dumpsterlid

@dumpsterlid@lemmy.world

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dumpsterlid, (edited )

Sega doesn’t fit any of those buckets. No consistency except that they’re not consistent. You don’t know what a Sega title will bring. Like they rotate management every week.

Yeah this is a result of Sega’s management strategy where all the employees line up outside in the morning along one of the business obstacle courses. Whoever can run through the course fastest and collect the most coins gets to be CEO for the day. Is it chaotic and ableist? Yeah sure, but it does ensure that if a bear attacked the office that Sega employees would be well trained to deal with the emergency. Also, it isn’t THAT much less efficient than having utterly useless out of touch CEOs running the company who don’t give a shit about their customers or the artistic merit of what they are making. At least with this system sometimes the good thing happens amid all the chaos.

Does Sega spend inordinate amounts of money on building elaborate obstacle courses that have nothing to do with their core products? Yes, but remember all that money and more would just be going to CEO bonuses and stock buybacks for investors at a normal large company, building obstacle courses is comparatively a much more efficient and equitable way to allocate profits (not to mention there is a much smaller carbon footprint to building obstacle courses vs. yachts).

dumpsterlid,

I keep watching clips of Helldivers 2 and it looks fun but I don’t understand why I would play it over Deep Rock Galactic, especially when the original Helldivers actually has splitscreen co-op.

So what does this game’s combat bring over Deep Rock Galactic? It seems a lot flatter and less tense.

I really want to see a good YouTube reviewer critically compare them.

dumpsterlid,

Helldivers 2 is a lot more focused on combat and fighting overwhelming hoards of enemies.

I confused, Deep Rock Galactic is almost entirely focused on fighting overwhelming hoards of enemies. Stealth isn’t an option since they aggro at you which seems like a significant difference though.

wawe, (edited ) to games
@wawe@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Do you find open source games interesting/good thing as a gamer?

@games I am a game developer working on game called Mushy Score. I decided that my niche would be to create open source games. I think these could be helpful for developers or teachers to teach about games and how they are made. Most open source games are small game jam games, but there are few “real games” that are open source like 0 A.D. and Doom. As a non-developer do you think open source games could be good thing?

dumpsterlid,

Long Live The Spring Engine

dumpsterlid,

Some open source games I love

  • Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead
  • Panzer Marshal
  • Shattered Pixel Dungeon
dumpsterlid,

Meh who needs this just go play Motor Town, stick a v12 in a tiny shit stick little car that absolutely can’t handle all the torque and do urgent taxi jobs. Yeah it is a realistic racing game with a good physics engine and well modeled tire drifting mechanics not an arcade game but when you are struggling to keep your taxi pointed straight because you are still burning out at 80mph in 5th gear while your taxi customers scream at you to slow down just try to tell me you are playing “Normal” Taxi.

dumpsterlid,

Maybe this time we can solve our problems by simply just hating a powerful, successful woman though.

dumpsterlid,

I mean yeah definitely fair, i don’t disagree billionaires shouldn’t exist.

dumpsterlid,

I really wanted to get into planescape torment because I have heard amazing things about the writing and I have played decently far into the beginning (escaping from the body morgue complex into city) but the whole damn game is just grey and beige and I couldn’t take it after awhile lol.

andrew, to games
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar
dumpsterlid,

They are doubling down on Game Pass, saying all their games will be on game pass day 1 Actiblizz games are coming to game pass, starting with Diablo 4.

One step closer to the dream of turning the video game industry into the music industry

Musicians in the age of streaming cannot, quote, “record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” That pronouncement came from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in a recent interview with the website Music Ally. His comment made a lot of musicians angry and reignited frustrations over how much Spotify pays artists. At a time when the company’s business is doing relatively well, NPR’s Andrew Limbong takes a look at how the cash is flowing.

Look for video game execs spouting this exact same copypasta class war bullshit going forward

Ref:npr.org/…/comments-from-spotify-ceo-anger-some-mu…

dumpsterlid,

To be fair being better than Deep Rock Galactic is an insanely hard bar to clear.

dumpsterlid,

I mean, I really don’t care about raw numbers that much here, in terms of the core gameplay loop DRG is essentially flawless.

