I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:
“AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?
Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.
All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.
The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.
Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.
And… same with writing. Ask ChatGPT to write your screenplay? It is going to be bad. Use the proper prompts to get the “voice” of a character right or to generate some background dialogue that you won’t even correctly hear because the mics are focused on Meg Ryan faking an orgasm? Suddenly you have a better “product” than everyone else who just tells extras to wing it or putty around. Same with having a Black Scottish Chick sound like she isn’t written by some white dude.
While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):
Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.
If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.
In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.
But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.
This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.
Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.
That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.
I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.
And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.
It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…
Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.
Just to elaborate on the community streams more. Most live games have their community managers (sometimes devs) do a weekly or monthly stream where they play the game, talk about what is coming, interact with the playerbase, etc. They are almost all puff pieces, but whatever. FDev reduced the frequency of those (I forget if by half or straight to quarterly) which was IMMEDIATELY fuel for “Frontier is sunsetting Elite”. And it isn’t like they fired the community managers. They just… do less streams.
TL;DR the developers of slay the spire created a fun free card game within 3 weeks to explore and learn the Godot game engine. You can play it here: megacrit.itch.io/dancing-duelists
Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.
But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.
It is very much not worth going back to if you don’t have the nostalgia, but check out Morrowind. You are still saving the multiverse but it is just so “weird” that it truly remains memorable.
As for CRPGs that are well worth a first play in 2023:
Disco Elysium. You play as a washed up amnesiac cop trying to solve a murder mystery. VERY much about “role playing” and while the main story goes places, it is fairly “down to earth” with a greater focus on exploring the philosophy of the world rather than fighting it.
Planescape: Torment. The inspiration for the former. You play as an amnesiac (hmm) man who woke up in a mortuary at the nexus of the multiverse. Your companion is a talking skull who seems to know more about you than he is letting on. And you explore the ad&d era Forgotten Realms multiverse as you try to understand why you can’t die, who you actually are, and What Can Change The Nature of a Man? Stakes get somewhat high, but it is still “down to earth” in the same way The Odyssey is
Tyranny. You play as more or less a middle manager for The Emperor who has conquered the world and is putting down anything even resembling a rebellion. Hijinks ensue, and you now need to navigate a civil war between two major factions while deciding what you will do with your greater power. Like all good Obsidian games, it feels like it ends about two thirds of the way through so you never really “save the world” per say, but you gain a deep understanding of what that would entail and need to decide if the ends justify the means. Also pretty notable in that it is an “evil” campaign in that even the “good” outcome of most quests is choosing the lesser of two evils. Like condemning a man to be brutally tortured and enslaved so that a town can be spared and so forth.
And special mention goes to Torment: Tides of Numenera which is inXile’s spiritual successor to Planescape, but I never actually got around to playing it. But everything I have seen puts it in that same category as Planescape of “anyone who has played this will tell you they played it because it is that damned good”. Mix of way too much going on and always being a bit off put by inXile’s approach to CRPG combat. Think I backed the kickstarter though.
I think The Eternal Champion from Arena transcended or some bullshit? But in Daggerfall you are just some dude who gains power of a reality warping mech for one crucial moment.
Battlespire I want to say you were just some random ass wizard? And Redguard you are just some dude trying to rescue his sister (?).
And even Morrowind is more complex than that since you ARE just some dude. But by following the steps of the prophecy (and, futzing with the magic artifact that created some of the gods to begin with) you BECOME a god.
And even Oblivion, you were just some dude who helped out Sean Bean until the DLC.
And I think in ESO you are something “Other” because of your lack of a soul?
The more I think about it, the more Skyrim is really the odd one out for making you a godling to begin with.
Old man yelling at clouds, but holy crap was Morrowind awesome. Actively questioning whether Tiber Septim/Talos was actually a god, exploration of the nature of the gods to begin with, bug based taxis, etc. Like, even the idea of whether The Nerevarine is actually Nerevar Reborn or just someone else who stole from the same god fount that The Tribunal did is explicitly never answered.
And then Oblivion immediately confirms that, yes, the Septims are magic linchpins of the entire universe.
Yeah. if memory serves, it both under-performed and under-reviewed which is likely why the follow up never happened. Glad that Pillars did well enough to not only get a (really interesting) sequel but also a Skyrim-lite, but really hoping Obsidian goes back to the concept, if not universe, of Tyranny. Because that was interesting and shockingly nuanced for a video game.
Pentiment is a good sign, but I really hope that MS realizes what they have with Sawyer (and Obsidian+inXile in general). Like, I get why old school CRPGs never grew beyond their niche. But these were doing nuanced and “shades of grey” stories LONG before people lost their god damned minds over why people think Our Glorious And Perfect Hero Joel might have done a single bad in his entire life.
