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Literaly one of the most popular Mods for Xcom 2
At those time frames it’s not just feature creep you have to worry about, but tech- and social creep as well. Think back what games were popular 12 years ago and what hardware we had. That’s why usually in longterm, large scale projects you have a technological freeze, where you essentially ignore all progress made outside of your project for the sake of completion, which Star Citizen clearly hasn’t done.
The problem is also how YouTube compartmentalizes the content. I like the Alveus Sactuary Channel, Maya Higa has probably one of the most noble causes for streaming. But because she’s related to OTK, YouTube thinks it’s fine to blast me with the full dose of their cringe drama. No amount of “not interested” or channel blocking is going to solve that, because there’s always gonna be copycat clipper channel reposting the same twitch clips over and over.
It’s funny how YouTube killed early short form animation channels (which was arguably peak YouTube content at the time) in favor for long form content, but then introduced Shorts. But those barely pay anything so people either rehash their 10+ minute video into 20 YT Shorts or spam AI generated garbage en masse. There’s also apparently no copyright enforcement on those shorts, since you can essential watch the entirety of a 2.5 hrs movie in segmented shorts with shitty music layered on top.
I wish YouTube allowed for blacklisting words in video titles for your feed. I swear if I see another “*insert vtuber* broke everyone by saying *insert mildest sexual innuendo*” I’m gonna loose it. What also sucks is that YouTube shorts got entirely integrated into Twitch, so the clips you see posted of any streamer is most likely some 3rd party clipper channel leaching off the actual streamer. Which means spam goes up, quality goes down. Sure its awesome for the streamer, they get a lot of traction and new followers but at the cost of their content flooding other platforms through reposts.
I realy can’t judge a person I don’t know personally, but I sure is hell can judge their content. And for Asmonds videos and streams, there’s just nothing there. There is literally zero content. You know those memes that imitate Joe Rogan, well here is one for Asmond.
“Yeah, Yeah”
“They way it is, is actually…” *blanket statement*
“Yeah, Uh Huh, No”
“Well actually…” *other blanket statement*
“What I would do is…” *some nonsense*
“Yeah, Yeah, Uh huh.”
Continues to pause and unpause a 10 minute video over the course of an hour.
That’s basically it, it’s almost an anomaly how content like that can get somebody filthy rich. It ads zero value to the platform or any of the viewers lives. I can even excuse other creators doing their YLYL challange #547, because it at least involves humor and engagement. But if Asmond would disappear over night, I bet not only would nobody miss him, there wouldn’t even be anybody to replace him, because his success is a straight up anomaly.
All these shitty reaction streamers are literally standing on the great shoulders of Filthy Frank, Jontron, early H3H3, early Idubbz, Cinemassacre, Ray William Johnson, etc. But those at least had weight behind their reactions, with bits and actual production behind every video. Those reaction streamers literally sit on their ass watch videos and somehow people pay them solely to hear their opinion, what a sad existence on both ends. To be frank, this is barely a step up of those YT shorts of a guy just staring into the camera while the top half of the screen shows some random video. I know YouTubes moto was “Broadcast Yourself” but some people really shouldn’t take that to heart.
I think nobody gives a damn about the PS5 anymore, neither the devs, the players or Sony. And for PC, the reason why the original game worked was, because it is a playable movie, and it belongs on a TV screen, not a desktop monitor. Even if it ran flawlessly and looked better people wouldn’t exactly rush to pay $70 for a 10 year old game.
This is a genuine invitation for disscussion.
Let me tell you, over more than a decade I’ve played a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2, like a lot a lot.
Last year, in December the servers for it got officially shut down by EA. And you know how I felt? I barely cared. It is still one of my favorite games of all time, and while there are private servers still active, I have no intention to play. And the reason for it that is simple. I’ve played enough of that game, I feel fully unsatisfied with the time I’ve spend with it. Its like 2 people growing apart over time.
Just to play devils advocate here. What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games. If you haven’t managed to get enough joy out of something during a decade of you life, then maybe the developer isn’t responsible for your personal issues.
By this time The Crew 2 would’ve been 6 years old. I agree that’s fairly short time to turn of the servers, but would people be still as frantic about the server shut down in say 2028? Wouldn’t 10 years be enough? Why straight up go for indefinite access.
A new map isn’t gonna name everybody stop playing the old ones, look at Counter Strike’s de_dust from 1999, people still play that map religiously even if there are new ones. The old maps were balanced and refined, and have been replaced with a completely imbalanced one. They’ve should’ve been available along side the new one.
I’m running a 1080 Ti, can still do most modern games on high - ultra on 90 FPS at 1440p. Played Hunt maxed out for years no issues, now I got everything on low except textures and barely scratch 70 between compounds. Searching the Steam forums and reddit shows similar complains from other people with even better hardware than mine.
