Sources from Build a Rocket Boy, developer of MindsEye, say the studio has begun layoffs amid a disastrous launch.
This might hurt every English teacher I ever had, but maybe title format should stop applying to article titles. Unnecessary capitalization hurts legibility.
Not that it would necessarily solve the wording issue, though, as I’m sure the data people for news publishers have some stats showing they get more engagement when the title is front loaded with more keywords, or something to that effect.
I am seeing more and more of these “review bomb” takes lately, too. Dragon Age Veilguard getting review bombed because their game is too woke. Moon Studios saying they might have to close because trolls are review bombing their new game. Monster Hunter Wilds being review bombed on Steam because entitled PC gamers expect their games to be stable, I guess.
Too many people out there are deflecting legitimate criticism in favor of what are basically conspiracy theories—that there must be a concerted effort to specifically punish these developers in particular for the crime of releasing a misunderstood masterpiece. No one wants to accept the possibility that they just put out a bad game.
I remember during the initial console reveal, basically the only thing they had to say was that the sticks are larger and smoother (in motion, not the caps themselves).
I don’t know if they mentioned much else later, but they were very tacit about their durability/longevity. I don’t have much hope that things will be better, at any rate. I still bought a Switch 2, because I know it will still bring me joy to play, but as much as I enjoyed the comfort of playing with a Joycon in each hand, I’ve learned from the original Switch to avoid using the Joycons where possible and opt for a separate controller when playing docked (I’m just using the Pro Controllers I have left over from my original Switch).
Console wars stopped being cool years ago. Everyone has their preferences and favorites, no need to shit on someone’s fun because you think yours is better.
Sorry, should’ve clarified that this isn’t directed towards you, OP! Just at a lot of the other comments in here who are acting like someone else’s decision to buy an expensive gadget is a personal insult to them.
Novel interactions and consistency remain a factor, though.
Xbox is essentially straight and standard, but Nintendo and Sony games often make use of controller features (gyroscope, touch, IR sensors) which, while not exactly widely utilized, allow for interesting methods of interacting with games that are not typically found on multiplatform releases that mostly support only features common between all platforms.
And with that in mind, you can safely make some of those novel interactions into core features of first party games when you can safely assume everyone is using the same input devices and has the same hardware.
This is basically a very minor nitpicky consideration, but as an example, gyroscopic aiming was born out of first-party games. If you’ve played a game with gyro aiming, it’s very cool and nice to have, but it will never become a standard part of most third-party games if only a subset of users have hardware capable of supporting it.
One factor might be just that Mass Effect came out first and was also Bioware’s last game before EA bought them.
The rest is just my opinion, but I do believe that Mass Effect simply told a better story (multicolored endings aside) and had a better cast of characters. Not to mention the fact that it was a single narrative across the three installments helped keep engagement up. And shooters were incredibly popular at that time.
I don’t think the Xbox One was a disappointment due to a boycott, I think it was just a product people didn’t feel the need to buy.
Sure, there was early controversy about the always-online DRM approach they planned to take, but it didn’t launch with that in the end. What killed its hype was just being US$100 more expensive than the PS4 and having no killer exclusives lined up.
With that in mind, though, since the Switch 2 runs Switch 1 games with better performance (even ones that don’t have paid upgrades), I’d wonder if it might not still be better to finish out the Switch catalog on Switch 2 anyways just so you can have consistent framerates on some games.
Yeah, ultimately it’s a matter of personal discretion.
Mainly I think we’re at the point where new consoles, now including the Switch, are more like upgrading your PC. Get the newer model to run existing games better.
Games are going to be releasing for both Switch and Switch 2 for a while, so there’s not much incentive to upgrade unless the very small list of Switch 2 exclusives is enticing right now. But if someone’s priority is playing through older games in higher quality now that it is possible to do so without pirating, there are a lot of reasons to upgrade.
It took several years for PS5 to get to the point where it was probably worth it for exclusives alone (and may still not even be there yet for many), but it was worth getting day 1 if there were PS4 games someone wanted to play at higher resolutions and/or framerates, and they didn’t mind the price.
Actually on the topic of price, also worth acknowledging that the market is a bit fucked, and existing consoles have only gone up in price since release, in complete disregard for earlier trends where they usually drop in price over time, so that could be a other reason for someone to want to get in on it early.
