Quetzalcutlass
@Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
- Comment on Just months after reportedly cancelling two live service games in development, Sony announces a new PlayStation studio with a live service game in development 2 hours ago:
I don’t think it’s actually gotten much worse, it’s just slowly made its way out of mobile games and into regular gaming. A F2P gacha game on Android being scummy is nothing new, but an $80 (soon to be $90) AAA game double- and triple-dipping into your wallet with paid season passes and FOMO banners and all that other junk, plus adding in-game advertising? That’s still relatively new to consoles/PC and putting that crap in paid games represents a new level of greed.
- Comment on Just months after reportedly cancelling two live service games in development, Sony announces a new PlayStation studio with a live service game in development 3 hours ago:
Not that video specifically, but the others were along the same vein. They were all completely open about how they abused psychology to get people hooked, and spoke about players using dehumanizing terms like assets or cash cows. It was disgusting how shameless they were.
- Comment on Just months after reportedly cancelling two live service games in development, Sony announces a new PlayStation studio with a live service game in development 3 hours ago:
I’m still salty they turned Marathon into an extraction shooter. Marathon, one of the all-time narrative greats!
Why make millions releasing games people want when you can potentially make billions by abusing addiction research to keep users playing long past the point they enjoy your game?
(I’m vaguely associated with the gaming industry. I knew things were about to go downhill when I started getting invites to lectures on retaining players and extracting money by using unethical psychological tricks - this was nearly fifteen years ago)
- Comment on Just months after reportedly cancelling two live service games in development, Sony announces a new PlayStation studio with a live service game in development 3 hours ago:
*Monkey’s paw curls*
Your wish has been granted. Look forward to our upcoming Syphon: Extraction, an exciting extraction shooter with none of the gameplay you remember!
Also on the docket is Ape Escape Infinity, a gacha featuring all your favorite apes and up to several minutes of gameplay. Now supports importing NFT apes, because our execs are still pushing crypto as the next big thing for some reason!
- Comment on Minecraft’s VR support is now gone 1 day ago:
Isn’t there a major graphics update coming soon? Maybe they didn’t feel like it was worth testing and maintaining VR compatibility with all the changes.
- Comment on You know... they have a point 3 days ago:
“It’s tee-ah-tim-eh!”
- Comment on What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games? 4 days ago:
The funny thing is being enslaved by the religious zealots is one of the best starts you can pick in the game. You’re stuck in a quarry doing backbreaking work (which levels strength), are fed just enough that you won’t die (acquiring food is normally a nightmare in the early game), and most importantly the guards won’t (intentionally) kill you, only knock you unconscious if you misbehave. Which matters because taking damage is how you train toughness, making it one of only a few places on the entire world map where you can train it without a high risk of death.
And it gets better. Every night after your shift you can sneak out and practice lock picking on doors and slave shackles and assassinating sleeping guards (since failure only results in a beatdown), which combined with the strength and toughness grinding leads to you becoming a ninja powerhouse by the time you escape.
10/10, would lead a slave uprising again.
- Comment on There's a new Honkai game on the way with characters from Star Rail and Impact 3rd, and it sure does look like a Pokemon clone 4 days ago:
A Pokémon-like spinoff of Honkai? Isn’t that basically what Star Rail was, with its type system and turn-based battles?
Pokemon doesn’t seem like the only game that HoYoVerse is going after, as there’s been leaks and other social media accounts spotted to do with a game that might be in the vein of Stardew Valley.
Gacha crops, gacha tools, gacha townsfolk, paid assistants… This sounds awful and like they’ll make a fucking mint off it. There’s so much room for unethical monetization in the farming genre!
- Comment on LIARS! 2 weeks ago:
(I know this is a shitpost, but I couldn’t resist lore-dumping)
The Dark Sign is actually Gwyn’s curse on humanity to seal away their potential (the Dark Soul being the only fragment of the First Flame that can be shared and passed on without weakening, he feared humanity growing powerful enough to topple the gods through sheer numbers). That’s why the Dark Sign appears as a flame encircling the Dark. When the First Flame weakens enough, his seal becomes visible as the Dark within humanity begins breaking free.
- Comment on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) 2 weeks ago:
Shivering Isles rivals Morrowind in my mind. It has a strange and unique setting and most of the content is incredibly well-written, which contrasts sharply with the standard medieval setting of baseline Oblivion (mandatory reminder that Cyrodiil was supposed to be a rainforest, but the devs retconned it to make development easier).