Like, Sony have mostly taken over the “prestige television” of gaming as it were. But there is a lot of room to turn MS’s studios into the “weird indie films” of gaming.
It won’t fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:
PC more or less is THE second platform (or first, with console as second) for a lot of people at this point. So if the option is:
Studio goes out of business because a great game didn’t sell amazingly well. See Mimimi for a “good” example of this
Soft or hard acquisition results in games trapped on a single platform with questionable backwards compatibility policies. Bayonetta 2 and 3 being nintendo exclusives until the end of Nintendo is a “good” example of this
Soft or hard acquisition results in game that is console exclusive to one platform, but also on PC
I’ll always pick 3. Because as console prices increase? A “couple years old” gaming PC is not horrifically expensive (so long as crypto stays in the shitter…).
But also? Shit like Geforce Now and other streaming solutions means that people (who don’t live in the ass end of nowhere and have such horrible internet they wouldn’t be able to download the day one patches anyway) can play these games on their macbooks or even their chromebooks.
People will constantly point to grey market sites like g2a and even gmg (g2a is really more of a black market site but…) and smugly mock anyone who DARES to buy a game new. Everyone cheers for (one of the daddies of gamergate) Total Biscuit’s mantra of never preorder and will insist that publishers and devs are trying to nickle and dime/steal from them for daring to release DLC for a three year old game.
And then we wonder why studios shut down.
So no, you aren’t looking for “solidarity”. You are so self obsessed with not getting what you want that you are recontextualizing it as everyone else is taking things away from you to get what they want.
Because: I would love it if there weren’t giant conglomerations of studios. But then I remember how some of the best studios out there, such as Digital Extremes and Larian, have stories of “Yeah, it was make or break and we really lucked out with getting in on the ground floor of some new concept or marketing gimmick”. Like, we would not have Baldurs Gate 3 if Larian had waited even a year or so longer before starting the D:OS kickstarter. Because rather than people saying “oh shit, we can get a new classic CRPG” it would have been “Fuck kickstarter. It is all vaporware. You are a fucking mark if you give them money”.
And if the choice is between having a different publisher on a game and hoping that enough folk from Obsidian end up in the same place to make another Pentiment or Tyranny? Fuck it, I’ll gladly let whoever keep the lights on.
It is worth understanding that, at least historically, CDP is a lot closer to “Polish Electronic Arts” than a dev studio. Not sure how that has shifted over the past decade or so and the new approach to localization and distribution.
I doubt they are going to shut the doors and move. But it is a possibility. Just cite that the CP expansion hasn’t sold well enough and they were still recovering from the initial bomb of CP and that they were counting on that Witcher 1 remake and it is a hard time financially and they would be operating at a much smaller capacity while they reorg. Do layoffs that are legally legit, and then reopen elsewhere citing concerns over geopolitics.
But yeah. My money is more on satellite studios that eventually become the primary. Takes a few years longer but drastically reduces union power and gives a warning to the industry as a whole. And is generally the solution in these situations.
Haven’t been following LOTF2 so massive grain of salt but:
In LOTF1, your class actually had a very strong impact on gameplay. It defined your magic which boiled down to buff, direct damage, and an ult. I THINK you could change that on an NG+ cycle but it has been a minute.
Since it is a different dev team and a more modern game, I assume it is closer to Remnant or Code Vein (aka “Sexy goth anime vampires”) where it is an equip slot that impacts stats and spells but you can more easily swap it out.
If you click the article you’ll see this is tied to the 2020 allegations. Which were mostly following on previous issues but nobody cared about abuse back then.
I REALLY hate the ongoing narrative that Titanfall 2 was sent to die or whatever.
Titanfall 2 was made by Respawn. Respawn/Infinity Ward/Whatever They Were When They Did Medal Of Honor have been more or less defining mainstream first person shooters for decades at that point.
And there is this idea that Battlefield 1 (and this was well after we had all decided we hated Battlefield) and CoD Infinite Warfare killed it.
The reality is that it always had an uphill battle because Titanfall 1 was MP only and turned a lot of people off. And FPSes had largely become a “multiplayer genre” with the big surprise of 2016 being DOOM which… still mostly needed people to realize it was good after the “weird” trailers.
The funny thing is that if Titanfall 2 had been Titanfall 1… either as pure MP or with TF1 having one of the all time great SP campaigns, it probably would have become the new Call of Duty in the same way that CoD became the new Medal of Honor. But instead it was a poisoned well released at a time when Gamers just weren’t interested in SP shooters.
Similarly, if it had come out a few years later (after people remembered you could tell a story in a shooter), it probalby would have done gangbusters.
But, like with most things, we instead blame EA. Because clearly EA were willing to piss away however much money Titanfall 2 cost to… get a really shitty VR game and make Vince Zampella work on Battlefield?
