Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.
It’s not the engines’ fault that game development got longer. It’s that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don’t have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That’s how you make this make sense.
Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line activation and Origin client software installation and background use required.
You might be able to hack your way around this, but this prevented me from playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train on a Steam Deck. Buyer beware. Dragon Age: Origins is on GOG.
I’ve got my own issues with Tekken, but what are you referring to? The scummiest thing I saw them do was locking replays against characters you don’t own the DLC for.
Gotcha. Yeah, if the season passes aren’t paying for that, then what’s the point? Though to be fair, Street Fighter does the same thing, and all of that stuff is in a part of the game that doesn’t appeal to me, so I hardly see it.
Celestial bodies that orbit a star, but there are lots of ways to represent them in video games, and KOTOR’s implementation was not what most people would call open world.
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
I never had a Dreamcast, but this was always the game mentioned in the same breath as Smash Melee back then when we were all getting competitive. These days, I’m a Skullgirls player, and MvC2 is a huge influence on it. The Fightcade implementation has issues, but even if the main player base ends up there for online play, it will be nice to learn the game with a better training mode and to boot it up without emulator jank. It’s worth noting that cross play comes with its own downsides.
This headline in particular, holding up Nintendo as an idyllic model to be followed, is going to also rile up people with an axe to grind. A brief mention of their litigiousness at the end of the article isn’t really going to make up for it.
They also lock their games down to dated hardware, with laughable solutions for things like voice chat, that we can emulate better than they provide legally, and they’re now just about the only company who won’t steer into the skid and release their current library and back catalog on PC. They intend to only make their back catalog available by renting it to you in perpetuity, eroding the concept of ownership just like the live service games that the article praises them for not following. Their business model is healthy because they have IPs that sell gangbusters on brand recognition, like Pokemon, even when the quality objectively slips, and that’s neither admirable nor replicable.
I’m sour about how Nintendo makes it hard to get old games on their platforms because it’s the history of this medium and worth preserving, even if they were bad. I don’t care what their reasons are for making bad hardware when they could be making the best decisions for the consumer rather than for themselves. If it was the best decision for both of us, it would be the idyllic model.
Sure, but like…would it really be the end of the world if it got controller support? I’m far more comfortable on controller than I am on mouse and keyboard, largely because I work on mouse and keyboard all day.
Without official support, I doubt they’ll ever map that well at all, but I’ve got an ergonomic mouse in the meantime. Official support would still be better though. Games that only work on mouse and keyboard will be a smaller and smaller library as time goes on, if all goes well.
They did it. They freed MvC2. The announcer said he was going to take us for a ride, and I nearly fell out of my chair. The training mode is expanded too. I can’t be bothered to care about anything they’ve shown in the rest of this presentation, but this is a huge deal.
I beat Animal Well on the Steam Deck while I was out of town. I’ve heard high praise for this one, and while I liked it quite a bit, I think I’m less impressed than the buzz I heard. When you see credits, there’s just enough of a tease that there’s more to come that you know it’s out there to find, but toward the end of the game, some of the challenges and traversal were just tedious enough to dissuade me from finding them. So if there’s some excellent stuff still to find after beating it, and I’m sure there is, they probably should have put their best foot more forward than that.
I finished the Fallout TV show, and damn it, that’s the most effective commercial for a video game I’ve ever seen. I immediately picked up the only mainline game that I haven’t finished before, which is Fallout 2. That game is pretty rough at the start, because it doesn’t give you a gun for several hours, so if you spec’d your character for anything but melee weapons, combat is tough and a bit tedious. I got over the hump though, and it’s just what the doctor ordered.
My wife and I have been playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. We love escape rooms, and this game plays out just like a really big escape room. Or, if you’re not familiar with them, it plays like Resident Evil 1 without the zombies. The biggest point of frustration has been that there’s no “back” or “cancel” button. All four face buttons do the same thing, and when you’re going in and out of menus, you just have to navigate to the back button in the menu to go out one level. I hope that changes. It seems to be firmly designed for mobile, but on a controller, it’s quite slow. Other than that, the puzzles have been fantastic.
They sell you a product at a fair price without putting it behind a loot box, unless I missed something. I don’t think that makes Paradox “just as bad” because they make a lot of DLC that you could choose to not purchase.
I’m going to rate “exploits addiction to make billions off of legalized gambling for children” as worse than putting out a sub par, broken sequel with DLC 5 months after release.
Until the next one is an always online live service that means it has an expiration date built into it by design, and that’s not even conjecture; we already know this.
What am I fearing that I’m missing out on when there are 62 DLCs for Cities: Skylines but I only wanted 3 of them? I wanted Green Cities, After Dark, and Mass Transit, but I really couldn’t care less about Airports. Why does this FOMO apply only to DLC and not the entire library of video games out there that you can opt to buy or not? I really don’t understand it. If you buy one Paradox game, do you have to buy every Paradox game or else miss out on having the entire library? I hope that this doesn’t come off as me being hostile. I just genuinely don’t understand it. Latching on to gambling addiction in EA’s Ultimate Team DLC is a concept that I can easily understand how it’s predatory. Making a bunch of other products that you may not want to buy does not strike me as predatory but as casting a wide net to make the right content for the right customer.
