It seems like a minor increment over the Steam Deck. Valve is targeting performance per watt, and what's available in a handheld right now isn't going to start running The Quarry at high settings and 60 FPS.
If it's not, then it'll never work, which is why Apple's endeavor is doomed too. There's such a massive back catalogue of games that we can't, won't, and shouldn't abandon that unless you've got x64 translation as good as Proton is for Windows translation, or better, switching to ARM will never work for the latest greatest games. I think that switch to ARM is nearly inevitable, but that translation needs to be excellent first.
Personally, I haven't seen an FPS made for me in a long time, so I was betting on a new TimeSplitters being it. The last two FPS campaigns I was into were Half-Life: Alyx in 2020 and Titanfall 2 in 2016. Those are slim pickings over a long timespan while the rest of the genre focused on live service garbage (though, to be fair, I still have yet to play Wolfenstein II). If that new Perfect Dark happens, I'm betting Microsoft spends $400M turning it into an extraction shooter multiplayer with a modern Call of Duty campaign, neither of which is what I want. TimeSplitters was likely only going to happen on a shoestring budget that couldn't afford to turn into the kind of game I don't want it to be, lol.
I think it's way beyond that business deal by now. They're not responsible for the layoffs at Sony, Microsoft, EA, or Epic, after all. Something ended the money party that everyone in the industry staffed up for, and that something might be inflation reducing consumer spending, the crypto crash, higher interest rates making borrowing money more expensive, something else entirely, or a little bit of all of that.
There are problems with Steam that a competitor could win customers from by solving those problems, but they didn't bother. They only went after the people producing games, not buying games.
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
That's all well and good. I just think it's silly to say that "at least CDPR fixed Cyberpunk, but Bethesda won't fix Starfield" when these things take time, and Starfield hasn't had much of that yet. And then we have people here calling mod tools an afterthought as though this company hasn't always prioritized making mod tools for their games because they know how important they are, just because (like their past several games) mod tools are going to take several more months before they come out.
You won't hear me defending them using that old engine, except that development time is also a resource. They should have spent it a long time ago migrating to a more modern tech stack, and maybe they will for ES6 now that there's a new boss in town; Microsoft did, after all, delay the game by a year and a half to make what is by all accounts their least buggy launch of one of their RPGs in decades. I also don't know how much we can claim they're leaving it up to modders when plenty of console versions are completely unmoddable.
I had also heard that at some point they were being directed to adapt the idTech engine which runs DOOM to become the new base for Bethesda games, but I guess that hasn’t happened.
They must have had trouble, because Arkane moved from Unreal to Void (which is built on idTech) for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop and such, and then back to Unreal again. Everyone got in a hurry in the 2010s to have their own in-house engine to avoid paying out fees to Epic, and then after running into trouble trying to adapt those engines to genres they weren't built for, they're back to Unreal again.
My past experience has been bugs that ruined my experience at launch and then got fixed shortly after. I'm sure there are plenty more bugs that I didn't notice, but they certainly fixed the ones that I did.
I'm not. Choosing not to buy a bad product has incremental effects on what gets made in the market from 1 person choosing not to buy it all the way out to no one buying it.
That's exactly my point. At some point, Divinity: Original Sin was a niche. Now Baldur's Gate 3 is poised to be called Game of the Year and outsold Larian's wildest expectations. Many of those sales came from people who bought BG3 and not Starfield. That sends a message for what customers actually want. There wasn't some mass campaign to boycott Battlefield 2042; their customers just told them, by way of not buying it like they used to, that the product EA put out was not worth the price they were asking.
So people play it on console because it's a good game without mods, which would mean it's not unplayable. There's also little reason beyond just general cynicism to believe mod tools aren't coming when their past several offline games got mod tools a handful of months after release, including Skyrim. As far as I can tell, it's quite normal for mod tools to come several months after release for non-Bethesda games as well. I don't think the longevity of mods has anything to do with whether or not a game is unplayable.
