“Gatekeeping: the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”
The lack of difficulty sliders make the game inaccessible to people who have no ability or desire for the unforgiving experience, nor any ability/desire to “Git Gud Scrubs”. It’s intentionally left out to exclude those people. That makes it “gatekeeping” by the definition for the word.
This is substantiated by the fact that a mode to make the game easier and a mode to make the game harder are in the top 10 downloaded mods for Elden Ring. If you leave out the loaders and modutils, those same mods are top-5. This is basically unheard of in most games.
You can argue that you approve of this gatekeeping, but it’s silly to die on the “it’s not really gatekeeping” hill.
Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it?
Not really. The experience with the Easy Mode mod in place is pretty much the same. I saw more “You Died” screens on easymode than the typical player sees on regular mode. The only difference is that I didn’t waste my money on Elden Ring by having to give up less than 10% into the game like I did on Bloodborne after 50 hours or so.
Some of us, especially older gamers, just don’t have the reflexes for that type of game. Unfortunately for us, Fromsoft writes GREAT stories and Let’sPlays are still kinda boring.
I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.
For online play, you can just match people who are using the same difficulty, and perhaps disable PVP entirely for Easy difficulty. For everything but PVP, it’s not that big a deal. Seamless Co-Op Mod works with the Easy Mode mod. If modders can make a coherent experience, I’m sure From could. If they wanted to. Which they don’t.
If you don’t like spicy food. Don’t buy spicy food
I don’t know about you, but every spicy restaurant I know has a little “difficulty slider” where you get to ask them not to pour a gallon of ghost pepper into it. It’s about making the customer happy.
If you don’t want to “git gud”. You can use summoned spirits. NPCs, other players
Or I can fucking mod the piece of shit and complain about it on forums because it’s fucking stupid. But I want BURN Bloodborne because I can’t mod it.
There already is a difficulty slider. It’s one you set for yourself.
Yeah. I’m getting really good at archery. Think I’ll cut my eye out. Natural difficulty slider
Why is it every time I express a valid criticism about an otherwise story-heavy game with a stupid difficulty-related gimmic the cringe-posse comes out and tries to convince me the game is perfect and no human being would find my opinion valid. Like seriously what I tell my little nieces and nephews, if you don’t have anything nice to say, move along.
In other news, I DO respect the Viva La Dirt League reference.
Soooo a game, which is not paid for nor developed by the community, and is rather purchased with the knowledge that it is a difficult game which will require ample skill to surpass its many challenges, should put in difficulty sliders despite them fundamentally going against the very nature of the game itself?
Fucking YES it should. I didn’t buy ER until I was 100% certain it had an easymode mod. So I got what I wanted out of it despite them shoving both their middles fingers at me and telling me I’m not worthy to buy their product because they’re intentionally hiding the good part (the story) behind gameplay I didn’t want. I’m still pissed that I wasted my money buying Bloodborne. You want me to get over that, cut me a check.
As I said to the other hater, what is with the ER-fanboys turning the chat into full-on-reddit level bitchfest defending it? Why don’t you just let me have my valid opinions? I know, heaven forbid there exists someone who has an opinion that doesn’t match yours.
Actually, I think they don’t want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, some skyrimmy feature it’s missing, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel
I don’t entirely disagree.
The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow
You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren’t really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the “power minigame” but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10
The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games
See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called “Arena”, and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was “Daggerfall” and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I’ve never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim’s radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.
Now here’s the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It’s just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the “Morrowind problem” (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall’s) for me while still giving you 60-80 hours of handcrafted stories, characters, maps, etc. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say “boy this game is so reptitious”. Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.
If I had to guess, each graphics cycle is a little less dominant than the last. The iterations on graphics are becoming lesser and lesser. A game from 10 years ago is far improved from a game 20 years ago, but not that much worse than a game from last month.
There are moments of awe (imo, especially in VR when a game “nails it”), but we’re pretty desensitized to high-graphics video games of late.
