Makes sense. The world moved on from Unreal Tournament for better or worse. You can’t just release and leave an online-only game any more. It has to be supported with years of content, or it’s never going to be popular and make it’s money back.
I’m going to guess it was always a small team ticking over in the background of Naughty Dog anyway. Their minute to minute gameplay is solid, but their stories and bombastic set-pieces are much more interesting and separate them from a crowd of pretenders.
Even most console games run at 60 now, with an option to turn on some RT graphical wankery and run at 30.
I often turn it on to see what it looks like, and then decide it’s not worth it. Ratchet and Clank actually played decently at 30, and one of the Ghostwire Tokyo options allowed you to have RT and decent framerates with a minor hit to resolution.
Gsync/Freesync/VRR is a game changer for lower end hardware, because then all those dips below 60 get smoothed out to an even 45 or so. I’ve spent a lot less time fucking about with setting on PC since getting a monitor that supports that.
My partner and I occasionally play games together, but they pretty much only play word puzzle games on their own. I’m not very good at word games though, and they don’t have very good spatial skills, so we frequently find ourselves mismatched. We have a switch and a single decent gaming pc, and a pretty old laptop....
We’ve only just got to the point where games don’t run on PS4 any more.
Current gen has good SSDs, 16GB RAM, fast CPUs and 4K (or at least scale to 4K acceptably) graphics. Most stuff runs at 60fps (with an option to turn on the graphical wankery and drop to 30-40), and when it doesn’t there’s VRR to paper over the cracks.
The only area it’s really lacking is RT performance, and only nVidia are there right now. The pricing for cards capable of dropping old lighting paths entirely (e.g. for Cyberpunk Overdrive mode) is obscene. Frame generation is a red herring. It won’t make games feel more responsive. Only real frames can do that. We’re a long way from dropping traditional lighting.
I’ve no doubt that Steam, PSN, etc can avoid complying with the spirit of the law on this, but the writing is on the wall as far as subscription services go.
Since I got my PS5 just over a year ago, I own 2 games for it. GoW Ragnarok that came with it, and BG3 that was only available digitally. PS+ has provided all the rest. I’ve spent the last week playing Teardown which is great. If this law actually happens, then all devs, not just indie ones, will be relying on game subscription service revenue.
The inventory management in the game is shockingly bad.
“Oh, I got a new companion. I wonder what I can equip them with.”
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
“I need to take a potion mid combat”
It’s somewhere in those 20 inventory wheels!
The whole inventory weight is kind of pointless as well, since you can send to camp at any point, and there’s very few places where you can’t just go back and get something. It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
Gear especially should just be kept in a separate place from consumables and quest items, with maybe some quick swap wardrobe feature for e.g. switching to a bludgeoning weapon for smashing walls.
I can only assume that you never touched co-op, or started playing in the last week, because that absolutely was not the launch experience for me and many others.
It is much better now, but it’s clear it was rushed out with a few months of development still to go. Which allegedly they did because they were worried about Starfield.
Even broken it’s probably the GOTY, but it did make certain things a lot more frustrating than they should have been and we spent a lot of time doing saves and waiting for the save to finish before continuing such was the prevalence of crashes to PS5 desktop. There was more than one fight we had to do from scratch because the following cutscene shat the bed.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
Isn’t Android very heavily based on Linux too (even if a lot of it is hidden at the surface level)? I can’t think of anything more mainstream than that.
I’m old enough to remember the Phantom Console bringing PC gaming to the masses too. Safe to say the Steam Deck is quite a lot more successful than that, given the only part they ended up making was a keyboard and mouse you could use from the sofa.
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
There absolutely can be a market like that. We’re in a digital utopia where we don’t actually own anything. You could even have a cutoff, where playing more doesn’t charge you more. Gamers might even accept that, in a weird way. You rent it per hour up to 70 hours, and then you just “own” it.
But I suspect most of his stats show that there’s a huge number of people out there who will spend $70 on a game on day one, play it for 10 hours and never touch it again. RDR2 for example has a 30% completion rate on PSN. 31% didn’t even finish the first chapter. And he certainly doesn’t want to say goodbye to that money.
I don’t want a market like that because it will lead to even more time-wasting and busywork in games than there already is. But maybe that would backfire. If you played 10 hours of a game and it was mostly trudging about doing nothing, would you pay to play more of it?
Marketing isn’t cheap either. Can’t rely on word of mouth when that word is “shite”. Fixing the code would have been relatively cheap compared to fixing their reputation.
It was OK when the games were a bit smaller (and also makes more sense when played in the right order).
Going from 1 to 2 was a huge improvement, as 1 felt more like a tech demo. Then they added two more 2’s, and frankly they were the exact same.
3 was a bit shit, and lost the city charm. It doesn’t really work in the countryside.
Black Flag was massively popular at the time, because the pirate ship stuff was cool, and it also featured the least amount of Assassin’s Creed gameplay. I think the more recent games still haven’t matched that feel with any of the ship gameplay.
