You’re against server based Anti-Cheat too?

Perhaps a little dramatic, but have you heard the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”

“things have changed” the makers of GDPR admitted it didn’t really accomplish what they wanted

The EU does great things, but this is an area plagued with issues. Like timed licences expiring, meaning even the devs/publishers can’t continue distributing the game, copyright and IP ownership being unclear who owns it after companies dissolve, leadership leaves or collaborations end. Not to mention the law still hasn’t really caught up over what it means to distribute a game. Does hosting a download for the client side of a game count as distribution? What happens if a company is obligated to stop distribution, but obligated to provide the community a way to keep playing? What if a member of leadership keeps providing a way to download the client-side, it might not contain copyright content, but maybe the server side does, which is actually distribution, is either?

We live in a world where 'I want to remaster <game> and I’m willing to buy the licenses and IP" can end with nothing happening because it’s too complicated.

So forgive me if “We want to continue playing games we bought =(” feels like too vague a direction for something this complicated and I can see far more concepts of terrible consequences for bad implementations than just having to click a popup box on every single website I visit and needing a VPN to visit the sites that try to block EU traffic because they don’t want to have to adhere to GDPR.

True, but it only got so popular because they had convinced both groups, hard and soft. I have no idea how they managed to convince people that Northern Ireland wouldn’t be an issue.

But back to the real point. Yeah, I thought GDPR would be good, but in practice it’s not changed the cookie/tracking landscape at all. Most places you’d have to send a letter to to get them to removed your data, and most would probably not be able to comply. Meanwhile we now have options that are subscribe (meaning they have legitimate reason to track and monitor you) or accept their ads and tracking cookies.

I think you have too much faith in them.

I didn’t say it was, but a lot of people are wanting offline access.

Point is it’s not inherently clear with one vision what SKG is. Just like Brexit and any number of dumb things it’s been marketed in a shotgun approach to get as many people on board as possible and coasting on a “well the EU politicians will just figure out what we want”

That’s not specific “the way we bought it” could be argued to require servers to be kept running and no company will take actions to put themselves in a position to get sued.

It’s not deep that Stripe uses whatever card network your card is on. Visa and Mastercard don’t actually do payment processing themselves, they have processors that do it for them. It’s those that they’ve told to put pressure on itch and Steam.

Stripe is just another 3rd party between Visa/mastercard and itch.

Mainstream betting has already gone too far even within the betting laws. There is no way to do it responsibly

That’s just how Steam bundles work. It decreases the cost by the undiscounted price of the parts you own to some minimum (I think it’s £1). Most likely they only thought as far as bundling the Rebuild edition and SnowRunner and giving it a cost of £60 and didn’t consider this.

Or maybe they did it deliberately given the name. Who knows

Now they’re having issues because sequels are the same game, better engine, but less content, but the old version is still fine.

Console updates and game updates are a thing. It will work, true, it just might be downloading and installing updates for a day before it does.

Didn’t one of the ea sport games have a literal slot machine you buy tokens to spin as part of their MTX?

I will say, going back to it I appreciate how light it is in comparison. It’s a shame the games feel overpriced compared to PC and rarely get discounted

Not to mention it’s still in closed beta, even if a lot/most people have a key now

The issue is doing DLC for an open world game is hard. The way it’s been done in the past is broadly one of the following:

• add a new zone that doesn’t interact with the rest of the world
• add a new location, a few new maps that link to the original zone and some quests The issue is that that’s not enough to necessarily make an entirely new playthrough worthwhile, but also an existing near-end save might trivialise loot and content.

The solution is so some combination of the following:

• Make the content spread throughout the world
• Balance the game so that new gear are choices rather than straight upgrades.
• Add new systems to engage with.

Fundamentally Bethesda as discounted the latter. It’s done with classes, it’s not added races, or new systems or new skills in years. They can’t add content throughout, that would require creating the space for the content to exist in ahead of time.

Not that it can’t be done, but that they don’t have the future awareness to make room for it.

The unemotive faces is the real issue. Facial animations from bioware seem really bad.

Except the complaints about Veilguard are about the pixar-like characters with very little expressiveness. So even if that were what he meant he’s still actually not addressing the real issues

The mantra from the devs is basically sub when you want and stop if/when it’s not worth it. They’ve never been really fighting to keep subs there’s plenty for people to do on an ongoing basis and they’re fine with people seasonally subbing for the updates. I don’t think they’re concerned about monthly value.

Server costs.

The issue is you provide production/team lead more artists and they can dedicate them to cinematics, environment, character and costume design and have them improve and make the process behind the stuff that already exists better, or put them into a fan-requested feature that’s a potential time sink that won’t really gain them any subs.

Alternatively you can end up in a too many cooks situation. For instance if you have 30 new armour designs putting more than 30 artists on the task sees diminishing returns.

The financial side can also be an issue. If your budget equates to having 6 months for the next patch, hiring more people reduces the time available, but might not speed up the process significantly enough to make the effective time loss worth it.

The problem is that DA:O was promised to be the spiritual successor to BG 1 & 2. They then immediately threw that away in the sequels because they realised the experience in console suited action combat better.

