It’s not even just about the games being terrible. The ballooning costs is just unsustainable. It’s the reason we’ve seen so many layoffs, and it sucks. It’s just mismanagement. The executives are the ones telling the developers to make open world games, for the most part. They don’t understand how that effects the rest of the design, or how much it ends up costing. They just see a trend and tell the studios they need to follow it.

If it was just that we got some shitty games I wouldn’t care. However, it’s effecting people’s lives. We need a more sustainable industry of smaller budget games that know what they are and plays to its strengths. We’ve got too many games trying to be everything games. It’s the reason studios ramped up the price to $70, and then, quickly after, $80. Soon they’ll be Charing $90-$100 because they let costs get too high to maintain.

You aren’t out of touch. Even the worst games don’t get that poor of a review. When you job depends on being on their side, it turns out you can’t voice an honest opinion.

For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.

Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?

I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.

I haven’t played it, so maybe they’ve done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You’d come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you’d have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that’s has to be accounted for.

Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it’s choice of rooms let’s them restrict how much you can abuse them. You’ll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.

I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.

This isn’t what I meant. There’s nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost “more than twice” that, so minimum $280m.)

I don’t think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that’s at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it’s going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?

Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it’d also save time and money).

I really don’t understand the open world though. I don’t think that’s the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I’ve played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it’s in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don’t die as quickly.

I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn’t really evolved with the times. (I can’t speak on the new game.)

Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 2, and Sekiro?

I suspect it won’t work for them, but I think the idea that they can’t work is wrong. With a really passionate and talented team, I think it could be done very well. It’d take real innovation though, unlike BotW. BotW was innovative for LoZ, but almost everything it’d done had been done before. I would say currently the closest formula they could copy is Elden Ring, and it isn’t as much of a Metroidvania as previous more enclosed entries were.

More profitable is not the same thing as better. For example, Marvel movies are pretty shit, but they make a ton of money. Palworld is better than Pokémon, for many reasons. One major one is that it actually tried to innovate on something. That’s more than Game Freak has done in decades despite having an infinite money glitch.

I haven’t played them in ages, but from what I’ve seen of them they’re worse than we had back then. At least they tried to present some challenge. I think that’s mostly gone now, like it is for most mainstream gaming.

I wonder if maybe doctors and modern medicine had anything to do with these recoveries…

Yeah, I just recently unlocked wall clinging. It feels like now there are several directions to go, but before there was largely just one. Also, because of the way charms are limited (only having two slots for each of three types) finding charms feels much less meaningful. You can only ever have two main combat charms, so you can never find something that’ll let you totally change things like you may in HK1.

Maybe it’s only the beginning (I’m about 12h in, so not that early) of the game that feels this way, but yeah so far it doesn’t feel like extra exploration will bail you out if you’re stuck.

I agree with this argument in Dark Souls. It isn’t quite the same in Silksong though. Upgrades are very limited. You can’t just swap weapons and go farm upgrades for it. You have one weapon and can’t upgrade until a few hours into the game, and after the one you can’t upgrade again until some future point. Health and silk upgrades are also incredibly limited, and you ability upgrade slots are equally limited.

In DS/Elden Ring, you’re supposed to go explore and spend your souls on upgrades. I’m Silksong there are very few real combat upgrades to be purchased. You can’t just level up or upgrade weapons to get more powerful.

I will say the run backs in Silksong/HK are better than, for example, DS1 for the reason you give. In DS you just run past enemies and it’s trivial. In the HK games running past enemies becomes a platforming challenge. Yeah, you can still do it, but you still have to engage with the enemy even if that’s just jumping over them. DS you just run past them and they almost always too slow to engage with you if you’re sprinting.

From what I’ve heard, Chinese gamers are significantly more likely to leave a negative review if there are issues. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I think it’s good for consumers to demand the products they buy to be as good as possible, but it also just makes developers want to avoid them, or do things like Steam has and separate reviews by language by default.

For how other genders fair, it’s almost entirely dependent on your voice, so feminine sounding people almost certainly get the same treatment, and masculine sounding people just get treated like normal.

But if you just treat them like normal you can make some good friends. I had a group of women I played CS with for quite a while after playing with them as a random and just treating them like regular people for once.

It takes absolutely nothing to just not act like you’re amazed at talking to a woman. They’re just people trying to have fun in the game, just like you and every other teammate you’ve had. Don’t treat them any differently.

You’re supposed to die and learn. Almost no boss you’ll one-shot, even if you know what you’re doing. Even the best players can’t just know boss behavior without having fought it once already.

Not that anyone is going to accidentally read this, but a large part of the fun of this game is the discovery. Don’t post information or guides in the open. If someone wants a guide they’ll ask for it, though they probably shouldn’t be given one for the first boss. If they can’t figure that out on their own then this game isn’t for them.

Main frame was just an example of a type of frame that aren’t glasses. There are many other types of frames that have nothing to do with glasses. A frame is just the structure of something. The people using that name to say it must be glasses are hyper-focusing on one usage of the word.

Although, truth be told, I mostly just want a Steam Controller 2.

This I can agree with.

There are so many incredible indie games out there. The people who think gaming has gotten boring need to look past the marketing and find interesting games. Yeah, AAA is fucking boring. Stop hoping that’s going to change. It’s business people making products, not developers making art. Find the indie games that do something new that fit your style.