I thought it was actually going to be a novel take on arena shooter formats, with a moving game map that would bring in new parts of a stage over time as others disappear. But the more I learned about it, the less interested I became.
So if anyone is looking to make a Rubik’s cube arena shooter, the market is still open.
I know there was a lot of controversy around the first game due to the developer’s connections with Russian state owned organizations. Is that still the case?
Not to mention the GAAS titles which are competitive in nature. The whales thrive on having a mob of casual players they can crush with their P2W advantage. If the whales were only matched against other whales, they’d win less and play less.
The Nickelodeon fighter game is still available I believe, but you’re still right in that there’s still basically nothing to hold a candle to Smash Bros.
Absolute embodiment of less is more. Controls are simple but intuitive, you can beat it in one session, there’s no major payoff in the end. It’s just a game about the journey and the friends made along the way.
I still remember having my mind blown that the other figure I met after the tutorial level was not just an NPC, when I noticed their movements were too deliberate and they were solving some puzzles for me.
I made it all the way to the end of the game with that person. Never knew who they even were until their name showed up at the very end. What a cathartic experience. I’ve also never been able to achieve anything similar since then.
Today’s game is some more of the oblivion remaster. I did some more of the Mage’s guild quest today and the specific quest took me a to a ruin. I have very vivid memories of this specific dungeon because of the puzzle from a few years ago when i did a brief playthrough with a friend. It was very tedious having to open the...
I am glad someone else noticed the painting! I had a good laugh when I saw it.
I’m almost positive the painting is supposed to be the count himself, painted either before he became a vampire or just made to look like he wasn’t a vampire.
If you’re interested in paintings, there’s a cool sidequest in Cheydinhal worth checking out.
My understanding is that Google charges for use of their API. The game could switch to a traditional flat price model, but the moment they stop making enough in sales to pay Google for API access, the entire game is dead for everyone.
The subscription sucks but it’s basically a requirement to continue running. Would be nice if there was any sort of open map standard with even half the street view data Google has so they wouldn’t need Google at all.
No arguments here. I used to love Geoguessr when it was 100% free, but have never once paid for it since they switched to a subscription model. I just blame Google more than Geoguessr is all.
Thank you for the detailed explanation! I had thought Ship was decompiling and recompiling it into its own package, but what you describe makes more sense.
This is the video I didn’t know I was looking for in life.
I’ve been very into Zelda rando stuff lately, but the mod support shown here just seems above and beyond what I’ve seen so far from my limited experience with Ship/2Ship.
At first I was like “Why would anyone want to change OoT’s art and mess with perfection?”, but I do have to admit that I have really been craving a modern Zelda game in the vein of the N64 releases, which is a formula they haven’t touched since Skyward Sword in 2011. And Oblivion just recently showed me that sometimes a new coat of paint really is all you need.
Wind Waker at least is a game that (visually) aged very gracefully and I think can still stand against newer games even now, but I’ve played it to death and just wish we had something new.
Also not to discredit BotW/TotK or anything, I think they are still great games and I also really enjoyed them, but they’re just built different. Zelda is now a franchise of 3 distinct styles, but only two of them (2D and open world) are still getting new releases.
Yep, even going way back, there are differences between speedrun times for Ocarina of Time on N64, Ocarina of Time on GameCube, Ocarina of Time on Wii VC, and Ocarina of Time on NSO. And that’s also not considering the native PC port recently assembled by the community.
And that’s why speedrun leaderboards always factor in game version/region and platform when measuring runs against one another.
Those sorts of things can absolutely happen. Newer versions of games often either patch issues on older versions or there may be some glitches that are not as easy to take advantage of when the hardware isn’t struggling as much.
The Zelda Speedruns site even maintains a list of version differences for various Zelda games which make a difference to which version is optimal to run.
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s just the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks. And it’s a pretty high-effort remaster at that.
I just think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better, when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible. It’s as good now as it was back then but it’s still a 19-year-old game.
Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.
As someone who played waaaaaay too much of the original game back in the day and was very concerned about a remaster doing it justice, I have to say it turned out about as well as it possibly could have.
It didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel or make fixes for things that weren’t broken (other than the leveling, at least), it just turned Oblivion into a modern game while still being Oblivion deep down inside.