BF1 followed Hardline which was almost universally mocked, 4 which is largely considered to be where things started going downhill, and 3 which was shit on for not being Bad Company 3 (… I can’t entirely disagree with that). It could just as easily have been a massive flop as a success (also, I personally never noticed the universal acclaim, but I do know it was generally tolerated).
Also, I can’t be arsed to check, but wasn’t the god awful free to play game out around that time as well? like the cartoony ww2 themed one?
If a game is not allowed to even be released in the same quarter as a CoD then… yeah.
The discussion is about the ongoing narrative that EA intentionally killed TF2 by releasing it too close to BF1 and CODIW. I pointed out that BF1 was not the juggernaut people think it is. You talked about how BF4 was a success even though it had a rough start… which is exactly what TF2 had.
The video game industry is currently facing a big wave of layoffs, and even contract developers at PlayStation first-party studio Naughty Dog aren’t immune. Kotaku has learned that the maker of hits like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and The Last of Us Part II has begun cutting contracts short for dozens of workers....
… what? Does lemmy have karma bots that just fire off pre-written feel good comments? … Does lemmy have karma?
What does that have to do with any of this. Where is the “long held product”? Hell, the sister article is even “Yeah… that MP mode is never coming out”
Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.
One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”
And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.
And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.
Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.
Again, what does that have to do with anything here?
Naughty Dog have not launched anything since the TLOU remake a year or two back. And WFH is not mentioned at all. So I have no idea where you are pulling your random ass talking points out of.
Because this is a pretty bog standard “We have had a troubled development cycle and our publisher/parent company is cutting their losses”
Alot of the time I’ll be playing will be in-between calls at work so being able to pause any time is important. The only one I’ve played is god of war but I never finished it .
Titanfall 2 is one of the greatest games of all time (I would say it is easily a top 50, maybe even a top 20). The singleplayer campaign is just ridiculously well designed and even has a surprising amount of pathos in the narrative.
But if you are likely to be regularly interrupted? Horizon Zero Dawn. most of the story quests are 10-15 minutes each and you can just do the checklist open world the rest of the time.
I disagree regarding the map design being “unbelievably good” (a lot of it was “okay” to “good” with very few standouts) but yeah.
It reminds me a lot of when Bloodstained and Timespinner came out. Both are unapologetic love letters to Symphony of the Night. Except…
Bloodstained felt just as clunky and awkward as SOTN (I should know since I replayed SOTN in anticipation) with a lot of the same “good for the 90s…” design choices and mechanics.
Whereas Timespinner straight up stole the menu. But also modernized the gameplay and filed off a lot of rough edges.
End result is that Bloodstained played like SOTN and was carried by nostalgia and influencers. Whereas Timespinner played like what we remembered SOTN playing like… but didn’t have Iga.
Same here. Games like Dusk, Project Warlock, and so forth all play like what we remember DOOM and Quake playing like. Prodeus… played like DOOM without the nostalgia factor.
DOOM and DOOM Eternal both did pretty well. And, truth be told, the pacing is not too dissimilar from a Call of Duty where it is a constant intensity with a few spikes for set pieces. Max Payne has a few “walk and talks” but mostly it is just about clearing rooms.
If this were a DCS and someone were insisting that the jet they flew for a few years actually has a secret vectored thrust system, I could sort of understand.
But this is “Here are twelve top secret documents. This tank should have 0.1 more points of armor on the left side”
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.
That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:
Distance: Mostly a “beat the clock” style racing game in the vein of trackmania, although the synchronous MP with collision is a great time at a party. But it also has a weirdly good singleplayer campaign with both a narrative and some solid mechanics and set pieces. Also a ridiculous steam workshop presence
Tales of Maj’Eyal probably doesn’t belong here as I think it has been ridiculously successful for a game made by a small team and consistently comes up in discussions by anyone who is aware of what “the berlin interpretation” is. But it feels like it is almost completely ignored in the overall cultural zeitgeist when roguelikes/lites comes up. Which is a shame since TOME is very much a roguelike (technically lite, but… meh) with some solid design concepts. The vast majority of runs feel like they were “worth it” and even the early leveling has enough variety and wrenches that it feels less like you lost an hour of your life when you wipe and more like you get to do the Sand Worm again. Some of the unlocks are complete bullshit (although, I want to say the special magic trees were just made “free” because everyone hated it?), but it is generally the kind of game where you can work toward something with every run.
UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock (fuck Afterlight). Back in the dark ages between Silent Storm (WOOO) and the 2012 nu-XCOM, there were a lot of eurojank games in the genre. And while I don’t think UFO Aftermath was “good”, I do think it was competent. But mostly? It is probably the best Stargate SG1 game ever made. Because the devs were trying to cash in on that Jagged Alliance craze and made the human weapons stage a lot longer. So you might find yourself in an endgame with a few G36s backing up your plasma rifles as you fend off the obligatory base invasion. Aftershock, and especially Afterlight, lost a lot of this charm (because they are years later timeline wise) but were still fun
Silent Storm. Sorry, Silent Mother Fucking Storm, if we want to be specific. Alternate history WW2 where you play as a special organization for the Allies or Axis that are investigating a third party who have the potential to turn the war itself and blah blah blah. Mostly it is probably one of the best balanced JA2 style AP-based strategy games out there (just… get a save editor because the leveling/training is broken) with an emphasis on line of sight, trajectories, and full destruction of terrain. The kind of game where you might spend six “turns” getting your scout into position so that you can have your sniper plug a person from behind a wall, your machine gunner unload on people sleeping in a barracks, and your grenadier to… make the guard tower not exist anymore. All without ever directly targeting an enemy because you are fully operating based on magic radio commands or whatever. Again, this probably doesn’t belong here since anyone who liked JA2 back in the day was talking about this but it more or less fell off the face of the earth in favor of nu-XCOM. And I feel like the genre would be pretty revolutionized if people remembered this existed.
There have been a lot of borderline stunt castings over the years. Patrick Stewart was in like 30 seconds of TES4 and Sean Bean was in about 10 minutes of it. Hell, Bruce Campbell was in all of Tachyon: The Fringe (which is like the fifth best space dogfighting game ever).
But they were largely wasted. Kristen Bell… she is spectacular within a narrow range and “generic girl in the chair” is not it. And then there was the (alleged?) contract dispute that led to her being a baddy that gets killed off real fast. And that was largely the case. It was “get a b/c-tier actor/actress and find out that voice acting is very different than camera acting”
In more recent years we started to see a big emphasis on VAs doing the motion cap as well and Christopher “Teal’c” Judge made Kratos “I moved to a non-extradition treaty pantheon” of Sparta into a woobie. And people very much underrate how good of a job Camilla Luddington and a few other performers have done over the years.
But… we still have shit like Rosario Dawson in Dying Light 2 where “okay… she was there?”.
For its many many many many many flaws and problematic aspects, I think CDPR did an amazing job with their “stunt casting” for Cyberpunk. Because Keanu knocked it out of the park (when he wasn’t just talking about his magnificent cock) and everything I have seen of Idris Elba’s performance is similarly good.
And it kind of does mark a paradigm shift. Because it is no longer getting David Hyde Pierce to do a cameo as a camp gay counselor or a snooty over the top version of Niles. It is more like getting Ted Danson because you need a character who can simultaneously be a sleazy asshole and also the kind of person you just want to open up to and tell all your problems. It isn’t the kind of performance that you get for a single episode of sweeps week or to make people tune in even after your lead actor fucked off. It is the kind of performance you build a show/movie around.
The problem is that he really IS wooden and obnoxious for basically the entire first two acts or so. It isn’t until you have that conversation outside the motel (?) that he is allowed any range.
And… that is also around the time the game falls off massively in terms of quality. It isn’t quite Obsidian levels of “We ran out of money” but it definitely shows what they spent time on and what they just had to get working to release.
Which sucks because that is actually when they delve into the character of Johnny (particularly WHY he hates Arasaka so much) and you start having actual conversations with him… unless it is a side mission where they all default to antagonistic first hour mode.
Speculation is strongly leaning toward it not being a standalone device and instead being in the WMR/PSVR space. Possibly coupled with a return of “Steam Machines” for a tv/console experience.
I would still prefer a standalone/hybrid. But with wireless a lot of the need for that goes away. Same with if the Steam Deck is powerful enough for stuff like h3vr and other “standalone” levels of games (and, back of the envelope, it is very much capable of that).
And I think the bigger advantage will likely be to focus on OS agnostic support for the HMD itself since that is kind of a cluster. Probably will still mean everything runs on steamvr (which makes porn apps a bit risky), but will couple well with unity’s cock up and people generally getting pissy if you remind them that “meta” is “facebook”.
It is less about taking your HMD on the go and more about not needing a computer. For a lot of people, having a “gaming rig” is very intimidating. And, as the quest (and steam deck…) have shown, you don’t really need too powerful of a computer to run “basic” vr, but you do need the right ports and so forth.
But also? A lot of people have a complete potato of a laptop that can’t even do that.
For me? Standalone does indeed matter less than wireless. But wireless is expensive radios and power issues. Whereas standalone that I can plug in if I want to play Alyx or something with better visuals? That is my jam
Also: Standalone lets you go to a different room. Whereas you don’t want to get too far away from the radio dongle with a wireless setup. Which gets back to porn apps and maybe wanting a wank in your bedroom instead of the office. Or… having more room to move around when you play Gorn, sure.
