MrFinnbean

@MrFinnbean@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The sneering was only half intentional. And personaly i quite enjoy discussing things like this.

  But i still strongly disagree with your view. Hello Games was small studio at the start, but they havent been ringing the indie bell for their game and in my opinion they havent stolen the limelight from indie devs. Games like Terraria and Stardew valley are still celebrated games and people are praising those games and the work devs have being doing with the updates.

  Following your logic one could argue, that companies behind those games are not anywhere near the small indie teams people imagine them. And we should be angry for them too, because they take the spotlight from games like Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid, that have been passion projects for years before those earlier two even were concepts.

  The main thing that makes No Man Sky different is that those succesfull indie games were good from the beginning, while NMS was horrible and borderline unsalvageable game, but the devs kept working on it and making it slowly better. A effort most companies wont do.

  So in my opinion people should be happy and support Hello Games, because that shows to the other companies, that even if the first release of the game is bad, it is possible (and profitable) to keep making the game better.

  Of course, if we lived in perfect world we could consider what HG is doing a bare minimum, but we live in a world where what they do is exceptional.

  Also i strongly disagree about they doing minimun professionally. They have kept the now almost ten years old game playable, added vr, new console supports. If you want to see what minimal is take a look of Assasins Creed Unitys state in 2025.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like i got it now. You want to add drama. You are the neighbor yelling over the fence, the one who seems to have something against the houses, even if it literaly does not effect on their life at all.

  This is why i did not want to respond to your analogy from the beginning. It does not lead to anywhere as everything is makebeliview.

  Facts.

  The game is overwhelmingly positive status on steam. Recently almost 90% of the people are satisfied to the product.

  Its player base keeps getting bigger.

  The game is soon 10 years old, but it keeps getting updates.

  Hello Games have been working on the game in the situation where industry standard would have been to stop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If i must abide by your original metafora i would say:

  They promised grandiose skycraper and delivered shotty apartment complex and the tenant who had bought the apartments were understandably angry. Very few of the tenants stayed anyway, but by all means the building was a failure to the point it would be completelly understandable to have the whole building just bulldozed.

  But where most companies would just disbanded and or disapeared with the money, they kept working on the building. Added new floors, made the yard nicer, lowered the prices of the apartments and the whole time tried their best to keep the remaining few people living there happy. And after few years (decates really if you think how much faster gaming industry develops than housing) the place started to be closer what the original brochure said.

  Eventually new people start to get intrested about the apartments and the people who originally bought the apartments started to move back in without paying any additional fees. And while the windows were little smaller and the shower tiling were little different than originally promised, people seem to like living there. In a way the constant repairs and the new additions to the place, make it even better to some people.

  The point that makes that building special is that nine times out of ten, in these situations the tenants are left with unhabitable home or even closed down building. And even more often the tenants need to pay additional fees to acces the fixed parts of the building.

  Is this purely genorosity from the builder? Of course not. They also have bills to pay and in the end its their livelyhood and they surely have investers waiting a return for their money. But is it monumental showing of backbone from the builder to say publicly “Hey, we messed things up and we are sorry, but we will keep working on it”. Absolutelly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would you force other industry term on the gaming industry? Thats just silly. It like saying apple is a bad fruit because it is a lousy boat.

  Gaming is pretty unique platform in a way where the product is measured by unquantifiable metric called fun, but you want to compare it in terms of other products.

  Im the end they kept working on a bad product where others would have stopped and ended making it good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Remember that at that point the game was allready 8 years old had had several large updates. Not counting few spikes from the updates first four years the game had under 2000 player/month in steam. Financially looking the pragmatic choice would have been to stop the development, but they did not.

  There has been several games from big publishers that were abandoned shortly after release, even if it still was possible to fix the game. Battleborn, Anthem, Concord. And even more games that are still in theory playable, but are just full if bugs or not fun to play.

  But so far i can think only three games that had bad start, but devs kept working on it and eventually managed to make fun games. No mans sky, Fallout 76 and Cyperpunk 2077

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Coming back to the map markings. It is also economics. How many players are going to use the feature versus how much work it is. It migh seem simple thing, but when you add option for player to write on the map there are lots of things you need to take in to account.

  How many symbols can be used, what happens if the games resolution is changed from the settings, how the text wraps if its close to the edge of map, what if there appears new automatic map marker under text user has wroten, are there interactive symbols for fast travelling or something else, will those go under the text or on top, what if writing uses special characters etc etc. Not to mention if devs have been cute with the map and its not just a flat texture. Skyrims map for example is the game world and you can see storms on it. Spending time to make and test all those features when it really serves a tiny fraction of the playerbase is wastefull.

  About saving the game. For better or worse its also a game mechanic and now days its not necessary about the limitation. For example if you could save in a middle of an battle in pokemon you could just save the moment you start a fight with shiny pokemon and you could infinetly try to catch it without any stakes. Or if you could save in middle of epic multiphase jrpg boss it would take away from the feeling of succes after long battle.

  But i absolutelly agree games should atleast have exit save, so if real live happens and you need to close the game, it should not punish the player and loose their progression.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.

  Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.

  About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.

  Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark “digging spot #31” just is not necessary.

  I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Same thing happens with games to some degree.

  There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.

  In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.

  During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.

  I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.

  Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Björk Calls for Greenland Independence, Warns of 'Cruel Colonizer'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I urge Björk to take a long walk in a short pier. Because thats what she is asking from Greenland right now.

  The way Trump is acting, its not time to alienate closest ally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We'll probably never see a Grand Theft Auto set in a futuristic city like GTA 2 because the team "hated it": "People didn’t connect with the game or its city"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I like how it looked. And to me it was and is game with perfect sized map and story lenght.

  Nothing feels like its too far to travel at any time, but the map is large enough to feel like city. But small enough that you can learn it.

  With SA i always feel like im over the game when i get to the last island, but in vice city the story pacing feels so good and it never outlasts its welcome.

  I feel like newer rock star games are just too large to complete fully and keep your intrests, but Vice City hit the sweet spot where you could complete the game without getting tired of it and after short break you could start a new playtrough. I loved gta 5, but after playing seemingly all content it had it took years and few rereleases for me to pick it up again, but VC was a game i played trough twice or trice a year for a long time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We'll probably never see a Grand Theft Auto set in a futuristic city like GTA 2 because the team "hated it": "People didn’t connect with the game or its city"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you me? I 100% agree.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why there are bugs in the release? Mistakes happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your analogy is not fitting.

  Placeholders are never meant to be part of the meal. They are there in the development stage when there needs to be something on the screen. They dont go trough the art department. Visual director wont review them. They are not representing the finalized game. They are there just as placeholders so people can see things work and not to need to look at wireframes when they work on the project. Often at parts of the game that has no quarantee to even be at the finalized game.

  Generally graphics are one of the last things that is finalized in games. There is no point to use artists time for making placeholders, when they can spend that time doing something meaningfull.

  In the end it does not matter if the placeholder is done by artists hand, is photoscanned from the doodles janitor made on toilet paper or if its done by AI. Hell, it could be pictures of spongebob fan art stolen from google search. It does not matter what people feel like is best and fastest way to get the texture, because its not representting the game and its not meant to be part if the finished product.

  If you want to keep the food analogy, placeholders are the toothpicks holding your meatrolls in shape while they are in the oven. They wont end to your plate and if they do, somebody somewhere did a mistake.

  Also i want to point out that not you nor i can say anything about overwhelming opinions. Clair Obscur for example has sold over 5 million copies. How big procentual part of those 5 million people you think has even read about the whole dispute, or put any meaningfull tough for the matter? Places like lemmy, steam reviews and comments on youtube videos are mostly from loud minorities that generally wont represent the whole fandom at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If its nicer and faster why would somebody not use it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Any projects i have been on, if i need quick placeholder i take it from some existing library that is filled with free to use textures or i create some bullshit texture name temp.png or removethis_brown.jpg and some real artist comes and makes the final one somewhere down the line, 10-1000 hours later.

  I have hard time understanding how creating the temporary texture that is never meant to be seen by end user is different when using generative tool versus paint. Especially when no artist looses their pay check or their spot in the credits.

  However I do take offence if somebody uses ai to replace writer, designer, voice actor, or artist of any kind in the final product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Merry christmas and happy new year!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry if i offended you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have really hard time feeling anything about this. In the video it seems like he is driving over the speed limit coming out of the tunnel. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

  I understand that losing somebody close to you hurts and i hope all the good for his family and people close to him and hopefully they get to mourn in peace without media tearing the case open, but personally i cant but think rich dude does stupid rich dude things and paid the price.

  Sorry in before hand if i offended somebody.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the olden days those assets were pulled from the google search and the people who had made them never saw a dime from the usage.

  Placeholder is excelent use for AI.

  If i need to do place holder for a dirt by hand it is900x900 brown square named brown_square.png and no artist sees a dime for it. How if somebody uses AI to generate little nicer looking dirt that is not going to end in the final game is taking money from artist?

  In both cases there will be an artist that makes the final thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Atleast in my experience bigger companies have either their own libraries, libraries of bought assets or dedicated sites with free to use stuff, so they can use the placeholdes without a risk of having copyrighted stuff in the files.

  Concept art is little tricky because it often is 10 version of the same character or random piece of the scenery and it takes hundreds of pieces and revision before art director finally decites “this is it, this is what our game looks like”. Personally i dont care if those are drawn on a paper or made in photoshop, paint, by a ai tool or trowing wet cats on a canvas. In the end i care that human decites what they are going to use and artist finishes the model. I dont see the point having artist spend their time creating seven different looking bandoliers for the protagonist, when nobody even knows if any version of those end in the game.

  And i just want to say way before the consept art when the product is in its early planning state there are often “feeling boards” that are just i want our game to feel like picture of breath of the wild and picture of skyrim or picture of cuphead and picture of warm and cozy fireplace and these feeling boards may stay in use until the very end of the production.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Plenty of people called Dave the Diver indie game. There are also lots of reviews from the time that call it indie game, both from youtubers and “real reviewers” like IGN.

