masterspace

masterspace, wczoraj (edited wczoraj)

To be fair, they didn’t gut the original creative team.

Max McGuire was CTO and a programmer on the original game, Ted Gill was President and a Producer on Below Zero.

Charlie Cleveland was current CEO, and the director and lead designer of the original game, so was the head of the origin creative team, and that does seem like a big loss, but no one else from the art, writing, or design teams seem to be leaving, so it’s not really a ‘gutting’ of the original creative team.

My guess (especially given how buggy Subnautica was), is that they were missing their delivery milestones so the publisher wanted to replace the organization heads and move at least Charlie Cleveland back down to a creative role, but they refused and left together.

masterspace, wczoraj

If you’re basing that on Subnautica Below Zero, it’s worth noting that basically the whole creative team is different, not just the composer:

Subnautica credits:

Director(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Charlie Cleveland
</span>

Producer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Hugh Jeremy
</span>

Designer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Charlie Cleveland
</span>

Programmer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Charlie Cleveland
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Steven An
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Max McGuire
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Jonas Bötel
</span>

Artist(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Cory Strader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Brian Cummings
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Scott MacDonald
</span>

Writer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Tom Jubert
</span>

Composer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Simon Chylinski
</span>

---

Subnautica Below Zero credits:

---

Director(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">David Kalina
</span>

Producer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Charlie Cleveland
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Cory Strader
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Max McGuire
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Ted Gill
</span>

Designer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Alex Ries
</span>

Artist(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Cory Strader
</span>

Writer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Jill Murray
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Brittney Morris
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Zaire Lanier
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Tom Jubert
</span>

Composer(s)

<span style="color:#323232;">Ben Prunty
</span>

masterspace, 2 dni temu

This has not remotely been my experience. It’s also incredibly easy to avoid getting into this situation by rainbow flipping.

masterspace, wczoraj

If this hasn’t remotely been your experience, how do you know rainbow flicking fixes it?

It doesn’t fix it, it’s how you avoid letting get that close to you.

The game is widely known to have multiple bugs affecting gameplay, from lags and desync issues, to crashes and even teams changing colour mid-match. In this case, and this is the second time I’ve seen it, the ball glitched into the ground after randomly bouncing around the pitch following a shot against the post befote finally getting stuck. It couldn’t be interacted with at all.

Well if this is a bug, you should probably make that clearer, because again, have not encountered a single bug.

masterspace, 3 dni temu

F tier click bait. Literally nothing informative was said in here.

masterspace, 8 dni temu

Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, and Alan Wake 2, are all some of my all time favourite games.

Going to wait for the next patch before trying out FBC Firebreak, but I’m excited and can’t wait for the Max Payne remakes and Control 2.

masterspace, 14 dni temu

epic bad, upvotes plz

Epic barely changed it. You stopped playing because you put 1000+ hours into it and eventually got bored and moved on.

masterspace, miesiąc temu

If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they’re clearly idiots.

If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you’re estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that’s because you (as a company) coded your software badly.

masterspace, miesiąc temu

💯

masterspace, miesiąc temu

100%.

Gamers act like Gabe Newell is a god, when he’s just a billionaire that charged them more than he needed to, like all the others.

Epis using Fortnite money to break up Apple and Google’s app store monopplies an objectively good ded

masterspace, miesiąc temu

Sweeney is not lionized as a false saviour.

Newell is.

masterspace, miesiąc temu

Apple is such a piece of shit company.

masterspace, miesiąc temu

Hot damn I want to see what modders do with this game.

Saber’s really showing itself to be a great studio.

masterspace, 2 miesiące temu

I would rather a law that extends many of the properties of physical ownership to digital sales.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

The Master Chief Collection is the single reason that I will never ever preorder another game no matter what bonuses it comes with or how confident I am with the developer.

In general though, Microsoft Games is pretty good about not pushing bugs out the door.

