That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.
And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.
As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.
Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.
Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they’re not building a game any larger than they’ve been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn’t need to sell 10 million copies to break even.
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I’m a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It’s worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.
They did it. They freed MvC2. The announcer said he was going to take us for a ride, and I nearly fell out of my chair. The training mode is expanded too. I can’t be bothered to care about anything they’ve shown in the rest of this presentation, but this is a huge deal.
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
I’m going to rate “exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children” as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that’s not even conjecture; we already know this.
What am I fearing that I’m missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn’t care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don’t understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game or else miss out on having the entire library? I hope that this doesn’t come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don’t understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA’s Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it’s predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.
I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
Silksong has already had some kind of deal with Microsoft in place, so if it shows up on a platform holder’s stream rather than their own thing, it’s more likely they show up with Microsoft than Nintendo. Given that it got content rated already, it’s still due for a release this year, so maybe we hear about it with Gamescom.
No, it showed up at an Xbox showcase in 2022, where every game was going to be on Game Pass day 1 and releasing within 12 months, which would have meant the game would be out by June 2023. Silksong wasn’t the only game that missed that 12 month window, but it showed that, at the time, they were confident that it was nearly done, and that they took a deal with Microsoft, because being on Game Pass day 1 means Microsoft offered them a huge bucket of money to make up for lost sales.
Neither is shit. 4 is way better. 1, 2, and New Vegas are better still. But 3 doesn’t tend to come up in these conversations when people talk about Bethesda Fallouts being worse. They always go to 4, and that surprises me.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
Personally, I think I’d rather not even give them the word of mouth of having played their game. There’s so much out there to play, and plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this, even if it’s second hand.
More and more lately, but not exclusively. I have an increasingly long list of things that are deal-breakers for me, and I haven’t run out of stuff to play.
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
Not all digital games. If they’re DRM free, and if the multiplayer allows for LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc; then they’re built to last, arguably better so than physical media.
Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk’s original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Greetings fay folk of the fediverse, It's the #SteamNextFest , to honor this celebration of the indie spirit, let's share our mutual experiences, and talk about the games that impressed you the most today
The winners of this Next Fest for me so far have been:
Aero GPX
Someone finally made a new F-Zero. It just wasn’t Nintendo. It feels like a proper modern version of F-Zero GX, but I don’t think it’s going to have online play. At least it’ll have local multiplayer, which is far more important to me in a racing game.
Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age
This is a 2v2 fighting game that I’m far more likely to play than 2XKO, since that one will almost certainly have no true offline mode and require installing a rootkit to play. No thanks. This one operates on 3 lanes, so all four teammates can be playing simultaneously. The art is gorgeous, the netcode feels great, and I could see myself getting really into this. The only problem is I don’t know all of the game’s mechanics, since the tutorial for the game really only teaches you about the 3 lanes. I can figure some stuff out in its best-in-class training mode, but without banging my head against the wall, I won’t figure it all out. I’m sure the tutorial will be more robust at release.
Tactical Breach Wizards
This is probably the most high-profile of the three, so I don’t need to say much about it. It’s a tactics game with magical powers and a good sense of humor, from the maker of Gunpoint and Heat Signature. I’ll be playing the full release for sure.
Also, I’d recommend Big Boy Boxing, a game inspired by Punch-Out, which I’ve played at PAX already, and now I’m just waiting for a release date. It’s that good.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
If I was Microsoft and I saw Baldur’s Gate 3 pop off, and I owned Obsidian and Pillars of Eternity, I would leverage the work they’re doing with Avowed to prop up Pillars of Eternity III as “our Baldur’s Gate 3”. In a worst case, I’d imagine Obsidian would continue to intelligently manage their development resources to work more efficiently and release games more regularly than basically any other developer their size.
Then again, if I was Microsoft, I wouldn’t shutter the studio that just made a game of the year contender, so who knows?
You think Pillars of Eternity II was only made for $5M? I’d be shocked. But still, assets made for Avowed could be ported right over to a theoretical PoE3, and that saves time and money. Here’s hoping. I’ll bet it happens, even if it isn’t the BG3 competitor version.
