I mean, what even is the point of winning a game? Ah yes, now I get to click through half an hour of dialogue and cutscenes, so that I can then not play the game anymore, because I’ve ‘completed’ it. Really, completing a game sounds like a scam invented by Big Game to sell more games. Like, oh yeah, we’ve made our game so fucking boring that players want it to be over with, so they can buy another of our boring ass games and play that to completion instead.
To some degree, it may make the player choice seem broader, as you can go full hero or full villain. In some sense, you can also go into the middle by kicking a puppy at one point and then helping an elderly lady at another.
But then, it’s also just hard to portray nuance. If the options are “pet kitty” and “punch kitty”, you know what’s what. But if it says “pet kitty” and “ignore kitty”, it becomes a lot less clear. Maybe the kitty does not want to get pet by a random stranger. You probably won’t be able to gauge its reaction from the character model to know what’s the right choice.
But you also won’t know what “pet kitty” really means. Will your character be gentle and back off, if the kitty does not appreciate the gesture? Or will they stroke that kitty until it bites them?
Yeah, I was gonna say: Oh, like most laptops then? If the hard drive is not encrypted, you can just boot a different OS to access what’s on the hard drive…
I’m actually aware of the difference, but would also argue that this difference isn’t that big. If you have to bypass security mechanisms to be able to use hardware as you please, that doesn’t sound to me like you actually own it.
The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.
Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.
I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.
I believe, you could in principle use any Blender model, although I’m guessing, they’d need to match in terms of animations. I’m not deep into either Luanti modding or Blender, so not sure how it works together, but here’s some documentation describing it: docs.luanti.org/models/using-blender/
Never played the Civ series before, but I’m totally into strategy games. Recently got 200 hours into Pennon and Battle and kinda burned out now. The Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era which I’m hyped for isn’t out yet, and there’s nothing else in the strategy genre grabbing me. Was about to jump into Civ 7 but saw the...
Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.
Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…
we would like to officially announce that this will be the [last] version labeled Alpha. We have already updated the versioning scheme (this version being 0.27.0) and we will progressively stop using the Alpha label altogether up to the next release, which will be Release 28.
Excellent. Whenever I told people about 0 A.D., I felt like I should add that it’s not actually an Alpha, especially with their webpage saying in various places basically “no, don’t look at us yet, we’re not ready yet”.
If they continue adding content, I do think that’s awesome, but what’s there is already plenty solid.
So this problem started back in 2023 as in still occurring. Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and Silent Hill 2 are some of the offenders. All these games were highly rated on gameplay and graphics...
I’ve heard the reasoning before that reviewers typically only have access to a, well, pre-release version. A day-1-patch is pretty common now.
So, as reviewer, you have to decide whether the performance problems look like they might be fixed on release day, and therefore whether you want to incorporate them into your review/score or not.
Certainly some food for thought, but I feel like people saying indies will save us are saying that as consumers and a lot more selfishly. AAA is struggling to deliver interesting games and indies are killing it, so you play indie titles instead. Whether those indie titles are actually produced organically and whatnot is kind of secondary for that purpose. The mass layoffs in AAA are bad, but in the New York Times article, for example, they’re mainly seen as indicative of the business model faltering, which should naturally give more room for indies. But yeah, that these studios are still horrendously profitable kind of shows that this may not be true in the end.
In the graveyard of live service games Concord may just be the biggest headstone, and that seems to have focused some minds over at PlayStation. Previously the noises coming from Sony were all about the importance of live service games to its future strategy, and it had announced plans to launch more than 10 live service games...
Yeah, theoretically the exact model for monetization isn’t as important, but many publishers are hoping to get players to pay subscriptions indefinitely.
Yeah, and they often launch with loads of systems where future content could be plugged in, but the actual content itself is typically bad or at the very least incomplete. The publishers try too hard to build a platform rather than a good game…
It would certainly be weird, after their recent games were so story-driven. You can’t tell a good story, if you need to always keep the end open for possible expansions.
Fucking hell, man, with how many very publicly visible security problems they had last year, you’d think the stakeholders would be on board with doing security for a bit.
I could never get over how boring the gameplay of Infamous looked. Comparing it to a third-person shooter is pretty apt. Like, you’ve got these crazy lightning powers, but 90% of the time, you just use your hand buzzer to give folks a bit of a zap. Riveting.
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.
I’m more surprised that it even got offered there. There’s some legal hurdles to clear for selling in a new country, and I guess, one of their distribution platforms decided it was worth it.
I guess, the Vatican might not have a ton of laws, though…
Interesting. I almost guessed that variant, too, but figured it would be a bit too wild for a country to auto-adopt most laws that another country implements. 🙃
What I don’t like about the genre, is that I’m bad at it. 🙃
More seriously, I do find it kind of frustrating at times. Restarting ten times in a roguelike, no problem, because it’s always a new challenge.
But if I miss the same jump ten times, or have to retry the same platforming passage ten times, you’ll see me getting impatient, which means I’ll fail the next ten attempts, too…
There's no magazine on any instance that I see of such a community on the topic matter. To anyone not familiar, a patient gamer is someone who is immune to FOMO, doesn't get caught up or tied up with current modern gaming. Someone who doesn't care that they've beaten a game from 1996 and here it is 2024. Someone who doesn't care...
