Carighan

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Imagine if exclusives didn’t exist and people could just access games they would like to play. Siiiigh.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Of course they “reset” the workers.

Not the entire upper and middle management which would save oodles more money if they slim down huge portions of that, nevermind not impact their productivity (much) and actually “reset” the part of the company that is responsible for their current woes.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

The Steam Controller is one of the best pieces of hardware I ever bought. There’s something incredibly chill about playing strategy games not originally meant for controller on the couch. I also genuinely like fiddling with cool setups and radial menus for it.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

So a good year to use a static avatar and a readable user name is what you’re saying?

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Well to any large company, main activity/product X is only an annoying thing they have to deal with. Their true product is share value, just like their true customers are the stock holders.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

I wish they’d aggressively apply it to replacing middle-top management. The jobs that don’t add anything except a lot of money being siphoned off, anyways.

Carighan, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah there’s some oddities in how they mark devices compatible or not. For example my Lenovo Tablet seens Oxenfree I but not II.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s the only way they can ensure it works, I suppose. They might need to control specific cookies and reported supposed clients depending on plugins, and so a packaged in-app browser for the login is easiest. Playnite does the same thing.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah after using both Playnite is better but GOG works a bit better as a ready made experience tbh. Both are great!

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah im sad China is so far ahead of curbing predative monetization than my own country is, now.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

And not only AO, if it included the same required gambling-warnings other gambling system have to show every time they so much as mention their name.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.

Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I’ll be honest, this seems… okay?

Like a worse Dead Cells but with a pretty pretty art style? Combat seems so-so, on the one hand it has some interesting mechancis that clearly try to ape fighting games (as they say), but on the other it also seems simplistic compared to, well, again, Dead Cells. Although maybe that’s just the early parts.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah I’m playing that right now, and I’m honestly massively impressed.

It is utterly boring and rote, in a lot of ways. It’s a 95% Far Cry (as in, it’s slightly weaker than Far Cry mechanically, which I didn’t think was even possible) in the world of Pandora. Some of Far Cry’s mechanics like the camps didn’t translate as well as the devs thought they would, plus the enemy AI is just bullshit, but luckily the game is easy overall as your longbow is extremely OP.

But, on the flipside, fucking hell does this game sell “Pandora”. More so than the movies, even the first one for the time it came out. Walking through and flying over the jungle is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s not just the texture/model designers that deserve a bonus payout: The actual jungle design is superb, too. And the level + sounds designers also created individual setpieces (like the trip up the rookery) that create the perfect feeling in that moment and are really memorable.

It’s in a lot of ways extremely well done. It’s also by Ubisoft and is a Far Cry reskin, which sadly massively limits how good it can be overall. I wish they had let the designers run wild and create their own thing. But it’s still an impressive game and far better than I thought it’d be, even if it’s all show.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Lae’zel and Shadowheart

This feels a lot more like the author is upset by the way these two were done, and is in turn projecting that upon “other gamers”.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Sure, but I’ve also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.

I’ll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it’s still easy to accept “Oh it’s because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!” as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it’s actually happening.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I would add another thing to this I wish the author would talk about instead of immediately projecting onto their own prejudices: People generally prefer the “good” option in games.

And I don’t even necessarily mean whatever the game calls Paragon-vs-Renegade. I mean the fact that for a game where you recruit characters to your “camp”, naturally losing characters feels like a fail state. Like you messed something up. As a result, players will intuitively lean to options that present the least “bad outcome”, in this context meaning the less often NPCs leave your camp the better. Recruiting someone is a victory, someone leaving is a defeat. The games present it as such, so it’s no wonder players err towards wanting everyone there.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Of course, I’m not saying that it cannot be the case, but it’s also not something I’d leave just standing.

Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:

• First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren’t just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the “Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they’re unhappy”, it’s difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there’s 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn’t even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
• And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.

Again, totally not saying that it’s not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. “Gamers” is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I know she’s supposed to turn good (maybe?) in sequels, but, hey, you’ve got to sacrifice someone at the end of 1, because cheap emotional engagement trick.

Yeah but that’s the other thing, that’s how you get gamers to let somebody from their group go: You force an obvious “One or the other”-pick. I can totally see how we as consumers can more readily accept that than we can accept the very understandable part of Karlach leaving as that was not presented right in the moment you made the choice. It didn’t feel like there should not be any Option C at all.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I played it for a while between stopping EQ1 and starting WoW when that released. Fun game at the time, but the expansions took a lot away from the experience as they naturally muddled the idea behind it.

Still, an important stepping stone in the progression of MMORPGs, in particular to mass PvP.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m genuinely more surprised that it was still being sold. Wow.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Because they don’t have the cult of personality of Mr Kojima.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Interesting that they are still going at it. I had assumed that like many of Amazon’s gaming forays it had been quietly shelved.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Personally I would love if they made something based on FATE. I would have absolutely no clue how to do it in a CRPG, but I love the system for actual pen&paper.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Well…

• 15 million dollars
• "scale exponentially"

Pick one. 15mil is a brief sizzle in the modern market(s), tbh. Poof and its gone.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

True, although I would guess the central argument still holds water. Most of the “game” looks like an asset flip indeed.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Early Access is just “release”. Only the devs openly admit ahead of time the game is buggy and unfinished, and promise - as always - to fix it up and add the missing parts.

Often they do. Sometimes they don’t.

TBH it’s ultimately nothing but a shitty buggy release, but the honesty of making that known ahead of time buys a whole lot of goodwill. It should be the default, that any publisher releasing a game that is not finished - so most AAA nowadays - marks it as Early Access, openly declaring the unfinished part.

