I came across this video yesterday, and I'm 100% on board with Ross and his stance toward games as a service, but this isn't a plan for a lawsuit; it's asking for help in creating the plan. I hope he can make something happen, because games as a service is going to leave a wake of destruction in the history of video games, but temper your expectations.
Sony appears to be refunding customers who own the PlayStation 4 digital version of The Last of Us 2 and who bought the PlayStation 5 remaster at full price.
Maybe treating these console generations as though they're somehow super different is more trouble than it's worth. Meanwhile, PC games I bought 20 years ago can easily be run on new hardware at higher frame rates and resolutions than when I bought them.
The last Pokemon game I played was Y. It was largely the same game as Blue and Gold. This expands on the concept in fun, crazy ways, and it's got me intrigued.
To be fair, those were so simple that they were barely a challenge when I was 9 years old. When I played Y as an adult, they probably wouldn't have even felt like puzzles.
And as far as legally playing their old games in the modern era, your options are to find an old physical copy or subscribe to a subscription service. There is no option to buy games individually. Even back when they did that, your purchases never carried over to their next console. They're awful.
How do you get 13 years? It's been 11 years since the pre-rendered teaser trailer, and it was less than that between announcement and release. They also were open about not being full force on development for the game until Witcher 3 finished, and the announcement trailer served as a recruitment tool, something that most studios don't do anymore.
Well, if you feel that that's what set that game up for failure, let me tell you about another RPG going through the exact same cycle: the next Mass Effect. That game isn't getting full attention until after Dragon Age. Its first teaser was 3 years ago, and it's still got at least 3 more years to go, assuming Dragon Age comes out this year.
Yup. But if Microsoft is smart, they'll be examining exactly the reasons why Starfield is what it is and how to improve the next BGS game. That will start with throwing their engine away, because any way you slice it, there's just no saving that thing.
He can stop making videos on The Completionist unless you really want to see someone cosplaying as a journalist list things he suspects the guy did but can't prove (beyond the first video). There's a reason that an actual journalist would want to get actual numbers behind the golf tournament, for instance, or consult with someone to see if maybe it's totally ordinary for signatures to be missing from documents because they were e-filed, or perhaps make sure that their legal definitions came from something other than just the first hit that they found with a quick Google, but maybe that timeline doesn't work for the World of Tanks promo slot he sold for his video. If the "bait" that he fell for in Jirard's response was as damning as implied, it might be in his best interest to stop making videos about The Completionist.
Click the link in my comment. There is room for almost all of what he said to be true, but he didn't prove it, and that's a big problem, because there's also room all of it or nearly all of it to be false. It's why an actual reporter would get someone on the record to confirm a fact, consult with an expert, and be sure that the things they think are damning are actually damning. Meanwhile, he and OrdinaryGamers may have made some legal faux pas in the process of putting up videos that are sensationalist for clicks. Again, this doesn't mean that their allegations are false. But it's so, so important to actually prove it, because if they're wrong, lies travel faster than the truth, and if they ever make a retraction (I doubt it), fewer people will actually hear it.
I'll start you off by saying that his "textbook definition of charity fraud" is not from a textbook, and you'll find that and many other answers in the video I linked you. It's long, but it's chapter coded with timestamps, and while I didn't skip it, the author gives you a sizable chunk on tax law that you can skip if it's too dry.
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl's you're talking about. Your answer doesn't give me a ton of confidence that you're being precise in your allegations about Karl.
As far as I can tell, the only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that. Even that has a reasonable explanation from a legal perspective, and even that answer may not be good enough for the people who donated to Open Hand. As someone who just wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, there was no smoking gun in the next two Jobst videos I watched, and that's the problem. Legally, the video I linked gets into far more about what they shouldn't have said and why Jirard's video was definitely heavily advised and/or drafted by actual lawyers (which even us non-experts suspected, even if we didn't know why) who may have set up Jobst to fall for a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately sue him.
These two and a half videos from Jobst (I got fed up with his "this response is the worst thing ever" video) are the first I've ever watched from him, because it came up in my recommendations, and his reputation around Billy Mitchell and Wata preceded him. What I saw led me to believe that perhaps he just needs to be the guy who exposes people's scummy secrets, but maybe this one actually ended before it got truly juicy, because life isn't always as dramatic as what gets written for television, and then he just had to fill time in extra videos. Either way, I was not a fan of what I saw and decided to never watch a certain YouTuber again based on his videos; it just wasn't Jirard...oh, and ordinary gamers was probably worse than Jobst.
