Carighan

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

I play it in that async multiplayer they support with friends, both against each other and semi-allied with bots.

It’s cool. I love the variety, I love how that works against the sameyness these games usually develop, and it has just enough techncial qualities like pretty graphics and okay netcode to never get in my way. Plus hey, async MP! Always a huge plus to me, and sadly way too rare overall.

I can see it become boring if one players singleplayer generated maps religiously, but I got Against The Storm to scratch that itch, personally.

As far as the gameplay goes, it’s mostly the usual 4X fare, of course. Differences, if you’re not used to Age of Wonders games:

• Magic is strong, to put it mildly. The games take their inspiration from the old Master of Magic game after all, and as such leader-cast spells can wildly swing battles even when your units are outnumbered and outteched. Likewise, strong summoned units and stacked buff spells make terrifying army stacks even out of tier 1 units (in fact there’s a spell tome specifically for that!).
• The way you learn more magic makes for a nice little variety. You get 3 spells offered to research, you can reroll but it’s costly. Every few researched spells you get to pick a new tome of spells from which to research, and every few tomes you get to advance a tier and pick higher-level spell tomes.
• From tomes + some other effects you have to “unlock” certain empire upgrades, and unlike other games some of these upgrades are instead instant effects, so at the right time they could swing things wildly (like healing all your units on the entire map to full).
• There’s less focus on building your own empire - as you can only have 3-5 cities max anyways - and more on each city expanding in a huge sprawling network of influence and vassalizing more cities you take over, then getting tribute from them and hiring units with a resource specifically for that + empire upgrades.
• Random encounters and events with decisions are way more common than in other such games. They’re not terrible meaningful 90%+ of the time (though cool ones do exist!), but it’s neat to get something shown so often, and sometimes you have replies that are unlocked by your specific empire attributes and setups.
• The race/faction creator is something I’ve not seen that way since Master of Orion 2, not even when Endless Space 2 tried to go wild with that with later patches.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

That’s news? If I spend that many billions of more people to fire, I damn well expect that my monthly revenue goes up. They’ve got to have some dedicated whales paying for lootboxes, after all.

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I mean at least they’re also removing managers at Blizzard and Activision with the layoffs. That it hits workers, too - sadly utterly expected 😑 - but at least MS isn’t above letting useless and redundant managers go.

(edit) Ugh, sorry. I should have added an explicit /s, it’s not as obvious as I thought it’d be. 😔

Carighan, 4 miesiące temu

Swarm networking! Booyaaaah!

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I’ve got to be honest, that game was so bad, I’d barely call it a game. Atmosphere was nice, but that was about where it stopped.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I was genuinely checking whether it was the Onion when I first saw that headline. What the fuck, Rocksteady? 😅

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

As if modern Overwatch has much it can lose from a COD-centric influence. 😅 That game has nosedived so hard unter their internal pressure to prioritize e-sports and pro gamers above the current playerbase which at the time was a widest-net casual playerbase that made friends of all kinds play Overwatch together.

Good for the devs, seem to have worked out and secured their jobs at lea… oh. Well fuck Overwatch e-sports then.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Not only that, the combat was also utter jank.

If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.

If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.

Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s in fact three games:

• Shadow Tactics is set in feudal japan. This one has an expandalone.
• Desperados III then takes the game to the wild west.
• Shadow Gambit goes wild and gives us a magic ship and an undead pirate crew. It has two rather pricey expansions, one bringing in a character from the first game. It also has a hidden character to unlock after you beat the game, which is kinda cool.

You can notice how each game perfects the formula, but they’re overall extremely similar. I would very much recommend the last one if you have to pick one, as the focus on magic allowed them to go truly wild with the character abilities. Gaelle shooting corpses and partymembers around with her cannon is a particularly fun one.

Sidenote: Far as I can tell they didn’t go bankrupt or anything, they just … stopped. They’re done or so. Did the same concept three times, happy now, works for them.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Isn’t a Rogue-lite just a very small or indie sneaky game? :P

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

We can also just call them all rogue-likes. Everyone intuitively understands there’s a huge space in that by now, and the games can wildly differ. It’s fine. We know that no two MMORPGs are alike, and now two rogue-likes are alike.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah no shit, though. Nintendo is excessive as hell with this, and Pokémon in particular is a franchise they protect like nothing else. Is it still the highest-grossing IP overall? No wonder they are onto anyone using it.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

these companies don’t have the gall to complain about a lack of manpower or expertise availability a few years down the line

Of course they will. It’s all driven by investor money and C-suite bonuses, the rest of managed just bends over and pulls down their pants. If the investors think gaming is hot, everyone will desperately hire. If they are meh on it, everyone shuts down.

