Carighan

Carighan, 5 hours ago

Ah sad, it’s just a teaser. Looks nice, but was hoping there’d be an actual introduction.

Carighan, 1 day ago

Fascinating. Would have never guessed this was worth fifty million.

Carighan, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Yeah but why would you want to finish a game as a dev nowadays? You get paid for your early beta releases (= “early access”), not for finishing it from there.

Carighan, 3 days ago

SLAMMED!

Love how terrible writing has become. 😂

Carighan, 3 days ago

24 years ago, I decided that instead of going into video game development like I had always dreamt of in school, I’ll go into business software because at the time there was only one nearby game studio (Blue Byte), they weren’t looking to hire in the next few years and I wasn’t really willing to move very far at the time.

Looking back, that decision was one of the best branching-path decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

Thanks, Blue Byte! Indirectly you got me an amazing job! 🥂

Carighan, 5 days ago

Note that since you claim the DLC permanently on GamePass, it’s cheaper to get it via that especially if you still got a free or €1 GamePass month or three about.

Carighan, 5 days ago

It’s… okay?

It’s a bit hard to describe. Overwatch 1 was a bit magical when it came out. It was the WoW of team FPS. Everyone (and their mother) played it. This made it this fascinating thing where your default way of hanging out with friends would be to be on voicechat and chat away while playing OW.
It’s unbalanced and ridiculous cadre of character loadouts also enabled just about everyone to play the game. Do they have amazing reflexes? Give them Genji or Hanzo. Do they have damn awesome aim? Hanzi, Widow, Cassidy (McCree at the time). Do they not have aim worth speaking of? Symmetra, Mercy, Bastion, Reinhardt, lots of options in fact. So you could always talk friends into buying it, and they’d enjoy it!

Now, of course, as such as game ages, players get better and better at exploiting the imbalances, so naturally there’s a bigger pressure on balancing.

But the crucial breaking point IMO came not with OW2, but a long time before that. When this need for more balancing arose, instead of embracing the ridiculous nature of many character loadouts, Blizzard worked against it. In their desire to become the biggest esport, they saw a need to make every character as skill-based as possible, to focus on individual player contributions and individual aim and reflexes. Lots and lots and lots and lots of balance changes slowly pushed the overall core of the game from first being about finding out who you as a player are, then picking a character fitting you, to having to mold yourself into “an FPS player”, because even Torbjörn, Symmetra, Bastion and Pharah need to aim quite a bit now.

And as this progressed, I could see my friends drifting away from the game. The game became effort to play. Not something you can have in the background while spending an evening chatting along on Discord, catching up. And Overwatch was at its core this social thing, so once some drifted off, so did more and more. And eventually, so did I.

Overwatch 2 was merely… how do I say… the end of this chrysalis stage of Overwatch’s life? What emerged from it was the final form of a more esports and twitch-aim-centric game. Gone were the double tanks leading to extremely slow kill times (which in turn meant players who lacked the reflexes to engage in twitch-gunning no longer had the time needed to react to anything), with it gone were the days of cohesive teams where everyone had a singular role, instead you needed to first and foremost be able to fend for and defend yourself, only then would you integrate with the team. Because otherwise you were long dead already.
But this was merely the result of finalizing the change that began all the way back with early post-release OW1 balancing.

IMO, OW1 could have been an absolutely fantastic social lightweight team FPS, if they had embraces the chaos and non-FPS-y nature of much of it. Instead they abolished it. OW2 is but a shadow of this former glory. It’s a decent enough team FPS, but eh, it’s also nothing special any more.

Carighan, 6 days ago

I mean, yeah? ATI was great as a budget alternative, less performance but more value. Please go back to that!

Carighan, 9 days ago

That’s mostly down to a legal thing if I remember? And last time I read about it, related to a non-english language and in that case I have fuck all Idea how to judge whether splitting rape into two words for it makes sense or not. Sounds wrong to me, but I’m not someone to judge that.

But yeah other than that, agreed.

Carighan, 11 days ago

Live service, as in: you better watch it live or you’ll have missed it! 😅

Carighan, 13 days ago

An 8bitdo Ultimate.

There, decision done, express lane service.

Carighan, 13 days ago

Yeah this is a solved problem with a lot of third-party systems though like 8bitdo has, since they just allow you to swap modes. Granted, sometimes it’s a bit wonky since for example the Switch won’t support analogue triggers but eh, it works for everything and everywhere, so I’m happy to have a single pad that has everything anybody can utilize.

Carighan, 13 days ago

Yeah. I love my 8bitdo Ultimate for PC use (and it just so happens to be extremely close to the Switch Pro in layout and sizing) but the actual thing is still works better in raw quality. Except no hall effect joysticks but eh, could always mod it yourself if you’re so inclined.

Carighan, 18 days ago

Damn this looks promising. If they can deliver a nice story and world for this, I’ll definitely need this!

Carighan, 19 days ago

Hrm, is it narrative-driven like the page claims? Or is it a roguelike? Because this sounds interesting, but not if it doesn’t have a proper story with a proper ending and all.

Carighan, 19 days ago

Yeah but it’s also been the only one I’ve seen pull it off since then. Everyone else just doesn’t really do a story, just some loose lore.

