I sold my PC yesterday because of financial struggles and as far as I’m aware, I would probably be unable to buy a PC or console ever again. That said, I still want to somehow experience the games I would otherwise want to play on PC. I’m thinking of watching let’s plays but of course, that’s not the same as actually...
Anytime I see super-smooth transition animations in a demo, or even just gameplay mechanics that seem to work out way too conveniently, it tells me it’s an animated “pre-viz” demo of the game they want to make. That’s kind of the impression I got from Perfect Dark.
Any chance he’s putting the question on social media to convince other stakeholders above him?
It’s possible he was in a board meeting when some novice shareholder suggested “What if you take an exclusivity deal”? And he just didn’t have clear evidence on hand of that being vastly unpopular. Obviously that could be me being overgenerous to him.
When all the decisions have to come rapid-pace, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything notable. It feels like mashing out light or strong attacks and maybe some block/dodges.
I’ll admit that there have been some action JRPGs where I just didn’t understand how the mechanics worked together, even after some explanations, because I had to play it out so quickly in combat. Those games ended up having low difficulty so that people that “weren’t getting it” could still see the story.
I’m still okay at Soulslike games where there’s not quite as many meters and illogical systems. And of course I’m okay with turn-based games having those weird systems because I can process things slowly until I get it, and am taking my turns at full speed.
Has the potential to be very cool! What might be sad is that many horror games now evoke the trope of “They move when you’re not looking”. Game development takes a long time, so I can guess this was not an obvious trend when you started on it. But there should still be ways to differentiate your work.
Today’s game is a game called PEAK. My friend that i usually play games with gifted it to me after seeing it online somewhere. From what i can tell it’s made by the same studio that made Clustertruck (that game about platforming on moving trucks). It’s like a weird combination of climbing games and survival games. You have...
While it is fraud, it’s murky waters when you realize this is what every Kickstarter does. Gamers don’t easily fathom the full sum of what it costs to pay qualified artists for a full development cycle. Kickstarters have only existed to prove to investors that there’s monetary interest in a concept.
It doesn’t look like Borderlands 4 will make the jump in price up to $80. A visit to the Xbox Store shows that the base version of Borderlands 4 will cost $69.99....
I think the only thing that might get me to go over the $60 line is if a publisher takes a chance on a franchise/concept I’d like to see more of, which these days is rare.
I couldn’t stand Near A Tomato but have tons of hours in SB. I grant it has nothing amazing in terms of story, but it has enough intricacies of combat to keep it fun, even if none of those mechanics were invented here.
Nier seemed to operate off a single attack button a lot of time, and working off RPG mechanics gave so many opportunities for level disparity that didn’t serve the game at all.
King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity. Even as a kid, I felt like it was a very strange gore-and-action focus shift for the King’s Quest series. Only as an adult did I hear the story of executive meddling that lead to the complete tone and gameplay shift.
Holy shit, how long has it been? Everybody assumed the devs ran with the money, they silently disappeared and stopped updating the game despite being in early access.
Turtle Rock said “Okay, we’re done developing content. We’ll move on to new things now.” And people took that to mean it was a failed, dead, and worthless game. Whereas the active state where they left it was pretty solid, still runs, and I have a lot of fun with it. It just wasn’t built to be endlessly live-service.
I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.
I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.
They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).
Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.
The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.
They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.
I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.
I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.
One bit that’s nice about being a gooner game is, there’s enough outfit options you can just pick something “cute” and tasteful, and then just play the game. So while many people are ogling, people that are not as interested can just play the game.
EDIT: Adding onto this, though I consider myself a gooner I actually had the opposite reaction to Nier Automata, the game’s carbon copy. I didn’t quite like the bare-ass-thong look of 2B, and it felt like it was consistently distracting enough to make the game’s emotional moments feel silly. At the least, if I put SB’s “Eve” in a denim skirt, that’s my own choice.
