Putin releases the RuskieStation. It’s fine. Not awesome or anything. Shortly after, Yum! Co. finally releases the KFConsole. Plays every game, even ones from the future, at 8k in real time FPS while also cooking an entire KFC meal for you. For only $299. Russia’s economy collapses. Putin is banished to the shadow realm. Somehow this also leads to peace in the middle east.
Before EA, Bioware’s RPGs had some personality and took risks trying new shit. Since Mass Effect, they’ve been especially formulaic, toned down, and sanitized for a larger audience.
EA makes good looking, (usually) well polished games meant to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, and when you have spent years playing games with a distinct style you can very easily see this shift once EA acquires a studio. Either you’re never going to see those games again, or they will become the most watered-down, generic version of the studio’s greatest IPs.
The one thing I can recall where it was known that EA had little to no involvement in development of one of their own games was when DICE made the first Mirror’s Edge. It was merely a AA game and the execs didn’t think much about it one way or the other during development; and then it became a huge hit so they started getting involved with the sequel. Which was shit.
You know the budget is spent almost entirely on the art when you actually pay attention to the credits and you see names for like 250 artists, but only 3-5 programmers.
Not to mention, it was Steam that was responsible for the advent of not owning the games you buy, something I consider to be one of the worst things to ever happen to gaming.
Hate to break it to you, but you didn’t own your games even when they were still sold physically. The standard liscence agreement for software as we know it today started in the 80’s, and it was mostly because of Microsoft.
Valve is, however, responsible for lootboxes which first saw action in TF2.
On the other: It’s free. When did everyone start bitching even about the free games? Claiming all the free games and never actually using the store, if anything, hurts Epic. You don’t even have to use EGS to download them! You can use a 3rd party app like Heroic.
I like how PS1 did 3D differently than pretty much any other system ever, which is why if you look long enough at a model, you will see it warp and contort weirdly as vertexes jump between points because it didn’t have floating point numbers or something like that (can’t really remember the technical details).
It’s super unique and faking this effect in modern engines is pretty neat. It’s also weird playing on some PS1 emulators that don’t have this effect, because it’s better than original hardware.
I’m glad that when I made my high school for Counter-Strike, it was back in 1.6 and not more recently. Heard about a kid who did the same for CSGO just a few years ago and he got expelled and I think he was arrested because they saw it like “terrorist planning” or some bullshit…
I remember finally getting my hands on the editor for the Build engine after a few years of making maps in Doom and Heretic and had thought 3D level design was only something super geniuses could do… Until Hammer showed it was just the garbage UI/UX of Build lol