ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

As a sustainable video game entity, WB games would be better suited in just about anyone else’s hands. WB has tried to sell off its games division in the past, but they’ve spent the better part of two decades making sure that their game studios produced nothing except for tie-ins to their movie and comic book businesses. I was told straight to my face at a PAX years ago that the pitch process under WB starts with a game idea and ends with, “Cool, now make it Batman,” or “Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.” Then when they tried to divest themselves of games, not only did they have no IP to sell outside of old Midway properties, they also thought the new buyer would love to keep paying licensing fees to WB for the properties attached to these gaming franchises. Bunch of geniuses over there.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

By the numbers, that demographic appears to be shrinking, not growing. PC has grown while consoles have shrunk.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

When they’re new and “incomplete”, it’s no different than how patches used to work for games before clients like Steam. I bought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and I can get updates through Heroic or Galaxy, or I can use the installers for each patch or DLC.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Surely someone out there is paranoid enough to be wiresharking constantly. Sony games get hit hard in GOG reviews for telemetry that I’d probably never think twice about.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s only empty if you haven’t been paying attention.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That’s called survivorship bias.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

In case you care about the things I care about:

What is the end-of-life plan?

Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I am not an Avatar fan, but I will caution Avatar fans that Nickelodeon games are historically made for shoestring budgets; basically whatever they find in the couch cushions. As a fighting game fan, there’s enough left to the imagination here that this game could be literally anything, and the developer has no other games to its name on Steam.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Pretty par for the course for a fighting game though, no?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

What would you prefer instead?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’d rather people get paid when they work hard to add stuff to a video game.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Could you name a few that are almost exactly like Battlefield, came out in the last decade, and let me host my own servers?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

We have very different definitions of “almost exactly like Battlefield”.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

This is crazy, because the competitive audience is pretty much done with this game, and the last few big patches didn’t help.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yeah, I get the sense that the old pros are just as sick of the game as most of the rest of the audience, so I’m not sure how much money they threw at these folks to make it happen. The other thing about it is that the game just takes long as hell to run, more than any other fighting game I know of. Grand Finals alone took over a half hour.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s a fighting game from Riot featuring League of Legends characters that just had a soft launch.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That’s what I keep seeing people say in comments. The devs say they got access to all of the voice talent from the show, and I’m not familiar enough with Walton Goggins’ voice to say that is or isn’t him.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I think I got fed up with how feast or famine the combat was. They wear FromSoft inspirations on their sleeves, but in those games, you can safely hang back and observe behaviors and patterns before you go in and try to dodge and parry and take them down. The wider normal dodge window did not seem to serve this purpose in this game, unless there’s some crucial mechanic that I completely missed. Often times, trying to dodge while learning the patterns, I’d lose a character to a single attack with intentionally tricky timing, and it would be easier to throw the fight and restart than it was to try to get them back in the fight and get my strategy up and running to deal damage. Then, of course, once I know the patterns, the fight is over in like 3 turns, and I take no damage at all.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I was on normal, spent basically every skill point I had on defense and HP starting around halfway through Act 2, since my damage was just about capped by that point. The combat feels great after you’ve already learned an enemy’s patterns, but the later game enemies (I basically only did the main story) were where they started one-shotting characters and this problem sunk in. Having to go through this huge discrepancy every time you find a new enemy just started to become annoying.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yeah, this isn’t him getting cast in a bunch of CRPGs; it’s him getting cast in a bunch of everything.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

The worse casting choice was who they replaced

Tap for spoilerSarevok

with.

EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I never encountered her in my playthroughs of 1 and 2, so I couldn’t say. The guy I spoilered was fine, and I’d say Larian showed a ton of reverence for those original games throughout. The entire format of the game is one BioWare made famous via Baldur’s Gate II, after all.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The other point to setting the game 100 years later is that they’re not beholden to the same exact geography, architecture, or, most importantly, the choices the player made in the previous game. And it allows people to step into this one without feeling like the previous two were mandatory. They did still choose a canon, and they can handwave others away as hearsay told in legends where multiple conflicting things are true, but the game was unmistakably made by enormous fans of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons. It is still a story that revolves around the city of Baldur’s Gate and Bhaal. It is the most authentic D&D game made since those old infinity engine games and arguably more so, given the ways their games are made to allow you to get more creative with systems, like the tabletop experience.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

We can chalk this one up right next to the hyperloop and just move on.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yeah, I’ve had this experience, too. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II communicated ahead of launch that the GOG release would come only a few months later (I did get the sense this was a publisher decision). Great! I can wait a few months. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made no such mention, and despite waiting several months to see how it would shake out, I bought it in the summer, and the GOG version came out right after I finished it. The developer behind Knights in Tight Spaces, when asked directly, said they were only focusing on the Steam release. Likewise, the GOG version came out shortly after I finished the game. From here on out, of the games on my radar, I’m playing the ones on GOG first, and maybe the other ones will get GOG releases in the meantime.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If anything, purely anecdotally with no data-based analysis, it looks as though GOG is getting more new releases than it used to. So I think as long as we show that DRM-free matters to us by buying there first, the situation will continue to improve.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yeah, it’s a pretty easy conclusion to come to from the outside looking in, but BG3 can launch on GOG day and date, and KC:D2 can communicate the GOG release ahead of time and still sell multiple millions of copies, so…it’s a practice I’d like to see change regardless.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

No, I get that. But likewise, Denuvo doesn’t have access to a second Earth either, and their pitch meeting will never include data of customers you’ve convinced not to buy the game due to the presence of their product. At some point, I don’t think those pirated copies are moving the needle, and that it’s just a cost of doing business like some units of physical goods breaking during shipping. The games that are most pirated are the ones that also sell the best. The anti-piracy case for the consumer is made pretty well these days by being downloaded faster, getting bug fix patches instantly, and keeping cloud saves.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Worth noting that the remastered versions have no multiplayer. There’s no bringing back multiplayer for Crysis 2 and 3, but the original Cryis Warhead is still available on GOG, where you can play old-school Crysis Wars multiplayer via LAN.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

For a game that old, “possible” is totally acceptable. I tested it on two PCs of mine on a LAN, and it works just fine.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Oh, for me, “online” is playing via VPN or direct IP connection with friends.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.