I’d love to see someone figure out how to up the player limit or link games. Baldur’s Gate would be such a great medium for a D&D roleplay server if it could be set up to handle it.
The way to fix it is for developers not to sell out. When your small studio’s game blows up, you’re left with a choice. Do you care about art and making quality games, or do you care about making money and appeasing corporations in exchange for empty promises?
Are you going to leave you work in the hands of its creators, or are you going to hand it off to someone whose entire path in life is centered around squeezing as much money as possible out of every product with no concern for its quality or integrity?
“The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team,” Spencer said. "I haven’t been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It’s obviously a decision that’s very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance...
Unfortunately, a lot of people blindly believe in systems and authorities. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re shown that companies give zero fucks and will light everything on fire at a whim, they think they’re rational actors who will do what’s responsible for their product, their customers, and their employees.
Clearly, that assumption isn’t remotely true, but they’d rather roll their eyes at anyone who doesn’t take it on faith than risk having their world view altered.
It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
The tabletop system is intended to be modular, with subsystems that can easily be added, removed, or tuned for different genres. The initial playtest I did was in a zombie survival setting, currently we’re doing a campaign that’s got a bit more of a Shadowrunny type feel, mixing technological dystopia and magic. The idea is to put out a core book in those settings as well as a fantasy setting and a space opera setting, so people can mix and match subsystems and do whatever they like with it.
I applied programming concepts to the design of the mechanics themselves in a way that I hope makes them more intuitive and tries to maintain a steady flow of tension and release without a bunch of pausing to check stuff once you know the system.
I don’t want to give too much of the details away, but I do plan to release a system resource document along with the actual books. And it’ll be released under an anti-corporate license, so other small creators can make modules for it, but big companies will have to shell out if they want to play ball.
Once that’s ready to go I have a couple of video games planned using the same system. One of them ties heavily into themes of abuse and autonomy, the other is about time travel. I have some of the early stages of the art and some shaders and stuff done for these, and have set up a few mechanics, but they’re still kind of on the back burner. I’ve been teaching myself music theory and composition so the soundtrack doesn’t become an afterthought, and I feel like there’s still something conceptual I’m missing at the core of the visual design. I’ll get there, though.
People literally buy into the idea that they wouldn’t know how to do anything if they weren’t being told what to do. They think that value comes from above.
They think that when a company sells them raspberries, that company invented the raspberry bush. They don’t realize that the raspberries were already there. They certainly don’t realize that they themselves are another kind of bush. Or that the labor bush operates without a company to own it and sell its labor berries.
Grow a bunch of labor bushes and make it incredibly clear that it’s not about them being owned, but about them being labor bushes.
To me the change from the current system doesn’t come by diving into the current system and trying to ask it nicely. It doesn’t come from asking permission at all. It comes from operating with zero concern or tolerance for capitalist bullshit.
Go help people who can’t afford to pay you. Make something beautiful and give it to the world in a way that gives them an opportunity to prop you up, but that also lets them enjoy it without having to be rich or emptying their wallet.
Internalize the idea that wealth is not a virtue, and poverty is not an ill. People who need help are an opportunity to help, and people who have value are in a position to use it to help, but holding onto that value and using it are mutually exclusive.
It’s not going to come from a politician or some big speaker or a revolution, it’s going to come from individual people in their own lives lives making different choices. Your choices matter.
I drive a cab and get paid very little to basically drive around and help people. Like, the job is to drive people from point A to point B, but I try to do more than that, and help people who need it along the way. I carry a lot of stuff around that I’m not really paid for and I try to go the extra mile for people.
If the projects I’m working on pan out and I manage to get to a place where I have more resources, I plan to use that as a way of making other small steps. Setting up a coop instead of chasing money, releasing a game license that allows independent producers to do their own thing. Things like that. Literally just leaving the door open for people instead of slamming it shut.
I don’t really have any intent to code software outside of games, but I’d like to empower others to be able to make the things they want to make and not just feed some big parasitic company with it.