One could argue we have the world’s strongest economy because we are business-friendly to a fault. People actually question the fairness of unions, but even with unions our labor protections are more third-world than first-world. But in return, the median income is at least world-competitive, and the typical individual buying power is through the roof. All we had to do to get here is sign away our collective souls to these megacorporations and be ok with the sacrifice of a million lives a year devastated by it all.
There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.
Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around “people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride”. It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the “limit” part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don’t know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.
Yeah. It seems to me while there’s a lot of ways to take “capitalism”, the moment you point out that people are taking paycuts to do gamedev there’s no way capitalism applies to their motivations anymore.
Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.
And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.
This here. Through the years, if I ever pirated a game and liked it, it was instabought.
Execs that know they’re producing shit are the ones that really double-down on anti-piracy measures. When piracy is considered, it turns into a challenge of quality. When piracy isn’t considered, it’s just about return on marketing spend.
The real lost sales are the people who pirate a game, spend 15 minutes playing it, and delete it saying “thank GOD I wasn’t stupid enough to buy this”. Make a refund policy just hard enough on Steam and most of those just keep the game with regret.
I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy
Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.
It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar
And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.
Which is why Quest is beating PSVR in terms of overall experience. Of course, it’s still not doing as well as it seems to need to. ACNexus did reasonably well considering the audience size, but they’re still pulling out.
I’m sure the corp interest rates issue is part of it all, but nobody seems to be able to overcome the “why would I buy VR with no games?” and “why would I research games for VR if I don’t have VR?”
I mean, for me, I’ve powered through more solid VR games since jan-1 than I’ve played PC/PS/Xbox games in the last 3 or 4 years. But the games I’ve been playing are The Room and 7th Guest (OMG t7G remake is the GOAT). Popular among an older generation, but not great to build a critical-mass following.
There’s a marketing challenge and nobody has solved it. Even when I got my headset it was more of a “shit, I have nothing else to ask my wife for for Christmas… The HELL do I pick?”
I didn’t say that there are no good games. But genres have been drowned in these microtransaction games enough that it has become disruptive. I find myself sometimes playing games that are in many ways inferior to older games because they are trying to be low-budget disruptors in a market where the high budgets are largely “filled with urine” as it were.
Look at a few companies’ recent “people are just going to have to get used to subscriptions/microtransactions” attitudes. It’s going the same way television has gone. One cannot pretend in good faith overall quality in entertainment is not going down for reasons that the decisionmakers know to be hurting the products.
While I agree, I start to get tired of a significant percent of the game industry being reskins on older games. I always wait till they come out and let them convince me they put enough effort in to justify my time again.
Like Dyson Sphere Program. I avoided it and youtubed it up until I knew it managed to transcend being a Factorio Clone, and that the factorio feel dies around the 2 hour mark, leaving 78 hours of completely new content. But had it not done that…ehhhhh
Yeah, as silly as it sounds, SS wasn’t on my radar at all before this video. Now (and from the next videos that youtube fed me after) I’m considering it. Wish it was on a no-risk service like Game Pass.
Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is “ripping off” or just a genre.
These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros… and about 2 dozen other games
I don’t think we can know for sure, but the typical reason SCOTUS refuses to hear an appeal is that they do not feel the case represents a significant question of law. As SCOTUS generally sees it, they’re not about “swooping in to right injustice”. They’re about being the final arbiter of actual questions of law. If there are no actual questions of law worth addressing, there’s no reason to take the case whether the verdict was just or unjust. There is more than one defensible outcome to a lot of trials, and SCOTUS is often not trying to “find the one right outcome”.
I think the exception to that would be if appeals courts go rogue and rule in direct contradiction to established law. Well that, and if SCOTUS wants to go rogue and themselves rule in direct contradiction to established law (like Dobbs)
Only if Apple doesn’t find a way to make their payment functionality worth using. They have options. They can keep the rate competitive, make the payment functionality easier and more efficient, add a new “revenue-producing app” tier that charges a lot more if you produce revenue from means outside of their app.
They’re definitely not powerless, but definitely will want to make adjustments to their process.
I finished Control last week, likely the best game to marry a creepy funhouse with a sprawling government office that you’ll ever play. I was up and down on this one for a few months. There’s a fun narrative and plenty of atmosphere, but I wasn’t always enjoying the gameplay....
