ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frostpunk creators cancel "Project 8" and lay off staff amid concerns that "narrative-driven, story-rich games" don't sell⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s all going to be relative to what they spent, which I don’t know. If they only spent $70M, they already made their money back. It’s looking like they’ll probably make their money back regardless, unless they spent an entire GTA6 on this thing, which I doubt. These are also only the Steam numbers that I’m calculating based on how many reviews it has; the PS5 version likely did quite well too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frostpunk creators cancel "Project 8" and lay off staff amid concerns that "narrative-driven, story-rich games" don't sell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Alan Wake 2 took an upfront buyout in exchange for appearing on a less popular platform. That would be an exception to the normal use case. A thousand companies will go bankrupt trying to make Candy Crush even though someone already made Candy Crush. And you can replace Candy Crush with Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, Destiny, or whatever you like. Those games take up all of your time by design rather than allowing and encouraging you to move on to another game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EXCLUSIVE - Year 2 Content is Planned for Ubisoft's Skull and Bones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For all we know, there may be no way this sci-fi future Porsche gets damaged, because it may not even be part of the game’s loop, as opposed to a driving game where we know for a fact you’re going to drive. When the appeal to a driving game is to be able to drive whatever brand of car you want, the car brand has the power in the negotiation. This is a game that takes place in retro future 80s sci-fi and doesn’t feature the actual real world car.

  The way Kojima was probably able to get Monster to pay him was either he has a friend at the company/ a friend is a shareholder or he was somehow able to convince them that the deal was film product placement, which is a different kind of license and comes with different rules, but often means the brand does pay the prodution studio. I am going to assume he just has a friend that works at or owns stake in Monster.

  Does he also have friends at CalorieMate, PlayBoy, and Apple? Sure, we know he has at least one friend at AMC, but this is a long line of product placement in Kojima games, and they do it for the same reason they do it in film; it’s an advertisement. I think it would be pretty absurd for an already expensive production to then license Porsche for their story when they could have easily, in 20 seconds or less, established a fictional car brand to plaster on the back on their space ship.

  If the problem was a woman lead, how come The Witcher 4 also didn’t get brigaded?

  It did.

  Even if what you are implying is true, the same thing happened to Concord, people brigading it for being “woke,” and we both know how that ended.

  People did the same for The Last of Us II, and that game sold over 10 million copies. Concord was a game no one wanted from frame 1, before we even saw pronouns in a character select screen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frostpunk creators cancel "Project 8" and lay off staff amid concerns that "narrative-driven, story-rich games" don't sell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Back of the napkin math says they’ve already sold about 1.5M on Steam so far. A handful of sales like they one they’ve got right now should help them easily blow past 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frostpunk creators cancel "Project 8" and lay off staff amid concerns that "narrative-driven, story-rich games" don't sell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My recent experiences with big budget AAA after years of avoidance⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Titan Quest II is around the corner too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EXCLUSIVE - Year 2 Content is Planned for Ubisoft's Skull and Bones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m expecting the licenses resulted in the money flowing in the other direction. Monster paid Kojima for Death Stranding, not the other way around.

  Dislike ratios are fake these days, as it just polls people who use the browser extension. Don’t put too much stock into it. Some segment of people get told that the game is woke because it stars a woman who shaves her head in the opening seconds, so they brigade the video and mash dislike.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EXCLUSIVE - Year 2 Content is Planned for Ubisoft's Skull and Bones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not underestimating how much Naughty Dog spends on their games. That stuff all leaked, so we can put an exact number on Last of Us 2. People dig the games that they make though.

