NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  I never made it too far into RDR2, but RDR1 is a VERY white game. Like, frigging Tom Jane’s Gun did a better job of acknowledging there was melanin in The Wild West and that game… does not age well. Was RDR2 significantly different?

  Because, inherently, a LOT of wild west stories are set in or around The Reconstruction and have The Civil War as a major aspect. In large part because that is what contributed to so many guns (and people who knew how to use them) in an environment where there were a lot of scores to settle and an expectation that the government would actively hinder anything.

  Whereas this sounds like a continuation of the AssFlag DLC where you straight up murder slavers in Haiti. Which, in turn, is a logical fallout of the origins of The Assassins mostly being about personal freedom and humanity and The Templar being a controlling fascist force that goes way back to Ass Creed 1.

  You know… the game where the real bad guys were actually the brown people who were manipulating everyone and King Richard was actually a pretty good guy with a really hot right hand woman.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Terraria⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Terraria is… basically nothing like a factory game? You can do some crazy stuff with the logic gates but that is mostly a hold over from Terraria being so inspired by Minecraft. But Terraria also had an actual progression system while Minecraft was still almost entirely a sandbox game.

  With Terraria? Go look up what defines a “room” (I think the next big patch will have the NPCs help you with that in game) and always have a spare “room” in any housing area. That is where new NPCs will move into.

  And then just play the game. Explore caves. Look for loot. Get your poopy pushed in by a boss. Progress will unlock new NPCs who will, in turn, point you towards other activities that will reveal new bosses or encourage you to seek out and build outposts in new biomes and so forth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it me or does it seem like review bombing on Steam has become so much worse recently?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Influencers (mostly vod and twitch based) have increasingly realized the way to move up to the next “tier” (or to maintain it) is to lead a “movement”. It is the logical extension of every new generation’s “All those people on X were corrupt and unethical and lying to you. Us here on Y are here to speak truth to you and will never let our opinions be bought. So make sure you like, comment, and subscribe and make sure to use my affiliate code in World of Tanks”

  In a lot of ways? Concorde broke the gaming world. It was a game that drew a LOT of hate for having “non-sexy” female models and also suffered from being incredibly “meh” so nobody felt a real need to defend it. But it let the chuds actually “cancel” a game. Which aligned well with all of the various reasons Black Myth Wukong became The Most Important Video Game To Ever Exist.

  So now all the influencers who want their own armies to harass and torment anyone they consider competition are trying to get in on that. Lots of verbiage shifts from “Wow, this game is horrible because those devs hate you. Unlike me who loves you” and more “Wow, this game is horrible and those devs don’t deserve to exist and people need to know not to waste their money on this” that translate to Call To Action style movements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you think he knows? He's gotta know.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  While it amuses me greatly to think his dick is disfigured from a botched surgery and he is in constant pain and embarrassment, the reality is likely that…

  There are two broad ways to have sex. The first is to actually engage with the other person and have some fun. The other is to pump until you nut and then move on because you just care about saying you had sex.

  Many chud adjacent white males do the latter. They just care about saying they had sex and care so little about the other person’s pleasure that they don’t even care about their own. Many are also taught to consider pleasure to be a sin but… talk to some sex workers. It is more likely just varying levels of sociopathy.

  So under those circumstances? I could see a world in which they banged solely for the cuckolding aspect. Just like the flight attendants he allegedly sexually assaulted and had to pay off. But the vast majority of the women he “sleeps with” are going to be a case of jizzing into a test tube and telling them to get IVF because his goal is just breeding and banging would take up time that could otherwise be spent snorting ketamine. And when he DOES want to get his rocks off, he can just exploit some rando around him because it doesn’t matter who does it so long as someone does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone know?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Historically? Mid-20s when you enter the work force and start wondering why groceries are so expensive. And then you lose your mind and get angry that life was so much better when you were 10 and not paying attention to that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting.