I got it for free on Epic a year or two ago. I love everything about Control - and I can’t stand the game.
Never quite figured out why. I think part of it was the controls feeling a little too “arcadey” for me? I just don’t know. Great story that I couldn’t stay into. Great level design which I kept losing track of. Fun puzzles that got on my nerves.
I played most of the game in Assist mode because I don’t like hard action. I quickly got sick of dying. But that didn’t affect my love/hate of the game. Perhaps if it had the “magic action balance” where your’e constantly challenged but never seem to die… but perhaps not, too.
I’m with you on RDR2. I can’t stand it. I don’t know why. Even BotW I get bored a lot. I really enjoyed Bioshock and Borderlands, though I’ve never finished either. ADHD is a hell of a thing, and only the games that should be the hardest to stick to (like JRPGS or Bethesda games) stick for me.
Exactly. I cannot stand how interested I am in soulsborne storylines because I’m simply not willing to put myself through playing that shit any longer.
The only soulsborne I’ve beaten is an “easy mode” modded Elden Ring. Nothing worse than watching a game LP on youtube because I really want to play it but don’t enjoy it. (Bloodborne, lookin at you)
Some of the KQ games had choices, but no character progression (one of the last ones if I recall, but it sucked). The QFG games had character progression and more choices than most RPGs.
The Quest For Glory games are a real genre-bender there, but one could say an RPG is defined by a feel and not just a specific subset of the RPG mechanics.
Considering the way they responded to ESPN football back when I was younger, I cheer on every time I hear bad things about EA Sports.
For those too young or who don’t recall… ESPN (or I should say, a company who licensed ESPN) came out with a budget football game 2000ish. They charged $20 for it, and it blew that year’s Madden game out of the water in terms of quality and reviews. It was situated to force the industry to pivot from AAA to lovingly-crafted AA titles by teams that clearly cared about the product being fun.
So EA gave the NFL a metric fuckton of money for exclusivity to murder the competition.
I think the “novel way” in this case is the idea that games can look at your data from other games to adjust difficulty. So if you do well in God of War, the AI difficulty in the new Devil May Cry could get harder. Ditto the other way around.
I would say it’s a newish idea. I don’t see it as particularly innovative, though. We just don’t do it NOW because it’s stupid.
It’s worse with this particular case because the patent is for cross-gaming. You suck at competitive Street Fighter? The next turn-based JRPG difficulty goes down.
My biggest hate to any non-interactive difficulty is that players change.
What if I take a 1-year break? I haven’t gone back to playing Go because I have a ranking I know I can’t maintain, and do not want to play games where I’m giving handicaps to people who I won’t be able to beat on an even level.
But yes, there’s also “different things are harder to different people”
Trying to find ways to make something patentable that otherwise wouldn’t be.
They don’t actually have to implement the cross-game side of things because they got a patent that covers “same or different game”, and they can now carefully patent-bully over an unpatentable feature because nobody can afford to fight Sony in a lawsuit.
Edit: And I say carefully, because I cannot imagine a lawsuit about that patent being successful if properly defended unless the app in question builds the exact same behavior, which nobody is going to do because it’s stupid.
Gotta love patent law. I work at a company who got a (defensibly valid IMO) patent recently. There was so much silly red tape and complication that our final patent looked unpatentable to an outside observer like myself, but was approved by the Patent Office. Unlike the original feature that was far more straightforward and innovative, but that the Patent Reviewer didn’t really like because he thought some random unrelated product was “prior art”.
And if I recall, that “prior art” was something very much like “list of student names in a database with various metadata like phone number or email address, rendered on a webpage”. My first reaction to their objection was “wait, that is absolutely unpatentable…right?”
No, sorry. The board game Go. I used to play fairly heavily in long games on OGS and got to a fairly good (not if you ask anyone actually good) rank. Then I took a break and tried to play some real-time games and I’m so many ranks weaker than my profile it’s not even funny.
