Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular
I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.
Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.
How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in
The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)
The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.
It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)
A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan
Literally a lower monthly payment, lower total paid and you end up owning a computer if you finance your computer with a predatory payday loan than with this rental program (per GN’s math)
Edit: at $259/mo that’s already $3108/year or 2-3x the cost of a good midrange DIY PC. Also at an incredible 36% interest rate because this hypothetical individual purchased a $3000 computer on a credit card and only pays a bit more than the minimum towards it, that’s only $177/mo on a 24 month loan. Or if you just got a $1500 computer (a pretty dang good computer!) on a 12% APR personal loan (pretty common from banks) you only pay $133/mo for 12 month, own the computer and only pay a total of $1600
The only way to make this rental program look at all good is if you are literally using the computer to make money but have very littlemoney upfront for a decent enough computer to do the same job (basically the “rent it for 1 month and win a fortnite tournament” fantasy one paid promoter suggested) except, oh look, you can buy a laptop from Dell for $520 or less than two months rental cost if you really don’t have the budget and then use that to make your money to fuel your future baller PC purchase. And I can assure you, that business laptop can run Fortnite if that’s your concern, because Fortnite will run on any potato PC if you turn the prettiness down enough.
Edit 2: Also I just found a similar laptop in 1 minute on ebay for $255 to further kill that “spend your allowance to rent a computer for a month to win a fortnite tournament” fantasy
I glanced at their site earlier (but after posting this comment) and it starts at $59/mo for a budget system with a 10th gen i5 and an RTX3050 so probably a $500ish PC when DIYed. And they have about a half dozen tiers above that up to the top $259/mo which is probably a $3000 PC if the parts were current. It’s still a bad deal no matter how you slice it though
As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.
Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.
For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations
Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.
Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.
I have an RTX 3060 that I bought about two years ago. Until recently I only had a 1080p 75Hz monitor, so I could play pretty much anything on max settings....
The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!
I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”
Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!
These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity
I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”
What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Gambling is heavily regulated in most countries, often including requiring the odds of winning being clearly listed and regulating the profit margin that The House can take (usually limited to less than 10%)
Many casinos and developers of addictive games will hire psychologists and other experts on human condition to help them find ways to make the game more addictive and make it easier to seperate players from their money. These “dark patterns” both make gaming worse and make it more dangerous for anyone unfortunate enough to develop an addiction.
In short, I welcome regulation on the worst aspects of the game industry to keep the worst aspects from become too financially successful to not implement (see the $60 AA and AAA games that launched with lootboxes and predatory micro-transactions like this one about 10 years ago before some countries announced they were investigating regulating such practices)
I mean, in the US before the reversal of the Chevron doctorine, the easy solution would be to pass legislation banning “dark patterns” then assign a regulatory agency to design guidance and enforce the law
If you think preventing predatory practices through legislation is a “nanny state” then I think you fail to understand the purpose of a government in a society with profit-driven companies
I’m curious if this will improve DLC mismatches. For example, I’ve purchased most of the map DLCs for Euro & American Truck Simulator, but my wife only purchased the base game.
By memory she previously could access all of the DLC via library sharing until she purchased it, then she could only access the base game and not the shared DLC. It’s probably cleanest to keep it that way since you never know how different games handle DLC being activated and de-activated within an existing save, but it would be nice to not punish someone for playing a game with DLC via library sharing then purchasing the game for themselves and buying DLC later
Ooh I hope that’s the case because that would be much more convenient
Edit for anyone who stumbles on this: it works exactly like the above commenter described! It looks like there’s some opportunity to better communicate what DLC the “copy” you select is installing since it doesn’t show a full list of DLC but it at least shows who’s library it’s pulling from so you should be able to infer the full DLC list based on who has all of the DLC
Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.
Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN
I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they’d have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn’t the case so they upped the free accounts
Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be “get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses” and they’re in the “establish growth” phase so I think there’s a few years before enshitification begins.
