sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’ve seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can’t imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.

As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a “fix”? I think that number is pretty small.

But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Do people really care what gender the MC is? I just role play as whatever gender the character is.

If I’m playing Tomb Raider, I am Laura Croft. If I play GTA, I’m CJ or Trevor or whatever. If I’m given a choice, I’ll sometimes look up if the gender matters (e.g. in Mount and Blade it can impact relations), and otherwise just pick randomly. When there’s a character creation screen, I usually randomize it a few times and get into the game.

I wouldn’t mind role playing as a gay or trans person, though I’d be a little worried about the content because I’m not looking for anything with relationships, I want to wreck monsters and solve puzzles.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Huh, I guess I never want to insert myself because I’m not that interesting. :) I play games to escape myself, and I really hate seeing my own name show up in games.

But that’s probably more my personality (I hate being publicly praised) than anything else.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s fair.

It’s just not something I have experience with. Even my wife, who likes public validation, also prefers to role play in games.

But that’s the great thing about most RPGs, they have options to get whatever character model you want. So whether I understand people wanting to play as themselves or not is irrelevant. You can make your character look like yourself, I can make my character look random, and a trans person can make their character look like they see themselves. How I choose to make my character look has no impact on anyone else’s experience.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, I agree. The mods exist to push a narrative and make others angry, that’s it.

I could understand if Bethesda made the MC trans with no way to change that, but expanding role play options is never a bad thing IMO.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Nothing until they actually announce something. Rumors aren’t to be trusted at all, Nintendo has a history of disappointing on specs and making up for it with interesting gameplay.

sugar_in_your_tea,

We recently went from 2 days to 3 days, and I chalked it up to our new CEO (old one replaced for unrelated reasons). Granted, many departments were full remote, in violation of company policy.

I’m hopeful that we can get back down to 2 days in office. However, if the industry goes for 3 days as standard, the might not be realistic.

Payday 3 developer drops Denuvo from the game before it's even out (www.pcgamer.com) angielski

It's common practice for PC games today to launch with Denuvo, a form of DRM designed to stop the spread of pirated copies of games, and it's also common practice for developers to remove Denuvo several months after launch as interest (and the risk of piracy) dwindles. Less common is a developer publicly announcing it's removing...

sugar_in_your_tea,

Unfortunately, increasing cache seems to be the direction things are going, what with AMD’s 3D cache initiative and Apple moving RAM closer to the CPU.

So Denuvo could actually get away with it by just pushing the problem onto platforms. Ideally, this would discourage this type of DRM, but it’ll probably just encourage more PC upgrades.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

That’s just not true, here are a few off the top of my head:

  • video games
  • docker containers
  • web browsers
  • productivity software

RAM is actually the one resource I run out of in my day to day work as a software developer, and I get close on my gaming PC. I have a really fast SSD in my work computer (MacBook Pro) and my Linux gaming PC (some fast NVME drive), and both grind to a halt when I start swapping (Linux seems to handle it better imo). So no, I don’t think SSDs are enough by any stretch of the imagination.

If anything, our need for high performance RAM is higher today than ever! My SIL just started a graphics program (graphic design or UI/UX or something), so I advised her to prioritize a high amount of RAM over a high number of CPU/GPU cores because that’s how important RAM is to the user experience when deadlines approach.

Large CPU caches are great, but I don’t think you can really compensate for low system memory by having large caches and a fast SSD. What is obvious, though, is that memory latency and bandwidth is an issue, so I could see more Apple-style soldered NAND next to the CPU in the coming board revisions, which isn’t great for DIY systems. NAND modules are just so much cheaper to manufacturer than CPU cache, and they’re also sensitive to heat, so I don’t think embedding them on the CPU die is a great long term solution. I would prefer to see GPU-style memory modules either around or behind the CPU, soldered into the board, before we see on-die caches with multiple GB capacity.

