Ugh. I suppose I can only feel grateful that Tencent’s stake is only in this subsidiary? I’ve already done as much as I can to divorce from Epic Games from Tencent’s 40% stake in them.

And yet, famous Japanese creators don’t understand the hate, and see it as a vocal minority. https://www.dexerto.com/assassins-creed/legendary-japanese-dev-says-normal-people-dont-care-about-assassins-creed-shadows-controversy-3168442/

I would be doing the same, but I decided to drop off fascist Twitch - just YouTube streams, and whoever cross-streams to Noice for me. (And, the latter doesn’t have ads!)

“Why did you put transgender people in this thing? Why did you make it divisive?”
“Wait. Walk that back. Why do you think that adding transgender people makes something divisive?”

The bigotry is hidden in the questions, but they’re not hiding so successfully anymore.

This might be a dumb idea, but I may buy this game just to make up for all the baseless hate it’s been hit by. Maybe just to avoid shareholder claims of “See, people prefer historical accuracy. Hence black people are banned in all future games.”

I haven’t really even tracked much of Ubisoft games for a while, and I recognize usually they’re pretty mindless open world fun - personally I’m often fine with that.

Wow, you mean they didn’t make a successful game and then immediately triple their staff and try to start pumping out formulaic games at double pace?

But what about company growth??

I’ve even wanted to bring up Valve in some recent political discussions on corporate governance. With the blatant exception of CSGO child-focused gambling, it is otherwise the “shining ideal” of a good company: They invented a product that people like and enjoy, maintain it well to please their customers, and pay their employees well without growing excessively or finding ways to cheat customers out of their money.

Common misconception. None of them want war. They want to show up, intimidate people into surrender, and fight no one. They’re dogs barking through a fence that blindly ignore the open gate.

Hence why all the mass firings were by email. Hence why Trump has twice caved to Canada and Mexico on tariffs. Hence why ICE has failed to force either Illinois or Boston to cooperate with their raids.

I understand the reasons people feel they have to be afraid, but miss that all of the fear is on the other foot.

There was a great video where someone dismantled an ultra-aggressive “we’re gonna destroy you liberals” claim video. He basically said “No, I know you’re not going to do that. Because you said it into a camera.”

Those couple weeks were in fighting for their lives against Nazis. In heat of battle, anyone can form a brand new relationship sooner than that.

You’ve renewed my idea for setting up a Discord server that literally bans zero-effort Twitch style chat messages. Each time someone hits enter, they must be conveying a human thought. Exceptions provided for reactions, which are a specific feature, but that’s it.

I don’t know if this is the priority for many other users, but Epic Games is 40% owned by Tencent, a Chinese corporation. That in itself is an inappropriate level of CCP influence to me - sadly, Chinese companies don’t really get to divest themselves of government influence the way American corps do.

(That said, with Google changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name, I feel less sure of that last claim)

The world has gone too long without game developers returning criticism to fans. Some game devs don’t serve their fans well and deserve a blasting, but that’s generally a minority. Most of the time, gamers in online spaces are the same sort of Karen at the register saying “The customer is always right” every single day, and they‘ve needed to take a step back for a long time.

Corollary: I play an online game that’s full of glitches. I’m upset at the dev about it, but also patient because I know programming is hard, and I’m sure they get frustrated at those bugs too.

New Animaniacs lyrics (no really):

“The trolls will say we’re so passé but we were meta first!”

Every time some incel wants to start a conversation about DA:V, I just point them to Baldur’s Gate 3.

That game is inclusive and diverse, and also fucks - both in the “adult content” sense, disproving their myths about diversity somehow siding together with censorship, and in the quality sense.

The dramatic fall in writing has happened across the industry and should be no surprise to anyone.

Check out “Aquaria”. Not quite the same thing, but a Metroidvania playing as a mermaid with song powers. Lots of boss fights! And you can even breech the surface when you get there!

Man, I think my playthrough of N:A was absolutely ruined by the RPG mechanics. I was lategame trying to get to this rumored “amazing story”, and something about my numbers wasn’t adding up because even switching to easy mode it was taking AGES to beat the bosses.

So yeah, I’m not even generally a fan of soulslikes, but S:B’s action-based difficulty was definitely more to my tastes.

They have a much better design than the blue shell.

In Mario, the guy in 8th place sends a bomb into the ether, and sends the guy in 1st place to 5th…while the guy in 8th stays there.

In Sonic, the guy in 8th sends a swarm of hornets, essentially a minefield. The guy in first CAN evade them skillfully, but has the most to deal with. As more people hit some, others will have fewer. The whole crowd gets slowed just a bit (and the person who threw it is unaffected when they reach them)

Can I confirm whether this outage was affecting downloaded singleplayer games? I didn’t think that would be the case.

