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One of the only times I’ve ever been grateful that Rockstar Games - a litigious and thoroughly despicable crew of money-grubbing cunts - are being pressed in their most sensitive and tender area: their bank account.
Now John Indiegame doesn’t need to worry about the Collective Shout campaign. The scumbags with the army of lawyers and endless rivers of money will take care of things.
/cope
I haven’t spent a dime on GOG since this happened. Fuck them. Not only is their professed anti-censorship stance fucking laughable in light of the Devotion débâcle, their game preservation efforts are even more laughable when they literally excluded a game from possible preservation because of a hoard of thin-skinned CCP hostages.
Even without that episode I would have stopped using GOG eventually, because they also went against their one selling point - no DRM - more than once. They sold Witcher 3 hard copies with online verification (you had to link it to your account with a serial number, you couldn’t just install it and play it from the disc offline). They included a little card in the box with an apology for this requirement, citing their need to protect their sales. Which is fair enough, but don’t pretend that this isn’t DRM. The fact that it was one of their own games shows how much hypocrisy they have when they complain about other developers doing the same thing. Being able to share the downloaded files freely makes me wonder why they bothered with any DRM, but bother they did.
Then they sold Hitman (2016) which has literally the most egregious and hateful DRM in the history of gaming. If you don’t submit to it, your game is essentially a very expensive demo. Most content and even basic game features like saving and progress tracking is disabled unless you’re connected to the DRM server. GOG users complained and the game was delisted, but the fact remains that they fucking tried. If GOG doesn’t even believe in being anti-DRM anymore, then I see no reason to use their [apparently] CCP-curated games library.
GOG may have started out as a plucky band of disruptors and idealists, but that dream died about 10 years ago. They’re EA cosplaying as Che Guevara. I wouldn’t even mind if they behaved like every other storefront, but it’s the pretence and the morality-washing that makes them especially despicable. I mean EA and Ubisoft aren’t feigning to be motivated by some grand political or societal good; they’re malignant capitalists who would sell their own children, and would tell you as much. GOG dons the robes of a grassroots pinko activist while dancing to the exact same corporate tune.
Nice gesture, but keep in mind that this is the same GOG that was poised to release Devotion by RedCandleGames, only to renege on it because CCP imbeciles told them to. They are brave against censorship except when it involves actual conflict with censors. As soon as that happens, it’s bootlick city.
I don’t really care? Is that allowed? 🤷
I’m old enough to remember when computers started to be used for art, and how traditional artists were complaining about how soulless the end product would be, and how unskilled people could ‘fake’ being good artists because the computer does most of the work for them. I mean the undo function of a computer on its own is putting incredible creative power into the hands of even the most useless digital artist, power that da Vinci himself would have creamed his little loincloth over. And the copy & paste function - and all of the other everyday functions all PC users depend on - cut down the production time by orders of magnitude compared to traditional painting/drawing. This isn’t even getting into the incredible transformation tools on offer in Photoshop (or even MS Paint 1.0).
Remember matte painters who painted incredible photorealistic chunks of the screen in films? Do Photoshop users of today feel any qualms about having extincted the fuck outta those people? Would they have even entertained the woes of those artists if they were around at the time? Would they have been calling for government intervention to prevent non-traditional matte painters from taking those jobs?
What about sculptors and stop-motion pros? Movies have been riddled with worse-looking CGI replacements for those things for half a century. Any shits given about those artists who spent their lives perfecting their craft only to be supplanted overnight by a cunt with a Pentium who produces objectively worse results?
AI is just the latest sabot-magnet disruption, and it won’t be the last, despite the apocalyptic language around it. Either find a way to live with it and exploit it, or lay down in the Artists of Christmas Past mass grave and pull the clay in over yourselves. Or, you know, go ahead and try to uninvent it or whatever it is you’re proposing 👍 And if you really wanna go hardcore, uninstall all of your digital art tools, get yourself an easel and see what you can do in the “real world” with your “real talents” without recourse to time-saving, labour-deleting, instantaneous bespoke-brush-manifesting technology.
Why are they so excruciatingly slow to release patches? This patch doesn’t even cover game-breaking issues, such as the bow’s paralysis perk crashing the game if you trigger the perk twice in a row. There’s a workaround where you edit .ini files to set the chance of paralysis to 0%, but most people aren’t gonna do that.
I got 100% of the cheevos and logged 110 hours in doing so. The game crashed for me literally hundreds of times (maybe close to 1,000), and I submitted the bug reports for every one of them. I had to quicksave every minute, to avoid losing too much progress. It’s the most unstable piece of software I’ve ever used, game or otherwise.
The game itself is great, but fuck me… almost 2 months later and they patched maybe 0.2% of the crashes and bugs every player is encountering 😒
SOMA still lives in my brain 10 years later.
$800 million doesn’t even seem that high at this stage (I had assumed they broke a billion by now).
Whatever this ends up being when it’s all said and done is never going to justify the production costs. If you developed a helmet that could trigger the hardest orgasm your body can muster at the push of a button, it would not justify $800 million.
This will be my first experience of Morrowind, the original is just way too old for me to try getting into now. I’m a Philistine, I know, but I need a modern UI and interface and UX and all that jazz. Skyrim is pretty old at this point too, but it still holds up in all the important ways. So, I shall wait for the release of Skywind! (Could probably have phrased that in a slightly less flatulent way…)
The game was acclaimed and beloved by virtually everyone who played it, and it’s only becoming profitable now? Is it too simplistic to say that a normal release across multiple storefronts, namely Steam, would have made it profitable in a matter of months?
I genuinely keep forgetting the game exists. An article like this one will pop up from time to time, and only then will I remember about it. Epic is a black hole.
It will be riddled with monetisation, with the attendant mission/quest structure to support that goal. Like, it’s an impossibility that it won’t be. Starfield was on the verge of getting some good will back from the player base, but squandered it on that bullshit pay-per-quest DLC they released recently. Bethesda is beyond help at this point.
- No Man’s Sky - 1,631 hours
- The Long Dark - 1,337 hours
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 651 hours (I combined the original and Special Edition playtimes)
- Nova Drift - 434 hours
- Fallout 4 - 378 hours
- Starfield - 178 hours (I enjoyed it!)
If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.
It’s quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn’t bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.
I wonder if there’s a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.
Here’s the video that half a dozen gaming sites turned into an “article”:
Wait, if devs are worried about it, and players are worried about it, who the fuck is doing it?? If it’s a widespread fear, they should band together and set up an AI-weary union, and gamers would support the shit outta them for it. Make it like a privacy policy, a binding agreement that AI will be used sparingly if at all.