ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

It also requires EA's always-online DRM like the recent Star Wars Jedi games. Steam needs to make that notification bigger so I know not to buy that sort of trash.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

And EA's launcher requires an active internet connection. Try playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, because I sure did, and it doesn't work. There may be a way to sidestep the launcher, particularly on older games like this one that had the launcher retrofitted into it after launch, but regardless, it tells me to stop buying EA games.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

I don't think we're looking for the same type of shooter per se, but I agree that they don't make them for me anymore either.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

No, this is against the rules. Perhaps the penalties aren't harsh enough, as most financial crimes come with very little actual punishment, but there are penalties.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

It's likely a far cry from shutting down, but shutting down is inevitable. Most online only games you only lose access to when they die, but Destiny deletes stuff while it's still alive.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

You can usually tell a unique machine apart from another via MAC address, but even that has issues, and that's giving Unity the benefit of the doubt when they haven't earned it.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

You're asking all the same questions we asked 15 years ago, when DRM started limiting installs on games like BioShock.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Bloomberg reports that newly-appointed CEO Takashi Kiryu is aiming to improve the company's profitability by whittling down the number of smaller projects it releases, while focusing on big-budget games with a higher potential to improve profitability.

So you're disappointed with the sales of these enormous games that spend far too long in development and don't get the return you want, and your plan is to double down on these games instead of Dragon Quest Builders and Octopath? Here's an idea: take someone who's successfully led a smaller game and then give them progressively larger projects to lead. And maybe don't make a main entry in your marquis series exclusive to a single console in an age where the PC market will likely outsell it.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

They don't think anything about them except how much money those games make, and FF16 didn't move tons of copies.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

More like effective immediately.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

There's just no way this was ever going to go well, no matter how they clarify. Oh, you can inform Unity of upcoming charity bundles to be exempt from fees? You know what's better than that? Not having a fee for something that stupid. No need to inform anyone of anything.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

It would stem the migration from Unreal if they just matched their pricing structure and access to the code base underneath.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Unless there's a coordinated effort by a fanbase to install the game over and over again because the game asked you for your preferred pronouns or some nonsense. Or maybe a pirated copy of the game still phones home to Unity and charges the developer. There are a lot of ways this could be problematic.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

It does.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

In-app purchases, requires 3rd party account, and no LAN. I think their biggest rivals are Grim Dawn still getting expansions and that new Titan Quest.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

after receiving interest from third parties

Someone came along and said they'd like to buy them. Perhaps at an attractive offer given the deal that fell through or perhaps at an even higher price than Embracer paid for it. Anyone would consider a sale at a decent price if someone approached them with the offer.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Each publisher operates independently. So far, to my knowledge, they've shut down studios that were spun up to work that $2B deal that fell through; and Volition, who haven't made a hit game in a decade.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Gearbox is also a publishing arm, which recently put out Remnant II, and they seem to have a stake or ownership in Risk of Rain, Bulletstorm, and Torchlight.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Their strategy was always diversifying in ways that other big publishers stopped diversifying, buying old neglected and mismanaged IPs for pennies on the dollar. If this strategy doesn't work, then I weep for what video games could have been, because this lack of diversification is why I can't get a decent racing game or first person shooter anymore.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Not just mobile games; any game that requires a server connection.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

But the PlayStation 5 version, released last week, introduces a third option: local, or so-called couch co-op, which allows people to play the old-fashioned way on a split screen, sitting side-by-side.

I'm pretty sure this feature also exists on the PC version.

