Criterion, the British studio behind recent Need for Speed titles and the classic Burnout series, will now focus the majority of its efforts on EA's Battlefield shooter franchise....
Especially since Oblivion seems to work fine on modern Xboxen. Back on reddit, all the Morrowind first-timers were using OpenMW, and all the Oblivion first-timers were playing on console somehow.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....
Spencer said in no uncertain terms that Microsoft could exit the gaming business if this projection became reality. Microsoft needs the light green and blue segments (PC and cloud) to get much larger and much faster by fiscal year 2027, or it could opt out of the business altogether....
Second-biggest chunk of the console market, effectively necessary for the PC market, gobbling up studios and publishers like fucking Galactus, and these empty suits still treat “making less money than the number we pulled from our asses” as losing money.
“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.
That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.
Ever Crisis is an avalanche of microtransactions and frustrating mobile design that makes one of Square Enix's greatest achievements a miserable experience....
Wait, they rehashed a Super Nintendo game from thirty years ago, and didn’t even launch with all of its dozen levels? The original weighed less than a megabyte! Opening day should’ve been every track from all two of the 2D F-Zero games Nintendo ever made.
Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.
Every other F-Zero game is third-party.
Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.
But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.
Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.
Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.
Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes responsible for half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?
It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.
We can’t be far from text-to-speech tweaking a ton of voice acting. Might have to pronounce or IPA your custom name, to get an AI voice to nail it… but maybe it’s better-off being wrong. There’s disarming verisimilitude in schmaltzy NPCs confidently fumbling your character’s name. Or if some characters heard it, but haven’t seen it, and you catch some mutter ‘so that’s how it’s spelled.’
Bash.org used to have a “worst of” section, for the lowest-voted quotes. It was mostly racist garbage. At some point the worst went something like, ‘that’s where black people belong: back of the bus, bottom of Bash.’
They nuked that shit shortly after, because why the fuck would you want that on your server?
Being black isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Being female isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Being queer isn’t political, until bigots like you make it political.
Every “identity” I’ve ever been given has come through violent conservative oppression. Sometimes I’m the group they like - sometimes I’m the group they hate. But I’ve never fucking asked for the distinction.
Gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity… these matter as much as hair color, until some asshole decides there’s a right answer. Every flavor of “identity politics” that conservatives screech about is an abuse they invented and hurled at people until those victims stood up and shouted “Motherfucker I am.”
You don’t need pride until someone’s tried to make you feel lesser.
Get our of our goddamn way, and stop imagining you’re the good guy. You are the entire problem. You can stop, at any time.
Bigotry is a political opinion, but the idea that all political opinions deserve identical respect is really dumb.
Some people’s ideas are bad, actually. It is fine and good to tell them where to shove it.
The kneejerk demand for “civility” confuses polite responses for appropriate responses. Some people are monsters. Some people need to hear, “fuck off.” That is the correct attitude for a worrying number of online interactions, and if moderators won’t step up and proactively remove the bigoted propagandist time-vampires who deserve it, the least they can do is stay out of the way. ‘What you chose to say is fucking awful’ cannot possibly be more of a personal attack than being told ‘everyone like you is inherently broken.’
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun.
No, it defaults to body type.
This option is literally nothing to people who don’t care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We’ve had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don’t need to endlessly litigate whether we’ve been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.
A website saying ‘no thank you’ to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That’s what moderation… is. That’s why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.
In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won’t brick your computer, it’s plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.
You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn’t been erased from reality. It’s just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.
And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don’t want to deal with that shit. You can’t make us, and still pretend you care about choice.
The reason some things get downvoted, is that they’re factually incorrect, morally intolerable, or just plain incoherent. Reasons matter. The fact it’s “your opinion” means nothing. Some opinions are bad, actually.
What you’re doing is a finger-curling argument. ‘Oh what, is curling your finger a crime?! I’m in trouble cuz I went like this?!’ Sir - you shot your wife.
In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn’t want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there’s some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.
The root issue is what’s being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called “him” or “her” independent of their appearance. To people who won’t use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they’ll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.
They’re whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they’re against anyone else having that option.
They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.
This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else’s yard.
I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.
The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.
It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.
I mean, ffs, there is a mod that lets you kill children in Skyrim. Is removing pronoun selector really worse than that?
Yes.
The people this bigotry hurts are not in the game. They’re real. And they’re the only possible target of removing a checkbox that most people won’t even notice.
Everyone showing up late to go ‘well I don’t see why they removed it!’ –
You are why.
Trolls escalate. They keep pushing until they get smacked down, then cry and scream and pretend they’ve been proven right. Being ignored doesn’t just embolden them, it bores them, and tells them they need to get worse to get attention. No matter what happens - no matter what anyone says to them - they get to use it in their stupid little word game.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
You have to simply get rid of it, and the sooner, the better.
One way is how trolls always escalate, because their entire fucking deal is pissing people off for attention.
The other is a textbook fallacy that plainly has not happened, since the last time Nexus removed some right-wing bigotry signal. This is not the first time. This won’t be the last time. The line will stay about where it is, because they don’t want to deal with this woe-is-us horseshit unless they have to.
