ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Fascinating story. The narrative at the time was that casual games were just too lucrative to bother with SiN sequels after Emergence, but of course, the truth has a lot more nuance.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Marketing cycles are short now. This will be the show aligned with Tokyo Games Show to show off games releasing in the last part of the year and maybe teasing a few high-profile games for next year.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The kinds of games Sony makes have gotten bigger and taken longer to make. Taking longer to make means you get fewer of them. There were three Uncharted games and The Last of Us between 2007 and 2013. Naughty Dog today hasn’t put out a new game since the PS4. When Sony spends $300M on Spider-Man 2 but they’ve actually sold fewer PS5s than they sold PS4s at the same point in the console lifecycle, you need to start getting your money back in other ways, like porting the game to PC. Helldivers II is a Sony joint, but the vast, vast majority of its sales came from PC, not PlayStation, and now it’s even on Xbox.

Exclusives are just going to be less and less of a going concern as time goes on. As for what Sony’s studios are cooking, Sucker Punch has a game this year, Intergalactic from Naughty Dog is at least a year away (but probably more), Sony Santa Monica still has their sci-fi project that Alanah Pearce wrote for that still hasn’t been announced (so likely at least a year away), Guerilla “just” put out Horizon: Forbidden West in 2022 (meaning at least another year on their next game), etc. At this point, all of the pent up projects from these studios are looking like they’re going to attempt to sell a PS6, with the same cross-gen situation we got for the PS5, where it comes out on both. Combine that with the talk about there being two SKUs of PS6, one of which being a handheld, acting as a Series S to the regular PS6’s Series X, and that’s what Sony’s output looks like to me. That, plus the collapse of Bungie following Marathon’s release and the collapse of Haven Studios regardless of whether or not Fairgames even comes out.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

This headline feels like a trap. Yes, Valve is the arbiter of what passes through the Steam store. Part of that involves checking for malware which, while their record isn’t flawless, they’ve let very little of it through given the sheer volume of games published to Steam every year. The consequences were terrible here, and I hope that can be rectified somehow. But the implication of this is that Valve makes this sort of error all the time through their “incompetence”, which they don’t, and the point of phrasing it this way seems to be to call anyone stating otherwise some kind of defender of a multibillion dollar company. It seems like a far better use of everyone’s time to be mad at the scammer here. Supporting and profiting from child gambling via Counter-Strike is a much better reason to be mad at Valve than the mistakes or other gaps in their vetting process that will be slightly tighter as a result of this mishap.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There are tons of scenarios where I can see it being useful, and I can often see a clear difference between it and release, but the problem I’ve got now is that there are so many finished games I could be spending my time and money on right now that it’s hard to justify buying an early access game. I think the last one I bought was Palworld, which I played for about 20 hours right when it came out, and now I’m waiting for 1.0 rather than the iterative feedback that early access thrives on. They’ve still got plenty of people to get that feedback from, but that’s the biggest early access release since Minecraft, so it’s an outlier.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’ll second the recommendation for Far Cry, particularly 3 and 4. Also, have you played Crysis? Later in the game it will move away from human enemies, but most of the game ought to be what you’re looking for, and it’s genuinely one of the best FPS campaigns ever.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s been a hot minute, but what I really liked about Far Cry 3 and 4 was that if you wanted a certain upgrade, you set your own goal as a player for a certain type of mission, and I really enjoyed that. I remember seeing in the marketing for FC5 that they changed that, and it killed my interest. I’m not sure what there is to take issue with story missions moving the story forward.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I liked the story missions for being one-off unique challenges and set pieces. I liked the outposts a lot, so I did as many of them as I wanted to, which may or may not have been all of them. As far as rising and falling action goes, I didn’t see outposts as a great way to support that, so it made plenty of sense to me to structure the game the way they did. That said, I didn’t play FC5, so OP can feel free to check that one out on your recommendation as well.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The things that used to allow for them to do that aren’t happening this time around. We’re getting diminishing returns on processor architecture improvements compared to a few decades ago. Also, this one in particular is only in the US, so…this one is tariffs.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I did not mean to imply that the architecture changed in PS2 slim compared to the original PS2, only that were able to make better, cheaper, cooler, smaller versions of that same architecture.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s not just stutters but also just general poor performance in the open world, such that I get about half the frame rate I would expect to see on high settings without frame gen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the optimizations here are like what happened with Assassin’s Creed: Unity where there was a bunch of detail that got sanded off of the world map in places that a player should never actually see it anyway.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Realistically, this game’s got bigger problems than what its DLC strategy is.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