But mostly it was about the puzzles and how Croteam (???) figured out how to couple every single mechanic in such incredibly interesting ways. There weren’t hidden mechanics you had to learn. It was all about learning a new trick to solve a puzzle and then realizing you could have done that two hours ago… and then finding a secret.
And if they think they have enough new mechanics/ideas? I am all for it.
Yeah. That is a load of bullshit. Just bring up how g2a (or even some of the historic, and probably current, gmg deals) actively hurts game developers and you get all the people coming out of the woodwork to talk about how the “artists” are stealing from them and it is only right that they do whatever it takes because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism and paying full price is racist.
… or just look at shit like The Last of Us 2 where Laura Bailey commit the ultimate sin of… portraying a woman with muscles.
This is going to be a MUCH slower burn (if only because of development times). But I expect a LOT more smear campaigns to be used to “justify” switching to non-union VAs and motion cap artists.
ANY gaming, or even tech, company looking at possible acquisitions is interested in Valve. In the same way that everyone would be down to clown with Ryan Reynolds if he knocked on their door but we know it won’t happen.
For all its many many many flaws (like having your flagship game start in a snow storm…), Google Stadia very much demonstrated the viability of full game streaming. Even people with shit broadband could still play a “last gen” quality game. Sure people in the outright sticks won’t be able to but… they likely aren’t doing a lot of gaming as getting a 10 GB patch out to them is hard enough.
And if you are only doing game logic and some simulations, rather than full rendering? The bandwidth needs drop even more.
Weird. Very curious what issues you ran into. I didn’t even have anything that bad on hotel wifi.
Mostly because: The video is pretty “easy” and mostly suffers from compression artifacts. If you can watch youtube, you can stream a game at generally one quality setting lower. Because latency is what matters. The actual game inputs are nothing on top of that.
Mostly it was just annoying that google did EVERYTHING they could to market it poorly and “Gamers” lost their god damned minds because they felt threatened. Which… is pretty reminiscent of MS cocking up the announcement of the One.
Part of it is because games have multi-year development cycles. And, for most of covid, WFH/remote was not something people really understood how to do (having kids around did not help). So basically all games lost 1-2 years of development time.
And for a major studio (like MS), you have limited support teams and resources. So if Ghostwire needed one of the support studios, DOOM Year Zero (!?!?!?!) would have to wait and so forth.
And then you just have release windows. It matters less in a digital distribution world, but you want your big games to hit for holidays and known good selling weeks. So if Starfield is end of Summer, DOOM can’t be.
And as you add on delays you need to improve the game because something else came out with a similar bit and you will come across as “derivative”.
In theory, having a whole new button would be nice. But understand that games are specifically designed around the 18+1 button setup and there is rarely a need for a 19th and a 20th. And if I am going full steam craziness: I tend to prefer modal mappings at that point anyway.
I could see something like a flight sim or an elite game benefiting from ALL THE BUTTONS but… at that point I want the HOTAS form factor. Or we are talking something like the x series where everyone knows the game is meant to be m+kb but we still try to make it work.
I mean, I am going to be a gatekeeping little shit and brag about how I got all the endings without needing that.
But it is a really good idea. Because there are very clear “meta” weapons and builds. And a lot of late game encounters and AC/HC battles more or less require them because of all the adds and attrition (especially on the NG+ missions). You either go “meta” or you are fighting bullet sponges and may not even have enough ammo to finish the encounter
And especially in Chapter 1, your arm weapons very much feel like they exist for adds and bubble popping with all your DPS coming from shoulders. We could even see that in the PvP showcase stream. Which is kind of the opposite of the rest of the game where weapon bay to carry 3-4 arm weapons is the way to go.
And it fits with the style of the game. Screw up once and the enemy will chain you for like 4000 AP.
No, that is very normal. Between “battle passes” and “season passes” and RMTs in in-game stores, 8 DLCs per year is pretty low.
As for adding new weapons: Welcome to a live game. If everyone that was released was worse than what was in the base game, what would be the point?
If you dislike the game and the kind of DLC they do, have fun. I will largely agree. But this constant refrain that comes up with long running games of “Ugh, there are so many DLCs” makes me wonder if people would lose their mind if they ever realized how many issues of a magazine there were or whatever.
The history of monetization and mods is a pretty complex one.
Back in the UT/Quake 3 era, it was not at all uncommon to pay someone to make a skin or model for you. Those would be put online “for free”, but the Influencers of the era (clan folk and prolific forum posters) would get the warm and fuzzies from knowing there was a 420_JustBlazeIt_696969 skin for the nali warcow.
