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ampersandrew

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Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Anyone feels like almost all modern online games are boring? angielski

I don’t feel compeled to play any online game at the moment except if a friend asks me to play with them. Even then, the only part where I am having fun is when some weird shenanigens happen which doesn’t happen at all given how sanetized and “ballanced” games are. I just want to see a funny ragdoll fly off one side of...

ampersandrew,
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It's basically physics-based wrestling, and it's goofy as hell.

ampersandrew,
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No need to go down fighting. Valve is a private company. They can just say no.

ampersandrew,
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Valve is more than Gabe.

ampersandrew,
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I think you might be in a bit of an echo chamber. Oblivion has a much bigger audience.

ampersandrew,
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Plenty of games do combat with dice rolls and surface the numbers, so I'm not sure why that would be an obstacle.

ampersandrew,
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I don't think they're interested in gatekeeping which group of their customers are considered "fans", nor do I think it's them that's out of touch. I know Morrowind is the cult classic, but Oblivion just does better numbers.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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I don't see that happening for Game Pass, but do you know which company has already displaced ownership for their subscription service? Nintendo.

ampersandrew,
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Boy would I love to see Nintendo's future in the hands of anyone except Nintendo. That's the only way their future will be off their own hardware, and probably the only way they become less of a barrier to game preservation. For those of you afraid of Microsoft absorbing Nintendo and becoming a monopoly, check the date on that e-mail and rest assured they can't get away with it anymore anyway.

ampersandrew,
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It's not happening for Game Pass because they're not in a position of strength to exploit. Nintendo is. Unity thought they were. Streaming video services all raised prices, and plenty of them are still offering value to customers at those prices, but I know that I cancelled two of mine in response; and streaming video services have at least four major players, which is more competition than the business they replaced (cable) ever saw. The $1 trial was always a teaser rate to show people the value they can get out of Game Pass. It's not for me, but the numbers make a lot of sense for a lot of people. Contrast that to Nintendo, who is in a position of strength, only offers their retro games for a subscription on their shitty hardware on their shitty emulators and sues everyone for offering them by other means, and I know which one I dislike more.

ampersandrew,
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Is that the worst thing you can think of? Because that sounds like more than an acceptable trade if it meant that I could legally buy a ROM of Super Metroid I could play on my Steam Deck, or if I could legally play Tears of the Kingdom on a machine that can run it at 60 FPS, or if the first F-Zero game made in 20 years wasn't a live service battle royale with an expiration date baked into the game.

ampersandrew,
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I already think Mario Kart is bland and not worth playing, so you'll need a harder sell for me. Also, the yearly release model is just about dead these days; very few can pull it off still, and it tends to not be as lucrative as just making DLC for one major version at a time, like Nintendo is already doing now with Mario Kart. The truth is, at this point, I don't care what kind of quality Nintendo's games are made with if they're sticking to the business practices they're using currently. I haven't bought Tears of the Kingdom or even pirated it. My time and money are better spent with companies making better products.

ampersandrew,
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I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid.

If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.

ampersandrew,
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You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they'd enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they've been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You'll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that's true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them...not that that will matter to your 5 year old.

As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other "99" games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn't bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn't been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn't care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur's Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.

ampersandrew,
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There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.

ampersandrew,
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If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant.

And if I had $100B, I'd buy Nintendo, but Microsoft can't buy out that much of the video game market either, especially after Activision got through by the skin of their teeth. Activision happened because Nintendo didn't.

Nintendo is bad for game ownership right now. Live service games like Diablo IV are bad for game ownership right now. I don't care what Game Pass might be one day. The second it becomes that, you can guarantee I'll turn on it.

...potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.

I'm a Linux guy. I was fearful of this for a long time, but it didn't take, and Microsoft clearly abandoned that strategy of trying to make the Windows Store happen for games. Even Microsoft couldn't force you to give them a larger cut of the PC gaming pie. Right now, they're struggling to increase Game Pass numbers beyond their ~30M subscribers even after they've added numerous publishers and developers to their catalogue in perpetuity, because, to my surprise, people can do math. The ones that the math works out for is probably not much larger than that 30M.