I think one of the things many players love about DRG is the graphical style. It certainly facilitates the destructible terrain which is an integral part of the gameplay.

dumpsterlid,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f2067249-b01f-4c09-be75-3769571db96e.webm

CALLING ALL THE CONDESCENDING PEOPLE WHO KEPT SAYING “LETS JUST WAIT AND SEE” WHEN PEOPLE LIKE ME POINTED OUT THIS WOULD HAPPEN WHEN THEIR BELOVED GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO SOLD ITSELF TO EMBRACER

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Don’t worry, the business model of companies like Embracer is literally to strip mine “inefficient” businesses run by artists through short circuiting the positive feedback loop between game developers passionate about what they do and loyal fans, trashing the work environment for the employees by cutting everything, and ripping off fans until they realize the place that made the art they love is alive only in name.

Valheim will be fine! https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/16b6a6f1-21fe-41e6-9f9d-b0f7e979c432.jpeg

dumpsterlid,

Well, this is a perfect opportunity to practice feeling empathy for artists pursuing their dream which as we all know often requires biting the bullet and doing something like working for a big soulless company to get enough industry experience to do the thing an artist really wants to do.

Also a great opportunity to just practice empathy for fellow workers, we get nowhere without solidarity.

dumpsterlid,

Tried this one out briefly definitely really fun game mechanics and I have heard the story is great.

dumpsterlid,

I‘m playing Monster Hunter World a worrying amount…

I mean going outside and family are important or whatevvvverrr, but also there is no guarantee whatever reality we zoom off to when we die will have Monster Hunter World. Play the shit out of now don’t be a fool and put off the important experiences in life.

dumpsterlid,

A decent enough artist to get hired by Triple A can absolutely get plenty of work elsewhere, and it’s getting easier every day.

Citation needed, ESPECIALLY with regards to it “getting easier every day” to earn a decent living making video games… or as an artist in general.

andrew, to games
@andrew@andrew.masto.host avatar
dumpsterlid, (edited )

The New Original Xbox X-S Console Series was just announced with two levels, the X-S Pro-X Phactor or cheaper ST-X Pro-BoxX 2.

The previous gen Xbox X/S will be re-released as a subscription legacy product called Xbox One 2.0.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.

The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.

So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.

That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.

Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).

It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can’t find a job it doesn’t matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are… they sure as hell aren’t coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn’t hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world… not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.

The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.

Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn’t profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start)… The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!

Wait… the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?

sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?

dumpsterlid,

How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?

I don’t know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn’t like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.

And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.

dumpsterlid,

If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.

Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)

dumpsterlid,

Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.

Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Microsoft with gamepass (and other large game companies) are trying to do the gaming industry what Spotify did to the music industry. Blow the bottom out of it, get consumers used to subscriptions where money goes to massive companies not the artists actually doing the work, and let it all collapse into a heap so execs can do whatever they want because workers in the game industry have zero leverage left to dictate a higher quality of life since the path to profit has been carpet bombed by the finance industry (you don’t want to work for Microsoft or Sony? Oh sorry yeah nobody else can make money in video games so tough luck finding a job somewhere else).

Why now? Well unlike the movie industry, video game nerds have a stunted awareness of the value of unions and worker organization so in plain daylight the rich can drive the entire industry off a cliff, fire a huge percentage of the workers and try to replace them with AI… and worst comes to worst those companies will be in a great position to demand whatever they want from the remaining human labor after the dust settles even if the AI crap doesn’t work.

Good old Disaster Capitalism.

dumpsterlid,

It’s 2024 can we stop pretending headlines like these are some kind of potential indicator of good rather than just putting pins in a map for the sake of records where billion dollar companies ravage mile wide swathes through forests of smaller functional companies and destroy everything good about them?

Yes I know in this particular case Epic is already a dysfunctional massive trashfire but this will just accelerate the enshittification into more of a drag race.

dumpsterlid,

fuck harry potter, read terry pratchett

dumpsterlid,

Imagine if JK Rowling had even a 1/1000th the artistry and intuitive empathy Pratchett had for the world, there would be millions upon millions of people out there with a life long love of a series who didn’t feel betrayed and forced to make a choice between being part of a community that textually hates them or continuing to love their childhood nostalgia.

<3 trans people <3 granny weatherwax and I really wanna get drunk with nanny og.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Absolutely but I do recommend whispering to yourself “get fucked JK rowling” before reading a book as it is good luck. You can substitute “eat shit” or whatever else feels right to you and it should still work fine.

dumpsterlid,

Does Nanny NOT make you do the chores?? She told me everyone else was very studious about doing them and that only I was slacking off.

Wait a minute….