I’ve known about this for a while, but assumed it was still deep in development.

I’m curious if this is partly influenced by demographics on how many people have used their PlayStation as their only Bluray/DVD movie player.

For me it’s rare now, but I’d also rather not brick my old movie collection by discarding my only TV disc drive.

I really like the resource/inventory systems of survival horror games. Often they can force interesting decisions as long as your current state doesn’t starve you of options.

• I can’t pick up shit! Well, I’m not using these three things so maybe I should box them. Or, I could use up some ammo on nearby enemies.
• I’m low on healing items! But I have a lot of ammo. Maybe I could stop conserving nuke launcher rounds to trivialize the next few rooms of giant zombies; try a bit more of this other weapon I don’t use much and stow my normal pistol.
• I’m low on ammo! But, I’ve been saving a hundred healing items. Maybe I can practice tanking past enemies and see just how much it will affect me.
• I’m okay on ammo but these enemies keep coming. But…I think if I make it to this area, it will give me a stationary healing spot. So I’ll just conserve ammo and take hits on the way.
• I’ve been poisoned! But there’s gonna be a bunch of other poisonous enemies before I get through this area. Maybe I can ignore it until I’m through.

I think I’d even like to find more games that focus on that sort of item management without being so horror-focused; helping you feel excited for saving an inventory spot or prioritizing the right things. It’s especially cool when you’re finding ways to shift risk in the right directions based on what you can afford losing. Example in Back 4 Blood: There are tools/resources that retain/add more “possible downs” for a survivor, which may mean you can put off healing for a long time and keep picking each other off the floor. One game has a death prevention item that you can only hold one of; so you’re encouraged to “get killed” before you find another one.

Alright, I’d rather hide this under a similarly cringey top comment, but: Clothing damage. I think it gets a pass sometimes when applied in a gender neutral way, but a lot of games now avoid it for fear of international censorship rules (and, it generates an ick factor for players that are not similarly cringey as I am)

As depressing as it is to ask, I feel I should kick off the brainstorm: Given that this personal information has been doxxed, is there anything that individuals could do to help the affected developers in any way?

The only people who can object against hating Nazis are Nazis themselves.

This was the key to his statement and I agree with him.

Video games need to generate acceptable targets. Aliens invading people’s homes, PMCs controlled by powerful men, thugs and looters looking to beat up whoever they find, etc.

But it’s ridiculous anyone would post “Hey! If aliens did come to our world to take control of our governments, they would be sorely offended by video games about killing them!” On one level because aliens don’t exist. On the other because if they were coming to take control of our governments, why would we want to protect or respect them?

Now, replace the little green men with discriminatory, media-controlling purveyors of hate speech. They exist. Everyone sane would rather they didn’t. That’s all.

That set of games in my library evaporated. I still have plenty of other games.

I’ll admit, if GP was someone’s entry into gaming and they never buy individual games, they would be a bit starved on unsubscribing except for any F2P games (which, tbf, is still a big set of options). But someone only able to spend that much a month on games is not going to have many options anyway; they’re the type that might buy a Ubisoft open world game just to get hundreds of hours through the year for their money.

But you’re also missing that this is very much the agreement and expectation: It is literally over a hundred video games, given the instant you pay them $15 (now I think $20) It is very fully understood to be on rental basis.

I was a big proponent of Game Pass! I still like the model.

Then they fired Tango Gameworks, the devs of MS Game Studios’ ONLY goty candidate, Hi-Fi Rush. Now, I am very much: Fuck Xbox.

I’m trying to write a story, and I struggled with this, especially when confronting certain realities:

• While fantasy, the story is meant to reflect some harsh political realities
• Multiple villains are killed, but the heartfelt good guys live.
• The ending has everything fixed and everyone’s happy.

I’m aware most stories don’t come anywhere close to a full happy ending like this. Every Batman story ends with Gotham still a miserable shithole. Every noir story ends with the case solved but everyone broken for it and the city still a dystopia. It generally has good reasoning, to reflect harshness of reality, but that’s a realm of fantasy I really want to venture into; one where things just work out.

I mean, I’ll bite: I enjoyed GP for a while, up until MS went firing-crazy and upped their prices.

Until then, I was very aware I rented games and might not get to play them later. Given that I was generally playing games that were new or sampling genres I don’t play much of, I wasn’t opposed to the time limitation, and the low price was reasonable.

Now that their price increased, I ended it. I am not locked into their ecosystem, and in fact swore off it pretty easily due to their changing circumstances.

I would agree the renting situation is poisonous when it comes to housing, because the model has driven the purchasing price of homes through the sky. But that is a situation with scarcity of goods. You can get video games anywhere.

