Sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me. I wonder if he could still fight it. Sure doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that it’s literally only to make an example out of someine while ruining his entire life for a crime with no victim.
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....
For the people who do find out about it and it hooks them enough sure, it’s not really forgotten or underrated. But I still think it’s kinda obscure / not well known?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Some of my most favorite games were fairly short experiences.
In fact I value when a game doesn’t waste my time and is 100% fun, great content without fillers and stuff to just give you FOMO that ends up being boring and underwhelming when you actually try to do it. Even worse when you can’t tell what is and isn’t the filler.
Like, I’ve bought Outer Wilds for maybe 20€ or so and it is probably my favorite game of all time. I wouldn’t have bought it for 60€ (and it’s especially a hard sell because you can’t really entice anyone to play it without spoiling some part of the game to them which really sucks; like, I’d argue even the Steam description already spoils some of the magic). But it would be 100% worth it even if I 100% the game after maybe 10 hours (and there is no way to replay it, unfortunately).
Similarly, I’ve gotten A Short Hike for free with a Humble Bundle subscription (and not like free to own as part of the monthly bundle but just free in their “trove”) and I also completely loved it - was maybe 5 hours.
Meanwhile I played, say, Cyberpunk 2077 for free, finished it, and I am still kinda disappointed? Like there was good stuff in the game but I’m really glad I didn’t pay for it - it’s enough that I paid by putting the time in it. It left me with a feeling of wasted potential and like “surely there has to be something more” and then I finished the game and there wasn’t more. It’s so hard to explain… Like yeah, I enjoyed many hours of it, I think. But in the end it doesn’t feel good overall.
So yeah, these are the extremes, but I really don’t think you can put value on a game like that. Games by their very nature vary a lot and length isn’t (or shouldn’t) really be the main criteria. And enjoyment varies a lot as well. It can be so good that a few hours of it is enough, and it can be so mild that it’s not really worth playing. Oh and that also completely ignores the fact that some games are made to be played for hundreds of hours by design (Factorio, Rimworld), while purely story games can hardly be stretched for dozens of hours and still be fun/interesting. And games with balanced narrative and gameplay can reach a few dozen hours but even for the larger ones going 50-100 hours is usually a stretch.
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
…which makes it pretty terrible. What did they change/improve if not the graphics? It should be so ahead that you don’t even have to think what looks better.
Having 5 streaming services instead of 2 when they each have exclusive content isn’t competition, it’s just separate small monopolies. They hold the content hostage and you can’t actually choose when you want to watch something specific.
It’d only be competitive if they all had the same catalogue or you didn’t care at all what you watch, which I suspect just isn’t a reality for most people.
That’s so convoluted that at that point I can just torrent the show. It’s easier, faster, free and I don’t have to wait for it or try to figure out which streaming service has it.
That’s probably pretty negligible numbers. In fact I’d suspect that the number of people who buy a single copy that they then install on multiple devices is lower than the number of people who buy a game and never play it.
It’s also much simpler to implement and the numbers are verifiable. Unless… that’s exactly what Unity wants; just “trust me bro this is the correct number” kind of deal.
Right, but how many people keep games for that long? How often do they reinstall? It’s tiny numbers. Even if it’s 1 in 100 installs that’s a tiny extra cost compared to the rest. In reality it will probably be much lower, and - again - most games have at least about 30% unplayed ratio.
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November....
They’re desperate trying (and failing) to compete with Unreal without realizing that it’s mostly small indie devs or mid sized studios who use them, and those can just move to Godot…
Even a full 180 isn’t enough unless they commit to not changing fees for years or something. The trust has already been broken, and they show that changing fees however they see fit isn’t beyond them. That’s terrible for anyone considering Unity as their game engine of choice because it could completely fuck up your business plan half way through.
Or, you know, Unreal if you are after making a 3D game. Between that and Godot, I wonder if Unity is just slowly strangling themselves to death? They don’t have much to offer. Perhaps most of what they have is existing tutorials, community and general knowledge of the engine, but if you piss off those people and/or they have to learn something else because you make it harder for them to profit, that could disappear fast.
It’d be some API call regardless, if you can figure it out you don’t even have to actually reinstall it, just call the endpoint correctly. Use a botnet to do it so it’s harder to detect as fake (there are already preexisting solutions for that) and bam, you can probably make at least a dent in their revenue.
A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
Elite is still just cleverly hidden/styled loading screens. No Mans Sky (and apparently Star Citizen but I haven’t played it) is even better and more seamless.
