I like your Heather Mason. You’ve found a perfect level of detail to make these work.

Like they’re just barely “too detailed”, making them just a little unsettling, the way horror game art should be.

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Have you done other characters?

You say “your style”, so my first thought is to wonder what else you’ve done since must’ve done enough to land on a style.

Edit: ah, found your other posts! Feel free to cross-post to gameart, we want to see and celebrate all the art that games both contain and inspire.

Unless they were looking, they wont have seen it. And as far as I know, just the cursor being active sends the “typing” indicator in some apps. When I see it for just a second I just assume someone hovered over the chatbox for a bit.

No-one thinks it’s weird for it to pop up for a second and then go away. Or for it to appear for a good while and still not get you a message. Sometimes I’ll write a first draft of a response right away, then leave it there for hours while I think about it some more, before finalizing it.

It would be smart if chat apps implemented a minimum, where “typing” won’t apper until you’re three words into writing a response or something.

That way it wont go off over nothing. It’s still useful, it lets you/them know whether you’re getting/giving an immediate response, so you/they know whether the conversion is continuing right away, or later.

I don’t actually think you can call it that.

I’m pretty sure they’ve spent every cent, considering how much they have in fact produced.

The part that boggles me to this day, is that they spend the money on making a litany of insanely high quality assets and features, with seemingly no plan for how they’ll fit together.

And then they proceed to spend even more money, and time, on trying to fit it all together into something that functions like a complete system.

And that’s before you discuss their obsession with “realism”. What there is to play, is marred with balancing issues. Better ships are just… Better. Because they insist on weapons and ships functioning “logically” within the game universe, rather than in whatever way is the most fun.

Fighters beat bigger ships because equipping the same weapons, a fighter can hit every shot it takes at a slow moving giant. Meanwhile the travel-time of weapons make the fighter completely unkillable for the big ship, becayse the fighter can land shots from a range where its own speed allows it to dodge literally everything the big ship might send its way.

They’ve been buffing the shields and ammo counts on bigger ships, but all that does is make the fight last longer.

The project is real, but it’s a mismanaged catastrophe.

This isn’t even something you should be doing for your devs just because being nice to them is nice.

So many indies on their second and third games are showing that once you get the ball rolling on institutional knowledge (skills and tools developed during the making of a game, contributing to the next) you can SERIOUSLY up your game. And for a lot less cost than it would have been to go that big from the start.

Meanwhile big studios are dumping staff and therefore expertise like it’s no big deal. Switching to a revolving door of subcontractors who can’t possibly get to intimately know the games they work on.

They don’t.

That’s why Hasbro can’t just make another BG game, Larian isn’t willing.

So now they’re looking to make it anyway. Without Larian, or even the people at Hasbro that Larian worked with.

Yup.

Unless they just take the IP, and assets they’ve made, and use that to make something else, Marathon is likely DOA.

If by the time it comes out it even whiffs of a luve service long-term nickle-and-diming, people will dismiss it.

I don’t know.

But it’s not all phones. I’ve had some android devices that take over a minute to start up, but my current Xperia 1V also only takes 20 seconds to ask for the pin, then another 2-4 seconds for the home screen to fully show.

I do want to point out that phones aren’t running blazing-fast ssds. Lots of android devices run fairly sluggish eMMC flash.

For a while now, I’ve been making sure the android devices I buy are running a recent standard of UFS flash, instead. The difference is noticable, just with stuff like opening apps and moving files around.

Yes, since most games are simply unrated.

But the “playable” rating does not require full steamdeck support, it just means the game runs. A “verified” rating means a game is a fully seamless experience on the deck.

Do you know about co-optimus.com? Is that the “third party” you mentioned?

I don’t know of anything better. Setting your filter and sorting by user rating is pretty effective. Aside from that I sort by release date and check back every now and then.

They do, though?

There is a “shared/splitscreen co-op” filter option.

Combine that with a controller support filter.

I assume you’re referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen?

These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be “in development”.

But I’d hardly call it a boom. There’s only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don’t really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases.

Then there are games that really do use the “Early Access” model to fund getting the game made. It’s not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get something in exchange for your money, immediately. And you can look up reviews and videos and see exactly what you are getting. People don’t buy early access games just to wait a couple years to play them. They buy them to play them right now.

And it has brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace…

Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before “1.0” dropped and became the explosive success it is today.

Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please the players.

I don’t really see why you’d be salty about this part of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that’s true whether a game is finished or not.

