lustyargonian

lustyargonian, 17 dni temu

Everything that Sony claimed turned out to be true. Games are now exclusive to Xbox, they run worse on PS5, Xbox would get exclusive Call of Duty content and early betas and Xbox is using its market dominance by putting all ABK titles on GamePass.

Oh wait.

lustyargonian, miesiąc temu

When iphones went from 400 to 999, I do remember people having an outrage, soon after samsung also raised their prices. It is that moment for console gamers right now.

lustyargonian, miesiąc temu

The original looked shitty af almost like a ps2 game. Thank God it’s finally getting a proper remaster that can make it look a tad bit better.

lustyargonian, miesiąc temu

Obvious sarcasm

lustyargonian, miesiąc temu

It’s also features one thousand and eighty vertical pixels. That’s way too many.

Source: I know my pixels.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

In the interview they said how they show the game the way it is and focus on that part of development. They said how combat wasn’t worked on yet when they showed the game, which now looks pretty reactive. They’re going to focus on sound next and performance last, and when they said 30 it seemed like “bare minimum is solid 30”. Given the feedback, there’s a chance they’ll try to incorporate 60 fps now.

While it’s a design decision, UE is also a bit more scalable generally, assuming it’s not all reliant on lumen, nanite and vsm.

Either ways, they need to learn from previous 30 FPS launches and try to communicate better. Saying it doesn’t need 60 is dismissive to a large audience of gamers who don’t like the trade-off of frames over image quality.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

My work macbook can only do 60 while my Rog Ally can do 120, and damn the mouse feel of 120 is so much better that I hate my work laptop can’t do it.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

Do you primarily game on mouse or controller?

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

120 hours in and I’m still playing Kingdom Come Deliverance. I think I like it much better than Skyrim. The only thing I don’t like about it is the missing crosshair for bows, but a simple console command fixes that for me. I’ve not yet completed the main quest lol and there are still plenty of side quests to finish. It’s crazy how the studio pushed CryEngine of all things into this interesting RPG. Puts Bethesda to shame honestly.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

Yes it is. It even has schedules for NPCs, activities to do, people reacting to your clothes or cleanliness, your hunger level or sleepiness, day night cycle, an interesting fast travel mechanism.

I also love their pickpocketing mini game.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

Just keep in mind that it is supposed to be difficult in the first few hours. But as you skill it starts getting easier to the point that you’re walking killing machine that can unlock any lock, speech check almost anything and buy the best gear.

lustyargonian, 2 miesiące temu

If PS4 -> PS5 isn’t a big enough of a leap for gamers and publishers, then I wonder what would PS5 -> PS6 look like? Is higher resolution at 60 FPS with better ray tracing enough?

lustyargonian, 3 miesiące temu

SteamDeck, emulate everything.*

• Proton technically isn’t emulation, but it’s pretty crazy that the device basically doesn’t have anything natively built for it, everything is translated emulated. It took that much effort to break Microsoft’s PC gaming monopoly.

lustyargonian, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah it’s pretty cool. Sometimes the translation can even beat native performance.

lustyargonian, 4 miesiące temu

Licensing will do that for you. At least you’ll be able to still play it, unlike Crew.

lustyargonian, 4 miesiące temu

tl;dr: it is what it is

lustyargonian, 4 miesiące temu

I was so confused by the trailer. What exactly is this game lol

lustyargonian, 4 miesiące temu

30 FPS and heavy motion blur put me off. Maybe it was just how it was recorded/presented in the stream I guess.

lustyargonian, 6 miesięcy temu

GTA 4. Currently playing TBoGT. I somehow forgot how cool the DLCs were. I’m quite impressed by Luis and the side content added in the DLC. If you squint enough parts of TBoGT already feel a bit like GTA 5. Luis also mentions vice city so I wonder if we’ll see him in GTA 6.

lustyargonian, 6 miesięcy temu

I wonder if MSFT would build an Xbox app that emulates Xbox, 360 and Xbox One on PC, making it possible to circumvent the need of cross saves/cross progression of older games. Currently it is annoying that you can’t just pick up a game on Xbox and continue playing it on your handheld gaming device for most games.

lustyargonian, 7 miesięcy temu

Wouldn’t these sentiments lead to expectations and then actual changes in policies?

lustyargonian, 7 miesięcy temu

And it occasionally ran at 24 fps, which I think is a phenomenal feat!

lustyargonian, 7 miesięcy temu

This from 360 gen and Arkham Knight from Xbox One/PS4 still look incredible.

lustyargonian, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

GTA IV and NFS Unbound on Rog Ally.

