drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on But I am mighty!! 2 days ago:
I used to think the same thing, but the thing is we don’t care about the amount of energy that goes into the sunscreen, we care about the remaining percent that goes into the skin. If you go from a sunscreen that absorbs 98% of the sun’s energy to one that absorbs 99% you are halving the amount of energy your skin is exposed to.
If you’re still getting burned with 98% absorption, then increasing that number by 1% would actually make a huge difference. And that’s without even considering things like having a safety margin for improper application.
- Comment on Anon turns on raytracing 1 week ago:
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.
So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.
Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.
Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.
But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?
Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.
When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct?
Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).
Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.
So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.
At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was that without these elements the player was much less likely to explore of their own volition (not just because its the opposite direction of a waypoint) and think about the level design. Speaking of waypoints I remember the first group of people really complaining that the arrow in Bioshock is even more egregious than waypoints, though IMO the way it encourages you to unthinkingly follow it is actually quite thematic.
Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.
I have actually played Portal. I had a section where I mentioned that Valve games were an exception to this sentiment, then I deleted it and forgot when I wrote the last part of my previous comment.
But anyway, I’ll admit that I was really thinking more about the time period from 2005 to 2015.
- Comment on Make dinosaurs weirder 1 week ago:
There are actually some fossils of dinosaur mummies, a rare preservation of a rare preservation. For some species these give us direct evidence of their physical appearance beyond their bone structure, and you can extrapolate from there to a lot of related species.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games. They did do some very innovative things when they first came out, but just like modern military shooters took regenerating health and the two weapon limit from Halo while leaving behind all the other gameplay mechanics that made that work, so too did many games adopt the open world and the general way you interact with it, while removing anything interesting. By “the way you interact with it” I’m referring specifically to the map unlocking, the collectables, the village / territory faction control, and the “heat” system that spawns enemies depending on how much attention you are generating.
IMO those sorts of games were very much the other side of the coin from CoD-likes, and the problem was that while the extremely linear levels of CoD-likes were too restrictive, these open world games had no structure at all. In games like Half Life 1, Quake, or what have you encounters are designed to flow in a certain way, with each one having its own flavor and favoring certain approaches over others. In some games you can even think of enemy encounters as a puzzle you need to solve. Level design and enemy placement of course form the two halves of encounter design. In good games this sort of thing extends to the structure of the game as a whole, with the ebs and flows in the action, and different gameplay happening in different sections so the formula keeps getting changed up. But in games where the level design is an open world that let’s you approach from any angle, and where enemy placement is determined on the fly by a mindless algorithm, there is no encounter design. At the same time the way enemy spawning works is actually too orchestrated to have interesting emergent gameplay. For example, if an algorithm made an enemy patrol spawn an hour ago, and the player can see it from across the map, they can come up with their own plan on how to deal with this unique situation. If the player gets one bar of heat and the algorithm makes an enemy spawn around a corner they can’t anticipate that at all, its just mindless. This has implications for the gameplay itself (no enemy can be very tough or require very much thinking or planning if you’re just going to spawn them around a corner) but also, as previously stated, the entire structure of the game.
As for the other games you mention I want to bring up Bioshock in particular. Its true that game is a master class in presentation and aesthetics, and a game I would highly recommend, its actually one of the games that I remember people complaining about when they said gaming was better in the 90s. Specifically the way Bioshock is very dumbed down compared to its predecessor System Shock, both from a general game and level design standpoint, but also because of the inclusion of vita chambers and the compass pointer that leads you around by the nose. (One place I will give Bioshock points though is that it has way more of an ecosystem than most imm-sims with the way enemies interact with each other; it even beats out imm-sim darling Prey 2017 in this regard).
This is admittedly a way more niche complaint than people complaining about QTEs or games being piss/brown, but it was definitely a smaller part of the much larger “games are getting dumbed down” discourse.
I could talk about Crysis and Spore too, but this comment is already really long. I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
You’re right, as is so often the case when people talk about a decade I’m thinking more of its latter half and the beginning half of the next one.
But in my defense I did say “the mid to late 2000s”.
- Comment on Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games” 1 week ago:
20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.
Here’s how I see it: From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew everyone’s minds that a game could be both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.
Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.
Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.
From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.
Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.
From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.
Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).
Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.
- Comment on Anon likes trains 1 week ago:
France has nearly the same population density as Ohio, and it has the TGV, which covers more than 5 times the land area of Ohio. So where’s the Ohio high speed rail network?
This is the scale of Japan compared to the US east coast: Image
So why aren’t there high speed lines that cover that same distance in the US?
Americans complain about US politicians and US policy on a near constant basis, and yet when comparing the US to other nations its apparently impossible for anyone to have made a stupid or self-serving decision. The US apparently is always operating at the absolute limit of what’s physically possible, and if there’s any deficiency its always because “the US is too big” or “we’re too diverse” (what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?).
To be clear there are actual answers to the questions I posed above, but its not either of those moronic excuses.
- Comment on Anon likes trains 1 week ago:
Wow, cool, ride an airplane directly into an abandoned mineshaft?
- Comment on What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality 1 week ago:
I thought The Outer Wilds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:
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She says she’s not interested in physical affection, but I don’t recall Parvati ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she’s better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn’t mean the same thing.
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I also don’t recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?
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Finally, how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?