  Mordhau is a game where the official forums had a long standing “show us your kni**a” thread and was full of bigotry and hatred. They only began to moderate after enough articles about it were getting popular at a time people remembered Chivalry 2 existed.

  Let alone the Black Myth Wukong dev who was “mistranslated” when talking about all of the long history of misogyny and sexism coming from a studio that outright banned reviewers from talking about “feminism”

  At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.

  Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights.

  And there we go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don’t give a fuck.

  But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don’t play the games. Because “Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say “Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is going to encourage people who don’t know how/don’t care to pirate things to buy it.

  And yeah, I’ll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective… not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don’t actually care enough to follow indie devs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship.

  Which is the problem.

  Games have been banned (even before the current round of christofacist hell). So what rule says we can’t have “AOC Torture Sim 2025”? Is that the same rule as “Musk Torture Sim 2025”?

  Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.

  What about “Trans Raper 2025”?

  The reality is that “being apolitical” IS being political. It is an inherently libertarian and conservative standpoint where you “don’t believe government should intervene” and “things are fine the way they are”. And creating an environment like that inherently benefits chuds who are much more detached when they talk about “I identify as an attack helicopter” and are super quick to criticize people for “getting emotional” when they care about their fucking right to exist.

  Which is what the steam forums ARE. I had the misfortune of trying to debug Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Linux when it launched (actually ended up doing a LOT of testing and bug reporting). The forums were a cesspool of dog whistles and bigotry because the game had the audacity to have a character creator. And in between sifting through the hate to see who else had figured out what triggered a DRM activation, you know what I found getting moderated? No, not the bigotry and hate. The people who finally said “shut the fuck up”.

  “Wheaton’s Rule Of The Internet” is the kind of thing that privileged white boys love to parrot around. But once you actually spend time giving a shit about anyone other than you, it all goes out the window and you start needing actual rules. And Valve have continued to not do that until there is a threat of legal action involved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Amazon has a Crucial BX500 2 TB SSD drive for 106 USD

  While I fully understand the need for devs to support older hardware, this is also a very low cost upgrade that has a massive impact on user experience. Hell, for 20 something years now there have been articles about how getting an SSD (now nvme) is the biggest noticeable performance improvement someone can do.

  As for the topic at hand: I like that they support older systems. But this is also similar to language packs (and high res textures back in the day) where it REALLY should be handled via an opt-in DLC-like system. Because the reason people “need” massive amounts of storage on their gaming systems is BECAUSE of stuff like this. That support for a spinner means the people with SSDs or NVMEs need to spend more disk space on this game which means they need bigger storage which means they start going cheaper and…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does Helldivers 2 have such a bloated install size on PC? Old hard drives, says dev⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So uh… you find a lot of people around you tend to ask that, huh?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  We obviously can only infer based on PR and past actions, but I don’t consider the ASUS whatever the fucks to be a threat to Valve.

  Valve are not XBOX. They are Windows. They have their own branded hardware that sets a baseline but it is very much not in their interests to be the only source for that hardware. We have already see the Steam Deck take a very niche market (that was basically just Win GPD and Aya Neo) and turn it into one where you have a wide range of specs and very standardized interfaces and capabilities.

  And, much like how Microsoft gets money from running Windows on a Surface or a Thinkpad, so too does Valve get money from buying Steam games on a Steam Deck or an Aya Neo or a MSI Claw or whatever.

  But yes. As consumers, I am deeply worried about what happens when Sony has no actual competition other than “you can build your own PC but that is so very very hard so just give us money instead”. Especially since people can never stop glazing Nintendo and insisting they “aren’t competing with anyone” even as the exact same games run at significantly lower resolution and frame rate (and even their first party games run like trash).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The merging of xbox and windows is actually a REALLY REALLY good idea.

  But I think it is less about being enthusiastic about R&D and more about… consoles are increasingly just computers. And mostly the R&D boils down to asking AMD (because Jensen is too busy burning benjies to soften his latest jacket) what APU they have in the pipes. And I would be shocked if the PS7 generation isn’t basically “here is a NUC with egpu support and a nice plastic case”… assuming we still have home computing then (that is a different and much darker conversation).