I honestly don’t understand the middle reception to Avowed, it’s been truly fantastic so far, and completely rock solid.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

Bruh avowed is great, I’ve been loving it.

This sounds like a you problem.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

The studio is pivoting from making Forza, to making Fable, this feels like a perfectly normal development timeline.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

Lmao. Bruh, wtf are you talking about. I’ve basically used nothing but melee or stealth / dialogue the whole time.

It’s a tight, well written game, that doesn’t waste your time with endless auto-generated quests.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

Sounds like the author has a skill issue with Stealth.

Mobs are leashed? Cool, that doesn’t matter cause I play the game like a high fantasy battle mage, and don’t run from fights.

Also, mobs are leashed in most games to some extent or another. Avowed is well written, well voice acted, tells an interesting story, and is fun to play through.

Really just feels like people were expecting Skyrim and are upset they got something more focused.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

Fair point, but in that case it means they’re not just pivoting, but building a whole new studio from the ground up for this game.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

People are complaining about Avowed? What the fuck is wrong with them?

I’ve been too busy loving it to be online reading anything, honestly cannot fathom what their complaints are tho. Avowed has repeatedly impressed me by being more clever and nuanced than I was expecting a game to be, in writing, level design, and combat.

Is this more dumb gamer anti-woke hysteria?

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu

Also, from a mechanistic standpoint I think that mostly has to do with the high cost of entry for games.

At $80-$100 for a full priced game these days, it’s hard to just buy on a whim. The only time you would is when they’re on sale, which happens well after initial release. So initial sales of games are basically entirely driven by reviews and online discourse (which itself has an effect on reviews), and you basically just have a bunch of people all waiting for the signal to buy or not.

I do think that services like Gamepass are a genuinely good way of reducing that effect, because now anyone can try anything on a lark.

masterspace, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Skyrim’s varied gameplay systems?

It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…

It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.

masterspace, 5 miesięcy temu

Who cares. Find a new game.

masterspace, 5 miesięcy temu

They’re not banning Mastodon, or the Fediverse, or EU based messaging apps.

i.e. the objection is not the US government doesn’t control it, but that the Chinese government does.

masterspace, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Quite frankly, executives of health insurance companies continually make money by denying medical coverage to people with children and letting them agonizingly die slowly.

I’m not on here celebrating his death for the sole reason that I think it’s just as likely this corporate espionage / assassination for money, but if it is a normal person shooting a health insurance executive for denying a loved ones’ coverage it’s hard to imagine how the executive didn’t deserve it.

You don’t get to be separated from the morality of your actions, just because you use neutral sounding business language to describe how you’re fucking over and killing people for personal profit.

masterspace, 6 miesięcy temu

Understandably. I’m emotionally removed from the situation enough to know that I shouldn’t actively celebrate, if I knew a loved one who’s medical care was denied by a for profit health insurer or if I had to waste my life fighting with them for basic care, then I’m sure I would be actively celebrating too.

masterspace, 6 miesięcy temu

We left Reddit because it was a corporate captured shit show that killed the only nice apps for interacting with it. We didn’t leave because they were too mean to health insurance executives, or because they made glib jokes in dark situations.

masterspace, 6 miesięcy temu

I mean, there are huge problems with American health care companies and insurance in general will always tend towards being a scam unless it’s extremely heavily regulated, but at a fundamental level insurance does offer a service (that of socializing the cost of extreme losses), and while executives do have fiduciary duties, the idea that they always have to pursue short term profit no matter what from a legal standpoint, is overblown and exaggerated.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

The Alan Wake 1 remaster is also published by Epic

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

Another great game ruined by gamers’ insistence on dick riding Gabe Newell and always giving Valve a 30% cut, no matter what.

Will anyone self reflect on whether they’re being a dumbass and hurting the entire gaming industry by insisting on only using Steam cause that’s all they’ve ever used?

No. They’ll yell at Epic and Remedy for not wanting to give 30% of their revenue to Valve.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

I hear what you’re saying, but gamers in this thread (and every thread), are demanding that it come out on Steam, not on GOG, which makes them a huge part of the problem.