Look, I get you're a fan of his, but this "if" is the problem, like I've been saying. The video I linked you, which you aren't interested in watching, only outlines why he may legally want to shut up about Jirard. The video author comes to this conclusion tediously because the law is tedious, but at least he's got some sense of humor. I personally just never want to watch another video of Jobst's because I think he did a poor job of reaching a burden of proof that an actual reporter would need before coming forward with a story. Even not being a journalist myself, I came to the same conclusion as that link the other user sent you. Good on you if you enjoy Jobst's videos, but I hope he holds himself to higher standards in the future.
The first video showed the money hadn't moved. Correct, we can observe that from his research. The second video alleged more money was missing, alleged embezzlement and fraud, because he guessed that some money from a golf tournament wasn't accounted for. The problem here is that he has no hard numbers for how much money, no source to say that something malicious happened and was hidden, etc. Please recognize the difference here.
The video was phrased with reasonable doubt, while often juxtaposed against a tweet from someone to show why a reasonable person would think so.
I'm not sure where you're getting that there's a lack of evidence of charity fraud.
The Moon video quite derisively mocks his and OrdinaryGamers' definition of charity fraud, as coming from the equivalent of "legal Tinder" for matching lawyers and clients, with the distinction being that one is interested in being easy to understand while the other is a definition that determines whether or not someone violated the law. They demonstrably typed in "definition of charity fraud" and went with the top result regardless of its reliability. The Moon video then goes on to point out several ways that the charity could be operating that would make the actions of Open Hand not just legal but ordinary. Jobst has circumstantial evidence for lots of things, and Jirard could be guilty of some of it. Given the scrutiny he's about to be under, we'll know for sure inside of a couple of years. The problem with what Jobst did is that we ought to be sure now, and we're not. If we're going to destroy someone's reputation (and the jobs of the people that he employs in the process) for doing something nefarious, we should know for sure that he actually did it.
Inspired by a discussion I had elsewhere and the article “Women in Games swaps male and female voices to highlight harassment in gaming”, how about we start a voice modulation challenge where you have to play at least one online game with a voice modulator to sound like a girl?...
Online games that let you talk to strangers aren't great when you're a guy either. Not because of targeted harassment, but because you often enough just end up with people screaming into the mic or repeating the N word over and over again for no reason. The last time I turned on voice chat with strangers was 7 years ago, with PUBG, and I quickly turned it back off. (It feels wrong that that game is somehow 7 years old.)
I didn't mean to imply that it's close, only that it's already awful enough that I'm not about to run some experiment for how much worse it can be. It's already an activity so bad that I haven't engaged with it in years.
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it's been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn't appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.
Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it's far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper's nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper's nests are now a thing you'll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.
If I'm rattling down a list of my favorite games ever, they're heavily concentrated in the last decade, with a couple of stragglers from earlier than that. I don't think that's recency bias; I think developers have just, in general, gotten better at honing in on what people like, especially in the age of rapid patching. There's plenty of negative that comes along with this too, but for every game like Diablo IV that patches out builds because they were too much fun and impacted their live service retention rate, there are plenty of games coming out of early access after learning what worked and didn't work with their players, much more rapidly than the old days of iterating on yearly sequels.
Definitions will vary from person to person, and plenty of games in each camp will represent some but not all of their defining characteristics, but you'll see some common themes. Historically, I've also preferred western RPGs by a wide margin, so that might color some of my definitions below. Also, both of these branches in RPGs had the same starting reference of D&D, and then a multi-decade game of whisper down the lane led to them diverging more and more.