It both wont ever happen, and has already happened.

ET only had the impact it had because the industry was small. Relatively speaking.

Today, production (both indie and AAA tbh) is diverse enough, that no one game could ever taint the whole industry to that extent again.

What we are seeing, instead, is more and more people who resolve “I’m never giving ubisoft/blizzard/EA/a gacha/a mobile game my money again” but still buy and play games. They just start getting more and more invested in what kinds of industry practices they want to discourage/encourage.

As an example, pre-ordering, while still something people do, is now pretty much universally understood to be a bad idea. No Mans Sky and Fallout 76 were such massive phenomenon, merely mentioning one or the other is a complete comeback to anyone trying to tell you pre-ordering something is a good idea.

Sure, NMS became a good game, eventually, but that didn’t retroactively make pre-ordering it a good move when it only became worth buying 12 months after launch.

Another great example, is Suicide Squad. People were interested, right up until it was revealed it was a live service game. Hype fell off a cliff, and nothing WB did could have brough it back. It wasn’t what fans of the Arkham games wanted. People passed it by before it even launched.

…

Concord.

With a duo, if the second player is walking around the ship/not aboard, Buddy will man the guns. If the second player is manning the guns, it will reload the guns (even crafting the required supplies when doing so). It does not seem like it will put out fires, or do repairs.

In solo, he will use the sensors, he will man the guns, perform repairs, empty the materia collectors, accompany you on space walks, carry items back to the ship for you… Basically a ton of stuff.

What I was really impressed with is that Buddy still helps out in a duo. We would have been in trouble otherwise. Keeping the ship together during a big fight is a full-time task, so when a fire starts up, mines grab onto the hull, or repairs become necessary, the second player can hop off the guns and Buddy will take over while you put out fires, fight off boarders, etc. It’s great.

And reloading the guns just means a duo can keep fighting as long as nothing is going wrong with the ship.

Essentially, you get to do the fun and chaotic parts, while Buddy picks up any slack when too many things need doing at the same time.

Played this too on the weekend, aside from clearly unfinished stuff, I was thoroughly impressed.

They even thought of solo/two player cases, with a robot crewmember that helps out with more stuff the fewer human players are on-board.

A whoo boy, the sound design is delicious. The first person guns, the ship weapons and engines both when flying/using them, and hearing them when running around the ship. The jumpdrive. The MUSIC.

The team is clearly pouring their souls into the game and it shows. The vibes are excellent.

It is.

Both me and a friend I played with did so on linux. No extra fixes, just install and play.

Sad to see.

It makes sense though. Xbox games don’t have the bult-in configurability to run at lower settings and resolutions. So to run all the Xbox games, they’d all have needed an update to add a “handheld mode”.

It’s not like the backwards compatibility, where you are running previous games on more powerful hardware.

It’s especially funny in RE6, because it contrasts with how all the other campaigns had playable, in-universe, part-of-the-story characters for player 2 to control. To the point that playing single player they’re still there as dumb NPCs.

And then when Ada is supposed to be solo, everything feels funnier with the bolted-on co-op.

Hell yeah!

Oh we did the same.

5 and 6 are a BLAST with a buddy. Throughout 5, we kept randomly asking each other, “oh hey, this is a horror game, right” as the latest ridiculous action bullshit was happening on-screen, and laughing our asses off.

In 6 in particular, in Ada’s campaign, she is alone… But since everything had to support co-op, for her missions a character called “agent” shows up. He’s just a faceless soldier for player 2 to play as, and every time he disappeared for the duration of a cutscene, and re-appeared for gamplay, it absolutely destroyed us.

Stuff like Ada clearly going through a door, alone, but then him somehow showing up on the other side the second the animation is over, happens CONSTANTLY.

We had this whole head-canon about how he’s an Ada simp that’s always there, just out of frame, and invisible to all the characters. A mysterius man even more unexplained than Ada.

They’re absolutely atrocious RE games, but some of the best fun you can have with a friend.

I’m down. Recent RE games have been a very fun time.

The more time passes the more 5 and 6 begin to seem like temporary missteps.

I’m sorry, but Battleborn was brilliant. Deadlock is the first game to re-capture (and expand on) the mix of mechanics Battleborn put together.

Didn’t stop Gearbox from shutting it down so that no-one who bought it could ever play again. Not even the story campaign.

Not a lot. Even when it isn’t a flatpak windows software running on linux won’t be able to interact with the system anywhere near as much as on windows.

They’ll be able to tell it’s linux, though.

