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ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

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

ampersandrew,
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They can prevent you from running cheats that other anti-cheats can’t detect. For instance, they could modify the value in memory so that your calculated hash always succeeds even when it’s modified. This doesn’t stop cheating though; it just means cheaters have to use cheat hardware that exists at a layer that even kernel anti-cheat can’t detect.

ampersandrew,
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And it’s worth noting that trusting the game developer isn’t really enough. Far too many of them have been hacked, so who’s to say it’s always your favorite game developer behind the wheel?

ampersandrew,
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ampersandrew,
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That’s one way to do it, but I worry less about those things by not supporting them with my time and money.

ampersandrew,
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Just checking, but you’re aware this is GameSpot the video game website and not GameStop the brick and mortar retail establishment, right?

ampersandrew,
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Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.

So, uh…why can’t we do that anymore? Even if you account for salary increases and avoiding crunch and such, $40M-$50M for a game as good as Uncharted 2 sounds great!

ampersandrew,
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I think we’re seeing that that’s no longer true. Minecraft is the best-selling game ever, for instance. If you want to build the photo realistic experience, maybe aim for a smaller scope of video game, like the more linear action games we used to get, because otherwise, the industry ends up in the state it’s in.

ampersandrew,
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I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.

ampersandrew,
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If it did, it would have just been throwing good money after bad.

ampersandrew, (edited )
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Both the development time and the budget have come in at a variety of different numbers with people refuting them, and I’ll bet several of those figures depend on how you count. The range is now somewhere between 4-10 years, and $50-$400M, which is an absurd amount of variance, but even at 4 years and $50M, it’s still probably too long and too much money to spend on a game that you don’t know is going to find a substantial audience.

EDIT: Kotaku is reporting that the acquisition was $200M and did not cover all development costs, which lends credence to that report from Colin Moriarty claiming $200M pre and then $200M post acquisition for the figure of $400M.

Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression angielski

For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up “turtling”, dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible....

ampersandrew,
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To your first bullet point, your own example of StarCraft. Rush strategies are usually so all-in that they win or lose in a couple of minutes. If they’re successfully defended, the defender now has such an advantage that the rusher can’t come back from it.

I actually don’t know of a game that’s ruined by an “aggression meta”. I don’t think I agree that it’s a problem. Neither rushing nor turtling is incentivized in StarCraft. The push and pull that the designers wanted from a given match is the optimal way to play, and you’ll find more success chasing that than either turtling or rushing.

I’m heavily invested in the fighting game scene, and the genre’s been getting more and more “aggression mechanics” for a long time now; some might call them “neutral skips”, skipping the part of the game where the two players try to approach each other. There’s a clear reason for why they do this: it’s way more fun to watch. Street Fighter V often devolved into two players left on their last pixel of health, since you can’t kill with chip damage (for the most part), so it was a boring situation of both players fishing for a last hit as the clock ticks down. Now, whether it’s Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Guilty Gear, you have a meter that you use on offense and defense. Being offensive rewards you with more and allows you to be more offensive, and being defensive will drain it. You can still have that moment from SFV that was supposed to be tense, but now it’s actually tense, because while that player is defending, the resource that prevents a checkmate situation is draining down, and when it’s empty, it’s basically game over.

ampersandrew,
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There are tons of decisions to make at any given time in a fighting game outside of trying to be on offense. That’s why it’s more of a recent trend to add mechanics to incentivize aggression. And yes, the fact that rushes tend to only terrorize lower levels of play is why it’s more of a gimmick than a feature.

ampersandrew,
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They changed a few key components about what some people were looking for in a Dragon Age game, which Dragon Age 2 did as well.

ampersandrew,
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The paid reviews conspiracy stuff is still a thing?

ampersandrew,
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People have guessed that a game that reviewed well, that they didn’t want to review well, has been because of paid reviews for decades. It’s not a thing. If it was, EA wouldn’t have “forgotten” to pay for Anthem reviews, for instance. I get that this may not be what you want, but that happens sometimes. Rainbow Six is now GI Joe for some reason. The best thing you can do is enjoy the ones you enjoyed and then play the next great game that comes out that was inspired by the ones you like. Getting too invested in a given franchise is what allows them to mutate into things you don’t want. At least this game finally did away with the usual EA DRM, so part of voting with our wallets is working.

ampersandrew,
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It’s weird how all of them are saying the same thing.

“Return to form” is just one of those reviewer-isms like “mixed bag” and “fans of the genre”. You’ve probably seen the words “return to form” in dozens of trailers over the years that put the review quotes in their sizzle reels.

Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? angielski

Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...

ampersandrew,
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It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.

ampersandrew,
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You can train it in mirror matches, but the V Rivals that you can fight other than your own mirror are an amalgamation of a particular rank. There’s a whole lot of skill variance in Master rank alone, so it might be good for training me against Dhalsim, because hardly anyone plays Dhalsim, so no one knows the matchup, but it won’t help me learn how to beat Punk, specifically.

ampersandrew,
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Puyo Puyo Tetris was the only game I ever bought a non-North-American version of, after watching Giant Bomb play it. As far as I can tell, it never got a real NA version for Xbox, or if it did, I missed it. I didn’t even notice the Steam version of PPT1 until looking it up for this comment. The slowdown problems you experienced may be relegated to the Switch version, because…it’s the Switch.

“…any developer releasing a multiplayer game in this day and age without cross play is making a huge mistake.” They’re the ones who have to pay for it though. You’re talking about a game that you acknowledge as niche, which is even harder to justify additional expenses for. The only entity offering cross play services for free is Epic, and some people, for reasons I don’t understand, will whine about Epic Online Services if the game includes them. Otherwise, it’s an expense out of the developer’s/publisher’s pocket, and in a world without LAN and direct IP connections, that means the online dies when that expense no longer makes financial sense. You may not like playing against bots, but you’d also hate playing against absolutely no one. They’re not the first ones to pull this strategy, and there’s a lot of nuance to it.

As for appeal to bring new players in, I was at Combo Breaker 2022, with a friend of mine. He was watching DBFZ top 24 (IIRC) right next door, and he couldn’t stand the sounds coming from the PuyoPuyo stage, so I’d call that a barrier to getting new players in, too. I don’t know that some new game is going to solve the player acquisition problem without a new gimmick. My recommendation? Make your own PuyoPuyo, like Kirby’s Avalanche, but with blackjack and hookers.

ampersandrew,
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The Switch should be able to handle it unless the game was coded in some toolset where performance wasn’t a priority, because it’s only Puyo Puyo. Then suddenly it’s on a low spec platform where performance matters.

And it’s not that cross play is non trivial; it’s that it’s an ongoing expense in most cases. To justify an ongoing expense, you’re going to need ongoing revenue, which Puyo Puyo probably isn’t going to bring in.

ampersandrew,
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Preserving a game isn’t about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It’s about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.

Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It’s absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.

ampersandrew,
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The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I’m sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn’t work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.

MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.

ampersandrew,
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The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn’t add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.

If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee “scene”; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That’s what you preserve when the game can still be played.

Marvel's Midnight Suns is criminally underrated angielski

I’ve been playing it for a good couple months and I’m still nowhere near tired of it, I’ll actually replay the whole game once I beat it because it’s so much fun. Love the story and voice acting too. This game goes on sale a lot so I’d highly suggest getting jt for cheap and trying it out

ampersandrew,
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I think a lot of us would have appreciated a more optional approach to a lot of the story stuff back at the base. Some of it can go on for a long time, may not be particularly engaging or exciting, and can just leave you wishing you could get back to the combat loop. Also, what’s up with that walking/jogging animation at the home base? I’ve spent $50 in the Unreal store and imported motion captured animations, ready for use in a commercial game, that looked better than that and could be hooked up in a few hours.

It’s a very good game that, when I recommend it, typically comes with an asterisk attached.

ampersandrew,
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There was also a little too much game. Instead of putting in every platforming challenge that they could think of for a given set of mechanics, it would have been paced much better if they just picked their two or three best. I’ll bet it doesn’t help that it requires the Ubisoft launcher on Steam either.

ampersandrew,
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They are making “complete” games with no early access period and no DLC with shockingly high production values for the budget. And people are ignoring them until there is a massive sale

I can think of several other variables that may be necessary for success that aren’t being tested in that statement. Like, is it a setting that resonates with people? Yes, I want more Max Payne, but not so much with vampires in it. Then when you find a game that gets acclaim and the audience is there for it, this is a good time to sequel that game, because now there’s brand recognition on the game people like, and they’ll be more willing to spend full price on a game where they’re confident in what they’re getting.

ampersandrew,
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Truthfully, all sorts of players are asking for all sorts of things, and you’ve got co-op story-driven games still coming out from other sources. Systems-driven games are way up my alley, and I’ll happily take one of those even without co-op. Besides, if a PlayStation game came out with co-op, it wouldn’t be offline co-op.

ampersandrew,
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There are a lot of interpretations of “player freedom” that don’t mean open world.

ampersandrew,
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There are still a ton of ways to allow for a lot of player freedom without being open world. In fact, I’d say lots of open world games lack the freedom that a much smaller game like Streets of Rogue has, for instance. But yes, Naughty Dog has toyed with open world-ish designs in the Uncharted 4 era and Jak before that.

