Other developers have already voiced their opinions on Baldur’s Gate 3. And it’s been “Oh no! Baldur’s Gate 3 is ruining the expectations of gamers about what a game is.”
Meanwhile most people playing BG3 have been saying “Finally, some good fucking food.”
Are gamers getting older? It would be interesting to see how this breaks down by age.
I’m getting older. I have 3 kids and no time. 10 years ago I had no kids and 3 time. Now when I play, I just put it on the easiest setting and play it like an interactive movie.
Na, gaming is where I can realise great strategy I cant do in real life. I’ve never been at work going “just want to do this” before I go home and sleep
Yeah, I’ve played plenty of Civilization over the years, but I’m married now. I have a kid. I keep a note with what I’m doing because it might be a couple months before I play again. I could play more, but I want to spend time with my wife and my kid. Usually when I take time to play I want to play again the next night, but that’s often not feasible, and then it turns into weeks again.
I started playing Morrowind maybe 6 months back, got hours into the game and was having a good time. Then I didn’t get a chance to play for a month, now I haven’t gone back because I have no idea what I was doing since half the stuff doesn’t seem to be written in the journal, and when it is, it assumes I remember who the person is or where I was supposed to be going. So I just haven’t picked it up again.
To be fair, Morrowind is just that kind of game. It’s been many years since I’ve played it, but I remember it being one of the last truly open world experiences I got from playing games. The plot drops you off in the first city and kind of just let’s you go at it. I remember hours of just wandering until I ended up at the city of vivec, which is the mess of floating pyramid temple lookin jobbies out on a lake somewhere. I didn’t know shit about anything but it was awesome and that was enough for me. Elden Ring almost brings this feeling back sometimes.
It was great while I remembered what was happening! But sometimes your only reference to a quest is something that says “Go out the door, take the third left, and look for an orange door” and you just have no idea even what city you were in when you got that note 😆
During the couple of weeks I was playing it, I didn’t actually feel lost at all. But now trying to return to it just feels more like a chore than a good time. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 now instead, I’m back in the era of quest markers!
You can add map markers with custom descriptions in Morrowind. I use them to leave little “what the fuck am I doing” notes for myself before leaving the game if I don’t know I’ll be back on within a couple days
For real though it can be a hard game to jump back into if you’ve had it on pause for a while. I usually just make a new character at that point see where the new adventure goes. There are so many factions and places to explore no one character can experience the game in full anyway
“We can say that, during his time at Telltale, Zak was one of the most talented, balanced and inclusive game directors we have ever worked with, and that is evident in the games he has delivered.”
That statement doesn’t read as the defense they think it reads as.
It reads as “all of our other game directors are somehow actually worse.”
Yeah, I read the IGN article earlier today and telltales statement actually put me off them if I’m being honest. None of the devs/publishers come out of this looking good.
I agree, I was of the mindset that I wasn’t going to buy it at launch because too many games are broken at launch, but then I the reviews were all great, and I learned that there would be no microtranactions and I realized that this is the type of game I want to reward by buying early and paying full price. I’ve not been disappointed.
Okay? I already said I am going to buy it but it would be great if it was on Game Pass which I already pay for, which apparently is downvote worthy that I am a bit poor at the moment.
apparently is downvote worthy that I am a bit poor at the moment.
Nah, you didn’t mention anything related to you only being able to afford gaming via GamePass in your current situation, so it can’t be that. Maybe your comment just didn’t jive with people on its own merit, completely unrelated to your financial situation. (I don’t have any particular feelings about your comment in either direction, so I’m just speculating.)
It’ll get it on Steam later, the implication was there. Odd, though. I was considering console until I saw how the frame rate is: “frame-rates are in the low 30s in performance mode (with some screen-tearing) and a nearly locked 30fps in quality mode” (Eurogamer). Definitely getting it on PC, eventually.
Games reach Game Pass via deals similar to those offered by Epic. Microsoft pay the publisher a fixed amount, so if it is believed that it beats the proceeds from the projected sales for the given period, there’s no reason not to agree to it. In other words, it’s all about how much they would offer and how long it would have been since the game release.
