Ephera

@Ephera@lemmy.ml

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

Ephera,

As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.

In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc…

Ephera,

Many people grew up playing Flash games and may want to revisit those. I doubt, there’s many websites out there, which still require Flash…

Ephera,

I feel like this problem might be somewhat endemic to the US?

In my experience, US culture in general is a lot more positive about everything. Like, if someone from the US is not praising the living shit out of something, that means they didn’t like it.
Whereas here in Germany, it’s usually the other way around. If you don’t find anything to grumble about, that’s the highest form of praise.
Obviously, US culture isn’t one massive blob, the extremely positive folks are probably just those I notice the most, but maybe that’s also what the video author is fed up with.

Well, and then people from the US tend to also be a lot more positive about companies in general, presumably a remainder from Cold War propaganda. The journalists/entertainers from Germany and the UK that I watch, do criticize games quite directly…

Are we ever going to see a remake of any Bethesda game? angielski

Fallout 3, New Vegas, Elder scrolls Oblivion are my three favorite games of all time If I had to put my finger on them. But it’s not enjoyable anymore to simply download them and try to play through them again. There’s just something about trying to replay them and it just doesn’t work. Maybe I spent too much time playing...

Ephera,

I’m still curious to see, if the Microsoft leadership pushes them to do that, especially with the more recent titles being duds, but in general, I don’t expect them to do it, because:

  1. As others said, mods and community remakes like OpenMW, Skywind, Skyblivion etc. reduce the value that an official remake would have. They would need to deliver something much better, otherwise they’ll get ridiculed.
  2. They don’t have an amazing story or anything like that, where there’s a strong argument for playing an old title rather than a new title.
  3. Their engine hasn’t made that many amazing advances since Oblivion. To make things look better, they’d pretty much need to update all the textures, which is a lot of work.
Ephera,

At first, I thought this was a screenshot from Lemmy and thought what the hell. Then I saw that it’s Reddit and all my questions got answered. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Ephera,

I don’t? There’s also 4chan.

Well, jokes aside, I’m not of the opinion that humans are either gross idiots or non-gross idiots. I rather think that their social context brings out the gross that lives in all of us.
Reddit is big enough that people feel even more anonymous there, and that there’s enough people willing to share their gross interests to form communities. When those communities exist, you also get an influx of users specifically looking for all of that. Lemmy is just not big enough.

Ephera,

At first I thought, they’re releasing this news now to drown out the Concord news, but 30 year anniversary, maybe they did have this planned a little longer. 🙃

Ephera,

It’s a slang word to mean the outfit or accessories. I believe, it started out regionally, but it’s been popular with the current teenager generation.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=drip

Ephera,

I don’t think the parent comment was trying to say that it’s particularly evil. They rather meant “greedy” in the sense that these companies get a bit too excited about money.

Basically, live service games are pretty expensive to make and generally result in an incomplete/worse experience at launch. But if they’re successful and gain enough of a player base, then they pay for themselves manyfold.
That’s why these companies keep on gambling, by building live service games, rather than two or three smaller games from the same budget.

Ephera,

I assume, NMS made money from their launch, despite it being so underwhelming, and that’s what they used to patch up the game.

Concord seems to have made essentially no money…

Ephera,

The closest approximation we currently have (and likely will ever have) are game ratings…

Ephera,

Man, Cyberpunk was not a Homer-like fuckup. They were promising features which were nowhere near ready, while their whole game hardly ran at all. That’s a crime, at least in my country. Homer doesn’t do crimes…

Ephera,

I mean, plenty indies dish out excellent gameplay. So, I rather feel like it conflicts with good graphics.
In particular, and this is an old-man-yells-at-cloud take, I do not feel like 3D graphics do us many favors for gameplay.

3D usually just means less overview what’s happening around you and more directions in which you can miss jumps/targets.
Game worlds suddenly need to look realistic, with sprawling (empty) mountains, cities and whatnot, rather than just screen-after-screen of compressed gameplay levels.
And of course, it’s also much more challenging for gamedevs to prototype in 3D, when prototyping is essential for good gameplay.

Ephera,

Flicky Bee is fun for a bit: f-droid.org/packages/org.lettucepie.flickybee/

Ephera,

Wow, did they really name that game “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle”?

I don’t know, if Indiana Jones fans get really excited by that, but to me, it sounds like the guy has to draw on the board during maths class.

Ephera,

Man, we’ve heard statements like this so many times and it’s practically never true.

Ephera,

I enjoy how you could put the 2012 design between 1988 and 1998 and it would hardly look out of place.

Ephera,

You might prefer other PDF viewers. I always liked Okular.

Sumatra is a bit more minimalistic, but also decent.

Ephera,

Are those which generate images also Large Language Models? I have been wondering what the technical term for them is…

Ephera, (edited )

Crunch is a common practice, even though data shows it to lower total productivity. (See, for example: cs.stanford.edu/people/…/econ-crunch-mode.html )

So, it might lead to a rise in productivity, at least.

Ephera,

Ah, thanks, I missed that.

Ephera,

I thought so, too. I’m finding news that a closure was strongly suspected, but it wasn’t yet confirmed.

German source: derstandard.at/…/piranha-bytes-das-studio-hinter-…

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.

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