Well, first I’d say that those three DLCs cost a maximum of $45 and not $60, if they were MSRP, with current MSRP being a little less than that, but I don’t know if they ever got a price cut. Second, Steam sales happen like clockwork, for DLC as well, and there’s no way I spent $45. Third, the right feature to the right person might be worth that price, and that’s the benefit of their model. Over the course of so many years, they can keep working on the game and add niche features, some of which might be up your alley, rather than putting out a base game that lacks features important to you and never expanding the game.
I’m not sure why the tutorials for features you don’t have are a problem, because then you wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing anyway, but I’m sorry that ruined the experience for you. It’s really hard for me to call that a cesspool though. They just put out a lot of product where you can decide what’s important to you, and I’d say that’s exactly what it ought to be.
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
Silksong has already had some kind of deal with Microsoft in place, so if it shows up on a platform holder’s stream rather than their own thing, it’s more likely they show up with Microsoft than Nintendo. Given that it got content rated already, it’s still due for a release this year, so maybe we hear about it with Gamescom.
No, it showed up at an Xbox showcase in 2022, where every game was going to be on Game Pass day 1 and releasing within 12 months, which would have meant the game would be out by June 2023. Silksong wasn’t the only game that missed that 12 month window, but it showed that, at the time, they were confident that it was nearly done, and that they took a deal with Microsoft, because being on Game Pass day 1 means Microsoft offered them a huge bucket of money to make up for lost sales.
Glad to hear they’re doing the smart thing and listening to what people want. Invasions sound cool on paper, but they end up just being annoying, and you design how you play around avoiding them. It’s cool to summon people from their summon signs, but it would just inherently work better if you could choose people from a damn menu, including your friends.
Neither is shit. 4 is way better. 1, 2, and New Vegas are better still. But 3 doesn’t tend to come up in these conversations when people talk about Bethesda Fallouts being worse. They always go to 4, and that surprises me.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
I believe that it’s possible to create a MOBA that would stand the test of time and be feasible and interesting for people to play casually or competitively for decades, and yet still be welcoming to new players.
League of Legends was enticing and built an audience out of regularly adding new stuff to it. I can’t think of an analogue for this in any other competitive game or sport, but live service games always wane when new content slows down, because that new content was juicing the numbers. Likewise, every new champ they added, especially beyond around 100, is going to make it more daunting to start playing if you weren’t already. So unless they had a roster of a few dozen champs at most, at launch, and never changed them, I don’t see how you build one of these to last decades. I mean, people do still play Third Strike 25 years later, but that’s a tiny fraction of the player base you’re talking about, and Riot would sooner wipe LoL off the face of the earth than allow it to be playable for a population the size of Third Strike’s right now.
I think you’ll find that if you go to the forums for any live service game whose popularity has visibly waned, which is nearly all of them on Steam, since Steam makes those numbers public, you’ll see people attributing it to things that the developer did, balancing or otherwise, but that seems naive to me. It seems inevitable that the popularity of these things will wane over time. To end up with anything else strikes me as a stroke of luck, even if the game is a masterpiece in competitive design.
What if LoL weren’t run by a company, but by the community itself, and the priority was simply to keep the game in a fair and balanced state and maybe gradually add a few new mechanics and heroes over time. That would be possible to keep going for a long time.
We have templates for this already. Online games that predate the live service era can still be played and enjoyed in perpetuity, including the likes of Quake (this one’s even open source), StarCraft, and, once again, Third Strike. You can check the Twitch numbers for each of them, and we can actually get really good numbers for how many people are playing Third Strike at any given time, give or take a few random arcade cabinets out in the wild, via FightCade. They don’t sustain a playerbase the size of League of Legends, and I don’t think any game ever will without a drip feed of new content. Chess hasn’t had a rule change in over 100 years, to my knowledge, and despite being proven to stand up to the test of time competitively, it will never do League of Legends numbers either.
Are you sure about that? I would assume there are many more chess players worldwide.
Probably only by the most liberal definition. Chess matches aren’t watched by a crowd that could fill a stadium like soccer is, and even after a surge during the pandemic, it doesn’t pull numbers on Twitch like League of Legends does on a bad day. I’ve played chess, but I don’t, present tense, play chess, you know?
I brought up the three video games I did precisely because it’s impossible to force obsolescence or put them out to pasture. Quake being open source allows for a game that’s proven to be competitively viable and enticing to be maintained and expanded by the community the way you described, but it doesn’t stick with its audience the way any “shiny new thing” sticks. Some people are still playing these games the way some people are still playing Supreme Commander and Battle for Middle-earth, but once again, they’ll always stabilize at a number way lower than a game like League of Legends with frequent new content, regardless of balance.
