They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.
And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.
A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.
My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.
It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:
GOOD voice acting
Significant “choice” and branching narratives
Plenty of content that players will “never” see.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.
And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.
The indie/pseudo-indie space still has a lot of great games. And the reception to those are vital for convincing the few remaining funding sources to “take a risk” on their next game.
But that is also not what the keighleys are. They are basically E3 in that it is about the big publishers and platform owners doing big announcements and a select few smaller studios being allowed to pad things out and get cut if Kojima decides he wants another jerk off session.
But I assume there will be a Steam demo event of some form during this (it feels like we have one of those every week now). There are also actual indie groups that do showcases around the same time. And THOSE are a spectacular time where it is clear people love the games they are working on. Also it is usually a great contrast to “all dudes, all the time” on the keighleys and actually having developers on the indie showcases.
But this also really highlights an incredibly unexplored “setting” for Souls games (or even games as a whole): Battlefields.
To my knowledge, only Nioh 1 (and to a much lesser extent 2) ever really approached that. The feeling of being one unstoppable murder beast of a guy sprinting from cover to cover as what feels like hordes of mooks with rifles unloading on you. Diving into a trench to try and limit the directions you can be attacked from. And storming into an officer’s camp to assassinate them.
Instead, we always get there after the war (which will likely be the case here since the story stuff is almost always set “in the past” for ER) or we’ll be off on our own and just hear a few rumbles in the distance.
Giant Lord or whatever TLG’s old name was has some vibes of it where explosions happen until the boss fight starts. But it is still very much on the outskirts of a battle with just a fancy skybox.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do “efforts” that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream “their” games… because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the “logical” extension of that. And, arguably, it is a “good” one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn’t going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team’s name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of “The Champion! just went through… A Table!”*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators’ rights and control what can and can’t be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done “ethically”? I don’t know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume “not in the slightest”. But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people’s lives aren’t tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don’t think those aren’t already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I’ll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are “in character” to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her “Rosa” voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can’t be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn’t ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn’t just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to “own” that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn’t end up in a competitor’s game next week.
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
The major publishers are at least a paycheck that can keep a studio going for another year or two.
I am going to pretend you didn’t mean it this way but that REALLY comes across as telling people who lost their jobs that they deserve it because they didn’t meet your requirements (that weren’t even true back in the day of DOS and BBSes…)
Please… fuck right off with that. The devs at Arkane Austin or Tango aren’t making the decision to add a battlepass or to release a game before it is “done”. They are doing what management requires of them. The same management that then fires them to make sure that the overall branch of the company turns a profit.
Which is still a complete load of demonstrable bullshit.
Getting funding for a team is increasingly difficult. Plenty of studios have talked about the horrors of 2023-2024 and how nobody wants to fund even a small team. And this would not be “take it across the finish line” but a solid 3-6 years before even a chance at a return on investment because these devs wouldn’t even have IPs or past releases to leverage.
But also? Listen to folk like Xalavier Nelson Jr who talk about this. They are fighting the good fight to push back against financiers and publishers to make games “the right way” with monetization models that are what people ask for. And they still get shit on endlessly and ignored.
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of “abandonware” back in the day. For those who are too young, for the longest time it was nigh impossible to buy a game that was even five or six years old because it would not be on store shelves. GoG (back when they were Good Old Games) was specifically designed to update and sell these games. And without invasive DRM to boot.
And suddenly all the abandonware torrent sites just started uploading gog installers. And now we almost never hear the term “abandonware” because… people were always full of shit and just wanted to make an excuse to justify their own actions.
My issue is the people who use this as an excuse to blame the devs who are just doing their jobs while trying to live their dreams.
Again. There are studios out there who are doing exactly what everyone insists they want AND are doing so in ways that make getting funding difficult. And they get shit on because of a “hot take” on twitter or because their game isn’t as pretty as Call of Duty.
When large groups of people get laid off because of corporate bullshit? The answer is not to say “Hey, you should fucking do better next time”. It is “Fuck corporations” or “fuck capitalism”.
So… only independently wealthy people should make games?
Game dev takes time. The way you shrink that time is to do it full time instead of working on it in your spare time for a decade or so. Because of increased cost of living, the ability to just take a few months off and burn your savings is increasingly not viable.
