I think EA was still worse. At least in my perception.
I think EA actually bought studios just to get the IP and immediately get rid of the employees. I also think they tried to milk a few of the IPs before letting it go downhill.
MS, from what I can tell, gave studios quite a lot of freedom to do what they do best. I don’t think they intentionally wanted to fuck over studios, but they rather sacrificed them.
Don’t get me wrong: that’s still bad. But there’s a difference between fucking studios over with intent and reacting badly to changed circumstances.
Same for the “online only design” argument. The moment they decide it’s not viable anymore and they want to shut it down: what does it matter to them, what players do with it? As long as they offer the service themselves, no one is bugging them. (Although I would absolutely be in favor of also getting self hosting options right from the start, I am realist enough to accept, that this would indeed lower economical feasibility of some projects.)
I imagine it’s rather licensing. If they have to provide the software at some point, they can’t use components they are not allowed to distribute. And I agree, that this will impact development costs. But with the law in place, this is not an unexpected cost but one that can be factored in. Might be, that some live services are then no longer viable… but I don’t care. There are more games than anyone could play and games are cancelled or not even started to develop all the time for various reasons. One more or less is just noise.
If you go for subscription, you accept that the stuff is temporal. Or at least you should. So it should make no practical difference if a game vanishes because it gets pulled from the catalog or if you decide to cancel the subscription because you consider it too expensive.
Today’s game is some more Starfield. I neglected the Main quest for a bit to go off and join a faction along with decking out my Crew. I found the Adoring fan, immediately he was the first addition to my crew. Love the guy and i’m so happy to have him back. I also had Sarah join the crew just to fill out the slots....
My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don’t fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.
Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn’t (or didn’t) feel like a cohesive game.
I would rather bet that most people have no clue what an operating system is and that the one they (unknowingly) use is made by Microsoft. On the other hand if they play games (on that PC), they will know Steam, because they actively had to install it and click its icon frequently.
It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don’t think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don’t get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.
On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction… see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).
The second one gives you the necessary flashbacks to catch up if you should intend to follow the story. It also explains all the basics of the game mechanics as part of the quests.
I even heard people being surprised it’s not Geralt. When they were surprised I started to question myself if I just dreamed that they announced that wayyyy back.
Or preferably: don’t care about the game at all until it releases. Ignore previews or alpha demos, beta footage, gameplay trailers/teasers, etc. That way you don’t build up hype that has a big chance to disappoint you. Take the game for what it is at release and either like it then or not.
While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.
I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).
I wonder if that would be a genuine use case for “AI”. If the voice actor consents to have his voice represented in such a scene but doesn’t want to play it out in a studio, the computer model could take over that part.
It’s an okay game, but far worse than the first two. They forced an open world onto it, and made it pretty repetitive. The DLC is more linear and feels a lot more like a typical Mafia story telling.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.
I said:
Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
So of course it’s about releasing anything (!) at all.
I simply said that you can’t compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.
ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.
They keep paying money for attorneys and court proceedings but don’t get anything in return, since the code is out there and will just be shared again by someone else. Hence: whack-a-mole
Gamepass isn’t cloud gaming, though. It’s a game subscription, but cloud gaming is only optional and only available for a subset of games. All of the games however can be downloaded and are played locally.
Only if you want to cap the skill limit. Otherwise you would typically have a hand full of players that are genuinely just good or rather far outside the normal skill range. I guess with a lot of data collection one might be able to determine if there was some kind of natual progress or sudden skill jumps, but all in all it could weed out legitimate players.
Also there could (and should?) be “simply” two launch options. One with “hardcore anti cheat” and one with some much simpler anti-cheat. Then a lobby option what you want to allow. You want to play competitive/league/whatever? Then require the hardcore anti-cheat. Otherwise: why bother.
This has to be the funniest PR disaster in video game history. “Guy did not forsee players getting mad for locking a gamemode behind a $250 edition, doubles down on it and tells people to chill out”
Reminds me of the Volkswagen boss when their emission cheating leaked. He said he didn’t know. Wow, you earn millions for managing a company that big and then claim to not know about something. The fuck did you do then? So either he was lying or admitting that he didn’t do his damn job. Both cases should have lead to him having to give back whatever he “earned” in his position.
I am not a marketing expert, but when headlines pile up implicating that Microsoft doesn’t fully stand behind XBox anymore, no wonder the number for new customers tank. I wouldn’t “invest” in something that seems to be on the way out either.
So why didn’t he stop playing at level 100 or 200 or whatever but waited with this rant until almost level 300 in a stream with large attention? Pure coincidence? To me it looks like he wanted to go out with a bang and rage bait.
As much as I like to shit on Epic, but UE 5.x is pretty much innovative with each minor release. Watching the release videos of what the engine can do in realtime is always impressive. They are used as realtime backgrounds for movie sets.