There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper
By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
The Sims 4 actually added a similar approach to character creation about 2 years ago, but very different kind of game with a very different market
Off the top of my head it has options for male presenting body type, female presenting body type, sliders for fat and muscle (and you can generally reshape most of the body) and the available clothing and hairstyles got sorted into masculine and feminine with I believe more traditionally gender neutral stuff getting placed into both, then for biological purposes there’s “can pee standing up/cannot pee standing up” and “can impregnate/can be impregnated” It defaults to Male/Female defaults but makes it easy to customize, and a good mix of default townies (NPCs) are all over the spectrum.
They also recently added more complex relationship and romance preferences, so sims can be sexually bi but romantically straight for example, but also expanded to allow various levels of openness to relationships as well as poly relationships
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
Witcher 3 it is more explicit if you buy the services on offer in the brothel. But it’s still far less than one romp in Wicked Whims, which of course is all mods so no motion capture there
I feel like some nudity and sex scenes when it’s appropriate are better than not. Really ruins my sense of immersion when there’s a naked person with a random potted plant conveniently blocking your view of their bits. Either commit to them being naked or don’t have them naked at all is my take
My daughter learned to jump because she learned she could walk over and hit the spacebar and see immediate feedback on almost every game we played, but at the time I was playing through one of the Tomb Raider games so I’d relatively frequently walk away with the game unpaused. Then she connected the dots of what she saw on screen and tried repeating the motions she saw Laura doing and did her first jumps mimicking what she saw on screen.
So in summary, Laura Croft taught my daughter how to jump.
My wife’s been playing a bunch of it and honestly best I can tell it’s an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with a easy-to-use game engine for beginners to make mini games in (similar to Roblox’s various games) with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing.
Which is kinda confusing given Epic also has Core which is also an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with easy-to-use game engine with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing
Oh and Fortnite has its official Battle Royale mode that’s largely a copy of PUBG
I know very little about cars, and even less about trucks. When I think of a truck, I think of a bed in the back where you can haul stuff from Home Depot. Where is the “truck” part?
Generally if you get a truck and do truck things with it, there’s 2 specific things a truck will have that no other class has:
A protected bed that you can put bulky and dirty/stinky items into for transport
The ability to pull a large trailer
But hilariously your average crossover is fully capable of hauling an inexpensive trailer and a couple thousand pounds of whatever if not more than that, which covers 99.9% of the lifestyle arguments most pavement princes truck owners make for why they need a truck
I’m sitting in a dark hotel room on the eve of my first - and possibly only - total solar eclipse, with my partner and step-son, and I am positively awash with emotions....
My wife only went because I was hellbent on seeing the eclipse at totality (we saw the last October’s eclipse and 2017 both from around 90% coverage). Afterwards she said “the Grand canyon ain’t got shit on a solar eclipse” and we are both still in shock for how amazing of an experience it was.
The wonky colors as day slowly turned to night, the sudden whooshing shadow as totality began, the burning ring of fire in the sky then the light whooshing back as totality ended, the cacophony of yelps by folks too slow to put their eclipse glasses back on. It was a hell of an experience
This has been big on some of AMD’s workstation and server chips because Windows generally doesn’t know what to do with the unexpected NUMA Node layouts. Or the scheduler just can’t handle 128 cores. So abstracting that away with Linux’s superior scheduler can help significantly on certain hardware
I mean the flip side of this is that by doing nothing you’re letting them write the narrative. I feel like whatever this mess is, it’s starting to grow, so a more legitimate source calling it what it is can be helpful
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
The gower brothers have not been part of Jagex for about 10 years, but are all involved in the development of this game IIRC
Edit: I was slightly worried too but it looks like the handful of tiles is more of a fog of war/view distance type thing. These two screenshots seem to show it the clearest
I bought a PS2 about 6 months ago from a coworker and finally got around to getting it working at a good enough resolution on my monitor. I currently have:...
A comment I saw on another forum basically pointing out that Palworld demonstrates the gigantic demand for a real new Pokemon game that isn’t whatever Scarlet was.
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
I’d argue that video games need remakes and remasters far more than movies do. Video game technologies change a lot in 10-15 years, so a remake/remaster is an opportunity to improve controls and fix issues with running the game on hardware that hadn’t been concieved at the time of the game’s release. Plenty of old games have severe bugs, outdated controls or general issues with newer hardware (can’t handle widescreen monitors, buttons don’t scale for high resolutions, etc.) which can make replaying them a pain.
