Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.
Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.
I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).
He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.
Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.
And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.
Personally, I really don’t like most of these games due to the tedium and frustration that comes with hunger/thirst mechanics. Most of the exceptions that I do actually like either make up for it through something else that elevates the experience enough - or they either don’t have these mechanics or allow for players to...
I can second that. Valheim has a very neat balance between exploring, fighting and building. If you don’t progress to quick, even your base is relatively safe. Although I now have turned off raids completely. So my base is always safe and if I want action, I can venture out into the world. I like that.
I don’t blame the engine. There are other studios out there with custom engines that evolved over time. Also Creation Engine evolved a lot.
That they work with many connected scenes instead of a continuous world also has advantages … it allows them to easily change the “world” between scenes by simply linking you “back” to a different scene (for example city under siege which before the dialog was not under siege). It’s how they work. They could do the same shit with Unreal if they wanted to and if they believe this kind of game design is the only feasible for their story telling, they would shove it into another engine as well.
I also don’t think the game feels “old”. I do think it feels like it is conceptionally unfinished. They had many ideas and you can see a lot of different systems in the game (space fights, planets with different biomes, ship building, base building, and so on and so forth). Each of these systems in itself has some kind of concept, but all these systems together are missing a clear concept, IMO.
From what I know, game dev typically works in modules that get thrown together. And this also seems to be the case here. However the “big picture” wasn’t refined or they realized that it needs a ton of small adjustments all over the place (conceptionally AND technically) to make sense of it and it looks like they were not able to deal with the complexity of that.
As a result we have a game that is okayish. It tells some stories, and offers a lot of content, but it feels not nearly as stunning as it should have and it’s not on a single front ground breaking.
If a significant amount of people “misunderstood” you, it’s not their fault, but yours for not clearly communicating or not tailoring your communication for the target audience.
Same here: if people play the game “wrong”, you didn’t design it properly and/or marketed it completely wrong.
Sure, there will always be “dumb” (or too clever) individuals who you simply can’t properly address and satisfy, but if the group is large enough to be loud, you failed your job.
They also have different processes. Each report would start as a support request that goes through some customer care department or even call center first, that will triage the issue with some knowledge base or decision tree. So before a meaningful report makes it way to a department that can actually deal with it, a dozen other people are involved first.
It’s a double edged sword. If the actual devs are exposed too much, they get bombarded with shit from so many people who have no clue and/or just want to vent, that they would not be able to do their actual work or would even burn out from all the toxicity.
Unfortunately people with actual helpful input are so rare that it’s likely not worth the hassle.
Would be cool though if the people triaging reports would have the knowledge to sort the wheat from the chaff. But same problem there: it’s likely so rare to encounter these reports that it’s not worth training people for it.
Same. I also play Cyberpunk that way. Driving cars without the ability to control the speed is just a PITA. A binary input doesn’t cut it for me there.
OTOH aiming with anything but a mouse is also a PITA. Stuff like weapon switching also works better with dedicated keys vs a weapon wheel.
Now that I write it… all I would need would be one or two analog sticks/keys and I wouldn’t need the controller at all. It’s mainly the analog triggers that I need.
I criticized your chosen abstraction. “go there talk to somebody and come back” is basically the definition of most interactions. That describes “going shopping”, “going to work”, “going to a customer” and in extension describes almost every quest in every game. That discriminates nothing of value.
I also enjoyed it playing on GeForceNow. I didn’t build up any game specific hype. I only looked forward to the next CDPR game and avoided most trailers and footage. Going into the game without expectations likely helped a lot.
I agree only a little. The game got more flak than it deserved. It was mostly a good game.
BUT CDPR brought this on themselves by building up massive hype with excessive promises they in the end were not able to deliver on. In addition they stubbornly tried to get a next gen game on last gen consoles which also failed hard.
I think a lot of the stuff that went wrong was management and marketing related and could have been avoided.
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
Which is, literally, not every major version. I didn’t say “all Unreal Engine versions are evolutionary steps over their predecessors”, I said “they don’t get rewritten from scratch for each major version”.
Someone else also brought up the Quake engine, which has even more evolutionary steps; even with forks like the Source engine.
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
Ubisoft open-world games typically take place across a map that’s filled with quest markers, and players are often guided with a compass or arrow that directs them to their next objective....
Even the UIs of their games look similar, even though they are from different genres (Division looks similar to AC looks similar to Settlers). IMO that alone shows that they are not about making unique games, but about hammering their franchise into the heads of gamers. They don’t foster creativity, they try to apply the same formula to everything.
I disagree. The UX design is a critical part of the design language of a game. The Settlers has a completely different setting than Assassins Creed or The Division. For The Division a “cold” and technical UI feels fitting, since this matches with the world it plays in. For Assassins Creed it’s a mixed bag, but since the back story in AC is also extremely futuristic and technical, it still fits. It would likely still be better if the UI was more aligned with the main-setting of the game than with the background-setting, IMO. And finally The Settlers doesn’t fit at all into this theme, yet the UI still looks like it.
Re-using the engine and the development tools is completely logical and a good thing. But the UX should be in line with the setting of the game, not the company that it was developed from. Because that breaks immersion.
