Carighan

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I mean, cool, they’re finally replacing Geforce Experience, one of the worst pieces of software ever made.

But they’re replacing it with shit that commits all the same crimes. Locally run webserver hosting web interfaces and a website running in a packaged Chrome accesses. Instead of something utterly wild like oh I don’t know, actually building a piece of software not a web page!

Also it still commits the cardinal crime of letting 11y old me do the design and what I thought was “COOOOOL!”, instead of just, you know, looking like an app. In the design language of the OS. Which would be wild, I know.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

That is true. I will say, even with all the features dropped, this is a step in the right direction.

It’s a small one overall, but credit where credit is due, this shows promise. Just wish the underlying architecture were better, it’s still based on the packaged chrome thing.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

The specific casting bugs me:

• Budget Deadshot
• Old Nami
• Hit Bunny-Girl
• Box Wheatley
• Extra #1216 from the Mad Max set

It’s just… I dunno. Doesn’t quite fit the tone from the games. But hey maybe it comes out and is surprisingly funny in it’s braindeadness.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I AM SO HYPED! Preordered right away (like duh)

Why would you preorder while you don’t know whether it even runs on day 1? Especially with From, where the main game had serious technical flaws initially, too?

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Fair enough, tbh. A little bit of hype is always nice.

I struggled a fair bit. Performance hit me hard with really bad stutter in particular during some early boss fights, I also had weird CTDs after the first patch, and of course it has the good ol partially-hardcoded key bindings were trying to use alternative input schemes such as cursors, ESDF or truly alternative input devices is a no-go. Though these days I find it difficult to criticize any specific game for that, I hate how ubiquitous this problem has become. Like CP2077 still has it after so many years, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora has it, etc etc.

Oh, and one big one I just recalled: The online would disconnect, but without telling me. This wasn’t always bad, but the game would not realize it’s no longer online, so sometimes it “stalled” trying to check something online. Never found out what caused that, it was gone after some patch. Long story short I waited a fairly long time, then played it after a bunch of patches when it was mostly - sadly not entirely - fine. And loved it. :)

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

incompetence and thoughtlessness shine through absolutely everywhere, and nothing works the way it ought to.

I mean the website also feels quite amateurish, as does the art-design. It’s not bad for an indie game, but it seems to want to be so much more.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b8da799c-7f67-4893-b275-f8ec129154af.jpeg

Interesting, but the implementation feels a bit meh. This implies traded items are sub-par, right? Since you get better items if you join the faction that causes them to be non-tradeable.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Should note that AFAIK there’s no confirmation that their project was in fact an actual Disco Elysium 2 (instead of a spiritual successor or something), and neither do we know whether a DE2 is not being worked on, just without people that made the first game.

Of course, it really does not bode well for any such game, but ever since Life is Strange 2/Tell Me Why vs True Colors where the former DLC-studio made a far better mainline game than the actual company making them managed, I am being more careful with considering a game “ded” just because the people involved with the game left.

🤷

To focus on the more important part: People got laid off. Which sucks. Hard.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah I thought the same reading that.

Even in the very game, CP2077, as impressive as it can be, it can also be just as disappointing. It’s still a nice technical marvel, but it’s not at all the gamechanger it wanted to be.

And there’s games such as A Plague Tale Requiem where the baked lighting looks flat-out better in most scenes than the raytracing, since unlike the “realistic” raytracing they hand-crafted it to be unrealistic but fitting for the tone and atmosphere of the scene. So I turned it off again.

I’ll be honest, so far the only game where RT universally made me go “I’ll leave that on, that’s awesome!” is Riftbreaker. And it has a comparatively minor effect there, but at least a purely positive one (CP2077 I prefer at native rez over RT + DLSS which gets a weird pseudo-blur even with carefully tweaked resharpening, it’s just part of how it renders I think as other games don’t have this issue).

