ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s just the Overton Window shift. If a game’s budget is in 9 figures of USD to make, I don’t see how you couldn’t call it AAA. Even the likes of Elden Ring and Metaphor are similarly big, and they’re probably only short of 9 figures USD by way of being made in Japan for a comparable amount of labor. There’s a wide spread between GTA VI and the next-most-expensive games ever made. The AAA of yesteryear was made by a team the size of The Alters or even far smaller.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Recover? It sold well, and it’s not v1.0 yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It took a friend and I a few dozen hours to hit a difficulty spike. Before that, it was easy enough that we had to turn the difficulty up a notch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Phasing out the optical drive from laptops was just about inevitable regardless of what Apple did. It saved a lot on battery life, not just form factor. I might see digital distribution of music, not video games, as a bigger driver for removing the disc drive, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, exactly why it feels gross to signal boost it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think we need to amplify one of the worst opinion columns written in a hot minute. This reminds me of that guy who wanted to shame every adult who uses a backpack, as some kind of fashion faux pas. Both of these people can get bent. Games are fun. Backpacks are practical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The hill I will die on: Games are the opposite of fun, and I’d ban them for anyone over 12 | Emily Watkins⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That was the first thing I took away from it, too. I like alcohol. It’s also objectively a worse activity for a healthy adult than playing ping pong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Steam doesn’t advertise a game’s DRM status. DRM-free Steam game lists are maintained on wikis by users testing them. Most of the time they’re not DRM-free, but sometimes the developer is motivated to release them that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d argue boiling a thing down to “slop” is a lazy way to avoid saying why they didn’t like it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  People tend to use it to mean, “thing I don’t like” far too often these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s funny, because I would describe Breath of the Wild as the antithesis of the open world design, popularized by Ubisoft, that was most ubiquitous when BotW came out. You climb and tower and decide what’s interesting by seeing it from the top of the tower, not because climbing the tower labeled it as a checklist item on your map. In fact, if you do all of the shrines visible from the top of the towers, you’ve only done about half of them, and late in the game, after stumbling across a few shrines by happenstance, you realize from the negative space on the map that anything you couldn’t see from the top of the tower would tend to have a puzzle to solve that would reveal it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thief vs. AAA Gaming - An Essay⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The zombies and monsters don’t fit the fantasy of being a thief. I didn’t try to fight them off, but mostly I just ran from them. It didn’t feel like I was sneaking around them or that it was something the game encouraged me to do when I encountered them, unlike with the human NPCs.

  Getting lost is part of the point with the labyrinth levels.

  If mine was the intended experience, it’s the part I would call dated, and avoiding that feeling is probably why we have so much white/yellow paint and so many objective markers. I’m inclined to believe, based on the presence of the in-game maps, that they expected me to find my way around by landmarks that weren’t as visually distinctive as they wanted them to be if they were unrestrained by development time or technology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thief vs. AAA Gaming - An Essay⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Movies are mostly settled science at this point, right? From the invention of the camera, there were decades of experimenting with what could be done on film, and eventually we arrived at feature length and a toolbox of techniques to use within it. Now and then some other innovation comes along and blows people away, but it’s not every year. Most of the time, it’s adhering mostly to a formula and tweaking it, or just telling a different story in the same constraints. Likewise, I don’t think games will ever advance as fast as they did in most of our lifetimes, but we’ll still get new stuff here and there.

  As far as “AAA” goes, the AAA of Thief 1’s day is barely bigger than most indie teams today. Shareholders or not, you can’t experiment with $100M (or as high as a few billion if you’re making Grand Theft Auto VI) like you can with $1M or even $10M. As much as the author puts Thief on a pedestal, I bounced off of it for not strictly adhering to stealth, like when it takes a detour into the undead and other monsters; and for the constraints of its own technology at the time, like geometry being so simple and textures being so reused that I found the levels tedious to navigate by way of lacking identifiable landmarks. Thief 1 loaded the entire level at once because there was no asset streaming. Thief 2014 had load-bearing walls demoed in the video because they couldn’t keep up the fidelity they targeted without dynamically unloading one part of the level and loading another from a hard drive.