Unity shoehorned in multiplayer, and managed to annoy both single player fans (who don’t want multiplayer) and multiplayer fans (because there’s like 4 missions you can do in co-op).
I didn’t play Syndicate because I was bored to fucking death of AC by this point.
Origins tried turning it into a massive RPG, with levels and choices that don’t really do anything, and stopped assassinations from actually being a guaranteed kill if your stats weren’t high enough.
Odyssey did more of the same, added the boat back in, and made the whole game ridiculously big. Like, there’s good stuff in there (the Minotaur tourist trap is a favourite, along with some of the fantasy elements), but you’ve genuinely seen most of the gameplay the game has to offer before you’ve even got off Tutorial Island. It doesn’t even really get harder. There’s just more of it. It was in serious need of an editor to bring it down to about a third of the size.
I’m still so burnt out on finishing that like 3 years ago, that I’ve not played Valhalla either.
I played it obsessively for the first season and got pretty decent at it.
The second season started, I got disconnected from my first four games about 3 rounds into each. Played it once more on the day that you could cheese the Infallible achievement by running Hoverboard Heroes over and over.
Never played it again. Certainly never touched it since it went “free”.
Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.
I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...
I mean, yeah. CoD has always glorified it. Even more so in recent years as they push for multiplayer and the massive payday that came with that. The earlier games often had a “war can be bad too” bits. The Russian bit in CoD1. The nuke. “No Russian”. But otherwise it’s a Michael Bay movie in game form.
Spec Ops The Line was the only game I can think of that bucked that. Even the publishers had no idea what it was, despite the antagonist literally being called Konrad.
Even though it was based on events from WW1, stolen under cinematic license for use in WW2 by Enemy at the Gates, and then subsequently stolen again by Infinity Ward.
MS is in the subscription selling business now. Their entire gaming future hinges on GamePass, and while I like the idea of games on tap (I’ve basically bought BG3 for my PS5 and nothing else in the year since I bought it, enough on PS+ to keep me going and I can barely catch up let alone keep up), I suspect the big devs that spend hundreds of millions on making AAA games are less than enthralled with the idea and if GamePass and day one “free” games win, the outcome will be more games that I’m not really interested in.
PS+ is not as good a product as GamePass, but I believe it’s healthier overall for the gaming industry.
The higher tiers. Not sure about the top one (Premium) any more. I got it because I thought I might want to play the older games, but it turns out there’s plenty of PS4 and PS5 games to keep me going, and frankly not enough choice of PS1 and 2 games to tempt me. A more complete library would have made sense, but I’ve literally got more on my shelf than they’ve got on PS Plus Premium.
And my internet is too rubbish for me to want to stream the handful of PS3 games either. It hasn’t even got MGS4 which would be the one interesting thing that hasn’t been anywhere else.
They take so long between entries that there’ll be adults with a PS5 who don’t even know what The Elder Scrolls is, let alone get excited for it.
We’ve had The Witcher 3. We’ve had Baldur’s Gate 3. Another clunky Bethesda “RPG” isn’t going to get the juices flowing like it did… fucking hell, 12 years ago.
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
Currently takes about 6 seconds to swap between characters. Every time. Every turn. Click, clunk, click, clunk.
Playing really thoroughly, we’re up to 60 hours, level 7, and just starting Act 2.
It’s bad design that part of Act 1 is behind the exact same prompt as the end of Act 1. I nearly missed a whole zone there, as well as an awesome weapon.
So today Unity announced changes in how they are going to monetize their game engine, and it is, rightfully might I add, poorly recievedHere is how much youtuber Dani would have to pay unity if they consider his games to gain over $200k in revenue Dani’s hypothetical unity payments...
No, I mean that they legally can’t support say PS5 and still be 100% open source. There would need to be a closed source wrapper, and that’s what they don’t want.
Which is fine, they can do what they want, but it means they can never be the choice of a developer that wants to put their game on as many platforms as possible.
It would sure be nice to run whatever I wanted on my consoles. Top of my list would be SteamLink for Switch.
Avoiding piracy is a thorny one for them. They’ve really locked that shit down in recent years. The last time I saw any was for the Xbox 360, where everyone at work had their drives altered and laughed at me for being a mug that still bought games, and then I laughed as they all got banned at once during the Great Purge of 2009. I think piracy was one of the reasons that the PS3 Linux thing was discontinued as well.
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
This is how games and drivers have been for decades.
There are huge teams at AMD and nVidia who’s job it is to fix shit game code in the drivers. That’s why (a) they’re massive and (b) you need new drivers all the time if you play new games.
I read an excellent post a while ago here, by Promit.
It’s interesting to see that in the 8 years since he wrote it, the SLI/Crossfire solution has simply been to completely abandon it, and that we still seem to be stuck in the same position for DX12. Your average game devs still have little idea how to get the best performance from the hardware, and hardware vendors are still patching things under the hood so they don’t look bad on benchmarks.
Bethesda the publisher and Bethesda the developer are different things.