I’ve never been more disappointed than the point where I realised nothing I did affected the story in DA2 and again when I realised that not only was it not a return to form, but it doubled down with time gates mechanics and a level of grind that would make a subscription game proud.

That’s on top of the fact that DA:O wasn’t even that great in the first place. It was decent for its time, but is still incredibly linear and binary in its execution.

They’re all deeply flawed games in the way they strayed from their supposed roots. They might be good when each considered alone, but as a journey as a fan they burned me at each step to the degree that nothing can convince me to buy DA4.

Did you know approximately 1-4% of the population are projected to be sociopathic?

True, but you do learn what you’re good at and what you’re not. You don’t play as a child or teen still learning their place, though you could, but generally that’s not what’s done. People generally have a decent grasp on their capabilities, though they can surprise themselves it’s rarely orders of magnitude out like it would not having a sheet.

Making it so holding a fire source sets any surface you stand on on fire is so cursed tactically.

Obsession with character sheets comes from pen and paper and a desire to simulate every aspect of the world. Without the tools to tweak your ability to interact with the system you can pretend to be a master thief, but unless the game reinforces that with its behaviour you’re just pretending. Like you can pretend to be a vampire in Skyrim, sure, but it’s more fun when you’ve actually got the curse and the game reinforces that.

Fundamentally a stat sheet is just a way to tell the game what your character is like in a way that it understands and can reinforce that’s more granular than definition by class or by what skills you’ve used. And every game has one, whether you can see it and change it or not.

It’s why “everyone” ends up as a stealth archer in Skyrim. Because stealth and ranged attacks are something every character would try to do, Skyrim’s design means if you as much as try something it makes you better at it, even if you want to be a clumbsy barbarian.

Which ironically makes it so you can’t just roleplay, you have to avoid trying anything that isn’t what your character is best at. It means you can’t hide from a patrol you can’t handle, you have to just charge in and swing, because the game will change your character otherwise and you can’t tell it not to.

I see where you’re coming from, though when they were using attack rolls to determine hits and was essentially real-time-turns I think I still disagree with your definition. I don’t have a good counter to your point, I just don’t agree on the words used now =P

You’d think the sensible business decision would be to see an under supplied gap in the market and fill it, but God-forbid they do something sensible.

Go play Morrowind and come back and say that it’s a simulationist immersion game again.

It is now but it’s roots were deep in RPG stats beforehand.

Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith explained that Larian’s success is an “exception” to the last decade of gaming trends, but one that shows a shift in desire from gamers.

There’s been no shift, we’ve just been ignored and under-served for around two decades. But, sure, keep ignoring us.

This is the bit that put me off entirely. FO4 was supposed to be an iteration of (if not an improvement on) FO3/FO:NV. It was supposed to be a first person RPG. But there’s enough dialogue where what you say just doesn’t matter at all. It was the inverse of the mass effect 3 ending made into a game where the options you choose don’t affect the dialogue and usually result in the same colour too.

Honestly I’m upset it sold as well as it did, because it reinforced the idea that people don’t buy fallout games as role-playing games any more.

Copyright doesn’t cover possession just production and distribution. You can download anything copyrighted just fine, it’s just usually illegal to distribute such things with the idea that you’re eliminating potential sales.

“normal” is around $10, “high” is $20-30, we’ve seen as high as $500 iirc.

Most indie games release between $15-30. Honestly most skins are around the cost of a new game, yeah.

My boycott of Sony continues, I would have really liked to play that.

I don’t know, they don’t seem much better than Elite Dangerous, which is a game that’s released. And those ships don’t take a real life mortgage to afford.

There’s not much of an interview here, but there’s also nothing to really tell that they learned anything from this experience. They still have this air about their words like they did nothing wrong, even when they’re admitting that it wasn’t just technical issues.

Sorry, I’m probably nit-picking. My point was team size and game size gave ballooned, but it’s not broadly a AAA thing, it’s a very recent issue (last 10 years). They did just find when they hadn’t got so insane, but not much before the numbers you listed. Halo 3 and Skyrim’s are beloved games made by studios of around 100 devs.

Payday 2 and payday 3 we’re made by the same dev studio, but with different producers. They own the IP, they’re burning it down of their own free will.

They tried to milk payday 2 to death and it didn’t work, so they tried again with payday 3 and lost their audience.

If we’re just talking about analogy then the band is the game, the dev team is the roadies and management is the publisher? Still. They fucked the stage by their own choice.

Not really true, Bethesda ballooned from ~70 around Skyrim’s launch to ~500 for Starfield.

The outer world’s dev team from obsidian was around 80.

Bungie has/had (bit unclear if this this before or after the ~200 layoffs) around 850 for Destiny

I think the AAA devs are proving that more devs don’t make things better. And Animal Well is 31MB, but I think that’s a bit of an exception really.

Self-fund or kick-start and hope (and beg) some YTer plays their game and it explodes.

The camera through the first one feels like a stalker perspective, the new one makes it very gamey

That’s cool