Carighan

Carighan, 2 miesiące temu

Yeah but they give you so little money compared to investors and shareholders. 😅

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

jobs will be cut at Creative Assembly

Ha! Can’t cut down on the QA and testing stuff if there is none! Smart thinking, CA!

Damn this sucks though. Happy for Relic that they escaped it, but Sega has been dropping the ball so hard lately, it sucks they take it out on their workers.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

What about its combat is souls-ish?

I mean I love Kena, but it’s more a game comparable to other classical action-adventures such as the Zelda games, not Dark Souls as it places very little focus on accurate dodging and judging when not to dodge, plus it has no gameplay loop built around repeated death.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

That’s assuming the person paying and the person receiving the input are the same people. Which in larger companies they most certainly are not.

Some manager or top-level “franchise designer” had the brilliant idea of asking streamers (of all utterly unsuited people!) for advise. Someone in the actual dev team then got all the input, and promptly decided that just asking a magic 8 ball would be far more useful and binned it. Sadly they did end up asking said ball, but eh, at least they ignored the streamer advise.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Oh wow that’s quite exciting.

Also am I wrong or is there the briefest of teasers about the actual big expansion they mentioned before right before the music video starts?

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

It can still be fun for small groups of players running their own game though? Like UT99 still being played a fair bit?

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Let’s not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077’s side quests are not that type of C&P’ed filler crap.

They are.

What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They’re incredibly good. That’s just a few ones sadly, but they’re big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I do. Enough games are coming out, this is getting skipped!

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I would guess the latter. That’s 10 guides a day. An even somewhat useful guide would take 5 days alone to research and write I would estimate.

What they want is the slew of spam-AI-generated “Here’s how to obtain the third rusty shortsword in age of calamity”-“guides” where it’s 5-10 pages of always the same overly verbose prose that’s totally not done by an LLM, no no. And there’s like 4 words of content in the whole article, about something utterly menial. And these guides exist for every single of 15000 items, in every single video game. Of course they do.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Primarily RockPaperShotgun, with some overall overview from bluesnews.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Instead of having to pay for the game’s premium battle pass or unlock that new hero through dozens of hours of gameplay, Blizzard will make Venture and all future heroes available to free for all players when they launch.

Wow, Blizzard actually taking a factually negative change back. No further modifications, no further rework, just a straight rollback of something that was a bad idea to begin with. That’s really a sign of the times changing, that always felt like something that is strictly forbidden at Blizzard! 😮

The new hero Venture is so/so though, IMO. Yeah their movement ability is awesome, but that weapon is so boring. And they hype it up so much, but it is just Sigma’s primary fire, including the ability to fire around corners and all. Unavoidable with so many heroes and not nearly enough niches for all of them that things will get doubled and tripled up, but it’s still disappointing to see something copied&pasted so directly.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

It is, don’t let the haters stop you from poking fun at Star Citizen. It’s a ridiculous thing.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Oooh, excited for this. Loved Ion Fury, hope this one can keep up!

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I think so. Which is more realistic of course. But also a weird way to out “random recoil”.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Even more fascinating, people are still chucking money at it. Because apparently too many ran out of other things to waste money on. Entirely.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah, maybe. But it’s also ridiculous, finish what you have instead of constantly bolting on scope to keep the sales treadmill running.

Of course, it’s a business first and foremost. And if that’s what people gladly pay for, no fault in pocketing the money I guess.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

There are plenty of jokes that look bad if you strip away the intention and context. They aren’t bad or offensive jokes they just seem offensive if you take them out of context and present them in a different way.

Yes, and as humans we are quite able to understand that we should not immediately suspect anybody who says something without any context, assuming in the situation we know we are lacking the content.

Tell me, what makes you look more suspect to a federal agency:

• The odd (frankly pretty bad, but then it’s by Shane Gills so that was expected) joke that lacking context could in theory be interpreted as a racial diss?
• Encrypting and hiding all your chat traffic?

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

No one has travelled further, toiled harder or learned more than Horatio. At least, according to Horatio!

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I no longer play this game and in fact I think it became significantly worse over time and in particularly with the conceptually good but utterly mishandled switch to OW2, but damn that’s a well-done trailer. Big props to the team who did that.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Why? The changes seem pretty sensible in regards to what was clearly above and below the power curve?