Sony is in a dominant position in the market. Xbox doesn't threaten them hardly at all. Even Sony isn't keeping games entirely exclusive anymore, probably because enough people like me did the math and found out that 4 exclusive games isn't worth having a $500 machine collect dust next to our TVs, so now their games get PC ports. These business models only turn to shit if you let them. We can live without all of them, so they're all optional. Don't give them money when they offer a bad product, and we'll only get better products.

ampersandrew,
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how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?

Both of them make PC ports now, which are automatically better for preservation, since PC is an open platform rather than a walled garden. Neither is perfect. They both put out live service games that are bad for preservation. But Microsoft especially is better at making their back catalog available for purchase years and years after release. Nintendo hunts down ROM sites and gets them shut down but won't make their old games available in a state that their potential customers are willing to pay for them.

As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!

  • Cassette Beasts (like Pokemon)
  • Lego <just about anything>
  • Overcooked and Overcooked 2 (it could be difficult for your kid at 5, but it might also be fun to play together depending on how they take to it)
  • Penny's Big Breakaway (upcoming, from the Sonic Mania team; 3D platformer)
  • Poi (I have no experience with this one myself, but I hear positive comparisons to Super Mario 64)
  • Sonic + All-Stars Racing Transformed
  • Sonic Mania
  • Do the kids still like Spongebob? There's that new Spongebob: The Cosmic Shake. That one's licensed, but I hear it's quality enough. It's also a 3D platformer.
  • Stardew Valley
  • Yooka-Laylee (admittedly, this one got middling reviews, but I liked it more than most people; 3D platformer)
ampersandrew,
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Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.

ampersandrew,
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Their new games come out on PC day and date, and they haven't released a console-only game since Rare Replay, if I'm not mistaken. "ROMs" are a little before Microsoft's time, if we're being honest.

ampersandrew,
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Well, there is, because SNES emulation is trivial, and Xbox emulation is much less so. Great SNES emulation is available open source and in many different flavors with many different features, and all you need to do is supply the ROM, preferably in a legal way. Most of Xbox's best games already have PC ports, and Microsoft's shift to supporting PC equally is as recent as only a handful of years ago. Especially in the interest of making the Game Pass offering more uniform across PC and Xbox, they still may yet backport those remaining Xbox games to PC in some way just like they ported Age of Empires II to console. Meanwhile, I have no prayer of Nintendo releasing their games on an open platform like PC unless they have an extreme change of leadership or another extreme failure in the market akin to the Wii U.

ampersandrew,
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If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that.

It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.

On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.

Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?

I'll just say again that, for me personally, I'd rather see almost anyone else run Nintendo, because they're a good chance I'd find that entity to be less shitty. But maybe the better alternative is for them to just screw up the successor to the Switch and take a bath on it financially.

ampersandrew,
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I can tell you that I find the frame rate and resolution of Zelda to be unacceptable, given that they don't allow any option for that game to run on other hardware, legally. I've heard enough complaints from my girlfriend to know how little they cared about Animal Crossing in the online experience (a minute and a half connection screen every time someone joins your island!) or the UX (manually hitting A over and over to craft something thirty times that you should be able to do in bulk). Smash's online could have been done right this time, but they took the cheap way out instead of properly developing it with rollback. Their voice chat solution is to hook up your phone with an app and use it separately rather than baking it into the device's OS. I would call all of these poor quality and unacceptable.

I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.

So then why does Microsoft frighten you when Nintendo already does the shitty thing of their own accord? The stuff they do with their online catalogue of retro games is the shitty thing no one else is doing. Remember that Microsoft had a great remaster of Goldeneye ready to go for 360 that Nintendo denied in the 11th hour, and when that game finally came out again, it's only available in subscription services rather than for purchase, both the Switch and Xbox versions were worse than that remaster, and only the Switch version had online play.

