Rainbow Six 1 (GOG) and 3 (Steam) are both playable via LAN and some of my favorite co-op games ever. The first game may require hacking some easy-to-read level config files to make them finishable, but 3 doesn’t have that problem. Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear isn’t available for purchase anymore. I hear SWAT 4 (GOG) is great for scratching this itch too, but I haven’t played it myself.
While not so story focused, you could also co-op Star Wars: Battlefront II; the good one, from 2005 (GOG).
If people were powerless to the whims of a corporation, Kinda Funny wouldn’t exist, but if you believe you’re powerless, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
See, that’s just it. This entire business doesn’t survive on ad revenue anymore. Everything that isn’t Gamespot and IGN have folded, because the money that used to be there in ads isn’t there anymore. Subscriptions are what keep companies like this sustainable and afloat. Kinda Funny came from former IGN employees, and they knew the power they had to bring their audience to them rather than surrendering to the whims of IGN. Digital Foundry, Giant Bomb, Video Games Chronicle, MinnMax, GamesBeat, Aftermath…they all transitioned to doing this.
As a cautionary tale, I said the same things about Embracer acquiring unused properties and underutilized studios in an attempt to revive more niche series for underserved segments of the market.
I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it....
Wasn’t prediction baked into the netcode very early in the FPS genre? I wasn’t playing multiplayer in the Doom days, but by the late 90s, you wouldn’t have latency so much as you’d have rubberbanding. Games also use very little bandwidth, so 56K was no different than broadband, from my recollection.
Not just tariffs, but Trump is trying his damnedest to add more inflationary pressure to the economy by firing the people who are keeping interest rates high, counteracting the tariffs.
“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment....
There are, were, and always will be games made in shorter development cycles. It’s just that people are finally coming to the conclusion that longer cycles shouldn’t be the norm.
I’m a coder, and I’m not in fear of losing my job. Definitely not long term. They can chase this trend all they like, but they’ll soon realize what they need people for. Or, something I find less likely, they don’t need those people, and you can’t un-ring a bell. Sometimes new technologies shrink the need for a certain kind of job, like farming, or they erase the need for it altogether, like telephone switchboard operators. I don’t see AI shrinking this profession all that much, and if it does, there’s nothing anyone can do that will undo it. Even Comcast can’t make people stick with cable using all the nastiest tricks in the book; sometimes things just become obsolete.
by forcing the development timeline by basically any means necessary
“By any means necessary” are your words, not mine, nor the article’s. I too took issue with the article saying that early access can just be a fallback; that’s not actually solving the problem and just kicking the can down the road. But we got tons of great games made in under 3 years, even with high production value.
This is how the AAA industry dies.
As we know it. But it might be how it finds a path to sustainability rather than the feast or famine of betting your career on a project that took 7 years to make. Rather than perpetually updated live service games, AAA used to make sequels on a rapid cadence. Rather than games that take dozens of hours to finish, often filled with a bunch of busy work, we used to get games that took a fraction of that, often with far better pacing.
That’s the fear the author raises, yes. I always say people are fluid, and we expand to fit our containers, whether that’s our schedules, filling our homes with junk, or anything else. Hopefully what the industry is coming to realize is that their container is smaller than they think it is, but yes, scope creep is a real threat. I’m rooting for the industry to scope down.
All that to say that adapting to trends creates genres and results in honing in on better versions of the original idea. There will be bad versions along the way, but it’s good to get that much iteration. We used to get that much iteration.
Fortnite is a still-very-visible version of this exact concept. They were able to iterate quickly. Mostly because they just adapted their dud of a horde mode game into a completely new genre using the same mechanics, but they still did it quickly and found that success. We’re also seeing it in the likes of Getting Over It, Lethal Company, Vampire Survivors, and plenty of other games that spawned imitators.
“Iterate quickly” isn’t corporate bullshit. It’s just English. There are always those that tag along to something successful and find success themselves, like Terraria and Starbound to Minecraft; or Apex Legends and Fortnite to PUBG. But if you spend 4 years chasing an idea that came out in 2017, you end up with Hyperscape or Concord, unless there’s truly such an insatiable appetite that customers can’t get enough. In a world of live service games, they look to retain those players for years. Decades ago, they didn’t. We had so many first person shooters coming out every year, single and multiplayer, that it would be a full time job to count them all. Most of them brought new ideas to the table, and across many releases it would take years of iteration trying things that are slightly different than the last idea that would eventually lead to things like aim down sights becoming a fairly standard feature of the genre.
I’m drowning in a deluge of great games to play, personally. The exception there being first-person shooters and racing games, and racing games are starting to fill in the gaps.
I think I’m saying that what we changed from is better than what it changed into. Chasing ideas being the desired goal, because it leads to permutations of those ideas. So it has changed. It can change again.
I have! I enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m not really so much looking for “boomer shooters”, but the style of shooters that postdated those from the late 90s through the 2010s, especially when they include a campaign and multiplayer in the same package, which is harder and harder to come by these days…and often times, they create a dependency on external servers when they do. I didn’t even have any appetite for Doom Eternal or The Dark Ages. But this was the extra layer on top of Doom 2016 that I wanted in order to keep it interesting.
Guilty Gear Strive just got a big balance patch and a matchmaking update, and it’s great to be back. The experience of playing the game is better than ever.
