already played it a dozen times before, and while twelve year old me enjoyed it immensely, thirty year old me can find better things to do with his time.
In short, it’s not that fast food is hard to enjoy, it’s just that every restaurant serves the same boring old burger.
What it's really about now is the combination of certain game mechanics. You've played a Bethesda game, and you've played a space sim, but you haven't played a Bethesda game in a space setting with ship construction, planet exploration and resource extraction outpost building, or really any light space sim with solid first person shooting at all.
To me, that combination is novel. Just like AC Odyssey's fusion of a true stealth game and an open world setting is novel and doesn't exist. The particular parts that make up the whole are not novel, the combination and execution are. There is still new ground to cover there.
That honestly sounds reasonable. It’ll be impossible to troubleshoot legitimate issues when they can’t even determine if the issues are being caused by a mod that the user installed years ago and hasn’t touched since.
I can’t name a single other digital service anywhere near steam level of trust. things you bought don’t disappear. they are on the record saying there is a contingency in case of shutdown. they havnt a used their position. as far as market leaders go, you could do worse
I don’t want a curated store though and would rather have people be able to release games, and let users decide if it is something they want or not. I can access reviews myself and don’t need companies deciding what game is or isn’t worthy of being available. And users is who I trust more anyways, which is why for so long search term + reddit is what I’ve relied on.
I mean, isn’t community self-policing and an overly tolerant attitude towards picking what type of games are allowed on your platform exactly what we want from them?
Quality control is another word for "high barrier to entry", and especially with their market position, being rejected by Steam for some arbitrary reason would effectively kill your project.
Not only should they not restrict the ability to sell your games there without a concrete reason; they shouldn't be permitted to do so. A company with that much influence shouldn't be allowed to be a gatekeeper of what constitutes a "good" game.
Their review system and strong return policy are more than enough.
I didn’t ignore it, you just didn’t think it through.
You’re complaining about having more options as if it’s some kind of moral stand. But the only reason to be mad about those things is if you were forced to buy them. Steam doesn’t only have to sell games that you specifically approve of and it’s not some kind of moral failing to sell games that are low quality.
This isn’t even getting into how you’re ignoring history to make the claim that they did it all for their bottom line and not the huge amount of user demand for them to open up the store. This also isn’t getting into how any money coming in from asset flips specifically is negligible, and not at all like some kind of NFT scam level of dubious behaviour like you’re referring to it.
The only reason to be this mad about more games being sold on Steam is if you feel a need to buy it all.
That’s an extremely loose idea of “promotion”, to the point of manufacturing upset. A storefront does not inherently promote something merely by offering it, that’s like saying a convenience store promotes Pepsi and Coca-Cola because they sell both even though both those companies have extremely strict promotional initiatives that ensure no crossover.
Because there is a gamer. Someone who plays games.
And Gmer. Someone who’s entire personality is based around games, and not in the fun healthy way. But in the justifying a monopoly because it’s their colour way. Just look at some of the comments here and you’ll see a lot of Gmers.
Ok, so that is the what, but what is the why? Why the censored word? I don’t get it. Nonetheless I’m closer to getting it now so thank you for that much
Just to echo what Marc said, we are so sorry for our earlier actions.
We are so sorry you took our earlier actions so poorly.
Genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet.
Genuinely disappointed that our removal of the TOS was noticed and publicized across the internet.
This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. And Marc’s response is true, you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity you are using as long as you keep using that version.
This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity, whereafter we will do everything we can to invalidate prior versions of Unity, and force upgrades on users.
We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer some Q’s live
We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer whichever Qs live we find convenient to our narrative, and ignore any that are not.
Please forget about our attempted greed, so we can try again in a stealthier manner in the near future, at our earliest convenience.
Marc’s response is true, you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity you are using as long as you keep using that version.
Oh shit, our lawyers have just informed us (again, but this time I listened) that trying to change terms of service after they’ve already been agreed is actually not legal and could get us in trouble.
Successful in terms of cash, which I’d imagine is the most common metric people look for. Now whether gamers will look back on bg3 or d4 more fondly? You decide!!
2000 shares is not millions… that’s less than $100K at the current share price. For scale, the CEO was paid over $8 million in stock in 2022, of which he sold about 50000 shares over the course of the year, which would translate to roughly $2 million worth, which I assume means he’s holding many more shares.
I just don’t see it. Seems far more likely that he just regularly sells shares as income.
I do agree the other two are more scummy than the CEO.
This article is talking about it like this is a new thing. It has been part of the core set of QoL mods for new installs for years now. Looks like they got a recent update though which is exciting
Edit: Didn’t look at the link just knew by name, looks like they released a new mod to compliment the one I’m talking about? This person is a fucking godsend
They did indeed release a new engine optimization mod, separate to the standard mandatory-install Stewies Tweaks. The past year has been crazy for NV mods.
Good, tbh, I think we’ve had to back off Open World RPGs for years now. Smaller scale RPGs can tell a story with far more focus. I think something like Witcher 2 or Baldurs Gate 3 are good examples of balancing exploration and story telling.
Yeah I’ve loved open world games since I first played oblivion as a teenager but being open world isn’t necessarily a good thing in and of itself and being too big often makes you spoiled for choice. Plus I just don’t have time anymore to explore the whole world. For me as long as the story is interesting and it has good systems and mechanics along with new game plus of some kind I can get into a game and play it over and over
Agreed, he knocked that role out of the park but other than that, he’s very generic. I don’t dislike the guy, all said (his ad-libbed lines in P&R are some of the funniest lines in the show).
Granted, the only Mario games I’ve actually played was SMB on the NES and Odyssey, so I don’t have the same attachment to the character as some, but I still don’t get the hate Chris Pratt got for that role. The movie wasn’t anything really special, the character was fine. But people were freaking furious.
Because Pratt isn’t a good voice actor. Really though, there were few standout performances in that entire movie, so he wasn’t alone in that. It’s almost like they picked the cast based on who can only play themselves, not on who would be a good choice. Princess Peach, Luigi, and Bowser were the only real solid performances in my opinion.
It had less to do with Pratt and more to do with it being a radical departure from the established voice of a very nostalgic and beloved character. It would basically be the same thing if Pratt was chosen to voice Micky Mouse or Bugs Bunny.
It’s also compounded by the fact that the Mario fan base, for good reason, loves Charles Martinet. Just see comments here for evidence. So pulling out a generic sounding Hollywood frontman felt like they were focusing on sales over source material. Which is true, but will always upset longtime fans.
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