Immortals Of Aveum Dev Ascendant Studios Lays Off 45% Of Staff (www.gameinformer.com) angielski

"Today, we are heartbroken as we part ways with friends and colleagues at Ascendant Studios – about 45% of our team. This was a painfully difficult, but necessary decision that was not made lightly; nevertheless, we have to make this adjustment now that Immortals of Aveum has shipped. We are supporting those affected in every...

sugar_in_your_tea,

It doesn’t need to be that way though. In this case, it looks like they shot for the moon and missed, when they probably should’ve started with a less aggressive title. Not every game has to be AAA, making a solid AA or indie game is totally fine too. If they did that, they could’ve released multiple games in that same time and budget and spread out the risk.

sugar_in_your_tea,

There is an ethical advertising system that works well: opt-in catalogues. I love Costco’s monthly ads, IKEA’s catalogue, Amazon’s holiday shopping catalogue, etc. When I need something, I can browse and create a shopping list.

My problem with ads is that it tries to get me to buy stuff when I’m doing something where I don’t want to buy stuff, like watching TV, browsing the Internet, or playing a game.

A game engine isn’t the right place for ads. Leave that to storefronts and other areas where I’m already looking to spend money.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, I love that analogy. When companies deviate from their core business model to try to increase revenue, it’s a symptom that the company is dying. If they’re having profit issues (which I doubt), a healthy company would innovate to attract customers, not to lock them in.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The 3D demos are impressive, and the most recent release added a lot of features for 3D development, such as a Vulkan renderer and a bunch of lighting effects.

I’m no 3D game dev, but from what I’ve seen, it’s ready for smallish 3D games. I don’t think the performance is anywhere near Unreal, but it seems to be capable enough for most indie 3D titles.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I don’t want ad blocking in my games, because I should never see ads in something I paid for. I hate that trend in streaming services, I hated it in mobile games, and I absolutely will not tolerate it in desktop/console gaming. I’d rather not play games than see ads there.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The article links to a story about some YouTubers who went on a rant about the optional pronoun feature, so yeah, I could absolutely see this getting blown out of proportion.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Unreal is not open source, it’s source-available. Open source generally gives freedoms like redistribution, yet that is explicitly not allowed by Unreal. To get access to the source, you need to agree to a licensing agreement with them.

That said, source-available is a lot better than most proprietary software licenses.

sugar_in_your_tea,

But Unity mostly targets smaller devs. The big AAA studios don’t generally use Unity, they usually use Unreal or something home grown.

It’s mostly AA and indie studios that use Unity.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s a leadership issue though. The CEO’s job is to communicate expectations to the board and balance long term and short term returns.

sugar_in_your_tea,

What did I mention that’s not part of the open source definition? Btw, I’m using this one, and only mentioned redistribution, which is the first one:

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

The next big part is able derivative works, which is also not allowed as part of the Unreal license AFAIK.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s only true if you’re talking about the goals of open source/free software generally.

If we’re just talking about a game engine and releasing games, being able to modify the engine is absolutely critical when optimizing a large game. So having source available is absolutely a very practical thing when using proprietary software.

So it really depends on what you’re concerned about. Source available is just as good as open source in most cases if your goal is to build closed source software. If your goal is to build open source/free software, it’s awful.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m pretty sure you can always modify code for personal use, you just can’t always distribute those changes. In the case of a game engine, this would mean you could modify the engine code in development, but you could not release your game with those changes in.

Unreal allows modification and distribution, but only if you’re a licensed user and only for your combined work, but you cannot distribute your own fork of Unreal, aside from a patch set for other developers.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

That’s a popular quip, but it’s just not true. If it were, Unity would lay off most of its staff and only do bug fixes. That way they’d save a ton on salary, and they probably wouldn’t lose any customers for a couple years until they fall far enough behind, so their quarterly financials would look great for about a year until they started losing customers.

This isn’t that. This is just a classic example of the leadership not understanding the business they’re in and trying to maximize profit. I think they overestimate the value of their product and what their customers are willing to pay for.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

Not Suzanne the monkey?