I’ve still been going through Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. It remains the best game I’ve played this year. I’m working my way through the Brushes With Death DLC, which has some interesting mission design if not the most compelling narrative. I think I’ve done all the side quests I planned to do before finishing the game, so I’ve got the last third or so of the main quest to return to after I finish the DLC. Then the second expansion comes out early next month.
I also started playing Mafia: Definitive Edition, and boy have I missed crime drama stories in video games. This one is pretty by-the-numbers when it comes to gameplay, but after 4 hours, they’ve got plenty of interesting set pieces and narrative beats. I’m very much into this. I plan to play through the next two games before picking up The Old Country.
Other than those, I’ve got a project I’m working on to set up a VPN that I control, rather than trusting an external service whose terms of service could change at any time, so that I can play old LAN games with my friends in this era of live service multiplayer games. Once I get it all sorted out and working, maybe I’ll write up a post here so others can do the same.
I think you’ve seen that there’s more than meets the eye, at the very least, so we can leave it at that. A friend of mine was quite sure he had almost finished it before when he was nowhere close, lol.
lacks the amazing writing and soul of the first one
Really? The first one seemed content to just let you do mundane tasks as part of your quests, but I’ve found that this second one makes sure that there’s always something interesting along the way.
For four years, we had to deal with the “tower”. Even if it functioned properly all the time, which it frequently didn’t, it was a miserable experience. They’ve now got a standard matchmaking and ranking system, which makes it so much easier to keep playing this game that has largely always been excellent once you...
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. The single factor that made it stick is that it is the longest game I’ve played this year. I can’t say I’m fond of the question.
They explicitly mention Stop Killing Games discussions from their customers as a large contributing factor to the work they did on this, which is awesome. Less awesome is the things that this announcement leaves to the imagination. It sounds like it will just shift to using the platform’s multiplayer services for finding...
At least what the perception of proc gen is. I can only name one metroidvania roguelike (A Robot Named Fight; Dead Cells doesn’t count, regardless of its marketing), so this genre is probably way harder to make with proc gen. To me, someone who doesn’t enjoy Hades, it feels a lot like people only played Hades, acknowledged its proc gen is bad, and then said all proc gen is bad and asked for hand crafted levels as a response. There are so many games that are good at proc gen.
Other countries got their price increase months ago. Ours was probably delayed so that they could tell how bad the damages of our idiot president would be.
Good games fail to make their money back all the time. It’s not enough to just make a good game. In the case of Apex Legends, a game that needs to keep you playing long term at the expense of others, it needed to not only be good but also be earlier to market than its competitors, which is impossible to plan for. Its success involves a lot of luck, too, and using it as an example is survivorship bias.
That’s plenty of variety to not end up seeing the same matchups over and over again, as long as there are no runaway top tiers to kill the variety. Really excited about this one still.
I’ve got a 3.5 TB hard drive that mostly holds video files and stuff, and there’s at least 1.5TB free at this point. When you’re playing games that predate solid state drives, that may as well be infinite space.
At the time, 12 years ago, maybe that was the most expensive video game ever made. Like Avatar, it too has been eclipsed by so many others. A Call of Duty game now costs about $700M to make. A Sony blockbuster costs $200M-$300M; Concord may have been $400M.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
In a roundabout way, I guess, due to where they land on the supply-demand curve, but I’m not sure why we’re talking about Super Mario World. Game prices weren’t really standardized in any sort of way until they moved to discs, where the “floor” price for any given game was minuscule, and as we moved to digital distribution in the next few decades, this is the period where prices remained fairly stable, as they rose far slower than inflation.
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
Best Co-Op Games? angielski
What are the best co-op games you enjoy? Anything from the modern games, to the old games....
After More Layoffs, Unionized IGN Workers Are Done Picking Up The Slack: "We feel greatly understaffed and undervalued" angielski
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36423623...
Atari has acquired five Ubisoft games, including Child of Eden and Grow Home, and will re-release and ‘evolve’ them | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
It would be nice to see some more IPs liberated from Ubisoft, since they’re not using them anyway.
Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency? angielski
I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it....
PS5 may get more price increases in the US, analyst warns (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment....
Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? angielski
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/44554525
If you ever had an interest in Guilty Gear Strive, thanks to the new ranked matchmaking, there's never been a better time to play! angielski
For four years, we had to deal with the “tower”. Even if it functioned properly all the time, which it frequently didn’t, it was a miserable experience. They’ve now got a standard matchmaking and ranking system, which makes it so much easier to keep playing this game that has largely always been excellent once you...
deleted_by_moderator
Splitgate 1 Lives on Through Peer-to-Peer Support (www.splitgate.com) angielski
They explicitly mention Stop Killing Games discussions from their customers as a large contributing factor to the work they did on this, which is awesome. Less awesome is the things that this announcement leaves to the imagination. It sounds like it will just shift to using the platform’s multiplayer services for finding...
Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Date Trailer (September 4) (www.youtube.com) angielski
Not a shadowdrop, but it's only two weeks away. Sweet.
Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow (www.theverge.com) angielski
Discoverability is the industry’s "Achilles’ heel," marketing survey finds (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
“Between 15 And 20 Characters For The Launch Roster”: Invincible VS Interview (www.thegamer.com) angielski
We’re Suing Minecraft in a Class Action Lawsuit (youtu.be) angielski
cross-posted from: feddit.it/post/20737894
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Definitive Edition is out now (www.moddb.com) angielski
Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? angielski
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/43998814
Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...