We already have strong indications of companies like Ubi using AI models based on past performers. And stuff like Tomb Raider/Lara Croft is downright famous for how much they model her appearance off actresses (sometimes the mocap actress, sometimes just a random attractive one). And its worth remembering that the big attempt at “a virtual actress” was from a Final Fantasy movie. Hell, the rumor has been that most of Martinet’s Mario lines were recorded decades ago.
Plus, as much as I love Warframe and DE, it has always been more than a bit sketch how many characters are voiced by non-union employees of the company (and, bottom dollar, Space Mom going out for a pack of smokes for a few years was worries that Reb would leave). And they are not at all out of the ordinary in that.
So yeah. Video games should fucking respect the unions
And for people thinking nothing will happen (like last time) because the vast majority of game dev can be done without the VAs or even the motion capping done?
Take a look at the SAG strike. A24 and the like “rolled over” almost instantly and are largely operating like nothing has changed. Expect the vast majority of indie and “small studio” productions to do so. It means higher cost per game, but the SAG rates are nothing compared to the rest of game dev. And then it gives them a significant advantage.
Whereas the big studios? Rockstar are nearing formal announcement on GTA6. Can’t do that if your talent is refusing to record lines and the like (not to mention the rumors (?) that they blacklisted the hell out of Nico Bellic’s VA after he dared to ask for more money). And you can bet that Sony are trying to find ways to get the TLOU show crowd playing games (although I totally expect Troy Baker to scab the fuck out of things).
There have been some fan stories of Troy Baker that make him seem like a real douche bag. But mostly, just watch basically any time he does a big stage interview. It is almost a meme that he will find a way to talk about how amazing of an actor he is and cut off any woman in sight.
He could very well end up being insanely pro-SAG and the like. But he shows every sign of being a Stephen Amell level of “Fuck you for not letting me promote my products”
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!...
Having a very weird “relationship” with this game.
Switched to linux for my desktop so PC gamepass is… a hassle. Which means I would be playing this on my xbox. But also? There is a full month of “early access” that I need to wait through to play the game I “own”?
Caught a few streams yesterday and it looked fun in that “Outer Worlds without the charm” kind of way. Could see myself going hard on the ship editor but… Avorion and Space Engineers already exist. Also Cosmoteer
Which makes this weird. It looks fine/good (like basically any bethesda game since Oblivion) but I kind of already am having difficulty mustering up the interest to go preload it on my xbox. Suspect I’ll just “forget” about this game until a Steam sale a few years from now. Kind of like Fallout 4 (although, I have yet to actually bother with that outside of ymfah videos).
It is not in the slightest bit surprising that bethesda would have issues with an interconnected world.
All (?) interiors are still different cells that require a load screen. And, since Skyrim (and, to a lesser extent, Fallout 3), the vast majority of towns are also a separate “exterior” cell as well.
MAYBE with the requirement of an SSD/nvme we could see a return to Morrowind/Oblivion style “the entire planet is one exterior area”. But we were never going to have atmospheric transitions.
There is a reason that basically every single “seamless transition” elite game has almost entirely barren planets. Balancing simulation for an entire solar system is already hard enough (and is why star citizen and elite dangerous like the long travel times…). Combining that with a planet where you potentially have to care about more than a few containers of loot and some scannable objects becomes hell. Its why so many games will hide a loading screen as you break atmosphere (I think one of the Evochrons did this? Been a minute) and why planets with cities are generally off limits… Or you just run like dogshit if you are star citizen.
That said: I REALLY hope this is the motivation for NMS to add cities. I don’t need “open world” cities. But being able to dock at a domed city would be AMAZING. And still get rid of a lot of these issues.
I think people were expecting fallout no man’s sky…and I don’t know why.
Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”. We had more, but smaller, open world areas but that isn’t much different than how The Pitt and the like were treated. Hell, it has been a minute, but I want to say DC proper was already a separate set of exterior cells that you transitioned into from the capital wasteland?