It’s also very different from a beta version, which is usually feature and content complete (otherwise it’s generally called an alpha). Early Access versions are often very early in the development process, they’re feature-complete-ish, but never or rarely content complete, usually just starting out on that. This works exceedingly well for games that need “just more stuff”, but can miss the mark on games that need underlying systems reworked as this ires the existing playerbase and splits it.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m talking to you Hello Games (No man’s sky), just don’t mess it up with upcoming ‘Light no fire’.

What messed up NMS was overpromise to a basically criminal degree. If this were a B2B-transaction, they’d have been sued to hell and back. There’s absolutely 0 chance LNF won’t suffer exactly the same fate.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Same, I got little enough gaming time, might as well play it once it’s in its best state and play something else before that.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m sorry, but gaming isn’t a religion. To me at least. I don’t out “faith” into developers or games.

I wait for reviews and check some videos and hey, if it looks neat I’ll buy it. If it then turns out to be crap I’ll refund it. And if the same studio or franchise has turned out disappointed or bad stuff before, I need to be more impressed by reviews before considering a purchase.

The only thing I’d buy on faith is a wedding ring for a church wedding, tbh… (And I’m not in any church , so chances are low 😛)

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

and they deserve the hate from the people

No meaningless dev of a meaningless video game is ever worth a witch hunt. As a consumer, you have better things to do with your time. Like in this case, digging around in your nose, watching paint dry, or pouring another coffee. All quality uses of time that aren’t the waste that is getting angry at these devs.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Sadly, legally, it ain’t the same.

That is important because in some jurisdictions “preorder” has legal implications and importantly, obligations for the seller. A kickstarter does not. Not yet at least, over in Germany there’s a discussion about whether crowdfunding is just a form of taking preorders (in the legal sense), which would grant customers the same legal protections then.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

You could cut the “2023” from that, and it’d be no less true.

I mean sure, this year’s ad-centric nature was particularly obvious, but come the fuck on, journalists/readers/whatever: Did you ever have any doubt, seriously, ANY doubt, that this is 100% ad-space? And if yes, how?! What part of this did you watch in what year that wasn’t just ad-space for publishers?

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

So little we know, but just based on her previous stuff I’m tentatively excited. Hope she gets to finish this and doesn’t have it ripped out beneath her.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Playing this now, the game is not bad at all, it’s just… massively disappointing?

It is just a skin over a Far Cry, with a lot of mechanics weakened to make space for the skin.

That being said, on the flipside, fucking hell is it the prettiest skin anyone ever made for any video game to convert it into another IP. Pandora comes to live like even the second movie could not achieve it, and walking between NPCs and through the jungle is utterly magical.

I would argue that if you get this cheap and you like Far Cry and in particular Pandora as a world, go for it. It’s not bad at all. But do not expect anything but a watered down Far Cry (which, granted, is an achievement in itself 😂).

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Damn.

This seems to be down to “do you like Ubisoft games” (the genre)? If yes, you’ll love this. If not, you’ll be bored out of your mind.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Wondering the same thing. From the aesthetics I was originally really excited about it, then it came out to tepid reviews and I was busy player other games at the time anyways so I completely forgot about it.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Embracer has truly advanced to the Extinguisher stage. :<

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Although I will say that by now the goalpost has long moved from 60 FPS and you really want to be aiming at 144 or more. That being said, without raytracing on - which is mostly disappointing anyways - there are some really high framerates achieveable by now.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Pretty good examples for how disappointing it is, tbh aye.

If you told me both sides were different settings of baked lighting, I’d instantly believe it. Sure, the RT looks like it is the higher quality one, but it doesn’t feel like a cyberpunk game with raytracing should “pop”. Good scenes are for it when driving around at night with wet streets. That gives the proper cyberpunk feel. But that’s about the only scenario where I’ve seen it truly work magic.

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

Ah yeah, definitely.

As someone who personally enjoys a told story more than a lot of directionless freedom (because I get bored after a few dozen hours, so I want the game to get its thing told and then I’m ready for the next game, basically) I of course enjoyed Geralt’s directed character more, but the two are definitely incompatible at a very basic level.

And honestly, none is inherently better, though I wish studios understood more readily just how different the underlying approach is. If someone creates a defined story then give me those fully defined characters. Give me a cool story through which I learn of them. With a few surprises. Make it like a book! On the other hand, if something is freeform, then go hard the opposite way. Make it sandbox-y! Allow me to create narrative myself through what I do, don’t hold my hand and try to guide me back onto rails.

(That is, the main story was just about the part I enjoyed the least in CP2077 next to the bugs, and I really don’t think V’s character fits the gameplay and what we players do in it very well. V is an interesting character, but not for an open world do-whatever-you-want game, and the game they created doesn’t fit a character that is supposed to have a specific design very well.)

Carighan, 6 miesięcy temu

As long as laws don’t constrain this rampant drive for short-term profit maximisation, and as long as laws permit the only truly valuable customer to be the shareholders and the C-suite’s own bonus programs, this won’t ever change.

Which in turn also already implies what needs to happen: Companies need to be prevented from caring more about the above two groups than the actual workers.

But this is difficult to pull off. The CEO (etc) should ultimately have the responsibility for the overall direction, but directly tieing them to the stability fo the workforce is tricky. It would be a way of doing it, of course. As in, loss of income of individual workers is directly judged against whatever payment/share program the C-suite managers enjoy, making them directly reponsible for not fostering an environment in which regular mass-layoffs are desirable.
Likewise, if shares automatically lost value whenever personel cost is cut (instead of gaining), firing workers would be heavily discouraged as it would decrease short-term profits and (correctly) flag a destabilizing event in the company.

All really tricky though, especially on an international level. But something ought to happen to keep this shit in check.