Katana314
@Katana314@lemmy.world
- Comment on Ex PlayStation exec says Sony can't keep "increasing the graphics power" with new consoles after tech plateau, but PS5 has already "made almost every game a better game" 19 hours ago:
The only occasion I could buy that a “console makes the exclusives” is when the costs are so high that the investors decide a $60 price tag isn’t enough.
That can be alleviated with DLC, or live service bullshit; or it can become an incentive to buy a particular console.
Then, when someone is braindead and doesn’t want a big epic award winning adventure, they’ll use that same console to play Fortnite. Thus, God of War helps sell VBucks or whatever.
It’s a weird analysis, but even though we no longer see console exclusives and it’s seen as a pro consumer move, I also think it was just a way for managers to boost one quarter’s revenue, and it wasn’t really good for the console ecosystem as a whole, especially considering how it would fund future exclusive epics.
- Comment on Great business idea, tbh 2 days ago:
Japanese principles of honorable work, fear of retribution in future jobs. They’re brought up to expect a very different relationship with their company, and end up with a self-abusive mentality that they must deserve the mistreatment.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
You can get quite a few options at Itch.io if you filter for games that have an HTML5 version, and click through - much faster than installing options from Steam Next Fest. Unity and other small game engines have been perfect for that.
- Comment on Many developers leave GZDoom due to leader conflicts and fork it into UZDoom 6 days ago:
A little lesson about technical projects: You will quickly reach 95% completion and have something amazing to show off. Then, 95% of the work is completing that last 5% in order to make the prototype usable.
AI is good at making itself look ready. It is nowhere near ready.
- Comment on A player before me destroyed a bridge in [the Tides of Tomorrow] demo, so I had to build it again in this narrative adventure where your choices have consequences for others 6 days ago:
I think this is why a certain scrolling shooter at the endgame of a certain game closely located to a tomato didn’t emotionally work for me. I can do the math - it can’t just throw that many other players at the problem to get me through the enemy ships, and the game needed to be playable off the internet since little else of it was online.
- Comment on BattleBit Remastered is surprisingly alive - a huge Operation Overhaul update test arrives in November 1 week ago:
The above poster is likely to become a racist terrorist, given their history of comments getting downvoted.
/logic
- Comment on Forbidden knowledge 1 week ago:
Not with de facto mayor Roland promising them a better future under his factory empire.
(Yeah, hard to work in Another Crab’s Treasure references)
- Comment on Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found? 1 week ago:
FUNKYHEART: In which the people who wrote that bunny-hopping script for Half-Life 2 speedrunning made a video game, in which they’re also strange cyber demon lesbians.
- Comment on Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found? 1 week ago:
For some of the cases where enemies are getting multiple turns in a row, using an S-Break (RT+D-pad) can be a good way to get yourself back on positive ground. If you get a turn, it also helps to give defensive buffs to the VIP before the enemy attacks them.
That said, I have heard that while Nightmare difficulty poses a great challenge to some masochists and optimizers, it’s not a difficulty level the developers really balanced around.
- Comment on Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found? 1 week ago:
Just tried it out. I’m unfamiliar with the extraction shooter genre, but it was interesting, I’m not necessarily opposed to tactical complexity for its own sake. I died to a minefield, and then on the next go didn’t have a weapon; so some of the mechanics come across a little bit unclear.
- Comment on Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found? 1 week ago:
I’m glad it has a demo because I know a lot of people don’t enjoy characters like that; there’s some great heartfelt conversations once you get to know the characters, but you have to be able to stand 20+ narmy and overly polite banter sequences to get to the moments where each of them surprises you. If you get that far, you usually get invested.
I REALLY like what they’ve done with the combat in this one. Even on normal, I was losing early boss fights for playing without consideration and using nothing but the enemy’s elemental weakness. I just finished Chapter 1, and I especially liked having moments where half the party was dead, and attacking was actually a good option to give my team a moment to revive each other, thanks to the stun/delay systems.
- Comment on PS6 and next Xbox console are both aiming for 2027 release, separate reports claim | VGC 1 week ago:
I wonder how much they’re paying Rockstar to delay The Only New Release of that generation; which will doubtless be available on PS5/XSX anyway.