I've played Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4, the latter two at launch. I've never installed mods for any of these games, and I rarely install mods in general. Skyrim had a rough launch, where it would crash for me frequently, but that problem was resolved within a few weeks, tops. They're all very playable, and I never felt like I needed mods to fix them, which is why they also sell well on consoles.
and the standard of the complete version of a game release costing 100 bucks before the industry still found an excuse to increase the usual price of 60 bucks up to 70
Inflation is a fact of life, and prices were going to increase somehow, especially since a lot of AAA games these days are recklessly large, including Bethesda games. There's a lot more at play with the way DLC works and the pricing around them than just trying to sneak a price increase by you, but the short answer is: I don't think it's a big deal to have an entry level price for a game and another price for the game and expansion content.
but something people tend to fail to mention is how much bigger the market is than when $60 became the norm.
No, people mention it a lot, but it's got a fundamental flaw in its rationale in that the larger market is not spread anywhere near evenly across the industry. Grand Theft Auto will outsell Starfield 10:1, and Starfield is an elite position to sell more copies than the vast majority of games out there. When we talk about how much bigger the market is than it was when prices increased to $60 (which was itself lower than prices had been 10-20 years earlier), we're capturing the sales of games that blow their next closest competitors out of the water. The same goes for profits, which are going to heavily favor an industry with Shark Cards and Ultimate Team loot boxes compared to a game that just sells a base game and an expansion pack via season pass for a total of $100. A rising tide does lift all boats, but it lifts a select few way higher than just about everyone else.
By the way you’re buying and reselling the regurgitated excuses, you have clearly lost to them like many, many others and I’m genuinely dreading what my favorite hobby is going to look like in five years time because of those people and their ever-increasing tolerance to getting screwed and expected to be grateful.
Buy the stuff you like and don't buy the stuff you don't like. Loot boxes and battle passes prey on impulses wired into people at an instinctual level that makes that more than just a free market scenario, but you like Witcher 3 expansions. Starfield is offering the same business model as that. Buy it or don't, depending on how much trust you have in that product to be good. I'm content to buy a $100 version of Street Fighter or Guilty Gear or Mortal Kombat but not so much Tekken (remember Street Fighter II cost $70 in 1992 money, $150 adjusting for inflation, offering far less than we get today). I feel like I got a bargain on Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3, but if they had something to upsell me on, I'd likely be a happy customer to pay for that too.
As for the game-breaking glitches you ran into, I fully believe that you encountered them, and that sucks. I also believe that sheer law of averages would indicate it's not the norm, and that the vast majority of people are able to play these games without mods, or they would not do as well as they do, critically and commercially.
Whatcha all been playing? I’ve been playing a ton of Mario world ROM hacks, including some kaizo ones. Also started doing my oblivion playthrough again!
The great thing about Baldur's Gate coming to an end is that there's no reason you can't just start it over again with a totally different type of character and play it entirely differently. I'm coming up on finishing the game a second time.
I'm still working on my second run of Baldur's Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team in Act 3. The two big bads of the chapter before the final boss went down like chumps. For one of them, without spoilers (you know the one), I didn't even need to stop the chant, because I just had so many actions with each member of my team. I've been playing less of BG3 now though, because I already did a pretty thorough run of Act 3 the first time around, as opposed to Acts 1 and 2 where I left a lot of content behind with my first character.
I beat 30XX. It's very good. I don't think it's as good as 20XX. The upgrade system is significantly more complicated to understand for basically no discernible benefit. There was also one major problem with 20XX, which was that, as a roguelike, you could see the seams in the level generation and easily identify the same pieces of the levels way too quickly, as opposed to something like Streets of Rogue or Vagante where you could play for over a hundred hours before it feels like you've seen these exact levels too many times. 30XX did not address this problem. So in the end, it's more 20XX, but it's not better 20XX. It's a shame, because I know the developers spent a lot of time trying to make this a substantial sequel, and the art style is improved at least, but this feels like a lateral move. Play it if you liked 20XX and wanted more.
I've also been playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. Similar to that 30XX review, I think this is a step back from Mimimi's predecessor games, Shadow Tactics and Desperados III. It's still great; it's just that those games did it better. I'm in Act 3 (of 3), and this game's got ideas, but only some of them seem to work, and most of them feel like they're worse than the more linear design of the other games. It's also a bummer that this is Mimimi's swan song, as the developer is dissolving after this. Play it if you liked their other games and wanted more.