Do you mix game development with engine? Of course an engine doesn’t make an innovative game by itself. An engine is - hence the name - only the means to an end to help develop a game. Innovative games are all over the place in regards to the engines they use; from in-house/custom to products like unity, unreal, etc.
That you have the impression that engines like UE and Unity are “less innovative” by judging released games just shows how many games are developed using these engines - especially Unity. It’s so damn easy to build games with it, that many people do, even when they only build something simple. And that’s fine … it means that more people can channel their creativity into game development, even when it doesn’t yield anything ground breaking.
It also shows, though, that developers can focus more on the game development and have to deal less with engine development and now even asset creation, since these engines also bring asset catalogs. So it’s really quite a good time to dive into game development, which fosters creativity and in the end there will also be innovative games among them.
The problem is IMO much bigger. Every connected and/or IoT device becomes physical waste if the vendor shuts down the backing infrastructure.
Every product (physical or digital) should be considered as a unit with the required technical infrastructure. Companies/producers should only have two choices: keep maintaining the infrastructure or publish everything necessary for individuals and/or a community to take over. This must be ready from the moment such a product enters the market and it must be part of the “will” of the company so if it goes bankrupt, the whole process can be triggered more or less automatically.
It’s not the same model though, is it? I can buy XBox, PS an Nintendo games in a shit ton of physical or digital stores. So there are different channels. There is no equivalent on iOS. If you don’t want to publish in the app store, no one will be able to install your app (developers with own certs and enterprise customers with mdm excluded).
What is your favourite developer company? Mine is ID Tech because they made games like the original DooM games which have serious long standing modding support and Quake for some of those tense DM games!...
Romero Games reportedly met with Microsoft just a day before the publisher pulled funding for the studio, and there was 'no mention' of the decision that put over 100 people out of work (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Statement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE (www.videogameseurope.eu) angielski
Microsoft layoffs are reportedly underway, with ZeniMax and King employees losing their jobs (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Day 332 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing angielski
Today’s game is some more Starfield. I neglected the Main quest for a bit to go off and join a faction along with decking out my Crew. I found the Adoring fan, immediately he was the first addition to my crew. Love the guy and i’m so happy to have him back. I also had Sarah join the crew just to fill out the slots....
SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
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The Witcher 4 Recasts Ciri (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Technical ambition, optimism, and timeframes: what we learned about The Witcher 4 from speaking to CD Projekt Red (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Found this to be a good interview with the developer.
2k Launcher has been fully removed from all games (support.2k.com) angielski
Thank god
After 350,000 signatures in an EU consumer rights campaign, Ubisoft is adding offline modes to The Crew games - but not the now-dead original (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? angielski
For example, for me, I would love a new Populous game based from what was done in Populous 3. That, and a new SimCity based on SimCity 4!
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
Is mafia 3 really that bad? angielski
I’m currently playing mafia 2 and I like it but I wonder if I should start playing mafia 3 after since I heard people say the game is dissapointing
Louis Rossmann's response to harsh criticism of "Stop Killing Games" from Thor of @PirateSoftware (www.youtube.com) angielski
Nintendo has DMCA’ed Sudachi’s GitHub (x.com) angielski
Gothic, Risen, and Elex Dev "Piranha Bytes" Reportedly the Latest Embracer Studio to Shut Down (www.ign.com) angielski
Team Fortress 2 angielski
Team Fortress 2 is such a great game that I never get bored of, everything from the sound to characters to the gameplay....
Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut - Launch Trailer | PC Games (www.youtube.com) angielski
Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio (www.theverge.com) angielski
Sony cancelled the PSN account linking requirement for Helldivers 2 (lemmy.world) angielski
Escape From Tarkov studio boss says he "did not foresee" players would get mad about charging extra for PvE (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
This has to be the funniest PR disaster in video game history. “Guy did not forsee players getting mad for locking a gamemode behind a $250 edition, doubles down on it and tells people to chill out”
Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking (kotaku.com) angielski
After 10,000+ hours grinding, MapleStory's first level 300 player slams the brakes at 299.99 to rant about the MMO and then quit, all on a dev-promoted stream (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game - Official Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Which game series had the worst anniversary celebration? angielski
Rockstar didn’t even acknowledge GTA IV’s tenth anniversary. Only by removing several songs from its radio stations....
Slay the Spire devs followed through on abandoning Unity (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Unity’s Runtime Fee debacle cost it the trust of several indie developers, and led to Slay the Spire 2 being made in Godot.
The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games [Accursed Farms] (www.youtube.com) angielski
Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! www.stopkillinggames.com
Phil Spencer wants Epic Games Store and others on Xbox consoles (www.polygon.com) angielski
Halo Infinite Update to Bring Networking Overhaul, Easy Anti-Cheat, and More Next Week (techraptor.net) angielski
Favourite developers angielski
What is your favourite developer company? Mine is ID Tech because they made games like the original DooM games which have serious long standing modding support and Quake for some of those tense DM games!...