She had me convinced SHE was the one being fooled this whole time, she even told me so

dumpsterlid,

Maybe you should :q your attitude

dumpsterlid,

sudo vim /chumps/bin/lm_old

gg

dG

:wq

dumpsterlid,

Sorry I use them all the time on your mum I figured you would have known

dumpsterlid, (edited )

What!? Are you serious? She texted me later and said “Don’t bother coming over again” and I honestly took it as having satisfied her so thoroughly that all she needed was one time with me!?

Also in vim “gg” navigates to the beginning of a document (remember it as the opposite of “good game”, you are at the beginning). “dG” deletes to G the end of the document, G being the opposite command to gg in that it brings you to the end of a document.

:wq of course means write and quit

dumpsterlid,

I use emacs anyways, pshh why did you think I even cared, nerd.

Ok yeah I mean I use evil bindings but I don’t need to fumble around with practically analog equipment like :wq and :x

…alright fine I just use stock spacemacs, someone let me into the wizard school and it is amazing but literally everyone else here knows to do magic and the most I have done is make a frog balloon up twice it’s size. I have to keep pretending like I am working on these massive architectures of spell books to influence weather systems in a way that takes dynamic inputs from remote wizard servers in towers…. and honestly I just love org mode in a pretty package that works well out of the box. …most of the gravestones here are dedicated to a great wizard known as Dotfile and I have NO idea who he is.

Don’t tell anyone or they will find me and run me out of the gates.

dumpsterlid,

Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see

dumpsterlid,

I just feel like what you are saying is “once the game is actually developed it will be good”. It sounds like an early access starfield.

Once the world is fleshed out I will play it, I could care less about an empty open world with vague promises. I could also care less about mediocre mechanics (is anything in pal world as fun as trying to nail a deer with a spear in valheim?).

To be fair Valheim has actual sailboats that sail according to the wind which is my pet peeve that other games don’t ever play around with this (sailboats are magic motorboats usually) so it is going to be hard to beat for me.

dumpsterlid,

Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Ok for sure, no judgement if you don’t like sailing but I grew up learning how to sail sunfishes and other derpy small sailboats.

Sailing is fun as shit. Yeah intense racing type sailors are absolutely insufferable but if you have ever had the pleasure of having a sailboat to fuck around in, it is like kayaking except you don’t have to do work. Wonderful. Amazing. Sailing is so god damn underrated in video games.

The basics of sailing are pretty simple and easy to grasp. Yet… 99% of games with sailboats as optional craft never actually make the sailboats behave like sailboats. They are just lame motorboats you drive until you can manage to hijack a speedboat. It sucks.

Or there are pirate/tall ship games where the ships just magically go in any direction you want and it just utterly kills the vibe.

There should be entire genres of sailing games by now that are basically just open world space trading games but with actually interesting vehicle controls and living dynamic universes (the fucking ocean) with regional wind patterns.

WHERE ARE ALL THE SAILING GAMES???

sigh but again no judgement if you hate sailboats but as long as a game implements them like Valheim, than rowing gets you there plenty fast enough i.e. you can just ignore them. Valheim sadly undersells sailing though since if the wind is blowing against you sailing upwind is slower than rowing which robs you of one of the fundamental magical feelings of sailing (how am I rapidly traveling my in the opposite way fronthe force powering me??).

There are so many reasons to love sailing, it connects us with human history, it is fun, and it provides a vehicle piloting experience with lots of mechanical depth.

/endrant

dumpsterlid,

Yeah but also I think the nature of viral content is just spinning out into chaos with the amount of AI generated content and bots. I am sure palworld deserves its popularity to an extent but it’s the velocity and utter completeness of palworld’s popularity that feels weird. At some level I think algorithms are heavily distorting cultural phenomena like this to be much more “winner takes all” in terms of popularity. It is not only how humans tend to act but it is also the most profitable way to monetize culture.

dumpsterlid,

I did like how it was handled in Windwaker to some degree, but that may also be because you don’t lose all your stuff 30 mins from home because a random mosquito attacked you out of nowhere 😅

Oof I got attacked by a “mosquito” and lost all my stuff way far from home in valheim and it made me temporarily quit. The mosquito was weird though, it was like 100 feet long with a big menacing mouth full of teeth, no wings thankfully.

Also some of the most fun sailing is in the tiniest sailboats you can get like sunfishes, lasers, j20s etc… they are simple, quick to tack (i.e. they keep speed through turns) relatively inexpensive and easy to get in the water and a blast to sail like a fool and capsize. Sometimes there are sailing clubs/classes you can sail these at that are pretty affordable if you live near water.