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- Comment on You can now search for Steam games by adjustable difficulty, mouse-only options and other accessibility tags 2 weeks ago:
An FoV slider tag might be a good addition to the camera comfort section; I’ve heard many people say that narrow FoVs can make them motion sick.
- Comment on what is north? 3 weeks ago:
It should probably say, “off the Antarctic coast”, or even “X kilometers off the Antarctic coast”.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
How hard is it to just say “I don’t like that scent”?
- Comment on Amazing. 4 weeks ago:
The definition of jank is that it at least sorta works.
If it doesn’t its not jank its just broken.
- Comment on To join Facebook these days, one must record a video selfie 4 weeks ago:
The thing to understand about large organizations is that appearances matter a lot and the people working in them have to look busy. This is well known phenomenon among low level employees but it applies to managers and even executives too (who have to put on a show that they’re increasing shareholder value and that their company is special somehow).
So, why do advertisers care if someone says “fuck” but not about someone whose spewing pseudointellectual misogynistic drivel? Because there’s someone whose job description is “brand value” and if they’re not upset about something then they don’t look busy. The amount of “fucks” per minute is a really simple metric that (now that speech recognition is as good as it is) is really east to measure. In other words its a straightforward way to look busy.
- Comment on The Gooner 4 weeks ago:
Play Fallen Aces if you want to experience a gooner shooter.
- Comment on Skyrim-style open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon releases out of early access today 5 weeks ago:
Its interesting to me that there are so many high budget open world games that fall within the assassin’s creed / far cry / GTA triangle and yet it seems like nobody tried to copy the Bethesda open world formula given the enormous popularity of Skyrim.
- Comment on they come 5 weeks ago:
Yes, thermal mass only serves to even out fluctuations in temperature. If the outside environment swings between hot and cold then a building with high thermal mass will tend to have a temperature in the middle of those two extremes. Like how a heavier ship is tossed about on the waves much less than a small boat.
But if a place is consistently hot or cold for a long time thermal mass doesn’t really do anything. At most you can use it as a battery, so you can, for example, run a heat pump while electricity is the cheapest and use the thermal mass to maintain the temperature you established over the costly period.
So many people think that its a substitute for insulation though, which slows down the rate of heat transfer in or out, and does actually let you use less energy to maintain a given temperature.
- Comment on Comfy cozy 5 weeks ago:
TBH, I think there’s something wrong with Americans.
- Comment on Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' 1 month ago:
In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.
In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.
The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
- Comment on AMERICAN POPE LETS GO 1 month ago:
Thanks for the cannibalism tips.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 1 month ago:
The monsters in REPO are worse somehow.
Not sure if its because its relatively easier to stun/kill them or of its because their mechanics are lacking in some way compared to lethal company’s, but I feel as if they don’t have the same sauce.
- Comment on Pictures of Animals Getting CT Scans Against their Will: A Thread 1 month ago:
Does a larger MRI produce more data than a smaller one (same data density over a larger volume), or is it the same resolution spread out over a larger space?
- Comment on I'm jealous 1 month ago:
There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny insects and plants. As such [they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.
Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.
- Comment on 100% all natural hand-drawn comic 2 months ago:
Modern day chemists have succeeded where alchemists failed by finally isolating phlogiston.
- Comment on Anon critiques humanity 2 months ago:
A group of fit humans who know what they’re doing can kill any animal on earth with sharp sticks.
This includes things like whales and woolly mammoths, which we hunted to near extinction or complete extinction using pointy sticks. Keep in mind that these animals were not only thousands of times stronger than a human, but the environments they lived in were also completely alien to the one in which we evolved. The ocean and the taiga can kill an unprepared human in just a few minutes simply by them existing in it, while the native animals are perfectly adapted to live there.
And despite all that we went onto their home turf and killed them all with pointy sticks.
- Comment on To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction 3 months ago:
I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.
This gave me conniptions when playing Control. I couldn’t just stop and look at the environments, which clearly had a lot of work put into them, or listen to the ambient sounds, for more than minute without the getting a loud “BRRRR” alarm in my ear and having a full screen text popup that says “BOARD ALERT: HISS COMMANDOS IN WASTE PROCESSING”.
This was compounded by the whole ‘randomly spawn in some random group of enemies at a random point every time you enter a room’ design of the game. That’s bad enough for other reasons, but those two things together gave the impression that the game designers were terrified of the player having 10 seconds to sit there and have a thought enter their brain.
- Comment on Games can no longer use virtual currencies to disguise the price of in-game purchases in the European Union 3 months ago:
If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.
Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be a ridiculous?
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 3 months ago:
I think they’re both better and worse.
In the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s AAA games were becoming increasingly hollowed out husks, with dumbed dumbed down paint-by-numbers gameplay and tons of QTEs. And its not like their narratives or art direction were any good either (it being the brown piss filter era). In the same time period we saw the rise of predatory practices like day one DLCs and preorder bonuses.
In more recent times I think we’ve actually seen a reversal of the gameplay hollowing out trend, and an improvement in art direction. However with the rise of lootboxes, trading, and gatcha, monetization schemes are more predatory than they’ve ever been (though these are mostly concentrated in multiplayer games). Its also really common now for games to release in an completely broken and unplayable state.
- Comment on Least extreme biophysics phd 3 months ago:
If you’re talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.
They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn’t, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.
It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.