The other expansion, Knights of the Nine, was just a bunch of fetch quests to unlock an armor set and was disappointing in comparison to even the base game (though at least the final boss fight was cool). It also put behavioral tracking on the DLC’s rewards that would disable them if your character gained infamy, forcing you to repeat a bunch of boring travel quests to fix them whenever this happened. There’s a reason KotN never comes up in discussions about the game.
- Comment on Euphoria Engine Introduction (Older than 2008) 2 weeks ago:
Digital Molecular Matter, the DMM you mentioned in Force Unleashed, is just as interesting IMO. It calculated how objects would break under various types of force and produced some of the best and most realistic destruction in gaming. It even simulated wood splintering vertically when twisted!
I’m guessing it had similar problems to Euphoria since I haven’t seen it mentioned since.
- Comment on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) 2 weeks ago:
90% of Oblivion’s voice acting budget must have gone to paying for Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean to say a few dozen lines. It’s long been a meme that basically every other person in Cyrodill shares the same six or seven voice actors.
- Comment on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) 2 weeks ago:
Jeremy Soule did amazing work. Unfortunately it turned out he was a terrible person and he was blacklisted from the industry after multiple allegations were made against him during the #MeToo movement.
- Comment on I know you all have big plans for this man 2 weeks ago:
The vampire stuff in Oblivion is interesting but short. There’s maybe an hour of content spread across the entire game world.
Morrowind had multiple vampire clans you could join (that were completely hidden and hostile to anyone not infected with their strain of the virus, so probably missed by 99% of players not using a guide), each with their own specialties and questlines, and there were unique interactions with NPCs and factions based on the progression of your vampirism.
It’s disappointing that Oblivion was such a step backward in that regard. My guess is the expense of universal voice acting made detailed optional questlines and responsive NPCs prohibitively expensive. Even Skyrim, which dedicated an entire DLC to vampires, was lacking compared to what was arguably a throwaway feature from Morrowind.
- Comment on Do it 3 weeks ago:
Time In A Bottle.
Oh no…
- Comment on V Rising's first big post 1.0 update brings a bevy of additions, combat reworks, and Steam Deck support later this month 3 weeks ago:
Crafting will be a bit easier too now as you can take ingredients from your vault without having to actually go to your vault to get them.
Why is “craft from chests” always only added to survival crafting games ages after launch despite players begging for it from day one? It should be considered a basic QoL feature at this point.
- Comment on V Rising's first big post 1.0 update brings a bevy of additions, combat reworks, and Steam Deck support later this month 3 weeks ago:
Does it require a connection for single player? I’ve been playing solo since early Early Access with no problem, but I haven’t tested with my WiFi off.
- Comment on FromSoftware aren't abandoning single player in favour of games like Elden Ring: Nightreign, says Miyazaki 4 weeks ago:
Rock Paper Shotgun went downhill a long time ago. The original was an opinionated humor column about video games founded by talented writers. It was sarcastic but all on good fun. The owners left more than a decade ago, it was sold to one of the media conglomerates that hoovered up a bunch of other games journalism sites, and RPS even operated without an editorial staff for a while (not sure if that’s still the case as I stopped being an active reader around this time).
The new guys try to ape the sarcasm and style of the old stuff, but it comes across as disinterested at best to downright mean-spirited a lot of the time. The useless clickbait titles don’t help either.
- Comment on Embracer studio Eidos-Montreal has laid off 75 employees 5 weeks ago:
Embracer is also splitting into three separate companies to shed the tainted Embracer name, all still owned and run by Wingefors of course.
Asmodee Group (for board games) and Coffee Stain Publishing (for indie games) are the only two with official names last I heard. The unnamed third is the big one and Embracer’s direct successor, but I guess they’re delaying naming it to minimize bad press associated with the name.
- Comment on Roblox players are going to start getting paid to watch ads 5 weeks ago:
Because so far that type of monetization scheme hasn’t made headway outside of the mobile space. This is yet another frog-boiling moment where they gradually push what they can get away with.
- Comment on How Ubisoft spent $2.1M on influencers to secure the launch of Assassin's Creed Shadows 5 weeks ago:
Or just excitement at getting “exclusive” early access as a small streamer. If you don’t know there are thousands of others, it’d feel like an opportunity to make it big.
