Carighan

Carighan, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?

Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
But at the same time, it’s intuitively and entirely understandable.

Who? GAME staff
What? Discovered something
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call

Or, written together, the title up above. And that’s a completely normal sentence structure, it’s essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start (“Via a mass microsoft teams call…”).

Carighan, 2 months ago

Ouff, this is difficult.

To me it’s a very close call between:

• Majora’s Mask (atmosphere, inventiveness with the loop, boss battles)
• Link’s Awakening (first self-owned game, lots of memories, also that nerve-wrecking final battle with forms after forms after forms)
• Tears of the Kingdom (the way they hid the third world until release, the grand atmosphere, the whole thing around the Master Sword)

Majora’s Mask probably wins. But it’s a really close call.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Given my experience so far, it would not surprise me if the assets were AI generated. If not manually controlled really well, those models can quickly become racist, like that Twitter bot.

But big ouff. What a situation for the devs to be in, more so because of how will received True Colours is in spite of these woes.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Which in most companies is actually everyone because they don’t want to pay someone to work on all the permissions and controls.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Still pretty early in the game - on the fourth seal - but I love it. Strong “just one more level” energy, plus the constant cycling fixes the city builder problem for me, how it all got stale very quickly. Here it’s all done after 20-60 minutes each time.

I feel they smoothed it all by now. AFAIK the only bigger issue I recall is that there is sometimes an issue with woodworkers delivery because of how some woods can proc a ton of different extra items, which doesn’t gel well with how delivery pickup is done. Fixable by always using a harpy as a hearth keeper, which I like the most anyways.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Yeah I was super-positively surprised by how faithful it was, loved replaying it.

And sure the ending fight was weird, but also, the “proper” ending fight was the room before that. So it felt complete in that regard, the last bit was just finishing off the game. Like in Crysis Warhead when you get the final gun, at that point it’s already won, just about finishing it off.

Curious to see what they’re changing.

Carighan, 2 months ago

That’s probably on Steam, not Nightdive? After all it’s just uploading some files and downloading them again, something the steam client is supposed to do for you.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Yeah I remember when this first happened, it felt a bit magical because while sure, the tech was around, this was the first time someone was doing it big. Virtual idols!

Carighan, 2 months ago

Console:

Except for when they did not, which was actually somewhat common.

But it also became quickly known, respectively stores stopped stocking buggy games. So in return, larger publishers tried their utmost to ensure that games could not have bigger bugs remaining on launch (Nintendo Seal of Excellence for example was one such certification).

But make no mistake, tons of games you fondly remember from your childhood were bugged to hell and back. You just didn’t notice, and the bigger CTDs and stuff did not exist as much, yes.

PC:

It was just flat-out worse back then. But we also thought about it the reverse way: It wasn’t “Oh this doesn’t work on my specific configuration, wtf?!” but “Oh damn I forgot I need a specific VESA card for this, not just any. Gonna take this to my friend who has that card to play it.”.

Carighan, 2 months ago

“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.

Exactly this.

Games back then were pricier - once you account for inflation.
Games back then did expect you to pay extra - in fact quite a few were deliberately designed to have unsolvable moments without either having the official strategy guide or at least a friend who had it who could tell you.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Yeah. I mean there was shitty stuff back then, of course.

Arcade games, games designed to not be beatable without their guides (it’s why moon logic is a concept in the first place), that kind of stuff. But it’s a whole different level nowadays.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Nevermind how downright bad leather is for most clothing applications. It’s high maintenance, stiff, non-breathing, non-padding and cannot be repaired easily. There’s a reason it was only used for specific parts of clothing in specific situations once we had figured out stuff like cotton or wool.

Carighan, 2 months ago

It’s supremely bad as a product, the origin doesn’t actually matter?

Smells, stiff, needs constant care, (comparatively) complex to repair, it just has virtually no upsides. It doesn’t even last long unless you’re comparing really high-quality leather to really low-quality cotton or something like that.

Carighan, 2 months ago

That’s not the same at all. PLA-printed 3D prints don’t take 1000s of years to break down, but they’re very clearly not something you add to the composter.

Carighan, 2 months ago

I mean you can make leather from all kinds of skins. And there’s one… animal… that we have a particularly large amount of on earth and we regularly have to get rid of a significnat number of deceased of without currently re-using their skin. Hrm… cool idea for an industrialist horror movie…

Carighan, 2 months ago

Note to self: Introduce more dragons to Ireland.

Carighan, 2 months ago

You know, the way you phrase it I’d be fine. Only in your example, instead of 60 for it all, it is now 60 for 80% of the story, another 2x15 for the remainder, and 10 per Outfit.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Yeah but they give you so little money compared to investors and shareholders. 😅

Carighan, 2 months ago

jobs will be cut at Creative Assembly

Ha! Can’t cut down on the QA and testing stuff if there is none! Smart thinking, CA!