The first time I can really think of there being actual premium content you had to pay for was Neverwinter Nights and, to a lesser extent, The Sims. Yeah, there were the titties and fucking mods and the better ones were behind paywalls. But NWN in particular had a few cases where prolific modders might want some cash to give you access to their really cool campaigns. And Atari/Bioware took advantage of that for premium mods (although, I don’t think any community mods ever got an official release? I know AL3 or AL4 was supposed to be but ended up getting released for free when the program ended).
But that was arguably the beginning of the end for the golden age of mods. Because a year or two later we had Unreal Tournament 2003/4 and the “Make Something Unreal” contest. Which was a competition held by epic where the best mods in different categories would get huge cash prizes and games like Red Orchestra actually came out of this. And… it almost instantly killed the modding community. Sure we got Chaos UT2k4 and a few others, but basically every large modding effort was part of this contest rather than “for fun”.
And… the reality is that the contest and atari’s half ass efforts were pointless. Because the reality is that, by the early 2000s, modding was of comparable difficulty to making a game from scratch. And tools kept getting better (UT became The Unreal Engine, if that is not obvious) and between UE and Unity it was a lot easier for people to just make their dream games and sell them rather than make a mod for someone else’s game.
The Bethesda games side was a lot more gradual. There wasn’t a massive exodus of modders but… the number of quality quest mods for Morrowind versus Oblivion and Skyrim very much shows that the particularly talented folk were off doing other stuff. And a lot of the old hats realize this. A mod list for Morrowind might have been hundreds of quests. A mod list for Skyrim is bugfixes, a few UI/UX fixes, a graphics mod or two, and… that is it. Like, you still get the occasional magnum opus. But… yeah.
So you get this push back over the idea of modding “dying” even more. Because people aren’t going to put in hundreds of hours of work to give something away when they can do the same work and get paid for it. But… that also means they aren’t putting in 10 hours of work to make a hilariously bad map that simulates what it is like to have Comcast internet.
And then you just have the children who throw a temper tantrum the moment they are deprived of something they want.
they are likely referring to The Forgotten City. Which is more than a bit more complicated than “one of the quest mods was so good it literally got turned into its own game” but is close enough to not matter. I enjoyed it but it also felt very reminiscent of the MSU mods that became full games (Helldorado? The shitty steampunk third person shooter with demons). Just with the added benefit of being artistic and a critical darling. If people weren’t huge on Outer Worlds for not feeling enough like Skyrim, they aren’t going to be a fan of The Forgotten City.
A friend referred to it as “an arthouse game” and… she isn’t wrong. The people who like it are going to LOVE it. And everyone else is going to say they like it so that people don’t judge them for not being a fan.
it is also a case of traditional modding dying out in favor of people just making their own games. But that person seemed confused and angry as is because I didn’t consult them before making a generalization so let’s cut them some slack.
Eh, that was close enough to a response rather than a frothing rant that I’ll respond.
Plenty of niche games have “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam. Because that is a function of the reviews by those who played it and cared enough to leave a response. Its one of the great things about Steam reviews. I don’t have to adjust a metacritic score because space dogfighting games always score 10-20 points lower than Call of Duty because I know the vast majority of people leaving feedback loved Freespace and are vaguely aware Tachyon existed.
But as far as the wider world? It was almost immediately forgotten. It got a lot of great reviews, but not a lot of play. Which is more or less the case for any arthouse movie. I know it can be hard to keep reading after you see something that MAKES YOU SO ANGRY but you should try. People have a tendency to elaborate on points.
As for Skyrim having “7x the amount of mods that Morrowind has”. First, that ignores how many quests and mods were lost to time. I genuinely can’t remember where we went for Morrowind mods (I want to say a mix of the official forums and back when UESP still had forums? It has literally been decades). But just looking at Nexus is only part of the picture. Hell, I think Nexus came out of Morrowind modding? Or did it only get big with Oblivion?
But also? of course it has more mods. The same way that basically every new game in a franchise SHOULD sell more than the previous one did. The audience for gaming has exploded over the decades.
The website makes me vomit, the citations are weak, and the visualization is just bad. But visualcapitalist.com/50-years-gaming-history-reve… gets the point across and looks roughly correct from figures I have seen given in interviews and the like. And the actual specific numbers matter a lot less (and weren’t even recorded in any way that is reliable).
Going off visualcapitalist.com/…/history-of-gaming-by-reven… so I can see it (and I am specifically citing the URL because I would not be shocked if it was actually different than in the article…), in the year 200 where was approximately 20 billion in PC revenue. And while Morrowind DID have an xbox version… it really didn’t.
As of 2020-ish, we are looking at approximately 73B according to “Visual Capitalist” (ugh). So if we assume roughly the same market share were playing TES games in both eras (and it is pretty safe to say that Skyrim is a MUCH more mainstream game than Morrowind was…), we would expect at least a 3.5x increase in the amount of mods. Oh, I am also assuming the same percentage of the userbase were interested in hobbyist game dev (ha) and that the tools have not gotten easier to use (TESEdit or whatever it was called was pure hell back in the day).