I’d say, I’m primarily a very low volume gamer, so I don’t play a lot of games, and if I do, I don’t play them for long. And that certainly makes it easy to look at the news of a game releasing and to think, yeah, that’s probably neat, but if I’m buying another game then it’d be Undertale or Baba Is You or such, and it definitely doesn’t look as neat as those…
Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...
Yeah, the easiest thing to implement is omnipotent AI. The code for the AI is executed within the game engine, so you have complete access to any information you want.
You can just query the player position at any point in time, even if there’s a wall between the NPC and the player. It requires extra logic to not use the player position in such a case, or to only use the rough player position after the player made a noise, for example.
Of course, the decision-making is a whole separate story. Even an omnipotent AI won’t know how to use this information, unless you provide it with rules.
I’m guessing, what OP wants is:
limiting the knowledge of the AI by just feeding it a rendered image like humans see it, and
somehow train AI on this input, so it figures out such rules on its own.
You see, the problem is that game publishers have been innovating hard…
…ly, so modern games are barely an improvement over old games, except in terms of graphics. In particular, they want to continue not innovating by re-releasing those same old games with new graphics slapped onto them.
If everyone could just play those old titles, then they wouldn’t need to play the new titles, which would be very bad, because it would mean game publishers would need to innovate.
Well, I’m at least not surprised. They didn’t achieve good face animations through technological advancement, but rather by throwing tons of money at the problem, i.e. hiring actors and motion-capturing them.
When it stops being your unique selling point, you’re not gonna get as much budget anymore, at which point it’s either scrapped or you might use worse equipment, worse actors and give the actors less time to practice and redo scenes.
In general, the problem with realistic graphics is that reality is your upper bound. It’s difficult to inch closer to it and it’s easy to regress when you don’t pay as much attention to some detail…
So, a few years back, I checked out this game made by a community of AoE2 fans.
I figured, I’ve played RTSs before, normal difficulty for the AI should be fine.
Man, never have I gotten my ass handed to me so quickly. The AI rushed me before I even had the thought of building defenses. It just slaughtered my whole village.
Anyways, I did enjoy the game after setting the AI to very easy and giving myself an AI ally. 🫠
The game is free, no strings attached, so here is your legally required ad segment: play0ad.com
I mean, trailers are going to pick the best-looking scenes. The comparison video linked in the article seems like it’s trying to be neutral and lots of scenes just look worse in it. I haven’t seen the actual game either, though…
Man, you almost feel bad for them, because clearly some effort went into this. It’s not like they just slapped high-res textures on and called it a day. You can tell, because that would’ve looked better.
But I don’t actually feel bad, because no one forced them to remake such a recent title. You don’t run that risk, if you remake something that actually looks bad in the first place.
Yeah, that’s fair. I assume whomever headed this remake steered it into this direction, because they also liked it better that way. I also know some people find graphical fidelity a lot more important than I do. I’d rather have pixel graphics and the right vibe than hyperrealistic graphics.
Man, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, much less its title, but when I heard “Throne and Liberty” for the first time, it immediately sounded like something lazily slapped together. I guess, it makes sense that specifically the localization is lazily slapped together.
All the initiatives I’ve read so far, did have pretty concrete suggestions for how laws should be changed. In my experience, law makers will gladly consider a suggestion, because making laws is hard. Yes, that means lobbying is rather easily possible, but consumers are the group that does the least amount of lobbying.
I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that....
There’s this open-source, Diablo-like game/engine, called FLARE, which I find interesting in that regard, because the basic gameplay is there. My monkey brain is having fun with it, i.e. getting an endorphine rush, because big numbers go brr.
But they obviously don’t have the budget of Blizzard, to try to hide that that’s what it’s doing.
I think, around 4 times throughout the campaign, you get the same spider model, but this time it’s five levels stronger than last time. 🙃
Apparently, it’s like Smash Bros in the Ubisoft universe, except it’s a first-person shooter.
So, you got different factions from Far Cry, Splinter Cell etc. with which you can play…
Yeah, I had to figure out what it really is from Wikipedia and my two reactions were:
Ubisoft has a ‘universe’? Huh, I guess, they do have a few franchises there.
That actually sounds reasonably interesting. At least it’s not just yet another uninspired shooter.
And like, yeah, lacklustre marketing puts it quite well. I had heard of XDefiant before, but all I got from that was that it’s a shooter, which made me fall asleep immediately.
Had they sold it as “You ever wanted to pit the Splinter Cell guy against the Far Cry bandits?”, I would have at least remembered it.
But to be fair, a lot of games are currently coming out. It is difficult to be seen for pretty much all titles…
If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not...
They’re not really for me, as I find it difficult to relax while playing them, but I’m glad they exist.
Gaming had a real identity crisis around the 2000s, when every other game was a brown military shooter.
Now we’ve got cute games and cozy games and artsy games, and I feel like that opens up the genre to more people and enriches the whole medium.