Mentioned elsewhere that I think anyone who was expecting seamless transitions just do not understand game dev (or Bethesda’s engine) in the slightest.
But it IS disappointing that there is such a massive emphasis on fast travel. Because Outer Worlds showed that traversing a space wasteland to do a few quests and find some POIs is really fun. And Bethesda have a LOT more resources than Obsidian and could have made that a much more “real” world. Even if it was mostly procedurally generated landscapes with painted in POIs.
R&C is cool as hell but it is NOT the revelation it was marketed as.
Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 had already done almost exactly the same gimmick years prior. And that MyHouse.wad DOOM map that everyone lost their mind over a few years back actually was ALSO doing the same trick. Hell, the Build Engine games (particularly Duke Nukem 3D) were entirely built around this trick.
The reality is not that you are “changing entire dimensions”. It is that the majority of the map is loaded into memory and you are teleporting between parts of it. This has been a solved technology for literally decades. You just have seamless “portals” between different parts of the map. But it boils down to just loading enough assets.
R&C mostly benefited from the larger memory of the PS5 (16 GB of GDDR6 versus 8 GB of DDR5 for the PS4) with the “direct storage” mostly being background in, ironically, the same way Morrowind was: You are loading a few “cells” ahead of you as you traverse the world map so that you never notice a load time (unless you use the boots of blinding speed… or are playing on a console).
Ah. I remembered the Imperial City being its own loading area (and kvatch was the town that gets wrecked? So that would make sense too) but I could have sworn the rest of the towns were still “open world”.
Ah well. Maybe someday I’ll play Oblivion again. But almost definitely doing Morrowind first because Morrowind was awesome and weird as fuck.
Keep in mind that the PS4 pro and the Xbox One X both had spinning disc hard drives. Going from an HDD to an SSD, let alone a pretty good NVME, is already an insane speed-up. There is a reason most PC outlets have said over the years that getting an NVME was a more noticeable improvement than a new GPU.
Similarly, most games and visuals that people were used to fit in 8 GB. This is twice as much RAM at a higher speed.
The “direct storage” argument is almost entirely marketing. And it is fundamentally no different than learning you can Boots of Blinding Speed across the map without loading if you installed Morrowind to an SSD.
It is a nice technical achievement. But pretending it was some unique and groundbreaking action is not only buying into the marketing: It is insulting to the devs who did similar with much less.
At the end of the day: it is all the same “trick” Morrowind used. You load N cells ahead of where the player is so that they don’t notice the load times because they have been done by the time they get there.
In this case a “cell” could be a room or it could be DM-Deck 16 or it could be all of The Imperial City. It is the same trick. Hell, I think some streaming services even do this at different quality tiers so that you have no delay between one episode and another.
Size of levels is entirely a function of available memory. PS5 had more memory than PS4 and TF2 was targeting PS4 specs (… actually, was that PS3? Let’s say PS4 so I don’t feel too old). Faster load from disk helps a lot but NVMEs alone already get you there, as anyone who has experienced zero load times while playing a game can attest.
Like I said below where I already addressed this exact same point: It is great to applaud accomplishments. But by buying into this “only with the power of direct storage is this possible” nonsense you are not only parroting marketing: you are ignoring the legacy of all the devs who already did this years (really decades) ago.
We were never getting Freespace 3. And, arguably, wouldn’t have “wanted” it because the vast majority of the people who worked on that left literally decades ago.
But a remaster/remake of 1+2 could have led to a revival of the space dogfighting genre.
That is true of basically every game. It is why we moved away from “Game, wait a year, expansion, wait a year, expansion. new game” on to DLC and now straight up live games. It is just a reality of development as it lessens crunch (you can put features off for later updates) and removes the old ramp up/down model.
