This is the worst take I’ve seen in a LOOONG time. The language learning is one of the best systems in NMS. The developers literally spent YEARS adding to the game, completely for free, but they don’t “respect their players”?
I know very well what was shown and what was stated, versus what was there at launch, but I’m interested in what you were going to cite. And I specifically asked about what was being referred to, because there’s a huge gap between the validity or veracity of many of the claims of lies.
Because if it’s just about the multiplayer working like anyone would obviously expect multiplayer to work, rather than just being able to see message boxes left by other people, yes, he lied to players about that, and he’s apologized many times for that, and talked about and shown the development pitfalls they ran into while they were trying to build the multiplayer, and has since implemented what was originally promised.
But I see people make other claims, almost always based on the original cinematic E3 trailer, which usually boil down to, “x feature that was present didn’t look like it did in a pre-rendered eye-candy trailer”, or things like “the flight system wasn’t 6DoF” which never even got mentioned, but was just assumed because spaceship, etc, and years later players still lie about what was or wasnt promised for a game that has since grown into having more content than was ever promised.
I really dislike that it’s game news outlets that get the vote, because they’re just plain gonna have a different outlook on games than people who don’t have to engage with ones they both do and don’t like as a job, and it really shows in the kind of games that get picked (shorter main storylines, narrative-driven), and the ones that don’t (sandboxes, open-world games, strategy, simulation games, etc).
And that’s only even when it’s not a selection of the 5 most well-known games, since just like the Academy Awards, not all of them have even played all the games they’re voting on.
It’s sad, but I think that the massive explosion of really high-quality smaller games means there’s ultimately less money to go around from buyers, all at the same time as big companies are consolidating funding into a few big-name series.
Anode Heart, Moonstone Island, Spirittea, My Time at Sandrock, Empty Shell, Quasimorph, Fae Farm, Sunkenland, Black Skylands, Techtonica, The Leviathan’s Fantasy, Forever Skies, Ghostlore, Roots of Pacha, Stranded: Alien Dawn, Homestead Arcana, Terra Nil, Sifu, Industries of Titan…
All of those released this year. That’s a LOT of really good small games (and that’s just from the games I got), even if they’re not all technically indie. I personally LOVE space games, as well as colony/group management sims, but Jumplight Odyssey just didn’t feel like my vibe, sadly.
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
I’m usually ranked either 3rd or 4th in FFA deathmatch matches, so if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not pushing the non-cheaters down, what is the point of cheating? And if they’re hiding it so well that they’re not actually even winning, how are they causing so much grief?
Maybe it’s a bigger issue in Ranked/ competitive, but if you’re not actually on an esports team I just don’t get caring about rankings and playing ranked (is it just for the ranked season profile badge? I did that one year to get to Gold Nova 3, and then never bothered again).
I remember back in like 2016~2017 seeing one of those spinning aimbots with a wallhack, just sitting at CT spawn in Dust 2 and killing everyone on T. We all watched it for 5 minutes until it got VAC-banned. That one was hilarious.
I do wonder if West Coast US (where I am) is more heavily policed than other regions. That would make sense if Valve is doing some kind of post-match automated analysis of player behavior, which would probably be too compute-intensive to run everywhere.
I’d argue that any software that is adversarial towards the user/computer owner, and takes actions specifically to hinder an action by them, on their own machine, is malicious.
We’d be absolutely apoplectic if the government demanded we install a surveillance tool on our laptops in order to e.g. access the DMV website or file our taxes, but when someone tells us to in order to play a game, it’s okay? Nah.
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.
Earth 2150 includes the base-building, as well as a very cool “persistent homebase” mechanic for the singleplayer campaigns, where you build bases in the mission sites but also have a home base that you can transport units to/from, for use in future missions.
Some people seem to think that 3 years (from when AAA companies normally drop their first teaser until release) is the full game development lifecycle duration, and anything past that must be abandoned.
I absolutely LOVE the concept of Caves of Qud, but I literally suck at it so badly that I cannot actually experience it. I leave the starting town, and insects kill me, every time. I have literally started over 50 times, and I never get further than some reeds where insect things kill me.
Starfield player counts will go way up once the modkit is released. Every single one of those people playing Skyrim on Steam have modded it out the wazoo.
I love the idea. Worker co-ops and subscription-based news (just like a newspaper) are both perfect models for this. I’m a big proponent for and supporter of the Patreon model for small creators.
…But I read through their articles and they’re just not in sync with my taste in gaming. I think they need more writers who are into sandboxes and sims, because they all seem super into smaller, narrative-core games, and somewhat derisive of open worlds that don’t hyper focus on a story.
Hmm, they aren’t clear whether it’s fully voice-acted or whether he provided phonetic sounds for them to synthesize according to the text, but in either case, it’s not AI whatsoever.
Important to note that ESS Technologies (the company cited there) was literally a company who made synthesized speech for video games.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer’s technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games.
The only time you have to wait for the ship is if it’s destroyed or lost. If you fly it to the station or landing zone and stow it, the delivery is immediate.