Western RPGs:
character creation, choosing from classes that you'll often see represented by other NPCs
allocating attribute points, both at character creation and as you level up, that govern other things about your character
generally flatter power progression (you might do hundreds more damage at the end of the game than you do at the beginning, but not hundreds of thousands more damage)
in attempts to recreate the tabletop experience, will often times allow for outside-the-box solutions to problems besides combat as well as choices that affect the world state
JRPGs:
usually a finite cast of characters that level up more or less only in one way, but you might have a secondary system for them to customize with equipment beyond weapons and armor
combat usually doesn't involve positioning on something like a tactical map but rather a line of combatants on each side of the screen
magic and abilities are more often limited by a magic points resource instead of a rest system
dialogue with NPCs tends to be more limited in choices, telling a more linear narrative
I'll be honest, trying to differentiate these two with a list of bullet points was harder than I thought it would be to articulate. I'm almost more inclined to just say "I know it when I see it", haha. But for some points of reference, I'd say Baldur's Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, and The Witcher 3 are western RPGs; Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5, and Pokemon are JRPGs; Sea of Stars is a JRPG that isn't made by a Japanese developer; and while also an action game, Dark Souls is closer to being a western RPG than a JRPG.
Hellblade II is almost certainly coming out this year, perhaps very soon, so I got Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice for a few dollars on the recent Steam sale. It's certainly a looker, but I would prefer if the mechanics were a bit more sophisticated. Maybe it'll get there, but I'm a few hours in now, and I'm pretty sure I've seen the entire loop. The combat and puzzle mechanics are both what I'd call serviceable, but it's really the presentation in this game that they knocked out of the park, yet I still don't know if that's enough for me to give the game a glowing recommendation, even if I am enjoying the game.
I'm still making progress in Pillars of Eternity ahead of Avowed's release, finally getting into some of the White March content, around level 6. The game remains great, but my biggest criticism thus far is still that the intended player level for a given area or quest should be better communicated. I end up timidly doing the stuff that I'm confident is around my level rather than the content that appears to be most interesting to me at the time.
Some friends and I started up a co-op game of Quake II in the remaster, and holy cow, this is so much better than our time in the first Quake, due in no small part to that compass feature they added. The era of FPS games I'm most into would be the era just beyond Quake II's initial release, and the biggest difference, I'd say, between those two eras in level design is that the older "boomer shooters" would let you get lost in a maze while their successors would close off access to most of the areas that you don't need to bother with yet/anymore, alleviating frustration. It also just feels so much better right out of the gate than the previous Quake, and the levels are somewhat trying to approximate a space that would exist in a fiction created for the game rather than just being a vague labyrinth with monsters in it.
In another co-op group, I'm in the early hours of Titan Quest, as a way of dipping my toes into the loot game genre, which I hadn't really had a taste for in the past. I figured with the sequel on the way, and no desire to touch Diablo with a ten foot pole, this would be a good time to do it. We just had to fight a centaur that I'm not sure whether it counts as a boss or not; hopefully bosses in this game are more interesting than that one was, because with the skills we had access to in the early game (not many), the fight was mostly just running around in circles and taking shots at him when we could without getting pummeled.
Do the NWN games offer better combat feedback than the 2e Infinity Engine games? It was a real pain point in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (especially 2) that it would just tell me something didn't work without telling me why it didn't work, and modern RPGs will show you the full dice rolls so that you can understand why.
Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.
In the fighting game scene, reaction time is studied, and the 40+ year olds can hang with the kids at the highest level. Your reaction time is a function of your focus. If you put your mind to it, yadda yadda yadda. Then it's just up to you to decide if it's worth sticking to it or getting to bed so you're well-rested for work in the morning, because that's what will separate you from beating Hollow Knight in your 40s.
I definitely had that experience with Baldur's Gate 2, but I'm about 20 hours into Pillars of Eternity so far and very much not having that experience. Pillars seems to give me all the information I need to know to get through an encounter while BG2 will just say "weapon had no effect" without telling you that this monster can only be defeated by a +3 weapon.
Right, that's my point. Those things are keeping you from finishing the game, not your reaction times. Those tend to not drop off until far later in life.
I haven't found a noble, king, or count 20 hours in yet, but there was a quest that said I had to go fight Lord Raedric, and then I'm warned by both an NPC and a quest description that this is something I should do later because it's going to be very difficult. Is it possible that you missed the warning and went to do something late game earlier than you should have?
That boss was indeed tough but also one of my favorites from that game. I even have a shirt of it (that is suffering from some wear and tear at this point). I probably spent several hours each trying to beat both that dragon and the game's robot boss as well.
Those two things are linked. I'm a frequent Economics Explained viewer, and the old comparison is that 1 accountant with a spreadsheet program can do what 5 accounts could do without one. If you only need the amount of productivity that that one accountant with a spreadsheet can output, that means you don't need four of your accountants anymore.