You might think this sounds like an unhealthy company model to let investors run everything like that. And you might be right! But we also created a system where the people making these decisions are monetarily involved with the investors, not opposed to them. Hence what hte investors say goes.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah it’s weird how the C-suites never have to personally bear responsibility despite being the one either making these decisions or fostering the environment in which these decisions are made.

How come companies are allowed to fire even one employee before the decision makers are bled of all money they have? Shouldn’t the life-ruining start with the ones who are responsible?!

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Oh no, we might be making marginally less profit than we told our investors we’d be making, and none of us have the backbone to just tell them that you know, sometimes you gamble money and get little in return.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

That is entirely not an excuse to be an arsehole to someone you don’t even know and for all you do could be your own sibling. The point exactly, btw.

It’s how toxic people “justify” their own toxicity so they don’t have to realize they’re the asshole.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

None of that excuses being toxic around the game though.

At most, it excuses just refunding it. And then never interacting with it or the community around it ever again.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Now it’s just, I guess, reddit, but worse because the toxic voices are louder in a smaller echo chamber.

Yeah I noticed that, too. All of Lemmy in fact. It feels like engagement is up, but only in select echo chambers of being angry about something.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

This is the very definition of gas lighting.

Devs: “Geezus folks, stop it with the harassment.”

Lemmy: “This isn’t harassment, you’re just making it all up!”

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

What you say actually mixes two quite distinct things, I feel:

Video game studios are not respecting players. It fuels hate speech.

I disagree with this, and quite harshly so. Independent of what companies do, and some of the releases very much fit the “not respecting” part, that’s not in any way, shape or form an excuse to be abuse to some poor support or outreach rep who has to read your shit. They’re just doing their job, they haven’t even gotten to the playing-a-video-game-in-my-leisure-time part of the day yet.

Most social media are also optimized for hateful speech because it increases engagement.

That is however quite true, and leads to an extreme echo chamber enforcing and reinforcing negative and abuse comments. It gets clicks, which is ad impressions, so it gets lifted to the top.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Eh, for game-released-in-a-disappointing state there’s always two points for me:

1. A personal thing, learn to not buy day 1 or even before. Let other people do that, then avoid ever putting yourself in a frustrated position by simply never buying the broken/unfinished game to begin with. Money - and time - better spent on other hobbies, or well, other games.
2. On a specific level, I always feel that just saying “I’m sorry, but because of X, Y and Z I don’t feel like the game is in any shape to be worth the money asked” and then refunding it is the only real proper feedback to go about it. Voice your reasoning, then undo the purchase to withhold the money. That’s more than enough brain space wasted on an unfinished game you’re not enjoying, anyways.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Of course, but that’s not on a personal insults level, after all. It’s on a professional, “product unfit for purpose”, level. As part of a commercial transaction, a goods purchase.

Hence your course of action would be:

1. Refund the product.
2. As deemed necessary, avoid that brand in the future.

But just like when your power drill doesn’t work, calling the helpline then verbally abusing the call center person gets you nowhere, and just ruins someone else’s day who had no say in the product disappointing you. And you didn’t really improve your own situation either, you feel briefly improved by being able to vent but you are still sitting on having spent X money for an unfit product. At least get that money back, that’s some genuinely action being taken.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Is it me, or did the graphics get downsized quite a bit from earlier material?

Probably had to finally optimize for performance at least somewhat?

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I think being stuck in Apple Arcade was it’s big problem, basically.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Hrm, fair enough, although I will say for it’s nearly opposite.

I expected it to be pretty meh, for those very reasons.

In practice, it makes me realize that when I play city builders, only a brief moment in an empty map is actually interesting to me, then it’s just hours upon hours of prettification and optimizing for the sake of optimizing, so here something gives me just an endless randomized sequence of those beginning minutes and eshews the parts after that.

But I can very easily see why someone would dislike it, after all I thought I would, too.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

That was a really cool surprise the other day, yeah. So many devs, even good ones, update way late on GOG, these here do it perfectly in sync.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I wish you had kept the original title, because that has significantly more content than yours.

Anyhow, getting back to:

Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get ‘Comfortable’ Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off

That’s hilarious, because as usual Ubisoft is blaming anybody but themselves. Subscriptions did take off. GamePass is quite popular overall. Not owning your games is completely normal, look at how many games everyone has on platforms such as Steam et al.