I found some cool stuff. I even coincidentally solved a puzzle involving an ice box on my first go. But it was taking waaaaayyyy too long to find anything interesting, and I had multiple runs where it felt like there was no chance to build anything other than a straight path of rooms leading to a dead end, either from lack of doors, or lack of keys.
I actually like the dice roll of getting different encounters and adapting to what comes up; but only when the goal is generally to do well, eg dealing lots of damage or exploring new directions. But often there’s very particular objectives in BP and the UI doesn’t do a lot to help you track them.
Would be great if the matchmaking world could set some criteria restrictions.
PlayStation controllers have a mic built in; make an expectation people will use it, and speak English. If people matchmake games, and then leave those games 45 seconds in, penalize them and prevent them from joining new ones.
I know those things are idealistic, but I also think with a very dedicated effort an online network could create that space.
Don’t worry, the controls on PC are just as unbearable. It’s that style of mouse movement that would be fine in an RPG but is absolutely terrible with an FPS.
Hey everyone! I have no power in here, have not checked if anyone has started one of these but I feel like being the change I want to see in the world....
I don’t see people playing Sea of Thieves much anymore. I never liked the top level pro PVP aspect but I do enjoy joining people for simple treasure hunts.
Oh look, another day where I barely ever even got rooms that had more than one door, and now that my winding path has hit a dead end all my resources are useless. Next day I guess.
Maybe I’m a simp for IOI, but the CEO’s allegations that the game might be getting paid-off negative press makes me curious. There have definitely been games in history that I’ve seen overwhelming negative reactions to from the internet, I tried them out and…they’re actually really fun. Sometimes it just feels simpler to join the bandwagon without trying a game out, not knowing a good 60% of that bandwagon might be paid trolls. I’ve always hated vague statements like “The game was released unfinished” or shit regarding paid extra content.
Anyway, all that is just my opinion that I’m going to wait and see, at the very least.
So far as I can think, wasn’t the only handheld that failed the Playstation Vita? And that had very visible reasons for the failure - designing itself around an obtuse storage medium, and requiring first-party memory cards. Even with those drawbacks and with no first-party support, it had a tremendous following.
It honestly could still be a worthwhile device to chain off of, since none of the current offerings fit in a pants pocket.
For those who don’t know, GeForce Now is a cloud option when you don’t have access to a strong PC to run a game. Back when Cyberpunk 2077 was unattainable for many, my advice to some was to run it through GeForce Now.
Interestingly, they also have “day passes”, making it practical for when you are out spending most of a day away from a gaming computer. Save files still synchronize to local games when you’re back.
Yup. You log in to something like Steam or UPlay, and it lets you play games you have on your account. It’s only their supported list sadly.
The service is fast enough I’ve been able to play mouse-based shooters. Latency is not perfect, but home monitors and input devices sometimes have comparable imperfectness.
The Geforce app used for drivers, and the app to connect to Geforce Now, are installed separately. In fact, you’d likely install the latter on weak devices that don’t even have an NVidia GPU.
I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.
Once every few years, EA and Ubisoft produce something that’s really cool; and much as we’d rather the publishers were replaced with better ones, at the least we can be happy that developers got to put out one or two good games through them.
Man, I wish I understood a single bit of this evaluation of the game after finishing every chapter (sorry - “Ending”). The whole thing felt mostly like a waste of time.
That said, I’m a fan of Spec Ops: The Line, a game that has much the same level of division among its players. Interesting how philosophical games get that reaction.
This gets trickier with games, because an experienced game designer can, for instance, look at the UI design and graphics programming of a Ubisoft open world slopfest, and say those parts were masterfully done (even if the overall game isn’t so fun). And, even the best of video games have bits of them that weren’t as good.
I was playing Mafia, and it’s a pretty cool game, then suddenly they drop in an F1 racing level where you need to grab first place against a bunch of AIs that never make a mistake.
The worst bit is, in the previous mission you did a lot of work to sabotage the rival’s car ahead of the race. So you shouldn’t even need to drive all that well to win against him, but it just forgets that.