I am curious to hear perspectives on what Skyrim-only players think about it, because while the Oblivion remake is arguably now the most modernized Elder Scrolls game, it still doesn’t have some of the gameplay and QoL improvements that later came to Skyrim. It’s a perfect remaster for me, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are folks out there thinking, “Why is there no dual wielding,” “What’s with the weird zoomed in dialog system,” “Where are all the skill perks,” or “Why are there no NPC companions,” and similar.
I also do hope that Bethesda or the community releases an updated version of the construction set soon so the modding scene can take off again for the game. From what I hear, the original Oblivion construction set is able to be used in the remaster with a good deal of messing around, but modders don’t currently have the tools needed to interact at all with the Unreal Engine 5 wrapper.
The main problem with it in Oblivion was that the enemies grow stronger as you level up, and since a lot of people didn’t understand the leveling system, they’d wind up with horribly underpowered characters in the late game. Some people deliberately remained at level 1 to keep the enemies easy.
Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.
Today’s game is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Taking a break and going to Arkham City (And 100% the base story) was definitely worth it.i think i was starting to get burnt out a little. Ubisoft made a fun game, but it’s way to big for it’s own good....
Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.
I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.
I don’t expect they would, since Skyblivion already has their blessing and the team has been working with representatives from Bethesda to make sure that everything they’re doing continues to be kosher with them.
The Skyblivion devs also released a statement recently that they are also looking forward to the release of this remaster, and believe that there is enough love to go around for both projects.
Basically, Oblivion fans are going to be eating well this year. If the official Oblivion remaster is underwhelming, there will still be Skyblivion to look forward to.
Don’t think we know yet. Based on earlier leaks, the thought is that Unreal Engine 5 is involved somehow, but there is uncertainty about whether or not it is full-on in UE5 or if UE5 is just being used as a rendering layer. If Bethesda’s own engine is still used as the core of the game, we don’t know if that means simply reworking the original Oblivion code, or if they updated everything to the latest version used for Starfield.
What we can assume is that, even if the original engine is used, there will need to be a good deal of work done to update it regardless, since it is still a 32-bit application that would need to be rewritten for proper 64-bit support. And a lot of the game mechanics, physics, movement, etc. would need to be updated to work with the UE5 rendering layer if that is indeed how it’s working.
That is still the big question for me. I am all for modernizing the engine and don’t care if that means Unreal Engine 5, but if it doesn’t have comparable mod support to other Bethesda games, I feel that will end up hurting it pretty badly.
But as long as they don’t pull a Blizzard and replace the original game with the remaster, the original game and all of its mods will still be there to be enjoyed, at least. And maybe that means we might someday see an OpenOblivion similar to OpenMW if all else fails.
As another user already said, this remaster is being done by an outside studio, so it shouldn’t be significantly affecting any ongoing work at Bethesda.
While Todd Howard is full of shit half the time, I do believe him when he talks about their development roadmap. When Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, it was under the disclaimer that it was not an active project for the team at the time, and would not enter full production until Starfield was done. Starfield released in fall of 2023, so Elder Scrolls 6 should have been in full development for about a year and a half now.
I’m guessing not likely, if only because we’ve already seen mod compatibility take a hit for less drastic engine updates (Skyrim vs Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 vs Fallout 4 next-gen). The work they’re doing seems more extensive than those examples, so I wouldn’t expect old mods to work, but maybe they could be recreated or converted through community effort.
Agreed, though one would think they’d have taken steps to C&D Skyblivion the very moment they decided to move forward with their own project if that was their intent. It wouldn’t make much sense otherwise to let Skyblivion keep going this whole time if they saw it as a threat to their profits, since the mod is pretty close to completion at this point.
My only thing is that Oblivion does not play well on newer hardware. It was a bit of an ordeal to try to get it running well on my PC where I have two monitors, since it only runs on whichever monitor is primary and only if in Fullscreen mode. And don’t even think about alt-tabbing to check Discord, or it just crashes.
If it got the OpenMW treatment, I’d be thrilled with even that.
My copium is maybe we get a little update with this announcement. Not thinking it likely, but this whole Oblivion shadowdrop move would tie in well with a statement that ES6 is still coming and this is their way of tiding people over until then.
It wouldn’t be the first sort of game that Microsoft has remastered in that style, though.
The Halo 1 and 2 remasters used a separate rendering layer over the original game which included updated art assets, and a setting to toggle between the original graphics and the updated ones on the fly. For the most part it was fine, but there were a couple of (primarily out of bounds) areas where the original collision did not always align with the updated geometry.