I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
It’s also, imo, because it’s a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, “I have a masters but can’t find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?”
And each time I explain that what they’re doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers’ salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.
Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)
Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
I definitely play games for the escapism (have you fucking seen this shit that’s going on?) but I manage to not be a bigoted conservative sociopath just fine. I don’t think that’s the cause
You asked why it attracts them. Which is escapism. Not everyone looks for escapism for the same reason. And it explains why GTA VI has so much outrage around it.
I didn’t but that does not surprise me at all. Apparently reich-wing chuds even made a mod to remove the ability to choose “they” as a pronoun in Starfield – I guess the fragile little flowers felt that they were being forced to accept the existence of us queers?
Mods are a different beast and not representative of the game, devs, or player base. Mods like this often get removed from big modding sites like Nexus, forcing them to be mostly in their own spaces. (There is/was a bg3 mod overhaul that makes every black npc white, some lesbian npcs into men so they are straight couples, the ability to change your gender and lock it to the body types. Etc and so on. But you can’t find it on Nexus. I remember the white Wyll mod but it got removed within 3 days)
It’s another matter entirely when a developer bakes this kind of shit into the game. Not every game has mod support and not everyone mods.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were to look at your past comments you’d prove my point for me. You might do it right in this thread for that matter
Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
Starfield, the epitome of scientifically correcty simulations. Why would I expcet my Starship Travel Simulator 2000 to be a fun-focused game after all, durr.
It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
But this was a dying business years ago, it was propped up by a few people who made a shit ton of money and a whole bunch of idiots they convinced to hold the bag.
GameStop was never going to last long, it was just delayed
It could if they were willing to modify their business model. They could have leaned into the game merchandise more but relying on used game sales was never going to be sustainable.
It should have ended years ago, it’s a crap company who were annoying to do business with, it became a meme and got to live a few extra years. But I say good riddance
For those wondering if this is under exaggerated, it’s not. Now my experience is on the Switch.
This issues I saw in my time before I got refunded was as follow. Texture Flickering and Shadow Flickering (hard to see as a screen shot so this is the worse I saw)
Well I’m glad you laying it out for us, I’ve got a better idea what I’m dealing with. And it really does miff me on how unnecessarily wasteful the game is with storage
Ditto, I sadly didn’t go online so no comment there. Well I mean I tried once and I couldn’t connect so I just jumped into instant action. But yeah the storage requirements are a bit unrealistic on Switch. I don’t think you can even play it on OG switch without a Micro SD Card.
But you’re actually probably at least partly right. I’m sure they’ve done at least some upscaling and stored at a higher res which may actually take up more space.
The controls are “fine” for the most part. If you were on an Xbox controller it would work. Space Battles in Battlefront II are an improvement, but the same treatment was never made to Battlefront 1. If I had to complain about anything, it’s that the auto aim needs to be more sensitive and when you blast an enemy it auto locks on them like the console games. Mouse and keyboard this would be annoying but on controller it’s necessary.
Looking at the 34GB install, I’m guessing it’s some kind of massive emulation layer; it’s scary to say but I feel like we’ve just run out of game developers that can genuinely code against the machine itself to optimize install size and performance.
When you look back on the meager specs of old consoles and what they got running there, it now feels more and more impressive.
Found a list of pal and Pokémon comparisons. And frankly, I think it just shows how lazy Pokémon has always been. Sure the two sheep monsters and the two stingray monsters look similar, but that’s because stingrays and sheep actually exist!
Should we start in on gamefreak for ripping off reality?
People comparing Piplup and the penguin pal and I’m like: they’re PENGUINS. They’re small PENGUINS, how the hell do you want them to not to look like each other!?
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn’t on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
I don’t really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn’t be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren’t.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I’m a developer. It’s work to do anything, code doesn’t grow on the LLM tree yet. That’s a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is ‘let us figure it out, just don’t sue us’. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
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