It’s also suspected that Yuzu was not “clean room” reversed engineered and built on code that they shouldn’t have had access to, which will allow Nintendo to pull down any fork of Yuzu but not Ryujinx.
Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.
They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.
As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.
This has happened before, for games from other publishers, as per the article. I don’t remember all of the reasons for it, but if I’m not mistaken, this is why Shogun: Total War 2 has a blood DLC for a few dollars, so that they can make everything but the DLC available in Japan.
I suspect Australia is responsible for Streets of Rogue changing “cocaine” into “sugar” as well, but I know Japan doesn’t allow things like beheadings in their games, which I thought was part of that DLC.
I recently booted up Half-Life 2 to replay it. I have played the absolute shit out of this game before, so 60% of it just feels like a drag to me now. It was such an amazing game but it’s sort of spoiled for me after I’ve played it too much....
Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.
I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.
Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.
The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history’s largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd...
Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate’s sunsetting. Evo’s only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn’t getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.
Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn’t appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
It’s a great game, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.
Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.
I just picked up Dread Delusion, Shadows of Doubt, and Stellar Tactics. I played demos of Dread Delusion and Shadows of Doubt a while back, and both of them blew me away; the former just launched out of early access and the latter is supposed to do so before the end of the year. Stellar Tactics is one that’s intriguing, but I haven’t played it yet. I’ve been playing Fallout 2 lately, and it made me want to find a CRPG that was more successful at what Starfield was trying to do; I typed in some tags into the Steam search, Stellar Tactics was what I found, and I think it’ll scratch that itch. Stellar Tactics is also in early access, and it’s been in early access since 2016 with no end in sight, but it’s very systems driven, so I’ll likely be okay with playing it early anyway.
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.
That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.
And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.
As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.
Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.
Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they’re not building a game any larger than they’ve been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn’t need to sell 10 million copies to break even.
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I’m a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It’s worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.
They did it. They freed MvC2. The announcer said he was going to take us for a ride, and I nearly fell out of my chair. The training mode is expanded too. I can’t be bothered to care about anything they’ve shown in the rest of this presentation, but this is a huge deal.
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
I’m going to rate “exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children” as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that’s not even conjecture; we already know this.
What am I fearing that I’m missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn’t care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don’t understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game or else miss out on having the entire library? I hope that this doesn’t come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don’t understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA’s Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it’s predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.
I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
Silksong has already had some kind of deal with Microsoft in place, so if it shows up on a platform holder’s stream rather than their own thing, it’s more likely they show up with Microsoft than Nintendo. Given that it got content rated already, it’s still due for a release this year, so maybe we hear about it with Gamescom.
No, it showed up at an Xbox showcase in 2022, where every game was going to be on Game Pass day 1 and releasing within 12 months, which would have meant the game would be out by June 2023. Silksong wasn’t the only game that missed that 12 month window, but it showed that, at the time, they were confident that it was nearly done, and that they took a deal with Microsoft, because being on Game Pass day 1 means Microsoft offered them a huge bucket of money to make up for lost sales.
Neither is shit. 4 is way better. 1, 2, and New Vegas are better still. But 3 doesn’t tend to come up in these conversations when people talk about Bethesda Fallouts being worse. They always go to 4, and that surprises me.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
Personally, I think I’d rather not even give them the word of mouth of having played their game. There’s so much out there to play, and plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this, even if it’s second hand.
More and more lately, but not exclusively. I have an increasingly long list of things that are deal-breakers for me, and I haven’t run out of stuff to play.
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
Not all digital games. If they’re DRM free, and if the multiplayer allows for LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc; then they’re built to last, arguably better so than physical media.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Nintendo has DMCA’ed Sudachi’s GitHub (x.com) angielski
Gothic, Risen, and Elex Dev "Piranha Bytes" Reportedly the Latest Embracer Studio to Shut Down (www.ign.com) angielski
Always Online / Live Service angielski
If there’s one thing that rustles my jimmies is that new games will sometimes put on an always online experience even when it is single player....
Konami is intent on region locking Japanese players out of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (automaton-media.com) angielski
Do you know any singleplayer games that are infinitely replayable? angielski
I recently booted up Half-Life 2 to replay it. I have played the absolute shit out of this game before, so 60% of it just feels like a drag to me now. It was such an amazing game but it’s sort of spoiled for me after I’ve played it too much....
Evo 2024 Competitors: By the Numbers (www.evo.gg) angielski
The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history’s largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd...
Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals angielski
Initial scrolling of the Steam Summer Sale seems pretty lackluster, but digging through the comments sections in other threads, a few gems have stood out, and it doesn’t appear we have a thread dedicated to this yet, so post what you think are the best deals here!...
MODERN WARFARE: How Call of Duty 4 Changed a Genre Forever (www.youtube.com) angielski
The Steam Summer Sale is live now! (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Star Wars Bounty Hunter - Official Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
Nearly 6 months later, Palworld devs confirm Nintendo never drew so much as an inch of its legal sword over bootleg Pokémon allegations (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Real-Time Strategy is incredible and you should play it (youtu.be) angielski
Timesplitters rated for PS4 and PS5, suggesting a PS Classics release (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Avowed's Creators On Why Romance Was Considered, But Ultimately Not Included And Skyrim Comparisons (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
Embracer rolls out new AI policy to 'massively enhance game development' | Game Developer (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Marvel Vs Capcom Collection angielski
Oh this one I’m excited for, especially MVC2 since it’s been in legal la la land for a while until now....
GOG Summer Sale has arrived (www.gog.com) angielski
MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics (www.youtube.com) angielski
Paradox Interactive has completely cancelled "Life By You" (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
Nintendo Direct announced for June 18 at 7 AM PT (www.resetera.com) angielski
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
How To Guess Correctly In Fighting Games (www.youtube.com) angielski
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
Nintendo Issues Multiple DMCAs On The Modding Site 'GameBanana' (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
Discussions in the past about not being able to access digital gaming content that users had paid for... angielski
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser (www.youtube.com) angielski