The only reason I trust Microsoft and Sony to do better, even by a smidge, is because they actually respond to market forces, and Nintendo would rather go bankrupt than sell you a ROM of Super Mario Bros. for $8 on PC. But Microsoft isn't acquiring them anyway. Buying Activision closed that door, so all of this is moot.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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Tears of the Kingdom is a marvel of engineering and losing sight of that because it's not running on the most powerful gaming hardware is a huge disservice to the work put into it.

I'm sure it would be a marvel of engineering if they got it working on the 3DS running at 15 FPS in 120p, but I don't find it acceptable to play at those specs either. They can put all sorts of work into making something unacceptable. If it sucks, it sucks. I frequently don't care about the biggest AAA releases, and it's not a requirement that every game I play pushes hardware to its limits. However, I do care about responsive controls, playing where I'm comfortable, and not having to squint to tell what I'm looking at. Making a game of the scope they targeted isn't comfortable for me on the only hardware they allow it to run on.

Both Animal Crossing and Smash Ultimate too, like I said, the online is disappointing, but they are still excellent games both single-player and couch multiplayer. To call it "poor quality" and "unacceptable"? If you really mean it then I just don't trust your opinion.

What is there to trust? It's my opinion, not yours, and you've played those games yourself to form your own opinion. Maybe you don't care about a best-case input delay of 6 frames in Smash or that extremely common actions in Animal Crossing that you'll be doing hundreds of times are made more tedious and add more downtime, but it has a huge effect on me and mine.

Market forces are currently driving a lot of games toward live service, planned obsolescence, and all that nonsense. Totally true. Bungie was fully capable of making a gross live service even when they weren't under pressure from Activision or Sony. But market forces are also going to eventually make them stop, as we're finally picking up momentum on customers pushing back against this sort of thing. With or without Pokemon, Nintendo's name on the box has never been a guarantee of a good game, and it's not true now either.

ampersandrew,
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Something I dislike is bad. I dislike things because I subjectively find them to be bad. But don't confuse poor performance with being old. We've done 60 FPS long before 2017, but they didn't make it a priority for Zelda. They didn't even seem to care about making sure 30 FPS was stable. The game they made is too big for that hardware to ever hit that metric, or the native 720p that the Switch supports. Metroid Dread, on the other hand, doesn't break a sweat.

This is not a flaw, it's a difference in intent.

It's objectively a flaw in an interactive game to remove interactivity for a minute and a half on a frequent occurrence like someone joining or leaving an island, and I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thinks manually crafting the same item 30 times in a row rather than being able to do it in bulk is somehow better for the vibe the game is going. It's not my preference for weapons to break as quickly as they do in Zelda, but at least I understand why they made that choice, and it's not a fault of the quality of the software. It would be objectively better for Smash Ultimate to have less input delay and be more responsive. People have measured it at 6 frames, and Street Fighter V had a rough time back when it had 8. 3 or 4 is manageable. The most responsive fighting games have 1 or 2.

ampersandrew,
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I dislike good things. I dislike Dark Souls, a game made with vision and care that a lot of people love, because to me it looks ugly, feels clunky and just utterly miserable.

Ugly, clunky feeling, miserable games are things you'd find to be bad. You don't have to acknowledge that other people like it if you find it to be bad. You can just say you think it's bad, at least with a clarification of why, or understand that when I say something is bad, it doesn't mean you can't like it, especially since I clarified why. I'm not obligated to say that something is good just because other people like it.

If Tears of the Kingdom was a native 1080p 60 fps game, it wouldn't have a whole system of physics-based interactive modular devices.

It could on hardware that they don't legally allow me to run it on! And that they don't let me do so is bad.

Of course it's more demanding than Metroid Dread, does anything in it even remotely compare? That game doesn't even need to render distant landscapes, it's all small rooms and predetermined backgrounds. Do you think that was a lack of wanting to make it happen?