As a kid in the 90s, I couldn't really tell the difference between the capabilities of the SNES or Genesis and a hand-drawn cartoon on TV. As far as I could tell, if it was 2D, those machines could process it, but my brother and his friends just a few years older than me could tell where the limits were. When Mortal Kombat got big, I thought that was the end state for video game graphics. Everyone's just going to do that, because you can't get more real than real people, I thought. Early 3D graphics did age more poorly than the best pixel art the SNES and Genesis had to offer, and we knew at the time that that would be the case too. After years of revisiting those 2D games via emulation, a trip to a local Barcade reminded me of how important scanlines were to the art style of most games from the era, and now I basically only emulate those games with scanlines on and the most accurate emulation available when I'm playing anything earlier than the PS2.
Half-Life 2 was insanely impressive, and the thing that sold it most was the big real-time G Man head at the beginning of the game. Valve took cutting edge research in animating faces during dialogue and implemented it into the game in a way no one had seen before. It did wonders for selling the "realness" of what you were looking at. Just 3 years later, we had Crysis, a game pushing graphics so far that no one could even build a machine that could run it at max settings at the time, but even on medium settings, it was the best-looking game I'd ever seen.
Nowadays, I can look at a Digital Foundry video with side by side examples of ray tracing on and off, with them explaining to me how and why it's so much better, and I often can't really tell the difference unless I squint. I did see an Alan Wake II example that seemed pretty noticeable, but mostly only in the side-by-side, and if I was in the market for Alan Wake II, I likely wouldn't notice what I was missing when ray tracing is turned off. The things that make games look best to me now are when they can add all of that fidelity to the textures and animations of human beings, like in Death Stranding, because we're wired to more easily detect when a human being isn't real than anything else.
Haven't there been multiple MMOs from former WoW devs that have all gone under by now? I remember Firefall used to have the biggest presence at PAX, and Firefall is no longer a game that exists anymore.
People say they hate free-to-play and that they’d happily pay once for access like a normal game, but the stats say otherwise.
I wanted to replay Planescape: Torment, and I knew it had a mobile version. Oops, it's not compatible with modern Android. Situations like those teach me to stop bothering with mobile. Then there's the fact that if I want to play the game on a larger screen once I'm home, not only do I not get the desktop version of the game included with my purchase, but there's also no standard, easy way to sync my saves. Like someone else here in this thread, I stick to board game adaptations and things like Slay the Spire (which I've also thoroughly played on desktop).
People who use ‘mobile game’ as an insult are usually wilfully ignorant about the platform and just have an axe to grind.
The mobile games that bubble to the top and are the most played are often driven by some of the worst business models, so it's not surprising to me when the term becomes a pejorative, even if there are good mobile games out there.
Agreed. I'm putting 2023 in my pantheon alongside 1998, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. A great year for RPGs and fighting games, with the latter bumping up two of my favorites from previous years, Skullgirls and Guilty Gear Strive, a few notches via updates. Hi-Fi Rush is the first game in the character-action genre that clicked for me, and I've tried to make it click so many times before.
Even if it were the best year for the products (there are several titles in the article that are curious), it’s definitely one of the worst years for the people who work on them.
For sure. As an armchair analyst, it seems to be the result of getting out of the era of cheap credit and VC money. I don't expect it to get worse, but I do think live services and enormous open world games ran out of money spreading their customers across too many games.
You've got RPGs and strategy/tactics games listed as some of your favorites, but Baldur's Gate 3 never caught your eye? How about Starfield or Cyberpunk, or the early access game Dread Delusion? Given tactics games and an interest in MGS, you could check out the Metal Gear collection or Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (or Shadow Gambit's developers' previous games, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados III, which I think I like better than Shadow Gambit). There's Wargroove 2, if you like the Advance Wars brand of tactics. It's 2D, but given your interest in other space games, you could take a look at another early access game (not on Steam) Starsector that a friend of mine got really into.