From the gameplay footage, it looks like a studio that’s only ever made walking simulators before is making their take on Dishonored. Maybe that’ll be pretty good, but I’d be surprised. What it certainly isn’t is an RPG that’s anything like Bloodlines 1, lol.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

If you’ve played the first game, watch their video demo of some gameplay. They’re just not even similar. It’s bold to call this a sequel for how little they have in common.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t think you know what grift means.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

GTA is a crime story video game. “Dishonest gambling” doesn’t mean “gambling I don’t like”. A science-based dragon MMO Kickstarter is a grift. GTA 6 is a video game.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Are you unaware that there’s a component of GTA 6 besides GTA online? Even in the online mode, they’re milking gamers for weak content using regular gambling. A grift would be like a carnival game that appears winnable but actually never is. For your gambling money, you do get “stuff” in GTA 6, even if you or I would consider it a poor value. I don’t know why a shitty online mode would make me want to play a good crime story single player mode less, but the mere existence of the single player mode easily makes it more than “just” that.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I just think that if you’re going to call something a grift, it should actually be one, because words have meaning. We can call it all sorts of other things. “Predatory” is a good one. I myself called it “shitty”. That’s not arguing in favor of a giant corporation. You can’t just pick your favorite negative descriptor when it doesn’t apply.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Honestly, I’m not. Rockstar has changed their formula very little since 2008. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options for crime stories anymore, and they’ve been telling good stories for just as long as they’ve had this format.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

You called it something it wasn’t, either because you misunderstood the definition or willfully misrepresented it. That was the argument. The game can be criticized in all sorts of ways, but “grift” makes no sense here, assuming they’re doing what GTA V did and didn’t come up with some crazy new scheme that hasn’t been detailed yet. And even if the online mode was a deterrent to you, there’s a whole other part of the game above and beyond the online mode where you never have to even see that stuff that could make the game worth playing, meaning it wouldn’t be “just” a grift.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Is this not the third tabloid style headline here about essentially the same thing?

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That would be hard to believe, because the game already conservatively made tens of millions of dollars in a few days.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s hard to consider an 81 on OpenCritic to be a trainwreck. People tend to buy games that review well, especially when it’s a co-op shooter with basically no competition.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Nah, that game’s great. The writing’s not good, especially for the villains, but people like that game because it’s good.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Ubisoft didn’t do this. It’s a community project.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The dispatch loop is extremely similar to a game called This is the Police. Any good management game like this will have situations where there is no correct decision, and the fun of it is having to make those tough calls. I’m curious to see if the core loop holds up over the full runtime, because it ran a little thin in This is the Police. The story bits between that harken back to Telltale are some much appreciated new special sauce on the formula in This is the Police, but that alone won’t keep the core loop fresh. Still, I’m looking forward to this.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I think these online subscriptions are proving to be a major factor in why there’s been a migration of audiences from consoles to PC. People are seemingly running the long-term calculus in their heads and realizing PC is cheaper at a certain threshold.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I think that’s exactly his point.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Not the current one, no. The Steam Deck is closer to a PS4 spec, and even if there weren’t optimization problems, this is built to a PS5 spec.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s by revenue over a certain amount of time, but I don’t know what that period of time is. A $35 game has to sell twice as many copies as a $70 game to rank just as high. Since the Steam Deck is about $400, depending on SKU, it’s usually in that top sellers list despite not matching the volume of sales that certain games do.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Boards like these don’t talk about Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed much either, but all of these are multi billion dollar franchises.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Borderlands 3 was significantly better, in my opinion.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I definitely wasn’t playing Borderlands at any point for the story. I like that it has one, but if they wrote some terrible villains, it doesn’t affect how much fun I had with my build synergies in those boss fights.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It wasn’t out of left field. They telegraphed it frequently.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The new DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out, Legacy of the Forge. I’m playing it after finishing the main game, but it’s looking like it will probably be best enjoyed when slotted into the main game. It’s early goings, but it looks like it will involve a lot of crafting and then selling things to upgrade your home, your shop, and your reputation. Still, there are new quests and more backstory for Henry’s “pa”, Martin, and I’ll take any excuse to play more of this game.

