Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah… Diabotical looked like a promising update to AFPS (which is what I’d say you’re describing), but it didn’t change enough of the formula (I blame the weapon design choices) and it launched on EGS instead of steam.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Crytek is working on Crysis 4 🙂

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

To be fair, in this case there is increased value because eventually the engine work requirements will be significantly reduced.

This isn’t rewrite everything, it’s basically remove a bunch of stuff and rewrite the rest.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Maybe, it might also be easier to reuse portions of the engine in Unreal Engine while using parts of Unreal (like its rendering engine) than you think though. Assets largely I’d expect to be portable or at least comvertable with a custom asset loader.

I’m talking a little out of my ass though, and neither of us is familiar with the code. Point being though, it’s a little different moving engines than rewriting a complicated web server (a project I have been a part of and would not recommend).

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

You can say the same thing about people that complain about Chinese junk and yet continue to buy it.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

That’s really cool!

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

There are new players… We just brought another on last month… It’s really not that bad. The new light stuff has actually been worked into a pretty nice onboarding experience.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Despite what others are saying, the game is fine (at least compared to its previous state/status)… They’ve made a lot of changes to improve the onboarding experience and remove pain points. They’ve made things less grindy and more engaging every expansion.

The last DLC just had kind of a meh story to it, “the discovery of strand.” The environment they used also wasn’t all that pretty or interesting. It wasn’t snow, it wasn’t a swamp, it was a minimalistic city-scape with some canyons.

That, plus increased pricing and over dramatization of the loss of the red war and foresaken content (which wasn’t even that good compared to the new stuff mind you – it was extremely short and grindy) has almost definitely caused the profit loss.

Not to mention, playlist activities still feel bland… Implement map voting and modifier voting, and make a higher difficulty playlist for PvE content. I swear once you’re caught up, it’s either stomp over everything in the same 5 maps over and over, or face the exact same somewhat challenging (or extremely challenging) encounter over and over for an entire week. They have all this content they could open up to high end rewards and mutators, but they don’t.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

There’s a couple here and there, it’s not like new players have completely stopped joining, but there’s not that many.

That’s typical when you hit market saturation/have an established game. Look at wow or RuneScape. The revenue comes from the people already playing your game.

The new light onboarding really was abysmal when I went through it earlier this year

You should’ve seen it before beyond light launched.

“Go shoot that, now that, now that. I’m so glad you’re back guardian. Welcome to the tower.”

My friends and I started without anyone to pull us through that mess, and we figured out what to do with Google and just clicking on things. We’ve since grown to a group of like 10ish, but yeah … Like newer people don’t really get what it was like before. It’s not great, but it’s gotten better.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

It sounds like the game’s next expansion has been delayed, and the game is being maintained by a skeleton crew while the rest of the studio focuses on Marathon.

FWIW, they have ~650 people even after the layoffs for destiny 2 alone. Hardly a skeleton crew. The content drops have been the same as they’ve been for years, seasonal content drops in-between expansions. There is definitely a lul period where there’s not new stuff getting released to give people a chance to catch up.

Competition. With few exceptions, good games always slowly bleed users as shiny new alternatives attract players.

There is some of this. I think there also just seems to be a general recoil of players at what games are costing these days. I’m personally fine with it, but I see what feels like infinite complaining about how greedy … basically every company that isn’t indie is being.

Realistically, I’d say it’s A) bad PR and B) a failure to make new gameplay loops that shake things up significantly C) a failure to fully utilize old content (there’s not a lot of reason to play old strikes, not a lot to encourage players to help others out in old story missions, etc – replay value is artificially neutered by making too many things curated which limits choice)

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Maybe, but we’re also seeing it in reviews in such high quantities, it feels like it has to be more than just kids. And like, sure I’d love if the games were cheaper, but they certainly haven’t gotten cheaper or less risky to make.

It’s frustrating either way… I don’t care if the game is $100. I want to know A) does it have pay to win mechanics or gambling (things I actually consider to be predatory – another word that is significantly over used right now), B) is it fun?, and C) how much replay value is it (i.e. should my expectations be set for a really great 80 hours or potentially hundreds – I’m okay with the former sometimes, but it’s nice to know what I’m getting into).

Lately with steam reviews it’s like “tHiS gAMe coSt toO muCh. Y u So gReDy!?!” Which tells me none of those things and just gives me old man yelling at a cloud energy about how things (particularly live service stuff) does cost money to develop and run beyond a 1 time purchase of $25.

Maybe you can relate … Maybe not …

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

Just wait until the Discord VC really starts to squeeze

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

I mean … Valve has an extremely reliable 2 hours or 2 weeks policy which is good enough for most games IMO. I’ve rarely needed more than that in terms of a demo to gauge whether I want to keep something or not

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

I guess that’s fair, but a lot of games also have “save anywhere” kind of saves where you can just close the game. Or they’re “there is no pause button” games.

