ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Not relevant enough? Valhalla made Ubisoft $1 billion. It's one of those games that sells to the type of person who only buys a couple of games per year alongside sports titles and Rockstar games.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

So many businesses operate on debt and investments. "If you're going to gamble, do it with somebody else's money." A lot of opportunities to acquire funding for developing video games have just dried up.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The publishers acquire funding this same way. Sony, 2K, and Bandai Namco have all operated as the publishers for their games, and they're all publicly traded companies. They pay the upfront cost for development that both partners in that deal wish to make a return on, and right now, the publishers or other investors (which may still exist regardless of a publisher deal) are scared of throwing money at lots of game pitches these days.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

What I said was that the developer may have other investors in the studio or the project even if they have a publisher. Immortals of Aveum, for instance, was published by EA but largely funded by venture capital.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I also have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I don't think it's a 3D vs. 2D thing. I think it's a Tekken thing. In 2D games, you can generally block low and then react to overheads, and then you'll have a few universal system mechanics. In Tekken, you block high by default and react to lows. You can't crouch-block mids, but you can create a whiff punish opportunity by ducking highs or sidestepping vertical moves. Okay, those are some cool tools to use. Except some moves hit low that look mid. Some moves hit mid that look high. Some moves that look like they can be sidestepped will actually just track your movement. I desperately tried to find some rules of thumb that would help me actually play defense in this game, but the answer I kept getting was that I just had to know what those moves look like and memorize those properties for each one. That's not a skill I excel at, and it's not a hurdle I'm interested in grinding to get past, which is a bummer, because this is most I've ever understood or found a taste for Tekken.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

I'm going through some more of The Outer Worlds. Still really enjoying it. It's got a good pace to it.

Palworld is still my second screen game for podcasts and such. It needs some tweaking in the progression, but I'm at the point now where I can expand to additional bases.

I picked up Penny's Big Breakaway. It feels great to play. The boss fights are really interesting. This could and should have been one of the best platformers I've ever played, and maybe it still is, but some bugs and jank occasionally get in the way. If you're swinging from your yo-yo and hit a wall, you're supposed to do a small climbing animation, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes when riding your yo-yo, you'll kind of just skip and jump off with poor feedback for why. Sometimes you get stuck in a wall. The design for air dashing by pressing the button twice can often get eaten by other inputs, and that doesn't feel great. The bugs and jank are not the most prevalent part of the experience, but they happen enough to bring down my opinion of the game a peg or two. I'd highly recommend this game, but maybe wait a few months for a couple of patches.

My friends and I beat the main campaign of Quake II in co-op. It's much faster in co-op and with the compass feature than they intended, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Next we'll move on to the expansions.

Still labbing some stuff in Skullgirls for my Combo Breaker grind. It's painful going through replays for my losses, but it's necessary, and I took good notes.

I had been dipping my toes into the waters of loot games with Titan Quest, and I think I'm at the point now where I can say I see the appeal with the genre and I'll stick with it. For this game in particular, I do wish the bosses were more involved, because they don't really hit a crescendo that a boss fight should have. Due to what defensive options the game gives you and doesn't give you, they often just end up being running away from the guy in a circle until you can land some hits. Still, it's fun. After this game, I might check out the sequel, Grim Dawn, or V Rising.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

That game is worth putting up with its jank. You may not know exactly what the character is going to say, but each option is always channeling either James Bond, Jack Bauer, or Jason Bourne.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I did finish it. Liked it, really enjoyed the presentation. There was a bit of abstract in the ending, which isn't really my bag, but I'm on board for the sequel.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

No worries. I was not really able to deduce any more depth out of the combat, really. There were some defensive options that seem to always cancel into offense options to feel snappier, but I think it was really a matter of what the game bothered to teach me and what I needed to do in order to make it through the game. If they want to make it a priority on the sequel, I trust them to know how to do that.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

For the author and everyone else. If they're not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they're making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Did you play Starfield? It's definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn't cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

We just got Baldur's Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It's a real time game, but if you try just mashing buttons, you will die quite quickly.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I don't see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they've got Microsoft's war chest to help aid the transition.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I would absolutely trust Obsidian to handle the NG+ angle that Bethesda was aiming for, because they would have known that the right way to do it is to not let you do every faction's quest line in the same playthrough.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:

• The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that's not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
• Baldur's Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for "moon logic" for a reason, and I'm not sure we're better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
• What you might call "handholdy", others might call "better UX" in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur's Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
• People's attention spans didn't necessarily drop, and it's even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

But this isn't a film. People replay systems-driven games all the time, because you can tweak the variables and make it feel new. RPGs have done this plenty of times. Interacting with a separate quest line that occasionally intersects with things you did in one of your previous timelines is something that there is absolutely a way to do, and Obsidian has made exactly that type of systems-driven RPG plenty of times.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The thing that Obsidian has done plenty of times is system-driven reputations. The thing that would be new is bending that into new playthroughs on NG+ that interact with your past playthroughs.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I don't know how worth it is to try to explain my idea of what a hypothetical better version of Starfield is, but the short answer is:

• only let you do one faction quest per playthrough
• those factions' quest lines already, in the real Starfield that exists today, intersect with one another
• change how different factions react to you and those other factions based on a system similar to the type of reputation system Obsidian has done before, not unlike Levine's "Narrative Legos" video, but it doesn't even have to be that advanced

It wouldn't involve grinding. If I still haven't articulated it well enough, don't worry about it, because that game doesn't exist anyway.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I don't mean to sound rude, but it seems strange to pine for something lost that not only isn't lost but also you don't seem to have looked very hard for. There are some high profile turn based RPG hits all the time. Pokemon games are still turn based RPGs, and that's the most successful entertainment property of all time.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Your best bet is to just go on Steam and start filtering by tags. You can click on a search and search for both "JRPG" and "Turn-based combat" tags, and that will give you a good list of games in the ballpark of Phantasy Star.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn't tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone's improvement is someone else's regression. I'll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

So perhaps the updated hypothesis is all asshole communities are tied to live service games, but not all live service games have asshole communities?