So… if we assume all else has remained equal (and ignore all my somewhat mocking points about how they clearly haven’t)… Oh, I forgot. Since TES games are basically the only ones with a thriving modding community these days (unless you count roblox and minecraft where monetization is even more standard), let’s also not assume that anyone who would have made an NWN mod or a UT mod or a Half-life mod decided to not make any Skyrim mods.
Oh, and revenue is also a horrible metric due to a combination of inflation and increased cost of game development, but it gives a rough idea of the audience size.
Uhm… where was I? Look, I can’t even keep a straight face on this. 7x is really not the win you are thinking it is. It should be a LOT higher than that if Skyrim modding really is thriving to the degree things were in the golden age of modding (late 90s, early 00s).
And that isn’t a bad thing. Like I said in the first post that set you off: This is just the trend we have seen. When it is literally easier to make a game in Unreal Engine than it is to make a quest mod in Skyrim… what are you going to do? This is why Unreal Tournament 3 flopped so hard. The expectation was that Epic would release a game and modders would run wild with it. Instead, modders were making UE3 games and getting paid. And the same happened with a few other games (arguably Half-Life 2). Neverwinter Nights 2, and CRPGs in general, largely died out for similar reason. People were less interested in paying for a 20 hour campaign that was “okay” if they weren’t going to have really cool user generated content waiting for them afterward.
And… I’ve already pissed off enough people so I won’t say anything beyond: How did Dreams do?
I remember that discourse and am going to call shenanigans. None of that was new and a lot applies to actual software development
Mods have been plagiarized for as long as their were mods. It was pretty common to find out that mod A stole scripts or even assets from mod B and that mod C is just completely bundling in an outdated version of mod D. “Gamers” generally don’t care and would shit on any creator who wanted credit because they were “causing drama”. I personally know two different Oblivion modders who bailed on “the scene” after someone straight up stole their interiors for one of the high profile mods.
Utility and support libraries are a thing. Been a minute, but I want to say it was two years ago that almost the entire internet ran the risk of shutting down because someone pulled their color code package out of npm?
This has always been true and was a big part of the “drama” about the Make Something Unreal contest. But you also get people who try to become “rockstar developers” because they are the main creator. Kojima is notorious for this but a decent number of the folk who came out of the modding scene did the same shit.
THIS is somewhat unique to Bethesda’s development “model” but, like with DLC, people have a tendency to very much stretch the truth. There was a prototype of a character six years before the DLC about that character was released? Fucking developers are just cutting content so they can sell it to us later!
I am not saying any of these aren’t issues and I do think that adding monetized mods a decade in to the life cycle of a game was a mistake. But, like with most things, if The People are suddenly fixated on and caring about something they had outright mocked a few weeks prior… they still don’t care. They just see a way to be morally righteous while they get what they want.
If you can get your mind around dodging, ER is a lot easier as you have much more options to out DPS your enemies. Bloodborne, even on NG, is really hard to overpower enemies without heavy use of the cum dungeon. And you hit the caps before that would really let you brute force your way through the DLC.
Programmatically? Not really. There are efforts among the major LLMs and content creation tools to embed digital watermarks in AI generated media. But, especially for 3d games where most of these are textures, that is pretty difficult.
What I do see is a focus on computer vision to identify/isolate assets and then look up the provenance of those. Whether it is ripped out of a different game, part of a commonly available asset pack, or registered as having been made by an LLM. Which I actually would expect Epic to push for (since they have an asset store…) but… yeah.
Key issues up for negotiation include pay and conditions, but also “protections against unrestrained use of artificial intelligence”, specifically the impact upon performance capture artists....
I think this is pretty much the perfect time to be doing this.
Plenty of actors and actresses do motion cap, or even full FMV acting, for a lot of smaller tier games. And plenty of major games outright market themselves on getting “real actors” involved. Remember how Patrick Stewart was in 30 seconds of Oblivion and Sean Bean was in five minutes? And not to mention the likelihood that GTA6 is publicly revealing fairly soon.
And looking forward: Anime games continue to be a thing and… that is an ongoing area of concern where the american VAs are openly acknowledging they are afraid to even SAY “union”. And while dubs are very much a third class citizen as far as studios are concerned, they are still a lucrative one and a lot of the major VAs have branched out enough that this could be an issue.
As for “AI”: All signs point toward The Law being about training data. In part because that maps best to the existing structures (if you steal a clip of a movie and don’t credit it, you get DMCA’d) and is something that benefits the actual major studios. With most of the SAG negotiations being about a performer/creator’s rights to their own media. The outcome will almost definitely end up being “all previous content is off limits for training. An actor or a writer can ‘agree’ to having their performance be added to a training database X years from now”.