  So it really does make perfect sense for MS to try and merge their Windows and XBOX OSes and, were they in a better position, I could see basically “just” selling Steam Machine style HTPCs as early as 2027.

  Whereas Sony and Nintendo kind of ARE stuck still making actual consoles. Maybe Sony could bundle “Playstation” streaming and even light local gaming into a Bravia TV but… why would they?

  But yeah. I will be amazed if the XBOX Brand/division exists (meaningfully) by as early as 2029.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand the importance of actually performing rigorous studies (haven’t checked their methodology) but… no fucking shit?

  GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement. Of course chuds are going to thrive under those circumstances.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nintendo have also bumped their flagship game price up to 80 USD. I recall Sony doing the same (and see articles to that effect) but it looks like their games are still mostly at the 70 USD point?

  Similarly, it is well worth noting that the Switch 2 announcement/deep dive videos specifically did NOT list the price or had vague reference to prices being announced regionally. This was primarily attributed to Liberation Day Tariffs but limited analyses do argue that the “base” price of the Switch 2 is higher than the Switch 1 which is consistent with increased engineering and overhead costs.

  To my knowledge, Microsoft is the only platform ones who is bumping up their subscription fee cost. In large part because that seems to be all they have (in the gaming space). But all projections and leaks are that platform hardware costs are going to be significantly higher next generation (so like 2026/2027) and game prices are similarly expected to re-stabilize with “full” games being 80 USD as a baseline and all discount prices shifting accordingly.

  In large part because development is getting more and more expensive and game prices mostly have stagnated for decades (until semi-recently bumping up to 70 and now 80 USD).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… if we want to talk about mismanagement, budgeting and delivery dates are barely a factor in game dev. With even a halfway decent publisher/stakeholder, the system of deliverables means that you tend to get into a case where the game is “done” by the time it was supposed to be and you are “just” focused on bugfixing and polishing. So you crunch until your staff are suicidal and then ship it and people criticize the “unfinished” area while loving the rest of it.

  The bigger issue is that the entire industry is more or less run in a start-up mindset. The competent project managers are mostly ignored in favor of the rockstar devs. MBA who spent hundreds of hours firming up jira tasks and translating between gitlab issues and said tasks? Get bent you stupid stooge, you are trying to ruin games. In a quick video blurb because you worked on the foliage in one of the boss arenas? How would you like a dump truck of money to run your own studio?

  And that is why we constantly see shit like Blizzard (when we actually look) where “locker room culture” is so prevalent and people just want to hire other people like them. They have no idea how to lead a project or deal with any kind of friction. But they are a genius Auteur until they crash and burn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mentioned it in one of the other threads about this but it bears repeating:

  BG3 did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a case of Wizards of the Coast giving money to a random studio and getting a masterpiece out.

  Baldurs Gate 3, as a product, was officially in development since approximately 2019. It released into early access on Steam in 2020 and 1.0 in 2023. It received repeated injections of cash through things like fricking google stadia over that period.

  But also? Baldurs Gate 3 didn’t begin development in 2019. Larian had been pestering/pitching the Wizards since freaking 2014 when they were still working on the kickstarted Divinity Original Sin 1. And Larian, as a studio, had been making CRPGs since 2002’s Divine Divinity.

  BG3 was agame with 3 years of active development and 21 years of experience and expertise.

  When studios get shuttered because they aren’t immediately profitable? You inherently have people who decide “I am done with this shit” and either were successful enough to enter early retirement or transition to related industries. You lose the experience that makes a “three year game” possible. Sometimes that is a high profile creative lead. But more often that is the people who don’t get to go on stage at the keighleys but who are interpreting said creative leads and actually making the mechanics and story beats we all love.

  Fuck EA. They are a horrible company that has mismanaged so many IPs and engaged in decades of worker abuse. But understand that we are also likely losing hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced game developers which will make future games from other studios worse.

