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.

Honestly, I’d rather see another studio take a crack at the franchise. I don’t know whether Gamefreak have lost a lot of important talent over the years or if they just got lazy because their games are guaranteed to sell no matter how poorly they’re produced, but they do not know how to make games in the current era. Full stop. The last handful of mainline Pokemon titles have been unacceptably poor quality, and Nintendo won’t light a fire under their ass because… why would they, when they’re already printing money?

I think it would be wildly beneficial to the health of the franchise if a completely new studio took the wheel for a minute. They don’t have to reinvent the game mechanics or take the story in some dark and gritty direction or anything like that, but if they just made it functional that’d already be a huge step up over Gamefreak’s last few releases.

Personally, I’d love to see Retro Studios take a crack at a mainline Pokemon title. They’ve already got a very close relationship with Nintendo, and have released nothing but bangers.

The electric costs aren’t nearly as high as people think. For huge datacenters, yes, but that’s because they’re processing requests for hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously. For a studio using it to translate lines for a single game, they could easily get away with doing it locally, and effectively for free. You can train your own local model on a consumer-grade PC without any issue, and it’ll still run just as fast as the big server farm-powered models.

My roommate has been playing with a bunch of different local AI models on his own PC for a couple years now. There’s been no discernable change to our electric bill. His PC draws more power playing an anime waifu gacha game than it does training/generating AI.

What was Wurm Online?

I really don’t think it was that secret. Every modern Ubisoft game I’ve played has had multiple unskippable TOS checkboxes that you had to agree to before you can even pass the title screen, which state in no uncertain terms that they’re going to datamine the shit out of your entire play session.

It is still nice to see this stuff being challenged, though, even though I’m doubtful that it’ll bring about any meaningful change.

Yeah man we get it, piracy good, laws bad, yar har and all that shit. This guy’s still an idiot, and so is anybody defending him.

It’s so lifelike!

If I had to guess, it’s probably to keep pricing parity across regions and avoid a clusterfuck of import loopholes.

Realistically, the gameplay loop doesn’t look too different from something like Helldivers 2; go into a mission, fight enemies on the way to an objective, complete the objective, return back to your escape point. Really, the only difference is inventory persistence, but Arrowhead manages to stuff a lot of story into that.

I don’t think it’s the most conducive medium for storytelling, but it’s far from impossible, if you ask me.

I really like the aesthetic, but the gameplay looks pretty much identical to every other extraction shooter I’ve seen. I feel like that’s such a niche genre that already has a lot of big contenders, so it just seems like a weird move for Bungie to invest so heavily into this genre without offering anything substantially different.

What makes you think this will be lacking in the lore department? Lore is what Bungie does.

I think $800m may be enough to place it as the biggest scam in gaming industry history.

The problem is that a live service game has to be a “complete” game, even at launch; ie. playing any one “season” on its own should be a satisfactory experience for a player. Star Citizen is nowhere near being a completed product.

There was fine print at one point during the stream that specified that 4K will be limited to 60 FPS.