There's just so much out there this year that I'm not sure who'd be left unhappy.
Starsector is definitely a sleeper hit building a cult following. I wouldn't have heard of it if not for a friend of mine. If fantasy settings don't typically do it for you, you can encroach on a lot of things that people like about Divinity and BG3 in the Wasteland games. Wasteland 1 is an old RPG that's almost a text adventure, but Wasteland 2 and 3 are pretty modern. Cyberpunk also got a huge revamp right before its latest expansion drop, so even the original game's RPG systems and world systems work very differently now, and there's a lot of positive buzz behind it (I haven't gotten to it yet myself, but I liked the launch version).
For fantasy settings, definitely don't play Wargroove for the story, but one thing I learned to enjoy about fantasy stuff is it can create a rock/paper/scissors of strengths and weaknesses of classes/races that you can't quite hit in most believable sci-fi settings. I never got far into Divinity, but one thing that really worked for me in BG3, apart from its production value, is that it doesn't just bombard you with lore. It gives you the bare minimum setup you need to get going, and then it diagetically fills you in on the larger world as you go, with dialogue that doesn't feel like an info dump, much like Game of Thrones managed to do. Plus, IMO, there are far more interesting tactical options in BG3's combat than in XCOM; and I love XCOM.
It would also be nice if celebrated a larger percentage of the non-Japanese side of things, if they go back to guest characters. Other than better netcode, the way you make a smaller roster make sense is if you flip the game on its head with a new set of universal mechanics, like how Street Fighter 5 to Street Fighter 6 is acceptable because everything is about the Drive system.
Two Mortal Kombat games, Injustice 2, Mad Max, Mordor games...that's a lot for $10-$15. It's a great deal if you only wanted two games in the bundle. They probably ought to have put Injustice 1 in there, but what can you do?
Oh, I see. WB also refuses to make games that don't have to do with their movie properties, with few exceptions. And since they've entered the gaming industry, some of their other notable games have been live services like Infinite Crisis and Gotham City Imposters that have since shut down.
Surely it will help them reclaim their spot as the de facto fighting game console in a scene where many people use unlicenced controllers with Brook boards.
A good quick look or early game LP with commentary will fill that in. The Giant Bomb format has one person asking another a series of questions, and game feel usually comes up. ACG reviews so many games that it's more than likely he covered it in a video. If you find a couple of YouTube channels where the reviewers or LPers have similar tastes as you, it ends up being as good a method as any to make an informed purchase. Demos can also sometimes be misleading, depending on the game. There's no perfect answer here, but there isn't for any other purchase either.
It's not perfect. Nothing is. But it does make for a pretty informed decision. As long as you don't abuse it, there's always 2 hour refund policies as well. I don't think it makes the OP an asshole to pirate a game as a demo, but I've been burned so few times by this strategy that I've never considered some other means of trying out a game to be necessary. If you're really unsure, you can wait for a sale, too.
Retro games are also widely unavailable, and often times when they are available, it's only on a subscription service for a machine that I don't want to play them on. Imagine instead if these companies steered into what their customers actually want. That would sure be nice.
You'll know if the reviewer is sponsored by the game, because they legally have to disclose it. ACG probably takes one or two steps more than necessary to prove he's incorruptible.
The type of person who buys Arkham Knights or Babylon's Fall despite the plethora of warning signs is either such a fan of Batman or Platinum that they can't help themselves, or they're like my friend who needs to see every major shit show in gaming. Neither game sold many copies.
They're not making a game like the old Marathon games, so I don't know why they felt the need to use the name. It's an extraction shooter. A live service in a sea of them. I thought they might be making a more traditional FPS to complement their live service FPS, but nope. More of that garbage. They're not making FPS games for me these days.
There are a few reasons that they might put out a non-gaas game even if that was the reason Sony bought them, like not competing with yourself. Also the fact that Halo is still Halo, but Bungie doesn't own Halo anymore, and Marathon is a close enough approximation that they do own. But no, looks like they're pulling a Prey and just thought the name was cool, so they put it on the next idea that came out of their heads.
