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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.