Ephera
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Starting to sound a lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that companies and investors get cautious and pull out their money, which is what makes the bubble burst.
But well, for good reason. You wouldn’t need to be particularly concerned about everyone else pulling out, if there was a clear return on investment, if you knew more money to come out of your invested money.
Well, on desktop I’m actually quite happy with that setup. I like writing with my default editor, because I know all the keyboard shortcuts. And apparently, you can configure Joplin to use an external editor, but then I don’t know what it adds. I also really don’t want to be running an Electron app at all times.
On mobile, I might have more of a use for it. In particular, I need reminders there. But I’m not happy with the sync format that it uses. It adds a lot of metadata and additional files, and names the note files with UUIDs. I’m guessing, it will likely also not be able to load files that I’ve created on my desktop by hand, because those will be missing all the metadata.
So yeah, if I get desperate, this might be another choice in the future, but not for now.
I split my notes/todos into multiple files, but I wrote a small program which basically just creates a file with a randomized name in a flat directory and then opens it in my default editor.
I just want to be able to start typing right away without worrying where to put the note or what to title it or whatever. Like, I will put a title on it and include some keywords to help me find things again, but I can do that later when I don’t need to noting things down…
I feel like the big name titles are all headed in a similar direction (realism, large open world, story-driven), because they need to differentiate themselves from the indie titles that cover the other bases for cheaper.
So, if that direction isn’t your jam, I can certainly see that you’d feel that way, because you need to inform yourself more actively to learn about those indies.
To be fair, the kids are just a pretty good indicator of where this whole boat is headed. Someone who’s been adulting for a while probably has savings and is willing to burn some of those to keep doing the hobby they like, especially when they’re invested with hardware or friendships that exist through gaming.
For me, it was Skyrim. It was one of the first games I bought with my own money and certainly the first where I followed the news before the release. I did not know that Todd Howard was a notorious liar and that ruined the game for me. Like, the game itself was probably fine. It was an upgrade in some ways and a downgrade in various other ways. But having been promised that it would be so much better than Oblivion and Morrowind, when it was simply not, that just robbed me of the fun I could have had with it.
If you tie yourself to a commercial platform, it’s gonna take advantage of you. That’s how they make money. So, I would also recommend using an open-source game engine like Godot and then distributing on multiple platforms.
The closest open-source thing to the Roblox model, that I can think of, is Luanti, which is basically a game engine and distribution platform for Minecraft-like games. Don’t expect to make money off of it, though.
I haven’t looked into modding yet, but from what I understand, most Morrowind mods should work seamlessly. It’s only those that need the Morrowind Script Extender, which don’t work in OpenMW.
Also, I’ve seen this website recommended before: https://modding-openmw.com/
The game looked quite generic to me. As someone who’s not deep into Star Wars, the titular character looked more like 70s mom than space adventure. And the gameplay also looked like they just slapped yet another texture pack onto something I’ve seen a thousand times already.
So, I don’t see why you’d buy this game in particular, unless you do a lot of gaming or a lot of Star Wars. I imagine, they missed out on most sales towards the more casual crowd.
I started noticing it around February or March or so.
I feel like it’s displacing Corporate Memphis, at the very least in terms of how much I hate it.
I mean, they do have the infinite money glitch, a.k.a. being owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft’s investors think Fallout 5 will make its money back, it’s more lucrative to get started on it sooner rather than later.
And it does also need to be said that they can’t keep remastering Fallout titles forever. They need to develop a new title at some point.
Bethesda Game Studios has so far always only had one game in development at a time, which should be TES6 right now. If they are working on Fallout 5, we’re likely talking pre-production stages. So, it might very well be the case that the two remasters come out in roughly equal spacing before Fallout 5 comes out in a few years.
Non-gaming anecdote: Colleagues wanted to build a Rust application for different platforms. (Save for scripting languages, Rust has some of the nicest tooling around that.)
Building for Windows:
cross build --release --target=x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
Building for Linux:
cross build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Building for macOS:
Uh, you need some signing key or something like that? I believe, they had also concluded that you’d need to use a Mac to do the build, rather than being able to cross-compile from wherever.
In the end, they decided not to support macOS…
Well, the unfortunate part about Metal is that it’s incompatible with the rest of the world, too. They could’ve integrated Vulkan and chose to do something slightly different instead, because that’s the way the Apple crumbles, I guess.
There is MoltenVK, which is a compatibility layer to be able to run Vulkan games on macOS. Maybe they’ll integrate that. But well, it wouldn’t be on-brand, and it certainly still doesn’t make it easier for gamedevs looking to support macOS.
