ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I don't see a technical debt problem getting any better by ignoring the problem for longer. No better time to start than when they've got Microsoft's war chest to help aid the transition.

It's a real time game, but if you try just mashing buttons, you will die quite quickly.

We just got Baldur's Gate 3 last year, and Persona 5 is a mega hit. Turn-based RPGs are very much still alive.

Did you play Starfield? It's definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn't cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)

I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.

For the author and everyone else. If they're not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they're making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.

When it first launched, the biggest departure from Rainbow Six was a guy who could revive people by throwing a syringe at them.

This is the kind of exceptionalism that bums me out. It's still a server that no one in the community can control, which means it will still have downtime while the game's making money and will disappear entirely when it isn't making money. It still means you arbitrarily can't play if you're in a situation where you have no internet, like on a train or in a cabin in the woods, and it means that your session will get interrupted with no workaround if something happens like Steam's matchmaking servers go down for maintenance for 15 minutes on a Tuesday; or when PSN gets hacked again. It means this game won't even be playable in 10 or 15 years for as excited as people are about it right now, and that's why I'm disappointed to see people making an exception for it that they didn't for all sorts of other live service games, because if Helldivers 2 shows that this stupid business model still works, companies will continue throwing money at it and making more of them.

So perhaps the updated hypothesis is all asshole communities are tied to live service games, but not all live service games have asshole communities?

Helldivers 2 is still selling tons of copies even though everyone is saying that the servers can't handle the capacity. No one seems to care over there, so I can see why the Nightingale devs thought no one would care with their game either. I thought we were recovering from live service, but Helldivers shows we haven't.

Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn't tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone's improvement is someone else's regression. I'll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.

Congrats! Yeah, lots of tricky fights in that game are solvable by just observing statuses and such. The game exposes almost 100% of its information.

Camera movement and perspective can have a huge impact on selling the images as "real". You can have a drone hover over a race car, and it will look fake, because your brain tells you it's a video game; "Here's to You" from the beginning of MGSV: Ground Zeroes still looks better than most cut-scenes because it emulates a person holding a camera.

I'd also like to see them expand on crafted items, improve the experience of playing with a bow and arrow, and maybe rethink a few other systems that an expansion could tackle.

I'd recommend playing them in release order. You can skip the MSX games and go right to Metal Gear Solid, but these games do build on each other. MGSV is probably the best-playing game in the series, but it has the least of the story bits that the series is known for.

Metal Gear is a series that will turn on a dime from being deathly serious into breaking the fourth wall for a joke or gameplay reasons. They're amazing.

A few dozen hours of content over the course of a month; I don't think it's strange that the player count dropped substantially. Live service games just broke how people think about video games, and this isn't a live service.

So what? Baldur's Gate 3's player base is about a tenth of what it used to be too. So is Elden Ring.

Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.

I'd say if you're buying it now, you should be doing so based on what it is as though it never gets another patch, because sometimes they don't.