  And before people say “fuck that, I like indie games”: Clair Obscur is the poster child of that and for very good reason. Maybe do some research as to who those core 30 people are (hint: They mostly were head hunted from Ubi et al) and where their money came from. And then think about what happens when there aren’t major studios to head hunt from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fans Left Speechless as Capcom Locks Street Fighter 6 Finals Behind Paywall⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh…

  They’ve been making a lot of effort to expand the “old” FGC (so basically Street Fighter) outside of Japan for a few years now. It hasn’t really taken hold (and I am going to pretend it is because everyone is like me and gets off on watching Guilty Gear!) and we see more and more Saudi money being pumped into “Western” FGC events.

  So I can see an argument for doubling down on their core audience to lock that in.

  And… PPVs ARE kind of making a comeback in The West. People are increasingly annoyed by “needing so many streaming services”. And, at least in pro wrestling, AEW have kind of been cleaning up with their 4-6 PPVs a year. And the human trafficking front known as WWE are starting to shift back that way as a result of, among other things, their ESPN deal. Companies have been desperate for more and more “event television” as streaming takes over (hence why AEW and WWE can get such lucrative tv contracts) and nothing is more “event” than paying 30-70 bucks to sit around the TV on a Saturday night.

  So I think it is less “a few greedy execs want to burn away the goodwill” and more… the overall industry trends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Autumn Sale 2025 Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  DOOM Eternal is to 2016 as DOOM 2 was to 1.

  New guns and an encounter design built around forcing you to be much more aggressive. 2 did it with the addition of the Archvile and Pain Elemental who were enemy spawners that would drain all your ammo if you just bunkered down near a corner. Eternal does it with the much greater emphasis on using special moves in combat to restore resource.

  I haven’t tried Dark Ages yet because of BDS and all that. But from what I have seen? Not super excited. Eternal is honestly one of my all time top 20 games because it just felt so good once you flowed. Taking that away and emphasizing blocking/reflecting is just… lame?

  ---

  And one of the biggest tips to vibe with DOOM Eternal: Play at least the first mission on Ultraviolence. The normal difficulty curve is such that you can mostly ignore all the new features and combos until you hit a wall and suddenly need them. Whereas UV forces you to engage with them as they are introduced so that it all kind of just flows. Feel free to knock it back down if you are sane and don’t feel like realizing you are physically exhausted after a single DLC level, but the game really benefits from jumping into the deep end to start.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Autumn Sale 2025 Has Begun⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Its a mix of things.

  • Part of it is that studios tend to price their games closer to what they are “worth”. So you have far fewer “This is a 20 dollar game we are gonna try to sell for 50”. They just put it at 20 to begin with (or get there pretty quick after launch). Which means that the same “get this for 10 bucks” is now 50% off instead of 80% off and so forth
  • Part of it is that game dev has gotten more expensive at all scales and all selling Big Rigs 1 for 5 dollars will do is prevent people from buying Big Rigs 6 for 30
  • Part of it is that… as you get older you are more likely to buy the games you want when they are “good enough” rather than waiting until EVERYTHING is at a max discount so you can spread the money you got from the banana stand over the summer as far as possible.
  • Which ALSO means that you have a huge backlog and it is a lot easier to say “Do I really need this?”
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's official: EA is going private.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.

  No, it really hasn’t. At least, on the PC side.

  if we go back to the 80s and 90s? SO much of what has defined video games actually were indie games. You just needed to call up a magazine and ask if you could put your game on their demo disk (often actually a floppy at those points…) or let the ten people on usenet know you had a BBS with games on it. Probably the most famous example of that is fricking DOOM but so much of what EA would acquire, fail to make a good sequel to, and kill, came out of that mindset.

  Then the early 00s were heavily characterized by mods being heavily platformed by the larger studios (a decent number of modern day studios actually came out of Make Something Unreal), demo discs getting even bigger (because now they were CDs), and the rise of The Internet meaning that it was possible for small publishers (fucking Strategy First) to do direct to consumer sales and games like Mount & Blade and later Minecraft being directly sold as direct downloads to sickos.