Of course this is political - because bigots made trans people’s existence a target of their politics. Defending them against that hatred and abuse is not somehow equally wrong, compared to that hatred… and abuse.
Horseshit. It targets a feature right-wing cranks are frothing about, and it has exactly the same effect as ignoring the option. Stop feigning ignorance about what diet Nazi trolls openly despise.
Nobody cares about your willful apathy on this topic. If you don’t care, stop talking.
Undoubtedly point-clouds can be beaten, and adding a single wide-FOV render is an efficient way to fill space “offscreen.” I’m just cautious about explaining this because it invites the most baffling rejections. At one point I tried explaining the separation of figuring out where stuff is, versus showing that location to you, using beads floating in a fluid simulation. Tracking the liquid and how things move within it is obviously full of computer-melting complexity. Rendering a dot, isn’t. And this brain case acted like I’d described simulating the entire ocean for free. As if the goal was plucking all future positions out of thin air, and not, y’know, remembering where it is, now.
The lowest-bullshit way is probably frustum slicing. Picture the camera surrounded by transparent spheres. Anything between two layers gets rendered onto the further one. This is more-or-less how “deep view video” works. (Worked?) Depth information can be used per-layer to create lumpen meshes or do parallax mapping. Whichever is cheaper at obscene framerates. Rendering with alpha is dirt cheap because it’s all sorted.
Point clouds (or even straight-up original geometry) might be better at nose-length distances. Separating moving parts is almost mandatory for anything attached to your hands. Using a wide-angle point render instead of doing a cube map is one of several hacks available since Fisheye Quake, and a great approach if you expect to replace things before the user can turn around.
But I do have to push back on active fake focus. Lightfields are better. Especially if we’re distilling the scene to be renderable in a hot millisecond, there’s no reason to motorize the optics and try guessing where your pupils are headed. Passive systems can provide genuine focal depth.
Still $300 or $400 for a wonky platform. That’s priced better than I thought they were, but the minimum viable product is far below that, and we might need a minimal product, to improve adoption rates. The strictly necessary components could total tens of dollars… off the shelf.
Less than you might think, considering the small range perspectives involved. Rendering to a stack of layers or a grid of offsets technically counts. It is more information than simply transmitting a flat frame… but update rate isn’t do-or-die, if the headset itself handles perspective.
Optimizing for bandwidth would probably look more like depth-peeled layers with very approximate depth values. Maybe rendering objects independently to lumpy reliefs. The illusion only has to work for a fraction of a second, from about where you’re standing.
Alpha-blending is easy because, again, it is a set of sorted layers. The only real geometry is some crinkly concentric spheres. I wouldn’t necessarily hand-wave Silent Hill 2 levels of subtlety, with one static moment, but even uniform fog would be sliced-up along with everything else.
Reflections are handled as cutouts with stuff behind them. That part is a natural consequence of their focus on lightfield photography, but it could be faked somewhat directly by rendering. Or you could transmit environment maps and blend between those. Just remember the idea is to be orders of magnitude more efficient than rendering everything normally.
Need for Speed developer Criterion to focus on Battlefield (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Criterion, the British studio behind recent Need for Speed titles and the classic Burnout series, will now focus the majority of its efforts on EA's Battlefield shooter franchise....
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer says acquiring Nintendo would be ‘a career moment’ (www.theverge.com) angielski
Microsoft documents leak new Bethesda games, including an Oblivion remaster (www.theverge.com) angielski
Stadia's death spiral, according to the Google employee in charge of mopping up after its murder (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....
Microsoft May Exit Gaming Business If Game Pass Subscribers off Console Don't Increase Enough by 2027 (wccftech.com) angielski
Spencer said in no uncertain terms that Microsoft could exit the gaming business if this projection became reality. Microsoft needs the light green and blue segments (PC and cloud) to get much larger and much faster by fiscal year 2027, or it could opt out of the business altogether....
Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis turns Square Enix's best into an avalanche of money-grabbing tactics (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Ever Crisis is an avalanche of microtransactions and frustrating mobile design that makes one of Square Enix's greatest achievements a miserable experience....
Nintendo will update F-Zero 99 with more courses very soon (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Nintendo is set to update F-Zero 99 with more courses and modes in the near future....
Microsoft's next-generation Xbox pitched as a "cloud hybrid" console (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Microsoft Nintendo acquisition hopes revealed by leaked Xbox exec email (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
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Xbox Partners With Alpine F1 Team For Multi-year Sponsor Deal As "Official Console Partner" (wccftech.com) angielski
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Your Minecraft account might be gone forever unless you act now (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
The ROG Ally gets a new Zen 4c chip and a worrying price tag (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
That's effectively half the Steam Deck's GPU for near twice the price....
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher Urges Members To Approve Strike Authorization Against Video Game Companies (deadline.com) angielski
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com) angielski
Valve employee reveals “stupid expensive” scrapped VR console plans (www.dexerto.com) angielski