Carighan

Carighan, 3 months ago

Why? The changes seem pretty sensible in regards to what was clearly above and below the power curve?

Carighan, 3 months ago

I would also put Subnautica here - and personally say it is worlds superior to Stranded Deep but of course personal preference can give either hte advantage.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Personally I thought What Remains Of Edith Finch was boring as hell as none of the emotional points hit and the super-low-fi sequences made the game feel almost buggy and as a result ruined a lot of the atmosphere.

OTOH, I loved Firewatch, a great short interactive story about someone working in isolation and trying to get away from their life.

Carighan, 3 months ago

I sure hope so, as someone who grew up with gauntlet everything else would be an insult.

Carighan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

This reads so weird.

The company is… just a consultation company? The kind of one you’re supposed to hire when working on a script including minorities et al to ensure you’re not accidentally getting something wrong or presenting it in a stereotypical or atypical way?

And for some reason they’re angry about someone listing games they’ve worked on, as if any kind of exposure would ever be bad for a consultation company that, by its very nature, usually works in the background and hence finds it a bit difficult to get exposure?

And at the same time, someone makes a Steam curator list because they’re somehow pissed some devs are doing something devs ought to do, hire a company specialized in character writing instead of letting someone less experienced do it?

Do people really, in 2024, not have any bigger issues so they 're busty with this shit?!

(edit)
Ah, it’s a very biased “article” that clearly just wants to riff on the consulting company further as if they’re responsible for games being bad, not the devs actually making the games. I also frequently blame the visual marketing ad designer for the graphics driver crashes, aye.

Carighan, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

group offers diversity inclusion consulting, whatever that means

It usually means ensuring a lot of small details. For example if you have a native american character, they’d make sure you do not randomly pick a culture that doesn’t fit what the character does or their background, that you don’t show some non-native stereotypes, that you don’t idolize them like in stories unless your specific story calls for that, etc etc.

You’re supposed to work with consulting companies like these when you don’t have people who can judge this on your own team, because it’s so easy to get so many details wrong. Of course it’d be easier if your team already knows how to do it, sure. But if you can’t, then it’s the right step to get someone external who can help you not make a joke out of a character. Again, unless they’re suppsoed to be a joke.

Carighan, 3 months ago

If you read the list itself and the discussions about it, it’s clearly a call for harassment (the list, that is), not just a simple listing.

Carighan, 3 months ago

what makes game great is the effort put in not whether it is woke/anti-woke

More importantly, the moment someone uses the word “woke” in such a context you already know that:

• They don’t actually know what they’re talking about.
• They are the problem, not the games they’re complaining about.

Carighan, 3 months ago

I struggle to think of an otherwise good game they have “destroyed” by “forcing” a narrative or token characters.

That is to say, I don’t think I can point to a case where the game would have been otherwise good. Adding badly written characters to bad games does make them if anything marginally better (at least they’re consistent 😅), plus unless the devs completely lost control of their own project the consultation company would not actually implement the characters. They’d give you background stories, profiles, example interaction scenes where they took scenes and re-did them with their characters, or example lists of character archetypes to utilize this profile in.

The actual (bad) writing, (bad) characters and (bad) narrative are still up to the devs to (badly) add.

(edit)
I mean just going by their official project list, I can only personally mark out Suicide Squad, BattleShapers and Sable as bad, and none of these games needed their inclusionism - such as it is, you could argue Suicide Squad makes a mockery of it anyways - to be terrible games, they were plenty able of being that on their own. Plus again, it’s the devs doing that, not the consulting company.

Carighan, 3 months ago

The “article” is very clearly just a call to forther hate on SGI. It’s crazy to what lengths people go to justify their bad purchases, desperately clinging to whatever explanation they can cook up for why there is no self-blame to apply for having bought into the shit that is Suicide Squad. No no, you see, the game would have been awesome if not for that WOKE consulting company! If not for them this would have been a 10/10, I could not have known it’d be bad!

