I feel a bit of shame that back in the Win7, Xbox Series S era of Microsoft I was sort of cheering them on as an underdog in several markets.

But it does seem like every large company is driving these zero sum efforts now. Anyone that high up is chomping for workforce reduction.

If larger-scale changes don’t prove possible, I still want Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism act as a way for majority workforce in a company to declare “No, this way is insane, fire whoever suggested it” earlier rather than later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw

“I’m sick of investing in video games. They’re always so unreliable.”
“You literally only ever invested in two companies.”

Does this mean in 6 years we’ll get “BelowTheWatermica Dos” by a new studio, and it will be a far better spiritual sequel?

It’s happened only a few times when a publisher cans the developers.

Anytime I see super-smooth transition animations in a demo, or even just gameplay mechanics that seem to work out way too conveniently, it tells me it’s an animated “pre-viz” demo of the game they want to make. That’s kind of the impression I got from Perfect Dark.

Any chance he’s putting the question on social media to convince other stakeholders above him?

It’s possible he was in a board meeting when some novice shareholder suggested “What if you take an exclusivity deal”? And he just didn’t have clear evidence on hand of that being vastly unpopular. Obviously that could be me being overgenerous to him.

When all the decisions have to come rapid-pace, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything notable. It feels like mashing out light or strong attacks and maybe some block/dodges.

I’ll admit that there have been some action JRPGs where I just didn’t understand how the mechanics worked together, even after some explanations, because I had to play it out so quickly in combat. Those games ended up having low difficulty so that people that “weren’t getting it” could still see the story.

I’m still okay at Soulslike games where there’s not quite as many meters and illogical systems. And of course I’m okay with turn-based games having those weird systems because I can process things slowly until I get it, and am taking my turns at full speed.

They could pull a Spec Ops: The Line, and use the franchise flag to pull a masterful writing twist that analyzes the original gluttony in a confrontational way.

Has the potential to be very cool! What might be sad is that many horror games now evoke the trope of “They move when you’re not looking”. Game development takes a long time, so I can guess this was not an obvious trend when you started on it. But there should still be ways to differentiate your work.

Every screenshot posted of this game is peak content.

I couldn’t stand Near A Tomato but have tons of hours in SB. I grant it has nothing amazing in terms of story, but it has enough intricacies of combat to keep it fun, even if none of those mechanics were invented here.

Nier seemed to operate off a single attack button a lot of time, and working off RPG mechanics gave so many opportunities for level disparity that didn’t serve the game at all.

I think the only thing that might get me to go over the $60 line is if a publisher takes a chance on a franchise/concept I’d like to see more of, which these days is rare.

While it is fraud, it’s murky waters when you realize this is what every Kickstarter does. Gamers don’t easily fathom the full sum of what it costs to pay qualified artists for a full development cycle. Kickstarters have only existed to prove to investors that there’s monetary interest in a concept.

Downvoted for censoring “Gamers”. Go back to TikTok.

I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.

This happened for me with Back 4 Blood.

Turtle Rock said “Okay, we’re done developing content. We’ll move on to new things now.” And people took that to mean it was a failed, dead, and worthless game. Whereas the active state where they left it was pretty solid, still runs, and I have a lot of fun with it. It just wasn’t built to be endlessly live-service.

King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity. Even as a kid, I felt like it was a very strange gore-and-action focus shift for the King’s Quest series. Only as an adult did I hear the story of executive meddling that lead to the complete tone and gameplay shift.

The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.

They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.

I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.

They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).

Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.

I mean, I enjoy PS+, it’s just a matter of whether you’re okay playing a bunch of games on a known rental basis for the price point.

I enjoyed playing Texas Chainsaw while it was on there. Now the game’s dead. To me, not much lost as I move on to other games (and I do buy games too)

I abandoned it.

I found some cool stuff. I even coincidentally solved a puzzle involving an ice box on my first go. But it was taking waaaaayyyy too long to find anything interesting, and I had multiple runs where it felt like there was no chance to build anything other than a straight path of rooms leading to a dead end, either from lack of doors, or lack of keys.

I actually like the dice roll of getting different encounters and adapting to what comes up; but only when the goal is generally to do well, eg dealing lots of damage or exploring new directions. But often there’s very particular objectives in BP and the UI doesn’t do a lot to help you track them.

Would be great if the matchmaking world could set some criteria restrictions.

PlayStation controllers have a mic built in; make an expectation people will use it, and speak English. If people matchmake games, and then leave those games 45 seconds in, penalize them and prevent them from joining new ones.

I know those things are idealistic, but I also think with a very dedicated effort an online network could create that space.