I’ve been playing Mafia II: Definitive Edition. It’s a pretty good crime story that leans heavily on Goodfellas inspiration (I guess if you had to pick one, that’s the one to pick), but the gameplay often feels arbitrary, which is a weird way to put it but probably most accurate. There was one mission that was literally just drive to a place and drive back with some story in between. Most are simple setups where a firefight happens in the middle. There are mechanics from GTA IV present that don’t really fit back into Mafia II’s core loop. In other words, this game is totally fine but not exactly a masterpiece. It’s serviceable, and I miss crime stories in video games, so I’m playing through this series before I play The Old Country.

I’ll also throw in an anti-recommendation for New Tales from the Borderlands. It animates well and looks nice, but this game basically is only story, and the story is awful. I played through it because I’ve now played through the rest of the Borderlands games, except Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and I suspect this game could be canon. If you don’t have the same compulsion to see the rest of the canon story that I do, steer clear. At least I’ve got Borderlands 4 waiting for me this weekend.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

For anyone curious, I politely asked a streamer to check for me, and this game seems to still have LAN, despite the lack of mention in their FAQ and the store page and the explicit removal in Borderlands 1 GOTY edition.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Having played through the entire series this year, they’ve constantly communicated via their actions that they’re aware of what the previous game’s shortcomings were, and they acknowledged as much for BL4 in the marketing materials as well. As for Jack, leave him be. We’ve killed him, killed his fucked up clone, killed the AI preservation of his consciousness, teamed up with him in a prequel, and allied with the Terminator 2 friendly version of him via a body double/face-off situation. We’ve had enough Jack. Come up with a new good villain, lol.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Alright, fair enough. There are two ways to interpret that sentence in English, and I guess I read it the other way, haha.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’ve seen Mat Piscatella talking about this, and it seems like his take is, paraphrasing, “it values different games”. Some games see far more success with the broad access they get to subscriptions, and some see less, which seems to be corroborated by the author of this article.

Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore.

I mean…you can for anything in Game Pass, but that’s not the case for Nintendo.

Without wishing to portray myself as a comprehensive researcher … I have come across one study of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus that appears to bear elements … showing that in contrast to the music or movie and TV industry, these subscription services have not “substantially cannibalized existing revenue streams”.

And I think a lot of that has to do with how much longer we spend with a given game than any song or movie. And even in television, every current show is on some streaming service, and you really can’t buy those, but in games, it’s the opposite. With few exceptions, you can just about always buy the game, and they’re often not present on a subscription service. When games are sold, they tend to command a higher price, too.

Then, not mentioned in the article, are weird cases like Indiana Jones or Doom, where they’re quality games that don’t sell many copies despite impressive pedigrees, presumably because everyone knows they can get them on Game Pass. But then games like STALKER 2 or Clair Obscur, with low-ish review scores and basically no pedigree, respectively, sell plenty of copies despite being available for far cheaper on Game Pass. Some of this might be the association with Game Pass being for Microsoft-owned studios or something, and Microsoft is aiding that association by making fewer lucrative deals for third party studios.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It actually is, and they listed that in the article.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Through lawsuits, we did get to see what those payouts were in the past, and they’re all individually negotiated in lump sums, not determined by algorithm. And those payouts were from the good days. Reporting indicates those payouts have dropped off dramatically, which was followed by a drop-off of Xbox ports, since that seems to be the primary way Xbox players play games at all.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’m fairly sure every Battlefield game until BF3 had LAN and private servers, so it ought to work, yes. Bad Company 1 never got a PC version, so you’re at the mercy of what those consoles allowed for, but Bad Company 2 is on PC.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

If you’re using Hamachi, you won’t need port forwarding, correct. I tried to make that clear above, but maybe it was easy to miss.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

What about people who like the game but have criticisms? This is the time to discuss it.