ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

Maybe it is a lack of imagination on my part, but that mechanic seems to rely heavily on characters that can be killed and come back to life with a vengeance on a regular basis, which I don't think makes sense in any of the settings you listed except for Borderlands, with its New-U stations, funny enough. You could adapt it into something where both you and an enemy are defeated non-lethally, I suppose, but that's a concept that strangely doesn't have a common template in video games.

That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can't spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you've got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.

I'm unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco's patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn't see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn't it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.

I just need to be able to buy and download DRM-free movies. Outside of that, I don't care what it looks like. Movie studios put so much DRM on my Blu Rays that they're a pain to rip (but notably, not impossible to rip), and "digital copies" of movies are just long term rentals. Meanwhile the movie industry is on fire while their old revenue streams dry up, and they're scratching their heads as to where they went wrong.

It's true, there are outliers like that. But if you're looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it's going to generally be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush's case, to the best anyone can tell, it's because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there's the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.

Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you're right, but it's been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I'd still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.

Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren't, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they're not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that's make or break for the studio.

One's mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.

Personally, I don't think that's worth getting mad over, especially not in this saturated market right now where there's always something great to play. Valve worked on Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead many times since their last iterations, but you have to give creatives time to throw out what's not working. And plenty of game developers I like work on plenty of stuff I'm not interested in. I just wait for them to come back around to the stuff I am interested in. In the case of live service stuff, it sucks, but Rockstar's hardly unique there.

I'm with them; my 1080p TV still gets the job done and looks great to me. Maybe I'd be more invested in cinema if cinema cared more about what I want. I can't even walk into brick and mortar and buy a movie anymore, and it's not like there's a GOG for movies.

I don't know why you're being nasty to me. I genuinely wasn't sure why someone would have an issue with Rockstar. If they don't want to make story DLC for GTA V, it's much the same as Valve not making a Portal 3. I can just move on and play something else. Focusing on a console release first and foremost, especially for a project as ambitious as this, made a lot more sense in the past, and maybe was still common wisdom when the project got rolling. It will stop due to natural market forces. Speaking of natural market forces, it's exactly why RDR2 Online would be abandoned: there weren't enough people to care about it compared to its costs. Modding isn't really my world, so I wouldn't exactly be privy to those shenanigans, but that sucks.

I'm not sure what support you're talking about, and I've never delved into mods for GTA V, but the rest are just sensible business decisions, at least up until now; we'll see how the different modern dynamic between consoles and PC plays out this time, but I think it's the last time they'll do it. As with all these exclusivity deals that are quickly dying out, that PC version will come, and that's when I'll play it.

I don't think a lot of people are going to double dip this time. This game will sell consoles, but it's not going to make up for the deficit the console market has compared to how many PS3s and Xbox 360s were out there in 2013.

Why?

The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don't know how you call that small.

I'm not really a streaming kind of guy. Early on in the game, you're mostly looking out for floor switches and spikes. You can hold the walk modifier to make sure you always climb down a ledge, which helps to make sure you don't accidentally land in a spike pit, and you can throw just about anything on floor switches to trigger them before you get there so that they're no longer a threat. You could check out a YouTube let's play and see how they deal with them, or you could just accept that the game is pretty cheap, so worst case, you're not out much money if you don't like it.

I would say it's a game that requires you to play tactically rather than rushing through it. Especially early game, the traps are very reminiscent of Spelunky, and it's clear where a lot of their inspiration came from, but Vagante gives you even more mechanics to deal with traps, like magic rings that let you go through walls and floors, for instance, but you won't necessarily find them every run. Noita has caught my attention here and there, but I just never made time to try it.

Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.

Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.

Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I've ever played, but to be fair, it wasn't exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn't really take off either.

There are also a handful of indie games that I've played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what's there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.

EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker's Toolkit's game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They're very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.

It was a nontrivial cost that factored into the price, and the switch to digital is a large part of why game prices were so inflation resistant for so long.

Central banks can adjust the inputs to the formula that result in inflation or deflation, but not the result. It can be a difficult target to hit, as you can see if you followed the news in the past 3-4 years.