But yeah in video games it’s usually just kind of boring. You’re mostly just waiting to get from A to B, with little to do inbetween.

This is true but it is so silly, if you ever get the chance to go out sailing on a windy day on like a 20 foot hobie cat style catamaran with someone who knows how to sail it and you would NOT say the experience was boring or full of long periods of nothing stimulating. Even if the water wasn’t its own unique dynamic environment just the mechanics of keeping the sailboat hiked over with your body weight to get maximum speed without flipping over are complex and stimulating and those things FLY. In a video game there is no reason game developers couldn’t dial up the arcadeyness and speed to make this experience even more fun, but I just don’t think most game developers give a shit about sailing so they don’t even think to try. They just program a motorboat and animate a cosmetic sail on top of it that swings around to whatever direction you are going and call it a day.

dumpsterlid,

There is a precise technical answer to your question a finance person can probably give you but it doesn’t really answer the question no matter how many acronyms they throw at you.

The actual answer is that there is no reason any of this has to be rational. Business people believe so strongly that companies like embracer are valuable and have a function in society that they detect zero cognitive dissonance when said companies don’t actually do anything but buy smaller companies, dissect them and destroy value.

You can’t understand business and finance people like they are scientists, they are closer to priests of a religious sect that believe in things because of their belief system not because of some rational framework that actually supports their ideas.

I think for the rich, it is just “good practice” to commit economic violence against smaller companies, it is good hygiene for keeping the power in the hands of the rich like mowing a field once a year or something. This doesn’t fully explain how poorly some of these companies function like embracer however.

Is there any love for BAR (Beyond All Reason-FOSS RTS) on Lemmy?

I just finally got into this game and I’m completely shell shocked! I had seen it recommended before but ventured into other games without giving it a fair shake. As an avid RTS fan since Dune: The battle for Arrakis on Sega genesis, I’ve been slowly feeling more and more lackluster in the genres future prospects. I was a...

dumpsterlid,

Yeah another big Spring Engine fan checking in here, the development of the Spring RTS engine and games on it has been a long road with lots of fun games played along it, mostly in Total Annihilation derivative games like BA, AA, XTA I forgot the other acronyms… and playing a TA-like game was what brought me like many others to playing games on the Spring Engine….

We wanted to play more RTS games like Total Annihilation but other than Supreme Commander FAF no game companies really seemed interested in doing anything but copying StarCraft (ughhh) or doing something totally different like Company Of Heroes. As a TA fan it felt like the RTS genre cut off its own head by treating StarCraft like it was this perfect RTS that demanded everyone copy it and I NEVER liked it. I liked TA with huge battles, the enormous amount of units with different roles not different gimmicks, the actual modeling of unit’s projectiles not some calculated MMO-like damage exchange, the fact that aircraft actually flew not just hovered, artillery had super long ranges like artillery should and battlefields could be as large and sprawling as my computer could handle.

I hadn’t checked in for awhile, but when I tried out BAR for the first time it got me really hyped again. BAR is so polished and well made and at this point just by virtue of being a TA-like Spring Engine mod there are years and years of tweaks, additions and subtractions to the TA formula that have been hammered out through thousands and thousands of games and many different mods with different ideas of what made TA good. The end result is a REALLY solid TA-like game that has the benefit of years of knowledge gleaned from tinkering with the formula of TA. This isn’t just a clone of TA, it is TA with 10+ years more of development work focused around gameplay balance and fun.

BAR is awesome! The AI got really good too at some point?

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.

It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.

That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.

I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?

Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.

Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).

I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.

dumpsterlid,

I agree with you to an extent, in my opinion the gunplay and general movement/action parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 just isn’t fun or deep. Rockstar sucks at gunplay for the most part. I respect that the game is hugely admired and people love the story and open world but I just can’t engage with it for very long because the basic gameplay loop is too unsatisfying.