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I would also put Subnautica here - and personally say it is worlds superior to Stranded Deep but of course personal preference can give either hte advantage.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Personally I thought What Remains Of Edith Finch was boring as hell as none of the emotional points hit and the super-low-fi sequences made the game feel almost buggy and as a result ruined a lot of the atmosphere.

OTOH, I loved Firewatch, a great short interactive story about someone working in isolation and trying to get away from their life.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I sure hope so, as someone who grew up with gauntlet everything else would be an insult.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

This reads so weird.

The company is… just a consultation company? The kind of one you’re supposed to hire when working on a script including minorities et al to ensure you’re not accidentally getting something wrong or presenting it in a stereotypical or atypical way?

And for some reason they’re angry about someone listing games they’ve worked on, as if any kind of exposure would ever be bad for a consultation company that, by its very nature, usually works in the background and hence finds it a bit difficult to get exposure?

And at the same time, someone makes a Steam curator list because they’re somehow pissed some devs are doing something devs ought to do, hire a company specialized in character writing instead of letting someone less experienced do it?

Do people really, in 2024, not have any bigger issues so they 're busty with this shit?!

(edit)
Ah, it’s a very biased “article” that clearly just wants to riff on the consulting company further as if they’re responsible for games being bad, not the devs actually making the games. I also frequently blame the visual marketing ad designer for the graphics driver crashes, aye.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

group offers diversity inclusion consulting, whatever that means

It usually means ensuring a lot of small details. For example if you have a native american character, they’d make sure you do not randomly pick a culture that doesn’t fit what the character does or their background, that you don’t show some non-native stereotypes, that you don’t idolize them like in stories unless your specific story calls for that, etc etc.

You’re supposed to work with consulting companies like these when you don’t have people who can judge this on your own team, because it’s so easy to get so many details wrong. Of course it’d be easier if your team already knows how to do it, sure. But if you can’t, then it’s the right step to get someone external who can help you not make a joke out of a character. Again, unless they’re suppsoed to be a joke.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

If you read the list itself and the discussions about it, it’s clearly a call for harassment (the list, that is), not just a simple listing.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

what makes game great is the effort put in not whether it is woke/anti-woke

More importantly, the moment someone uses the word “woke” in such a context you already know that:

• They don’t actually know what they’re talking about.
• They are the problem, not the games they’re complaining about.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have “destroyed” by “forcing” a narrative or token characters.

That is to say, I don’t think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they’re consistent 😅), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They’d give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.

The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.

(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it’s the devs doing that, not the consulting company.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

The “article” is very clearly just a call to forther hate on SGI. It’s crazy to what lengths people go to justify their bad purchases, desperately clinging to whatever explanation they can cook up for why there is no self-blame to apply for having bought into the shit that is Suicide Squad. No no, you see, the game would have been awesome if not for that WOKE consulting company! If not for them this would have been a 10/10, I could not have known it’d be bad!

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

As someone who just played Sucker For Love I find nothing wrong with gender bent characters. Ln’eta would be supremely cross with me if I did.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Could you please stop shoving your political agenda into places where it doesn’t belong, like this thread?

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Hrm, depends. Usually in modern online payment systems it should be impossible for the debitor to have the CVC of the card and hence leaked information could not make actual payments from it, but it could spam the card’s number with bogus payments to continuously keep it being blocked.

In any case if you’re affected I would recommend asking your bank how to proceed, just to be on the safe side.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Nah, use Mastodon or Bluesky 😜

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah but as the shareholders get used to companies laying off workers to “cut costs”, any company not doing it sees their shares tank. Which is Not Ok™️, so they keep firing people so the execs can pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses over high stock prices.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

That’s probably the point here. They’re intentionally not showing anything and not saying too much because this is the launch game for the Switch U or whatever it’ll be called.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah it’ll now come with oodles extra merchandise you can buy. And the game world looks like it’s N64 now but with the framerate of the original Star Fox.

Carighan, 3 miesiące temu

If so, try Cassette Beasts. Actually blew me away completely unexpectedly, combining smarter combat, really neat pixel graphics, inventive monster names that are of course all terrible puns, and a really really great combat soundtrack that dynamically gets vocals when you fuse.

Only downside is that it makes modern actual Pokemon games look even worse by comparison.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

By itself, yes. GameStream is EOL. And this is said end, it seems.

Your replacement option is Sunshine, or switching to using a steam link setup.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Not for me, no. Sunshine is already the open re-implementation of the gamestream component of Geforce Experience.