ampersandrew,
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They’re not opposites. Baldur’s Gate 3 is both of those things, for instance.

ampersandrew,
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No, I meant to reply to you. “A lot of player freedom” is not at odds with a great story-driven game, and I gave an example of a game that fits both criteria, so I think it’s unfortunate that the perception is that you can only have one or the other.

ampersandrew,
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There’s no need to worry about it, because long-term, this is a good thing for everyone. The market didn’t tolerate multiple home video or audio formats for very long, so it’s kind of a strange anomaly that we tolerated it for video games as long as we did. Now the concept is coming up on the end of its usefulness, especially since the platform holders won’t let up on certification/patch fees, online subscriptions, external digital storefronts, and all sorts of other concessions that have historically made them more money but maybe don’t make sense in the modern era.

ampersandrew,
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Handheld game systems of a similar size that play mostly the same games seem pretty comparable to me.

ampersandrew,
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Nintendo has acknowledged that a new Switch is coming, and we’ve seen leaks come out of Chinese manufacturing that appear to be legitimate to those in the know.

ampersandrew,
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The vast majority of Switch games are not made by Nintendo, and the vast majority of those are available on PC and Steam Deck, and typically better versions of those games at that.

ampersandrew,
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It was an open secret at Gamescom that it’s going to be similar in performance to the Steam Deck or a PS4 except running on ARM. That will be a huge upgrade compared to Tears of the Kingdom struggling to hit 30 FPS at very low resolutions.

ampersandrew,
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I mean, I just said they were comparable. To say that they’re not remotely comparable is laughable. But here are a quick few reasons: one of them is in Walmart and the other is not; one appeals to children (not the least of which is the presence of a brand “moat” in Pokemon) in a way that most other electronics do not, which also translates to multiple children in a family each having their own, which drives up sales numbers; one of them already had an international distribution chain to handle territories like Australia rather than having to build one up; one came out 5 years earlier than the other, including existing in a time period where handheld gaming PCs were typically not driving comparable 3D graphics, but that changed a mere few years later with advancements from AMD in the x64 space.

This is a paradigm shift that has occurred since the Switch’s launch. Here’s an interesting thought: do you think there will still be the “port everything to the Switch” crowd for the next Switch when the game already has a PC version ready to go on the Steam Deck? Because I’ll bet they just buy that device, or a competing handheld PC, instead without having to hope that the game they want to play gets a Switch version, and that’s exactly the weakness of the console model in the modern era.

ampersandrew,
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The differences between those two things have begun to dissolve very quickly in the past 5 or so years, and that’s both why they’re very comparable and why so many people are seeing the writing on the wall for consoles.

ampersandrew,
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But what is interesting and says a lot about the flattening silicon evolution curve is that your game on your monster PC is not going to look or play 3 to 5 times better than on a PS5 Pro console. There is a huge diminishing return now on high end silicon, and that might have an impact on the life cycle duration of console hardware.

Likewise, there are diminishing returns in how much better PS5 Pro games look than base PS5 games, and that’s kind of the problem. Don’t compare a PS5 Pro to a top of the line PC; compare it to a similarly priced PC for the same reasons.

ampersandrew,
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I think that’s a different company.

‘Unknown 9: Awakening’ Arrives To 200 Steam Players, Poor Reviews (www.forbes.com) angielski

You can’t really gauge its Steam reviews because there are only 13(!) total so far, reflective of a game that has launched with just a few hundred players. 224, as I’m writing this article. Sub-Concord levels. Yes. Concord is a unit of measurement now....

ampersandrew,
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You know that in the wake of Suicide Squad and Saga from Alan Wake II, they stated quite clearly that what was “obviously” their contributions were totally wrong, with Remedy confirming on their end? It may not be inaccurate to state that sensitivity reading or consulting for authenticity when writing diverse characters are services that they offer, but their contributions to each game are not itemized. It’s like when a bad port happens and people see Iron Galaxy in the credits, they want to see this pattern of Iron Galaxy being responsible rather than <beloved creator of game you like> and then throw out any evidence of Iron Galaxy actually being a really good port studio. I get that you want to form patterns of why something you perceive to be wrong is happening, but the truth is that these companies’ contributions are not itemized, because video games work more like a traditional business than Hollywood, and it’s no one’s policy to break out which work was done by a contractor versus in-house, so you’ll actually never know. Instead, Endymion, or whoever it is you watch that picked up on the week’s trending rage bait topic, cosplays as a journalist and infers a whole lot of what Sweet Baby does that they just didn’t do, whereas an actual journalist would get quotes from sources to confirm that it’s true.

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