Before I was finding players 2 seconds after I pressed search on Europe servers, now, even though player numbers skyrocketed after the patch, I can go make my self a cup of tea, come back and it’s still hasn’t found anything. Maybe it has something to do with my MMR rank.
Speaking of, you’re right, I noticed the rank changes before the patch. I was always a 4 Star player, sometimes dipped in 5 Star after a good match, sometimes dipped into the 3 Star. Now I’m effortlessly sitting at 6 Stars. How do I know I improved skill wise if I’m already sitting at the max possible rank? Why are mediocre players like me suddenly bundled with sweatlords, who presumably are also 6 stars?
The skins now have rareities that determine their price, this came with the new update.
I’m not talking about minor bugs. The reason why I uninstalled is because if the boss gets killed in my compound by me or anybody else and I open the map, my game freezes and crashes on a regular basis. I validated the game files, I’ve updated my drivers, etc. It is straight up unplayable. I open the map on accident and I’m out. Again I’m not the only one with this problem. This is not some minor bug, this is absolutely unacceptable for a PvP game with permadeath. But that’s the reality of this new shitty Hunt.
That’s why DayZ has open experimental servers running months in advance, and their push to official is largely bug free. But, oh my, Crytek wants a big reveal for big update, who cares about playability, buy our Battlelass.
The best to come of this update was Port Sulfurs new single.
How was that even an upgrade, they removed 2 maps, tanked the performance, increased the matchmaking time tenfold, reduced server performance, screwed up the ranking system, increased skin prices and introduced countless new bugs and crashes. If anything this was a huge downgrade.
They should’ve left Hunt the way it is and released Hunt 2, but they didn’t have the balls because they knew nobody would play that shit. I guess releasing good old fashioned sequels to multiplayer games is bad for business, especially if you’re such an incompetent dev. No, the new school way is to shitify you game in the name of a next gen update, and straight up deny everybody the ability to play the old version, see Overwatch, CS:GO, Squad, Warzone and now Hunt.
And don’t come at me for saying Crytek is incompetent. Incompetent is the most polite thing they can be called. What they’be done is straight up malicious. You know how I know? Because you could sit me down, 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and my whole job for months would be nothing but to come up with the most dogshit UI possible, and I couldn’t even come close to what they’ve decided to release. They must’ve had a whole TEAM of “experts” working 24/7 on that.
I swear I wish Steam would introduce a new rule. 2 hour refund window resets after every major parch, just to put the devs and publishers on a leash, when it comes to fucking up the product people have already paid for.
Quite the contrary, I love this subgenre more than any other one regarding shooters. But I’ve never seen it done right. If you know any game that doesn’t end in frustration about the AI, please tell me.
I’m more than OK with micromanagement in games, but that’s not how it should work in shooters. Men of War is a good example, it’s a strategy series with a notorious amount of micromanagement, but the difference is, you get all the information needed to manage your units and you as a player are not part of the battlefield. No enemy unit can look up in the sky and shoot down your birds-eye camera. But in shooters, not only do you have limited information about your enemies and your own team, you can also be killed during micromanagement. This is not how it should work. Your friendlies being a little bit more pro active is the least one could ask for.
Like imagine you storm Osama’s hideout and every time your soldiers have to ask you - the captain if its OK to shoot the terrorist in the room, or if its OK to move onto the next room, or its OK to take cover, that’s how it feels.
And because you’re essentially responsible for every single action of your team, you also feel responsible for every single mishap, whether it actually was your fault or not.
Also modern shooters themselves have already fairly demanding controls, pairing that with the ability to command different units means compromises have to be made in user experience. Your commands are usually limited by line of sight, you can’t tell your units to advance behind this wall and search for cover. Arma 3 tries to address this issue with the “Command Mode” that let’s you zoom out the camera to a birds-eye view, but that’s essentially what a strategy game is anyway. You also can’t command multiple squad simultaneously, each squad needs separate attention, while the AI computer can do everything at once, putting you even more at a disadvantage.
Developers also rarely bother implementing actual military techniques. The only 2 examples I can think of are Arma 3s combat advance (half the units cover, the other half moves) or Ready or Not’s room clearing. What ends up happening is, people just take 4 machine gunners with scopes or 4 snipers, since all units essentially behave the same AI wise, there no downside to that.
In my opinion a squad control game should essentially play itself, meaning that if your character dies, the rest of your AI should be smart enough to finish the mission or at least retreat on their own, just like a real squad would if their commander dies. The challenge shouldn’t come from janky controls or cheating AI, it should come from having the odds stacked against you. The goal shouldn’t be to just finish the mission, but have everybody come out alive. A lot of those games become almost trivial, if you just leave the AI at spawn and run through the mission yourself.