I use Trello a bit, but not consistently. I’ll use it at the beginning of a project to kind of map things out, then come back a few times to kind of check in with where I’m at and see if there’s anything I’m not thinking of. I also have a ton of note files just laying all over my computer, my discord, and my notesnook account. I used to use Google Docs, but I don’t really want them scraping my stuff for their AI before I even get to finish it.
Honestly I just kind of operate like a blob. I expand in a bunch of different directions on a project a little bit at a time until it starts to come together. Stuff percolates and another piece will fall into place and I’ll get a burst of momentum. Eventually I’ll notice I’m banging my head against something that doesn’t work and I’ll realize I’m looking in the wrong place or I don’t have the right thing yet and I’ll work on some other component.
A lot of stuff just kind of comes to me at random times and I try to get it out before I forget it. But it also involves a lot of like sort of flow state thinking keeping track of how different pieces of a thing connect with one another.
But also like, I feel like you kind of have to be comfortable just having a bunch of files full of concepts that don’t necessarily go anywhere immediately? Like, you need to be ready to just throw some shit out there, see how it works, chop massive pieces off of it or throw it away entirely. The moment you let yourself be self-conscious about your work or worry if you’re “really going in the right direction” you’re fucked. I mean, you can have that moment I guess as long as you don’t stay in it, but it’s the drive and the confidence that gets the actual thing finished whether anybody sees it or not.
You have to do something. You can always do something else later.
Once it’s done I feel like that’s its own other game entirely. Like, I have some guerilla marketing ideas and some former contacts I can try to get on the radar of, but that’s another phase of things. I can’t worry too much about that while I’m over here in playtesting, tweaking, and adding play-informed mechanics land.
Like right now we’re just basically playing a game and I’ll stop suddenly in the middle of it and be like oh I need to add something, and I take some notes and then we keep going. A lot of the time at the end of the session I know pretty much what I need to do; whether a mechanic is too complicated or fiddly or not robust enough or needs something else to compensate for it or whatever, it becomes evident when you watch it play out.
I’m not really sure how I’d ever get anything done if I was too focused on the organization of it, to be honest. I give myself enough hats without trying to also be a hat rack.
I’m going for very specific look of stylized visuals that’ll play well into my animation experience with Flash. I’ve got the shader for it pretty much nailed, I’m just working on my actual like body concept stuff and I’m not fully sold on the actual perspective angle I’ve been playing with. I definitely have a lot of artist and animator friends who have seen it and I’ve gotten good feedback.
But yeah, on the music side of things, I honestly think I want to try to find some folks to play with some time soon. I’m still shoring up my performance end of things, but playing some bass and/or keyboard and/or guitar with a band would probably help my ear a lot and also give me some folks that I could have a musical understanding with who could help me with the soundtrack.
I’d honestly love to release a sort of grungy album. Most of what I’ve been composing seems to lean into experimental guitar stuff, but it’s all still pretty raw.
There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.
One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.
But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.
If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.
It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.
I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.
In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.
Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.
I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.
Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.
I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.
I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.
I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.
But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.
Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.
There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.
This person has zero IMDB credits. Call me after making literally anything even remotely approaching the quality of anything Bethesda has ever sneezed out.
Does he maybe have some semblance of a point about NCR and New Vegas? Sure, but if that makes it a ‘bad show’ that ‘no one will watch’, please let me point you at Star Wars, which jettisoned its own extremely substantial extended universe to the chagrin of long time fans and is doing fine.
Can’t you just, like, look at it like anime or like Douglas Adams?
Yes, we get multiple iterations of more or less the same story in different mediums. No, they aren’t exactly the same. Is that a problem? Does the Ranma 1/2 TV series have to match the OVH or they’re both shit?
Do I have to choose only the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide books, or the radio series, or the show, or the movie? Am I not allowed to enjoy them all?
Is it really more economically viable to make a living being an entitled and cynical jackass about other people’s work than to go make your own?
I couldn’t wade through the first episode of the Last of Us. I watched this entire thing in one sitting and have now seen most of it twice. It deserves a decent score on RT.