- Comment on Xbox consoles and games will no longer be sold at Walmart and Target, according to employees 1 week ago:
There was still back and forth between PlayStation and Xbox. For the PS3, Sony went bonkers on architecture, and as a result Xbox won a lot of players. With the Xbox One, they made stupid plays on TV access and always-online, and Sony succeeded against their foot-shooting. Then, with the Series S|X, Xbox still lost but won back some consumers by introducing service-based game rental, which Sony followed suit on later.
The two have bettered each other by serving as competition to capitalize on the other’s anti-consumer actions, and by at least competing on pricing and ideas. Imagine if people called out the Xbox One’s always online, but PlayStation didn’t exist.
“lol, too bad gamers”
- Comment on Xbox consoles and games will no longer be sold at Walmart and Target, according to employees 1 week ago:
Here’s a question. For ages back, the console market had three contenders. Who do you think would compete in the trifecta between Nintendo and Sony?
Normally, PC markets stay aside from that conversation, but it might be Valve and the Steam Deck. I’m just not sure if Valve is the type to be interested in running big promotions at Wal-Mart by Mountain Dew displays.
- Comment on Space battle games for casual player? 1 week ago:
If you want something a bit closer to Starfox, rather than an all-range flight arena, try Rogue Flight. It definitely evokes the power fantasy feeling, living up the classic arcade trope of “one ship being readied on a mission to save humanity”. There’s some very big-name voice actor work in it, as well.
Another good game for the “power fantasy” trope, though it’s a bit more outside the target, is Ace Combat 7. Or, perhaps any games in the series, but this one is pretty accessible. The combat is close to what you’d get in X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, but with fighter planes. It breaks from realism a little bit where needed to make the stunts fun. And, the story very much orients around the silent player character being “scary tough” in a fight, to the point enemy fighters are retreating just from seeing your wing markings.
- Comment on Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response) 1 week ago:
Estelle, from Trails in the Sky.
She’s introduced as a bit of a cocky moron who constantly has to be wrangled by her more mature brother. But, there’s a slow development of competency where she starts to become decently sufficient at all the things her brother is good at, while he meanwhile lays bare some heavy emotional flaws - many of which Estelle excels at processing (call it a feminine trope, but it works).
Of note, all the rest of the Trails series have had male leads, and their pace of character development ground to a complete halt.
- Comment on The Shady Acquisition of EA Games 1 week ago:
I wish it was easier to predict when the AI bubble is going to pop. There’s likely lots of money to be made shorting them, but it’s not something small investors can do easily - and there’s a real possibility some thousands of investors instead pull harder on the copiumand just lie to themselves for the next decade that “it’s almost there bro, we just need another lake for cooling our doubled power output”
- Comment on The non-profit helping people from all over the world to become successful game developers 1 week ago:
I think it’s perhaps more necessary than you might think.
We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms. They intelligently gather players, and they successfully evade boycotting measures, but they don’t make people happy. And, the studios that went into them used to make such games but have been bought out and squeezed out by private equity.
If somebody really wants to play an online shooter, they’ll still play COD even if they hate it, IF it’s the only good option. The more new options appear, the less valuable those entrenched games get and the more likely they collapse entirely.
We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified. Even Gabe Newell won’t live forever.
- Comment on Anyone remember Heroes of Might & Magic 3? A remake is coming 1 week ago:
I realize when you search Steam there’s a lot of successful iterations of the classic Fire Emblem formula. Makes me wonder if any teams have done the same for HOMM3. I remember there was the fanmade expansion for it, it seems viable to invent a story/system from scratch.
- Comment on Losers 1 week ago:
I imagine they were the school bullies, but also convinced themselves they were the repressed minority being “bullied” by the rest of the school.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 2 weeks ago:
That is a conclusion made in hindsight, the easiest place to make predictions. Not every studio has the same forms of public popularity and good will they can bank on.
Also, selling millions of copies is not an indicator of a studio’s upper bounds. Publishers - even indie-oriented ones - need the lightning in bottle releases to pay for games that didn’t do well. We can’t do an experiment where KC:D2 releases on two planet Earths, one with a DRM-free release and one with DRM, and say for certain that the second wouldn’t let them additionally fund another studio’s pet project.