I’ll be honest, I was too young to understand GTA IV’s lore back then, and I was mainly playing it for barely getting 20 FPS on my PC and the physics system of the game. But now when I actually listen to the dialogues and radio station, man it sounds like they saw what America would be like in 2020s a decade early. “We should reduce minimum wage and remove rights of citizens to fight against the illegal immigration crisis”. Damn.

lustyargonian, 7 miesięcy temu

Meanwhile

lustyargonian, 10 miesięcy temu

Still no clear release date. I guess it’s safe to assume it’s in the second half.

lustyargonian, 10 miesięcy temu

I think Flight Simulator has paid mods and I’ve seen ambivalent or slightly positive opinions of it. It is definitely doable and is actually a good idea, but something about Bethesda and their way of doing it always seems shady.

lustyargonian, 11 miesięcy temu

Speedrunners be like, “oh a discount!”

lustyargonian, 11 miesięcy temu

Larian raising the bar for everyone.

lustyargonian, rok temu

As an Asian and a fan of Doom Eternal, I really enjoyed Shadow Warrior 3’s soundtrack.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Guess I’m gonna live in the metros.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Umm, isn’t this more on Bungie than ABK?

I mean yeah ABK has toxic culture, but Bungie has been with Sony for over a year now (Aug 2022), and Alm was hired just few 2 months before Sony acquisition and the issues followed up until September with false termination.

lustyargonian, rok temu

F

lustyargonian, rok temu

Do all cancelled projects get wiped off of internet?

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It’ll be interesting to see how a linear shooter from back then would translate to today’s time. Would it be more like Last of Us where each encounter is thrilling and tense, or would it be like Max Payne 3/Uncharted 4 where you move from one level to another with a moving plot line?

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Me too. Max Payne 3 is like the previous entries, just a bit more focus on close range corridor shooting with cover mechanics. Similar to previous entries but with a very stylized story telling.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Yeah you’re right. Doom Eternal is great. I’m playing Metro series and even that’s pretty good in terms of balancing story and gameplay.

It’s just that coming from Remedy, Max Payne’s basic formula of corridor shooter probably doesn’t match their other games anymore, so I’m curious to see how they’re going to remake it.

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Idk first thing about any of this, but I do think with MSFT controlling Windows, Azure, Xbox, GitHub, OpenAI, Teams; at some point one has to ask if MSFT is just too big for no good.

Think about it, a competing game studio might be paying MSFT for Windows licenses, Teams for internal communication, Azure for game servers, GitHub for hosting their source code, ChatGPT Pro for using AI in smart ways and finally a 30% cut to Xbox Store, only to compete with bazillions of first party titles under Xbox Game Studios.

Now think of a big publishers, they need to somehow compete with GamePass, which takes all the money MSFT can throw at it and makes game sales kinda irrelevant. Why would a consumer buy a $70 game when they can play other games for $15 max a month. Even if it’s $30 a month, it’s still a steal. Why would a studio go to a big publisher and give up bigger chunk of revenues (Outriders didn’t get much under Square Enix despite being on GamePass) when they could just become a second party developer with XGS and rake in whatever cash flow positive MSFT would give them before the game is even launched, with a bonus of marketing of “Day One With GamePass”.

In nut shell, MSFT makes a tonne money during development even if the game isn’t released on Xbox, and Xbox Game Studios slowly hollows out competing publishers by using the MSFT money to secure deals with third party studios or straight up acquiring them. They can adjust profitability by tweaking prices at several touch points of this huge Microsoft services pipeline.

If Xbox was broken away from MSFT, they’ll become yet another publisher, though a pretty big one, without the daddy money. It would make the industry more competitive between publishers, but it may also probably lead to egregious monetization strategies like we already see these days, because MSFT is uniquely positioned to do what they’re doing.

Similar things can be said about Amazon or Google. How is it that if Netflix succeeds AWS wins and if Prime succeeds, AWS still wins? How can Google make the search engine, video hosting platform, dominant browser and a ads platform and cross pollinate money like crazy? If big companies weren’t allowed to build such synergetic businesses, consumers might be paying to several different companies, but they’ll also be seeing competition in each of those domains, driving prices lower, hopefully.

So yeah, I support the idea of breaking up companies that start dealing with orthogonal domains that end up creating a nest of services that no competitor can easily break free from.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.

Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Exactly, on their own the products aren’t harmful at all. The problem comes when MSFT can leverage their position to undercut prices or shoving their products in other products.

