Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Ephera,

I believe, there was some special overlay on the XBOX to allow buying it directly ingame. Maybe Microsoft was involved there?

Ephera,

I’m using Simon Tatham’s Puzzles for nonograms.

It’s basically this webpage in app form: www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/…/pattern.html

It doesn’t result in a pixel art picture when you solve it, if you care for that, but the solutions do have contiguous regions.

Ephera,

cataclysmdda.org

It’s a roguelike in a post-apocalyptic setting with survival elements.

Ephera,

But it’ll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.

At first, I read this as if you needed to ingest a verification can before you’re allowed to make a purchase. But alas, it is the usual shit where you have to buy their fake money.

Ephera,

I don’t believe, they’re actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they’ve been busy developing Starfield since then.

As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like…

Ephera,

I feel like it also has to do with lots of games featuring elements of (or full-blown) violence as part of their regular gameplay loop.
Yeah, in Helldivers 2, you’re committing genocide for insidious political reasons. But in Pokémon, you’re committing genocide, because you’re a ten year old and your neighbor gifted you a pet.

Normally, the genocide part would be the very obvious red flag for something political going on. Instead, you need to be aware of why precisely you’re doing the genocide this time around.

Such genocide elements are usually also paired with fun gameplay (because violence is easy to translate into gameplay), and with a terrible story, so it’s understandable that people would skip all the story elements.

Ephera,

Hmm, that seems optimistic to me…

Ephera,

Well, as you can imagine, they don’t have quite the same marketing budget. Many of them market themselves on social media.
Personally, I keep up with gaming news anyways, so that’s how I’ll usually find out about them.

If you don’t do that, there’s occasionally indie showcases where it’s basically trailer after trailer for (already more established) indie titles.
Here’s a recent one, which had some good stuff, albeit lots announcements for the future: iii-initiative.com

I’m sure, you can also find a million articles and videos for “best indies of 2023” or similar.

Ephera,

Jeez, somehow she simultaneous says nothing and repeats herself constantly.

Ephera,

Nah, it’s an obviously false take, because as you say, why would all journalists agree on this?

XBOX has been underwhelming for a while and journalists will report on that, and they will focus on those bad parts and certainly also sometimes make it sound worse than it really is, because it brings in clicks.

That can make it look like journalists dislike XBOX, but causality is simply the other way around.

Ephera,

Does Arkane Austin co-develop Blade? Because in the article, it says that Arkane Lyon is (also) working on that.

Ephera,

My best guess is that Microsoft/Bethesda hired too many people during the pandemic, because gaming had a boom then. I do not know, if it’s a massive management failure or planned, that all these people would need to be laid off shortly after the pandemic-boom ends.

Ephera,

I did feel like they went a bit light on the racism in Skyrim, too. In Morrowind, you’d get called the N-word multiple times a day.

Ephera,

I mean, as I understand, that was the purpose of that company. His customers were not the players, but rather investors. They wanted lots of companies to be acquired. And they were free to pull out their money, if that plan stopped working, which they did, which is why Embracer evaporated.

So, task failed successfully, I guess.

Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability. (lemmy.world) angielski

Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...

Ephera,

A few days ago, I found out that one of the first games I ever owned, The Broken Land, was abandonware. I knew that it was generally considered a bad Diablo knock-off, but I had it remembered as at least the items and enemies being ‘meaningful’ in ways I don’t see it today anymore.

Lots of games just look formulaic and predictable to me now. Like, there’s a small and a medium potion, yeah alright game, I’m slowly getting too large of a health pool for you to not give me the big potions.

Well, I looked a little closer at the screenshots, and yeah, fuck me, the game doesn’t even try to hide its formulaicness. Health potions are literally just PNGs with a number attached, in variants, small, medium, big. There’s like 10 different PNGs of armor. And you’ll frequently have just one or two enemy types copy-pasted all over an area.

I guess, that is why people call it a bad Diablo knock-off. But having been a kid without expectations when I played it, that had me remember specifically that part as comparatively good, when it was objectively pretty bad…

Ephera,

I just remembered that Redfall also flopped last year, and that was supposed to be one of their two big titles, along with Starfield, which got overshadowed, to say the least.