No, I said that it was for lack of designing a game that can run well on the hardware they restricted themselves to. And if we were still in the 2017 world where the Switch is the only way to play a game that demanding portably, or even here in 2023 where it would be the cheapest way to play a game that demanding portably, it would be acceptable, but not when it's the only way to play the game at all.

I love Smash. But I also don't live in a dorm room anymore, and online is the primary use case for most fighting games. I go to locals, but if I get my ass beat at a local and go home to practice, my way to practice it is to go online, and its online sucks. Having bad online in a multiplayer game these days is about as bad as not having subtitles in a story-driven game or missing any other standard feature. The input delay is also rough even when you play locally.

I'm not the target market for Animal Crossing, so don't worry about what I think of it. My girlfriend was the one who played it. I played that first one on the Gamecube, and even back then I eventually became a little grossed out by how they wanted to make that game a habit like mobile games do today by making you afraid of weeds piling up. I do feel pretty confident in evaluating how bad those two aspects are when I could frequently walk through the living room and see the same few flaws over and over again.

ampersandrew,
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That one's on car manufacturers. Anyone that licenses real cars deals with the same nonsense. Those games in particular are not built to be sold forever, perhaps because car manufacturers only want you to think about the new models. It's also probably a factor in why the upcoming Forza is built as a "live service" that will keep getting updated, though I suspect that means old cars get removed in favor of their new models somehow.

ampersandrew,
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It's interesting that your example is Dreamcast, because while every company that doesn't put out a console also has an incentive to make great games, this also shows that making great games isn't enough.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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It's extremely more likely that they'd put up emulated Nintendo games. We have something bordering on perfect emulation for several of Nintendo's old systems, and we don't have that for Xbox. They can literally just slot in an emulator that someone else coded rather than having to patch in custom emulation code on a per-game basis like they currently do for backwards compatible Xbox games. Again, the point is moot. Microsoft will not own Nintendo, but if anyone else took over Nintendo for any reason, it's much easier to sell fully functioning retro Nintendo games on PC than it is to do the same on PC for old Xbox games.

ampersandrew,
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in order to sell the idea of 'you can only get this experience with platform X'.

I think this is the exact idea that Sony and Microsoft realized doesn't make financial sense anymore, and that Phil expected Nintendo to come to late.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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You keep making it an axiom of your argument that they just have an emulator ready to go to port all the same games even though the best information we have is that their emulator requires specific tweaks for each game to even get them running on a single hardware target. So you're repeating yourself on an assumption that I don't think is fair to make. That plus their MO is more along the lines of putting out a remaster of Fable or the Master Chief collection on PC for the very few true console exclusives on Xbox. We can agree to disagree and call it here.

ampersandrew,
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Sony's games are on PC now. Final Fantasy restricted itself to PS5 and underperformed. Games that those platforms use to sell their platforms also come out on PC because they just cost too much to make, and there are too few of them because of how long they take to make now. Nintendo generally spends less, but they're still running into the same problem with development time, and that means their exclusive offerings will dwindle as they have to ramp up fidelity on more powerful hardware, just like what happened with Sony and Microsoft, which means fewer and fewer games that can only be played on that specific set of hardware. Third party exclusives mostly disappeared because, for the same reasons, restricting yourself to one platform is generally a stupid idea these days.

As an aside, racing games in general are rare these days, not just kart racers. My options are Mario Kart, sim racers, one step down from a sim racer like Forza Horizon, and little else. I like racing games, but not any of those. The market will come back around; I've got Trail Out right now and Aero GPX in the near future that will hopefully tide me over until someone makes racing games for me again.

ampersandrew,
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Do you really think the PC market is that big that it'll plug a shortfall like that?