  Then we had Steam and… okay let’s ignore the Steam Greenlight program because that was just bad. But it mostly removed the barrier and made direct to consumer sales almost trivial. And it made it REALLY “easy” to show that you had a solid game to make that pitch meeting for the “last few years” of development a lot easier. More on that in a bit.

  And as games became more expensive to create (if you tried to sell Soldat today… well, just go look at Soldat on Steam), publishers were more and more needed. Sometimes as blatant “Embracer published this” and sometimes as “just” investments that never really get disclosed but leads to weirdness where one pissy investor means a game can never be sold again.

  Which gets back to the 2020s. Economic uncertainty and the realization that “just fund this studio for 10 years” guarantees nothing have made it a wasteland. Again, plenty of developers have been very open about this. NoClip even did a series of lite documentaries about their attempts to go through the process of making a game and it is bleak (Danny repeatedly compared it to being on Tinder… Which raises a few questions but I am sure somebody told him how much being single sucks). There is less and less money to go around and it is more and more going to the surest of sure things. All but guaranteed to make back the money and then some? Yeah, but this studio is promising us a 5x return so…

  Which gets to Hooded Horse et al. I fucking LOVE Hooded Horse and Kitfox and so forth (still not sure how Microprose suddenly came out of nowhere to become just as big a part of my entertainment as they were… 30 years ago). It is also very worth understanding that they are mostly swooping in on games that have been in development for 4-10 years and just need some money to dedicate time to polishing things up and making assets (Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of this). Or are devs/studios with MASSIVE pedigrees and, quite often, the rights to remaster/re-sell their back catalog (this is more a Microprose thing).

  Which gets back to the role of major studios.

  Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago

  HL1 was published by Sierra and fronted by former Microsoft devs (you ever wonder why GabeN gets off on sticking it to Windows?). They had a start-up funded by independently wealthy developers and, according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Deve…, one million (1990s) dollars advance and STILL involved going into potentially serious debt to make.

  Which, again: Technical abilities developed on someone else’s dime. Good chunk of cash from getting in early on the rise of frigging Microsoft. And publishers who would throw (doing rough inflation math) about 2 million dollars at a project because “why not”.

  And… you know how publishers got the money to do that? Sierra was a frigging powerhouse in the 90s. So much of the adventure genre was kinda just them and they had already branched out to strategy, party games, delicious copaganda, etc. Like… en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_v…

  Everyone loves the idea of someone making something truly ground breaking in their basement with scraps. The reality is that we mostly see evolutions and deep dives on existing games. But what people often forget is that the thing that takes a game to the next level is almost always very experienced developers. And… most of them tend to have some time at a major studio under their belt where they can learn the dos and don’ts and so forth. Get rid of those major studios and suddenly everyone is dependent on finding the right online tutorial and not realizing that the old hats who make said tutorials and come in to “take things to the next level” are all retiring or changing industries for the same reasons those major studios are getting gutted.

  And also… the reality is that the Terrarias and Quds of the world are incredibly rare. Mostly we get complete jank fests that barely function and are clearly just someone’s wank fantasy.

  I am not saying people need to feel horrible over the death of EA (although… you probably SHOULD considering how many people they employ and how they still make some certified bangers). But this “Fuck it, this massive industry pillar collapsing will have no impact on the industry as a whole” is just plain naivety.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's official: EA is going private.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a problem only for the AAA industry,

  No, it really isn’t. Rather than just regurgitate what the “video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money” twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.

  Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people “wait for sales”. Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.

  I’ll also add on: What you are seeing are not “AAA games”. At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn’t justify the development costs.

  What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the “B Game” studios and the “I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time” indie studios and… I shouldn’t have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.

  And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall’s Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game… that increasingly can’t be made anymore.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Clair_Obscur:_Expedition_33#De…

  Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire “dozens” more contractors.

