ampersandrew
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world
- Comment on Hero shooter Highguard reportedly didn't even pay for the Game Awards slot that's earned it so much preemptive hate—the showrunners thought it deserved the spotlight 12 hours ago:
I’ll give you the private fiefdom part, but whatever other criticisms you’ve got for the Game Awards, and there are so many, that man loves video games. Putting Highguard there was likely misreading the room, but he probably thought it would be a banger.
- Comment on Hero shooter Highguard reportedly didn't even pay for the Game Awards slot that's earned it so much preemptive hate—the showrunners thought it deserved the spotlight 15 hours ago:
Are you calling Geoff Keighley a tech bro?
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 1 day ago:
Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
So then if Facepunch were to buy New World and allow players to self-host servers, it would be a first for the genre, which would be cool.
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
Survival games like Rust often offer, as an officially supported feature of the game, the server code for you to run your own. When a World of WarCraft community server is run, it’s against Blizzard’s wishes and terms of service, and when they find out about it, it gets shut down, because Blizzard only wants you to play that game on Blizzard’s servers. I’m asking if any other MMORPGs offer community servers as an official feature the way that most survival games do, because it would be the first I’ve heard of it.
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
In an official capacity? Because there’s something like City of Heroes, but they only have 1 licensee and that’s all they’re interested in. Or are they games that call themselves MMOs while doing way less technically than an actual MMORPG, like Guild Wars 1? I’ll grant you I could be way out of the loop, but I’ve only ever heard of pirate servers serving this role in proper MMORPGs before.
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
It still sucks, but at least there’s a path to playing the game, so that bodes well for this game’s future even if Facepunch buys it.
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
It doesn’t inspire confidence, but it looks like they have a game post-Rust that still works on Linux. Does Rust allow for self-hosted servers?
- Submitted 3 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on Amazon MMO New World Has Just a Year to Live, Rust Dev Offers to Buy It - IGN 3 days ago:
As an MMO, would that make it the first of its kind?
- Comment on 'More DLC = More FPS' — Monster Hunter Wilds Players Ask Capcom for Answers After Theory Suggests a Backend DLC Check Is Tanking Performance - IGN 4 days ago:
Word is Digital Foundry in touch with the modder and will be running some tests.
- Comment on Bethesda announces a new Fallout... reality show 4 days ago:
It’s called a “casino”.
- Valheim player keeps building Dollar Generals despite friend begging them to stop: 'I do not want to play Valheim with Greg anymore'www.pcgamer.com ↗Submitted 5 days ago to games@lemmy.world | 43 comments
- Comment on Dragon Age veteran says scrapped Anthem Next "could have been" up there with No Man's Sky's legendary turnaround 5 days ago:
I’m glad you enjoyed it, but that reputation spread because reviewers had a bad time with it. It wasn’t, like you said, because the internet just needed something to hate that week. And since it never got a No Man’s Sky esque update, I doubt the consensus on it would have changed much even if more people had given it a try after the fact. They certainly had the opportunity with steep discounts over the past few years. In that time, Destiny got plenty more attention and two or three other Borderlands games came out.
- Comment on Dragon Age veteran says scrapped Anthem Next "could have been" up there with No Man's Sky's legendary turnaround 5 days ago:
A big site redesign just happened at Giant Bomb, so I can’t view the review, but there’s typically a difference between an always-online game not working and some of the things you listed. Cyberpunk was reviewed on PC, and it mostly worked fine for a lot of people on PC, which is what the early review codes were sent out for. Skyrim crashed a lot but kept plenty of auto saves so you rarely lost progress. In an always online game, the functionality just isn’t there if the problems are related to server infrastructure. In fact, this is rarely punished in review scores, and the likes of the latest Flight Simulator are the exception rather than the rule for it.
But even when there weren’t infrastructure problems, people still weren’t thrilled with the game that was there when it worked.
- Comment on Dragon Age veteran says scrapped Anthem Next "could have been" up there with No Man's Sky's legendary turnaround 5 days ago:
It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.
- Comment on Dragon Age veteran says scrapped Anthem Next "could have been" up there with No Man's Sky's legendary turnaround 5 days ago:
“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.
Fuck, man…all the reasons to do so are spelled out right there.