A few years ago, I would have fully agreed with you, but having tried my hand at (hobbyist) gamedev broke those rose-tinted glasses for me. It’s just extremely hard to curate gameplay mechanics.
The only real way to know whether a mechanic works in your game, whether it’s fun, is to implement it. That means you’ll be programming for weeks and at the end of it, you might end up deciding that it actually isn’t fun, so you get to rip it back out.
This is also a somewhat linear process. If you think of another mechanic at a later point, you’re not going to re-evaluate all previous mechanics to see whether a different combination would’ve been more fun. Instead, you just decide whether this new mechanic adds fun to your mechanic-soup or distracts from it.
Point is, even as a hobbyist and idealist, with theoretically infinite time, I quickly learned to swallow my pride and appreciate when something just adds fun, whether it perfectly fits in or not. You’re just not going to create the perfect game. And a game that’s a sum of inconsistent, fun parts is still more fun than a coherent game that doesn’t exist.
Of course, this does not mean, you should include mechanics even though they’re overused. That seems to rather be a result from long development cycles, where games decide to include the mechanic when it’s not yet overused, e.g. when a popular game featured that mechanic, but once the game comes out, then a whole bunch of other games have come out before, which had also decided to include that same mechanic.
I think, part of it is also that it’s a rather isolated feature which is fun on its own. You don’t need multiple systems working together to make parrying fun. Instead, you just react in the right moment and there’s your endorphins. Pretty much the hardest part about implementing it, is to make enemy attacks readable, which you likely need for dodge rolls, too. And then especially for AAA titles, which can’t afford to experiment much, such an isolated feature is just a no-brainer to include.
Problem is that it’s also an impossible equation to expect customers to keep paying higher prices despite inflation nixing their wages. I really don’t know what they expect to happen. Many people will simply wait until it goes on sale.
I guess, it’s a way to squeeze the day-one rich kids a bit more? But at the same time, you’re cutting down sales when the hype is biggest. And if two people spend $60 each, that’s more money than if only one of them ends up buying your game…
Well, as the others already said, it’s a matter of taste and different factors play into it, but your argument with the AI is precisely why I find this decision so jarring: You don’t need nor want unpredictability in a skating game.
It’s not a competitive genre where the unpredictability makes it interesting. And I remember watching a video of a guy playing Skate where NPCs would constantly walk into his path and it was the most infuriating thing. If there would’ve been no NPCs, no unpredictability, the game would’ve been better.
Of course, with an MMO, other players will probably have no collision. But if you can still see them where you’re skating, they’ll still get in the way of you seeing what you’re skating on, particularly if you run into trolls.
I’m not completely negative to the MMO concept. Maybe it is fun to see just the sheer chaos of hundreds of others skating in the same place. Maybe they have some sort of idea to actually make interaction with other players relevant in some way. Maybe it’s kind of cool for folks to log into the Skate MMO and just hang out. Or maybe it’s only an MMO hub-world and you don’t have to see other players on the individual courses. But yeah, I’m just not holding my breath.
The problem is that no one asked for an MMO. The game series always offered singleplayer. The gameplay is likely made worse by being an MMO. People who are not fans of the series can just skip this game, but those who are fans of the so-far-singleplayer series are those who are asking for a singleplayer experience.
Mindustry is basically Factorio with more focus on tower defense.
Hmm, you mostly press the button in the top right to progress through turns as well as through the individual ‘decisions’ within a turn. And each decision is something like “What should this unit do?”, so it will automatically select a unit and you can instruct it by either clicking on the map to tell it where to walk/attack or with the buttons in the bottom left.
In your first turn, one of those units is a settler, which you might tell to found a city. In that case, you also have to tell the city what building to construct, for which it will bring up the city screen and then you select that in the list on the left. Well, and if you do build a city, you also have to select a technology for it to research, which brings up another screen with the possible technologies in a tree structure, where you select one technology and confirm it.
I’m sure, there’s tons of places one can get stuck on, but it is fairly linear gameplay, so don’t overthink it…
Well, if you played it a few years ago, the tutorial was also still rather sparse. That should be better now, too.
Oblivion Remexicoed.
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Yeah, that is crazy to me. I understand them wanting to make other games in between and that making those games takes a few years each. Rationally, I’m on board with the decision-making and the math that leads to this.
But that the result is a generation who didn’t have an Elder Scrolls part released in their childhood, that still feels like far too grand of a concept.