  We can talk forever what indie means personally for everyone and everybody who has a opinion has little different view.

  But originally in both movies and music indie meant indepented publishment. That means the artist have no oblications for outside parties and can freely and without restrictions carry out their own artistic vision. Budget or crew size has nothing to do with it. Only reason people associate it with small teams is that largest portion of indepentedly published projects were done by small teams and or passion projects.

  Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is indie movie with budget of 220 million while average hollowood movie budget is somewhere between 100-150 million . Hell, passion of the crist, had budget of 30million and is maybe one of the most famous indie movies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well the definition for indie is independently published. Its not vague in its self, but the way people have started to use the word have changed its meaning to from something well defined to something more feeling based consept. I personally dont like it. People counted game like Dave the Diver to be an indie game when it had huge company Nexon publishing it.

  If followed by the original meaning of the word Blue Prince is not indie game either. It was published by Raw Fury, but Baldurs gate 3 would be indie as Larian published it.

  Indie as a word is like AI. It does not follow its original definition and because people have became used to misusing the word it has became the new norm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If this is the case then i dont care.

  Placeholders and production assets are just random low effort garbage somebody puts together and are just meant for people internally see how things work. No artist lost paycheck or merit.

  I dont see any difference in this than when Batman Arkham asylum was released with placeholders. Skyrim had also placeholder textures on the release, so did Halo 2, Fallout new vegas, CoD MW2 and probably hundreds of more. Only difference is that they were done by coders in paint or something instead of generative ai.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People are tearing eachothers up in the comments, but does anybody know what the textures were?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divinity - Cinematic Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It all ready seems little counterintuitive to keep commenting here but you literally commented: “But my main gripe, regardless of the topic, is to say “everyone does it so it’s fine”.” and im trying to answer to that, why everybody does it.

  Also if you are speaking in a wider sense. When there are busineses that make hundreds of millions you can be sure there is a reason why they do what they do. For example Amazon does insane amount if research how their checkout works and how to make sure most customers that reach that point would finish the purchace. You can be sure what they do works, so why any other companies would use their time doing the same research when they can just copy the homework of others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divinity - Cinematic Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And im giving you a context “why everyone does it”.

  There is also plenty of other benefits in releasing cinematic trailer. First thing of course is to get knowledge of the game out there and create intrests, but it also:

  Helps devs to gauge the intrest in their game, See how people react and if necessary change things early in the production, If company is in stock market, it necessary to make clear to the public they are doing something, If they have financial backers its easy to give them reassurences by telling how many times the trailer has been watched and commented. Especially important if they have nothing else going on that quater or financial year, Youtube statistics also give devs insight to their fanbase as they see who are the people watching it, and that helps them gauge things like need for localization

  The part about moanin isint necessary about you, but more general thing. Sorry if it felt like attack towards you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divinity - Cinematic Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is real world reason why everyone does it.

  Graphics are usually one of the last things that get finished in games. There is no sense spending hundreds of hours and thousands if dollars to make character models and levels pretty, when there are bound to be changes in both. Also even if they would make it so.

  Teaser trailers basic gist is to show people “hey we are making this, follow us for more”, cinematic trailers are world building and showing the overall theme. Also if the public has bad reaction they still have time to make changes to the game.

  Down the line when the devs are confident that aspects of the game wont go trough any more major iterations they can start to show gameplay.

  Inherently all trailers are just marketing and the very fact you are commenting something here says that they have succeeded.

  Moaning about cinematic trailers is like asking a cheff to show the steak while the animal is still grasing on the meadow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divinity - Cinematic Announcement Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I get where you are coming from, but cinematic trailers are not pointless.

  Its easy to think that they are garbage meant to just invoke hype, but under the surface they are also meant to convey the story and set the setting.

  Like now we know the game is going to be gritty, vicerall and even vulgar. Also looking at it, there is something connectin overconsuming and hedonism to suffering. I know that sounds something i might be intrested in so i will know in the future to look in to this game. And if somebody sees this and feels its not for them they know to stear clear from the game.

  You really cant make the same impact using just the in game assets and engine larian is known for and in game development game can change a lot in short time. Basically if they show some gameplay mechanic in a trailer and post it on the internet they are tied to that mechanic and cant remove it. Untill things like ui components are set in stone, and abilibities they show are sure to be included, showing them has little to win and lot to loose.

  What really pisses me off are trailers that try to trick you to think cinematic moments are done ingame engine. Or when the cinematic trailer does not match the games vibe (looking at you, dead island trailer)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Every time news like this come up, I cant but think how big conglomerates get more power and what does it entail for us consumers.

  Cant wait telling to my grandchilds about the great corporate wars and how “Tudum-company” and evil mouse-company fought in -38

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming Pet Peeves⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It really depends of the implementation for me.

  I completelly understand that if you take a mission where you kill a merchant, you loose the option to purchace from them or miss their questline etc. Its a story point where your acts changed the world.

  But if you miss some unique loot item from dungeon you can go trough only once, because, it was too well hidden or it was behind some convoluted puzzle that you missed, im pissed.