Damn this sucks though. Happy for Relic that they escaped it, but Sega has been dropping the ball so hard lately, it sucks they take it out on their workers.

Carighan, 3 months ago

What about its combat is souls-ish?

I mean I love Kena, but it’s more a game comparable to other classical action-adventures such as the Zelda games, not Dark Souls as it places very little focus on accurate dodging and judging when not to dodge, plus it has no gameplay loop built around repeated death.

Carighan, 3 months ago

That’s assuming the person paying and the person receiving the input are the same people. Which in larger companies they most certainly are not.

Some manager or top-level “franchise designer” had the brilliant idea of asking streamers (of all utterly unsuited people!) for advise. Someone in the actual dev team then got all the input, and promptly decided that just asking a magic 8 ball would be far more useful and binned it. Sadly they did end up asking said ball, but eh, at least they ignored the streamer advise.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Oh wow that’s quite exciting.

Also am I wrong or is there the briefest of teasers about the actual big expansion they mentioned before right before the music video starts?

Carighan, 3 months ago

Note to self: invent better water.

Carighan, 3 months ago

It can still be fun for small groups of players running their own game though? Like UT99 still being played a fair bit?

Carighan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Let’s not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077’s side quests are not that type of C&P’ed filler crap.

They are.

What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They’re incredibly good. That’s just a few ones sadly, but they’re big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.

Carighan, 3 months ago

I do. Enough games are coming out, this is getting skipped!

Carighan, 3 months ago

I would guess the latter. That’s 10 guides a day. An even somewhat useful guide would take 5 days alone to research and write I would estimate.

What they want is the slew of spam-AI-generated “Here’s how to obtain the third rusty shortsword in age of calamity”-“guides” where it’s 5-10 pages of always the same overly verbose prose that’s totally not done by an LLM, no no. And there’s like 4 words of content in the whole article, about something utterly menial. And these guides exist for every single of 15000 items, in every single video game. Of course they do.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Primarily RockPaperShotgun, with some overall overview from bluesnews.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Instead of having to pay for the game’s premium battle pass or unlock that new hero through dozens of hours of gameplay, Blizzard will make Venture and all future heroes available to free for all players when they launch.

Wow, Blizzard actually taking a factually negative change back. No further modifications, no further rework, just a straight rollback of something that was a bad idea to begin with. That’s really a sign of the times changing, that always felt like something that is strictly forbidden at Blizzard! 😮

The new hero Venture is so/so though, IMO. Yeah their movement ability is awesome, but that weapon is so boring. And they hype it up so much, but it is just Sigma’s primary fire, including the ability to fire around corners and all. Unavoidable with so many heroes and not nearly enough niches for all of them that things will get doubled and tripled up, but it’s still disappointing to see something copied&pasted so directly.

Carighan, 3 months ago

It is, don’t let the haters stop you from poking fun at Star Citizen. It’s a ridiculous thing.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Oooh, excited for this. Loved Ion Fury, hope this one can keep up!

Carighan, 3 months ago

Paolo Macchiarini

Exactly the name I was thinking of when I read the headline. Yikes. I sure hope this one isn’t a quack and she dies from blood infection in a few weeks/months.

Carighan, 3 months ago

I think so. Which is more realistic of course. But also a weird way to out “random recoil”.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Even more fascinating, people are still chucking money at it. Because apparently too many ran out of other things to waste money on. Entirely.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Yeah, maybe. But it’s also ridiculous, finish what you have instead of constantly bolting on scope to keep the sales treadmill running.

Of course, it’s a business first and foremost. And if that’s what people gladly pay for, no fault in pocketing the money I guess.

Carighan, 3 months ago

What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.

Carighan, 3 months ago

There are plenty of jokes that look bad if you strip away the intention and context. They aren’t bad or offensive jokes they just seem offensive if you take them out of context and present them in a different way.

Yes, and as humans we are quite able to understand that we should not immediately suspect anybody who says something without any context, assuming in the situation we know we are lacking the content.

Tell me, what makes you look more suspect to a federal agency:

• The odd (frankly pretty bad, but then it’s by Shane Gills so that was expected) joke that lacking context could in theory be interpreted as a racial diss?
• Encrypting and hiding all your chat traffic?

Carighan, 3 months ago

No one has travelled further, toiled harder or learned more than Horatio. At least, according to Horatio!

Carighan, 3 months ago

I no longer play this game and in fact I think it became significantly worse over time and in particularly with the conceptually good but utterly mishandled switch to OW2, but damn that’s a well-done trailer. Big props to the team who did that.

Carighan, 3 months ago

As someone who just played Sucker For Love I find nothing wrong with gender bent characters. Ln’eta would be supremely cross with me if I did.