That is where investors come in. Whether it is a kickstarter campaign (NEVER PRE-ORDER!! RAWR!!!), a venture capitalist, or a major publisher. And all of those have consequences.
But, increasingly, it is only the major publishers who are even trying. And they are increasingly selective of who they try it with. NoClip have been making an indie game as a way to better understand the market and they have a SPECTACULAR video where Danny O’Dwyer talks about his experience pitching the game to publishers and what kinds of responses they get. And it is really telling that he gushes over how nice one publisher (I think it was Humble?) were in that they actually responded and said they couldn’t move forward rather than just ghosting him.
I doubt it is even thoughts over how powerful Halo is as an IP. I would be shocked if MS corporate hadn’t realized that any 343 Halo is going to get shit on because “this isn’t Bungie”. And people hate 343 enough that firing them and pushing the leads out won’t raise any red flags.
But yeah. Look at how much damage control MS did when they were releasing fucking Pentiment on switch (look, I love that game with all my heart but you know things are fucked when people remember it exists). There is zero chance 343 “closes” until the next full generation… probably that gen’s refresh SKU consoles. Because it would instantly be interpreted as “xbox is dead”.
But gutting Bethesda? We already see people in this very thread talking about how it is good because they didn’t like a game one of the studios did.
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was “we have Diablo at home” but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of “how to do business”. Like Digital Extremes, they are a “legacy” studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC… and was still a mess after). It was mostly “lucking out” and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And… Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That’s right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from “typical” and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
And this is WHY the smaller studios are on the chopping block and not core Bethesda.
Because smaller games that are incredibly solid don’t matter. What matters are AAA tentpoles. And Tango’s A/AA games were “lukewarm” at best. They had an AMAZING B/A game but fuck 'em. Same with Arkane Austin
And… probably same with Obsidian this fall (?) when their Elder Pillars game comes out and people decide it isn’t Skyrim so it is bad. Ignore that Pentiment was amazing or their long legacy as one of the best studios in CRPGs. People will just talk doom and gloom because it isn’t The Last Of Us.
Which will lead to MS continuing to try to be Sony rather than take advantage of the studios they actually have. And people will continue to talk about how they can’t compete with Sony because they don’t have a Horizon Zero Dawn.
I’ve been saying it ever since MS started buying every studio they could. They have an AMAZING roster and can basically dominate the market by “flooding” it with high production value “indie” games. But… people want their AAA tentpoles.
Honestly? Put most of your healing stuff there too. You are going to get a LOT more resources than you need in the early/mid game and are going to be glad it is there in the late/endgame.
Dragon’s Dogma is very much about the long journey to a vaguely known destination. Your personal inventory is very much a balance between traveling light enough to make good time and pick up items with having enough resources to survive whatever encounters you meet along the way.
Always feel Talos Principle 1 and 2 deserve more praise than it gets.
Ignoring the complete insanity that this is from the Serious Sam developers: Talos Principle (1 in particular) is one of those rare puzzle games where things “make sense”. Mechanics are introduced and the vast majority (I want to say all, but it has been a minute) of interactions and “tools” come from that. Rather than “oh, but you see, if you had noticed the way this one picture on the wall looks you would have found the secret tool you needed” wanking.
And the story is interesting enough to motivate progress but not so vital that you feel bad about taking a day or two off before going back to the puzzle.
Baba Is You has some of the “ha, its a secret trick” nonsense but, by and large, is a similar vibe and approach to puzzle solving.
Even those are generally “obvious” as level design makes it obvious there are interactables not inside a puzzle or that use tools that aren’t part of that specific puzzle. The narrative is what pushes you to think “… what if I take this out of the puzzle room?” but many puzzles outright teach you those skills with the kill fields.
As opposed to “You should have looked to the left while walking between these areas and realized that if you lined up the level geometry it would make an arrow”
gog.com/…/alpha_protocol_is_back_drmfree_for_mode… is the actual announcement. And the Raycevick sponsored video is 100% worth watching as it very much acknowledges… Alpha Protocol is probably a bad game but it is still fascinating. And then pivots into a strong push for the preservation aspects of things.
Which is a stark contrast to the way that the usual “I downloaded the latest AAA game because i want to preserve it” pisses on the efforts.