It’s just that Ubisoft’s absolutely shitty subscription for their absolutely shitty games, Ubisoft+, has not taken off, because surprise, you only get Ubisoft’s shitty games with that, not all kinds of games like on GamePass. It’s almost like they’re trying to jump the enshittifcation-process that video streaming sites were and still are going through, jump straight to single-publisher services with tiny catalogues, then wonder why nobody would want to pay for that when the service where you get games from ~everyone still exists as a competing service.

It’s just an exec trying to justify why they want their bonuses despite failing to meet targets. And blaming gamers, of course. They’re always at fault, never the bad execs making stupid decisions that completely fail to capture the amrket.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m quite comfortable not owning Ubisoft games, and have been for years. It helps that other than one Switch game that I have physically, they haven’t released anything really worth purchasing.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Honestly I don’t think the addicted Assassins Creed and Far Cry players care. Too addicted to the endless gameplay loop.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Bit sad they aren’t exploring removing the - IMO unnecessary - broadness of the item + skill-up system for something like the talents HotS had (or even better some sort of small branching talent tree), just to keep evolving the genre.

But I can also understand it, since well, they have an established playerbase and this is probably more a refresh than a “true” successor.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

This always makes me wonder how their operation can be so pricey.

It sounds more like their human resource cost is just absurd, not that their underlying technical operation is the problem. Plus assuming they did any calculation on the ads at all, their server usage should pay for itself as more load means more views means more ad impressions.

But what does Twitch need X-thousand people for if they still cannot do anything about curating content with those endless people? All I see of them is someone writing flip-flopping statements about whether nudity on stream is okay or not, always depends on which month it is it feels like.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Or just buy Onlyfans. 😅 For Onlyfans it’d solve their payment issues: Amazon allows using it for payment, and Amazon is big enough that Visa and MC cannot just threaten it.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I’ll be honest, if the solution is Twitch, then I don’t need my problem solved. That is, compared to Twitch, I don’t need an alternative. Not having Twitch is a solid improvement over having Twitch. (kidding of course, but all too often it feels like that with just how bad the technical aspects of their site are)

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I actually liked Beyond 2 Souls, too. Didn’t age well at all especially with the naked model allegations and all, but playing it at the time there were some intense moments in there.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Or maybe I am some kind of supercop… 🤔

Disco: Elysium really is an absolutely fantastic game. Hard to describe how much it moved the goal post for these games.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah what I was thinking, too. Someone stripped a bunch of long-deprecated old pipelines, but this is a nasty side-effect of it as the new pipelines all mandate that DRM being added.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Not all games need to be officially supported forever, tbh.

You can easily run your own server for it, so like UT99 or so, fans can form communities and play.

Basically, I’d rather them put effort into a Team Fortress 3, even though I know that’s of course utopian given we never got an HL3 either.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s not like they’ve stopped selling those. This is interesting on a philosophical level though.

This would be clearly illegal as a software. But what if the hardware includes it? How do you even detect that?

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

But it’s your hardware doing this? Are 3D-headphones illegal then, because of the massive benefit to aurally locating your enemy? Are hall-effect analogue keyboards illegal, due to the configurable much much shorter actuation distance? Etc, etc. Once it’s in hardware, it is a really interesting discussion where you place the cut-off.

You can’t even go "Once it has to actually know which game you’re playing, as profiles already work similar in gaming drivers, plus importantly most 3D audio is per-game optimized.

(edit)
And come to think of it, DLSS or FSR are also AI-powered frame-per-frame image analysis to add output to the existing image.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Man, when even IGN drags a game such as this through the mud, you know you didn’t do well. Ouff. 😢

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Why would I wan’t more MS bs, if I don’t need to run 3D Max, MagiCAD or some god awful DRM raped software on my system.

Ignoring your eloquent wording, you want Windows - from the perspective of a device maker - because it ensures the easiest access for your buyers.

That’s a non-trivial point that should not be easily dismissed. Virtually everyone games on Windows. Virtually all PC-bound games are primarily developed for and optimized for Windows. If you make a hardware device, and you do get to pick the main OS you ship with, making it Windows ensures both maximum compatibility and a smooth transition from their desk-bound gaming to their handheld for your users as the UX is the exact same.

Sure, to power users is a downside. But those are also the ones who will figure out how to run whatever OS they like on it, and they’re also a very small number to begin with. While the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs before it were okay as power-user-centric devices, if this device type is going to be truly mainstream in a post-Steam-Deck world, then something like basing them on Windows by default is a quite real considering for a device maker, and a very natural one.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

The Lenovo with its mouse-like input is still the most interesting to me, next ot the Steam Deck with its dual pad inputs.