  Anyway, Project Shadowglass looks awesome. Hopefully there are no zombies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thief vs. AAA Gaming - An Essay⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The fascinating thing to be reminded of by seeing this video so many years later is that this cycle will repeat over and over again. “Thing I liked years ago is better than thing people like today,” says essayist. Some of it was, but it came at a cost, so we then valued other things in response to those costs/flaws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you consider GTA VI overpriced?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I knew what it was before we had this conversation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you consider GTA VI overpriced?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, you’ve never seen the throwaway bonus missions on a game SKU before? Truthfully, no one knows but Rockstar how substantive that extra stuff is. But my gut and past experience tells me that if it was actually worth seeing, they wouldn’t have padded out the list with a bunch of variations on guns and cars, of which there will be many even in the base game, because it’s Grand Theft Auto. The missions that we know about, which you have to read on one or two select pages but they’re not present on others, is some kind of mission around collecting cars for some fence; I’m not losing sleep over not having that and keeping an extra $20 in my pocket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you consider GTA VI overpriced?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, deluxe versions of stuff like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Borderlands.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you consider GTA VI overpriced?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, alternatively, it’s $80, but they’ll let you plus it up with some bullshit that doesn’t matter for $20.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you consider GTA VI overpriced?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth what someone is willing to pay. I have paid north of $100 USD for new video games before. For what’s different between those two versions of GTA6, I probably would have been just fine on the $80 version and felt it was worth the money, as the $20 more expensive version doesn’t seem to offer much of value to me, but that’s if it came out on PC in the same calendar year. By December, all of the cultural zeitgeist around the game will be discussed to death on end-of-year gaming podcasts, and by the time it comes to PC, it will be long past spoiler discussions and that cultural moment. So by then, I don’t know what I’ll be willing to pay, but it will be far less than $80.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m aware of the Evercade. I just don’t see that becoming a market that’s going to trend up and resemble the market that consoles had at their peak in 2009. So who’s going to challenge Sony’s supremacy? To me, it looks like no one, because even Sony isn’t poised to be supreme anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Are 16-bit games not solved via DOSBox?

  Also, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s the economics of it that are tearing down consoles. If you’ve got a set target, Game X launches on PS4. Now the PS5 comes out. It plays PS4 games, but it can’t ever run them better than the PS4 ran them. It also asks for an upgrade to run the “PS5 version”. It also demands you use a PS5 controller and not a PS4 controller. Game X is still super popular for more than the duration of the PS5’s lifespan. Now the PS6 is coming out, and the cycle will repeat.

  Because of console cert, and all of those added costs, it’s far easier to get out the next indie hit on PC for less money. People go to play the indie hit, and it’s old news by the time it gets a port for Switch 2.

  PS2 used to have tons of exclusive games that Sony didn’t even pay for the privilege. Now architectures and capabilities are so similar that if you’re making a game on only one platform, you’re leaving money on the table. So as the customer, you’ll probably end up going for the one with the most games you want to play, which has a greater chance of being PC every time the above paragraph happens.

  Online gaming doesn’t have to come with a subscription fee, but they all choose to, and customers are savvy enough to notice their long-term costs after they’ve been gaming for some time.

  Each of these things gets people to check out of the console space as it loses the value it once offered.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can also watch a season of a TV show far faster than I can play through a video game at the size that AAA publishers keep making them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Game Pass Was Supposed To Save Xbox – Instead, It’s Killing the Company⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the reality is that we outgrew our need for consoles the way they’ve always existed, with certification, exclusives, walled gardens, generations, etc. that no longer make sense. If you want physical to come back, it’s probably on a PC somehow, but people also don’t typically have disc drives anymore, and even offline games tend to get patches and updates that you’d have to account for in some way; the media you can store that on will have a more restrictive shelf life and cost more to purchase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSBLACKOUT (boycott of PlayStation)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I don’t think the weeklong one will accomplish anything either, but I often see people talk themselves out of individual action because they can’t control other people’s actions. If we all stop doing that, it’s called collective action, and it works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSBLACKOUT (boycott of PlayStation)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This one did earlier this month.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I built a free game where you try to beat a couch at timing the market. Over 80k plays later, the couch usually wins.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The example I always found in investing literature is that the best class of investor is “dead people”, since they don’t time the market. Hard to say which one makes the point better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls appears to block SteamOS / Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there are more customers who will now not buy the game than there are those who would stop due to a few cheaters. People who don’t compete at the level I do aren’t going to run into cheaters in the first place, because they rise to the top so quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls appears to block SteamOS / Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At the skill level you’re likely to see a single cheater in a fighting game, you’ve already learned and conquered much of what the game has to show you, and I doubt that running into a cheater a few hundred hours later is going to deter you from competing. In this genre and community, we also know that ranked doesn’t count for as much as tournament results, online or off, and they’ll ban cheaters if they find them, no sweat.