I checked the numbers on League just before that comment. They’re still at about the 100k average they’ve been since the beginning of Twitch Tracker’s history for it in 2017, with a similar bump that chess got during the pandemic. I’m all for those evergreen competitive games; I refuse to play LoL anymore, among other reasons, because it can’t ever be one of those. But I’m very confident that LoL has the numbers it does because it continually introduced new things, and that always has an expiration date.
Personally, I think I’d rather not even give them the word of mouth of having played their game. There’s so much out there to play, and plenty of it doesn’t come from a company doing lousy stuff like this, even if it’s second hand.
More and more lately, but not exclusively. I have an increasingly long list of things that are deal-breakers for me, and I haven’t run out of stuff to play.
Also “forgot its roots” and “stuck in the past” can’t be used in the same sentence, PC gamer. They literally mean opposite things.
Not necessarily. In this case, BioWare’s roots are just even further in the past, and there’s a middle part in the past (somewhere between 2005 and 2014) where one could argue BioWare and RPGs in general lost their way. Your mileage may vary, but they’re not opposites here.
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
Not all digital games. If they’re DRM free, and if the multiplayer allows for LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc; then they’re built to last, arguably better so than physical media.
I said it explicitly in the comment that you just replied to, implicitly in the one before that, with the potential reason why being that even in games that support it, it’s not some life-changing feature for a lot of people who end up turning it off. And perhaps the reason why it’s not mentioned often is that it’s not a big deal to all that many people.
'Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League' Character Artist Confirms Industry Bias Against Attractive Female Characters (boundingintocomics.com)
Looks like the ‘uglification’ of female characters is real.
Avowed's Creators On Why Romance Was Considered, But Ultimately Not Included And Skyrim Comparisons (www.gameinformer.com)
IO Interactive's mission to speed up game development. The Hitman developer discusses the advantages of running its own tech and how it's looking to make games 'cheaper, faster and better'. (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Avowed's Creators On Why Romance Was Considered, But Ultimately Not Included And Skyrim Comparisons (www.gameinformer.com)
Factorio Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0 (factorio.com)
Grab your best lube, because it’s time to talk about fluids!
Dragon Age games are 90% off on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
Bandai Namco Studios, developer of Tekken 8, sees negative annual income for the first time since founding (automaton-media.com)
Star Wars Outlaws interview: ‘Uncharted is a wonderful game to be compared to’. Creative director Julian Gerighty discusses the challenges of creating the first open-world Star Wars game. (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Embracer rolls out new AI policy to 'massively enhance game development' | Game Developer (www.gamedeveloper.com)
Article textNewly-restructured Swedish conglomerate, Embracer Group, will leverage AI models to bolster game production. As noted in Embracer’s annual report, the company has adopted a new AI policy package it claims has the capability to “massively enhance” its production process by “increasing resource efficiency,...
Marvel Vs Capcom Collection
Oh this one I’m excited for, especially MVC2 since it’s been in legal la la land for a while until now....
GOG Summer Sale has arrived (www.gog.com)
Nintendo Does What Everybody Else Nintendon’t - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
Todd Howard says Bethesda won't be remaking the first Fallouts because 'some of the charm of games from that era is a little bit of that age' (www.pcgamer.com)
MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics (www.youtube.com)
Weekly what have you been playing discussion - week of June 17th, 2024
Paradox Interactive has completely cancelled "Life By You" (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Very surprising. The game looked like it had a lot of potential and could’ve been the most popular sims alternative, but it’s suddenly been cancelled.
Nintendo Direct announced for June 18 at 7 AM PT (www.resetera.com)
“Join us for a #NintendoDirect livestream focused on #NintendoSwitch games coming in the second half of 2024! There will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during this presentation.”...
FromSoftware says Elden Ring's popular Seamless Co-op mod is 'definitely not something we actively oppose,' and may even 'consider ideas like that with our future games' (www.pcgamer.com)
Bethesda Is Charging $7 For A New Starfield Mission, And Players Are Upset (www.gamespot.com)
How To Guess Correctly In Fighting Games (www.youtube.com)
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it’s an interesting way to frame a situation I’ve been in myself thousands of times.
Senior Riot devs say the League of Legends playerbase is getting older, with fewer newbies jumping in: 'Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago' (www.pcgamer.com)
Nintendo Issues Multiple DMCAs On The Modding Site 'GameBanana' (www.nintendolife.com)
Dragon Age: The Veilguard's gameplay reveal emphasises just how terminally out of touch EA and BioWare have become (www.pcgamer.com)
Discussions in the past about not being able to access digital gaming content that users had paid for...
I have a recollection of some long threads about some companies discontinuing gaming content and members of Lemmy having strong feelings and evidence about all this. I have been trying to search these older threads up but I can’t find them. Does anyone remember these conversations? What companies were involved? Games? How much...
PlayStation architect Mark Cerny discusses the evolving console, how PS5's design choices impact PC gaming (www.techspot.com)