And you can buy and rent ships in-game, using in-game money. This is about preventing you from instantly jumping back in the same ship repeatedly which could have huge implications for PvP, for instance.
Well, if taming dinos in ARK was instantaneous, it would massively change the game, and turn it into nothing but a constant stream of t-rex (or other large predator monster) battles. Those 1-hour countdowns are a time-gate for balance.
If reloading in CS:GO was instantaneous, there would be no tactical decision around when you do it, or danger presented by it happening at an inopportune time. Those 3-second reloads are a time-gate for balance.
There are tons of time-gated mechanics across all sorts of games. You just don’t like this one.
How does the user experience improve or degrade if the wait is [less]?
Well, it means that other players may have to contend with them too-quickly returning to a fight as though nothing happened, which would be pretty crappy if you just got finished killing them. It would mean that if you fly across the solar system in a ship with a very fast Quantum Drive, you could potentially just summon your large, slow ship at your destination, effectively obviating the difference in travel time.
What’s the difference between acceleration humans can’t survive and wait times? What’s the line we can’t cross to suspend disbelief?
It’s not about realism, it’s about game balance. Your ships are something you need to take care of. Dying is and will have major consequences (loss of items, for instance). Do you think that Eve’s manufacturing timers are about realism, or that they are disrespectful to the players? Should a tiny shuttle take the same amount of time to build as a Titan (the largest ship class in the game)?
There are like 14 people who play the current iteration seriously, everyone else are just trying to keep up to date on the status of SC.
At this point you are just flailing.
If you actually had any clue about SC or had bothered to Google it, you’d know DAU numbers (50,000 average daily players across all regions, in 2022), and you’d never have made such an inane claim.
And no, CIG does not call it a tech demo, they call it an alpha, the 2 of which are not remotely similar.
That was a standard that existed because of older, ‘linear’ SDLCs. It stopped being the case when Agile development took over. When you’re using Waterfall, and all your milestones are planned out before a single line of code is written, you can do that.
Modern software development doesn’t work like that, and it’s silly to use nth-degree nested decimals (0.1.0, 0.1.1.2) when you can just use 1.1, 2.13, etc, and call something RC1.0 and 1.0 on release without bothering with internal version numbers or project codenames (or just keep the working version numbers anyways).
Freelancer is one of my favourite games, and Discovery is my favourite Freelancer mod. Thought you fine folks might want to take a look at the trailer they’ve just put out....
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
No, 10 years since the announcement of their intent to build the game. Then they had to build the company, the engine, and they are building 2 games at once (SQ42 and StarCitizen).
Developing a AAA single player game + an MMO at the same time, with the components working across the 2, and now being at the point where they are feature complete on SQ42, is pretty impressive.
I’ve been playing it with my wife for years, so it rankles me when people show up with the “will it ever release!?” takes. Go play it and see for yourself; they have free-fly events every quarter, so you don’t even have to buy anything.
“Will Eve Online ever release? They haven’t shown us any progress on Walk In Stations in years!” /s
They didn’t start pre-production in 2010, that’s when they started building the Kickstarter video, unless you’re counting the broad story strokes in CR’s head as “pre-production”, in which case Starfield was in pre-production for 25+ years. :P
Development on SQ42 started in 2013, and 10 years to not only build a game, but the engine tech and the studios as well, is not at all crazy given the game. Major games like RDR2 and GTAV take 8+ years, and they are working with already-established teams, and not doing anything crazy tech-wise.
And yes, MMOs have extremely long lives, both pre- and post-release. Eve is over 20 now. WoW is who knows how old. Maple Story devs have literally had kids and watched them go off to college.
You are basically throwing out the existence of bad AAA games to discredit the idea that people can pull off AAA games. Here’s a secret; in software development, money and experience cannot overcome bad management. Lots of publisher-driven games release as crap because the publishers have them pegged to a certain financial quarter they want to show a revenue pull in, irregardless of where the game is at.
But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.
I think it’s fair to hold early access games with skepticism, but plenty of people do play early access games (and SC).
But also, CitCon is first and foremost an event for current players, not a marketing one for new players. It’s a bunch of dev panels on nitty-gritty details of things like UI design, flight model physics changes, npc AI design, backend economy simulations, sound and lighting, etc. The SQ42 video was them throwing current players a live-view bone about the state of SQ42 development, rather than just the usual Jira-derived sprint status reports and development milestone updates that we get every 2 weeks.
All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.
This is just cynicism about publisher-driven game-dev. It may be justified for those, but SC is not one of those, it’s quite literally an “indie” (publisher-independent) game. Plenty of independent game developers create “large-scope” games (Grim Dawn, Kenshi, Rimworld, Project Zomboid, etc) that have scope and depth (e.g. in number and complexity of mechanics) comparable to what AAA games do.
If people had not been actually playing SC (since what, 2016 for PU release iirc?) then I’d understand the idea of its potential “non-existence”, but it’s hard for me to take that stance seriously when it’s sitting on my harddrive right now.
