setsneedtofeed

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a1a460cc-7f07-460e-84b4-9f03424a42e6.jpeg

I’ve been working my way through Half-Life Opposing Force. It is harder than the base game, but I do enjoy it. It has a lot of ideas like the squad mechanics that would be great to see reworked.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.

Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.

I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.

My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.

Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.

I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.

I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don’t need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I’m thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.

The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

This is a good example. The cartoony graphics work well for Nintendo because it fits their hardware better as well.

For my personal example I can still play Starfox64 easily, but Goldeneye (one of my favorite childhood games) literally gives me a headache to look at. Goldeneye was going for a more realistic look on the engine of the time and aged terribly. Starfox is all big bright cartoon designs.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

Not as much as you’d think. I keep my soldiers faceless and unattached until they are fairly leveled up. By the the time they get customized, they tend not to get meatgrindered. Usually.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9017b895-f3a0-4ec3-909b-eb83e6887fc0.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

Nothing will ever top the Modern Warfare 2 Infamy trailer.

Imagine it is 2009 and you have no idea what the future of COD looks like, no clue what is going to happen in MW2, and you see this trailer.

setsneedtofeed, 6 miesięcy temu

Live the dream.

www.moddb.com/mods/dnf2001-restoration-project

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

Repostin’. Trying out Arcanum for myself for the first time.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e9c1447b-0824-475b-b7f0-de79dbdd3ab8.jpeg

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

“Guns guns guns” Brrrrrrr

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

Anime waifu weirdos turn out to be weirdos. More at 11.

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

Those were both side games. Like how Fallout New Vegas isn’t Fallout 4.

setsneedtofeed, 7 miesięcy temu

Shibari controller setup.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

One time I got an “in between” job at a local business. The first day I showed up and the place made me sign a 17 page front and back NDA.

I’ve signed actual, legitimate NDAs. They are like 3 pages, max. Some people are just preposterous.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn’t a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.

Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they’d only spent a little more they’d have kept the game afloat.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.

Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

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setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.

Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

There’s a danger in any game where it might be largely designed and marketed to be one thing, and then has lengthy mandatory sections where it becomes another.

Poorly made stealth sections are a prime example. Game designers want to change things up, but if the game isn’t made to do stealth, it can easily turn into an annoying mess. There are a few (not a ton, but a few) games where the mandatory stealth sections are well liked, but they were made to carefully take advantage of the game’s strengths and knew when to end.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Oh boy. Time for an 800 comment long flamewar about Star Citizen. I’m ready.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Unfortunately the good taste of people who actively comment about games often has only slight overlap with what makes money.

Three of the top ten US game earners in 2024 were yearly sports game rehashes. One of the top ten games was Call Of Duty. One was Fortnite.

These are money making machines. We can argue and beg and plead all we want. There is a huge mass of gamers out there was simply don’t care, and who will continue to buy formulaic rehashes and microtransaction infested treadmills.

The AAA publishers are not in it for the art. Look at AA and indie if you want games that are willing to appeal to a niche. I’m talking to you and everyone else reading this because this might actually have an effect. Saying what AAA publishers and developers should do is pointless, not like they will ever read it.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Personally, I think Star Citizen is shallow and pedantic.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.

Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Its a educated wish.

setsneedtofeed, 8 miesięcy temu

Indeed.

setsneedtofeed, 9 miesięcy temu

Unironically, I would play this.