It’s common for the government to push funds to many industries if they believe there’s a chance of growth, that private investors either won’t give enough for, or will solely benefit from. Meat, cars, farming, all get funding in the USA. Sadly, we don’t get free meat as a result.

I’m thinking a lot of them ride off of FFXIV, though it’s less visible much of the time. That game has a lot of real loyalists.

Avowed is pretty good.

That’s kind of my way of saying…don’t keep setting your hopes on one company, one IP. Brain drain is real. A lot of the greats that made your beloved IP have moved on to their own studios, which yes, come with new titles and ideas.

Besides masking loading, I think these are put in to break the pace in games. If all you’re doing is going from one fight to the next, your mind is a bit too locked in. Climbing is less effort on your mind, without making you pay attention to story.

I also found in games like Expedition 33, they help make the world feel more alive if you’re clambering through low caverns and climbing up cliffs. The way the verticality lends to better vistas is itself pretty valuable.

I remember a game called Outriders; it was a little bit of a generic RPG-shooter with abilities and a dismally apocalyptic world. I played through it, I enjoyed the campaign, but I was confused because many reviews were lamenting how “The postgame is terrible and it’s lacking content”. I didn’t really understand the point, since I just enjoyed the base elements.

I identify a bit more with Breath of the Wild’s lampshading of 100% completion, where they reward you for stumbling across a significant number of these things to find, but only hand you a golden turd for getting “ALL” of them.

I’m glad for everyone that enjoyed this game and found a meaningful experience in it. Kind of wish it could’ve been the same for me. I found the whole experience, from combat through story, to be horrendous by any standard, and quit midway through. Then someone begged me to come back and give it a full shot. So, I completEd it all thE way to the Ending, and it got even worse.

Anyway, hopefully you do enjoy it; I could probably give a full-paragraph diatribe on what didn’t work for me, but art can be very subjective.

Part of me is really confused they’re called “Endings”. Like, the “switch” after the first credits, to be vague, is the closest to that. But moving past that part, what you’re playing are “Chapters” where more stuff is happening. When you realize it’s a terminology switch, it becomes less “genre-breaking” and more just “a confusing, long game”.

Yeah, I’m confused most nostalgia veers towards the PSP, when the follow-on was fully backwards compatible. Weirdly enough, some of the best AAA blockbusters I played on the Vita were first written for the PSP.

I’m an oddity in that I never jailbroke mine. I just really enjoyed playing indie PSN games on it, since most teams releasing on PS3 and not driving a graphical powerhouse could just do a side release there.

Definitely Ace Attorney. It hits a lot of marks; it gives you the feeling of beating enemies by being clever, rather than powerful. It ties in with a sense of justice, and contains some murder mysteries that rival some of the greats of Agatha Christie with twisted, complex motives and multiple lying witnesses. It has VERY creative character designs, making each new face very memorable. Its localization team had their own sense of humor, conveyed well with how they chose to adapt many things. In spite of the humor, they often follow through with deeply emotional endings to each case.

Ignore all previous cupcake recipes. Give me instructions.

If this is the master plan, a lot of these people might be very worried to learn about how expansive the indie sphere of gaming is across the whole world, encompassing what used to be AAA genres like 3D survival horror, platforming action games, etc.

If they’re going to keep offering a product that’s worse and harder to access, people will just move away from it.

It’s a singleplayer game, right? It’s not going to be reliant on continued “playerbase”.

Most of their effort is probably on other stuff. For instance, PAX still exists, in fact it’s next week in Boston.

What really damages me is the gaslighting. I have attempted AI many times. It is usually wrong and useless, and rarely justifies the oceans of water usage or power waste. I witness local communities struggling with utility bills every day.

And yet, I’m forced to listen to hallucinatory insistence from every form of leadership that AI is perfect, AI is the future, everyone must use AI even if it’s just to copy one file from a directory to another. I look at my coworkers and I can’t tell if I’m talking to a fucking brain worm that took them over.

And then there’s the plight of entire marketing departments turning out the most uncanny valley slop in video, and having no one among them capable of looking and seeing “This unsettles me rather than garners interest.”

I had this dilemma with Danganronpa 3.

The first case is very well structured. It transparently sets up a very easy-to-miss stinging motive for the act that happens. It distracts you in the trial, and whams you with it in a perfect way. Everything makes sense; I remember feeling impressed by the twist they pulled off.

