It’s basically an infinite money glitch! All Google has to do is make sure not to have the project run by the guy who botched the Xbox 360 launch and it’ll be unstoppable!

Yeah, at best it’s “A framework for Red Alert 2 in web browser”.

How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?

One could easily apply Hanlon’s Razor to this. For example:

• Bob is a game artist. Bob has a folder on his desktop called “Inspirations”, where he saves art pieces he finds online that he likes, and a folder called “Assets” where he saves things he’s created for the game. Bob transfers to a new department in the studio, or quits, or is fired; either way, he returns his equipment to the IT office.
• Dave is an IT guy at the studio. Dave takes Bob’s computer after he leaves the job, and transfers all of Bob’s files to the studio’s shared drive. Dave isn’t an art guy, and doesn’t know the difference between “Inspirations” and “Assets”, and dumps them all into the shared drive in a folder called “Bob’s Things”.
• John is the studio’s new artist, replacing Bob. John syncs “Bob’s Things” to his computer. John assumes everything in this folder has already been cleared for use by Legal. John starts implementing the art into the game.

I used to be a pretty hardcore Destiny 2 player for several years. In that time, I’ve seen Bungie fuck up a lot of things. But those fuck-ups were almost entirely caused by somebody in the studio not playing close-enough attention to something, and details getting mixed up in the pipeline. I don’t think anybody at Bungie knowingly put Antireal’s art into the game. I think the more likely explanation is that there was a lack of oversight, and files that shouldn’t have been mixed together, got mixed together.

It wouldn’t even be the first time Bungie had something like this happen; there was an instance where a third-party studio that Bungie contracted to build a Destiny 2 cut-scene accidentally used artwork that was not intended to be in the actual cut-scene.

Not to suggest that any of this excuses Bungie for multiple cases of plagiarism. Obviously, they need to have stricter standards in place when transferring files between parties. It’s a colossal fuck-up, but I don’t think that it was a fuck-up anybody set out to commit.

“Having” is not the same as “owning”.

But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we?

When it comes to video games, we’ve never had ownership rights. Buying a game has always been just buying a license. The only thing that’s changed is that now publishers have a mechanism with which to enforce it.

I think the canted touchpads are a nice touch, and inline sticks are the way to go (I can’t believe Nintendo and Microsoft continue to get this wrong).

Feeding the ducks

It’s hard to be critical of something that hasn’t been released yet. All anybody had to go off of were statements from the developers, until the product was actually released and people could get their hands on it.

You should check out Embark Studios’ (ARC Raiders dev) other game, The Finals. Literally the most innovative FPS I’ve ever played, it completely reinvents the competitive shooter genre.

You’re paying with your data.

If you knew about any of the four reporters that founded 404 Media, or the incredibly high quality journalism they produce, this thought wouldn’t have even crossed your mind.

If one could ever actually read anything on 404 Media in the first place, maybe one would know that. But as somebody who doesn’t have the preexisting knowledge of who founded the org or what sort of reporting they do, it’s hard to glean anything useful when the articles are cut off by a paywall.

The point is, I don’t see any evidence of malice here, so I have to assume stupidity.

Oh, I definitely agree. I just think that Valve would’ve come up with a much better solution than a daily deal if this was a game from a big publisher.

I’ll bet you that if it was an EA (as in the publisher) game, Valve would’ve figured out how to send those wishlist emails.

This has been my concern, as well. Games rarely ship as a finished product anymore. All the disc is really good for is acting as a token for ownership. But even that is limited, as the disc often doesn’t even have enough space to fully install a playable version of the game, and you still need to be able to download the rest of the game from official servers.

I really wanted it to be good, too. They tried to modernize the mechanics so much that they lost touch with what made L4D fun in the first place.

That’s honestly surprising to see, considering that the console launched with like… five games, none of which were even a mainline Nintendo title.

It’s also surprising because I just haven’t seen any hype for it. With the Switch 1, everybody I knew either got one right away, or as soon as they were restocked. I still don’t know anybody who bought a Switch 2, or is even excited for it.

I believe OP is referring to input latency, which isn’t so much a result of the system slowing down due to increased load, as much as running in a consistently slowed-down state causing a delay on your inputs being reflected on-screen. There’s several reasons for why this is happening more often lately.

Part of it has to do with the displays we use nowadays. In the past, most players used a CRT TV/monitor to play games, which have famously fast response times (the time between receiving the video signal and rendering that signal on the screen is nearly zero). But modern displays, while having a much crisper picture, often tend to be slower at the act of actually firing pixels on the screen, causing that delay between pressing Jump and seeing your character begin jumping.

Some games also strain their systems so hard that, after various layers of post-processing effects get applied to every rendered frame, the displayed frames are already “old” before they’re even sent down the HDMI cable, resulting in a laggier feel for the player. You’ll see this difference in action with games that have a toggle for a “performance/quality” mode in the graphics settings. Usually this setting will enable/disable certain visual effects, reducing the load on the system and allowing your inputs to be registered faster.

It’s definitely not going to live up to the hype. We already know what Hollow Knight is like, and we’ve seen a demo of what Silksong will be like from last year’s E3, and… it’s really not that much different. Not that that’s an inherently bad thing, since Hollow Knight was already really good, so any improvement on that is only going to be better.

I worry that it’ll suffer a similar fate to Duke Nukem Forever. In a vacuum, DNF isn’t necessarily a bad game, but it suffered from being overhyped for years. So when it came out and just turned out to be “okay”, that was the final nail in the coffin for the Duke Nukem franchise. I hope I’m wrong, though.