I’ve played all the games you mentioned and I am a huge fan of squad control games. I’ve recently looked through Steam games with tags “single player” and "shooter"most recent titles are primarily arcade style shooters. One thing I’ve noticed while playing CTA Gates of Hell is that no AI, whether friendly or not has ever had any sense of self preservation, and this is true for any game. So what ends up happening is, you as a player always end up babysitting your AI. You expect a squad full of capable soldiers, but end up having one capable one and a punch of crayon eating babies. That’s why most modern titles cheat with their friendly AI, making them immortal, invisible, teleporting them and giving then wall hacks. I’ve mostly given on the Idea that a squad control game can have satisfying AI interaction. If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.
While I see that nothing like this currently exists on the market, I can kind of see why. The reason old school shooters look and play like they do is because of technical limitations. There’s a reason new Ghost Recon games don’t look like Ghost Recon 1 anymore, even if Ghost Recon 1 is still available and playable today. And if you’re interested in ultra janky gameplay, we have Arma 3. I just don’t understand who this game is for exactly.
Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make. I bet my soul on that Concord was quickly thrown together in the last couple years by temp diversity hires and 3rd party contractors, or at least the version of Concord that we got now. I love that one of the devs said that “a lot of talented people worked on it”. If it really took them 8 years to make that is the oppsotite of talent. In 8 years I could probably get get a double masters in programming and game development and make a better game myself.
I disagree. The rule is “sex sells”, always has, always will be, period.
The people that complain about “wokeness” in games are a small but loud minority. The majority doesn’t care, hells seeing the steam achievements for some games the majority doesn’t even care to finish a game past the tutorial yet alone care about story or characters.
The problem is the approach to game design has changed. In the earlier stages of gaming, you would take a fun concept (finding perfect fits for boxes) and make it into a game (Tetris), that was all there was, Super Mario was literally called “Jump & Run Man” at one point. It was the essence of fun presented in a replayable form.
Now games have to have a story, morals, relatable characters or some sort of overlaying message. This together with good gameplay can create a very good game no doubt. But each aspect has to be good on its own.
Take away the story from Last of Us and it’s essentially a 3rd person arena shooter, but it’s a good one at that. This alone would be a good selling point, add on top the story and you have an objectively good game.
But take Saint Row 5 as an example, take away the story and it’s a less than mediocre 3rd Person sandbox game, the fact that the story isn’t compelling either makes it objectively bad.
Rember the Hot/Crazy scale from His I Met Your Mother? Well there is also a Hot/Boring scale for games. If your game is boring it has to compensate by having hotter characters, if it’s fun it can get away with uglier ones. I can name countless examples where this is true.
Studios often overlook this connection. I’m all for diversification of the actual development environment but not the games themselves. It should always be fun first.
Never in my life have I heard anybody say “Are you going to get new game …? I’ve heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool.”
Studios then get upset because their model “Here diversity. Where money?” isn’t paying off.
It’s like not wanting to buy a cheaply made plastic valve for a boiler over a solid metal one and the company asks “Why are you not buying it? We made it blue.”
The fanbase is never going to change, because at some point we all realize that we want value for our money and often times studios spend so much time and effort making a game diverse, they forget to make it fun.
I don’t think you understand what chaos in terms of gameplay means. Chaos comes from unpredictability. On maps like shipment unpredictably goes out the window.
“What’s gonna happen if I round this corner?” “Prefiring” “What’s gonna happen if I stay in this spot?” “Grenades.” “What’s gonna happen if I rush?” “Spawnflip”
That’s it, there’s all there is to this map. That’s no chaos that’s pretty much as deterministic as it gets. What people mean by chaos is “If I 5 kills, I chain killstreak and big number on scoreboard.”
I can only speculate on why but speaking from over a decade of experience, leave it to the respective gaming communities to always pick the worst, most uninspired maps every time.
I think it has something to do with the saying in game development “Given enough time players will distill the fun out if every game.”.
If a map gets you kills fast it will be always picked above anything else. It doesn’t even have to be a guarantee, the prospect alone for getting a high kill count is enough. This results in either very small maps being favored (Nuketown, Shipment) or maps with critical chokepoints (Operation Locker (BF4), Metro (BF3,BF4)), Fort de Vaux (BF1)). Also maps that allow for cheap non-counterable tactics to get kills like Base Rape (Suez (BF1)), Vehicle Camping (Golmund (BF4)), Spawn Camping (Piccadilly, (MW2019)), etc…
Generally, every map that rewards unsportsmanlike behavior will be a community favorite.
If I ever were to release a video game I would never allow for map voting. As a player, I’d rather play maps that I dislike every once in a while instead the same 5 maps every time. And as a developer, why should I bother to invests tens of thousands of dollars to make a DLC with maps, if they are never going to be played anyway. The cherry on top is, the community still has the audacity to complain if a DLC has less maps than the last one, but then never play them anyway.