Do you realize how large the PC market has become? Games that used to only be available on consoles now sell more on PC than any single console.

ampersandrew,
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That's true, but again, I think they're going to run into more resistance with development time as they upgrade their hardware and the art assets have to rise to meet the new spec and the new audience expectation. Those Wii U ports had the benefit of being ports, which is a situation that will never happen again. Since basically no one played the Wii U, it was more like a machine gun fire of games for the Switch that already had the hardest part done. Also, unlike any time in history except for the lifespan of the PSP, there are real alternative options for handheld gaming now as we head into this new Switch successor, which probably doesn't affect anyone buying the machine for Pokemon in hell or high water, but it will have an impact on the buyer who just wants to play Hades or Doom in bed or on a road trip and now has that many fewer reasons to buy Nintendo's console over a more open platform.

ampersandrew,
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It won't have the same newness factor of the WiiU ports

This is exactly my point though. Backwards compatibility is an expectation now, but if you didn't have a Wii U, like most people didn't, it makes the Switch feel like it's got twice as many original games as it actually had, and they won't be able to repeat that.

You mean the Steam Deck and clones? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but the least janky of these units has you scouring ProtonDB to check a games compatibility with the unit, and community notes on what to enter into the advanced run commands section or on rare occasions, even what Linux commands to run.

I've sat just about the most technically unsavvy people I know in front of a Steam Deck and told them to stick to verified games, and it's been as smooth sailing as a Switch is; which is to say that neither is perfect, and the way they're imperfect is a little different between them. But again, PCs have been steadily growing in gaming market share for over a decade. PCs got easier, consoles became more complicated, and maybe some percentage of the market was also willing to learn what they needed to to further close that gap just like how all of our parents eventually learned how to use the internet and cell phones. I'm certainly not capable of measuring the effect of each of those things on that trend, but this is the way we're trending.

The Switch 2 is certainly safe. In particular, the Switch is a device made for children, which helps it reach a demographic that the Steam Deck isn't targeting and may never target. I'm not so sure the next Switch is going to do as well as this one has though. And in each subsequent generation, I think they'll head in the same direction as Microsoft and Sony or do something absolutely insane instead of responding to what the market is actually asking for.

ampersandrew,
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Verified games are not a small selection anymore. They're not the entire breadth of Steam, but there are about as many verified games as there are Switch games. Double that if you're including the certified playable games. No Switch tax, no compromised version of the game, no subscription to play online. I get a lot more value out of mine than I do a Switch, and the most I've fucked around on it is installing EmuDeck.

ampersandrew,
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Short of legislation that requires these machines to allow you to hook into alternate digital storefronts, or a requirement for even console purchases to be DRM free, I don't think consoles will ever have a bright future for preservation regardless of a disc drive.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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No, I'd say that's why you want DRM-free games. Plenty of games don't even get physical releases because the economics don't make sense, and then they get crucial patches that fix game-breaking bugs. Your console will break over a long enough timeline, and eventually the parts to fix it won't be produced anymore; I doubt your Switch will still play Breath of the Wild 40 years from now. Basically the only way to preserve modern games that makes sense to me is to make them run on PC, DRM-free.

The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.

Nah, because making that remaster or re-release costs them money and is more of a gamble than just putting out the old version for cheaper. Most of GOG's business is built around this, and then you see things like Sega putting out a huge collection of their ROMs entirely DRM-free with ROM hacks built into the Steam workshop.

ampersandrew,
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Company Losing Market Share to Competitor With Exclusive Games Bought Studios To Make Their Own Exclusive Games

ampersandrew,
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I think that would make more sense in a Shadowrun campaign.

ampersandrew,
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The thing I keep thinking of is that Musk bought Twitter and destroyed billions of dollars of value with bad decision after bad decision, and this Unity thing is still dumber than all of that.