I just never beat the race, so the game came to a halt for me.
Many of us only view a game’s release in passing, and view it as an “event”. Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don’t hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate “online” games with being “live service” - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character...
Back 4 Blood was the game that served as the idea for this post.
I recently felt like picking up some cheap copies of it to play with a few friends, and decided to launch it once ahead of time just to test it out and see how it ran. I picked “Online” mode out of habit, feeling it would likely search for a bit before handing me 3 bots to play singleplayer. Instead, I actually got a decent group of people together several days in a row.
In B4B’s case, while the developers visibly “abandoned” the game in news headlines, the form it exists in is very playable and generally bug-free, even if its ultra-highest-difficulty “endgame” allegedly lacks some refinement. It got a lot of outlash for not matching the playstyle of Left 4 Dead; having players use a deep system of roguelike-style upgrades. Since the enemies escalate in difficulty, those upgrades are often necessary and can connect with team strategy. It’s now on PS+, and since it’s crossplay, Steam players will get a lot of queue buddies. It’s also playable with just 2 people since the other 2 characters will just be bots.
I want to appreciate the additions, but…this is also not a good way of doing it.
The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.
Maybe that’s navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that’s working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it’s that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they’re playing with an input delay.
That’s why the games I’ve liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.
From how it sounds, especially with the actor’s permission, this seems like my preferred way of using AI-generated voices.
I’d really want to make sure any legal language around actor AI permissions is built to avoid coaxing though - like including it as an “industry standard” clause for infinite use when recording a single audition. Ideally, the voice would always “belong to” the actor it came from, and would only be licensed on specific uses, like “This NPC within this game mode, available for 8 weeks in summer of 2025”. No idea if that’s what they did here.
“Wrong direction” sums up my anger towards everything FromSoft.
Two Soulslike games I really enjoyed though, are Tunic, and Another Crab’s Treasure. Both are generally pretty rewarding of exploration, but also tightly guide you at the beginning. I honestly just don’t feel like FromSoft is very fair when it comes to early exploration. One path utterly destroys you and has no reward at the end.
My first PlayStation was a PS3, and thankfully, around then they were still releasing a number of ported “trilogies”.
Even though mine was not a backwards compatible model, I was also able to play digital versions of the Fatal Frame series, which is sadly now pretty much inaccessible.
I never played Jax, but I saw an analysis of its vector-based facial animation, where there were few enough vertices for animators to directly tweak; and it does feel like a nostalgic way to make cartoony, expressive faces.
I would really love to kill some time on my phone. The games I have tried include: Slay the spire, shattered pixel dungeon, unciv, dead cells. Other than that, are there any solid phone games or otherwise ports, paid or not?
If you have a Netflix subscription, the app lets you install many games that aren’t looking for microtransactions within.
Most of the Ace Attorney games are on smartphones.
I’ve also been having a lot of fun with Zenless Zone Zero. F2P, combat is based around swapping between a team of three, and making use of parry / dodge frame effects.
I can’t imagine playing this without a mouse honestly. It seems like the type of game where you would be 3 menus deep and alternating quickly between cookie clicking and managing buildings & upgrades.
It was only recently I saw that Blue Prince did not make a PS4 release, which surprised me - quite a lot of games even in the past year have still put that out when there’s nothing in them that’s highly demanding. Usually, it just means it hovers around 25-30fps.
Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all (www.polygon.com) angielski
For people who want to play their favorite games but are unable to, what are you currently doing? angielski
I sold my PC yesterday because of financial struggles and as far as I’m aware, I would probably be unable to buy a PC or console ever again. That said, I still want to somehow experience the games I would otherwise want to play on PC. I’m thinking of watching let’s plays but of course, that’s not the same as actually...
Microsoft is closing down Xbox studio The Initiative, with Perfect Dark killed as well — joining Everwild and ZeniMax's new IP, and other unannounced projects (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Subnautica's Original Creators Have Been Removed From Unknown Worlds "Effective Immediately", As Krafton Makes Concerning Leadership Changes (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Kerbal Space Program 2 vibes... I'm suddenly less optimistic on subnautica 2.
