Katana314

@Katana314@lemmy.world

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

Marvel Rivals Apologizes Following Alpha Banning Controversy (gamerant.com) angielski

​​​​​​With such a broad scope on what counts as “disparagement,” this has caused quite a stir among the community, with some players being banned without realizing the terms of this contract. The developers released a statement addressing these terms, with NetEase saying it is aware of the “inappropriate and...

Katana314,

They were not misleading or miscommunicated terms. They literally banned negative subjective reviews.

So now they’re guilty of both controlling reviewers, and lying.

Katana314,

I sort of saw it that way, but the last bit about “subjective negative reviews” seems unusual even for contracts.

There’s enough lazy rage bait “Turns out X is DOGSHIT?!?” videos out there that I don’t think it’s unreasonable to put some terms in expecting some professional effort. But disallowing even polite criticisms definitely seems too far.

Katana314,

I’m wondering if better AI could save this genre. I always hated the fragility of any soldiers I wasn’t actively controlling, having idle workers, workers trying to chop wood in the middle of enemies, etc.

If the computer can take your high level commands but also put out logical low level ones, and maybe also punish high APM, it might restore some of the moderate-paced feel of the game.

Katana314, (edited )

No no no…

Support techs do not have access to insider industry information. They deal with dozens of region-blocked game support issues a day, and in 95% of cases that block was placed by the publisher. The tech is likely just using that term out of assumption and familiarity.

I’m not saying it’s impossible that Sony are the culprit, but a random support reply to an individual is not how we’d find out. It’s happened before that a Valve official puts out a correction to something support says.

EDIT: Seems like I was right.

They should have been part of the original restriction and it was noticed when the restriction was put in place for Tsushima. This was noticed and executed independently by Valve.

Katana314,

Social communities like Lemmy aren’t their target demographic. Mostly, it’s our job to ignore them until they buy a studio we actually like.

Katana314,

It’s like an administrator/tenant relationship. Generally, the publisher controls the region locks, but if the publisher starts doing something potentially illegal or brand-damaging, like selling a bricked game, the store owner can also manipulate the locks.

If they couldn’t, a dev’s efforts to willingly commit brand suicide by releasing a game that bricks people’s computers (not beyond the pale given how stupid publishers are now) would also take Steam down with them.

Katana314,

I’d only take this as a valid point if you could point to any games succeeding in spite of being cloud only. When Stadia tried it, it kneecapped them.

Katana314,

I play DBD, and one of the playerbase’ biggest annoyance is balance by win rate and usage rate. Sometimes an option is just fun and well designed, without being too strong.

It’s especially important to look at what’s fun for multiple players. A good example might be Helldivers 2’s jet pack. Yes, it’s so fun to cover a lot of ground at once, but if the way that’s used is to abandon a cornered teammate to go do objectives while they die surrounded, then it suddenly makes teammates feel slow and useless.

Meanwhile there’s dopamine-driven team synergy potential with the assisted reload weapons. But, there’s not a lot of mechanical information encouraging their use, and it’s pretty simple for people to just use them alone.

I remember TF2’s simple idea where all weapons did more damage the closer you were to enemies, and it demonstrates what I think can be really good balancing design.

Katana314,

Obvious frustrations aside, this article gives a great summary not just of current events but the last decade with Microsoft/Xbox.

Katana314,

For what? They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore. Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian. Bethesda as a whole is not trusted for big RPGs after Starfield. Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. Id has been doing okay, but has had a lot of brain drain, and they definitely don’t produce the “live service hits” MS appears to be looking for - just things people would love to see on Game Pass and discard. There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.

…We about to see Crash vs Spyro Autobattle Royale?

Katana314,

This is an excellent explanation of why the layoffs were a terrible idea.

I wouldn’t have volunteered $30-$40 for Hi-Fi Rush on release because of my low budget for new singleplayer games - but I did play it through Game Pass, and knowing how good it is now I would’ve paid more. Similarly, MS has put out many “mixed” games that are perfect for certain types of people but not many others. Those are the things that keep people on Game Pass. Nobody needs to be paying $100 a year to keep playing the few familiar live service games they know.