ampersandrew,
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Is it possible to block a domain without blocking the OP? I'm sure they're a nice person, but they post the dumbest rage bait articles, and I'm sick of seeing them in my feed.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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I think the ones that bother me more are the ones that are rage bait for a thing that the OP hasn't even experienced themselves. Maybe everyone else enjoys X and you find an article that summarizes your feeling on it, so you post that article and say how you share that position. That's all well and good. But posting an article that's angry about FFXVI's depiction of slavery, even though OP has no first-hand experience with the game to say if the article is full of shit or not; that bugs me. I don't know how many of the topics the OP has first-hand experience with, but I know they have none with FFXVI, and all of these articles are just designed to get people angry about something. Plenty of games have slavery in them without having to make their story about slavery being bad; we know slavery is bad. If OP has a problem with it after playing the game and that article sums up their thoughts, then it's okay to post that article. If OP is sincerely as pissed off about every one of these things that the articles they post are pissed off about, then maybe I should block them, because they'd have to be a miserable person. We also don't need 3 slightly updated posts about Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen not working on the Series S.

ampersandrew,
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It starts conversations because it's designed to get people angry. It's the kind of engagement-driving Twitter nonsense that the fediverse doesn't rely on. Try shooting from the heart with your own opinion in a self post rather than just posting the most outrageous thing someone said on the internet today.

ampersandrew,
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I finished the story mode for Mortal Kombat 1, and it's another fun NRS story mode, but this one might be their weakest. The opening takes a while to get going, and some of the dialogue can be overly stiff, plus Megan Fox's delivery sucks on every other line. Still, it does pick up, and it's got some ideas. Unfortunately, I'm now left grinding the Invasions mode that I'm not really enjoying so that I can unlock the last few kameo fighters, because 5 of them are still locked when you finish the story mode. I'm not sure yet if MK1 is going to be a regular in my rotation of games I compete in, but it's got a decent shot.

Once I've had my fill of that, it's back to Baldur's Gate 3, where I'm finally in Act 3. I've still yet to arrive in Baldur's Gate in the game called Baldur's Gate.

ampersandrew,
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Is the loot more like a Diablo or Borderlands, where it's a treadmill and you're constantly getting objectively better equipment with higher numbers? Or is it more like a tabletop RPG or the old-school Fallouts where there's often nothing wrong with your starting equipment and you could feasibly play through the entire game with some or most of it? Baldur's Gate 3 has had me building a list of all the RPGs I wanted to play but missed, and your talk about the loot is making me reconsider this one.

ampersandrew,
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Play Baldur's Gate 3, one of the two newest Zelda games, or Elden Ring without a walkthrough. You can still get this feeling, but due to economics, you're unlikely to find it in big expensive games anywhere near as often anymore. Smaller indie games can experiment more with this sort of thing. But basically, it's still out there.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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Real survival horror games don’t exist anymore

We're in a renaissance of survival horror games right now.

Puzzle solutions are told directly to the player, because using your brain is too hard and delays the reward. God of War literally tells you the answer before you barely even look at the puzzle.

That type of mass market game has been doing this for a long time. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune literally gives the main character a book with all the answers instead of letting you solve the puzzles yourself, and that game came out in 2007.

Games now include rewards for completing the tutorial.

In the case of achievements, this is often for stat tracking reasons. Otherwise, it's a good way to tutorialize you on how to use those hypothetical coins. If we're being honest, most games don't have explicit tutorials anymore. They'll have learning tools baked into the game itself. There's a principle in game design where if you can make multiple decisions but one of them is objectively best, you should just make that automatic so that it doesn't appear to be a decision, but the exception to this is when you're teaching the player, somewhat invisibly, how to play the game. Like if you have a skill tree and you start without a crucial skill that you'll definitely want first, it's okay if they make you choose that skill first just so you know how to interact with the skill tree. The 500 coins for completing the tutorial often fills this exact role, unless it's tied to a free-to-play-esque business model where "the first hit is free".

ampersandrew, (edited )
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Not quite Quake speed, though I enjoy Quake just fine too. For me, the sweet spot was stuff like Halo, 007, Metal Arms, Half-Life, Crysis, that sort of thing. But yeah, everything these days is an online-only, live service battle royale or extraction shooter.

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