You might really enjoy DayZ. The public servers are pretty brutal, but if you find a comfortable RP server you can settle in and really enjoy exploring the landscape. Once you’re used to the mechanics it’s so smooth.
Stereo headphones or even like monitors make hunting a lot of fun, listening to distant sounds trying to find a deer or boar is a lot of fun. And once you’re used to dealing with zombies and the sthough.l mechanics, crafting and all that, it really opens up.
Plus the ability to expand it with modding is pretty extensive. We’ve got some neat stuff on our own server (though not much pop atm), and I’ve seen others that do some next level stuff like player vampires and werewolves and stuff.
Even just the vanilla game is absolutely gorgeous though. If you like exploring, scavenging, and crafting, especially with friends, it’s kind of perfect.
Conan Exiles has a somewhat similar vibe but a bit clunkier and in a low fantasy setting. It’s also got a lot of D&D roleplay servers.
It seems like they’re not just profiting on children, they’re setting up a system in which work is exchanged for a roblox company scrip and then charging them that same scrip to advertise their game. They also take a cut. So if a game gets a little traction but doesn’t immediately blow up, there’s a built in incentive to put the money right back into roblox.
Shady. Is it not enough to brush uncomfortably close to child labor laws with an army of child modders creating your value? You really have to turn around and loop them into an exploitative model where you get paid like 3 times before they see a cent? And even then they hold their money hostage until the kid manages to save $1000 rather than spending it on ads and more roblox stuff, that or they need a premium subscription so roblox gets paid 4 times.
Like, it’s illegal to have child labor so therefore it’s a foregone conclusion that whatever you’re doing won’t be child labor, so you might as well do some crazy shit that an employer could never get away with?
Honestly tracks with modern-day capitalism.
That said, like, it would have been cool to learn lua scripting when I was 12. Maybe if it weren’t for the obsession with constant growth we could have the nice thing without the shitty thing that supports it.
Can we eventually learn this lesson please and move on as a species? It’s literally the problem in every news story.
At first I thought “hey, patient gaming is taking off” when I read this headline, but really, what it’s saying is that people are spending most of their time on evergreen live service titles like Fortnite. Ugh.
Also, like, with every game with private servers, the private servers are pretty much universally better than the public ones. Someone close to the server has to care enough to put the thing up, which goes a long way past some company opening a few hundred for money.
Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?
Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.
What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.
I’m not sure that’s the danger you think it is, or that arguing against them is a panacea.
Arguing with them or loudly pointing at them makes a spectacle, bringing people to the issue on both sides. Just an argument isn’t super likely to bring people around if they’ve already made up their minds, but it will certainly organize the opposition.
In the mean time, unless you’re actually able to sway the thing you’re arguing over, there’s now just a big visible and time consuming turf war going on over things that nobody in the discussion has any ability to change, because they all pertain to the opinions of others.
Compare this with disengaging. Suddenly the loud opinion has nothing to reverberate off of. It’s alone, yelling into a void that doesn’t care. It’s not even a blip.
The right knows this, which is why they DARVO. We need to learn this, but to use it honestly instead of using it to become better manipulators. Disengaging doesn’t just prevent the triggering of massive opposition organization, it saves energy for where it can actually be useful. Then you can just go do the thing without making a spectacle of people with shitty opinions who otherwise wouldn’t even matter to the progress being made.
Stop giving them something to fight about day in and day out and they’ll get bored and go back to looking at big trucks instead of paying attention to politics.
Could be, I guess. I found the whole mess through SubredditDrama, which was already a bit of a cesspool of its own. To me it initially just looked like part of the whole back and forth between a lot of the notable players and subs that tended to make a sport of fighting one another. Then it was suddenly this whole other thing.
Limitations don’t get in the way of creativity, they produce it. Listening to people who have no clue how to make a good game, though, will definitely stifle creativity.
Among Us can be a lot of fun with a big group, and it goes up to 15 people. Or if you want something a little more focused on the sneaky and investigative part you could check out something like Town of Salem.
Games of low-stakes lying and finger pointing can be a lot of fun. And trying to be the baddie in one of them without giggling like a fool in an internet cafe and giving yourself away sounds amusing.