Also, bonus points, Raycevick managed to get THE Matt Rorie to talk for like two minutes on his greatest contribution to society and gaming.
The Yuzu devs were basically going to lose unless they got the most tech savvy judge/jury in existence AND all of Nintendo’s lawyers had food poisoning for a few months straight.
But the Yuzu devs losing in an actual court case would create precedent that would be a lot harder for all the other, more cautious, devs to dance around.
So… yay for Goliath smacking the shit out of David? I guess?
The primary source for legal precedent is Sony vs Bleem.
I mean, small developers
Just like you told your girlfriend the other night, size doesn’t matter
who set up a money-making pateron based on an emulator for a currently sold system,
Bleem was a commercial product to emulate Sony Playstations that came out while the PS1 was still active.
without providing a way to pull your own system info or games from carts (and is therefore heavily reliant on piracy of things currently being sold by the parent company to run)
As long as they aren’t giving details on how to rip the games (which, funny enough, would be the dumper) they are in the same grey zone as system BIOSes and the like
is basically screwed, but this isn’t news, and pretty much every other emu dev would run away screaming from such a setup.
There are other nintendo switch emulators. And emulators like RPCS3 very much were active while their target consoles were actively sold.
Its bad for Yuzu/Tropic Haze. But it is “not bad” for emulation as a whole because there was no legal precedent.
If nintendo decides to continue to strong arm emulator teams into shutting down that is going to be really bad. But that is ALSO when activist orgs tend to get involved and foot the bill/provide lawyers because they want the precedent that prevents those kinds of lawsuits.
And that is literally what (the mechanisms that support) DMCA requests are for.
Github/Gitlab and the like will pretty much auto-nuke it the moment they get a claim and might even set up a filter to detect the repo.
Which will basically leave yuzu as dead/unsupported code that only exists on the sketchiest of sites (so the places that make Sourceforge look legit). And there will inevitably be people who get viruses because someone tainted the clone.
Also, I expect the yuzu source code to be even more radioactive than the nintendo leaks of the past few years. Anyone caught copying or referencing it are opening themselves up to massive liability.
Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer developed by the team behind Sonic Mania. Really looking forward to playing this one, John from Digital Foundry had nothing but glowing praise for it.
ARPGs have basically been live games since Diablo 2 and only gotten farther down that route ever since.
If it is at the point where the developer can no longer justify maintaining the master servers, the game is (generally) dead as a doornail and the “100%” demand is a very small number.
I always prefer to have the option to do whatever I want with a game. But I fully acknowledge stuff like LAN mode for a live game is something that only benefits a small subset of players and is very much about “What happens after we have all lost our jobs?”.
Its the same reason that any studio that claims they will make all the DLC free or remove the DRM or whatever before they shut the doors are, at best, naive. And most likely lying. Because that is the farthest thing from a priority when you are trying to rip the copper out of the walls before you get called in for your layoff.
Its not “forced obsolescence”. Its about there being limited time and resources involved in any project. And stuff like this is very specifically about making sure the game will still be viable for the people who still want to play it after the project/company is over.
The Internet so any metaphor will immediately lead to anger but: It is good practice to document processes and design decisions so that someone who comes after you can understand them. And yes, there is an argument for “job security” if you are the only person who understands how the backup server works. But it is not “job security” to slack a bit on properly documenting and filing that information because you have a million and one other things to work on.
And a lot of the “We need LAN/offline mode in case you go out of business” can feel a lot like “So… we need you to make sure that this will work if we fire you tomorrow”. Yes, a good developer will do that (because it really does reduce support burden down the line) but that is not going to be your priority when you have other deliverables or stuff you actually enjoy working on.
So… the problem is they should just make better games? Really?
Also: While I have a LOT of fucking issues with ubisoft and insist they have the resources to keep those content servers up (if not the multiplayer servers) for games like Splinter Cell that used DRM models that involved streaming game logic, they also aren’t killing the latest and greatest games. The Crew 1 is shutting down in April (apparently, hadn’t heard). That is a 2014 game that very much underwhelmed and has had a sequel for 6 years now.
While it is possible that the Uplay client is where EVERYONE is… anyway. SteamDB says The Crew has 21 concurrent players right now steamdb.info/app/241560/ and peaked at 76 in the past six months. I don’t think all that many people are going to be impacted by shutting down the servers.