But yes, split-screen is an endangered species at this point. Halo Infinite dropped the feature and Forza is about to launch without it. Helldivers used to have shared-screen co-op, and now it's online-only. The Quake 2 remaster supports 8 player split-screen, which makes so much sense in the age of large HD TVs that I can't believe no one bothers with it, but FPS games in general are also almost extinct, so maybe that comes with that territory. Hardly any game is going to have as demanding of a use case as Baldur's Gate 3, so I'd really like to see more games sacrifice some graphical fidelity in order to support the feature, if possible. Just about any multiplayer game these days is designed to be a live service that you log into every day rather than a game that you can play through for a handful of hours with friends and have a satisfying experience. It's money left on the table when there's only so many of the former that the market can possibly sustain.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

It's also that you're rarely going to want to spend that much development time on a feature that only works on one platform out of 2-4.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

There's only one HDMI port on a PS5, so until that changes...(also, don't hold your breath).

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

They could also be used with a PS5 if Sony didn't put stupid and arbitrary restrictions around it.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean the kinds that aren't extraction shooters or battle royales or some other kind of "live service" that pretends it's a service so it doesn't have to admit that it's a bad product. Something more substantial than the crop of "boomer shooters", with co-op and/or friendly deathmatch; something with objective design and a story that's interesting to follow. Basically what we used to get between the late 90s up through the middle of the last decade; what Halo used to be before they decided it had to be both open world and a live service.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

I guess custom campaign stuff keeps NWN going? How's the game out of the box? I don't really hear about that one compared to other Bioware games. Additionally, how's the enhanced edition? And has anyone modded in decent controller support?

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

I'm still going with Baldur's Gate 3, and it continues to impress me at every turn. Steam says I've played for 43.5 hours now, and I'll bet I still have at least 20 hours ahead of me on this first playthrough. After primarily playing fighting games for the past few years, this game has reminded me of what I love so much in RPGs and created a backlog of games for me to play through in the next couple of years to follow it up, especially since a tabletop group of 5e probably doesn't fit into my life right now.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Was anything ever done to mod in controller support to Pillars of Eternity from the console versions? I'm building a list of RPGs I'd like to play after BG3. Also, I'm pretty sure the game uses its own roleplaying setting and rules, but is it as complicated as 2e from those old Infinity engine games?

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

You can side load a program called Heroic Game Launcher that will automatically download from other stores and apply the best known version of Proton to it. It's not as good as proper Steam support, but it will often get the job done.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

There are just too many good games this year. Some of them won't make the cut when we've only got so much time and several of the best games of the year each take 100 hours to finish. Armored Core isn't making the cut for me this year.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

They did update it after release, but having not played it myself, I got the sense that it was never fully fixed.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

First off, Payday 3 has zero local play. 100% DRM. This means that if their matchmaking system goes down, you don't get to play the game. Now, this isn't a complete deal-breaker for me, provided the matchmaker doesn't go down. After an hour of play, the matchmaker went down for the rest of the night.

And that's exactly why I'm hoping to convince more people to make this a deal-breaker. The servers going down is inevitable. If they stay up, it's a bonus that makes your life easier. Of course, for Payday, I'm not expecting LAN, private servers, or split-screen. They make far too much money from funneling you to their cash shop. I just hope that the lack of these features is soon seen as a black mark that makes a game unmarketable.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

It's not simple or easy to spin up a VM that will run indie games from 10 years ago.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

No, it takes time to spin up a VM that will run PC games from a bygone era using an old version of Windows. We're talking minutes from the time you click the VM until you can run the game, compared to seconds on a native executable. It's one method, sure, but it's not ideal. It's definitely not simpler or better.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

What does the season do differently that you can't do by just selecting a new character option from the main menu?

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

But if you can complete a character in 20 hours, why not just have daily and weekly leaderboards? Why even have arbitrary seasons?

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

And yet they'll still have invasions. Is it so much to ask to take that formula, with co-op that works from a damn menu, without invasions?