Also, it’s not 3D, but you may like 140, where you play as a square that turns into a circle when jumping. It’s actually a great game, like a decomposition of what it means to be a platformer.

Dune: Spice Wars review: a compulsive 4X that both nails and wastes its source material (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski

This realtime 4X makes great use of Dune’s furniture in crafting a compulsive, busy, and well-made strategy game, and its new campaign is a great addition. But the soul of Dune remains elusive, leaving its desert planet feeling barren in the wrong ways....

sugar_in_your_tea,

I loved Dune on Sega Genesis, and it had a great campaign IIRC. It’s too bad, because if this had a decent campaign, I’d probably get it out of nostalgia.

sugar_in_your_tea,

A rising tide lifts all boats.

I don’t think it’s surprising that a sci fi game with exploration elements from a major AAA studio renewed interest in a sci fi survival/exploration game from a smaller studio. If you want more of the exploration part of Starfield, No Man’s Sky is the natural option.

sugar_in_your_tea,

No, it’s probably just being sold to pay taxes.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Or it just means they see it as compensation and are selling for taxes and expenses, not because they are worried about the long term direction of the company.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And the 3D demos are impressive. The recent version uses Vulkan and has lots of interesting new features.

I hope this increased interest results in better funding. It’s a great project, just limited by manpower.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

Yes, but it doesn’t rise to the level of “insider trading,” which means using internal-only information to make trading decisions. If they sell these stocks regularly, on a schedule, in the same quantity, it’s not insider trading.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing, you can see their trades, and they’re consistent for about the same amount. So they’re not trading because of changes going on internally, they’re trading based on a schedule, probably because they need cash flow for some reason. My guess is taxes for their stock compensation.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, my wife has spent far more on Lost Ark than she ever spent on WoW…

I hate F2P, so I’ll be passing on this, but the model does work.

sugar_in_your_tea,

They do have a $100 submission fee, which the developer can recoup once they have $1k in sales. So that alone cuts out a lot of the nonsense since low selling games won’t make enough to be worth the effort.

Maybe there’s an argument that the fee should be higher, but at a certain point you’re just making releasing a passion project impractical.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

Nobody is claiming that, the claim is merely that a lot of the games under $5 are shovelware. I’m sure you could take it a step further and try to remove shovelware, but that’s gets really subjective really fast.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

Trolls. Competitors. Vigilantes. This is the Internet.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Something something $$$.

But yeah, revenue sharing makes a ton more sense. Maybe have a per-seat option up to $X in revenue, and a revenue percent above that amount.

sugar_in_your_tea,

IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.

I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Why did you spend so much time with it then? Surely you would’ve stopped after a few hours of not enjoying yourself, no?

sugar_in_your_tea,

IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.

Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.

Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It’s clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.

So I just don’t buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn’t really my thing. It also doesn’t help that I don’t like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn’t a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it’s just not what I’m looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.

But that’s what I appreciate from Bethesda. They’re pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it’s not for me.

sugar_in_your_tea,

One of the major disappointments imo is that space isn’t interesting. You only really go there for the odd ship battle to progress the plot or whatever, but you can’t really fly between planets, so you miss out on the cool side stories you get with Elder Scrolls games by walking between cities. I was hoping for Firefly the Bethesda game, but it’s just Skyrim stretched across planets that you fast travel between.

I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.

I think the planets are fine, but I’d rather have fewer, more densely populated planets. I don’t think space-colonizing people would only make 3-4 settlements per planet, there would be dozens if not hundreds of settlements before moving to the next planet. I’d rather buy a DLC to get access to more systems then current setup where everything is spread out. In fact, just give me Sol with Earth, Mars, and maybe one of a Jupiter’s moons being inhabited with the rest working like the planets in Starfield.