If they want to put out poor quality products in pursuit of short term profit, they can deal with long-term consequences as they lose their customers' trust. This game is reviewing quite well at the moment, and most of the ways we're fearing AI will be used will result in poor quality products. I'd argue Ubisoft has been putting out poor quality products for a long time, and even this game won't be available in a form that I can consume it due to the short-term deal they made with Epic.
"There is indeed pressure from the market because the standards in terms of production values, length of experience and knowledge of our medium from customers are going up," Clerc says.
This is another important piece. Games that used to be linear and 8-15 hours are now open world and 60-80 hours long (often to their detriment). Most of the biggest games are designed to be played forever, which means it's coming at the expense of buying or playing new games. And development cycles are exceeding 5 years when they probably ought to be aiming for under 3 years.
The industry is making games with riskier development cycles, adding features that arguably don't make them any better or more marketable, and they're designed to make it actively hostile to the next person trying to sell a game to the same customer. It's no wonder it can't sustain the current trajectory.
Why would anyone play EA’s destiny clone when they could instead play destiny, especially when the time investment makes it infeasible to play both?
There's a big reward for being second or third to market, but not too much beyond that. A few MMOs saw plenty of success despite WoW. League of Legends and Dota are massively successful, but Smite did well too. Minecraft is huge, but so is Terraria and Starbound. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Warzone are huge, but Hyperscape couldn't cut it.
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.
I'm not fluent in Diablo parlance, but essentially it makes it harder to work toward the gear you want because they don't give you as much storage for the items you can't fit on your person?
Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.
Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It's a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it's a pillar of their genre.
Half-Life YouTube legend Ross ‘Accursed Farms’ Scott, of Freeman’s Mind, is planning a lawsuit against Ubisoft over The Crew’s shutdown. (www.pcgamesn.com)
Sony Reportedly Refunding The Last of Us 2 PS4 Digital Owners Who Bought PS5 Version Full Price - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Sony appears to be refunding customers who own the PlayStation 4 digital version of The Last of Us 2 and who bought the PlayStation 5 remaster at full price.
Palworld Sells Over 1 Million Copies in Just 8 Hours as Steam Servers Struggle to Cope With Launch - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Palworld has hit a big sales milestone just hours after release in what is already looking like one of the biggest video game launches of 2024.
Xbox Developer_Direct 2024 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Looks at Ara: History Untold, Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, and Visions of Mana....
'You won’t find our games on a subscription service' says the founder of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, after Ubisoft forecasts a future of players 'not owning' games (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit."
What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations? angielski
For consistency sake, let’s say that any game that’s >or=7/10 at what it’s trying to do while having a popular perception of being a
Twin Galaxies, Billy Mitchell settle Donkey Kong score case before trial (arstechnica.com) angielski
For the uninitiated
How about starting a challenge #VoiceLikeAGirl to put on the other shoe in gaming? angielski
Inspired by a discussion I had elsewhere and the article “Women in Games swaps male and female voices to highlight harassment in gaming”, how about we start a voice modulation challenge where you have to play at least one online game with a voice modulator to sound like a girl?...
What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time? angielski
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of January 14th
What are you all playing? I’ve been playing a ton of Mario world ROM hacks. I beat super nothing world. Now I’m playing some hacks by the jump team
Capcom adds new DRM to old PC games, raising worries over mods (www.polygon.com) angielski
Sony gives Gran Turismo Sport the boot | This Week in Business (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
And a look at the flawed, marketing-centric rationale behind designing games to disappear, leaving the customer with nothing.
Twitch "isn't profitable" admits CEO, in wake of recent layoffs (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
What difficult games/game challenges did you give up on?
Be it a game that’s difficult in its entirety, or a particular challenge in a game that you just couldn’t complete....
Nintendo Switch 2 Release Date May Have Just Accidentally Been Revealed by...Gameshark - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
The Nintendo Switch 2 is supposed to launch in September 2024, according to a press release from Ai Shark (formerly Game Shark)....
10 Days Into 2024 And 2300+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced (kotaku.com)
cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/10945203...
Nacon exec says industry's problem is "too many games" (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Valve: Most games made with AI tools are now welcome on Steam (arstechnica.com) angielski
Well shit…