But in games? Kojima is infamous for just making Snake look like (and be named after…) Kurt Russel’s performance in Escape from New York. And plenty of versions of Lara Croft and the like have looked eerily similar to some actresses. Same with studios over the years accidentally openly acknowledging that they are using episodes of Days of Our Lives or whatever as motion cap to model face emotion and the like. Hell, how many thirsty bois were wondering who the face model of the new soldier lady Jane in FF7-R was?
Right now, that is a wild west. But if that gets your studio put on the shitlist then it starts being a real issue. Especially with the ongoing acquisitions (even if we are in a lull). Get caught training your AI off of Anna Kendrick’s performance in 50/50? Your studio has now become radioactive.
For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!...
I was going to talk about how the load times are mostly just masked but still there but you acknowledged that.
At which point: Mark and Recall (or any of the Interventions) on an NVME is nigh instantaneous. And, much like Shang Tsung got neutered, those spells were largely removed because it made it too easy to load into a cell with a LOT of resources rather than an intentionally controlled and safe (asset wise) fast travel point.
AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Tom Clancy Ghosh Recon Wildlands vs Breakpoint angielski
Which one is better? I have to choose one game to buy this weekend.
Elite Dangerous studio Frontier Developments announce layoffs and "organisational review" (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
TL;DR the developers of slay the spire created a fun free card game within 3 weeks to explore and learn the Godot game engine. You can play it here: megacrit.itch.io/dancing-duelists
The only meme I've been picturing while playing BG3 (startrek.website) angielski
Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators (www.theverge.com) angielski
CD Projekt Red devs are forming a Polish games industry union after a wave of layoffs earlier this year (www.vg247.com) angielski
From the article:...
Lords of the Fallen - Dark Crusader DLC Class Gameplay (youtu.be) angielski
Ubisoft execs and employees arrested over sexual misconduct allegations (massivelyop.com) angielski
Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2 (lemmy.world) angielski
What a fun game . Wish it was a little longer though .
Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers (kotaku.com) angielski
The video game industry is currently facing a big wave of layoffs, and even contract developers at PlayStation first-party studio Naughty Dog aren’t immune. Kotaku has learned that the maker of hits like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and The Last of Us Part II has begun cutting contracts short for dozens of workers....
Having trouble deciding what game to play next . which one of these games should i try (lemmy.world) angielski
Alot of the time I’ll be playing will be in-between calls at work so being able to pause any time is important. The only one I’ve played is god of war but I never finished it .
Prodeus: The Elder Veil - Reveal Trailer (DLC) (www.youtube.com) angielski
Remedy says its Max Payne remakes are ‘a big, big project’ | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
War Thunder user leaks restricted military documents for AH-64D Apache Longbow (forum.warthunder.com) angielski
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved? angielski
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Idris Elba: Actors in video games like Phantom Liberty is 'sign of the times' (www.bbc.com) angielski
Idris Elba, who stars in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, sees a future where films and games converge.
SteamVR 2.0 beta adds tons of new features (www.pcworld.com) angielski
The Talos Principle 2 | Release Date Trailer | Available November 2 | PC | PS5 | XSX/S (www.youtube.com) angielski
SAG-AFTRA Members Vote to Authorize Video Game Strike (www.hollywoodreporter.com) angielski
SAG-AFTRA may soon have another strike on its hands....
Microsoft - keep your filthy hands off Valve, leak shows MSFT would buy Valve (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Microsoft's next-generation Xbox pitched as a "cloud hybrid" console (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/3209376
FTC fails to redact Microsoft document, revealing an old Bethesda release schedule (lemmy.world) angielski
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/152884184065507328/1153553505022390292/image.png
Controllers with paddles? angielski
It seems like ring finger paddle buttons are becoming a controller staple. I know of these, what are some others?...
ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON - Patch Notes 1.02 (en.bandainamcoent.eu) angielski
Payday 3's roadmap promises four DLC drops in the first year (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Starfield players pirate the DLSS mod after the developer locks it behind paywall (www.gamescensor.com) angielski
Game recommendation, looking for easier western 3D ARPG angielski
I am on the older side, really like everything about Elden Ring, except the difficulty. Is there games like Elden Ring but easier?
Tim Sweeney says Epic Games Store is open to devs using generative AI (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
SAG-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Key issues up for negotiation include pay and conditions, but also “protections against unrestrained use of artificial intelligence”, specifically the impact upon performance capture artists....
[MEGATHREAD] Starfield - Your experiences! (cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com) angielski
For those who have pre-ordered it is already here, the rest have to wait a little longer. Starfield is finally here! Have you bought it, why or why not? If you’ve already played it, what do you think of it? We are very curious!...