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Metal Gear is a series that will turn on a dime from being deathly serious into breaking the fourth wall for a joke or gameplay reasons. They're amazing.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I'd recommend playing them in release order. You can skip the MSX games and go right to Metal Gear Solid, but these games do build on each other. MGSV is probably the best-playing game in the series, but it has the least of the story bits that the series is known for.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I'd say if you're buying it now, you should be doing so based on what it is as though it never gets another patch, because sometimes they don't.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

So what? Baldur's Gate 3's player base is about a tenth of what it used to be too. So is Elden Ring.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

A few dozen hours of content over the course of a month; I don't think it's strange that the player count dropped substantially. Live service games just broke how people think about video games, and this isn't a live service.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Terrible name, likely online-only and with that kernel-level anti-cheat that makes it both intrusive and Windows-only, and it's got hitstun decay. It's like they're trying to tell me not to play it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

We've seen games sold on Epic for less, and people wait to buy them until they're on Steam. I do it myself, even.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video

Netflix isn't the service I'd point the finger at for low quality streaming video. That would be Amazon. They don't even have the problem that Max has where it always starts low and then evens out by the time the recap is done.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

They used to have purchases of "streaming copies" of movies, which is the same thing as setting your money on fire, but they don't do that anymore.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

GameSpy is patched out of the game now, and I'm pretty sure you can play over LAN regardless. Plus the games are available on GOG. If you don't want to put up with microtransaction nonsense in these games, there's for sure a route to avoid it.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I thought that was clear from the start. They haven't really been shy about it. There haven't been exceptions to games appearing on Game Pass day 1 when Microsoft owns it; not that I can think of, anyway.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I was thinking more like Rome, Sweet Rome.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

But not for multiplayer, correct? No LAN coming? I imagine they wouldn't want to let you play offline when it has the in-app purchases tag.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Cosmetic or not, it provides them an incentive to want to keep you online for multiplayer, so they're probably not in a rush to add a feature like LAN that's just plain better for the customer to have.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The demand for LAN skyrockets to 100% as soon as it isn't profitable for the developer to run a server for the game anymore. LAN (or private server, or direct IP connection) games can be played via low-latency VPN when there is no official infrastructure for the game anymore. Devs like to pull out the excuse that LAN isn't used very often for why it doesn't get implemented, but it's a dishonest answer. It does take development resources to build, and playing with official online infrastructure is in fact the path of least resistance, but the death of that infrastructure is inevitable, and even when it's running, you can run into an issue like Helldivers 2 is right now where it just isn't reliable. If you want to omit the feature because most people never use it, you may as well design cars without seat belts or air bags. Grim Dawn and Titan Quest will be playable in multiplayer indefinitely into the future, because they have LAN.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

For me, it's a stamp of forced obsolescence on a game that didn't have to be. If they don't want to put in LAN, they can offer the server binaries, and people can and will figure it out if it's an option. But let's be real; the reason it isn't there is because it creates a dependence on them that helps them sell you more stuff. I'm okay with them trying to sell me more stuff. I'm not okay with them destroying the longevity of a game to get there.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The server can, and often does, shut down when the business is still around. Nexon is still around, but Warhaven is going away. Ubisoft is still around, but you can't play The Crew anymore starting in April. I know that there are limited time and resources involved in any project, but I also know they should have spent those resources on making a product that will last, especially when their competitors in V Rising or Titan Quest II managed to do so. This is forced obsolescence, whether they intended it to be or not, but they almost surely intended it to be.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Man, this thinking sucks.

So… the problem is they should just make better games? Really?

No, the problem is that there's no reason these games should have to disappear except that they were engineered to. All games are worth preserving, even bad games, even old games. It doesn't matter that my friends and I were perhaps the only people in the world playing Rainbow Six 3 at that moment in 2014, because that game having LAN meant that we could still play it, and we would always have the opportunity to play it. The Crew, much to my surprise, actually found a substantial audience, and it is a different game than its two sequels, but now Ubisoft can force obsolescence in that game that people today are still enjoying in an effort to get them to buy one of the sequels. They shouldn't have to buy the sequels to keep playing, and more than that, they should be able to go back to the old game whenever they want.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Then they can't blame me when I buy from their competitors instead, who prioritized a critical feature in the development of their game. (And also, building the game this way is a larger drain on their resources than if they built it without the server requirement. They just want microtransaction dollars.)

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It is planned obsolescence. I'm quite familiar with software development and its realities. They knowingly built a game that won't continue to function in multiplayer after the plug is pulled.

In any case, you and I aren't going to agree, but I take issue with their definition of "full offline" for the reasons we've already discussed, and I'm disappointed that the answer I found in this thread is that they're not interested in adding LAN to this mode.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Do you have much crowd control in your party? Can you disable either him or his minions? Pay attention to what he is vulnerable to and what makes him vulnerable when he goes into that other state. Remember that you can inspect any enemy and see their buffs and what type of enemy they are. Perhaps you have special arrows strong against that type. Perhaps you have some spells that do a type of damage that works well against him.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Congrats! Yeah, lots of tricky fights in that game are solvable by just observing statuses and such. The game exposes almost 100% of its information.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

CD Projekt Red is owned by a public parent company, and their last game was probably in the top 50 of most expensive ever made, with some of the highest production values we've ever seen, at least with the latest 2.0 update. Valve wouldn't count as a AAA developer by your definition, but it's difficult to call Half-Life: Alyx anything but a AAA game. I don't think most people would follow your definition.