Cozy games are more difficult to make, though, because the gameplay is not anymore just “point cursor at screen and click in the right moment”. So, yeah, you will get some worse examples, especially as the genre is still figuring itself out.
I’m torn about them. On the one hand they free up the combat design to be as wildly different from the exploration as it wants. Which can result in really creative stuff. Favorite examples are Undertale, MegaMan Battle Network series, and Tales series....
I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.
More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.
RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…
Tetris angielski
Sorry little one. *clicks 'kick puppy' button* angielski
Any Xbox 360 Can Now Be Hacked with Just a USB Flash Drive (www.youtube.com) angielski
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remake Will Reportedly Be Revealed Soon, and Released Not Long After That (www.ign.com) angielski
Pokemon Legends Z-A's visuals aren't "great" say former Nintendo marketing leads, but hope Switch 2 could allow Game Freak to "go back to the drawing board" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Luanti (formerly Minetest) v5.11 out now with an in-game settings menu and better server browser (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Games with good pixel art are my weakness (lemmy.world) angielski
Why there are few native Linux games compared to Windows or even Mac? angielski
Does the existence of Wine compatibility layer discourages the creation of native Linux games?
Is Civilization 7 not fun? angielski
Never played the Civ series before, but I’m totally into strategy games. Recently got 200 hours into Pennon and Battle and kinda burned out now. The Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era which I’m hyped for isn’t out yet, and there’s nothing else in the strategy genre grabbing me. Was about to jump into Civ 7 but saw the...
Open source real time strategy game 0 A.D. releases Alpha 27 (play0ad.com)
0 A.D. just released a new version today with some interesting changes....
Reviewers giving high scores to poorly optimised games really grinds my gears
So this problem started back in 2023 as in still occurring. Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and Silent Hill 2 are some of the offenders. All these games were highly rated on gameplay and graphics...
A Pivot To Indie won’t save us [AURAMBLES blog] (auratriolo.com) angielski
An indie dev’s response to NYT’s “Games Can’t Afford To Look This Good” and the meme of “I want smaller games with less graphics and I’m not kidding”.
After the catastrophe of Concord Sony is reportedly cancelling other projects including a God of War live service game (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
In the graveyard of live service games Concord may just be the biggest headstone, and that seems to have focused some minds over at PlayStation. Previously the noises coming from Sony were all about the importance of live service games to its future strategy, and it had announced plans to launch more than 10 live service games...
Microsoft lays off employees in security, experiences and devices, sales, and gaming — separate from performance cuts (www.businessinsider.com) angielski
Infamous vs Prototype | 15 Years Later (www.youtube.com) angielski
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good (www.nytimes.com) angielski
Elon Musk says too many game studios are owned by giant corporations so his giant corporation is going to start a studio to 'make games great again' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Musk says he's going to launch an "AI game studio" at his xAI startup.
Larian revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has sold 2 copies in the Vatican (gamerant.com) angielski
Let's discuss: Platformers (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
Are you a patient gamer? (kbin.melroy.org) angielski
There's no magazine on any instance that I see of such a community on the topic matter. To anyone not familiar, a patient gamer is someone who is immune to FOMO, doesn't get caught up or tied up with current modern gaming. Someone who doesn't care that they've beaten a game from 1996 and here it is 2024. Someone who doesn't care...
Is Elden Ring a good Breath of the Wild replacement? (fedia.io) angielski
Title. If not what games are almost direct BotW replacements
Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? angielski
Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...
Publishers are absolutely terrified "preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes," so the US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Full article text:...
Welcome to the modern age (lemmy.world) angielski
Until Dawn Remake Is Being Criticized For Looking "Way Worse" Than The Original (www.thegamer.com) angielski
'None of this makes any sense': Amazon's latest MMO import is a localization disaster (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I really don’t care about MMOs, especially not Korean MMOs, but this is a very entertaining read.
Stop killing games (www.stopkillinggames.com)
There's always something to talk about (lemmy.world) angielski
I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying. angielski
I’ve been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them… irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that....
Ubisoft Says That XDefiant Has Fallen Behind Expectations (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Fntastic (the makers of The Day Before) is trying to make a comeback angielski
tweet 1 nitter / twitter...
California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it (www.theverge.com) angielski
If you don’t retain some kind of actual ownership, they will not be allowed to use terms like “buy” or “purchase” on the store page button. I hope there aren’t huge holes in this that allow bad actors to get around it, but I certainly loathe the fact that there’s no real way to buy a movie or TV show digitally. Not...
[Opinion] Why do so many cozy games suck? (www.youtube.com) angielski
Came across this video critiquing the gameplay of some out of the sheer number of “cozy” games coming out recently....
Ori and the will of the wisps | WDR Funkhausorchester | WDR Rundfunkchor (www.youtube.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/20096992
What do you think about random encounters? angielski
I’m torn about them. On the one hand they free up the combat design to be as wildly different from the exploration as it wants. Which can result in really creative stuff. Favorite examples are Undertale, MegaMan Battle Network series, and Tales series....
No 'Sims 5' Coming as EA Updates Franchise With Multiplayer (variety.com) angielski