Wikipedia tells me the CoD release in 2023 was “the lowest-rated mainline Call of Duty installment on Metacritic”, although it seemed to have still printed them money with essentially no work invested, so I guess that’s good?

Diablo IV, I think, did reasonably well in its niche. I remember it being a bit overshadowed by Zelda.

Not sure, if I’m forgetting any other major Microsoft/Bethesda/Arcane/Obsidian/Activision/Blizzard/King games, but yeah, that doesn’t look too great…

Ephera,

After reading that headline, for just a moment, I thought this was going to be Bethesda-style gaslighting of players…

Ephera,

Ah, yes, love the productivity boost of being in a voice call, but now with all my colleagues quacking in the background.

Ephera,

It’s called a “rhetorical question”. Glad to be of help.

Ephera,

I am aware, yes.

Ephera,

This year has been so strange, with seemingly a new hype title every two weeks or so. I wonder what lead to this…

Is there some sort of Indie Game Showcase? angielski

Started playing a few indie titles on PC, or at least titles that I would not normally be able to find without digging a bit (Sea of Stars, Hollow Knight, Garden Story, etc). Finding games that are made by smaller studios is a little (not much, but a little) harder than finding “Top Sellers” on Steam. I have tried Steam’s...

Ephera,

or even something hosted in person with actual demos like E3. Does anything like this exist?

The GamesCom in Germany always hosts the Indie Arena Booth, which has tons of indie devs densely packed in tiny booths, where you can play demos.

Since the pandemic, they’ve also had an online offering, where during the GamesCom, you can explore a virtual space with virtual booths, which will then also link to playable demos that you can download from Steam.

Ephera, (edited )

Personally, I found it particularly damning, how generic all of it was. They had a really interesting, diverse world with Morrowind. Then Oblivion was already a severe step backwards with relatively generic high fantasy. And Skyrim felt even more samey to me.

Well, and now with Starfield, I already start sleeping when I hear the name. What is it supposed to be? Astrology Astronomy Simulator 2024? Did really no one in that management meeting have a better idea for the premise other than that it’s Fallout in space?

To some degree, obviously it’s not supposed to be fantasy, so maybe they’ll actually be more creative with that, again, but with them now belonging to Microsoft, too, I just fully expect design by committee.

Ephera,

Yeah, I did mean astronomy. Stupid charlatans co-opting postfixes.

I did not play Starfield; only watched some videos about it. Which is why I didn’t want to argue that it had no ideas, just that it’s overarching premise is incredibly mundane.

But thinking about it now, I guess, even that is the case for their other games. Like, the actual Elder Scroll items are basically irrelevant. And ‘Fallout’ is just a generic postapocalyptic setting. Maybe it’s just that it’s a new series, so it hasn’t yet established an own identity, which gives the weak premise much more weight.

Ultimately, they don’t want a strong premise, because it’s supposed to be sandbox-like. That’s what their fans want. But for answering why you should play specifically Starfield, when tons of space games exist which have done a better job at the space bits, it’s just not doing them any favors.

Ephera,

Maybe they could clear up with another critique, if they introduce a solid NG+: That you can be the hero of everyone and a ruthless murderer, a thief and the guy who stops the thieves etc…

To some degree, I don’t want them to limit the player freedom here, because it is a role-playing game. Maybe you are role-playing as infiltrating the murderer guild. They can’t know.

But having no interaction between the factions at all, just makes the world feel less credible. Ideally, they pull off the BG3 and allow you to role-play an infiltration, while also punching you into the face, if your cover is blown.

Ephera,

Well, this isn’t so much about how much sense it makes, but rather that they had a cool idea and then ignored it. They could have used their freedom of interpretation to build a really interesting setting and instead, they kind of just built Italy.

Ephera,

New Minecraft developer isn’t either…

Ephera,

Yeah, the loneliness thing really resonates with me. I like to play this Minecraft-like game which doesn’t even have mobs. I live in a society all the damn time. It’s a form of escapism, to dive into this world, where I can just be by myself for a while, without responsibilities or the like.

