Codex
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He likens Arkane’s approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: “Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that’s what Arkane had to do.”
Damn, what a concept: doing the same kind of game multiple times, iterating on the design to perfect it. Obviously Bethesda gets releasing the same game over and over again, but this idea of “improving” the design is so alien to them. Wouldn’t adding thousands of microtransactions be an improvement?
That’s a cool board. I’ve been thinking about something in similar form factor, kind of missing old slide phones with physical keyboards. The idea of building out little mesh devices for a local emergency network is quite interesting. Maybe with a few supernode base stations built around RasPis to act as data-storage/relays/service-providers…
Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.
Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.
It’ll have no trouble meeting my expectations, because I expect that Bethesda today can’t make a good game so I expect it to be shiiiiiiit!
But also, fuck Bethesda and this “lower your expectations” bullshit. No Todd, it isn’t impossible to please your fans. No Todd, it isn’t impossible to make a good AAA game. No Todd, it isn’t a burden or a problem to have millions of fans who have high expectations for you.
If you can’t cut it, fucking quit and hand the reins over to someone with fresh ideas, someone who’s still hungry and still wants to make good things.
I wish games just wouldn’t license music, or would attain a perpetual license that allows the work to remain whole and as intended. Can you imagine if your movie collection just auto-updated to change the soundtrack or add some new scenes in now and again? It’s fucking stupid what people put up with in games and software.
I’ll controversially say that I really love the Steam controller. Not the steam deck (which is honestly my number 1 if we’re including handhelds) but the original controller intended for use with the steam link device.
It really just needs a right analog stick and it would be great. The lack of one takes it from 10/10 to like a 7/10. It’s so good otherwise, great weight and size, good design. Sensible layout and the big track pads work really well! It was clearly a prototype for how the Deck layout ended up, though I actually like the controller’s big circular pads more than the decks little square ones.
Jeeze what’s next, the simple wholesome thrills of Moonman Doom?
(I don’t think they should have taken it down, political satire like killing Thatcher/Trump/Biden in a game isn’t in the same ballpark as actually bad or dangerous Doom mods like moonman or various maps that copy layouts from schools and malls.)
Eh, I might buy it on sale since I already have the other Castlevania collections on Switch. They’re convenient to play and I liked the portable games quite a bit. Ecclesia is probably my favorite in the series!
But yeah, also, emulating on Steamdeck would probably be better, but more work to set up and hunt down ROMs.
Speaking of Ecclasia, why did the DS have such great entries in several series? Days of Ruin is also my favorite Advance Wars game, and I feel like both were later games, darker in tone than previous, with actually good use of the touchscreen.
Hmm, an intriguing idea, an adventure game but you have to use a fantasy version of git or svn to mine through old source code repos looking for erased clues, abandoned forks, and other hints of The Truth hiding in the code. Using file diffs to compare versions of a .finger file found on two different VMs where some significant detail has changed (a file hash or a phone number or something).
Could be good in several genres too. Secret romance in the all queer dev team, lovecraftian digital dieties hiding in the archives, counter-espionage trying to locate a critical secret under time pressure, etc
It’s the data diving that’s really ruined the fun of this. You can’t hide anything in a game now because for a legion of hackers, exposing every locked or hidden thing in new releases is the game. I think that’s why so many indie games that want to have deep hidden content end up making ARGs, so you only have to put hints in the game and the solution is on your website or in a geocache or something. Then the worst the data miners can do is dig up all the clues faster.
I also feel like part of the appeal of “lore over plot” is tied up in this. With YouTube and Twitch, it’s likely that more people will consume your game in the form of “lore analysis” videos than will ever play your game.
If your game just tells a straightforward plot, then a 12 hour commented Let’s Play is going to eat some amount of people who might otherwise play your 60 hour game. I definitely found Whitelight’s 7 hour walk through of Death Stranding a lot more interesting than playing it.
With the lore-heavy games, there’s no consensus story to spoil so everyone can make their own 10 hour long interpretation of what Goldmask’s finger positioning implies about the elden lord’s dining habits. It feeds a whole speculative video ecosystem and encourages people to play the games and “decide for yourself” what it all means.
And yet the Kex engine still doesn’t offer QoL improvements like multiple quick saves, auto saves, and control configuration is very limited, especially for mods/games that offer extra controls like jumping or inventories. No free mouse look or free aim.
Cross multi-player is neat but it was running kind of janky when I tried it. There’s also a pretty severe bug that enemies forget what state they were in after you load a save (they default back to idle). I don’t think that was an original bug, other ports (and pretty sure this one prior to this update) don’t have that bug.
I get that Doom at this point is more community platform than game, but other ports make clearer their intent at either upgrades-and-options (gzdoom) or attempting to stick close to the original (chocolate, eternity). I don’t think the Kex port makes clear it’s position on this. Controller support, cross-multiplayer, and some graphical options (like the weapon icons) make it seem like a QoL port but then things like no freelook make it seem like it wants to also be traditional.
It never bothered me in Source games, but I don’t really care for it as a mechanic. Specifically in Half-Life, I don’t like how it overlaps with long jumping either. (Jump then crouch to crouch jump, crouch then jump to long jump.)
But I wouldn’t want it in other games because manteling is a superior mechanic. Mantelling is usually when you can hold down the jump key close to a ledge to grab it and pull yourself up, rather than jumping. In most games that have it, mantelling into a smaller space (a vent or pjpe) auto-crouches as you enter.