The “unsubscribe” button is really easy to reach the month Game Pass stops putting out anything new and interesting, and that’s coming soon now that they have no one ready to put out these surprise hits.

Katana314,

I really hope this bites them if the industry goes less IP-centric. We’ve gotten a slow build of “From the developers of…” fan hype, and I don’t think a big “2” matters as much as it used to.

Elden Ring, Overwatch, Cyberpunk, Genshin Impact, were all technically “new franchises” but built insane followings off either good marketing or high knowledge of their studio. So now all MS can do is copy the death path of their parrot studios like 343 Industries and The Coalition, which were built to try to tentpole their old franchises made by better studios.

Katana314,

In a way, in Activision/Blizzard’s case, it seems more like it slightly postponed their death.

Tango Gameworks, however, was murdered.

Katana314,

I suppose anyone who saw the rise of EA a decade or so back saw this coming.

I didn’t, because, well…I think I naively expect the world of business to make sense.

Katana314,

Even if I side with the community on the turnout, I feel like a community manager’s job is to represent the company’s interests to some degree. Kind of like a defense lawyer.

They shouldn’t go as far as lying to people or making bad promises, which can make it a tough job, but they definitely shouldn’t be siding with the players against the company, or the internal employees are catching flak from both sides.

Katana314,

Taking a look at big-cash high profile releases like Redfall and Starfield…is “guaranteed failure” what they’re going for? Because those indie games were pretty much the main reason I kept subscribing to game pass.

Katana314,

They are announcing that they are ready to announce the announcing of a future announcement of further announcements.

Katana314,

The biggest stumble seems to be from releasing without the requirement initially, and making the game available for sale in non-PSN countries.

Other studios like EA and Microsoft have traditionally required their accounts on online games since release; but unless I’m wrong, those accounts are also available in more countries.

Katana314,

There was a theory that the purchase restrictions were put in place by Valve, not Sony (because those countries couldn’t make an account without violating TOS). If so, Valve might shortly remove the restrictions.

Katana314,

Valve can remove games from sale for any reason they like - it’s been a point of consumer contention when they are accused of censorship for certain risque anime games, too.

  • They can completely remove a game from sale if it turns out to be bricking people’s computers or function terribly. (Sony did this with Cyberpunk on PSN, without CDPR’s approval)
  • There may be suspicion the game is not legitimate for sale, for instance it illegally uses someone else’s work.
  • Going country-specific, if a game is revealed to be slightly less than universally positive to the perfectly infallible, totally-not-genocidal Chinese Communist Party, they may want to stop sales in China.

If a game lets you buy it in Tanzania, download it in Tanzania, and then to play, has you sign an agreement that says “I truthfully state that I do not live in Tanzania”, then that bone-headed agreement reflects poorly on Valve, so they have almost a legal need to take it out of sale in that country.

Basically, each country has its own laws of sale. Having those switches to turn off sales in certain places is important for the store’s own safety. While 60% of the blame for selling a faulty product goes to the manufacturer, 40% still goes to the storefront that chose to stock and sell that faulty good. In this case, the fault was specific to the country of play.

Katana314,

So, someone in my Discord channel posted a tweet that maybe alters perspective a bit;

cdn.discordapp.com/…/not-surprised-but-damn-v0-jj…

To summarize or if the link breaks, one of the devs “knew beforehand” they’d have to require PSN accounts post launch, but disabled them for a smooth launch. That’s interesting, but as long as Sony was acting as publisher I feel like the blame still goes on them for selling the game to non-PSN countries initially.

Katana314,

I expect media companies to be greedy. What feels absurd is when they act out of blind, unmonetized efforts of control that seem to hurt their bottom line - like forcing employees to commute instead of work from home.