There are very much arguments for games like Madden that have a two to three year life span (if memory serves). And that IS “planned obsolescence” but also… is kind of support for the game. Because just look at the old expansion pack model of FPS where a new expansion/DLC would splinter the playerbase drastically and run the risk of killing Battlefield or even frigging Starcraft. Keeping everyone on the same two or three versions works wonders at keeping the game alive (and is why they should just be live games with a new DLC every year but that is a different discussion).
We see similar with the various open world areas in Guild Wars 2 where the vast majority are ghost towns if they aren’t part of the latest DLC or event. And that is why Destiny 2 decided to disney vault their story.
But that is not the same as not dedicating significant developer resources to something that has 20 concurrent players. Moreso if the team/company is shuttering.
When devs are already crunching 60-80 hour work weeks to launch a game and are increasingly worried about their studio being shuttered because they only have one or two fan favorite games in the pipeline? I don’t at all blame them for not taking the time to prioritize it to the 10 people who want to play the game three years after their unemployment benefits ran out.
Okay? Obviously you should buy what you value and if LAN support is a high priority, buy based on that.
The point I have been making is that preventing the 50 people left playing a game after ten years from continuing to play is not “planned obsolescence”. It is just the reality of software development.
Been more than a minute, but I assume it was mostly racist depictions of indigenous peoples?
But yeah. The bigots always lose their god damned minds over anyone acknowledging mistakes or apologizing. Was it last year that Ian Jomha/idubz took down a lot of his earlier REALLY racist videos and apologized? And the entire internet showed their asses (even Charlie/Moistcritical/Normie Centrist Jesus lost his god damned mind and insisted nobody should ever apologize for saying bad shit if it is was funny).
Likely because it ruins the idea of “The evil liberals are out to ruin your life over one mistake you made forty years ago. And that is why it is okay to call people the n-word”.
So if they had made more specs/revisions for a tech that already didn’t sell particularly well?
Even stuff like the Valve Index (and HTC Vive before it?) never got a significant marketshare. And WMR, like steam machines before it, would have split that between the three or four manufacturers who followed the spec.
The facebook quest 2 seems to be doing well but that also pushes hard on the closed ecosystem side of things (you CAN use it on PC but it is clearly marketed as standalone). Maybe if MS had done that but… again, if it was just “put more money in” then they would have done it during the past few years of “spend it or lose it” because of inflation.
I loved my HP Reverb G2 (best seated VR ever). I am not at all surprised to see MS fully kill it considering that “the killer apps” have largely been the same for the better part of a decade. The market is stagnant and we are going to need apple’s dream of everyone wearing AR goggles 24/7 to come to fruition for there to really be much of a market going forward.
It gets really murky and there is a question of intent but… I think it is truly elevated by how painfully average it is. That is the game that everyone was making and playing, right down to the overhead camera explosives shot with the mortars.
And what made The Line “work” is that… it pointed out how fucked up it is that this is so normalized. We had been trained, arguably indoctrinated, by so many Call of Duty style games that there was zero question about how fucked up what we were doing was.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so. Rather than understanding that “walking away” is… maybe not buying the annual, rather mid, "shoot brown people in the middle east’ simulator.
My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
As someone who is VERY aware of the over-specificitty of The Berlin Interpretation:
Generally speaking, nobody is saying a roguelike is worse. Just like DOOM is not worse than Operation Flashpoint because it is not a milsim. It just has to do with having criteria to indicate what games people might like if they liked others. And while there are a lot of borderline cases*, generally speaking, roguelikes and roguelites are very much built differently. Roguelites are very much built around “failure is progress” in the sense that, quite often, you actually need to fail a few times to unlock the endgame.
So when people are saying a game is “the wrong genre”… it can get annoying. It isn’t saying that Hades is worse than Stoneshard** but more that they are very different kinds of games.
*: For example, Tales of Maj’Eyal is NOT a roguelike. Maybe you don’t care about the aesthetics (I sure don’t) but stuff like the transmog bag and the unlockable classes and “races” very much disqualify it. But there is a reason it is one of the most loved games among the “roguelike” crowd. It is one of the best modernizations of the formula to ever be made.
There basically is. “Run based games”. Stuff like FTL also fall into that category.