I guess we’re just two kinds of gamers though.

Dark_Arc, 7 miesięcy temu

I largely agree with what you’re saying but I’m going to add… If you get to the point of release and you’re off 300% and not 15% … you screwed up.

There definitely aren’t easy answers to these kinds of problems but there are steps that should be taken along the way to prevent them. Getting to the end and then addressing any and all performance issues is a recipe for disaster.

You don’t want to be making major architectural changes at this point in the process. You want to be dealing with hiccups. Throwing hardware at the problem and “optimization” only go so far.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Devs are not as easy to replace as factory workers, EU and US/CA software talent is top tier. I’d imagine even factory workers aren’t so easy to replace these days.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Honestly I’m okay with this one, but it’s mostly because Activision Blizzard has great IP with some seriously awful management … and Microsoft actually has been doing much better in that department for games.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Exactly what I’m hoping for.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

I mean, it’s had plenty of success with its own IP… Heard of Starfield? Minecraft … and it’s nth successful Spinoff? Forza Horizon 5? Sea of Thieves? Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition? Age of Empires IV? Age of Empires XYZ DE? Fallout 76?

The only major “flop” I can think of that wasn’t corrected (at least so far) is Halo Infinite and … that largely seems to be a 343 issue. There’s also Redfall, but that was a new IP in an over saturated space … it’s not like they’ve stopped developing IPs, fixing games, and trying new things.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Microsoft even with Activision Blizzard would not have a captured market. Valve, Crytek, Sony (which now holds Bungie), Epic, Electronic Arts, CD Projekt Red, Take-Two, and Ubisoft are all still quite potent AAA capable studio just in the PC space … along with tons of independent studios (e.g., Ghost Ship Games, Shiro Games, Hello Games, Re-Logic).

The Microsoft internal doc leak said they’re mostly after King Games (mobile games) anyways. I’d wager at worst Microsoft will let the traditionally Activision & Blizzard studios do their things… at best they’ll clean up the executive teams and let the devs “play” a bit more with the IPs.

Mojang has flourished under Microsoft.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Yupp…

• store.steampowered.com/…/Call_of_Duty_Warzone/
• …steampowered.com/…/Call_of_Duty_Modern_Warfare_I…
• store.steampowered.com/app/2357570/Overwatch_2/

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

Go look at Fallout 76’s reviews, it was unpopular at launch (IIRC) but it’s doing very well now … and that’s the point, they kept the lights on until the majority of players were happy.

Minecraft has had several games derived from it, that were entirely different games set in the Minecraft universe.

Microsoft bought Bethesda 3 years ago. To say that they had no ability to influence and/or didn’t take a risk on Starfield is … lazy at best.

And yes, they own Redfall as well, time will tell if they fix that one or it’s just a straight up failure.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

This isn’t great though:

Notably, Alm was hired at Bungie just five months following an IGN report on the company’s work culture. In it, over 25 employees alleged the company had a history of allowing toxic culture to fester, including racial and gender bias, with those who reported such instances to HR alleging their reports were frequently dismissed or even turned against them. Following this report and prior to Alm’s hiring, Bungie’s former HR head stepped down from her role. IGN understands from its sources that following its 2021 report, Bungie also hired a number of new HR personnel in an effort to address the issues from the article, amid some pressure from its new parent company Sony.

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

If you are okay with Vox Media Group, I’ve been pretty happy with Polygon. They even have RSS!

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

I haven’t really noticed that…? But, maybe that’s just because whatever’s being said “agrees” with me or isn’t in the articles I choose to read from them (?)

Dark_Arc, 8 miesięcy temu

I want Quake, DOOM, and Hunt Showdown to have a baby.

Some kind of mad, fast paced, extraction shooter with crazy weapons in a gritty dystopia. Maybe Bungie will come close with Marathon.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Maybe if godot gets bigger something like that could spew out of its foundation.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Man the thing I hate the most about fortnite is that it killed UT4…

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn’t really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m pretty sure they have the same refund policy as steam. They also do have a networking system (which I think even has interop with steam – the Bigfoot game tried to use it but it was very unpopular since it required steam gamers to link an epic account but it exists).

Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.

And yeah, steam streaming and card collecting aren’t really all that important to me in particular, but I get that some people really like them.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I don’t really think it is. Steam hasn’t really tried that hard to get developers to use their platform because their users already demand their platform. They’ve made concessions on their preferred way in a handful of cases with very large gaming companies like Activision.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it… Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped … as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) … AFPS is a genre that isn’t getting much love from consumers.