But I am hoping that it is more than just a simple rendering layer over the original game, because like you said it would require more hands-on work to improve things like forest density and interior clutter. It would look odd if they just increased the polygon count of foliage while still leaving it as sparse in places as the original. At least based on the leaked screenshots, the side-by-sides do give the impression that things have moved slightly and additional objects have been added, so extra rendering layer or not, my guess is that edits to the original game are also still involved (and likely means there won’t be a Halo-style graphics toggle button).
Wouldn’t be much of a point, though. Skyblivion is already just about done. If they C&D it later this year, there will still be a 99% finished Skyblivion floating around on various hosting sites that they’d never be able to stop people from getting their hands on. Basically I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not Microsoft/Zenimax would want to kill the project to boost their own profits, but rather if they even could at this point, and I think the answer is no. A few years ago may have been a different story, but that ship has sailed.
It’s not the same sort of situation as teams making mods or romhacks of Nintendo games who (foolishly) announce it early and get C&D’d immediately before there’s anything to play. Skyblivion is something you can play in an almost-complete state right now if you wanted, and I don’t think a C&D in a few month’s time will stop modders from finishing it anyways since it’s so close to completion.
MindsEye Developer Build a Rocket Boy Begins Layoff Process Amid Disastrous Launch, Studio Sources Say (www.ign.com) angielski
Who could've possibly seen this coming?
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | Review Thread (92/100 OpenCritic) angielski
Game Information...
Stellar Blade on PC Hit 1 Million Sales 19 Times Faster Than on PlayStation 5 (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Switch 2 Teardown: Still Glued, Still Soldered, Still Drifting (www.ifixit.com) angielski
Joysticks: Probably Still Drifty...
PC Gaming’s Mascot Squad—who makes the cut? angielski
Who are the mascots of PC gaming?...
Spiritfarer Developer Thunder Lotus Reveals At Fate's End, An Action Game With Dialogue-Driven Combat (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
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Inside the 'Dragon Age' Debacle That Gutted EA's BioWare Studio (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
A lot of it is almost exactly what you’d expect.
Switch 2 Breaks Records By Selling Over 3.5 Million Units In Four Days (www.forbes.com) angielski
The Switch 2: Is it worth buying? (www.cgmagonline.com) angielski
To be honest, this gamer is totally gob smacked on the attitude that people have when it comes to new console releases....
MindsEye - Official Launch Trailer | 2025 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Scott Pilgrim EX - Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Holy shit! I loved the first Scott Pilgrim video game, this was an amazing surprise. Same dev team, and even Anamanaguchi is back. Let's go.
LEGO VOYAGERS | Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
The CUBE - Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Atomic Heart 2 - Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Summer Game Fest begins in 15 minutes (www.twitch.tv) angielski
Quick reminder for folks who are interested. What are you expecting for this year's show?
MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
What games are just objective masterpieces? angielski
Day 309 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing angielski
Today’s game is some more of the oblivion remaster. I did some more of the Mage’s guild quest today and the specific quest took me a to a ruin. I have very vivid memories of this specific dungeon because of the puzzle from a few years ago when i did a brief playthrough with a friend. It was very tedious having to open the...
GeoGuessr's Steam Release Hit With Overwhelmingly Negative Reviews For "Completely Pointless" Monetization (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Doom: The Dark Ages' PS5 physical release reportedly has just 85MB on disc, and Xbox isn't much bigger (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
[Game Bundle] Xbox Games Studio Bundle (www.humblebundle.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/29393583...
Zelda 64: Recompiled (Majora's Mask) adds modding support, texture pack support, optimizations and more (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Speedrunner already beat Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch 2 (www.polygon.com) angielski
Oblivion remake is... really making it apparent how outdated Bethesda is in its approach to making games angielski
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
Oblivion Remastered Impressions (and Discussion Thread) angielski
I’ve been playing a lot of Oblivion Remastered and was hoping on starting a discussion thread about it....
Day 281 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing angielski
Today’s game is Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Taking a break and going to Arkham City (And 100% the base story) was definitely worth it.i think i was starting to get burnt out a little. Ubisoft made a fun game, but it’s way to big for it’s own good....
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remake Reveal Livestream (starts in 23 hours) (www.youtube.com) angielski
Bethesda are finally going to show it. Rumors are that this will be shadowdropped (releases on the same day)