But also? Just because you like Stoneshard doesn’t mean you like Shortest Trip to Earth. Just like how “action games” covers pretty FPS and TPS and Platformers. Or how “FPS” covers arena shooters, Call of Duty, and milsims.
Well, a lot of that boils down to actually “putting in the effort” to have sane-ish distinctions (the bar is low). You’ll see similar arguments from the milsim crowd, for example. Same with a lot of flight sims where there are generally pretty well understood criteria for the different subtypes (even if it is a mess to find a way to refer to stuff like “Lock-On” that is not “arcadey”…). This isn’t “Well, it has a level up animation so I guess it is an RPG”. This is “It meets criteria X, Y, and Z so it is a roguelike. It meets only x and y, so it is a roguelike. Why do you keep bringing up Operation Flashpoint?”
Contrast that with something like FPSes where you can vaguely distinguish the different eras but there is a lot more bleedover to the point of (fucking stupid and borderline offensive name aside…) not actually being sure if DOOM 2016 is a “boomer shooter” because of the design decisions… even though DOOM is the gold standard for both 2016 and stuff like Dusk (actually Quake was, but DOOM markets better).
Like, I assume most of the crowd are too young to remember but there were actually REALLY big arguments over “MMO” back in the day. Maybe we all remember the question of “So… is Destiny an MMO?”. But there were a LOT of arguments over Guild Wars 1. Because it looked like an MMO and it even progressed like an MMO but… it was Diablo 2 with a fancy skin for the IRC chat room between instances. And a lot of people (kind of rightfully…) blame Guild Wars 1 for the mess that has resulted in “Diablo 4 is my favorite MMO”.
Which, getting back to Roguelikes/lites… as long as you listen to WHY something is not a roguelike, it is a really good distinction. If the reason involves progression mechanics then you almost immediately know if you care. And if it becomes one about aesthetics, you know nobody, not even the person bringing it up, really cares.
UPDATE: Despite saying they were using SteamOS on the homepage, they’ve since clarified that it’s actually “an optimized version based on HoloISO”. HoloISO seems to be a community compiled version of SteamOS. It’s very similar but it’s not officially SteamOS....
Ayaneo (and GPD) have been doing pretty well for the past few years. Well before Valve dipped their toe into the PC handheld market.
It is mostly that Valve have demonstrated the viability of linux for gaming (in large part to preserve their de facto monopoly on PC gaming as MS find ways to convince people to put up with GFWL…). Which means Ayaneo (and GPD) potentially have a way to not have to factor in windows licenses with all of their SKUs.
Yeah. I was looking into a handheld well before the steam deck was announced. GPD probably have the best hardware, but ayaneo the best overall “package” and form factor. My issue was always that they require their proprietary software to be run on top and… I don’t trust them with shit like steam credentials.
But yeah. The company is REALLY Chinese and tend to (presumably) run most of their stuff through a translator. You get used to it.
Say it with me everyone: Companies aren’t your friends.
I think Valve’s work on proton and the like have gone a long way toward making linux viable for “normal” users. But they are very much doing this because they don’t want to give up their giant slice of the pie to MS.
In Sunshine, Peach was genuinely confused as to whether she was actually baby bowser’s mom. The only way that happens is if you fuck on the regular and do a LOT of drugs
So not only are they sacrificing more troops than a PS3-era musou on the reg, they are doing it to play act some REALLY kinky sex fantasies.
You aren’t “archiving” shit of this magnitude. Forums and hosts get the real letters and even the more permissive countries and hosts tend to have minimal issues taking action for these kinds of leaks. They are just as transient as chat rooms with a much bigger investment to run
Which leave “dark web” sites that very much do exist but don’t get linked in news articles
404 Media (formerly Motherboard at Vice) are generally more “tech news” but they are similarly going down that road (and it sounds like they actually worked with the Remap (formerly Waypoint at Vice which worked closely with Motherboard at Vice and were in a similar org structure) crew to iterate on the model).
And what it will actually entail is unclear, but Gamers Nexus similarly brought back their written article website to provide more information on hardware reviews and so forth. Also sounds like it will be a venue for longer form pieces similar to their Artesian Builds video.