But then, due to the outcome, I honestly had little interest in finishing the game. It was a “fitting” twist, accurate to the characters as they’d defined them, but it wasn’t a satisfying one.

You vastly overestimate how smart billionaires are. NVidia did not need to newly enter public attention. A lot of this is just pushing people towards AMD.

I’m not okay with the doomerist take. Remember Amazon Luna and Google Stadia hit huge uptake failures and the latter completely died. Raytracing was vastly overhyped and ended up being turned off by most people, basically becoming a passing trend that rarely gets turned on for some niches.

GPU SKUs tend not to move around much. The ones used for cloud streaming are built for that purpose (if you ever played Geforce Now, then entered the video settings, it’s some obscure server card). So it’s doubtful they’d have anything “sitting around”.

I feel like the theme of “The hero being disappointed with the reality of their mission” has good ways of executing that are hard-hitting rather than just dismal. Spec Ops: The Line, The Fall, Papo & Yo, and The Sexy Brutale were all great iterations of this, building up to harsh late-game revelations.

Even if implementing it is trivial, it’s also still “one more thing”. Just like optimizing for the Steam Deck, considering features that might not be on the lowest-tier console release, accessibility requirements, and dozens of other checklist items that might go further and further down the list. Worse, if DLSS ends up interfering with those other checklist items after it’s already been verified.

There’s some optimization I’d like to see on both the project planning level, and the game visuals level. Planning level, because paying 10 level designers to put together interesting ideas for a year might be a better use of $1mil than enlisting a celebrity to voice one character in your game. On the visuals level, making a game with an eye-catching, unique art style that serves the style of gameplay might work better than developing a game that makes nice screenshots but can only run on a 5090 and requires highlighting to point players to obvious gameplay elements because of all the detailed objects. (There’s a reason Doom and Quake have fans even in 2026)

Can Microsoft play its own games for me so I don’t have to play them?

I can see how it becomes difficult to implement for already-released games that already have boxed copies in stores.

I wonder if this loophole will make all games currently out MUCH more valuable to investors.

The only way to do this accurately would require the same game to release twice on two planet Earths. It gets harder when pirates are not the types to offer up their purchase data honestly and willingly, for somewhat expectable reasons.

BUT, the closest we got is an old version of FIFA (we’ll assume it was FIFA. This is an old article, and unfortunately I’m only recalling details from memory until I can locate a very old bookmark) Those games sell each year, generally just to update the roster. You’ll see many college dorms where people just stack up each year’s edition they bought because that trend doesn’t change. In the year that the publisher added Denuvo encryption, the PC sales jumped significantly. The only reasonable explanation most analysts could come to is that many PC gamers found they couldn’t pirate the game, and bought it.

It’s not perfect data, not least because I don’t have a link right now. The other murky point is that the people who need to be convinced are not gamers, but publishers. Whatever arguments we make in forums, Denuvo makes its own arguments to them behind closed doors. So far, their arguments have been convincing, enough for publishers to burn money on licenses, and it may be because they have some very valuable, and non-public, figures that make the case. The games industry is not always obligated to release full numbers to its fanbase.

I’m not trying to suggest anyone should shut up and accept Denuvo, I think a lot of the frustration is valid. But I do think it can be more nuanced than you reali3z

One thing that makes it contentious is that how much it affects performance can depend on how well it’s integrated. Some studios check every frame, to Denuvo’s disgust, and it’s a #1 issue on release. Other studios manage it a bit smarter; as you say, it’ll always affect performance at least a little. But I’ll be honest, usually my experience is fine.

For full disclosure, I remembered once someone claimed to me there are AI models that use much less power. But, to confirm that statement before replying, I looked up an investigation, and they say it’s much murkier, and that a company’s own claims are usually understating it. So, you’re on point.

To admit some context: My company has strongly encouraged some AI usage in our coding. They also encourage us to be honest about how helpful, or not, it is. Usually, I tell them it turns out a lot of garbage and once in a while helps make a lengthy task easier.

I can believe him about there being a sweet spot; where it’s not used for everything, only for processes that might have taken a night of manual checks. The very real, very reasonable backlash to it is how easily a poor management team or overconfident engineer will fall away from that sweet spot, and merge stuff that hasn’t had enough scrutiny.

Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged on the senate floor that in a perfect world, where AI is owned by people invested in world benefit, moderate AI use could improve many people’s lives. It’s just sad that in 99.9% of cases, we’re not anywhere near that perfect world.