- Comment on FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH gets a smaller download on Steam Deck 2 months ago:
There’s an old internet law about computer programs endlessly expanding to gobble up every resource as computers improve. Nowhere is it more obvious than in gaming. Textures you’ll never use, translations included in the default download for no good reason, the same files duplicated many times over because it gives a slight improvement to load times on consoles, delta patches using up an entire CPU core and taking longer than simply redownloading the whole game, ten minutes spent compiling thousands of bespoke shaders on startup…
Ugh, shader compilation is the worst since it can ruin an entire planned gaming session. As annoying and performance-crippling as it is in its early stages, I can’t wait for ray tracing to become the default. Modern computer graphics are built on hacks upon hacks upon hacks. Ray tracing, by virtue of acting how light actually acts, cuts the Gordian Knot and vastly simplifies things. Hopefully it’ll help do away with the multitude of shaders used to imitate perfect lighting through imperfect means and we can just simply run our games again.
- Comment on Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra's release may fall in Christmas 2025, according to the Black Panther 2 months ago:
I was ambivalent until the article mentioned Amy Hennig. There’s a chance this might actually be good!
I’m still salty about that canceled Star Wars heist game she worked on.
- Comment on Former Fable dev behind hit free Ultima-style RPG adds 100-floor megadungeon for a fiver 2 months ago:
Someone should do a roundup of what all the old Bullfrog/Lionhead devs are up to these days.
I know a bunch of them teamed up to make Kynseed, an okay attempt to make a game that delivered on Fable’s promise of the world growing up/around your character, and which had the misfortune to compete against the sudden resurgence of life/farming sims due to Stardew Valley’s then-recent success.
And Peter Molyneux is… around, doing Peter Molyneux things (as he is wont to do).
- Comment on FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH gets a smaller download on Steam Deck 2 months ago:
I hope the Steam Deck-specific content depot gets used more often.
I also wonder if the Steam CLI can download from it on other platforms. I’m running a 4060, so being able to trim out all the texture boat I can’t even run would be a godsend.
- Comment on The Sims 4's Businesses & Hobbies expansion pack will let open your own business and tattoo your Sims 2 months ago:
Too little, too…
and it lets Sims open their own tattoo parlour, pottery studio or - if you have the right complementary expansion - a cat café.
Fuck.
- Comment on Dwarf Fortress has some exciting plans for the future 2 months ago:
Are certain features still introduced when you hit population milestones? I haven’t played since 40d, which was… a while ago, but I liked playing without worrying about nobles or the greater economy or any of the other features that complicated the game even more. Just a small band of dwarves living their
brief, hellishdwarfy lives. - Comment on Day 204 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots 2 months ago:
Heroic is the fun kind of hard. Legendary in Halo 2 is just brutally unfair, and even if you play perfectly it’s completely down to random chance whether you’ll succeed. As in you’re literally at the mercy of RNG in the enemy AI deciding whether you’ll be instakilled with no possible defense. Those fucking Jackal snipers…
And it’s even worse in co-op because you need to restart from the last checkpoint if either player dies, whereas on other difficulties (or Legendary in the other games) the other player can continue playing and you’ll respawn if they make it to a safe area. That one change makes co-op controller-snappingly frustrating.
Beating it in multiplayer is a legit praiseworthy achievement. Either that or a sign of deep masochism.
- Comment on What are your favorite games for killing nazis? 2 months ago:
Company of Heroes gets my vote. I love having a sniper take out a machine gun nest, then my riflemen flip the gun 180° and mow down wave after wave of Nazi reinforcements.
- Comment on Religion 3 months ago:
My point was that what constitutes a god differs between religions, and the Christian claim of monotheism uses a very narrow definition of god that excludes the many supernatural beings described in their religious texts.
By the standards of other religions one could easily argue it’s a polytheistic religion - the Trinity, or one divinity appearing in multiple forms, is similar to other religions considered polytheistic.
It’s an endless debate because both sides talk past each other due to disagreeing on the basic definition of the term.
I do not know much about mormons, aren’t they christians? I thought they were.
That’s a matter of debate I’m not at all qualified to get into. They have some very [out there](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaltation_(Mormonism\)) beliefs that they understandably don’t advertise to outsiders, and that only became common knowledge with the advent of the internet.