It allows for making longer jumps, exciting last moment saves, pulling yourself up into small spaces, simpler climbing mechanics, and more. It’s just a better, more intuitive mechanic that replaces long jumps and crouch jumps and requires no extra key presses.
The project lead, Eniko, was one of my first follows on Mastodon and still one of my favorite people to see post! Been looking forward to this release for a while!
Braid was a critical darling but I think a lot of it’s early success can be accounted for by it being one of the first games in Xbox Live Indie Arcade. For a little while, it was literally one of the only games available. And yeah, it’s a fun puzzle platformer but more than a decade of “Is Braid the greatest indie art work ever made?!” thinkpieces have really overhyped it.
“Did you know it’s about nuclear bombs? Did you know the designs are a reference to Mario!?” Like yeah, these things aren’t hidden lore, they’re the text of the game, but psuedo-intellectual posturing towards it is on par with Blade Runner and the Matrix for pure inanity. Plus no real marketing on the remaster, no press releases about “what an important moment in gaming this is” or anything.
Also, Braid isn’t a singular game anymore. Games obviously in the Braid-lineage have pushed the genre. Animal Well most recently, but it’s hardly the only game now eating at the table with Braid, Fez, etc.
I think Blow started to belive the hype a long time ago and now just expects that the mere presence of his genius on a work should immediately push it to best-seller status. And I like his games, I liked Braid and I think the Witness really is kind of genius but man he is insufferable to listen to and I really think that hurts the buzz around his work.
It’s a ridiculous metric anyway. There are dozens of ancient MMOS that still manage to crawl along because a few hundred subscribers is enough to fund one or two developers in maintenance mode effectively forever. See also indie studios like Spiderweb Software who’ve been sustainably selling games to their fans for decades. See also indie roguelike devs who manage to make their one game a job by having a patreon and a few hundred fans. See also retrogaming. See also the boomer shooter renaissance.
Games on the whole have never been less dead, unless their studio intentionally smothers them by shutting down servers and locking off access.
I dunno, I’m just not that interested in trying to bring back Starcraft. I think MOBAs largely replaced RTS for good reasons.
Making and balancing a competitive RTS is very hard, and SC being the champ means every other RTS tries to copy it, especially right down to the micro. Micro is considered the key player skill in RTS and I think MOBAs won because it’s much easier and more fun for players to manage the micro on a single hero unit than on several heroes and dozens of regular units.
RTS that try to reduce micro tend not to focus on competitive multiplayer so the whole genre has stagnated.
Do charities normally get buy-out offers from for-profit businesses?
Fair point, although actually… 🤔 I mean non-profits do get bought out (and/or abused) for their good optics. See "Open"AI.
It’s just sad, looking up the company on Wikipedia (to get the buyout history right) reminded me of the very first humble indie bundles (which I participated in) and what a nice feeling it was to directly support indie studios and a good charitable cause. We could get into “consumer-activism” and what a joke/paradox that is, and maybe we should because look at what Humble Bundle is today but I still think it started out as something good.
Remember when Humble Bundle was actually a charity and not just a charity-themed storefront owned by IGN?
Well, technically owned by IGN, a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis, formerly J2 Global, formerly Ziff-Davis.
I’m sure firing what was left of the employees with any commitment to the concept of HB and folding the brand under the rest of your e-commerce verticle will have no further adverse effects on the quality or usability of HB as a service.
I think the obvious “early access” success story is Minecraft. That’s what all these games are trying to copy.
But yeah, early (beta) MC was still a fun game and worth the 10 to 20 one would have paid for it. The actual “release” of the game was fairly arbitrary as it had huge updates after as well.
The unprecedented success of it led directly to early access as a commercialized concept. Prior to that, AAA/AA and other professionally made games just did actual releases, and indie/solo games were sometimes released in free beta to get playtesters.
The idea that the audience should fund the development from alpha through release is a wild concept that the capitalist class jumped on because they could sell you less and in many cases make the audience pay for what used to be considered a part of development (testing and polishing).
Frankly, I’m just amazed other industries haven’t caught on yet. Music is getting there, with songs being released in very raw form sometimes and the constant stream of remixes and rereleases that are needed for chart ranking also allowing for an iterative approach to music production. How long until TV shows offer “early viewer” discounts where you pay 50% for a show with no visual FX that you can hope, if it’s funded enough, will someday have CGI added?
Valtonen says that this has made the CPU the weakest link in computing in recent years.
This is contrary to everything I know as a programmer currently. CPU is fast and excess cores still go underutilized because efficient paralell programming is a capital H Hard problem.
The weakest link in computing is RAM, which is why CPUs have 3 layers of caches, to try and optimize the most use out of the bottleneck memory BUS. Whole software architectures are modeled around optimizing cache efficiency.
I’m not sure I understand how just adding a more cores as a coprocesssor (not even a floating-point optimized unit which GPUs already are) will boost performance so much. Unless the thing can magically schedule single-threaded apps as parallel.
Even then, it feels like market momentum is already behind TPUs and “ai-enhancement” boards as the next required daughter boards after GPUs.
Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.
Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don’t even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.
But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.
And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.
But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.
He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.
The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.
Nice! I’m playing through TP2 right now and it’s great fun, though I did enjoy the mystery of the first more I think. How many laser puzzles does a person need in life though?