A loading screen lets you load different areas of the game discreetly and make the game performative. This is especially important as Starfield is a single player game, it’s not hosted on a server or anything so it can’t distribute resource load that way, its all happening client side on the player’s system. They would have to simulate the entire world on their PC alone or develop a way to stream the content out dynamically and seamlessly.
That’s not how any of it works.
We have had level streaming in Unreal for like a decade. Sure it’s more complex to do things this way, but in general the way it works is that when you approach some area (are some distance from a planet or part of a planet) the next chunk of the world loads in, together with any NPCs and logic and everything else - it’s basically a self contained map, just seamlessly integrated with other maps. There is no meaningful performance hit if done correctly. You certainly don’t simulate everything all the time.
Additionally, all the other games mentioned (NMS, Elite, Star Citizen) also have basically all of the processing on the client side. The servers don’t help the clients in any way; they only store primitive states for gameplay purposes, but all the simulation and whatnot is done on the client. And they still manage to be better optimized.
That’s not an unsolvable issue, and you can always handwave it away for simplicity with some lore. The ships are already magics, like any star ship, so you can just say that the motors and calibration compensate for different planets and whatnot so the ship is easy to use everywhere.
Elite’s biggest issue is that it never really knew what kind of kame it wanted to be. An MMO? There aren’t enough multiplayer features for that. A (mostly) single-player space experience? It’s too shallow with no story, so it won’t satisfy the RPG fans. A space “simulator” where you just have fun flying ships? It’s probably closest to that, except you can’t fly any ship you want, and in fact it takes dozens of hours of grind to be able to switch things out so they’re fresh and you have more fun with the game again. And the simulation is very simplistic and not all that fun either, so it’s not for hardcore simulation fans either.
And because of this approach it has a bad combination of features that not only won’t fully satisfy either of the potential target groups; they also often work against each other. For example the multiplayer component is a dealbraker for me: I want a truly SP game where I can dictate how I play it - where I can mod it, or at least use cheats to find my own pacing, fly different ships on a whim, whatever. But the game simply won’t allow that.
But it’s also not a fully-fledged MMO where you could build (or at least own) systems/planets/bases whatever with your clan and compete against others for … idk, something.
And, again, it’s just not a story game that you could play from start to finish for the storytelling and worlbuilding.
Really sad, because the potential is there to have any (or perhaps even at least two) of those types of games.
It’s more like they really want to use their own engine (for many good reasons) and it’d probably be really hard (if not near impossible without a complete rewrite) to add such a fundamental feature to their existing engine. Even if it wasn’t that hard it’d probably still cost a shitton of developer time and they were spending it elsewhere.
and I am really not impressed. I don’t want to know more about the story, don’t want to build a spaceship that I can fast travel with, don’t want to explore the universe....
And I’d argue that even in No Man’s Sky it’s not as fun as one would want it to be; sure it’s “seamless” but it’s also more or less just a glorified loading screen. Turns out there just isn’t much meaningful gameplay you can do while moving from one place to another through empty space across vast distances especially when the game has to work in the background to load and unload everything.
But at least it’s immersive. In something like Skyrim you at least have something to look at, or in Fallout you can marvel at the desolate landscape that’ll be different everywhere you go. Space is just that, space. Which is why in, say, Mass Effect it works well, because you get to explore your ship and talk to the crew between missions and that’s fun, while the travel is minimized (though still just loading screens).
The data is misleading, it only shows data from 2017 and then a projection. Sure, one that’s pretty reasonable (other sources have similar numbers) but still anything could happen.
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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....
When was a game's price worth it to you?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Well, Cities: Skylines 2 is here, and it's another broken game release. angielski
I don’t really understand how people make the review threads, but we’re sitting at a 77 on OpenCritic right now. Many were worried about game performance after the recommended specs were released, but it looks like it’s even worse than we expected. It sounds like the game is mostly a solid release except for the...
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...
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.
Was Unity lying yesterday or are they lying today? (lemmy.today)
Unity: We have to charge for every install because we only see totals. Also Unity: We can tell which install is which, so you won’t be overcharged.
Unity plan pricing and packaging updates (blog.unity.com)
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November....
Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume (www.axios.com) angielski
archive...
Unity introducing new fee attached to game installs (www.gamedeveloper.com)
Starfield remake created in two days actually lets you fly seamlessly from space to the surface (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.
I watched 2 hours of starfield gameplay and an hour of review angielski
and I am really not impressed. I don’t want to know more about the story, don’t want to build a spaceship that I can fast travel with, don’t want to explore the universe....
Starfield Review Thread
Game InformationGame Title: Starfield...
Visualized: $300B of Video Gaming Revenue, by Source (www.visualcapitalist.com) angielski
Article: visualcapitalist.com/…/video-games-industry-reven…