Katana314,

There’s a Smash Bros mechanic called Stale Moves where repeating the same move many times causes it to deal less damage. It feels like a worthwhile topic to delve on for more interesting fights, but given the way knockback works there could be a better target than just damage adjustment.

Katana314,

Summarized it much better than I could.

If you’ve ever seen isometric pixel sprites, authors often draw those first “naked” to get the shape right. If they show an in development model that’s naked, and later have added clothes, is that then “censorship”? No of course it fucking isn’t.

Katana314,

There’s such thing as consumer-driven censorship.

Let’s say that I’m a game developer, and also a terrible person. After beating my game, it shows a victory screen that says “You know, Hitler might have been right!” Everyone will shit on the game; and that’s just normal player reaction.

Now, it’s easy to predict that no one would be so negative towards giant exposed breasts - except yes, plenty of people are. For all the porn-obsessed pervs out there, tons of people just want to enjoy an action adventure game without cringing distractions.

Don’t believe me? Look at Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The game lost a bunch of its potential sales to players that might enjoy a sweeping JRPG, but couldn’t stand frequent boob/butt shots of its overendowed and subservient female main character.

Katana314,

I’m curious if they decided to go with a story reboot. I think even EDF 4 had most of humanity’s population killed in the chaos.

Not that story especially matters in these games!

Katana314,

There’s potentially some cloud-based options for this, if someone doesn’t want to maintain a gaming device.

Basically, it seems like Game Pass Ultimate will let you play games like The Sims 4 and Minecraft using a constant video connection to an Xbox server. If I’m right, these are in fact the mouse/keyboard version of the game. Probably not as moddable though.

It’s not a great option especially considering the subscription, but it sometimes feels more hassle-free depending on the user.

Katana314,

It’s been so tiring clicking through the Do Not Recommend option on every single channel mentioning Sweet Baby as the new flat earth conspiracy.

Katana314,

No matter how much hobbyists liked selling their games back to GameStop so the store can mark them up 500%, I have always hated that the industry of used games punished releasing fantastic short singleplayer games much much more than perpetual 2000-hour microtransaction live service games.

That crowd of gamers absolutely contributed to the fall. The general distrust of digital is acknowledged, but if people were just paying low/moderate sale prices for each SP game and keeping them, instead of paying used prices, we’d probably have fewer publishers moving this way.

Katana314,

Wait, do they mean 2016 Blizzard, or 2024 Blizzard? I feel like no one is happy letting 2024 Blizzard stay…

Funny thing is, now it’s adding to the list of terrible failing games Microsoft has put out from companies that used to matter. Who remembers Redfall?

Katana314,

One ethics quandary is AI child porn. It at least provides a non-harmful outlet for an otherwise harmful act, but it could also feed addictions and feel insufficient.

Katana314,

Before you ask, no, there is not a Trepang1.

Katana314,

Since you mention FPS and open world, you could try some of the Far Cry games. AAA but often fall out of public eye fast. They’re all the same but do what they do pretty well.

Another interesting AA is In Sound Mind. Shooter-puzzler about a psychiatrist trapped in the minds of his patients.

Katana314,

Can’t watch the trailer yet, but definitely excited for this! I haven’t played through many Steamworld games but I enjoyed this one!

Katana314,

Oh. I wouldn’t know - I have the Roguelike tag filtered out.

It’s extremely rare that the habit of constantly getting reset to ground zero for little mistakes gives me any sense of adventure.

Katana314,

Haven’t played either remakes, but I feel like the brevity (and, at its time, novelty) of the story/scenes in the original made them a bit stronger. Some of the dramatically lengthened scenes have kind of undershot their impact.

Plus, with text speech and tiny gestures from 3D models, your mind was filling in the details your own way, which could actually work well sometimes.

Katana314,

There are some very good games out there that have survived this; including most of Valve’s greatest games - Half Life 1, 2, and Team Fortress 2. Remains to see if the same can happen with this team.