Randy Pitchford asks fans if they'd swallow future Borderlands exclusivity deals, almost 10,000 people say just put your damn games on Steam (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers (www.videogamer.com) angielski
Do Mannequins scare you? I am making a horror game inspired by Fatal Frame in FPS where your only weapon is a Polaroid Pictures! (lemmy.world) angielski
Day 338 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing angielski
Today’s game is a game called PEAK. My friend that i usually play games with gifted it to me after seeing it online somewhere. From what i can tell it’s made by the same studio that made Clustertruck (that game about platforming on moving trucks). It’s like a weird combination of climbing games and survival games. You have...
Studio Camelia shuts down a year after raising €300,000 on Kickstarter to fund JRPG (Alzara Radiant Echoes) (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
ICE Protests Pop Up on Roblox as Kids Organize Virtual Demonstrations: 'FRICK ICE' (www.latintimes.com) angielski
Borderlands 4 Price Has Been Confirmed (insider-gaming.com) angielski
It doesn’t look like Borderlands 4 will make the jump in price up to $80. A visit to the Xbox Store shows that the base version of Borderlands 4 will cost $69.99....
Stellar Blade on PC Hit 1 Million Sales 19 Times Faster Than on PlayStation 5 (insider-gaming.com) angielski
A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"? angielski
I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much....
BattleBit - Operation Overhaul: Teaser Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Holy shit, how long has it been? Everybody assumed the devs ran with the money, they silently disappeared and stopped updating the game despite being in early access.
MindsEye Becomes 2025’s Worst-Rated Game As Reviews Creep In (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Xbox Game Pass might be getting a price hike (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Stellar Blade PC launch Hits 99K+ Concurrent players, surpassing every other PlayStation-published single-player game on Steam (noisypixel.net) angielski
Blue Prince - Have you played it? How blown is your mind? angielski
Found this on game pass (which I keep meaning to cancel, but here we are). Holy. Shit....
Atomic Heart 2 Announced At Summer Game Fest (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Sea of Thieves Season 17 Announce Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Deathloop is free to claim on Epic Games (store.epicgames.com) angielski
Now this is how you do pride month, take notes AAA devs (lemmy.blahaj.zone) angielski
The first weekly What Are You Playing? thread! angielski
Hey everyone! I have no power in here, have not checked if anyone has started one of these but I feel like being the change I want to see in the world....
MindsEye studio execs depart Build a Rocket Boy, one week before game's debut (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans (www.techpowerup.com) angielski
The GeForce NOW Native App for Steam Deck Is Here (blogs.nvidia.com) angielski
EA Cancels Black Panther Game, Closes Cliffhanger Games - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
What games are just objective masterpieces? angielski
That fucking helicopter level angielski
Wait, that game is still playable online? angielski
Many of us only view a game’s release in passing, and view it as an “event”. Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don’t hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate “online” games with being “live service” - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character...
Lies of P is getting difficulty options to make the Soulslike more accessible (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Gatekeepers in shambles
SAG-AFTRA Files Unfair Labor Practice Complaint Against Epic Games Due To A.I. Darth Vader (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
1st time Demon's Souls Player angielski
I don’t know anyone IRL I can explain this to, or discuss this with...
I just realized the only way to get new gamers to care about Jak is to release a "remastered" version, which sucks. angielski
The games look great even to this day. I’m personally a huge fan of PS2 graphics and how it forced artists to rely on style rather than “realism.”...
Any good mobile games? angielski
I would really love to kill some time on my phone. The games I have tried include: Slay the spire, shattered pixel dungeon, unciv, dead cells. Other than that, are there any solid phone games or otherwise ports, paid or not?
Cookie Clicker coming to Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
I can’t imagine playing this without a mouse honestly. It seems like the type of game where you would be 3 menus deep and alternating quickly between cookie clicking and managing buildings & upgrades.