I am ride or die with Remap (added a year of Founders during the launch stream) and consider their podcast insanity to be worth the monthly fee alone.
But for 404 and Aftermath and whoever else, I am planning on buying a month or two here and there when there is a particularly good article I want to read/“support”. Probably comes out higher than grabbing an issue of EGM or OPM or PC Gamer back in the day, but also inflation so it might even be cheaper?
Well, they never really did. They just more or less stopped making A-AAA games and got rid of Kojima. The Castlevania remasters and the pachinko shit continued. I want to say their football game also continued?
But… they are getting back into “gaming”. So even those who “remember” no longer have anything to complain about?
The other aspect is their nasty break-up with Kojima. Which was VERY much amplified because of how many game journos are massive Kojima fanboys and how the rest more or less said “Well, labor rights are good to care about”. Because, ignoring the Kojima love fest, Konami:
Stopped funding someone who wasted massive amounts of money motion capping horses and making women strip down so he could motion cap them in the nude (yup)*
Finally let said problematic asshole recast the fan favorite voice actor… but didn’t give him an unlimited budget so Jack Bauer only got paid for like six lines of dialogue (in fairness, the audiologs had a LOT more Kiefer).
Fucked around with security and opsec to make it really hard for staff that would soon be laid off to find new jobs on the company dime. This is fucked but “only kind of fucked” by Japanese corporate standards.
Released a game without the last mission. Because The Island of Eli or whatever the fuck has no indications of being this massive “half the game” that people claim and was likely going to be about 5-20 minutes of gameplay and cutscenes comparable to when mother base got zombied.
But also? People still get super excited for a quantic dreams, ubisoft, or blizzard game. So worker abuse and sexual abuse are not factors in terms of whether a publisher/dev is “good”.
So yeah. Getting the fan favorite back is going to go a long way. The MGS1-3 remasters are god awful (and somehow worse than the HD Collection a decade or so ago?) but considering the big complaint people have with MGS-Delta is “the color balance is not warm enough”, time will tell.
*: Seriously, I think the absolute best thing that ever happened to Kojima was that he was mostly “heads down” during the #MeToo phase of the pandemic. Although, part of me REALLY wanted him to get a Silent Hill just because, of the ideas we know he had, it would lead to the greatest holy war of all time as the Silent Hill fans and the MGS Fans fight it out. And Bloober would still be too stupid to stay quiet and would catch all the strays.
Yup. If memory serves, Kojima had been pretty publicly trying to burn that bridge since at least MGS3 and allegedly (?) tried to use that as one of the conditions for “I am done with Metal Gear Solid and will never make another” that he kept doing during that era.
I want to say that Hayter hinted at it going back to MGS2 during some of his interviews the past few years, but can’t find any examples so assume that is a fever dream.
As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.
As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.
And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.
*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of
Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.
All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):
This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.
A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.
Honestly? I think Hayter is Snake, much like Kurt Russel will always be Snake.
But Kiefer actually can act (… when he is not struggling with his demons and tackling Christmas trees). And basically from MGS2 on, the decision was made that MGS should have pathos that is not “so is this intentionally funny?” a la “Can love bloom on the battlefield?”.
MGS2 sort of got away with it because Quinton Flynn is actually a pretty talented VA but… everyone hated Raiden because he was “the player” rather than “Snake”. Same gag as Otacon but people sort of realized it this time.
But MGS3? I am not going to claim that the issue was that Hayter “couldn’t do the voice” or whatever. The issue is that he just isn’t the kind of actor who can carry those scenes. And that is why we mostly had EVA (unknown, but likely a “real” VA/actress) and The Boss (Pearl Krabs) carrying the story with a lot of the more emotional scenes involving Naked Snake silent and in agony.
And MGS4 was the worst of all worlds. Between having the player mockery character fuck the fanservice version of Bastilla for no apparent reason and actually putting a lot of the pathos on Hayter and Meryl (Debi Mae West has a fairly limited range) and some random kid… yeah.
Which gets to MGS5. When Kiefer speaks, he knocks it out of the park. His career is largely built around taking REALLY mediocre scripts and somehow making us care about some obnoxious bully or a psychopath running around with a car battery. But apparently “lessons were learned” from MGS4 so it was mostly awkward silence while Kaz or Ocelot did the talking and… yeah.