Katana314,

I think my first was Majora’s Mask (I joined the N64 age late) and I’m the same. I wasn’t even committed to buying “new Zelda” until I saw they were upping the difficulty and having players be more self-reliant, and I loved it. I still can’t categorize the exact mode of fun people associate to “dungeons” compared to wide-open exploration.

Katana314,

no it’s because you have to put two AAA batteries in the disc to play the game

Katana314,

Worse, it might depend on licensed infrastructure. Maybe a company can stand giving away their proprietary server, but they can’t legally give away a library toolkit they purchased a $300,000 non-transferable license for. That kind of middleware is extremely common in the industry.

Katana314,

It’s been a challenge for devs to find ways to make each weapon pickup rewarding without constantly having ATK number go up.

  • Division 2: Every spare weapon can be dumped into the Specialization research for that weapon type. If not, it probably has unique weapon mechanics that are interesting if nothing else
  • Zelda TOTK: All weapons break, so even a duplicate of an old weapon will let you keep swinging that weapon type
Katana314,

People pretty often completely understate the Vita’s popularity/lifespan. Less than the 3DS for sure, but early metrics were stupidly counting hardware sales when it was moving early to digital.

In Japan it stayed popular long after the USA stopped talking about it.

Katana314,

As much as this seems like an obvious ask now, I feel like there’s a lot of tightly pressed popular indie games now where this would be impractical, and require constant maintenance to have a “private server” version ready for the game’s end of life.

Take Helldivers 2. Their lobby system (the ship) is wrapped up around this online representation of the global war effort. Sure, there’s ways to change the game for a simplification with a Join Server By IP system, but that’s UI development you’d have to do while the studio still has money to do it - before some decline towards expiration. Often, it would have to somehow elevate priority above other bugfixes and expectations that are taking charge during the popular phase, especially since it will involve the core networking problems.

So, like anyone, I want this; I found Knockout City fun and it sucks we don’t have it anymore. But realistically, I also understand how this situation can happen.

Katana314,

That’s true; I tend to think of a private server hosting a single game session of 1-4 players, but I haven’t interacted with private reimplementing of large community interactions. Generally, the commercial implementation would involve many connected servers, so it’s perhaps a bit more complicated than giving a separate address in a launcher option, but becomes less of an excuse overall.

That said, while the game is alive and well, the only motivating reason for that option’s existence is to support piracy of their game. Depending on how much they care, it’s something they’d have to keep under wraps in a development folder until the day the game dies out.

Katana314,

What would be cringingly terrible, but entirely possible, is if Will DID record lines for his character, but content pipeline faults/laziness or programming errors mean it doesn’t play ingame.

I even feel like that same circumstance has happened before…

Katana314,

Any chance a lot of the money got funneled somewhere else and the actual game had some tiny budget?

Katana314,

Feels a bit like if they had DLC for ammo in a Resident Evil game. The design of those games is very clearly intended to be around partial ammo starvation, to get you to aim better, choose varying weapons, and sometimes run away. But, I can imagine a small team of publishers deciding “People want ammo? Let’s let them buy it!” It’d be very easy for players to presume the base game has been made worse as a whole, and that opinion will become hard to quantify - unless very nuanced reviewers can just pretend the DLC doesn’t exist.

Katana314,

I don’t really follow what “on the same balance” means; I guess it’s simply that the benefit far, far outweighs the negative? Or, that the negative should never be mentioned because it implies benefits behind something horrible?

I can marginally understand the latter. It’s a bit like trying to praise a piece of artwork on its own (because it’s a really amazing piece, and it could even inspire other people) while trying to set aside that its artist was a terrible person who deserves no recognition.

Part of the reason I bring it up is, I’d like to hear more vocalizations on whether these things should exist. Under a certain forward-thinking mindset, it could be that neither GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6 ever comes out - or they cost $100 and take 10 years, to adequately pay the developers and give them healthy time off. The math is never straightforward, of course, but it’s something of a thought experiment to get people to think about what they care about most.

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