Exactly. And the “rusty” factor in Go is notorious. We play by handicap stones, and if you’re rusty enough, you can lose 9 stones (basically a 9 moves in a row handicap… not quite but close enough) . It took me years to get to the 2-3kyu rank, but now I’m probably closer to 9-10kyu if I’m being honest. SO imagine me playing against someone and THEM getting a handicap when I should have 6 or 7 full turns of handicap.
I miss Go, but I just don’t have the time anymore to dedicate to it.
Absolutely. There are a lot of solid reasons that people should be kept in control of their own difficulty levels.
I refuse to purchase or play Fromsoft games anymore if I don’t have access to mods, despite absolutely loving their storytelling style. Why? Anyone who reads this immediately knows why.
Nope, The Terminator came first… And I don’t think that’s THE first game, either.
I only knew this because I did some research out of confusion. See, when I grew up I had a game by a company called “Bethsoft”, and I vaguely remember it being a joust clone (though I could be confusing two things). I remembered it real well because I was 9 years old and their logo was a “tastefully” topless fairy. And you know what “tasteful” means to a 9 year old boy lol
Edit, looks like their very first game was Gridiron!
Right. Arena has a special place in my heart. Never got close to beating it, but played hundreds of hours anyway. I wasn’t very good at finishing games at that age lol.
Daggerfall was a dramatically better experience IMO. Never beat that one either, but I played it more than Arena. If I recall, that one was the one where just chilling out and questing could cause the main quest to timeout.
Helldivers 2 director weighs in on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty: 'A game for everyone is a game for no one' (www.pcgamer.com)
Epic won’t update Fortnite to run on the Steam Deck. Tim Sweeney says Linux is ‘a terrifically hard audience to serve’ (2022) (www.theverge.com)
Starfield has "something big going on behind the scenes" (www.eurogamer.net)
PlayStation exec predicts focus will ‘shift from graphics to immersive narratives’ (www.videogameschronicle.com)
[Louis Rossmann] Blizzard locks you out of account if you don't agree to new terms; no ownership, forced arbitration (www.youtube.com)
[CNBC] Why The $183 Billion Video Game Industry Can't Quit Microtransactions (www.youtube.com)
Denuvo Unveils New Tech That Will Make It Easier for Devs to Track Down Leakers (www.ign.com)
Yuzu & Citra devs fold to Nintendo's demands | Pay $2.3million to settle, take down github, domains, patreon, discord, with immediate effect. (m.youtube.com)
A sad day for emulation and open source advocates, and a reminder that Nintendo can and will destroy you if they see fit....
A Year Since Its Release, Sony Seems to Have Abandoned PlayStation VR2 (www.ign.com)
Diablo 4's latest microtransaction controversy is a $30 portal recolor: "You can get Palworld for this price" (www.gamesradar.com)
10 Steam Next Fest Games You Should Try (iamcoboney.medium.com)
[NikTek] These Two Games are 9 Years Apart (youtu.be)
Palworld Devs Says They Have Received Death Threats Amid Pokémon 'Rip-Off' Claims (www.ign.com)
"The Supreme Court will not hear Epic and Apple’s appeals. That leaves things mostly an Apple win. But with one court order for Apple to allow developers to point users to external payment methods." (twitter.com)
Nitter link: nitter.net/stephentotilo/…/1747289705622733062...
Control - the first game to get me to turn on cheats in decades
I finished Control last week, likely the best game to marry a creepy funhouse with a sprawling government office that you’ll ever play. I was up and down on this one for a few months. There’s a fun narrative and plenty of atmosphere, but I wasn’t always enjoying the gameplay....
Easy Mode Is Actually for Adults (www.theatlantic.com)
Seasoned RPG devs from Obsidian and Bioware blame the temporary death of the isometric CRPG on 'vibes-based forecasting' from retailers (www.pcgamer.com)
"I can't stress enough how often I'd hear a retail rep declare a genre/style/look was dead with zero supporting data."
Sony Patent Aims To Change Game Difficulty In Real Time As You Play (insider-gaming.com)
[NakeyJakey] Bethesda's Game Design Was Outdated a Decade Ago (www.youtube.com)