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Ah, it’s good someone is looking out for the poor poor shareholders. Just earlier I saw a long line of them at the unemployment office, begging for food from passerbyes, destitute in their poverty. /s

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I mean I do blame the consumer. Specifically for not voting in harsh consumer- and worker-protection laws curbing corporate abilities.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

It’s such a shame that the OW1 discussion about loot boxes went nowhere in regards to giving ingame gambling the same legal framework as IRL gambling.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Well, I’m of two minds about that.

To a healthy person, the current system is pricier and more aggressive. Things are constantly being shoved in your face, but they’re all purchase-only, and 20€/skin is just absurd.

But, I disagree that it’s more predatory. To a vulnerable person, the new system doesn’t elicit an addictive response, which loot boxes due to their gambling nature do.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.

The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.

And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

As a Xenoblade fan, I call BS.

What a bunch of jokers!

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Hrm, tricky.

If I had to pick one, Zenos from FFXIV. Incredibly overdone - even in a japanese-game context - hero foil, always used at moments where his presence doesn’t fit the tone and interrupts an otherwise consistent tonal progression.

He among other things wastes much of the catarsis of the story’s ultimate ending in Endwalker by adding a 6-10 minute incredibly boring battle with a ton of exposition for no reason right in the middle of it.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

How would that work? Considering I mean that past studies have always shown that this doesn’t work like that for kids learning things from fictional works.

(nevermind that there’s no way they’d have a gun except in some really ass backwards countries without any gun laws)

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Having now had firsthand experience with this, I’m very happy I didn’t buy it myself. It is so soulless. And the characters feel nothing like their inspirations, while they are distinct, their distinctions just aren’t between Harley Quinn and Captain Boomerang and so on. They’re just “random asymmetric abilities we tossed in”.

Ah well, GaaS ruins another in-theory solid idea for a game.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Bit unfair, because when compared to Terry Pratchett, just about everything else gets tossed to read more Pratchett. 😅

(not that I disagree, Pratchett is best)

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I would - and I hate my saying this - rather recommend Avatar then. Yeah it’s a Ubisoft game. I know. Yeah, it needs a beefier machine to actually look really pretty.

But oh my fucking hell is it pretty when cranked up. And it helps the generic open world gameplay a lot to be this awesome looking. Fun to just wander around and take in the scenery, even when you leave the jungle areas and go to the plains and see the wind-swept grass and all.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Not the person you asked, but for me personally to rate some open world games:

• Hogwarts: 4-5/10. It’s pretty damn bad IMO, beyond the fan pandering.
• Avatar Frontiers of Pandora: 5-7/10, it’s a slightly worse Far Cry (which is already damn tepid) but looks insanely pretty which makes it a good braindead time waster.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Originally 2/10, laughably underdesigned and so buggy it felt like industry-criticizing sarcasm. Nowadays 7/10 if including the expansion, still quite buggy but not in a bad way, and the redesigned combat and character systems feel artificial but pretty fun. City still too dead and underdesigned, sadly.
• Skyrim: 6-7/10, damn impressive at the time, but only briefly as the game was shallow as all hell, even in its best moments. Still impressive but it’s all on the mods and hence the players, not the game designers.
• Witcher 3: 8-9/10, essentially same design flaws as modern CP2077, but given its fantasy world suffers much less from it, of course the empty countryside is, well, empty.
• Subnautica: 10/10, amazing horror vibes, good progression, not too open and not too confined, focus on exploration.
• Outer Wilds: 10/10, completely open and pure exploration, reductive game design done perfectly right.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Azkaban is not based on platform but house, join Hufflepuff to see it.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

No like… it feels pretty obvious they weren’t that way originally, if that makes sense? That this got changed after the game was already out for a while, this wasn’t how it was designed at first?

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah I don’t think his daughter is that hot on allowing a lot of people to do stuff with it. Last year’s animated Maurice movie was about the only thing in a long time, I think?

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

This just feels absurd. That’s a high entrance fee, in particular for any smaller team.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

An The news itself? What do you think about those? 😜

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Still in early development, probably not that suited for a kid. The bespoke and enclosed experience of Minecraft would be better, assuming you can turn the shop off or limit it in some way.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I got that information from the official page, which lists features implemented vs missing.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Oh sure they’re people. Otherwise there’d be no legal basis for jailing them and throwing the key away, so that’s an important aspect.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

me, looking up from wiping with SOIAF What?!

