ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I think you're looking for Wasteland. They shared a lot of DNA already, and they've got different senses of humor, but Wasteland still has a black comedy angle.

It has been a trend that we see fewer AAA games per year, for a very long time. I think that can easily stabilize at a number of AAA games similar to what we saw last year, when we stop designing games that take up infinite time to play. Likewise, a great year for games doesn't mean that so many of them are concentrated in the AAA space. Hollow Knight Silksong, Mina the Hollower, and Penny's Big Breakaway could, potentially, all be some of the best games we've ever played, and not one of them will have come close to a $100M budget. (I don't think this year will top last year, but my point is that it doesn't require massive budgets to do so.)

As said in the last thread, these aren't revelations. This is someone's opinion.

Nah. I remain hopeful that this is a market correction against live service investment. Devs will be hurt in the interim, but think about how something like Redfall happened. The suits said they had to make a live service game at Arkane. Arkane devs had no passion for that. 70% of the studio left, leaving Redfall's development to inexperienced new hires that replaced them, and they essentially set those development funds on fire making that game that no one wanted to spend money on. Sega made Hyenas for $70M, their most expensive project to date, and decided it was better to just not release it than to continue to run infrastructure to enable it. A similar story to Hyenas over at Sony, where they cut their live service portfolio down from 12 games to 6, seeing that the well had run dry. There have been a lot of these bets made, and they've been big bets, with the assumption that they'd see all the success that their predecessors in live service games had, without realizing that there aren't enough customers out there for you to be lucky enough to capture that success from when they're busy playing other games.

So what do all of these devs make instead? Video games that people actually want to play and spend money on, that can be made with budgets they can afford.

The method of delivery for movies can be accomplished more independently too, if the movie studios hadn't formed enormous cartels.

Even without any cynicism, I think the government was more interested in there being tighter competition among cell carriers than they were with the people who will lose their jobs in a merger. With all due respect to those who fall on tough times as a result of that kind of merger, it's a more short term and small scale problem than there being fewer viable competitors in an important sector of the market.

Or they've been dying for a different way to play Pokemon than what Nintendo's been selling them for decades.

A character action game is something like God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, or Hi-Fi Rush. Combo-based, juggle-based, score chasers, but different than the rhythm-based combat in Batman: Arkham or Spider-Man.

Having seat belts is objectively better than not having seat belts. It doesn't mean that the way transportation is structured around cars in the US, for instance, is safe enough. Having kernel level anti-cheat may result in fewer cheaters or less obvious cheaters, but it doesn't mean it's worth giving that company such deep access to your computer, as the video shows.

There are plenty of ways to curb cheating. It still happens in fighting games too, but the way the genre works makes it far less prevalent. FPS games these days are largely designed around things that are hard for humans but easy for computers to do while looking like humans. Just spitballing, but if aiming was less of a concern, like it might be in the likes of old James Bond games or Metroid Prime, there are other ways to build competitive strategy around an FPS besides how well you can get your tiny crosshair to line up over a tiny target. Otherwise though, I'm with you on it being inevitable. There's no way to truly stop it.

I had the same reaction to God of War, with reverence for the combat in those other games you listed as well. Do you typically enjoy character action games? They all kind of felt the same to me, and I couldn't really get into the combat in them even though I ought to be into it on paper. Then Hi-Fi Rush came along and made that genre make sense to me. Now I've gone back through most of the Devil May Cry series and plan on giving God of War another shot when I find the time.

Cars are actually a great analogy here but probably not in the way that user intended. The way we use them and the scale at which we use them are inherently unsafe, but seat belts and air bags are an illusion sold to make us believe that we solved the problem as best we can, even though we didn't.

From my experience with fighting games, people are also prone to mislabeling others as smurfs when they just know one or two more things about the game that give them an edge. I've observed replays in Street Fighter 6 that people claimed were smurfs, but they were absolutely playing at the level their rank said they were.

They've all got server side anti cheat too.

Couldn't you also just save a respec item to burn whenever the DLC drops?

I've been playing a ton of Pillars of Eternity still. I think I can wrap up Kana's quest before I head into Act 3. I've got a lot of irons in the fire of my quest log that look like I need to advance the plot or level up more to finish them, so Act 3 is maybe when they intended for me to finish those.

Fortunately, since it's playable offline, it doesn't seem to matter how many people will be playing in a month.

I only heard this guy's name come up in the wake of Starfield, but none of this internet hate mob mentality is surprising. I still get flashbacks to how quickly the internet demonized and harassed Jennifer Hepler of BioWare. Internet bullying is bad regardless, but it's especially hard to know whose work you're criticizing in most video games, because they're made by large teams, and "written by" will often be credited to something like 5-10 people on a game the size of Starfield's.

I had a ton of things to critique in Starfield, including the writing, for one reason or another, and when I saw credits roll, I was looking for how many quest designers they had, because my criticism was that it felt like they were stretched so thin to make so many quests that hardly any of them could stand to be any good. Sure enough, for the hundreds of quests in that game, they only had a handful of people listed under quest design. I'm still not going to single out any of them as being bad quest designers, because I don't know who worked on which quest and if this was a product of how much content they were under pressure to design. There is one person I can point to for a different criticism I had, and that's because he proudly took credit for it specifically in an interview, but rather than bullying someone on the internet for a creative thing that they worked on, just note to yourself mentally that it was a subpar product and don't buy the next one. It's the sane response in a situation like this.

I came across this video yesterday, and I'm 100% on board with Ross and his stance toward games as a service, but this isn't a plan for a lawsuit; it's asking for help in creating the plan. I hope he can make something happen, because games as a service is going to leave a wake of destruction in the history of video games, but temper your expectations.

Yup. But if Microsoft is smart, they'll be examining exactly the reasons why Starfield is what it is and how to improve the next BGS game. That will start with throwing their engine away, because any way you slice it, there's just no saving that thing.