  Clair Obscur is an “indie” game in the sense that Sandfall don’t have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades.

  As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the “I’ve been animating for 12 years” are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to “build out a portfolio” for one of the very few remaining jobs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fun yet unknown gameplay MECHANICS? (POLL)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Back during the pandemic Abby Russell played RE4 on Giant Bomb and chat was pretty much constantly losing it over how much ammo she was using. But the game’s drop tables accounted for that and she basically was just playing Gears of War for all intents and purposes.

  Was fascinating since basically everyone who has ever played that game focused on headshots and conservation rather than just unloading.

  But it also speaks to how this is usually implemented. It is more about making every playstyle viable rather than actively getting the hammer and nails if it sees you are getting a bit too excited during a combat sequence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lara Croft is a Sociopath⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes

  Looks like it was on twitter so here is a blogspam article instead, but Jonathan Cooper and Amy Hennig both effectively confirmed this

  screenrant.com/uncharted-game-nathan-drake-luck-m…

  Basically the idea is that only the last shot matters. Nathan isn’t actually getting shot by a full magazine from a FAL. He is getting grazed and shitting himself. And when you finally die? THAT is the bullet that hit. Which actually makes a lot more sense since the damage indicators (aside from Nate face tanking a 50 BMG…) tend to line up more with how video games portray suppression and the like. And it is why a single pistol shot to the leg in a cutscene leads to 20 minutes of slow walking and a time skip.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's official: EA is going private.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You should be worried if you at all care about video games. Yes, EA sucks. But even a decade or so ago they were pretty much one of the big two and are still one of the biggest “developer” houses.

  Because we already saw this play out with Embracer et al and increasingly with Microsoft. Video games are a horrible investment. If you make a "good game"and do all of your PR right and get REALLY lucky? Yeah, you can buy a yacht or twenty. But that comes after 2-8 years of expensive development with many points where you have to just keep throwing money at it in the hopes of success.

  And EA was one of those companies that could get away with that because their sports games are so popular that they can fund development of the entire company AND still make a solid profit.

  Because

  it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games

  That isn’t how this works. You don’t say “Wow. Development is really expensive and has no guaranteed ROI. Let’s fund external development that we have even less control over”.

  As Swen et al constantly remind people: Baldurs Gate 3 is not a model that studios can follow. It was a once in a lifetime convergence of circumstances. Larian had been making CRPGs for close to two decades at that point and had used multiple kickstarters to modernize their stack in a genre that had mostly been forgotten. And they STILL needed 3 years of early access and a LOT of marketing money (BG3 was a fricking keypoint of Stadia for crying out loud).

  That isn’t what Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Mirror’s Edge will get. At best they will get cheap remasters by Nightdive (which would actually be nice but…). More likely they will get the kind of “Are you sure this isn’t a mobile game? From the 2010s?” that we see plaguing Warhammer 40k and the like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Whitelight] You Don't Hate Remasters Enough⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t checked Deus Ex specifically but my general experience is that Wine actually makes older games easier to run. In large part because you aren’t having Windows 10 use compatibility mode to Windows 8’s Vista’s 98 compatibility mode and are instead just tricking it into thinking those libraries are just there.

  That said, I have no issue with the remaster. If it is good? Awesome. I’m willing to throw another 20 bucks down the hole if I want to replay that without needing to google for unofficial patches. And if it is crap? I don’t buy it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lara Croft is a Sociopath⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  DC’s Poison Ivy is always one of the best examples of this.

  I want to say she is from the 70s? And “evil lady eco terrorist” is both sexy and evil. Except, as time went on, more and more of the readers/viewers started to REALLY like the lady who murders the patriarchy while destroying chemical factories and oil refineries to protect the planet. So she became more of a plant monster and DC Editorial learned how many of us are into bondage and so forth. Which has led to the modern day where she is basically an anti-villain, at best, alongside her lesbian lover Harley. Although the Harley Quinn show did a great job of playing with that with everyone more or less thinking her an annoying goodie two shoes even though she is torturing and murdering children and whatever else her background atrocity of the week is.