Seems like a good time to go indie. Big game companies are bloated and unhealthy. Specialization is so niche that there clearly isn’t the kind of interdepartmental communication there ought to be, and it’s pretty obvious that the money people have their hands in way too much.
That doesn’t seem to me like an environment that’s conducive to art.
I just did a replay recently and it was a lot of fun. They really nailed environments, sound, really the whole look and feel of the thing. Gameplay too; I did a monowire netrunner build this time and it was wild. Unlike anything I’ve played before, really. But I did have to cheat a bit to get there.
There used to be a monowire you could go grab out of a box right from the start, but they took it out and locked access to any monowire behind street smarts. I added a console to give myself one and added some cyberware while I’m at it, because why not chrome up?
This was, in fact, totally fine. The locking out doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with balance.
I did have to spawn myself a bunch of these new shards to increase my cyberware limit, though, because they decided to cap them out and add an item to unlock them. Again, my going crazy with it really didn’t disrupt balance at all.
So why? Because someone in some department somewhere sees game mechanics as a commodity, and they’re treating them like dlc. I get an infinite sea of generic weapons, but try to do the cyberpunk things and the game wags its finger.
Aside from treating game mechanics as a commodity and meting out little scraps, it really doesn’t seem to have any concern for player autonomy when it comes to a lot of the quests. At one point they shoved me into a hideous green snake skin pantsuit and I stopped playing for a week. The game repeatedly forced me to use a pistol, turning what would have been fun quests into obnoxious slogs while I waited to be allowed to play the game again.
Hell, even a pivotal moment in the DLC literally forces a gun into my hands and glitches out if I try to do anything it doesn’t expect. I had a character literally glitch its hands through its head to shoot at me when I tried to run behind it. That’s not even mentioning the numerous points where going off the rails just immediately kills you and forces you to reload. Not because of anything actually dangerous or bad, but just because you’re not supposed to go that way. Rather than making some obstacle, they literally just pick you up and put you back on the path. Could have invented literally anything to explain it away, maybe a security shield or something that kills anyone with a head computer who tries to leave the area, but they just didn’t bother. Telling the player ‘no’ is enough for them. Cool. Fun.
It’s a fun game overall, but it could have been a way better game with a little more inter-departmental communication, a few less money people, and a little more respect for player agency.
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Sounds like a terrible business model that deserves the problems it runs into. If a company doesn’t prioritize the quality of its offerings, why should anyone give them a cent?
Im missing a lot of charm that w2 and first starcraft games had, and i did not see any open engine recreations, nor clones that lived to this day. With warcraft 3 i only ever finished half of the game, by the time sc2 came out, i was already too old to even bother trying.
If you’ve never played Dune 2 or Dune 2000 or whatever other iterations and remakes of the Dune RTS series, I strongly recommend it. It seems like a lot of Warcraft’s DNA comes from Dune.
Yeah, seems like. Like when I was a kid and I played Dune 2, then played Warcraft a few years later, the one seemed to inherit most of its ideas from the other.
But I didn’t like go look up the dates or exhaustively check that no other game came up with the format first. I know the first Age of Empires is somewhere vaguely in that same time span too, but I’m not certain of the order.
Even just modding I’ve noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that’s equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.
The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the ‘alpha wolf’. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I’ve heard both) is an ‘alpha’ wolf that’s stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.
And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you’ve been actively developing mods for it.
There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
Yeah, exactly. They’ve created a viable ecosystem for themselves. They have a highly moddable engine and they tend to leave a lot of abandoned code in the game that modders find and make use of. People eat it up and they use it as a starting point to get into development.
I’m on exactly that track right now. For me it’s been all about very open ended kinda buggy games that you can mod the hell out of. Wanting to change or tweak a little something here and there leads to wanting to implement more elaborate ideas. Eventually it starts looking appealing to make something of your own, or to make a bigger contribution to other projects. Personally, I don’t really want to work for a big company (or anyone other than myself), but a modding portfolio can certainly be a foot in the door.
