Now those online services are supported by digital sales, like on PC storefronts. Digital makes up the majority of console purchases now too, but they still continue to charge for online, so it’s no wonder PC market share grew in the interim.
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I’d be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way...
You are asking if it could be same experience as an MMO-lite without being online. Think about it.
No, I’m asking if it could be the same experience without running it on someone else’s machine. V Rising does not have an online requirement, but you can play it online on a server you control, perhaps even the same machine you use to play yourself, with up to like 60 players. Destiny is an MMO lite, is it not? For the most part, you’re only playing that game 3 players at a time too, just like this one. Is there something that this game was already doing that it won’t be able to do now that it’s peer to peer?
No, I meant things that people would miss. I guess matchmaking fits that bill, but we’ll have to see what it looks like outside of direct invites once this new version exists. Each platform provides free matchmaking services, so I’d be surprised if it didn’t exist at all.
Gotcha. As I said in the original blurb, I’d prefer some way to play the game LAN that it seems like they’re not doing. V Rising and most survival games, for all that I can tell, preserve all of those elements of MMOs or MMO lites, and it exposes how unnecessary it is to take away the ability for the player to host their own servers. Even in a best-case scenario where the game is super successful, you can run into things like login queues or server maintenance, so having the ability to play the game no matter what is a must for me. Survival games tend to lean into the use case of people who want to PVP and grief other players, which isn’t for me, and I’d much rather co-op with some friends, but since I control the server, I absolutely have the ability to tune it that way. And since these games account for dozens of players on the same instance (Factorio goes up to 255), you’re capable of replicating all of those random interactions, for as rare as they actually are in a game like Destiny or Warframe, which are my frame of reference for MMO lite games, because they have you spend most of your time in instances for only a few players.
Have you played Wayfinder before to say how much of the game up to this point was built on those larger scale random interactions as opposed to small instances with a few players?
If you miss that old style of game, that’s fine, but there are probably tons of ways to morph the RTS genre that solves its old problems, finds it more success, and still scratches that itch. I’m quite fond of Cannon Brawl, and Tooth and Tail had its issues but was on the right track.
FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a “cursor character” that’s like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There’s also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you’re commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there’s the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.
The industry historically hasn’t shrunk when studios close like this. There just ends up being more bespoke studios all over the world with former developers from those studios.
I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I...
I can think of plenty of games with writing I’ve really enjoyed in recent years, not the least of which is Baldur’s Gate 3 just last year, but FPSes in particular are in one of only a few genres where I haven’t been well served lately.
I would not agree with that, no. First because I’d say mechanics are almost always the most important part anyway, and also because I’ve probably come across more stories that have held my interest in recent years than I did 25 years ago. Stories were pretty basic back then, more often than not. In fact, these days, I’ve been carried through mediocre gameplay by well-told stories more than a few times, and I don’t think that ever happened 25 years ago.
Not exactly, but I have found a taste for loot games lately, so maybe someday I’ll get around to that one. It still wouldn’t scratch the same itch though.
It peaked today at just shy of 100k concurrent players following its successful early access period, with about 70k reviews, both of which are indicators that it’s selling extremely well, as well as taking the #4 spot on the top sellers list on Steam.
Fortunately there are enough people who value them more than you, because most games, even moderately budgeted ones, wouldn’t be able to sustain themselves at that price.
Let’s say that including benefits, a developer’s salary is about $100k. Maybe a small team of 8 people worked on a game like The Thaumaturge for 3 years. Before you even factor in contract work like voice acting, that would put the development budget at $2.4M. If the game cost $20, they’d have to sell about 120k copies to break even on that investment, which is far from guaranteed. By pricing the game at $35, their break even point is nearly half of that. This is a moderately budgeted game, not a AAA game with microtransactions.
Even an experienced team like Mimimi games, who made smart development choices by iterating on what they built before to keep costs down, releasing critical successes several times in a row, ended up closing down because the money coming in was too tight. Their games ranged from $30-$50 and had every sale, bundle, giveaway, and promotional opportunity you could think of.
I’m sorry that you don’t enjoy video games enough to pay $30 for most of the good ones, but I hope one day you can sit down with a calculator and realize why it must be that way.
Video games are often afraid to be only a couple of hours these days, often to their detriment, but if you multiplied a movie’s runtime by 2-3x for some extra production value in your game, you end up at that $35 price point easily for a game that’s 5-10 hours long. Even for a direct comparison to Atom RPG, I’d rather pay 2-3x as much for a Wasteland game to get what I’m looking for, and Wasteland games aren’t exactly short. Neither is V Rising.
Video games are afraid to be only a couple hours because they are afraid of charging less than $10
I would love to live in a world where we get FPS campaigns that are about 8 hours long, are fulfilling, and cost $60. That used to be the norm, and we were happy with that. A Let’s Play is not a substitute.
So if you wanted to get what you’re looking for in this case, Fallout 1 and 2 are $10 each, or you can get a bundle of 1/2 and Brotherhood of Steel for $20 (more like brotherhood of steal amirite).
That assumes I don’t care about things like better resolutions and frame rates, voice acting, modern considerations for how people actually interact with games, etc. I’ve also played Fallout 1 already.
Again, “more” is often to the detriment to the value of the game, because adding hours is easy. I’m saying that, on a AAA level, games were worth more to me when they were shorter. We’re currently paying less for more. But at below AAA levels, I’m often served extremely well for $35.