The issue is not that star citizen is trying to be a live game. It is that it is horrendously mismanaged and helmed by a “rockstar developer” and his family. Apparently the brother actually DOES know how to ship a product, but he isn’t the one who runs around telling people to prioritize bedsheet deformation. Or to insist on needing 64-bit coordinates rather than using the industry standard approach of only loading a few cells within range of the player (and then lots of complex shenanigans to update the rest at a much lower rate). And so forth.
And I am not even going to complain (too much) about the sp campaign never coming. That is what I bought a decade or whatever ago and I am still pissed that was immediately dropped in favor of making the game Microsoft said “… fucking no. Release Freelancer god damn it” to. But the majority of current players want star citizen so… fine.
But the issue is just that there is no competent leadership. And all anyone has been able to figure out is “If we keep releasing ships, people will keep buying them”.
Because if they had gotten a vertical slice in? This would have eaten ED’s breakfast and NMS would never have had a chance at recovery. It was everything that every elite game has been working toward (and Evochron already did a decade or so ago…) and would actually give people stuff to do with those ships. Add in new solar systems, game systems, etc after the fact.
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being "finished"
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”
Building upon the foundation of v1.2’s massive changes (now in public playtesting!), we are proud to announce that Grim Dawn will be receiving a third expansion: Fangs of Asterkarn!
I dislike the GD/Titan Quest style of character builds (a lot of awkward “meta” mechanics and you more or less are the same character from level ten to endgame) but GD is very much a game I go back to every few months. So pretty much a no brainer to buy this expansion. Just something about the encounter balance and meatiness of attacks keeps me happy
Which is a shame that everything feels so “whiff” in the Titan Quest remaster.
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
I feel crazy but I think Mortismal and a few other youtubers did a large preview of this game a few months back? It looked “fine”. Very b-game with the potential to reach “Bulletstorm” levels of “Why did nobody play this? it is awesome”.
But yeah… if anyone is wondering why Alan Wake 2 delayed by a few weeks… this is why. And AW2 is part of a franchise by a studio that a LOT of people love. This… has a name and premise that we would expect Ice-T to be explaining to an old white guy on a cop show.
Until the aya neo system (or whatever the hell it is), I agreed on the vaulting for relics. Now? They cycle regularly enough and you can often buy the stuff you don’t have. But, more importantly, it pretty much killed the platinum market so you can generally buy the frame you REALLY want for fairly cheap.
I strongly dislike nightwave. But it is generally cosmetics and slots that you are missing out on and it is “free”. I still prefer the old alert system where I just check what is worth doing for extra resources, but I can see how that would have cannibalized the void relic playerbase.
The Baro rotation I feel is a lot closer to FOMO. But you can also “just” buy some cosmetics for Tennocon and get access to the entire catalog. Which is a different kind of “uhm…” but has the added bonus of, again, breaking the platinum market.
Because that is mostly the path to “catch up” or avoid grinding something obnoxious like eidolon hunts or caches. Grind some relics to get ducats or to sell on the market for platinum (or just get a prime access pass…). Then use that platinum to buy the shit you can’t be bothered to grind for from other players.
The annual arcane event is definitely FOMO though. Basically the only chance to get arcanes in a timely fashion and if you don’t engage you are looking at thousands of plat or just ignoring them.
At the end of the day: Its a live game. I personally feel Warframe is a lot more mellow. But they aren’t for everyone. And the “achievement hunter” mindset of needing 100% completion in everything really broke live games/MMOs for a lot of people.
Been a couple years since I messed around with GW2 but:
GW2 has seasonal events. And (possibly removed a week ago?) daily login rewards that “penalize” you for skipping a day. And the Living Story used to be full on “never again” but became “login to unlock it”?
And I would probably classify the world bosses as being comparable to the Warframe void relic alerts. Unless you are part of the zerg you aren’t going to be beating them or having any chance at their drops and they, by definition, happen on a cycle that can make it hard to progress if you have other responsibilities.
