ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TV tie-in MMO looter shooter Defiance returns for a free-to-play third shot at life and gigantic messy boss battles⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content

  The Borderlands games made billions of dollars, and no one needs to keep them running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STOP destroying videogames⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It means that the publisher needs to provide the player with the server executable, which is a one time expense for them to prepare, rather than continually paying for humans and machines to keep a server running on their end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom (2016) now DRM free on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Also it opens up the ability to play network multiplayer regardless of the presence of someone else’s server on the other end. The lack of LAN or direct IP connections is just DRM by another name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom (2016) now DRM free on GOG⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This does not include the multiplayer. I’m sure it wasn’t the selling point for most, but I hate how the multiplayer use case isn’t well taken care of on GOG. I don’t want Galaxy required; I just want developers to put a bit of work into putting LAN into their games again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: I want a law for PC games to be offered in physical versions again⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.

  A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nintendo does not have a monopoly on fun video games without “aggressive enshitification”, which I’m guessing you mean microtransactions and battle passes. I’m drowning in a deluge of great stuff to play, and none of it is Nintendo lately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.

  That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish you the best of luck. I don’t know what that threshold is where the smaller communities make sense, but for me, we haven’t met it yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Consoles just have a dwindling list of use cases, so trying to create problems that furthers their use is going to have much the same effect as cable companies trying to pretend that streaming video services don’t exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I’m at the point of “fuck walled garden ecosystems”, not to mention all the legal work they’re doing to ruin video games.

• Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S.www.nintendo.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨64⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the 2 hour refund limit on Steam affect game design?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, the two hour limit affects game design. Based on what I’ve read about Blue Prince, it probably didn’t affect that one much at all. The business model always affects the game design. When games were expecting to be rentals, the first few levels would be front loaded with the best that the game had to offer, and then later levels would be more phoned in. In the arcades, games would be louder to catch more attention, they’d be harder to make you put in another quarter, they’d reduce downtime to get the next person on the machine, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, things are trending in the right direction, but we’re still a long ways away from needing smaller sub communities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game genre communities on Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think a lot of these are going to be placeholder for a while until more generalized communities like this one see more growth. It’ll be a while before we even hit 100k subscribers here, and you need to have a subset of those people who are looking to talk about an even more specific interest in more depth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a cancelled game you really miss?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I gave it a chance, and I remember the objective design being different for the sake of it to the point of being worse. They had a capture the flag mode involving charging a battery, but it could be charged to 99% at one base and then scored at the other base at the last second, making everything except the final play meaningless. It had a point control mode, but the points were only active in certain intervals, creating a real stop and go feeling that made the inactive periods as meaningless as the aforementioned first 99% of CTF.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a cancelled game you really miss?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.

  For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remaster is real - Eurogamer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Video game marketing changed dramatically about 2 years ago. No one likes long marketing cycles anymore. There are too many opportunities for delays or “puddlegates”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 - The Final Patch: New Subclasses, Photo Mode, and Cross-Play⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t played it, but it’s on my list. A very long list. And Rogue Trader is 40k, right? Meaning fantasy trappings but in space? That can also be fine, but I appreciated Starfield’s setting for sticking to harder sci-fi tropes, like its obvious inspiration of Interstellar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 - The Final Patch: New Subclasses, Photo Mode, and Cross-Play⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I wasn’t a fan of a number of choices they made in their RPG systems in the Original Sin games, so until we see what their next game is, I’ll wonder how much of the heavy lifting done in BG3 was due to D&D rather than their designers. Still, BG3 knocked basically everything out of the park, so even a lesser RPG from this team will still likely be great. It would be nice to have the CRPG equivalent of Starfield from Larian, since most sci-fi RPGs tend to stick to the post-apocalypse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Deck / Gaming News #10⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I watched two Jobst videos, and the second one didn’t sit right with me, so it’s no surprise he played fast and loose with facts that might see him lose a court case.

  As for what I’ve been playing, I just beat Borderlands 2 the other day, and now I’m working my way through the DLC before I move on to the Pre-Sequel and 3. It’s mostly a huge improvement over the first game, but they definitely unflattened the progression compared to the first game, which is something a lot of RPGs and adjacent games do. It’s never been my preference, and it comes with its own design problems, like how the game refused to give me some decent guns toward the end of the game and then suddenly gave me guns that trivialized the next part of the game.

  I’m still in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well, but I’ve only inched forward in it since the last of these posts.

  And I’m always playing fighting games like Skullgirls, so that’s the free space on my Bingo card.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5 price to rise in Europe, Australia and New Zealand⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I built my last PC in 2021 just accepting that graphics card prices would never come down anytime soon, and I paid about $1400 for one. They did come down, not long after. I can wait more patiently this time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Metro 2033 Redux is free to claim on GOG for the next two days⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You have to go specifically to the giveaway section.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5 price to rise in Europe, Australia and New Zealand⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When I build a new computer sometime in the next year or so, I’ll probably end up buying the second-best AMD card available at the time, because that’s where there tends to be the best bang for my buck. But in reality, I’ll be using the full power of that card for only a handful of games over the lifetime of that machine, and I’ll spend most of my time playing a 2D game that came out in 2012. Yeah, you can absolutely get away with cheaper cards and have a great time.