Last night I did 2 ‘bunker missions’ (infiltrate facility, kill bad guys, loot), and salvaged 3 derelict ships. Night before that I was doing bounties on NPCs and running bomber support for some guys who had gotten pinned down by another group of players at a planet-side wreck site (Ghost Hollow). I don’t do mining, or cargo hauling, or drug running, or ship or ground pvp, or player-rescue medical missions, or racing, or investigations, but those are also in there.
I swear sometimes it’s like the people who talk about SC ‘not releasing’ seem to have no clue about what has literally already been released.
Yet I suspect that if SC released now as a 1.0, and then continued to add stuff for 20 more years in order to reach a comparable number of game systems as Eve has now, you’d be critical of it.
I doubt you played Eve back then (if at all), but it had fewer game systems than SC has now.
Does SC feel like a $70 game ready for release and formal critical/audience review?
Compared to plenty of other AAA games? In terms of game loops, yeah absolutely.
Eve was a complete game with a complete gameloop.
What gameloop was that? There was no endgame back then. There was mining, manufacturing, and combat. That was about it. But I’m sure you in all your infinite knowledge and totally-not-just-talking-out-your-bum experience with Eve know that, right?
I’ll copy from another of my comments:
“Last night I did 2 ‘bunker missions’ (infiltrate facility, kill bad guys, loot), and salvaged 3 derelict ships. Night before that I was doing bounties on NPCs and running bomber support for some guys who had gotten pinned down by another group of players at a planet-side wreck site (Ghost Hollow). I don’t do mining, or cargo hauling, or drug running, or ship or ground pvp, or player-rescue medical missions, or racing, or investigations, but those are also in there.”
A game is either a full release or it isn’t.
This is an absolute gas. Other people in here talking about how AAA games all release incomplete nowadays, so they don’t trust that SC will be complete on release, and you in here going, “no guys, games that are releasedARE complete, and ones that aren’t released aren’t.” I’m not claiming SC is complete, but claiming that a game saying it’s released is the arbiter of it having a complete experience is just hilarious.
It’s more about time. I’ve been here since the beginning, and back in 2016 it made sense for people to be like, “this is way over-scoped and they don’t have a lot to show for it”, but 7 years later there is a ton to show for it (I’ve spent far more time playing it than Starfield, and I sank 120 hours into that in a little over a week, to give you some idea of how much I play games), but people gonna bandwagon just to feel smart I guess…
Personally, hard disagree. I don’t find FO76 fun at all. The world feels small, the characters are boring, and finding zany houses sprinkled around breaks any versimility of the world, which is the cornerstone of Bethesda’s games.
To be fair, ESO shouldn’t really be on this list. ESO was developed by Zenimax Online, not Bethesda Game Studios (Todd Howard’s team). It’s as close to Fallout or Starfield as Prey or Doom are (same publisher, different devs).
Morrowind is imo the best from a gameplay mechanics perspective. The utility magic alone was such a huge loss for future games.
I could cast levitation, walk up to the moon prison, magically open the lock, use chameleon to sneak inside, steal stuff from 30 feet away with telekinesis, and if the guards find me, jump down with slowfall and then escape underwater with waterbreathing.
I don’t doubt it has new events, new ways that things can pan out, etc… but it’s the same characters, the same goblin camp, etc.I am very big on exploration, and without a world large enough to find places I haven’t seen, or at least places that it’s been so long since I saw that I don’t remember it, I bounce off games very fast.
New single planet fantasy game from Hello Games (www.youtube.com) angielski
The Game Awards 2023 Discussion Thread
Hey y’all. Figured I’d make a thread for this. Discuss anything about the game awards and it’s announcements here!...
Armello studio lays off over half its staff and 'indefinitely' pauses development on its ongoing early access game because 'almost all funding and investment has evaporated from the videogame industry (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Valve needs to step up on Anti-Cheat angielski
So yeah, I want to discuss or point out why I think Valve needs to fix Anti-Cheat issues. They have VAC but apparently its doing jackshit, be it Counter Strike 2 (any previous iterations) or something like Hunt: Showdown the prevalence of cheating players is non deniable. For me personally it has come to a point that I am not...
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.
What game company from your childhood do you remember with fondness?
I was thinking about how I remember Maxis fondly, and I got to wondering what other people’s experiences were like!...
Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in 'company reset' (web.archive.org)
By Anna Tong...
Stardew Valley Expanded exceeded its creator’s wildest dreams (www.polygon.com) angielski
Caves of Qud’s “Creatures of the 7th Plague” Update Released (youtu.be)
Live and drink, water-sibs
Here Are The Nominees For The Game Awards 2023 - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
Former Kotaku writers are launching a new video game site — and they own it this time (www.theverge.com) angielski
Embark Studios' The Finals uses text-to-speech AI for in-game voices (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K (youtu.be) angielski
Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
Discovery Freelancer Multiplayer - Official v5.0 Release Gameplay Trailer (youtu.be)
Freelancer is one of my favourite games, and Discovery is my favourite Freelancer mod. Thought you fine folks might want to take a look at the trailer they’ve just put out....
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
Every Bethesda RPG, ranked from worst to best (www.pcgamer.com) angielski