  But a lesser known example that might actually be one of my favorite movies at this point is Donnie Yen’s Raging Fire. Yen plays the hero cop, as he always does, who is older but has morals and butts heads with his bosses who are too political. Except that, years prior to the movie, he was on a case with his protege and partner and they were told to do whatever it took to find a rich business man. Oh noes! His entire unit accidentally kills a suspect and now then Oh Noes, Donnie narced on them because of his morals so they went to prison and had a REAL bad time.

  And now they are out and killing the corrupt cops and business people who betrayed them. Also it is basically Heat (right down to getting caught because the psycho killed a hooker) and the movie does a REAL good job of showing why Tse’s criminal is the way he is and why Yen’s cop is pushed to his breaking point and outright fighting the system he is supposed to uphold when his loved ones are in danger.

  Until the final sequence which is the bank robbery from Heat. Except the writers realized the CCP is REALLY not going to like a movie that is this anti-cop so suddenly they are mowing down civilians left and right and lobbing grenades everywhere just to make sure you understand these ex-cops are actually the bad guys. And Donnie Yen and his CCP mouthpiece ass still has it.

  Its a deeply problematic movie, like most of Donnie Yen’s post 2010s work, but it is also incredibly fascinating when you think of it from the perspective of sympathetic villains and state mandated “tone”. Also, like ALL of Donnie Yen’s work, it is a beautiful spectacle of martial arts coming from a guy who is even more frustratingly charming than Tom Cruise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lara Croft is a Sociopath⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Shadow definitely went off the deep end as it tried to up the stakes. Most of her personal motivation (frantic survival and then the mystery of her father’s death) were out the window and it was just a nebulous “I want to stop the bad guys”. And… it plays with it but it is very clear the intent is that she is unleashing the apocalypse as she steals these artifacts before the Bad Guys can. Whether the Bad Guys would have still done it without her is, of course, up to the viewer. It’s Indy and the Ark/Grail.

  But I think the game overall does a good job of getting to the status quo and establishing Lara as having a Very British reason for looting everything and shooting every dinosaur she ever sees. If she doesn’t steal it, err, have it gifted to her, then somebody much worse will and they’ll be a lot meaner about it.

  On the scale of “it belongs in a museum”: She is definitely much more psychotic than Indiana Jones. But she ain’t got nothing on Nathan Drake.

  ---

  Personally? I loved the original. I felt the second wore out its welcome by the end. And I actively disliked the third but it was short enough I finished it. But I think that is also why I will probably never bother to play Uncharted 4. I am just done with humping walls looking for yellow paint and waiting to see when my character reaches for something so I know to hit the jump button.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One game has issues -> “always problematic”

  Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.

  The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asus ROG Xbox Ally Gaming Handhelds Cost Up to $999.99, Preorders Open Now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The Steam Deck was pushed specifically by an online storefront as a “first party console” for the purposes of being, if not a loss leader, something approximating it.

  ASUS is not Microsoft. They were going to release a handheld format gaming laptop regardless. They just took some cash from MS to change the plastic on one of their buttons. Once they sell this, that is it for profits (aside from all the spyware ASUS bundles in). The GPDs and Aya Neos had the same problem. And these are significantly more powerful than a Steam Deck at this point.

  I would need to dig through the marketing and cross reference AMD’s latest naming nonsense. But 1k for a gaming laptop is a shockingly good deal and the MSI Claw A8 has the same processor and, as of the Toms Guide article I found, was priced at £849.

  Personally? I don’t think there is much point in getting something ridiculously powerful as a gameboy and find the Steam Deck to be a great sweet spot where I can play the games I want to play natively but also stream (locally or from a cloud service) if I REALLY need to play something Bigger on there. But I also never really saw a point to gaming laptops for similar reasons.

  But the people who do want a gaming laptop? This is what you are looking at.