No, they don’t automatically make a game better, but if I’m choosing between two games that are similar in themes or mechanics, I’m leaning toward the one with voice acting and better presentation. That’s worth extra money to me. It’s far easier to retain story elements when they’re acted out. Production value is still value. Not only did I get a killer RPG for $60 in Baldur’s Gate 3, but I also got some killer performances to help sell it. That extra production value is worth extra money. I could play the previous two Baldur’s Gates for pennies on the dollar, and I did, but I would certainly say I got more value out of the game that costs more. In V Rising’s case, I know of no other action RPG/loot games that have been combined with survival games in this way, playing with independent movement and aiming instead of mouse pointers, so that’s worth the money to see. I think we’re done here, but your sense of value is just very strange.
Currently, mine just says it can’t connect to Steamworks and gets no further. Anyone else having that issue? I would expect the game to fall back to offline mode at least, but even with Steam in offline mode, I get the same error.
So Redfall was set up to fail, and you make those people fall on the sword, and then Hi-Fi Rush is a game people clearly want more of and could have stood to cost more than $30, and you let those people go too instead of hitting the ground running on a sequel? What is wrong with you, Microsoft?
Being after well received titles is congruent with their Game Pass strategy. Being after as much money as possible would mean they probably should have charged more than $30 for one of the best games of the year.
It highlights the crucial flaw with Tekken for me: you have to just memorize how to defend everything your opponents can do to you rather than being able to intuit it on the fly. Which moves hit high/medium/low/overhead or track horizontally? There’s no language to it; it’s just done on a per move basis for balancing reasons, which means it would take me forever to get to the part where I actually get to think and play the game. This string, mashing 3, has highs, mediums, and lows all built in, plus it low profiles some counter attacks from opponents. This bot would beat me, too.
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
If a little extra jiggle was crucial to the vision, then I’d say they need a better vision, but that’s just me. The commentary I heard around this case in particular is that ratings boards around the world impose a ton of different criteria, and getting around all of them is no easy feat, so that could be to blame.
The sex cards in the first Witcher were particularly egregious. One of them is a woman who sleeps with you as a reward for saving her from being raped.
You’d have to change how the laws for all of software work to make that a reality, not just video games. And all that’s technically needed to make games work after support ends is a distributed server binary and a change to a client config file to point to it. The engines that games are built on are often not open source, so you’d change the entire business model of the likes of Unity and Unreal (Unreal’s source is available to developers but not “open”). Sometimes source code can even get lost, because it’s not strictly required, just in the way that computers work, to come attached to a compiled executable. The world would be a better place if all video games were open source, and I don’t think open source games are at odds with making a healthy profit (as Doom illustrates), but I think you’d have an insurmountable task of making the entire industry agree to it, as well as a certain amount of the consumer base that drinks the PR kool aid about why games need to stay closed source.
The effect that open sourcing a game would have on cheaters is basically propaganda as far as I’m concerned. Cheating has not and will not be defeated by making a game closed source or even installing rootkits on players’ machines. However, open sourcing a game isn’t necessary to keep it alive after sunsetting it either.
The only kind of cheats you can use on a game like that would be aimbot or wallhacks. But both of those can often be detected using anti-cheat software which acts like a rootkit. So a combination is most often used.
I’d hardly call that defeating cheating, and a rootkit anticheat, while overstepping boundaries in what is acceptable to be done on your own PC, still can’t detect those cheats powered by external hardware, including aimbots. The difference in results between a closed source game with this server authoritative design and an open source one is moot. It’s a bad excuse. It doesn’t mean I’m going to fight too hard for all games to go open source when there are way bigger fish to fry though.
Rumor has it that Yuzu and all of its derivatives violated the DMCA in a way that Ryujinx did not, in that Yuzu was allegedly developed inappropriately using proprietary information from Switch SDKs, where Ryujinx is doing it legit via “clean room” reverse engineering. So Ryujinx is likely safe, but anything using Yuzu code is legally poison.
Microsoft to release next 'Call of Duty' game on subscription service, source says (www.reuters.com) angielski
Announcing Wayfinder Echoes - Forging Our Own Path (online-only game soon to be playable offline) (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I’d be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way...
Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Will Aggressively Pursue a Multiplatform Strategy After Profits Tumble (www.ign.com) angielski
Great, can we get FF7 Rebirth on PC now?
New Doom Game Could Be Announced At Xbox Showcase In June (www.gamespot.com) angielski
The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Xbox president: Studio closures will ensure 'business is healthy for the long term' (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Xbox Has Had More Studio Closures Than First Party Game Releases So Far In 2024 (twistedvoxel.com) angielski
We've almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
Perfect Dark Reboot Is Allegedly In Bad Shape (www.gamespot.com) angielski
I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I...
V Rising has launched out of Early Access! (steamcommunity.com) angielski
V Rising 1.0 review: one of the slickest survival games gets even slicker (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
BREAKING: Microsoft has closed Redfall's Arkane Austin, HiFi Rush's Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda. | IGN (twitter.com) angielski
A Tekken 8 streamer spent almost a week using a one-button mashing bot to prove that Eddy Gordo is as big a menace as ever (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
That is honestly hilarious from a old, old used to play Tekken player.
Controversy and Censorship angielski
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
UK Government Response to the Stop Killing Games Petition (petition.parliament.uk) angielski
The Government recognises recent concerns raised by video games users regarding the long-term operability of purchased products....
Nintendo DMCAs Yuzu forks on GitHub (github.com) angielski
Unsurprising move. People should’ve moved them elsewhere.