Even setting aside all of the gore and cruel executions, BJ’s growling inner commentary is a great mood-setter for that game.

Valve absolutely limits the sale of people’s games.

Usually, this would come in the case of “Hey, this game doesn’t work, we’re taking it out of sale everywhere.” But with Helldivers 2 being so popular and high profile, that wouldn’t have been a good look for Valve. Instead, they limited the zone of sale to prevent customer support complaints.

Sony was limiting where you could legally sign up for PSN and thus play the game, not where you could buy it off Steam. That was a conflict of their own mismanagement and inexperience selling on PCs. Had they been smarter, they would have restricted regions to begin with and there might have been less outcry, but poor planning caused Valve’s parental slap.

To try to explain this better, imagine this:

You’re browsing Steam. You find “ULTIMATE Inchworm Arena”, a strange but fun-looking online multiplayer arena. You buy it, and download it. The game then says “Welcome to Inchworm Arena! To certify yourself for online play, you must provide One MoistCoin, a cryptocurrency obtainable only in the Republic of Kongo!” None of this was clear from the Steam store page. The developer support response is less than helpful.

Would you continue protesting the developers, or would you blame Valve for presenting this obvious worthless scam game as an offering on Steam? By putting it on their store, Steam asserts some level of responsibility that the game in question is actually playable, and doesn’t contain critical bugs; like failing to start up, or having a user license agreement that its lawyers did not think through.

When this happened for Helldivers, it was Valve that restricted their access because Sony didn’t even know what they were doing on the PC store, and hadn’t thought through that players had no legal avenue to play in some countries. Valve does not want to be put through more cases of user customer support complaining to them, and wants to ensure certain behavior from their game vendors to ensure that doesn’t happen.

As I understand it, there’s not currently a PSN restriction on Helldivers 2. Valve themselves blocked it because Sony was making no promises that it would continue to be a legal and playable purchase in outside countries.

I would guess Sony may still have to convince Valve to increase the game’s availability. To sell a product that will remain usable, Valve needs a better commitment/promise than “We’we so sowwy consumews, we pwomise we won’t do it again.” Probably some kind of contract.

Halo Infinite’s campaign was mildly enjoyable and the grappling hook was a small idea that was fun. But, the amount of money they spent to achieve that “mildly enjoyable” game was staggering.

The bit I couldn’t handle is, it’s a first person game with a less accessible “detective vision” where guards fill their detection meter super fast.

You could do fun stuff if you already knew the level layout and guard patrols, but exploring creatively without opening dark vision every 8 feet caused you to run into a guard and suddenly it’s a chaos run. The combat was not fun enough to dedicate efforts to that.

I think the moment where I stopped playing was when I was perched on an awning above the guards, and they still spotted me. Often, a conceit of stealth game verticality is that guards don’t look up very far.

Compare to Hitman: If you trespass, a guy escorts you out. If someone sees through your disguise, they chase after you with questions, not bullets. If one person sees you act illegally, they try to arrest you and you can grab the gun. With basic awareness, you can often prevent escalation to gunshots fired and backup called.

I maintain it was more an issue with basing their fight around spacing, than teaching via popups. I didn’t even mind the many enemies that had unintuitive concepts like feeding them grenades. Once you attune to them, they’re simple enough.

Even after they teach you all that about Marauders, it’s not just a matter of how to shoot them, and when - but when NOT to. Plus hoping for their AI to act reliably as described.

After the betrayal of Mick Gordon, came the Dark Ages. Seems fitting.

Did they ever fire the game director that caused that whole controversy?

Someday I’d like to hope our game design sensibilities evolve enough that we can stop deflecting every negative review with “git gud”. There are absolutely things that hard games can design badly that don’t add to the overall enjoyment of the game.

Marauders were one of those things.

I’d love a new Wolfenstein-style game that diverges from the simple divide of giving them helmets.

It’s simple morbid truth that these people are human beings, who have committed their minds to unimaginable cruelty. It’d be fun to have more games about reciprocating that cruelty.

Mortal Kombat’s fatalities gave me a big ick factor when they leaned into cruelty and pain (and thankfully turned towards looney creativity to be entertaining). But I could see the former being a bit more valid when there’s universal reasoning behind why it’s being applied.

Strange that they suffered a review bomb. As routine, gamers don’t really follow the actual cause of events/actors that get in the way of their games.

I want to hope this leads to some shift where fewer games are run by Chinese publishers, but in current momentum I doubt that will happen.

I vaguely remember The Matrix had an MMO that apparently evolved the lore in some crazy ways. And I’m going to guess they abandoned that for the new one.