Carighan, 3 months ago

Could you please stop shoving your political agenda into places where it doesn’t belong, like this thread?

Carighan, 3 months ago

Hrm, depends. Usually in modern online payment systems it should be impossible for the debitor to have the CVC of the card and hence leaked information could not make actual payments from it, but it could spam the card’s number with bogus payments to continuously keep it being blocked.

In any case if you’re affected I would recommend asking your bank how to proceed, just to be on the safe side.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Nah, use Mastodon or Bluesky 😜

Carighan, 4 months ago

Yeah but as the shareholders get used to companies laying off workers to “cut costs”, any company not doing it sees their shares tank. Which is Not Ok™️, so they keep firing people so the execs can pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses over high stock prices.

Carighan, 3 months ago

That’s probably the point here. They’re intentionally not showing anything and not saying too much because this is the launch game for the Switch U or whatever it’ll be called.

Carighan, 3 months ago

Yeah it’ll now come with oodles extra merchandise you can buy. And the game world looks like it’s N64 now but with the framerate of the original Star Fox.

Carighan, 3 months ago

If so, try Cassette Beasts. Actually blew me away completely unexpectedly, combining smarter combat, really neat pixel graphics, inventive monster names that are of course all terrible puns, and a really really great combat soundtrack that dynamically gets vocals when you fuse.

Only downside is that it makes modern actual Pokemon games look even worse by comparison.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Nah, Freakonomics is a book that makes a good argument for needing to obtain a permit to be allowed to publish a book. 😅

Carighan, 4 months ago

It says a lot about modern republican shit that it’s not trivial to tell.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Even in medieval times you could plead the belly to avoid being incarcerated.

Carighan, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I mean, cool, they’re finally replacing Geforce Experience, one of the worst pieces of software ever made.

But they’re replacing it with shit that commits all the same crimes. Locally run webserver hosting web interfaces and a website running in a packaged Chrome accesses. Instead of something utterly wild like oh I don’t know, actually building a piece of software not a web page!

Also it still commits the cardinal crime of letting 11y old me do the design and what I thought was “COOOOOL!”, instead of just, you know, looking like an app. In the design language of the OS. Which would be wild, I know.

Carighan, 4 months ago

That is true. I will say, even with all the features dropped, this is a step in the right direction.

It’s a small one overall, but credit where credit is due, this shows promise. Just wish the underlying architecture were better, it’s still based on the packaged chrome thing.

Carighan, 4 months ago

By itself, yes. GameStream is EOL. And this is said end, it seems.

Your replacement option is Sunshine, or switching to using a steam link setup.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Not for me, no. Sunshine is already the open re-implementation of the gamestream component of Geforce Experience.

Carighan, 4 months ago

The specific casting bugs me:

• Budget Deadshot
• Old Nami
• Hit Bunny-Girl
• Box Wheatley
• Extra #1216 from the Mad Max set

It’s just… I dunno. Doesn’t quite fit the tone from the games. But hey maybe it comes out and is surprisingly funny in it’s braindeadness.

Carighan, 4 months ago

I AM SO HYPED! Preordered right away (like duh)

Why would you preorder while you don’t know whether it even runs on day 1? Especially with From, where the main game had serious technical flaws initially, too?

Carighan, 4 months ago

Fair enough, tbh. A little bit of hype is always nice.

I struggled a fair bit. Performance hit me hard with really bad stutter in particular during some early boss fights, I also had weird CTDs after the first patch, and of course it has the good ol partially-hardcoded key bindings were trying to use alternative input schemes such as cursors, ESDF or truly alternative input devices is a no-go. Though these days I find it difficult to criticize any specific game for that, I hate how ubiquitous this problem has become. Like CP2077 still has it after so many years, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora has it, etc etc.