So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it’s not the reason it wasn’t picked back up. I’d imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they’re going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean most games can’t even bother to give colorblind people a slider or a palette of colors to change the red outlines and tints they put on things. That’s a way easier problem to solve than variable sized text in a UI.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

There was an old Gameboy Harry Potter game I really enjoyed that was basically you performing the major Harry Potter plot points (sneaking around, buying stuff, talking to people). The combat was kind of the Pokemon style turn based thing where each side had a health bar and so many moves. Very neat game.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I haven’t played many “open world” games, but I think this captures my general feelings for them.

Like, the new 343 Halo Infinite game’s campaign… it just kinda feels like wandering around a big map doing nothing in particular. I couldn’t get into it.

Compare that to what Bungie has been doing recently with Destiny … much more interesting, much less filler/go do this to keep you busy stuff.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

You mean we won’t have to buy ewaste electronics to play Mario Kart? Sign me up.

Realistically though, I’d bet on a “Mario Kart Mushroom Kingdom Racing” release (or something) that would just be a cross platform live service.

… and honestly I’ll take that any day over Nintendo, which I’ve given $0 in over a decade because I refuse to buy their ewaste. I would love to have their games on PC though.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

PC parts can be reused and resold until they’re irrelevant. Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).

Meanwhile, consoles do one job only, play games. If something breaks, more often than not you get an entirely new console; maybe the manufacturer actually fixes your old one (if they’re still working on it).

They also lose security updates and become opportunities for botnets to infect and exploit. No device should be used past its end of software life that’s connected to the Internet. Regardless of that, many people do continue to use old consoles and smart phones that are long past their socially responsible expiration date.

Beyond that, if someone has a computer capable of playing a game, to force them to buy a different piece of hardware is by definition unnecessary ewaste.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Window’s compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades… In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.

You don’t need to reach 100% to provide value.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

The Squeal of Fortune, replaced by Treasure Hunter.

But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best.

I really don’t know about that. They seem to do it so regularly that it’s been a borderline abusive relationship over the years. Back when the Gowers ran the company, things operated much more smoothly and particularly the pay-to-win aspects were completely absent.

There’s no other game I know of with a subscription, pay-to-win loot boxes, cosmetics store, season pass, and bonds. There’s also no other game I’m aware of that has overhauled its combat system to such controversy that it split the game in half (and seemingly most people play the old version) – the closest being Minecraft. There’s also absolutely no game where the developers regularly say “that’s engine work so we can’t do it”, when they own their own engine.

I still like RuneScape, but at this point I’ve completely given up on PvP in the game and anything resembling fairness. I just expect Jagex to do everything they can to try and entice me to give them more and more money for … ultimately … less.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep.

Agreed.

The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.

Yeah, I think the right thing to do would’ve been to make the wilderness a safe PvP faction vs faction area that’s basically a continuous version of one of those events.

I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.

Any code base can be fixed, it’s just a function of time and money. They can yell spaghetti code all they want, but ultimately Jagex is the one that allowed that to happen in the first place. It’s not an excuse to further gaslight your customers. It’s something you should take accountability on, and work to fix. Done right, having your own engine is an opportunity to do new and exciting things.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.

They might be doing exactly that FWIW. There’s some evidence Jagex is working on a “RuneScape universe” oriented game in Unreal Engine.

Still, that’s not the silver bullet that people often think it is. Rewrites are often far more expensive than originally anticipated and extremely risky as even if you intend to make the exact same game, there are often differences that come down to the underlying engine in how the game plays that can be controversial.

For context, I’ve been on a team that did a full rewrite of a large complicated C# web application in Ruby and I’ve also worked on several C/C++ “desktop” applications that have roots in the late 80s and early 90s. The former is more “fun” in a sense, you can make up for a lot of sins. However, I fundamentally believe that unless the language you’re moving from has serious fundamental issues (e.g. you’re insane and wrote a million line application in Bash), you’re probably better taking a hard look at your application and retrofitting new systems inside of the old application where you most badly need those changes.

Even in the “worst case” it’s in practice true that most of the code doesn’t need touched, it’s just some really intertwined portions that need revamped. You can often get away with making a new system that replaces the guts of the old, thus powering both the existing code, and allowing you to achieve whatever goal you had in rewriting in the first place (working faster, safer, more readably, etc).

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.

We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.

I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.

I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.

Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.

Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).

They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).

There was and has been consistent follow through.

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

In those Reddit threads almost everyone seemed like they had second hand information or it was just a meme that was constantly repeated.

Literally every conversation about Stadia

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Basically just memeing to death how bad is was… it actually had valve like store policies, really good latency compared to other cloud options (even now) to the point it felt local even on a shooter, false information that you had to pay a subscription to play your purchased games, etc

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m all for Godot getting better; that said, has Epic, Open3D, or Crytek made similar moves?

(I know Crytek isn’t much of a player currently, but as someone who’s been following them closer in recent years, it really seems like they got their house back in order)

Dark_Arc, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s a shame idTech is no longer released publicly. It would’ve been amazing to see what people could do with the beast of an engine that powered DOOM Eternal, especially modders.