It is because Balatro actually had playing cards and pretended it was poker.

Playing cards != gambling

Poker != gambling

Its similar to how so many older games could have your character popping meth near constantly but it is fine because it isn’t tobacco.

What kinda games are you referring to here?

The problem with this detection method is that you occasionally run into honest players catching bans for being legitimately too good at the game. While rare, there are some players who are accurate enough with their tracking that even professional players would assume they’re cheating, and end up getting banned because the developers decided nobody should ever be that good at the game.

This ends up putting a skill ceiling on a game, which is uhhealthy for a competitive game.

Considering one of the common refrains about the most famous game in the series, Silent Hill 2, is that the combat being crap is an important part of making you feel like a regular guy way out of your depth, I’d say they have right to feel concerned. There’s a serious incongruity between “horror game” and “detailed combat system”.

I agree, and this was precisely the issue I had with some of the more recent western-developed SH games, like Homecoming. They give the player too much agency, for a franchise that was built on making the most of limitations (both technical and strategical). I have similar complaints with recent Resident Evil games for the same reasons.

That said, SH:F already seems to be a pretty major departure from the franchise, so maybe they’re trying to gauge reactions to possible avenues for spinning-off the series to other genres with its own “rules” and design.

Thanks, now all of my fingers hurt!

From the video, it looks like a lot (but not all) of the gameplay is forced into 2.5D controls. If this is the case, then I think it’ll probably work out pretty well.

A huge chunk of that Linux development was paid for by exploiting child gambling.

Just because one does a few good things with their money, doesn’t justify how they got it.

It depends on the game, and my familiarity with it. If it’s a linear, story-based game where the player doesn’t really influence the end result at all, then watching it is just as good as playing it myself, in my opinion. Or if it’s a new addition to a franchise that I’m already experienced in, like a new Super Mario game, then watching it is generally just as fine of an experience as playing it.

But if it’s a game that’s based entirely around the experience of playing it, like most multiplayer shooters for example, then watching somebody else play may be entertaining, but doesn’t substitute actually playing it myself.

In that case, I’m even more confused. Who do you think is going around just rebuying games they already own?

nobody wants to buy a full price game that they already own on steam that they got on sale 3 years ago.

How many Nintendo games are on Steam?

It’s an absolutely beautiful love letter to Zelda, and I wish I finished it while it was still free on PSN. So much thought and attention went into every little detail you see and hear. Tunic teaches so many lessons about game design that I wish AAA studios would hear.

I really want this to do well. I’ve lost a lot of faith in Konami in recent years, but the SH2 remake gives me a bit of hope, and I’d like to see them ride that momentum and breathe some new life into Silent Hill.

I’m excited, as I loved the first one. I’m not in love with the disconnect between visual designs in the the pre-rendered scenes and the gameplay, though; the cutscenes look like they’re for a completely different title altogether.

Also, no Miriam?

It took a while to get there, but Cyberpunk 2077.

As someone who spent several years and hundreds of dollars on Destiny 2, I sure am glad to see that this is why we couldn’t get a new Crucible map for like five years.

I just recently finished this one, and The Man Who Erased His Name. Apparently I’ve been sleeping on the Yakuza series, because they’re fantastic, and have amazing soundtracks.

I seem to recall reading something around the time PT came out, where somebody said that Kojima is pretty difficult to work for, and runs his studio more like a director on a film set would. Apparently, he doesn’t take input or suggestions from anybody else outside of a few trusted writers on his team.

Granted, that was 10+ years ago when he was still at Konami, so maybe things are different now that he’s independent.

If you look at the Bungie art it couldn’t possibly be an inspo gallery because they are just straight up used with (some) changes made to them.

That’s why I’m thinking the folders were merged in error. Bungie makes a lot of stupid decisions, but I think “willfully stealing art and assuming nobody would ever find out as we heavily advertise our game to get as many eyes on the product as humanly possible” is too stupid, even for them.

I can almost guarantee you that what happened is that Antireal’s art was saved to one of the artists’ “inspiration” folders, and somewhere between creating an inspo gallery and that artist quitting/getting laid off, the files got merged into a “concept/assets” folder. Likely when going through the laid off artist’s hard drives, they found images that they probably assumed were all originals.

Another theory I’ve considered is that the artist may have known they were about to be laid off, and intentionally merged the folders in secret to sabotage the game. But I feel like that’d be hard to cover your tracks on, so I’m going to apply Hanlon’s Razor to this.

Yeah, he’s crossing into a bit of Hideki Kamiya territory with actions like that.

Or do you want to admit that you didn’t really look at the comparison images?

You’re already like five comments deep into an argument that hasn’t even happened yet, calm down.

The art director followed Antireal on Twitter.

If not for this, I would’ve chalked this up to the designs being abstract enough that it’d be feasible for two separate artists to have come up with them independently. The fact that he was following the artist is a bit damning.

It’s a shame, because he’s a fantastic artist, himself, but this is definitely going to soil his reputation, and probably calls into question some of his earlier pieces, as well.

Something that you may not be considering is that a big part of live service updates is stopping cheaters. Whether the game is balanced or not doesn’t matter at all if other players are flying through the map and insta-killing everybody else.

Allowing the use of old versions of your game will consequentially allow cheaters to continue having access to known, exploitable files. Even if those files are no longer in use in the “live” version of the game, giving cheaters a sandbox to experiment in inevitably allows for further exploits to be discovered in the live version.