It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game. The rest of the industry is encroaching on it, and it's ridiculous there too. Right now we're looking at a AAA industry that's taking about 5-6 years to make a game, and everyone knows that has to come back down somehow; the ones that go longer than that are Prey (2006), Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good & Evil 2, etc. Not a great track record.
the business model was no more “exploitative” than something like Apex or PubG that make literal billions yearly off cosmetics
Those are bad too. In different and sometimes arguably worse ways. But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU. That, of course, makes Star Citizen an easy target once again.
People have their ego wrapped up in the criticisms about the game, they don’t like the idea that they got duped into hating on something by people who profited off their rage. People need to stop trying to save face; they were wrong about Star Citizen and SQ42.
I saw a trailer for this game with Gary Oldman in it 8 years ago. 8 years. They cast a lot of fan favorite actors that were already, let's say, of an advanced age, and I'm betting one of them dies by the time Squadron 42 comes out. I'm looking forward to playing Squadron 42, but if it takes you 8 years from the time you had something to show for your work for that single player mode to come out (which can and should be smaller in scope than an MMO and have none of the CI/CD restrictions that a live service game has), then you can bet your ass there's something to criticize there. At the very least, project management. And it's totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn't exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there's a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it's doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game's audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn't get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren't immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.
Also, that "8 years" is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that's reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3's launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn't working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.
If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don't even know when you'll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it's priced to cash in on whales. At least it's not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.”
Don't attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven't changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It's me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.
You misunderstood what I said by diminishing returns. They're clearly important to you. The further away you get from that level of hardcore enthusiast, the more like you're going to find people who don't find those features to be important compared to a game that runs better and with fewer bugs, let alone how they affect the actual game design. No game is immune from criticism, and people can and will criticize it for all of these things and its business model. If I'm a person who paid $45 because I wanted to play Squadron 42, which at the time I believed was a game releasing in 2016, how do you expect me to not criticize them for taking 7 more years and still not having it done when it's a much smaller scope than the MMO that they're building?
Stop trying to make it out like we’re rubes who got a fast one pulled on us
Once again: I did not say this. You are arguing with me about things other people said. Argue with them.
Valve says "technology doesn't exist" yet for full Steam Deck 2.0 (www.eurogamer.net)
Suicide Squad Publisher Promises Even More Live-Service Games (kotaku.com) angielski
Seems like someone can't read the room on how poorly Suicide Squad is going to go after almost 9 years in the oven.
Embracer’s TimeSplitters studio Free Radical faces closure | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Facing closure, potentially unless Embracer finds a buyer, but a handful of devs have already been spotted looking for work, so layoffs have started.
Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable (kotaku.com) angielski
The company behind Fortnite is currently in a legal fight against Google over in-app fees
Starfield group fixing Bethesda's bugs say their job is tough as mods feel an afterthought (www.eurogamer.net)
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 5th
Whatcha all been playing? I’ve been playing a ton of Mario world ROM hacks, including some kaizo ones. Also started doing my oblivion playthrough again!
Blizzard announces World of Warcraft's next 3 expansions: 'We ain't screwin' around,' declares Chris Metzen (www.pcgamer.com)
cross-posted from: kbin.social/m/PCGaming/t/596090...
isn't it weird how newer games manage to look more realistic than older ones? - GST Channel [5:32] (www.youtube.com) angielski
Former WoW devs announce new studio: Fantastic Pixel Castle (twitter.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/13613260...
What are your thoughts in mobile games? (lemmy.ml) angielski
2023 Is The Best Year For Games In A While (And Maybe Ever?) (kotaku.com)
Sakurai Is Sceptical That Future Smash Bros. Titles Can Match Ultimate's Scope (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
"It would be difficult to push it any further than we have"
[Humble Bundle] WB 100: Play the Legends (www.humblebundle.com)
Celebrating 100 years of Warner Bros heroes & legends...
Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002' (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/ajgMB...
AITAH for pirating games before buying them?
Nowadays, the absolute vast majority of games that I play are shit tbh....
Thoughts on Marathon? Sorry, I know I'm late... (www.marathonthegame.com)
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/12993314...
Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K (youtu.be) angielski
Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.