ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Chad Nobark] The New Vegas Ending According To The Fallout TV Show⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Drawing things out was the problem with Westworld. I agree it wasn’t that much of a backpedal, but it robs the initial reveal of its impact, probably in pursuit of getting more mileage out of certain leading actors going forward. They get a wag of my finger for that one, and hopefully they don’t do too much more like it. Do what’s best for the story.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Chad Nobark] The New Vegas Ending According To The Fallout TV Show⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Without putting spoilers out there too blatantly, there’s a big reveal at the end of season 1 in a flashback at a Vault Tec meeting. In season 2, they did some backpedaling so that it was like, “No, no, no, that was the plan, but then they didn’t do it.” I’m loving the show so far, but I loved Westworld season 1, too, from the same showrunners. Hopefully later seasons of Fallout fare better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Aliens: Fireteam Elite Is No Longer Playable On Switch⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The Stop Killing Games movement has something cooking in parliament right now, so here’s hoping.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Chad Nobark] The New Vegas Ending According To The Fallout TV Show⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The video is trying to be nitpicky, but more than half of these are easily explained by things like the passage of time between New Vegas ending and the show starting, which is 15 years long and involves nuclear attacks to upset the order of things. I’m sorry to anyone whose head canon didn’t continue in the Amazon show, but it’s been a top-tier adaptation so far. My only nitpick of it is that season 2 already retconned one of their big reveals from season 1.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Take-Two CEO Says We'll All Be Streaming Our Games In 3 Years⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if they’re not greedy, I don’t think the price that it would take to provide that service at cost is going to ever be a price people are willing to pay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Locking a gameplay trailer behind a Netflix subscription is a new level of greed' — GTA 6 callout Rockstar for 'paywalling' the game's extended look⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Doubtful, given that it’s only a console release for the foreseeable future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is Mixed on Steam as players report poor PC performance, no Linux support, and countries without PSN unable to play⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a real shame, too, because I’d love to be able to play it. I had a lot of fun with the beta at a friend’s place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d say that’s what makes it news.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capcom isn't worried about PlayStation and Nintendo shrinking the physical games market: "90% of our unit sales are digital"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re reassuring their investors to remain optimistic about their investments. Besides, some amount of that 10% will shift to digital, as it’s been trending that way, where they get higher profit margins, so it might come out in the wash in actuality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, this makes history. The first time a video game advertisement was paywalled behind a subscription for 6 hours. What a shitty thing to make history for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  but aren’t these players part of the same “gamers” pie that all these companies want to get attention of?

  I can’t speak for Piscatella or how much he thinks about it that way, but it seems to be the perspective of this video, and one I would very much disagree with. The video acknowledges what the video game audience used to be 20 years ago. I’d argue that audience stuck around, while the growth that the industry experienced disproportionately went to people who “aren’t gamers, but they just play this game”. I don’t remember exactly how the video put it, but we know who that person is, and it includes your kid. Your kid would still be playing games if there was no Fortnite, but how that demographic used to look (best we can scale it to yesteryear, as times have certainly changed) was just picking up this year’s model of an old franchise, like moving from Halo to Halo 2 to Halo 3, a dynamic that still exists in sports games for that same large bucket of players that might only play one game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But that’s your kid falling into that other bucket that primarily plays one of those games. It’s a fool’s errand to target that player rather the type who samples many video games on a regular basis, because your kid has already found more or less the only game he’s interested in. Meanwhile, the kind of person who plays Resident Evil is far more likely to play a dozen other games in a given year. You’re not getting “scraps” if that’s your target customer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Is Happening To The Video Game Industry?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For a generalized channel from people who don’t know gaming like we do, it’s surprisingly spot on. Something that they might not know is a data point even worth quantifying is that in addition to hiring more developers, those developers are also, on average, spending more time making a single video game, whether it’s live service or not. And contributing to that problem of not having enough time is that even the non-live-service games are longer than the equivalent game used to be 20 years ago.

  I would push back on this point that even Mat Piscatella makes where if you’re not Fortnite, League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, or a handful of others, you’re somehow “fighting for scraps”; there’s the argument later in the game about what people want out of a multiplayer game or a social space; and then the question of “why wouldn’t you just make a mobile game?”. I don’t think these are often the same audience. The thing in common between most mobile games and most console games is that they’re made by people who have a very similar skill set, but their customers are often very different human beings. People on a Lemmy gaming community will probably play Grand Theft Auto, but they’ll also probably a dozen other new games in the same year. Those dozen other games aren’t fighting for GTA’s scraps; they’re just a subset of GTA’s audience who don’t intend to play it forever.

• ⁨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 ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I knew what it was before we had this conversation.