Basically, given how many failed releases happen that we never hear about, it can be misrepresentative to point to some good games and say “See? Studios are able to pay their mortgage.” Denuvo is able to sell to studios, costing those studios money, in part by showing raw data (that we might not ever see) explaining how it promotes early sales.
- Comment on Silent Hill f, now on GOG 2 weeks ago:
My general guess: The delay is tied to Denuvo. Smart devs will launch with Denuvo so that pudding-headed pirates (my label for a certain small demographic among pirates) drooling over marketing will see the trailers, try to pirate, fail, be told by crackers to wait like 2-3 weeks for them to unlock it; but instead become impatient and buy the game full price.
But the time period to capture pudding heads is not constant, and is not perfectly predictable before release. So, the developer may not want to commit to a certain release schedule where they will release on GOG, dropping Denuvo at that same time. They might even want to reserve the possibility the game will go years without dropping DRM, if it’s somehow staying constantly popular, and constantly desired by pirates, and/or they can see that the hacking communities have failed to unlock it.
- Comment on When you say you don't like linux on Lemmy 2 weeks ago:
I’m currently in the process of converting over; have a dual boot and will probably leave it that way for the next year.
It is NOT, by any measure, that Linux is annoyance free and perfectly designed. It’s that Windows has been building up its annoyances in competition, so that going penguin takes a considerable measure of bloat off.
We’re at a point where some games are just performing better through Proton than running right on Windows.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 2 weeks ago:
The original Fatal Frame trilogy are some of the best horror games I’ve played. Not only are they genuinely scary without using a lot of blood, but they have difficulty that connects well with the scariness.
It occasionally feels “unfair” and makes you feel vulnerable, but is still relatively doable so that you don’t get overwhelmed. At times you’ll be retreading old ground just trying to solve a puzzle when another ghost will come at you out of nowhere.
- Comment on New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars" 2 weeks ago:
Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.
Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.
They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 weeks ago:
There’s a scene like this in one of the Telltale Sam and Max games that really deserves a better reenactment. Went something like this:
Sam: “So, Bosco, how much do you want for this…’Deadly virus’ that’s really just a tissue you sneezed into?”
Bosco: “A hundred trillion dollars.”
Max: “WHAT? That’s insane!!”
Sam: “How crazy can you get to think we’re going to pay something like that?”
Bosco: “All I know is, I keep finding the dumbest junk around my store, and think up the most ridiculous price I can imagine for them! And you two keep paying it! So who’s crazy now, fool?” - Comment on Hollow Knight Silksong (mod recommendations) 2 weeks ago:
If it’s too hard?
I’m not far enough in Silksong to give an opinion, but: Had this happen with Stellar Blade. I was playing through, actually started to enjoy the story, and it has a series of about 3 bosses at the end, interspersed with cutscenes (not fought in a row, just progressively harder). And they were awesome - challenging, but awesome. I felt rewarded for recognizing the full combo strings and parrying, as well as recognizing opportunities to get attacks in.
I get to the final boss (the “Take hand” one), and it’s a brick wall. Epic and all, but feels like a leap in difficulty for an already-tough game. I keep at it, trying my best, but it gets no easier. It’s also an unsatisfying runback after often barely getting far into the fight. Finally, having not needed it all game, I switch to the game’s built-in easy mode. Even then, it’s a challenge, and I lose if I’m not paying attention to the attacks! But, I can at least recover from those failures, and try to learn more in one go. From then, I’m eventually able to get through and see the conclusion to the story. I recognize I do not hold bragging rights to that final boss, and I’m fine with that. I liked getting to see the ending cutscene, I exhibited as much patience as I could give with the bosses…but any more than that, and I would’ve started to hate the game.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
At the time, I predicted you were probably right - but it would still be a good value for the time that the price stayed low.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 2 weeks ago:
If it matters, the money in that case was going to a charitable cause, not the people you’d date.
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 2 weeks ago:
I remember when a date auction at my college worked this way, the girls always came in pairs. When I thought about it afterwards, it made sense, but it still made me feel just apprehensive enough in the moment - being outnumbered in a moment of social vulnerability - that I didn’t bid on anyone.