You sit down to watch a 25 year old movie and it’s pretty easy to watch, but you sit down to play a 25 year old game and it’s going to vary wildly if you can even get it to run in the first place, let alone if it’ll run well
But in the context of consumer product pricing it’s wildly anti-consumer to bill a software running largely on your own hardware consuming your own electricity based on how long you run said software. It’s expecting consumers to accurately project and plan their usage which consumers are pretty famously bad at. It’s also expecting consumers software running on consumer hardware on consumer home networks to function as expected, and all of the three are famously unreliable and janky
The AWS model works so well because of intense automation in horizontal and vertical scaling plus technologies like Kubernetes, Ansible and the entire automated build pipeline. But most importantly it relies on a full team carefully designing the automatic deployment and scaling to maximize benefits and minimize costs
Literally a used Switch game in a big, ridiculous bag with a “New” sticker on it. Imagine going into a GameStop with a game in a bag like this and convincing them to give you credit for it as “New”....
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good (www.nytimes.com) angielski
GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam” (gameworldobserver.com) angielski
Do Not Buy NZXT | Predatory, Evil Rental Computer Scam Investigated - Gamers Nexus (youtu.be) angielski
So, looks like NZXT are looking to rip off gamers with their computer “subscription” service.
Anyone have a sudden loss in gaming?
I’m in my late 30s now and over the past 6ish months, I have been gaming a lot less or I find myself gaming but not enjoying it....
Yakuza creator Nagoshi says the era of game size being most important is coming to an end (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
(By game size he means scope of the game and huge open world maps, not game install size)
Upscaling really is black magic
I have an RTX 3060 that I bought about two years ago. Until recently I only had a 1080p 75Hz monitor, so I could play pretty much anything on max settings....
Dragon Age Creator Slams "Woke" Criticism: "You're an Idiot" (comicbook.com) angielski
The winner of every difficulty comparison (lemmy.world) angielski
Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread angielski
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Help me to settle on a face design for the character I've just added to my game, called The Humorless Toaster. (It's only here to make toast, not listen to your nonsense.) (lemmy.world) angielski
Steam Families is here - Steam News (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Up to 6, sharing your shareable games library...
Introducing Steam Families (youtu.be) angielski
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will end service in Nov 28 - but will transition to a paid offline app angielski
Source about the offline app thing: faq.ac-pocketcamp.com/…/36353725150489-What-is-th…
I don't hate Body Type replacing Gender, I hate laziness angielski
This is a bit of a rant, but please try to stick with me through the whole thing...
Actors demand action over 'disgusting' video game sex scenes (www.bbc.com) angielski
TL;DR: Video game actors being told to mo-cap sex scenes without being told beforehand
This is me helping my toddler learn to play video games with Donkey Kong Country and SMW (lemmy.world) angielski
Fortnite Players Band Together to Pick on In-Game Tesla Cybertrucks: 'Destroy on Sight' - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII - Official Teaser Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
I hope it’s better than Civ 6.
After 30 years, I'm finally going to see a total solar eclipse. Also, Potato World is a thing. angielski
I’m sitting in a dark hotel room on the eve of my first - and possibly only - total solar eclipse, with my partner and step-son, and I am positively awash with emotions....
Switch performs better running games through an emulator emulating the switch than natively. (streamable.com)
Full original video from Taki Udon
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Jagex co-founder and ex-employee (Andrew Gower) announces new MMORPG inspired by RuneScape (store.steampowered.com)
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
Best PS2 games? angielski
I bought a PS2 about 6 months ago from a coworker and finally got around to getting it working at a good enough resolution on my monitor. I currently have:...
Im still undecided about if it looks fun though (startrek.website) angielski
What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time? angielski
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
Whats your favorite Main Menu music? angielski
I’ll start it off - Legend of Dragoon has my heart with this one...
Are there too many video game remakes and remasters? (www.eurogamer.net)
I've got a bad feeling about this (startrek.website) angielski
GameStop’s definition of “New” (lemmy.world) angielski
Literally a used Switch game in a big, ridiculous bag with a “New” sticker on it. Imagine going into a GameStop with a game in a bag like this and convincing them to give you credit for it as “New”....