Lock in exists partially because gamers have lionized Valve for throwing them trinkets and refuse to use anything else, while Valve has designed their platform around a mandatory launcher and done what they can to lock players into it.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

Despite other problems, it really feels like Microsoft runs around Sony in circles when it comes to their software prowess. Quick Resume doesn’t work flawlessly with every game, but when it does work it’s pretty incredible to jump straight back to the exact same state in another game as if you’d never closed it.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

It functions differently, but both are trying to accomplish the same thing from a user perspective, to get them back into the specific part of the game they were just in.

The differences in how they approached that problem is what I mean by Microsoft running around Sony software wise.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

That’s what I mean though, both are trying to accomplish basically the same thing, but Sony’s implementation is kind of half baked in that it requires developer support and doesn’t actually resume the game, just gets you close to where you were.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

Yes I do, both are designed to get the user to where they want to be in the game faster than loading the game from scratch and navigating through menus to get there.

They do different approaches in design, but both are attempting to tackle the same UX issue.

masterspace, 8 miesięcy temu

The combat is way too easy on normal difficulty

I played all the side quests and by like the halfway point, I took off all my armour and just beat every single enemy to death with my bare hands. I would definitely recommend a higher difficulty if you’ve played any rpgish games before.

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu

What the honest fuck are you talking about?

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu

Xbox does not have full screen ads.

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu

In that vein, if anyone likes well written, story driven, stealth / action / immersive sim games, the Dishonored series & Prey (same devs, different universe) are incredibly worth going back for.

Made by former Bioshock / System shock developers, and they’re just some of my all time favourite games, and I only played them because of all the time I suddenly had with the COVID lockdown, but they hold up incredibly well. Dishonored 1 (2012) honestly feels and looks better than Dishonored 2 (2016) because of the Xbox’s auto HDR and auto FPS boost, but both are super fun and gorgeous games.

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu

I would generally agree with you about the main macro plot beats in Dishonored 1 and leading into 2, but I would still argue that the writing is quite good overall.

In Dishonoured 1, you still have Daud’s storyline which I found a bit more interesting on a macro level (both in the main game and both expansions), but then I would also argue that the Dishonored series has great micro writing which is a large part of the world building and the fun of exploration.

They both know how to write good little interesting world building hooks and stories, and how to pace them out and not overload you with junk documents and writing.

The Outer Wilds, Bioshock, Subnautica, Remedy Games (Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, etc.), Obsidian (New Vegas, Outer Worlds, Grounded, etc.), are all masters of rewarding you with more story and world building.

Conversely studios like Bethesda (Starfield, Skyrim, etc.), and Ubisoft (all their RPGs), are pretty bad about trying to make the world seem realistic at the expense of having a ton of just hastily written uninteresting documents around that bore you as much reading real world documents at random would.

And while I would put games like Cyperbunk and the Witcher and even Deathloop, somewhere in-between, I would put all the Dishonoreds and Prey right up there at the top with the best.

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.

I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.

The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).

So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.

masterspace, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.

I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.

I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.

masterspace, 10 miesięcy temu

Too bad. Valve’s not exactly known for making good games anymore, just for printing with money Steam.

masterspace, 10 miesięcy temu

You shouldn’t.

masterspace, 10 miesięcy temu

Lmao, says the guy defending a multi billion dollar megacorp’s monopoly.

I prefer competition in all markets, if you prefer monopolies that take 18% more of every single sale, I have bad news for you about your level of grown up ness.

masterspace, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

I honestly cannot fathom how gamers don’t see how much Valve has fleeced them. Like you said, it’s literally just 400 tech workers who would have had $150-200k salaries get to win the lottery and get $300k-500k salaries, at the expense of every single other gamer who just wanted to play a game at the end of their shift.

masterspace, 10 miesięcy temu

Because I’ve never once tried to argue that anyone should use it.