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

If you hate the practice of exclusivity (or the version of it that Microsoft or Sony have these days), the more effective action would be not only to not buy it but also to not play it. When you play it, you can discuss it on forums, share word of mouth, and other things that encourage other people to buy it. When you don't play it, you're probably supporting some other game that needs the support more and abides by your values.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

SkillUp said that he saw/played it both recently and a number of years ago (before the pandemic), and the game changed shockingly little between those two points in time. And it's basically still just the ship combat from Assassin's Creed IV.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

A "forever game" also would have been what they made before. This game as a service to follow it up will more likely than not have an expiration date on it that the old games do not.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

Latency on wireless controllers isn't a big deal (and a lot of Smash players are using wired Gamecube controllers anyway), but it's not a big deal on wi-fi either. The problem with wi-fi is packet loss and not being able to send and receive at the same time, which feels like latency in fits and starts, because it has to wait until the packet sends successfully. Ethernet helps with Smash, but it still sorely needs rollback netcode regardless. Even on a wire, you're still on delay-based netcode.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

The new way is better, and it's not close. The only thing I miss from the old days is the ability to preserve each individual old version and old meta, whereas these days we just update the new version on top of it. If you're the kind of player who felt like Happy Chaos ruined Guilty Gear Strive, you can't really go back to a version before he existed. Up until this latest patch, I felt like the best time in the game's lifespan so far was right before Happy Chaos launched (for reasons beyond the state that Happy Chaos launched in). Thankfully, this new season is great, but we might not have been so lucky.

People outside of the fighting game sphere would perceive these new games as a "rip off"

I'm going to wager plenty of people inside that sphere would consider them to be a rip-off as well. Super Street Fighter IV didn't change any more about characters' gimmicks than your typical seasonal update does in modern games. They had limited ability to patch games back then, and the new boxed copy was all they could do, but this new method allows them to demonstrably keep a larger pool of players online playing the game than the old method did, which provides more value to future purchasers, which theoretically drives more sales before we even get into the economics of Street Fighter costumes. I know when I bought Guilty Gear Xrd Sign, I wasn't too compelled to pick up Revelator when it came out, since it appeared to be barely different from the version I already had, and no one was really playing that previous one online anyway.

An example would be Super Street Fighter IV launching with 10 new characters and 5 new stages for 40 dollars -- a price that is basically in-line with modern "seasons" in the worst case scenario and it can be debated that it was actually a great value when you consider all of the additional work and polish to other UI and gameplay elements.

That's $40 in 2010 money. It would be more like $56 in today's dollars.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

The size of Baldur's Gate 3 isn't the standard I want it to set anyway. I just want RPGs to be that deep with that level of production value. I finished Act 1 in the time it took me to finish all of Mass Effect 1, and I can't believe I've still got two thirds of the game left. This game is the entire Mass Effect trilogy in one game, but Mass Effect didn't give me a ton of ideas for different ways to play the game I just finished. You can play a Shepard who kills more with powers than with guns or more with guns than with powers, but it's nothing like this.

Also, here's the other standard. The game has multiplayer, but it's not a horde mode. It's not a live service hero shooter. It's just co-op; the video game version of playing tabletop with your friends. It's got LAN mode and direct IP connection. It's available DRM-free. It supports controllers and mouse/keyboard really well. Other than that weird Larian launcher that you can disable easily enough, this game is doing everything I need it to do from a software perspective and to stand the test of time in a world where live services inevitably keep dying.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

No DLC, but I'll bet there's a Tears of the Kingdom Deluxe for the Switch's successor that has some extra content in it to justify charging you full price again.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

The DRM is the key part of that. So the answer is DRM-free, not physical media. Especially since all games get patched these days.

ampersandrew, 9 miesięcy temu

You can't buy all games on disc either. Also, not every game on Steam has DRM.

ampersandrew, 10 miesięcy temu

I'm mostly chalking the dated design of BG1 and 2 to the designers at BioWare rather than the D&D rules, but there are definitely things about the old rules that are just horrific. AoE stuns that last for 10 rounds may as well be instant death when they hit your party (5e versions of the same spells only target 1-4 opponents), and then you get to things like Energy Drain that semi-permanently drain entire levels in 2e but only temporarily drain one stat in 5e; the things that remedy or counter those spells basically require you to know what's around the corner, and the game doesn't foreshadow them.