Oh, and one big one I just recalled: The online would disconnect, but without telling me. This wasn’t always bad, but the game would not realize it’s no longer online, so sometimes it “stalled” trying to check something online. Never found out what caused that, it was gone after some patch. Long story short I waited a fairly long time, then played it after a bunch of patches when it was mostly - sadly not entirely - fine. And loved it. :)

Carighan, 4 months ago

incompetence and thoughtlessness shine through absolutely everywhere, and nothing works the way it ought to.

I mean the website also feels quite amateurish, as does the art-design. It’s not bad for an indie game, but it seems to want to be so much more.

Carighan, 4 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b8da799c-7f67-4893-b275-f8ec129154af.jpeg

Interesting, but the implementation feels a bit meh. This implies traded items are sub-par, right? Since you get better items if you join the faction that causes them to be non-tradeable.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Should note that AFAIK there’s no confirmation that their project was in fact an actual Disco Elysium 2 (instead of a spiritual successor or something), and neither do we know whether a DE2 is not being worked on, just without people that made the first game.

Of course, it really does not bode well for any such game, but ever since Life is Strange 2/Tell Me Why vs True Colors where the former DLC-studio made a far better mainline game than the actual company making them managed, I am being more careful with considering a game “ded” just because the people involved with the game left.

🤷

To focus on the more important part: People got laid off. Which sucks. Hard.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Yeah I thought the same reading that.

Even in the very game, CP2077, as impressive as it can be, it can also be just as disappointing. It’s still a nice technical marvel, but it’s not at all the gamechanger it wanted to be.

And there’s games such as A Plague Tale Requiem where the baked lighting looks flat-out better in most scenes than the raytracing, since unlike the “realistic” raytracing they hand-crafted it to be unrealistic but fitting for the tone and atmosphere of the scene. So I turned it off again.

I’ll be honest, so far the only game where RT universally made me go “I’ll leave that on, that’s awesome!” is Riftbreaker. And it has a comparatively minor effect there, but at least a purely positive one (CP2077 I prefer at native rez over RT + DLSS which gets a weird pseudo-blur even with carefully tweaked resharpening, it’s just part of how it renders I think as other games don’t have this issue).

Carighan, 4 months ago

Ah, it’s good someone is looking out for the poor poor shareholders. Just earlier I saw a long line of them at the unemployment office, begging for food from passerbyes, destitute in their poverty. /s

Carighan, 4 months ago

ROCK AND STONE! ⛏

Carighan, 4 months ago

I mean I do blame the consumer. Specifically for not voting in harsh consumer- and worker-protection laws curbing corporate abilities.

Carighan, 4 months ago

It’s such a shame that the OW1 discussion about loot boxes went nowhere in regards to giving ingame gambling the same legal framework as IRL gambling.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Well, I’m of two minds about that.

To a healthy person, the current system is pricier and more aggressive. Things are constantly being shoved in your face, but they’re all purchase-only, and 20€/skin is just absurd.

But, I disagree that it’s more predatory. To a vulnerable person, the new system doesn’t elicit an addictive response, which loot boxes due to their gambling nature do.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Yeah I will say, it’s painfully generic and I hate the MCU-style humor, but it’s not a bad game per se. It’s just in no way shape or form triple-A, except for looking rather snazzy.

The worst offense to me though is how there’s no magic in the game. Just guns with weird graphics. They managed to not make the magic feel like, well, magic. That’s the big flaw of it to me. Everything else is minor by comparison. Still, not a bad game, just not a good one either. At least for me.

Carighan, 4 months ago

If I had to guess, texture quality and graphical fidelity is really high, plus this was one of the first games to run in UE5. A mix of extreme amounts of manhours invested into graphics coupled with slow progress due to having to get used to everything.

And rampant corruption at EA, I bet. 40 million marketing my ass, the game barely had any marketing!

Carighan, 4 months ago

Yeah and for a while it was mandated to be used for ~everything IIRC but after years of struggling to retain programmers and designers they finally relented on that mandate.