I don’t even care about propagandist views. I’m just like “Hey devs, has your government stopped invading a sovereign country? No? Okay, no buy.”

Don’t worry, the controls on PC are just as unbearable. It’s that style of mouse movement that would be fine in an RPG but is absolutely terrible with an FPS.

Oh look, another day where I barely ever even got rooms that had more than one door, and now that my winding path has hit a dead end all my resources are useless. Next day I guess.

I don’t see people playing Sea of Thieves much anymore. I never liked the top level pro PVP aspect but I do enjoy joining people for simple treasure hunts.

DM me if you’re looking for more players.

Maybe I’m a simp for IOI, but the CEO’s allegations that the game might be getting paid-off negative press makes me curious. There have definitely been games in history that I’ve seen overwhelming negative reactions to from the internet, I tried them out and…they’re actually really fun. Sometimes it just feels simpler to join the bandwagon without trying a game out, not knowing a good 60% of that bandwagon might be paid trolls. I’ve always hated vague statements like “The game was released unfinished” or shit regarding paid extra content.

Anyway, all that is just my opinion that I’m going to wait and see, at the very least.

The Geforce app used for drivers, and the app to connect to Geforce Now, are installed separately. In fact, you’d likely install the latter on weak devices that don’t even have an NVidia GPU.

Yup. You log in to something like Steam or UPlay, and it lets you play games you have on your account. It’s only their supported list sadly.

The service is fast enough I’ve been able to play mouse-based shooters. Latency is not perfect, but home monitors and input devices sometimes have comparable imperfectness.

So far as I can think, wasn’t the only handheld that failed the Playstation Vita? And that had very visible reasons for the failure - designing itself around an obtuse storage medium, and requiring first-party memory cards. Even with those drawbacks and with no first-party support, it had a tremendous following.

It honestly could still be a worthwhile device to chain off of, since none of the current offerings fit in a pants pocket.

For those who don’t know, GeForce Now is a cloud option when you don’t have access to a strong PC to run a game. Back when Cyberpunk 2077 was unattainable for many, my advice to some was to run it through GeForce Now.

Interestingly, they also have “day passes”, making it practical for when you are out spending most of a day away from a gaming computer. Save files still synchronize to local games when you’re back.

I’m guessing this is basically how the Xbox works already.

I’d really rather gamers focused their energy into showing support for the developer groups making cool projects, than specifically deriding any works made under publishers they dislike.

Once every few years, EA and Ubisoft produce something that’s really cool; and much as we’d rather the publishers were replaced with better ones, at the least we can be happy that developers got to put out one or two good games through them.

It will be very funny if Microsoft releases their handheld, and is instantly better with Linux.

This gets trickier with games, because an experienced game designer can, for instance, look at the UI design and graphics programming of a Ubisoft open world slopfest, and say those parts were masterfully done (even if the overall game isn’t so fun). And, even the best of video games have bits of them that weren’t as good.

Man, I wish I understood a single bit of this evaluation of the game after finishing every chapter (sorry - “Ending”). The whole thing felt mostly like a waste of time.

That said, I’m a fan of Spec Ops: The Line, a game that has much the same level of division among its players. Interesting how philosophical games get that reaction.

Wait, that’s online?

I want to appreciate the additions, but…this is also not a good way of doing it.

The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.

Maybe that’s navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that’s working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it’s that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they’re playing with an input delay.

That’s why the games I’ve liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.

Back 4 Blood was the game that served as the idea for this post.

I recently felt like picking up some cheap copies of it to play with a few friends, and decided to launch it once ahead of time just to test it out and see how it ran. I picked “Online” mode out of habit, feeling it would likely search for a bit before handing me 3 bots to play singleplayer. Instead, I actually got a decent group of people together several days in a row.

In B4B’s case, while the developers visibly “abandoned” the game in news headlines, the form it exists in is very playable and generally bug-free, even if its ultra-highest-difficulty “endgame” allegedly lacks some refinement. It got a lot of outlash for not matching the playstyle of Left 4 Dead; having players use a deep system of roguelike-style upgrades. Since the enemies escalate in difficulty, those upgrades are often necessary and can connect with team strategy. It’s now on PS+, and since it’s crossplay, Steam players will get a lot of queue buddies. It’s also playable with just 2 people since the other 2 characters will just be bots.

From how it sounds, especially with the actor’s permission, this seems like my preferred way of using AI-generated voices.

I’d really want to make sure any legal language around actor AI permissions is built to avoid coaxing though - like including it as an “industry standard” clause for infinite use when recording a single audition. Ideally, the voice would always “belong to” the actor it came from, and would only be licensed on specific uses, like “This NPC within this game mode, available for 8 weeks in summer of 2025”. No idea if that’s what they did here.