Still, if you can get past the trademark Kojima misogyny, MGS5’s gameplay is miles beyond every other Metal Gear short of Rising. It does have the problem of trying to shoehorn in a progression/unlock system while giving you a silenced (later infinite silenced) tranq gun (and tranq sniper rifle) in the first three hours of actual gameplay, but that actually works with the general horrible pacing and lack of plot (and spoilers built in to the intro cutscene of every level…).
Although, if you have the option, play it on PC and fiddle around with one of the bigger mods. Doing more missions as OSP (start with no gear) and tweaking the progression so that the top tier stuff isn’t balanced around multiplayer goes a long way.
Still. 4 with a more talented VA (and a lot less fanservice) would have been so amazing.
Much like Escape from LA was shit compared to Escape from NY, the MGS series has gotten progressively more and more hindered by being built around a “… how did you not get sued?” reference to Kurt Russel in the 80s joke. Like I mentioned elsewhere, I really wish MGS had become an ensemble piece (and MGS2 was trying for that before the backlash). Rising being a character action game as Raiden is AMAZING. Imagine an IOI led Hitman-style game where you play as Meryl or Johnny infiltrating an enemy base. Or an Arkane led game where you play as The Cobra Unit with all their magic powers. And not having to keep going back to such a one dimensional character as the core of the series.
Also, just to make it clear. I am not shitting on Hayter. Bruce Campbell is one of my favorite actors (also was in Escape from LA…). He can do very short bursts of pathos but it was clear that Burn Notice was struggling when they had to rely on Bruce/Sam because Michael/Jeffrey was still learning how to act and it would have been INSANE to let one of the better tv actresses of all time (Sharon Gless) do anything other than play a one dimensional character. Not every actor is Lead material and that is fine. Because you need a lot more top tier supporting actors/actresses than you do “good” Leads.
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed (www.youtube.com) angielski
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Don't expect big reveals at Summer Games Fest, says Geoff Keighley (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Sounds like there aren’t going to be any groundbreaking reveals this summer games fest.
ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree | Story Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Microsoft Closes Redfall Developer Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush Developer Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda (www.ign.com) angielski
Affected devs:...
[Gamers Nexus] Dragon's Dogma 2 is a Mess: GPU & CPU Benchmarks, Bottlenecks, & Crashes angielski
The Talos Principle II: The Most Underrated Video Game of the Last Decade (www.youtube.com) angielski
Obsidian's Alpha Protocol is available again thanks to GOG (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Yuzu developers agreed to pay $2.4 million in damages to Nintendo to settle their lawsuit (storage.courtlistener.com) angielski
Everyone in the emulation scene can breathe a sigh of relief.
Penny's Big Breakaway - Available Now (youtu.be) angielski
Penny’s Big Breakaway is a 3D platformer developed by the team behind Sonic Mania. Really looking forward to playing this one, John from Digital Foundry had nothing but glowing praise for it.
Last Epoch 1.0 Patch Notes (forum.lastepoch.com) angielski
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Windows Mixed Reality to be removed in Windows 11 24H2 (blogs.windows.com) angielski
Windows MR and HP Reverb VR headsets to lose all functionality in Windows 11 24H2, so don’t update if you use those headsets....
Spec Ops: The Line permanently removed from Steam and other digital stores (www.theverge.com) angielski
Something something digital ownership
Roguelike vs Roguelite - what's the difference? (whatnerd.com) angielski
My takeaway is that it’s only original Rogue fans that care about the delineation of the terms. Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?
AYANEO NEXT LITE handheld announced with SteamOS Linux | UPDATE: Not SteamOS Apparently (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
UPDATE: Despite saying they were using SteamOS on the homepage, they’ve since clarified that it’s actually “an optimized version based on HoloISO”. HoloISO seems to be a community compiled version of SteamOS. It’s very similar but it’s not officially SteamOS....
Has Bowser finally turned good and gave up on hunting Peach? angielski
You know Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope?...
The full source code for GTA 5 has apparently been publicly leaked (archive.is) angielski
Former Kotaku writers are launching a new video game site — and they own it this time (www.theverge.com) angielski
'This is only the beginning': Metal Gear Solid fans lose their minds as David Hayter returns to voice Solid Snake in a new teaser (www.pcgamer.com) angielski