But yeah. I am genuinely not seeing a difference outside of the examples I listed above (arcane event, mostly). Basically everything is grindable/“you can check it off” if you just play the game. If you miss a cycle you can do an RMT to grab it rather than wait for it to come back around. I forget if you can trade for gems(?) in gw2 or not, but it is the idea of “I was busy last month so I missed a chapter of the living story and now need to buy it” versus “I was busy last month and forgot to buy a dozen void relics to grab Volt Prime”.
The major franchises are, by and large, sponsored by the platform holders and major publishers at this point. They can actually spend a few years working on a game. More time means less crunch
And as a consumer? I already got way too many games to play. Right now I have Baldurs Gate 3 (!), Armored Core 6 (???), Alan Wake 2 (… I have to have died and somehow got put in The Good Place, right?), and LAD Gaiden (that actually is sane) in the next few months. Let alone whatever I managed to forget because this shit is so insanely stacked.
But also? it doesn’t really matter i I play a game at launch. Last of Us 2 and God of War 2 were some of the bigger games ever with massive twists that EVERYONE cared about. And… because I ignored threads about it, I was pleasantly surprised (well, mostly bored but…) when I finally got around to them a year or three later.
And… for as big as these new games are? I still got Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld and Warframe to check in on way too often.
So yeah. I am perfectly happy with the big sequels getting more time in between games.
Kenshi is fun but always feels like too much of a time investment to get to the fun parts. Sort of like a roguelike where the first hour is always the same but you still will probably die. Caves of Qud is VERY different, but has a similar “let’s do some weird stuff in a weird world” but is “fun” from the first few minutes.
Starsector I could just never get on with, but keep trying every year or two. I think the problem is that I “grew up” in the peak of the elite game genre and with stuff like EV Nova. And now that Cosmoteer is out, that is more of what I want from that style of game. Just a shame the quests are so weak and there are no mini-narratives… yet.
More than a bit corny (and I loved that clearly bamco just figured “Vaati likes Souls, Vaati likes AC” so Vampy had to ask awkward questions about how Vaati is a long time AC fan) but I loved it overall. If anyone wonders why that interview was so awkward? Vaati basically only ever touched an AC game earlier this year when he did a speed through of the series (and I think he didn’t even play the expansions for the most part?). Absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I loved his stance on the “is this mech souls?” debate, but it was definitely funny.
Because… this is Armored Core. We were always the sickos. Our games controlled horribly, were horrendously balanced, had monetization/distribution models that made no sense, and had weird ass plots that we constantly shoehorn into some semblance of a narrative. And we’ve been playing these games even while we loved Souls games. The “showcase” SHOULD be corny.
Also, calling my shot: Oro fucked his build for a reason. There is some ridonkulously powerful shoulder laser (Shoulder mounted Karasawa?) and he got REALLY used to that build. So when he switched to the starter cannon he had all the energy drain with none of the insane DPS to justify it.
SAG-AFTRA Calls Interactive Media Strike Authorization Vote (www.hollywoodreporter.com) angielski
"SAG-AFTRA is standing up to tyranny on behalf of its members,” stated president Fran Drescher.
[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!...
Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down (www.theverge.com) angielski
Former CIG employee speaks out about Star Citizen’s design trajectory and money burn (massivelyop.com) angielski
Announcing Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn! (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Building upon the foundation of v1.2’s massive changes (now in public playtesting!), we are proud to announce that Grim Dawn will be receiving a third expansion: Fangs of Asterkarn!
In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info) angielski
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
Anyone remember Xfire? (lemmy.world) angielski
Soulframe - Official 31 Minute Gameplay Demo Walkthrough (youtu.be) angielski
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 - The First Preview | gamescom 2023 (www.youtube.com) angielski
The wait between major video game sequels is getting longer (www.axios.com) angielski
ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON Showcase (www.youtube.com) angielski
Apex Legends is, yet again, falsely banning linux players angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/3398415...