Could be. If so, they did fantastic work for only $4.4M. The entire console business is in the process of being turned on its head, so nothing is predictable anymore, but if the world still worked now the way it did a few years ago, you’d eat the cost of making a must-play game knowing that you weren’t going to make your money back just to get eyes on your brand and console. Two years ago, Microsoft might have agreed. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
Pillars 2 was already fully voiced, give or take some narration, and RPGs are more evergreen than a subgenre of first-person shooter. And I’ll never forgive reviewers for dinging Outer Worlds for its scope. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were.
It’s funny, because I thought POE2 proved quite handily that we very much were not losing out. Yeah, it raises the cost, but we’ve had a decade now of CRPGs bucking the trends of the AAA RPGs that motivated them, most of them fully voiced at this point if they didn’t launch that way. POE2 launched fully voiced, and it’s still one of the best of those.
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it’s got potential. I hope it’s got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
I can’t even think of a mobile game in the ballpark of what this is doing, but its closest competitors are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, which aren’t exactly known for being lookers either.
Not according to the voice over or description in the video. It’s also why they quote a Dwarf Fortress developer in the opening seconds, talking about how impressive the simulation is. Dwarf Fortress in that it’s simulating this entire city for you to mess with, but the different take being that you seem to only control one person in it.
That was the comparison they’re establishing, not that it’s a colony management game, yes. But neither is this game indicating it’s anything like the Sims; Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld would have more in common with that.
I don’t need much. Shadows of Doubt’s objective is “solve this murder”, and for this game, maybe it’s “amass a ton of money so that you can X”. Just something to propel me forward to come up with a way to achieve it, because I won’t be a baker for the sake of being a baker, probably.
Now let’s see how they screw up the multiplayer. The world could use more FPS games closer to the original Perfect Dark than what we typically get out of the genre now.
The examples of games that made a comeback were No Man’s Sky, a sandbox game missing features where, development-wise, it’s very feasible to add in missing promised features; and Cyberpunk, a game with good bones that didn’t function a lot of the time. Starfield’s problems are deeper than that, at least from my perspective.
The tech tree and leveling system is “improve by doing”, which runs into the same problems those systems always run into, which is why no one else does them anymore. It incentivizes me to get shot in combat on purpose so that I can improve my healing, and other stupid behaviors like that. So many of the quests are thoughtless fetch quests with nothing interesting along the way, and the game would actually be better with their omission than their inclusion. The endgame mechanic is an interesting one on paper, but seeing as the major quest lines only really play out one or two slightly different ways, there’s not much that’s interesting about going back to them, and you can also do all of them in a single playthrough, so there’s no need to engage in the endgame mechanic to see it. These are some of the problems that can be fixed but will likely be so costly and time consuming when there are Elder Scrolls and Fallout games to be made that I doubt it’ll ever happen.
The more fundamental flaws are that you can’t spec your character to interact with the world in wildly different ways and get clever with its systems; the universe doesn’t flow together the way that one of their terrestrial open worlds from before do, and fast travel is now mandatory; and the story walks right up to an interesting sci-fi story and stops just short of being good. To change these things sounds a lot like making an entirely different game.
Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it (youtu.be) angielski
Timesplitters rated for PS4 and PS5, suggesting a PS Classics release (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Avowed's Creators On Why Romance Was Considered, But Ultimately Not Included And Skyrim Comparisons (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
Embracer rolls out new AI policy to 'massively enhance game development' | Game Developer (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Marvel Vs Capcom Collection angielski
Oh this one I’m excited for, especially MVC2 since it’s been in legal la la land for a while until now....
GOG Summer Sale has arrived (www.gog.com) angielski
MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics (www.youtube.com) angielski
Paradox Interactive has completely cancelled "Life By You" (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
Nintendo Direct announced for June 18 at 7 AM PT (www.resetera.com) angielski
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
How To Guess Correctly In Fighting Games (www.youtube.com) angielski
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
Nintendo Issues Multiple DMCAs On The Modding Site 'GameBanana' (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
Discussions in the past about not being able to access digital gaming content that users had paid for... angielski
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser (www.youtube.com) angielski
Dragon Age: The Veilguard | Official Gameplay Reveal (www.youtube.com) angielski
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed (www.youtube.com) angielski
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Streets of Fortuna- Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it’s got potential. I hope it’s got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
Perfect Dark - Gameplay Reveal - Xbox Games Showcase 2024 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Starfield: Shattered Space - Official Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
They’re still trying to make Starfield a thing