I think DLCs are becoming a thing of the past in general. Usually the data for the DLC comes with the main game, you just buy a license to unlock it. I can’t remember the last time I bought a DLC and hat to download something additionally or update my game. I’m not a fan of it, but this is where we are going. This just means that wherever you bought the main game from, you will also have to buy the DLCs, since companies will never accept to share licenses between each other. This is not a Steam issue, this is a developer issue.
I always loved the progression from gathering by hand, to having a farm to grow things and having Felynes to send and gather stuff for you. I was a little bit disappointed that newer titles ditched the farm from Freedom Unite, it had a certain charm that other titles couldn’t match.
I agree the Ancient Forest was a maze. I think the Egg delivery quest always served a very good purpose to teach players a map. You had to try and find a good and efficient route, so naturally you would learn the paths from the starting area all the way to the top.
It just boggles me that these apex predetors all simply chill around the area just to be killed. It should be emphasized that these monsters are usually in areas unaccessible by Hunters. And the area that we play in is their common hunting grounds. And that’s why those beasts of which some are literal gods are so easy to kill, because they are outside of their natural habitat.
It doesn’t make any sense why Nergigante is such a big threat in World, but then you just kill 10 of them casually. And there’s also a tempered version, which somehow wasn’t the main threat of the story even though it would wipe the floor with normal Nergigante.
I always hated that High Rank is outside the main story line. The most difficult monster off the game should mark the end of the main story, not some random High Rank quest.
You’ve picked up on how much easier it is now to get to monsters, and finding monsters on the map. We received feedback that they were kind of difficult to get to sometimes, especially in maps that are very vertical where you have lots of different geographical elements. And, with the introduction of the Seikret, it’s easier for players to figure out where to go, and where to find monsters on the field.
That is probably my biggest critique of recent titles. It always feels like bigger monsters aren’t part of the environment, they are just there to be killed by the Hunter. If getting to the boss is so easy, what’s even the point of having a open world? Why isn’t every fight in an arena?
What also break immersion is the fact that you have to farm a monster like 15 times. By the 5th time your fight, items and approach is so optimized that it is barely a challange, you are just running through the motions. I always wanted fights to be more opportunistic. Instead if selecting a quest with you monster you’d have to wait for it to appear randomly (or even with some provocation). Sometimes you’d have to break of a fight if a higher priority monster shows up or you’re under prepared. Being able to teleport to your item box without penalty takes away all stakes off the fight. You can never run out of ammo, potions, traps etc… Fights should be longer and harder but way more rewarding. You should be able to select which parts you want to carve.
Also the are often times odd outlier quest which have you facing a monster outside its usual environment. But the monsters never change their behavior. Diablos should not be able to burry itself in solid rock, Rathalos should not be able to freely fly in a dense forest with trees, etc.
I’m afraid that this will be another step away for players who actually enjoy the hunting part instead of the mindless killing part.
It felt like Rise undid a lot of that. I don’t know whether it’s because of the limitation of the Switch, but Rise felt lifeless compared to World. Monster Hunters problem in general is that after a few hours it starts to feel like a Boss Rush mode and the ecosystem gets neglected. Instead of a Hunter you become a Killer.
I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.
Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?
Those things put seperatly Steam is far from the best option , except for the store part because that’s their main thing.
The launcher part is just part of Steams basic DRM, some games can be started from their directory without Steam running.
The subreddits and Discord servers for certain games are usually more organized, cohesive and feature better fan made content than Steams Community Hub.
Nexusmods is far superior to the Steam Workshop in every single aspect.
For Reviews most people go to YouTube and watch a video. Steams review system is more an indicator of general reception rather than actual gameplay.
Steam doesn’t try to squich all the other platforms they just provide a convenient alternative to them. So why are all those things suddenly an issue.
How do you even enforce breaking all those things up? Should there be a law that all governments agree on, that states Steam exclusively can’t host mods anymore? Should they be split up into subsidiaries, like Steam Store, Steam Community, Steam Mods etc.?
No, but anything can be grounds for a lawsuit as long as you have enough money to throw out. And given that they are being sued by the government, all bets are off.
That’s my whole point, none of the provided arguments are a good reason for a lawsuit. This has early 2000s “It’s those darn videogames” vibes, except this time instead of saying that their doing it to protect our children, they are openly doing it to get the money.
As far as I know, regional pricing through Steam is completely controlled by the publisher/dev. It’s literally a checkbox for each region and a text field to enter an adjusted price. And Steam has made great efforts to stop regional key trading to prevent people from just buying cheaper keys from 3rd world countries and reselling them.
Which one? The original? The Remaster or the Remake? Or the 2nd or the Remaster of the 2nd?