How can slack compete, despite being a superior product, when MSFT puts Teams in the effing taskbar of Windows and sells it for half the price, and bundles it with office?

How can bitbucket or gitlab compete if MSFT integrates npm, GitHub, Azure, GitHub Copilot, VSCode and so many other dev tools so well, for much lower price?

Azure is second, yes, but my company, like many other companies, uses Azure over AWS because MSFT gives a sweet deal where Azure, Outlook, OneDrive, GitHub, Teams are all bundled in such a way that it’ll be expensive to use individual companies for each, and also a big hassle. And when MSFT becomes an incubator for a startup, it’s even better deal for the startup. How can digital ocean, for example, compete with that?

I mean that’s what happened with Internet Explorer. Netscape couldn’t compete coz MSFT could give IE for free and bundle it into the operating system. Google did something similar by getting other softwares to bundle Chrome with them in the installation process, and also asking users to use chrome on all Google properties. Firefox can never compete with IE or Chrome or Safari, as long as these big companies can integrate their services and products so seamlessly.

So you’re absolutely right, individually none of the products are harmful, infact some of them are really good deals for consumers, but due to them all being under one umbrella, it’s hard for competition to thrive.

lustyargonian, rok temu

You’re right. A company should be allowed to create and acquire other companies, no doubt in that.

The problem, as I listed above in the very long post, is unique to the big tech players where they can create such synergetic businesses that it’s pretty difficult for anyone to compete or break free from that.

What you’re saying makes great sense. Xbox indeed needs more and more IPs and more importantly much better quality control to compete with Sony. They lost the last generation, and they need to do everything in their power to course correct. After ABK, they would match Sony in number of IPs and maybe surpass them in number of studios. Fair enough. But, as a whole, this gives a lot more power to MSFT, and my question is simply whether it’s too much power or not.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Glad I could make my point clearer. It’s hard to narrow down what feels wrong about this level of consolidation, and given MSFT’s track record in recent years, it’s hard to say they’re definitely going to become evil, but just that possibility feels scary.

Things are good, until they’re not.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Metro Last Light, Lies of P and RDR2. Mid, fast and slow paced games lol.

lustyargonian, rok temu

Let’s hope they can chew what they’ve attempted to eat. They can barely manage their first party studios, and now they’re going to attempt to manage one of the biggest publisher/studio.

lustyargonian, rok temu

I mean yeah, that’s how acquisitions and exclusivity works. It’s not like PlayStation bought Bungie to lose money or make exclusivity deals with third parties to bring games to Xbox. That’s just how this industry works.

By manage I mean, they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.

lustyargonian, rok temu (edited rok temu)

You’re right, they’ve been hands off and basically done bare minimum for marketing and promotion. And it hasn’t been working well for them at all, exhibit A: Halo Infinite, exhibit B: Redfall. Clearly they can’t sustain this anymore.

Starfield has been probably the first example where they actually got invested in the production, delayed a game by a year, got their entire QA team test it. Layoffs from top to bottom at 343 is probably another example of them intervening.

Regarding exclusionary buyouts, I don’t know if you aren’t aware of it. But it has been a thing in this industry for decades. This is how Sony got where it is today, by being highly competitive by making exclusionary deals and buying studios with whom they had exclusionary deals with for years. Sony entered this industry out of nowhere and bought their way into success, and everyone agrees that only made the market more competitive. Xbox had no games and was not bringing competition in market, and now that it has more games, it’s anti competitive?

The difference with MSFT is that they bring their games to PC (an open platform) via Steam, and to Xbox, along with a price accessible service of GamePass, so it doesn’t force a gamer into first buying a $400 console and then a $70 game to play on it.

We can agree to disagree, my original point is primarily around lack of confidence in MSFT’s ability to manage these studios and do justice to their legacy. Sure making workspaces less toxic and inclusive for everyone is a massive win, but will employees stick around under a new management that seems pretty incompetent to eff up their own flagship series (Halo).

lustyargonian, rok temu

I think they cared about it, saw the numbers, and realised the case can’t be made because of the current way market is setup. CMA initially wasn’t convinced but with correct calculations it got resolved. FTC actually didn’t make a big point over cloud but that this could destroy PlayStation, which also wasn’t justifiable with data. EU held similar opinions but felt it also is pro competitive given the number of IPs Sony holds.

But after ABK, I don’t think that case can be made anymore. With ABK the number of IPs and content becomes more competitive with PS and Nintendo, and they all kept saying this is a vertical merger, Nintendo or Sony wouldn’t, and thus wouldn’t be allowed.