So you prefer playing as another gender? (quanticfoundry.com) angielski

Well, as a guy, I’ve been asked multiple times why I systematically play games female characters in video games, to the point of skipping a game if I’m forced to pay a male one, with a few exceptions (I really liked Albus from Troubleshooters for example). Whenever there’s romance in a game, I’ll also take the F/F route....

Ephera,

If I have to stare at a butt all day, I would rather it be a female butt.

I mean, yeah, this is basically the reason for me, without the horny part. I don’t experience immersion in third-person games, and I don’t have a strong sense of identity, so I might as well have a character bobbing up and down on screen that I enjoy looking at.

Ephera,

Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?

Ephera,

Well, these genre names are rarely chosen intelligently. People were initially just saying that certain games are like Rogue, and that eventually just started to include more and more. In recent history, we’ve also had “Souls-likes” which started out similarly innocent.

I mean, sometimes there’s a relatively intuitive name that people standardize on, like “Jump’n’Run”, but that wasn’t really possible with Roguelikes, as people hardly knew which parts of the Rogue formula were genre-defining.

Well, and it’s also just a rather abstract genre. Even retrospectively, we could only really call it “Permadeath’n’ProceduralMapGeneration”.

Ephera,

Personally, I like games that are actually similar to Rogue, because they’re basically puzzle games, but long-form and less strict.

I do also enjoy the games that are less similar to Rogue, as with a permadeath mechanic, they still usually present a puzzle (rapid rise in difficulty vs. finding the right strategy to keep up with it), but aside from that, they’re generally just less puzzley.

So, personally I do find the distinction useful. But to make it extra clear, I usually just say “traditional roguelike” when I mean a game actually similar to Rogue…

deleted_by_author

    •
    Ephera,

    The supplier is funding this action.

    So, is Bethesda/Microsoft pulling it?

    Where is this screenshot from? Is it any kind of official information? Or is this a supposed leak?

    Ephera,

    Unless they do it on top of your corpse…

    Ephera,

    Strategy games also tend to implicitly have it, in that you can team up the weaker player with a strong AI player.

    Or sometimes there’s also fun options, like a map where you can place the strong player into the fortified center and they have to defend against three weaker players at the same time. That can serve as a handicap, but the asymmetry also just means that it’s less obvious and therefore less frustrating, who’s better.

    Generally, I’m in favor of having such handicap features, of course, but I feel like it’s even better when the game’s design is just naturally less brutally competitive.
    For example, in Gang Beasts, yes, you’re competing with each other, but the weirdo controls mean that it’s never entirely your own fault when you lose, and of course, everything is just less serious in general.

    Ultimately, such handicap features will break competition, too, because rather than the weirdo controls or your stupid AI buddy, you can then blame the handicap. I guess, it also helps to not take games too serious in the first place…

    Lastly, I’d like to throw in the objectively best handicap: Having to play cooperatively with the weak player.
    Just don’t compete with each other, but rather tackle a challenge together.

    Ephera,

    I don’t know, but there may be technicalities involved.

    I’ve heard before that FIFA was able to have them, because the loading screen games were close enough to their actual gameplay (it was a simplified scene where you could pass a ball between 2-3 soccer players, if I remember correctly).

    Well, and then there’s also many games where the loading screen is ‘hidden’ in a section where your character takes an elevator or squeezes through a narrow path.

    Ultimately, what even is a loading screen?
    With a bit of a transition, you could argue that the minigame is actually part of the gameplay and it just happens to load things in the background.

    So, it could also be the case that Namco never would have sued anyone, because a court clarifying the applicability could cause their patent to lose all value, as then everyone can do it in a non-applicable way.

    I got to play Terra Nil, and here is my two cents on it (lemmy.world) angielski

    This year I was recommended Terra Nil, a “reverse city builder” as the developer Free Lives call it in the store page. From screenshots and what gameplay I did see of it, my mind raced to games like SimCity 3000 and the potential of destroying a run down, or decaying city and returning it to nature....

    Ephera,

    Well, it’s available on lots of platforms. Maybe the Android version isn’t working so well for people…?

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