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I just realized it’s Laura Bailey who voiced her! 😮 The Laura Bailey. Jaina Proudmoore! Wow!

There was a time window around 10-15 years ago where it felt like not a single AA-AAA game released where she didn’t have a voice role in. Absolutely legendary talent!

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah the game as it is now is fantastic. It’s still mostly a painting simulator IMO so I never expected the playerbase to stick around as so little of the time any one player spends in the game is spent on actual playing. s😂

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

It might just be in-context. For all I know it’s a quite solid live service game now - unlike in the previews, which were truly terribly bad and laughable.

But that’s the thing, it’s still a soulless and styleless and barely suicide squad live service game. But the bar for those is so low overall, this might be quite good in comparison, so if you enjoy the near-endless time investment and this is your genre of choice for those, this might be a good fit for you. Personally I have FFXIV for that, so eh, not really interested at all. 🤷

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Watched a few reviews now and … it seems very disappointing. Some good ideas in there, but the characters aren’t who they are, guns are all anemic and samey stat vessels, enemy variety is inexistent, and the core endgame loop is boring and clearly just exists to sell you mtx.

What a shame.

At least with the tepid reviews (60/100 at time of writing) plus the low player count, there’s a good chance this’ll not be long before it is put out of its misery.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

The two games are entirely different genres.

The first is an absolutely phenomenal coop FPS. While this one is a single player vampire survivors clone with the characters and theme of DRG.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I don’t get this?

Is it just combining tags to discover new tags, and placement of more than 1 has no effect?

… 26 minutes later and I’m still clicking. SEND HELP!!!

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Hrm, that’s tricky. I suffer from the same, if I knew how to overcome it I bet I’d play more 4X games.

Somehow it works for me here, I guess because I mostly play it in MP, and mostly async. Means I never spend more than a few minutes on a single match at a time.

If city building is also your thing, check out Against The Storm, a really clever roguelike take where you only spend 30-60 minutes or so on each village you build.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah same. I disagree with a whole lot, but it’s refreshing to see that perspective, and in a lot of ways that tells me much more how the rework is (knowing the base game) than the more “positive” reviews.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I’ve finally got and sat down to play Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

And I had not played since around release when I beat the game. I will say this: If this game had come out in this state - including the content from the xpack - I would have loved it. It’s still buggy and janky, but little enough to be funny instead of grating. All the new interactions they added like romances visiting you is amazing and adds a lot of details and atmosphere, and the new story being far more on-rails helps so much in establishing and keeping tension.
My one big criticism I’d still have is for how much the game sometimes struggles against it’s underlying design. The whole map being a city feels weird, because like the countryside in Witcher III, vast areas of it feel dead and empty. Luckily with the xpack being centered on the very dense and compact Dogtown, that is largely solved for the new content.

8/10, would recommend if you enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

But doesn’t that just move the same point?

Why is the board not held accountable for fostering the atmosphere via pressure on the CEO then? So the buck ultimately passes to them, they had every chance to rectify the situation, including replacing the C-suites if they don’t think the current ones are fit for the job?

I know, they just think of the shareholders and their pockets, but that’s my point: If you get money when your decisions make the company more profitable, maybe your decisions should lose you money when they do the opposite.
And specifically, I mean long-term. Not just based on share-price. You meddled with the company. If it tanks, you held X% of their money for Y% of the time, that’s how much you’re in the hole for now as your decisions were ultimately responsible for that percentage of the total decision space cash the company ever had in its time.

Plus, I don’t think that excuses CEOs from having 0 integrity. Yeah they could get voted to be replaced, but that doesn’t excuse it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as an analogy, soldiers are supposed to refuse inhuman orders, no? Just that the board tells them to ruin 1900 people’s lives doesn’t mean they get a clean bill for the moral implications of being the one to pull the trigger on that.
Pluuuuuuus… isn’t it the CEO who would make the decision to take a company private again? So they could always reverse course if they mind the shareholders meddling too much?