Just for the heads up, this thread will probably have a lot of spoilers. I’m gonna try to go vague on spoilers for anybody that hasn’t played Hotline Miami 2. If you’ve played the game, you’ll probably know what I mean, but I’m going to say some purposefully esoteric shit to keep it out of full spoiler territory....
I think the game is full of different emotional triggers. The one that got me was the revelation why the person in question actually wanted to the moon. All the mysteries in the game around weird behaviors and circumstances suddenly made sense and the implication of what the moon really meant to this person made me cry. That was so damn sad. It still makes me cry just thinking about it.
Or as a true Guild player describes it: “keeping save game backups and doing regular checks to figure out if the game state is still in sync”. “The Guild” was the reason I got a “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” T-Shirt for LAN parties.
And don’t get me wrong: I am saying the game is SO GOOD it was totally worth all that trouble. I wish so hard for someone to release/leak the source code some time so someone with enough pain tolerance can try to rework the network stack. Or maybe a remaster of that game. It has a so much better feeling than its successors.
In my experience the sync issues get much worse over VPN. The implementation seems to be extremely timing sensitive.
Oh and over the internet you don’t have the chance to quickly look over to your pals monitors to notice that their current court hearing scene looks different from yours (at which point you can alt+f4 and look for the last good savegame).
In a response to a post from the AntiDRM Twitter account, Ubisoft Support has clarified that users who don’t sign in to their account can potentially lose access to Ubisoft games they’ve purchased. The initial post from AntiDRM featured a snippet of an e-mail sent to a user from Ubisoft notifying them that their account had...
Oooh, I would really like to see that challanged in front of a German court after such a deletion happened. There are so many different legal facettes here.
Is the deletion maybe necessary due to GDPR? (they have to keep the minimum amount of data)
What’s with the physical copies / codes that were bought. Should they automatically be freed up for re-use once the account that claimed them is deleted? (That would kinda make sense to me.)
What about stricly digitally bought games?
How far are their ToS valid in our jurisdiction?
Damn I really hope they do this to the wrong person and rub them the wrong way so they get dragged to court for this.
Disney invests $1.5bn in Epic Games and announces major Fortnite partnership (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Players who don't like survival games as a genre: Which survival games are your personal exceptions, which ones have you enjoyed nonetheless and why? angielski
Personally, I really don’t like most of these games due to the tedium and frustration that comes with hunger/thirst mechanics. Most of the exceptions that I do actually like either make up for it through something else that elevates the experience enough - or they either don’t have these mechanics or allow for players to...
GTA VI won't launch on PC (www.businesswire.com) angielski
Grand Theft Auto VI is coming to PlayStation® 5 computer entertainment systems and Xbox Series X|S games and entertainment systems in 2025.
What game company from your childhood do you remember with fondness?
I was thinking about how I remember Maxis fondly, and I got to wondering what other people’s experiences were like!...
Bethesda responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam (www.eurogamer.net)
Bethesda Is Responding to Negative Reviews of Starfield on Steam (www.ign.com) angielski
First look at the new Tribes game from Prophecy Games (fps-z.com) angielski
Gamedev and linux (treebrary.pone.social) angielski
Control Ultimate Edition on Steam | 75% off - 9,99€ (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Winner of over 80 awards, Control is a visually stunning third-person action-adventure that will keep you on the edge of your seat....
Do you prefer playing with Keyboard or controller more, and for what type of games?
Shout out to that moment back in 2009 when Robin Walker of Valve once wrote that they started working on Team Fortress 2 back in 1987. (www.teamfortress.com) angielski
(2nd paragraph) …which would have put the development of TF2 11 years before the first Team Fortress came out. Nice one, Robin.
Cyberpunk dlc sucks. 10 side missions and like 5 story missions for 30 bucks.
That’s half the main games price… Just don’t buy it...
CD Projekt Spent Roughly $125 Million Turning Cyberpunk 2077 Around Post-Launch (www.ign.com) angielski
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield (www.destructoid.com) angielski
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
Legendary PC developer says Denuvo is “a punishment to the consumer” (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
Sources: Ubisoft’s canceled Immortals 2 was a big break from the company’s formula (www.axios.com)
Ubisoft open-world games typically take place across a map that’s filled with quest markers, and players are often guided with a compass or arrow that directs them to their next objective....
Most emotional moments in games? (SPOILERS)
Just for the heads up, this thread will probably have a lot of spoilers. I’m gonna try to go vague on spoilers for anybody that hasn’t played Hotline Miami 2. If you’ve played the game, you’ll probably know what I mean, but I’m going to say some purposefully esoteric shit to keep it out of full spoiler territory....
We all have 'that game'. For me, it's Europa 1400: The Guild. What's your's? (media.kbin.social) angielski
Ubisoft Can Delete Inactive Accounts, Making Users Lose Access to Their Games (gamerant.com) angielski
In a response to a post from the AntiDRM Twitter account, Ubisoft Support has clarified that users who don’t sign in to their account can potentially lose access to Ubisoft games they’ve purchased. The initial post from AntiDRM featured a snippet of an e-mail sent to a user from Ubisoft notifying them that their account had...