The publishing arm seemed to know what they were doing, certainly enough for MS to buy them.
The developing arm is nothing if not consistent. You know what you’re getting into. An RPG, with lots of character build possibilities (even if a particular build overpowered enough for 90% of players to accidentally stumble across it, like Skyrim’s stealth archer build), a handful of memorable NPCs, no real character development, so-so performance, and a shitload of bugs.
If people are still buying them and still not enjoying them I don’t know what to say. It’s like watching Fast and Furious 10, and going “well that’s fucking dumb”.
I watched the first one many years ago, which appeared to just be Ocean’s 11, but for people who think putting blue lights under your car makes it go faster.
Then I watched F&F9 on Netflix the other month. I don’t remember any of the plot. At one point a car did a Tarzan rope swing.
I love couch co-op, but BG3 has all manner of bugs in co-op on PS5.
Your PSN name and a “mute” icon is overlaid at all times in the top corner of the screen where your rolls and character approval/disapproval information should appear.
From about halfway through Act 1, swapping characters (which you do all the time) triggers multi second pauses for both players.
Cut scene bugs, like invisible characters, no lip sync, no voice acting, voice acting only on alternate lines, one cut scene didn’t actually load at all, just leaving me with the text and a screen full of fog.
We also had no tutorials, but this does appear to be rectified now via a patch released yesterday.
Not sure what happened to the horn-fest other players got, but I suspect that co-op players aren’t getting full “reputation” with NPCs, as this appears to be tracked individually.
Series S performance with it like this would have been something to behold.
I’m not sure why “performance mode” is disabled in co-op either. In single player it runs at a decent pace. It’s just as soon as player two joins that it starts to feel like a PS3 game.
I mean, it’s still fun, the underlying game is clearly good, and occasionally the hitching stops for a few minutes and it’s less frustrating, but it soon comes back again. It’s like it’s doing something daft like reloading the zone between characters.
Naughty Dog Ends Development Of The Last Of Us Online (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
There's simply no going back (startrek.website) angielski
Recommend a game for me to play with my partner angielski
My partner and I occasionally play games together, but they pretty much only play word puzzle games on their own. I’m not very good at word games though, and they don’t have very good spatial skills, so we frequently find ourselves mismatched. We have a switch and a single decent gaming pc, and a pretty old laptop....
Baldur's Gate 3 Has Been Completed by 1.3 Million Players, Shadowheart is Most Popular Love Interest (techraptor.net) angielski
GTA 6 is likely to skip PC again and only launching on current gen consoles (kotaku.com) angielski
I’m confused why Kotaku mentioning next gen in the title when Rockstar only commented on current generation PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
EU court rules people can resell digital games (www.gamingbible.com) angielski
Finally some good news! I’ve been waiting for quite a while for such a ruling....
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 1 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 5 Adds New Playable Epilogue With 3,589 Lines of Extra Dialogue, Much More (www.ign.com) angielski
Star Citizen Just Had its Biggest Crowdfunding Day Ever With $3.5 Million in 24 Hours (techraptor.net) angielski
Bethesda Is Responding to Negative Reviews of Starfield on Steam (www.ign.com) angielski
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck' (www.pcgamer.com)
GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour (www.forbes.com) angielski
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
God of War is coming to GOG (www.gog.com) angielski
www.gog.com/en/game/god_of_war...
CD Projekt Spent Roughly $125 Million Turning Cyberpunk 2077 Around Post-Launch (www.ign.com) angielski
Ubisoft just added Denuvo to Assassins Creed Mirage via a day-1 patch a few minutes ago. AFTER all the major reviews went online. (meta.masto.host) angielski
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/0c095e3d-ac73-49eb-b142-65d0c7d2b8af.webp
Report: Fall Guys dev Mediatonic "decimated" by Epic layoffs (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
$600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen (exputer.com) angielski
Game prices are too low, says Capcom exec (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up....
‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda (progressive.org)
I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...
Microsoft completely misjudged Baldur’s Gate 3 (www.polygon.com) angielski
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The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion - 18-09-2023 (lemmy.world) angielski
Have you been spending hours trying to pass a level? Or maybe you are completely addicted to a newly bought game. Do you have a question about a game or would like to share something else? In the Weekly Discussion Thread, you can do it all!...
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft | Nintendo Direct 9.14.2023 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Absolutely hilarious subtitle, as if people don’t know it’s starring Lara Croft
So, Unity is charging game developers per video game install now... (blog.unity.com) angielski
So today Unity announced changes in how they are going to monetize their game engine, and it is, rightfully might I add, poorly recievedHere is how much youtuber Dani would have to pay unity if they consider his games to gain over $200k in revenue Dani’s hypothetical unity payments...
Nintendo has filed a patent for ‘smart fluid’ joysticks, perhaps to eliminate drift | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Let’s hope this isn’t just a random patent, and we actually get better sticks next generation.
Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield (www.destructoid.com) angielski
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
Couch co-op is finally making a comeback? (www.latimes.com)