There’s no way it’s VR. They already have the Index name for the VR line. It’d be called the Index 2 without a doubt. Maybe AR glasses, but frame does not imply glasses. Sure, glasses have a frame, but so do so many other things. Have you ever heard of a main frame? Those aren’t a type of glasses.

They’re very different, so you need to figure it out for yourself. Both are great, but we don’t know your tastes. I would recommend BG3 though, for what is worth.

However, if you’re strapped for cash, I would recommend playing indie games. They’re often more interesting than these larger budget games (though these two are exceptions to large budget games being shit), and they’re usually like $20 max. Most people can get more out of Factorio or Dwarf Fortress, for example, than they can out of these games, at a much lower price.

Just buy it for random people on your Steam friends list if you want to do that. There are still plenty of people who don’t own it (like me) and it might finally give them the push to play it.

I play a lot of Squad, which has no progression or anything that’s tracked from match to match. I’ve also played a good bit of X4, which is a space sandbox game, where you mostly set your own goals. Factorio is also one of my favorite games. I’m fine with games where you set your own goals. I just don’t get NMS.

I think part of it is that there’s absolutely no friction when saying. For example, flying makes it impossible to crash. There’s just nothing at stake and progression feels mostly pointless. If there was danger or a threat to defend against, I think that’d go a long way to making it feel like there’s a reason to do what you’re doing. As it is, it just feels like chores.

But in MC there is a drive. It’s not an extrinsic goal though, rather entrinsic needs. You need better gear, you need food (and maybe you don’t want to spend time doing it so you automate it), etc. NMS has a notion of this, but barely. It’s enough to say there is progression, but it doesn’t feel like you’re progressing.

That said, I barely got into base building. Maybe that’s where things get good, but it takes far to long to get to that point that I’m bored by the time it’s a real option.

I’m glad people like it. I just don’t understand why.

Cyberpunk 2077 would be another big one. A lot of the issue was bugs, but also a lot of missing content.

I gave up on Elite shortly after launch. However, I do keep tabs on it on occasion. The end game of Elite is basically choosing factions to support and helping them take over star systems. Honestly, it seems at least intriguing. I can’t say the same for NMS.

I appreciate that the devs keep updating the game, but honestly I don’t get it. Sure, there are a lot of planets. There’s not any reason to one over another though. They’re all procedurally generated with the same general stuff (yeah, you’ll need to travel for specific resources). For me, it just feels like I’m wasting time, because it doesn’t make you feel like you’re doing anything meaningful. I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

Yeah, usually the stars are classically attractive still, but there’s a lot more space for other people in other roles. I think comedy in particular has a lot of stars who aren’t incredibly hot.

However, probably a lot of people who are getting jobs as extras are trying to make their way in the industry. The industry, being dominated by attractive people, attracts attractive people. Ugly people fear they wouldn’t succeed, so it creates a selection bias.

Yeah, the only way I see it happening is if it’s done in a way that’s invisible to users. Even then, I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Either you store a copy of all content locally or your content is only available when your server (presumably your computer or phone for most users) is online. Most people aren’t going to have to storage space for self-hosting federated content that’s distrubuted, and having people go down constantly from turning their computer off is far from ideal.

I don’t know when you’re talking about, but it probably wasn’t self hosting, unless you’re talking about like original internet stuff. GeoCities, for example, was not self-hosting. It was hosting your content on their platform.

Edit: Messed up a copy/paste.

I couldn’t find the exact context of what you linked, but down from it I saw your opinion, which I don’t agree with, and doesn’t say what you’re claiming now.

I honestly don’t understand what you’re asking of me. Women having equal rights is a binary thing, they either do or don’t.

This is wrong. They can be equal in some parts and unequal in others. No culture gives identical rights to all other cultures. There are degrees to equality. It isn’t all or nothing. I would say most of the west is more equal than countries that follow Islam as a state religion, but most of them don’t have total equality. I assume you agree with that, right? And Saudi Arabia is better than Iran, right? Not significantly, but there are degrees to it, right?

Painting it as binary all or nothing is wrong, and probably is antithetical to progress. If it’s all or nothing, and something would take a step in the right direction, then why take that step if it isn’t all the way, right? Treating it as binary is bad.

I love the “you can’t modify my mod because it undermines authoritative intent” and then modifying things like the standing stones because “oh, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.” Obviously he doesn’t even believe what he says. He just says whatever he needs to to “win” like a true narcissist.

Yeah, that’s what I said.

I assume the planned release date for 1.0 is staying the same though. This doesn’t buy them any more time. It only delays the time where they’d get feedback from the community. You can always wait for early access to be over if you want. This is all that was delayed, not 1.0.

Early Access is being delayed. They were releasing early access to let users give feedback. Now that feedback will be delayed, which allows them to make mistakes that may have been avoidable if they heard from players sooner.

That being said, the current course of action, regardless of justification, is actually going to get us a better game in the end.

Eh, I’m not sure about that. Sure, a more complete initial launch (probably still early access), but will 1.0 be better, or after that? Part of what made previous games good was getting user feedback early in early access. Sure, they played less complete versions, but it allowed them to direct where the game was heading sooner.

Also, how much does this hurt morale of the team? Are they still going to care about the project as much with their owners fucking around with the project? If they don’t care as much, the final product is almost certainly worse.

I agree, but Subnautica was more about exploration than just survival. Sure, you could keep expanding the world to add new environments, but eventually that gets out of hand. For a Subnautica type game, making new ones makes sense, especially to address tech debt as well and start fresh.