On the other hand I think really well made point and clicks like Strange Horticulture, the Blackwell Series, Machinarium and others and “interactive fiction” esque games like Roadwarden are awesome ways to tell stories. Other ways are cool too like Firewatch, Oxenfree or Papers Please. If the gameplay is fun I like games with good stories, but I don’t enjoy story focused games with mediocre but prominent mechanics.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Honestly even if you don’t like the specific mechanics of Vintage Story I think you have to appreciate it for being the only real alternative to Minecraft (besides the still pretty alpha stage project Minetest and Valoren which seems to be trying to recreate a different game). Which… stop for a second and think about it as gargantuanly lovecraftian-eldritch-god-sized of a phenomena that Minecraft is… there aren’t any other moderately successful alternatives that really try to innovate or even copy Minecraft that have stood the test of time and attracted consistent playerbases besides Vintage Story. That is awful for the health of the genre that Minecraft pioneered and popularized! As a video game fan it is worth appreciating Vintage Story JUST on that basis as there is so much incredible potential in the ideas Minecraft clumsily fumbles at even if you hate Minecraft (which honestly has terrible core game mechanics, especially combat, see Valheim for an example of how to do pretty much everything Minecraft does better minus the whole blocks thing).

Vintage Story provides an alternative place that Minecraft modpacks/total conversions (like what Vintage Story was originally) can find a platform outside the control of an awful multibillion dollar company. It is only a matter of time before someone makes a modpack for Vintage Story that you will like even if you don’t like vanilla Vintage Story. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Minecraft, even though there are countless mods for Minecraft there is no way in hell that Microsoft currently or in the future will ever truly value the role of artists and modders in evolving Minecraft. Long term as far as Microsoft is concerned the Bedrock edition and merchandising the aesthetic of Minecraft is all that is really worth investing in no matter what their PR says. It means decisions about the structure of Minecraft won’t truly ever include a consideration of how it will impact modders who want to apply their own creative spark and vision to Minecraft.

It is similar to how even if you don’t like the specific game mechanics of 7 Days To Die (it certainly at times has unfocused design goals) you have to respect it for being a great platform for modpacks and total conversions run by a company that isn’t mono-maniacally focused on being a shitty late stage capitalist nightmare machine.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

Sure Minetest and Mineclonia are great but they aren’t anywhere near as developed or fleshed out as Vintage Story. In a couple of years maybe I will agree, but at this point Vintage Story is a fully fledged Minecraft-like with a complete gameplay loop and Mineclonia isn’t. Minetest/Mineclonia are super cool though, I am not bashing them (I will bash their terrible names however).

But why would I play (and mod) Minetest, when I can play Minecraft which has way bigger community, so there are more interesting mods?

Because on a longer term scale even if Minecraft has way more mods currently there are very serious issues and limitations with the Java edition. There are also serious performance bottlenecks with the Java edition. Microsoft also doesn’t give a shit about modifying and building out Minecraft in a way that facilitates modders doing new interesting things, they are simply incapable of valuing modding given the nature of a cancerously large company like Microsoft. The point is to sell merchandise and push kids onto the Bedrock edition, that is the only lens through which the people with the power to make decisions at Microsoft will ever perceive Minecraft.

Long term, successful mod packs on Minecraft Java are on a dead end road. Maybe not everyone can see that dead end right now, but disgustingly huge and powerful companies like Microsoft only ever make one kind of choice in these kinds of situations, the dead end is inevitable for modded Minecraft. Maybe it won’t happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t happen for a couple of years but it will happen and the fact that Vintage Story and Minetest exist chugging along with small but vibrant modding communities will be the only thing that saves the creative potential of the genre at that point.

dumpsterlid, (edited )

I have been espousing its merits so much that I surely look like a shill but check out Motor Town as a low poly open world driving game that centers on supply chains of deliveries and basically GTA side job driving quests fleshed out to an entire genre with pizza delivery on mopeds, box vans delivering packages, garbage trucks, taxi drivers delivering urgent passengers as fast as possible, tow truck jobs and tractor trailer jobs etc….

The physics and driving feel are superb (very realistic unlike GTA V not that GTA V’s driving isn’t a blast), and there is a diversity of vehicles from a wide variety of sports cars to pretty much any type of work vehicle you can think of. You can tweak, tune and engine swap to turn basically any of them into a fire breathing metal box that transports you as fast as possible to utter ruin. You can play multiplayer collaborating with others on deliveries or just play singleplayer.

It’s early access but it’s got a demo so check it out! If you are anything like me you will throw your fists in the air and angrily shout why nobody has made a game like this for you before lol when you try it. I know it doesn’t look like a racing game but you can absolutely play everything in the game except bus driving like a racing game (and you can just have AI do the bus driving if you want to do bus stuff).

Tooling along in a semi with a trailer at 80mph on a windy country road and plowing cars out of the way like soccer balls for fun has never felt so good in a video game.

…steampowered.com/…/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

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