But no, it’s just Skyrim set it space, with fast travel between cities. That’s fine, just not particularly special. I may play it at some point, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I guess that depends on how narrowly you define “genre.” It’s a pretty good sandbox RPG, and it’ll get even better with community mods. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s great and way better than pretty much anything else.

But if you broaden it a bit, it has a mediocre story, mediocre combat, and mediocre exploration. So compared to other RPGs, it’s really not special.

So I’d give it a B grade. It gets Cs in many areas, but the sandbox is good enough to pull it up to a B. To get to A, it needs to excel at something, like exploration (e.g. do more with the ship in space) or economy (e.g. invest in trade routes and impact the cost of goods by flooding the market). But it doesn’t really excel at anything, it’s basically the same formula they’ve had in the past with a different setting.

It’s still a good game, it just doesn’t stand out in any particular way. For everything it does, another game does it better, and it really needs to be the best at something to get an A from me.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

The fact that you can’t space walk without cheats is what I’m getting at. I want to be able to leave the ship to go investigate some wreckage, get into someone’s airlock to bring some needed supplies to a stranded vessel, or set up a mining outpost on an asteroid. Basically, the same feel you get when walking between towns in Elder Scrolls games, but with the unique mechanics space allows.

Starfield does a lot of things pretty well, but doesn’t really stand out in any of them. There’s a lot of elements of a great game there, but it just ends up being pretty good instead. That’s still awesome and it’ll sell well, but I am looking for that special something, and I’m basically seeing Skyrim in space. Not a lot of innovation, just a mapping of that formula into a space setting.

sugar_in_your_tea,

But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.

So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It would be more immersive, just like flying into and out of planets with no loading screen would. Their Elder Scrolls games nailed that immersion, yet Starfield went backward with a bunch of loading screens and limitations.

It’s still a pretty good game, like an 8/10 or so, but to really get that GOTY 10/10 rating, they need to excel at something. Either have better immersion, or limit the scope in some way to improve other aspects of the game.

Steam's Oldest User Accounts Turn 20, Valve Celebrates With Special Digital Badges - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski

Some of Steam’s oldest user accounts are turning 20-years old this week, and Valve is celebrating the anniversary by handing out special digital badges featuring the original Steam colour scheme to the gaming veterans....

sugar_in_your_tea,

Nice. I didn’t make a Steam account until it supported Linux back in 2013 or so. So I guess I’ll be celebrating 10 years on Steam soon.

sugar_in_your_tea,

They could also release a few campaigns that DMs could use to start from. That wouldn’t require much dev time aside from the DM tools (e.g. add a surprise if the team is doing to well in a battle, or hold back a surprise if they’re struggling).

I think a lot of people would buy story packs, even if there’s a way to make your own or get free community stories.

What do you think is a good required completion time for video games? What examples come to mind of games that felt just right? angielski

I used to like open world games that would take 50+ hours to beat but I feel like as I get older these games can be intimidating to even start and I often get sidetracked with other games frequently only getting half to three quarters of the way through....

sugar_in_your_tea,

I don’t have a minimum, and my maximum is negotiable. I’ve played <5 hour games that felt too long, and >50 hour games that felt too short.

I generally shoot for 20-30 hours, but that’s because it seems like a sweet spot where most games with tons of filler are longer. I actually have a category for short games, because sometimes the 2-3 hour experience is what I’m looking for.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Some that I’ve played:

  • Gorogoa
  • Raven’s Hike
  • Klocki
  • A Juggler’s Tale
  • Donut County
  • Chronology
  • Golf Club Wasteland
  • Portal
  • Aer
  • Oxenfree
  • Titan Souls
  • Ittle Dew
  • Doki Doki Literature Club
  • Thoth
  • Nuts
  • 140
  • Limbo
  • What Remains of Edith Finch
  • INSIDE

Those were all around 5 hours or less, in rough order from shorter to longer (just pulled up my Steam games by playtime). I have a few more on my list that I haven’t played yet but are likely about that length if you want more. :)

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, both are on my list of games to play.

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