Carighan, 19 days ago

Damn that looks uncomfortable to hold. Still, interesting device. So far I don’t need retro gaming in portable but it’s a neat idea.

Carighan, 21 days ago

You know it’s not a movie adaptation game, yes?

Carighan, 22 days ago

“Single player games have taken a backseat”. Okay. We’re just going to state that as a truth? And also just stating kids as being the main video games audience still?

I mean if single player games have taken such a backseat, why are big companies pouring so much money into games such as Horizon, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Anno or Dark Souls? Why are indie games, thousands and tens of thousands of them, so overwhelmingly single player? Why is Zelda still not a MOBA? Just does not really hold water as an argument IMO. If anything it seems the opposite is happening and after the height of MOBAs in ˜2015, the market is slowly creeping back.

Carighan, 22 days ago

Also calling Overwatch a “MOBA shooter” is like calling Mario Kart a “Rogue like racer” because you start each race fresh with everything reset. It’s just an FPS, nothing MOBA about it.

Carighan, 22 days ago

Yeah, was thinking the same thing. Which, importantly, is already a game based upon a DLC for a previous Borderlands game!

Carighan, 22 days ago

I mean, I did not even know a game called Concord exists.

Carighan, 24 days ago

Especially the adaptive joystick is a really great idea. What with being able to do the design with them but then have it 3D printed elsewhere.

Carighan, 24 days ago

Not really, far as I can tell. At least not for Microsoft the company and Microsoft the gaming team.

Only for the marketing, really. They never explicitly push it. But I feel this might just be because they feel they don’t have to, they’re already the default, and “PC” is their native environment everyone associates them with.

Carighan, 25 days ago

The “REV-8”?

Damn, the very next update will come after you. (The Rev-9 was the Terminator from Dark Fate)

Carighan, 26 days ago

I mean I saw it, but it immediately got filed under “Just another pretty-in-renders soulsy clone”. There are so many thousands of them, they’re just some background buzz in game releases.

And I’ll readily admit, I don’t even know whether it is a soulslike, and neither do I care to find out. That’s how invisible this game is when you scroll past it, as it immediately mascerades as a game in an ocean of utterly samey titles.

Carighan, 27 days ago

‘Who’ is for subject and ‘whom’ is for object, right?

Carighan, 28 days ago

Same, friends and me went to DRG instead. While of course it gets rote after a whole the procedural generation helps, and it’s the chill background game to play while voice chatting that Overwatch 1 was in its early days before its balance shifted to high-end competition.

Carighan, 29 days ago

Dragon Age, too. Then ask the Fahrenheit line of games. There’s a lot overall.

Carighan, 29 days ago

And also largely nonsensical in how they occur and are written. It’s so boring. I mean I would love an actual intimate relationship to contact such a broken world but the devs of course won’t let me, instead I get fanfic writing.

Carighan, 29 days ago

Oh that’s really rare for me, since I’m not a person who can generally do “grindy” parts well if the grind extends past what is clearly the main intent of the game (that is, usually the story).

The last game I 100%ed is Pineapple On Pizza. A free 10 minute game, 20 if you go for all achievements. Says a lot about me I suppose. 😅

However, I do sometimes go after rare achievements because the ideas behind them sound intriguing to me. But I can’t be arsed to go for all the other stuff, ingame and external, too. One good example of something I had to do is that the expansion Hate Plus has an achievement that for the longest time would get manually credited by the dev if, at a fitting moment in the story, you bake an actual cake and take a picture with it in front of the monitor at that scene.
Was time to bake something again, anyways. 🎂

Carighan, 30 days ago

Sad trombone.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Betteridge’s law says the answer is ‘no’.

The general rule against youtubers too full of hearing themselves talk says ‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, not going to click that link either way’.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Yeah exactly. It’s quite likely they didn’t really blacklist The Verge anyways, just won’t send them invites any more for this particular game. Best kind of marketing is hype marketing, and this is how you fuel the hype.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Have you tried it? Genuine question, since we’re free to talk about it I’d love to hear why you think it’s mediocre, so far all the talk is always hype so I’m eager for some less positive takes.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Bullshit. The actual reason will be that this is far better marketing once you’re at a level of Valve. Shit gets leaked anyways, might as well make it intentionally so to fuel the hype cycle.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Oh interesting, so it’s not at all like early Overwatch 1 which was way more FPS and was only compared to a MOBA because of the comparatively mild focus on abilities?

That’s both good and bad to hear, but yeah, sounds like overall it has a long long way to go.

Carighan, 1 month ago

I mean, why not?

People are paying for it, so they clearly enjoy it?

Carighan, 1 month ago

It’s weird how little identity this has now, visually. The previous design was quite striking, now it looks easily confused for something else.

Maybe this works better with screen readers though since it’s just black text on white background in simple text blocks.

Carighan, 20 days ago

Yeah although, within reasonable boundaries this is now on the side of the consumer:

• Reviews exist and we can wait for them.
• Even in cases where they intentionally tricked journalists and reviewers by giving them special copies, we got a 2h refund window on Steam and similar services on say GOG nowadays.

Can still be circumvented by shady publishers, sure, but it’s getting more difficult to trick customers slowly.