ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The Saudi part matters a lot, as they’ve been grabbing lots of the gaming industry in their diversification efforts.

It also moves what their incentives and goals are. They’ll still try to make money, which means Ultimate Team isn’t going away without legislation, but when they’re private, they can probably afford to burn through some war chest searching for new franchises to replace their defunct franchises, and perhaps public investors wouldn’t be interested in losing that money in the short term.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Truthfully, you’ll likely see very little change in the next few years, but they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see an advantage to it. The article outlines some of them.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I literally can’t. The article is speaking from the industry perspective of sustaining its jobs though.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I believe Gearbox has always done this royalty situation union-less. But that doesn’t spread out sales to other games that need customers. There are still going to be plenty of games that just don’t move a lot of copies because other games suck the oxygen out of the room.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The article is about how so many games are coming out that many of the companies making them are going under even when they make games that are evaluated as being good or great. I provided an anecdote about myself that probably contributes to it. I didn’t really share it to be about my attitude toward being able to play these games. I’ll be just fine.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Multiplayer games 20 years ago were also built to be more scalable to different numbers of players, and they mostly had bots and such, too. I might push back on how long they sustained huge player bases though. Those games were often sequeled very quickly, and most of the players would move to the next one, leaving behind a small percentage. At least the old game was always still playable for those who bought it, though.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It also comes at the cost of being paid less than the industry average, which isn’t high. But it wasn’t so much tooting Gearbox’s horn as it was pointing out that it doesn’t solve the problem stated in the article. It wasn’t about how well the employees at a successful studio are paid but rather how many studios are unsuccessful because of how much competition there is. The industry might generate absurd amounts of money, but a large percentage of that is still just going to a handful of games that gather all the attention rather than being spread around more uniformly, and I don’t think there’s really a way to spread it around.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’m sure it looked great when they made Borderlands 2, but they also made Battleborne. Borderlands 2 devs still get royalties to this day. And hey, Gearbox still gets some stuff right sometimes. The entire Borderlands series still supports LAN, which even the people who manage the Steam pages don’t seem to care about. They can be good in some ways and shitty in others. Life is rarely so simple.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Very true. And sometimes there’s an answer to those questions, even if we discount the games designed to disappear after a few years. You might be sensitive to spoilers, it might be the perfect game for you in the moment (like the right game for a handheld system just before a trip), your friends might want to play it with you or talk with you about it when you’re done, etc. But that competition with back catalogs absolutely exists.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Not every game costs $70. Expedition 33 in particular only costs $50 when it’s not on sale, unless you’re in a different region where $50 USD converts to $70 in your country.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’m only buying the games I’m going to play, and this article is about the industry’s problem.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That still isn’t what the article was about. It was about how there are so many games coming out that even critically acclaimed games can’t break even, even though critical acclaim generally helps move copies.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The things getting reviewed already have a selection bias that makes them more likely to review well. It’s not a problem that reviewers focus their time on the games that their audience is most interested in, as opposed to reviewing every asset flip published to Steam.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Distribution. It’s very easy to put your game on Steam next to Grand Theft Auto. You’ll have a much harder time getting your indie film in theaters or on a streaming service. High quality movies aren’t typically found on someone’s YouTube channel.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Yeah, but 2003 graphics are an improvement on 1999 graphics.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

There should be exactly the toggle that the article asks for given this criticism. I don’t know how likely it is, because it seems like whatever engine they fed this game into just handles lighting very differently. Deus Ex is a great game, but I’m personally of the opinion that it’s quite ugly, and just about anything you do to the graphics are an improvement. The mod that the article compares it to doesn’t look better, just slightly different. In either case, the reason that both look better than the original, and why we pulled out the year 2003, is that the technology in cutting edge graphics didn’t really change until mid-to-late 2004, and the advancements in between were basically just more polygons and better textures, which is all you can reasonably expect in a remaster. More than that is a lot more work and gets you into remake territory.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Hey, that’s fair. If you already have the old version of the game, this one’s going to have limited appeal for you, most likely. As is the case with most remasters.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

What excuse? I was stating an objective fact.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Controls improvements alone are low-hanging fruit for Deus Ex.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The PS2 version is surely severely compromised compared to the PC version. Even the sequel designed with the Xbox in mind had to cut back on a lot of things to make it fit on a more powerful console.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The fan mods aren’t exactly accessible to PlayStation players. What would you want to see in a Deus Ex remaster that a mod couldn’t do? Mods are capable of a great deal, but there’s a lot of value to having things preconfigured to modern standards out of the box.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They did redo the models and lighting effects; I can’t speak to the animations.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Maybe where the consensus is, but I know which of those two I’d rather play.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I never played this game back in the day, but in a world where it has voice acting and a PC port, this is the one I’ll likely try. I have no idea when that might be, since it’s already a struggle to keep up with game releases, but someday, for sure.

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

Reporting from outside sources has covered what Steam’s vetting process is. They check to see if the game runs, if it has the features that the publishers/developers claim it has on the side bar, and they check for malware. Often times this is outsourced, but the buck does stop with Valve. The thing with any security measure though is that anything can be circumvented, and preventing the same vector of attack in the future is an arms race. And another way to read what you said about how many instances of malware there are is that it affects 0.02% of games released this year so far, and they’re not the games that customers are most likely to buy in the first place like your Borderlands or Battlefields.

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

I don’t think you know what grift means.

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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