Was 3 made after aquisition?

Still have it on android 15, Sony Xperia 1 V.

I strongly disagree on their roguelite “bug” being something they need to drop.

Bastion didn’t land for me, so I didn’t play it, but Transistor would have shined as a roguelite. Its combat system is far too complex, and has potential for so much more, than what can be explored in one or two playthroughs.

The same goes for Cloudbank as a narrative setting.

Transistor, but with Hades’ gameplay loop and storytelling style would be insane. It already felt like a roguelite, but without a gameplay or narrative reason to go in for multiple runs.

Supergiant hasn’t cought a roguelite bug… They’ve found the perfect narrative and game format to match the gameplay systems and worlds they like to create.

I’m using a personal music library, built up and maintained over the years.

I host it using Jellyfin and access it using Symfonium on my phone. Performance is excellent.

That said, YT music seems to perform just as well, and is the only streaming service I’ve used on and off.

Neat, it’ll support the adaptive trigger features from PS when playing with a DS5.

Lot of games do that now.

Yes.

And yes. The cables don’t come with the GPU. 5$ more for every new PSU made is not a drop in the bucket.

And I don’t think you realize how thick, cumbersome, and stiff, two sole conductors that can do 500W at 12V would be.

The only reason mains power cables are so thin, is because they operate at 120-240V, allowing the amps (and the stress on the cable) to be fairly low. (It being AC also helps, the problem is WORSE with DC)

To do 500W at 12V, you need truly massive cables. And it gets exponentially bigger the more these cards pull.

In fact, the XT60 would not be enough. It can handle bursts of the 700 watts a 5090 can pull, but to deal with the fact that these GPUs pull that continuously, you need to go all the way up to an XT120.

No. But you can get away with less material if you do.

The amount of copper required to carry 500 watts over 12 connectors is a lot less than 500 watts over two connectors.

XT connectors are designed for two big conductors.

But you actually end up needing a lot more copper than you do when using several smaller wires, to carry the same current.

Large wires are also a lot less flexible.

ATX connectors have been fit for purpose for decades. It’s only this latest addition that seems to push things too far.

They are countries that do not have PSN access. As Sony wants to make PSN accounts mandatory on PC, they got in hot water for selling their games in countries where you can’t legally even have a PSN account.

In response, they blocked sales in all those countries.

Sure they do. Just not often enough.

Ok?

I’m saying is that modern game engines and rendering tech allow a lot of the things that are good about these games to be turned up to eleven, both in terms of gameplay and art.

Helldivers is still blocked for those countries. They just dropped the PSN requirement.

I don’t entirely agree.

Say what you will about what it did with the characters, but Sly 4 took the level design and art to new heights, and that was thanks to modern advancements in graphics.

Rift Apart does the same for Ratchet and Clank.

That’s nice.

Even for the rest of us, I think it’s just good for a person to experience other versions of “me”.

I’m a white dude, but games can give me hints about what’s it like to be someone else, and it doesn’t have to match my reality in any way whatsoever. Even more than books, games immerse me into the perspectives of others.

Sure, but if they keep trying to go bigger, they WILL hit a ceiling. And they have yet to show a willingness to go smaller with a subsequent project when one ends up too big to pay for itself.

Squenix does not seem to know how to match a budget to the size of the market that actually exists, and only ever goes smaller in scope when something is a “side project” adjacent to a main product.

And the signs that they are finally starting to make the same mistake with FF are beginning to show.

Intergrade was not as big as main FF installments, but it was well received by a lot of players. As a result they immediately scaled up Rebirth to be as big, or bigger, than anything they’ve done. And lo and behold, players coming from Intergrade love it, but it didn’t magically mean a bunch more people bought it.

I’m referring to Squenix’s habit of overspending on a franchise the moment it gets traction, and then not selling enough games to recoup cost, because there was never that much demand to begin with.

If they make money on this cross-over, then ok. But as someone with zero interest in MtG, but plenty in the new Final Fantasy games, this just feels like yet another expensive marketing stunt that will not get an actual return.

They lost money on Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, because they couldn’t stop themselves spending almost as much on marketing as they did development, expecting a fan base orders of magnitude larger to materialize out of thin air.

And then, instead of reducing scope to match the number of fans and thereby sales they could actually expect, they just axed the franchises.

I like the remakes, but I really wish Squenix would just stop making things weird.

Whenever they get a taste of success they immediately blow up the budget, overspend, and then blame the market for not showing interest to match.