  Concord selling themselves as having developers who worked on Destiny reminds me of a trend I’ve observed though, though maybe there are outliers that have slipped through the cracks that would prove me wrong. When a new studio pitches its inaugural game as being from developers of X, Y, or Z, it pretty much never goes well, especially if it’s aiming for AAA. Maybe there are difficulties building a game and scaling up to that team size simultaneously. Any of a number of things can be the case, but at this point, it’s a red flag for me. The difference between that and “from the makers of The Last of Us” is that Naughty Dog is still Naughty Dog, and that’s more or less the same band sticking together. The Last of Us didn’t do it for me, and neither did Uncharted 4 honestly, but their games keep seeing the same levels of acclaim and success release after release.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EXCLUSIVE - Year 2 Content is Planned for Ubisoft's Skull and Bones⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re inferring a whole lot from a mock-up of gameplay that isn’t actually gameplay. A single player Naughty Dog game has a huge leg up over Concord in that you can play it regardless of how many other people bought it. Just saying “from the makers of The Last of Us” buys a few million copies sold where Concord didn’t clear 50k. If you want actual candidates for the next Concord, it’s going to be Marathon and, even more likely, Fairgame$.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More PlayStation-Exclusive Games Coming To Xbox, It's Claimed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, this is misleading. My mind goes to the likes of Sony first party titles in reading this headline, but the examples that the article uses as a metric for “PlayStation exclusive” are more like the games that either were paid to not go to Xbox or didn’t see the fiscal sense in doing so. It doesn’t rule out first party titles, but that’s far from the most likely. Of Sony’s first party games, the ones most likely to come to Xbox, if at all, are the live service games, and that’s looking increasingly like a strategy that Sony regrets anyway, so why even bother with Xbox when it’s not going to move the needle?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Black Myth: Wukong producer on The Game Awards top prize snub: "I came all the way here for nothing!"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They run the gamut from the long-standing outlets to IGN to the Patreon-funded stuff like MinnMax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 Is Being Review Bombed By Chinese Gamers After The Game Awards⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The people who review the games are the same people who vote for the winner, and Astro Bot was the best reviewed game of the year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rumors Of End to Xbox-Only Exclusives Swirl As More Game Studios Embrace Simultaneous Launch Strategy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It may very well be, but the impetus in the article of Outer Worlds 2 and Square Enix/Ubisoft’s strategies seem to be the wrong way to draw that conclusion. Square Enix is pivoting because being Sony exclusive wasn’t working. Ubisoft has pretty much always done simultaneous launches, so I’m not sure why they’re even listed here. The first Outer Worlds was third party before Microsoft acquired Obsidian and was published by 2K, so who knows if any agreements had to be honored or were more expensive to break.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capcom says it’s working on ‘re-activating other dormant IPs’ like Onimusha and Okami⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kunitsu-Gami was this year. Like it or not, Exoprimal was last year. And Capcom’s got a ton of IP that would work really well in the modern era and/or deserve compatibility with modern x64 hardware. I’d personally love to see Viewtiful Joe and Darkstalkers come back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad news for PC Elden Ring fans: Nightreign's network test is only coming to consoles⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no stranger to this in fighting games. It doesn’t mean you’re a second class citizen per se. It means they don’t want people to hold on to the beta version for months between the beta and the release, and they don’t know how to stop it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a warning on Dauntless’s store page saying that it uses EAC for kernel level anti-cheat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That is a perfectly valid use case for a video game that I paid for though. I do exactly that with games like 007: Agent Under Fire (in split-screen), and I played games like Rainbow Six 3 long after the official servers weren’t there anymore. Agent Under Fire in particular is a lot of fun with all of the modifiers on, like moon gravity, and I wouldn’t mind playing some multiplayer games with friends with cheats like that one on; things that you wouldn’t want on in a ranked queue, but things that I should 100% be able to do with the product that I paid for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of cheats send completely legitimate information back to the server, and that’s what they’re seeking to stop with the client side implementation; I don’t think it has anything to do with costs. I haven’t heard of any data mining happening, and surely someone would have caught it with wire shark by now, but there are enough things that we know for sure about kernel level anti cheats to make it offensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless they deviate substantially from how they build games in genres like shooters, server side anti-cheat isn’t going to catch everything that kernel level anti cheat does. However, kernel level anti cheat doesn’t catch hardware cheating anyway, so if cheating is always going to be imperfect, we ought to stop short of the kernel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They see it as a threat to their business model. Without any other option, you have to be on the latest version, seeing the latest skins, and you’re unable to bypass their store and mod them in yourself. If I can help it, not giving me the option to run the server myself will be a threat to their business model.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In the wake of Crowdstrike, Microsoft was going to allow for additional avenues for hooks into the OS that don’t reach as deep into the kernel level, but they never said they were removing the hooks that Crowdstrike or anti-cheat use, as far as I can tell. One solution for PC handhelds is to run whatever modified version of Windows that Microsoft is cooking up, so that you get the console-like interface without compromising on the anti-cheat compatibility. The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m against them being able to ban you from playing online in its entirety, which is something they can do because most online games don’t let you run the servers yourself anymore. Sure, if someone cheats on official servers, ban them from the official servers. They should still be able to play, cheating or not, on the server they run themselves, but that’s not an option we even have most of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game surprised you with their length?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that AAA developers are the ones typically not making short games, and I agree that I am well-covered by indies. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. FPS games are about the only genre I feel like I used to be well-served in that indies haven’t quite picked up yet, so I can’t really just “go elsewhere” these days to scratch that itch (but games like Mouse: P.I. for Hire may be the start). But I was really just arguing against the efficiency part. I don’t think they’ve become less efficient at making content, but they’ve seemingly stayed exactly as efficient and just spent much longer doing it. I don’t find that a big open world makes a game any more memorable, especially when it exhibits the negative trends of filler and bloat I mentioned already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game surprised you with their length?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I do, and I miss it. I’m far more likely to feel these days like they made too much game to its own detriment than to make it a length that felt better for the game’s pacing. Baldur’s Gate 3 was phenomenal from start to finish, but games frequently come in at a third of its length and feel like they were longer than they should have been. Lots of games transitioned to open world that used to be linear, and the open world is little more than a menu that makes it take longer to select your mission, because you have to travel there. They create checklists of busy work to keep you playing worse content between the moments that you actually want to do, like the side missions that litter modern Assassin’s Creed games with progression gates. I didn’t know how good we had it when we got FPS campaigns between 8 and 12 hours in the years following Half-Life 1, because they’ve been so rare since Titanfall 2 came out 8 years ago. Games being longer now is not solving a problem that I had, and I’d argue it’s often creating problems.

  Maybe you prefer your games longer, and good on you if you do, but it’s most definitely not due to developers getting more efficient with their content. For one reason or another, because you’re demanding it as the customer or because modern asset pipelines make it make the most fiscal sense, they’re just spending more time making the content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Godot Engine – 2024 Showreel⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The only one I’ve played is The Rise of the Golden Idol. If you haven’t played that one or its predecessor, The Case of the Golden Idol, I highly recommend both. They’re very good logic/deduction puzzle games. You basically examine a frozen moment in time and then deduce what happened based on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What game surprised you with their length?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Developers are demonstrably not getting more efficient with their content. More content means more assets, and that’s why development timelines have only gotten longer over the years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outer Worlds 2 no longer exclusive to Xbox, is now coming to PS5 – WGB⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It reviewed well, and I personally loved it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outer Worlds 2 no longer exclusive to Xbox, is now coming to PS5 – WGB⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a gesture that acknowledges that they’ll never be a market leader following the old model ever again. Those days are over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Virtua Fighter Project Teaser Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m ready to step into VF and hope that it resolves my issues with Tekken. The last time I played a VF game, there was no online mode, and I definitely didn’t understand fighting games like I do now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Outer Worlds 2: First Gameplay Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I probably will check it out some day, but that mechanic that’s similar is the thing that deters me.