Games that do not have monetary incentives for winning/playing generally have significantly fewer cheaters (IE no drops or trading or anything like that, that could support a 3rd party black market). Also games with player-ran servers that have active moderation nearly 24/7.

Eurojank also exists. But, yeah; Stalker is Slavjank, not Eurojank.

Esoteric Ebb is fucking awesome and everyone should buy it so they can get funding to add voice acting.

If I sell my soul to the Vatican, can I get insane guitar playing skills instead? I know the other guy would take that deal.

Not the process, just the images used on one.

I think using AI for storyboarding is okay. They are already pretty shitty, quick af sketches used to figure out how to arrange the action and get animators on the same page. Now that can be done just a little quicker.

However, using them as placeholders that could end up in the final thing even accidentally, is dumb. A placeholder doesn’t even need to be representative visually of what it’s holding a place for. Textures could be text that says “texture of wood 1” and words can be normal ass Ipsum Lorem.

The first game I ever bought with my own money was Metal Gear Solid 1. And the PS1 to play it on.

I wanted FF7 but they didn’t have it. But MGS was a good second choice. It was also the first time ever buying anything from a second-hand store. I wish I could remember the name of the store; it wasn’t Funcoland or EB. They had a logo that was an anthropomorphic SNES cart, tho.

FYI you have never owned a game

The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)

If Valve fired 1000 people, that means they somehow managed to fire like 700 people from a different company. Gabe is that powerful. 🤣

Post game content? Like NG+? Other than NG+, I’ve seen maybe a cutscene after the credits roll, like a bonus scene in a movie. How many (and which ones) have playable content post-credits that isn’t just NG+? 🤨

I rarely do NG+. It has to be significantly different to warrant it. The first ever game I played with NG+ cycles just turned me off to it. Oh sure, I could get a sick ass laser sword… After beating the game like 12 times already tho. At that point, it wasn’t fun anymore. Especially when that laser sword made the game easy as shit since it one shot everything.

Nier Automata has been pretty much the only game I can think of that required playing NG+ to get the entire story, with each new cycle being almost totally different. Either playing as a different character and seeing new areas, or doing old areas in a new order with new enemy placement.

The numbers don’t show that. Indies are finding success, yes. But very few of them are putting up the same numbers as AAA slop. Silksong is the only one of note recently that has huge numbers, and it still hasn’t surpassed the latest iterations of Battlefield or Call of Duty. The current best selling game of this year is Resident Evil: Requiem.

And with the massive hype train for Silksong, I feel like the big boys are gonna take the wrong lesson and just spend more money on marketing than ever before to get those massive pre-order numbers while the actual products get worse.

How I would innovate within this confined space:

“What if it was actually a first person game, but your character is a little guy on the shoulder of a bigger guy and you’re just whispering in their ear to control them?”

The environments look damn near real, and I’m playing on Low/Portable settings for maximum FPS. The only thing I am really losing are good reflections and shadows.

Isn’t that what the PS2 version of EverQuest (EQ Adventure) was supposed to be, too? 🤔

Variety doesn’t sell. Homogonous goop does.

Esoteric Ebb.

I pirated it to check it out after hearing about it, played through once and can’t bring myself to play it again, even though I really want to, because it demands my money and trying to do another run on the pirated copy makes me feel dirty.

Ridge Racer back in the day had you play Galaga while it loaded. Namco patented it tho, so nobody else ever did it. (the patent has since lapsed, but it’s still not being done by anyone :()

How did Sekiro get roped into this? I mean, sure it has ledge shimmying; but it’s pretty much optional, except in the tutorial where it’s needed to reach the kid the first time and then at the big snake for like a second before getting into the sedan.

I miss the advert poster I had of the live action Crash in a gold speedo, laying in a bed of rose petals. 😳

Nothing has shaped how I view games more than Dark Souls.

The deathclaws are in the quarry, which you can easily run by if you simply stay on the right side of the road. The narrow canyon just beyond the quarry and before you’ll end up outside NV proper is full of cazadores that are much harder to sneak/run past.

Where Winds Meet. You can adjust the preset; can’t turn it off entirely.

Nearly every AAA game I’ve played that has come out the last 2 years does not have the option to disable DLSS/FSR.

Those also fuck with the aesthetic of the game and I don’t use them. But they are also not forced on me to be used, like DLSS often is. I don’t even necessarily want the upscaling done, but in so many games you can not disable it.

This is like if nVidia forced you to use their Minecraft texture pack instead of the one you actually want to use.

First of all:

Any game with any actual design put into it woild account for these and also be part of the artistic vision and intention.

Second: There is a differende between aesthetics and graphics. The terms are not interchangeable. You adjust the graphics; this does not affect the aesthetics. All those signs get a little blurrier each time you lower the setting; but the art style is uniform still.

“It fuses the controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with the uncontrollable and unpredictable element of generative AI!”

Adjusting literally any of the possible settings in a gane “takes away from the original artistic vision”

Those settings don’t completely alter what the art looks like. It changes the method in which the math behind the scenes works. Like setting shadows from Ultra to Low doesn’t remove the shadows, it just alters how they are rendered. Often this does not really affect the appearance at all.

Any game with any actual design put into it woild account for these and also be part of the artistic vision and intention.

They did it before with SLI, of course they’ll do it again.

I’ve seen the comments about the vehicles thing often, but, like… Once you had access to zip lines and the floating following carriers in the first game, you were practically fast traveling with a huge load of cargo anyway. And you got those fairly quickly.

The next game I am paying for is 100% going to be Esoteric Ebb.

Imagine Disco Elysium, but instead of a weird cyberpunk alternative history real world type setting, it’s Forgotten Realms and uses D&D rules.

By story DLC do they mean a new story driven addon, or a DLC that gives the base game a halfway decent story?

Just you then, got it.

If you think games are more about realism than art, I’m afraid you’re the one who has no idea what they are talking about.

There’s Pokopia. An actual Nintendo made game that just came out. My BF got it recently, and it’s basically Pokemon+Minecraft+Animal Crossing+Palworld’s automation using the Pokemon.

It’s super good and I want it now. 😳

All video games in the future will be PINBALL. Pure mechanical games that don’t need memory beyond keeping a single number (the score). 😤

I just started playing (literally; at character creation now) and I am wondering if making him like a D&D cleric would be good for the first time, focusing on Str, con, and wis. 🤔

I mean, I need to go for Str at least. I don’t wanna be accused of being afraid of women or not caring about quests.