- Comment on As The Division 3 development continues, Ubisoft announces layoffs at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft Stockholm as part of 'a proposed organizational restructure' 6 days ago:
On the bright side, it’s never been easier for extremely small teams to put out something relatively high quality on the side.
- Comment on The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps 1 week ago:
No, I wasn’t. I clicked the title. The link points to a JPEG. Maybe it works differently for you on your UI than it does in lemmy.world?
- Comment on The new owner of GOG discusses taking on Steam, the devil of DRM, and following in Nightdive's footsteps 1 week ago:
Something’s up with your link. It’s just the GOG logo for me.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Ah, I see. In a lot of games, tutorial, story, and gameplay are happening all at once. Do you have an example offender that was on your mind originally?
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency.
Right, but the style has point values assigned to you. If they’re unchanging, there is a way that will always work best, every time. At a high level (correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m somewhat new to this genre), rewarding style is similar to rewarding variety, juggles, and getting multiple enemies in the same attack. If you go down the checklist of your arsenal, you can always hit the variety. If you know exactly how the enemies behave, you can reliably get multiple enemies in the same aerial combo that the scoring system rewards most. The same actions give you the same output, and one of those score values will be the highest out of all other possible options. One set of actions will reliably always handle the same mob if it’s deterministic.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
That’s just damage. The rest of the fighting game is rock paper scissors. A beats B beats C beats A. At round start, what button do you press? There’s always some option that beats your option, and that’s before we’ve even calculated the resulting damage. Some of what they’re doing is responding to what you’ve been doing, but the rest of what they’re doing is trying to be unpredictable; AKA random.
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
That’s interesting. As I said, I’m somewhat new to this genre. The short version is that Hi-Fi Rush got me interested in checking out all of the DMC games (minus the reboot), and 5 ended up being my favorite of that series (but still not as good as Hi-Fi Rush).
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Would you mind listing some of those? Because that’s a tough bar to clear.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
The reason they’re in RPGs is the same reason they’re in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you’re rolling with the punches based on what you’ve found.
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I’m curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you’re doing?
- Comment on Pet Peeves with Games? 1 week ago:
Money changed hands, so they have to show them. It’s advertising for the other companies that they worked with, or building up brand recognition for the publisher, etc. In the best case scenario, they mask a load screen, but I’ve found plenty where they don’t even start loading until after the unskippable logos.
- Comment on Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period 1 week ago:
All of new gaming hardware is decidedly less imminent now that this pricing nonsense is going on. Even if the tech exists, no one thinks they can sell at what they’d have to charge for it. It’s going to be a rough near term future for gaming hardware before it eventually levels out. Reports are that consoles planned for 2027 are now looking like they’ll be pushed back.
I’m not super used to calling that “hybrid gaming”, but my wife seems to have no problem playing cozy games on the Steam Deck, almost exclusively on the TV when I didn’t take it with me on the go. And we’re once again back to the best games and the best graphics not being all that correlated. The other part is that even if a random gamer has a Steam Deck, it’s unlikely to be their only gaming PC, and if they want the power to produce that larger image at better frame rates at home, they’ll play on that other PC, and that game will run its best there. On Switch 2, that one device is your only option no matter what. That means that if you want to play one of those beefier titles from the Switch 1, they’re not going to run at better settings ever unless the developer explicitly upgrades them; even then, there’s often the Switch tax compared to buying the same game on PC.
I’m not trying to talk you down from a Switch 2 if that’s your preference, but if someone’s asking me for a recommendation for a gaming handheld, the Steam Deck is going to be what I tell them until I rule it out due to some other need. I definitely wouldn’t start with a Switch 2. The Deck just hits a compelling price with a good software experience and, perhaps most importantly, a library that dwarfs what Nintendo could ever hope to match by following the traditional console model.
- Comment on Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period 1 week ago:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t region locking on the NES and SNES largely implemented via the shape of the cartridge? Frank Cifaldi and the VGHF just put out that NES history video, and it had some kind of authentication chip that could only be provided by Nintendo, and it was in the NES but not the Famicom. And on Gamecube, I seem to remember you needed an Action Replay to break the region locking, but I never dabbled in it myself.
- Comment on Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period 1 week ago:
I played it all on desktop, but it looks like it got a performance update a month ago and is now Deck verified. Friends of mine played it on Deck before that and didn’t mention any complaints, but I wasn’t fishing for them either.