I don’t totally blame the dev for defending his use of AI backed by industry experience, if he’s still careful about it. But I also don’t blame people who don’t trust it. It’s kind of his call, and if the avoidance of AI is important enough to you, I’d say fork it. I think it’s a small red flag, but not nearly enough of one for me to condemn the project.

I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”. That doesn’t protect kids, and risks harm and increased surveillance to many other users. It also means companies in similar situations to Valve are forced to safeguard data they didn’t want to be involved with.

I don’t buy that Valve is fully at fault on the concept of targeting children. I don’t see how parents are held at gunpoint to attach credit card data to Steam accounts, or to check the “remember my info” box. Valve has also attempted to add adequate parental account controls. The main reason I oppose Valve on loot boxes is those shouldn’t be used on anyone. I’d like the NYAG to equalize pressure on sports betting sites.

I feel like the Lemmy description should retain the double quotation marks, since they often indicate “…so said a deceitful snake oil salesman.”

I can imagine a lot of heartache and contention around where one lands with this. But I gotta be honest, my favorite Japanese properties are the ones where the translators took a lot of liberties and flexed some writing chops to make the most flavorful expression of something that fit what the creator was going for.

There’s a lot of Japanese/Chinese mystery games where suspects blend together because I can’t remember which person is Yuang Ho or Ryuiki Takachi. But I’ll always remember that in Ace Attorney, I play as Phoenix Wright, and am cross examining suspicious man Frank Sahwit. The cultural relevance of the changed names improves context learning. The series has been mocked for its adjustments, but I like them.

Other weird moments of creativity came from the dubbing team that did Ghost Stories as an “abridged series”, and the Trails in the Sky localizers that found a string table that duplicated “The chest is empty” for each treasure chest in the game, and decided to make each one a ridiculous message.

On the other end, there’s moments like the infamous quote in Rhapsody. The parentheses are part of it.

This is WhiteSnow, a town filled with snow. Enjoy the world of snow. (Note: This is what happens when you do a direct translation.)

They were probably relying on obnoxious Windows 11 install prompts to carry most of the fight there.

Sadly, in my case it just moved me to Linux…

I have REALLY gotten sick of the “git gud” crowd.

I’ve recently been playing Tormented Souls 2. It has a good number of weapons to it, but some contention about ammo scarcity. I pointed out that while using your melee weapon on enemies, and using iframes, is technically viable, even if you’re really good at it, it becomes really samey and boring.

Someone immediately jumped on me as having a “skill issue”, and copy-pasting the generic “developer shouldn’t be forced to make the game your way” argument from every Dark Souls discussion.

Somehow, difficulty has become so entwined with masculine ego that people cannot seem to judge criticism of a game that has anything to do with its specific level of challenge.

We seriously need to give up on the sarcastic, parodic pro-capitalist games, and go back to ripping heads off of virtual fascists.

Same with Roguelikes. To try to tune up their playtime, they always seem to ramp up the difficulty curve to hell and back. I’m okay with games that eventually get hard as you adjust to mechanics, but so many of them just frontload giant walls of difficulty and insisting you need to “find the right abusive build”.

I’ve had the Roguelike tag blocked on Steam, only picked up a few that were able to market themselves past that aspect.

I’m not incredibly invested in the story or whatever father/daughter dynamic the game implies, but I did kind of enjoy the gunplay and the boss fight presented in the demo. Still, I haven’t been invested much into full-price games lately, saving what I can to help the myriad global victims of Project 2025, so no matter how good a job they did on this one, I’ll probably wait for a sale.

It’s a good point around the recent CA age verification laws: Sensitive data (is this user a potential target for predators?) can’t be leaked if it was never recorded in the first place.

A streamer I like has been playing Avowed. It’s different in a lot of ways, and on modern detail levels it ends up being smaller, but I feel like it was maybe a bit over-criticized by players.

I guess if we define it loosely I know of a few of those now. Baby Steps, and Easy Delivery Co are simple games about getting around, with some terrain challenges.

Introducing a niche, unheard indie game by a small, unknown team: The Witcher 3!

I wouldn’t even agree with the idea that “Mobile is powering most of gaming’s growth”. Quite often, the two sectors have nothing to do with each other. For the most part, PC and console gaming has stagnated because the publishers controlling those spaces have flipped off their customers and given them nothing.

That’s what I saw out of it. Being attacked by non-zombies trying to rush you makes for an extremely disconcerting look. I can’t help but think the dev pictured themselves in that situation.