My first mod for a game was a thing to shut up the Longs in Fallout 4. Super simple, literally just broke the link to their idle audio files. That was ages ago, and my own journey has been more related to getting DayZ to do what I want and now using Conan to further explore game design and more involved elaborate systems, but Bethesda was still that first step.
They’re not perfect, and their IP in some cases has certainly been watered down a little, but they make great games and have a workable business model that isn’t as toxic as some others. They’ve done a good job fostering creativity and innovation.
I don’t really get the complaints by people who’ve never made anything even remotely approaching a Fallout or an Elder Scrolls acting like the developers are trash and they know better. Let’s see your blockbuster open world rpg.
Piracy is literally the only method by which a lot of media is preserved in the era of subscription services and abandoned properties. It’s a public service that ensures that some of the most significant art of the last century isn’t lost.
The archives of pirates are a digital museum for a culture that can’t be bothered to preserve its own legacy.
Mod support in Baldur's Gate 3 will be final handover moment to players, says Larian CEO (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Old News from the Latest Disasters: If sunlight is the best disinfectant, why haven't years of shocking tell-all stories done more to improve game development processes? [Remap] (remapradio.com) angielski
Exclusive: Fresh Jurassic Park: Survival Details Revealed, Including New Locations and More (nordic.ign.com) angielski
Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Addresses Studio Closures (www.ign.com)
“The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team,” Spencer said. "I haven’t been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It’s obviously a decision that’s very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance...
GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement (www.gamesindustry.biz)
If you’re a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? angielski
It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...
Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better?
Less DRM, smaller filesizes, no stupid anticheat, and no always online bs. Anyone agree with me?
ESA says members won’t support any plan for libraries to preserve games online (www.gamedeveloper.com)
Tales Of The Shire's First Trailer Reveals It Is Middle-Earth Animal Crossing With Hobbits - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
Fallout Show, so bad that no one will remember it in 3 months (fandomwire.com)
Open world games, need recommendations
Its been a while since I played botw and totk, I want to get into similar open world games with good combat systems, any recommendations?...
Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation, it's a gift (www.eurogamer.net)
60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data Shows (kotaku.com)
At first I thought “hey, patient gaming is taking off” when I read this headline, but really, what it’s saying is that people are spending most of their time on evergreen live service titles like Fortnite. Ugh.
You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder (www.theverge.com) angielski
Evidently on a posting tear today. What happens when you’re stuck in a Dr.'s waiting room, I guess…
New study suggests kids are now experiencing social pressures to buy in-game items (patrickklepek.substack.com)
Once you hit middle school, the pressure to “fit in” hits. Naturally, this includes games now.
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com) angielski
What to play at after work?
What game should a group of around 15 colleagues play to get the most out of 3 hours after work at an internet cafe?...
Disco Elysium standalone expansion reportedly cancelled and quarter of staff facing redundancy at ZA/UM (www.eurogamer.net)
According to Kotaku: 25 Days Into 2024 And 5,800+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced (kotaku.com) angielski
this is a running tally they’re compiling in a single “article” and yeahhhh. not looking very good right now
What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations? angielski
For consistency sake, let’s say that any game that’s >or=7/10 at what it’s trying to do while having a popular perception of being a
‘Almost nobody left’ of D&D team that helped get Baldur’s Gate 3 off the ground, says Larian CEO (www.polygon.com) angielski
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
Warcraft 2 / Starcraft type games ( or clones, or engine recreations )
Im missing a lot of charm that w2 and first starcraft games had, and i did not see any open engine recreations, nor clones that lived to this day. With warcraft 3 i only ever finished half of the game, by the time sc2 came out, i was already too old to even bother trying.
Eiji Aonuma, co-creator of Zelda video games, named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (newsinfrance.com) angielski
Former WoW devs announce new studio: Fantastic Pixel Castle (twitter.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/13613260...
Stop blaming teeth for Cities: Skylines 2 performance problems, say devs (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
The Elder Scrolls VI will skip PS5 and isn’t coming until at least 2026 (www.theverge.com) angielski