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It’d be hilarious if one of the people negotiating one of those military contracts went “well, apparently your company can’t even handle scaling up a video game made by your own company, so we no longer have the confidence to rely on your product. We might offer a chance at the contract again in ten years, if no other incidents shake our confidence again.”
It doesn’t need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.
If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.
As far as the patent, hopefully it’ll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it’ll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.
Maybe Valve needs to stop pushing updates for things they certified working until they certify the update won’t break them.
Never understood why Steam forces updates, but this would be a very good reason for them to do a 180 on it and let customers choose the version they want instead of forcing an update to the latest.
When the technology gets there, this will be amazing. I’ll be able to sit down at the computer and say “make me a mystery detective RPG in the style of Sherlock Holmes but set on a cyberpunk styled city on a space station like the Citadel from Mass Effect” and I’ll get just that, generated exclusively for me with a brand new story that fits the themes I asked for.
But that is gonna be a couple decades or more I expect. I dearly hope it happens quickly so I can live to see it, but it’s not going to be in the next ten years, that’s for damn sure.
First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it’s unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and…ehhh…mostly true.
One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn’t have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one…does not.
Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.
So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…
Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.
Yeah, these projects done by one or two people could be better with a larger team, but it’s definitely not a matter of hiring a big pile of people suddenly.
The ideal size is probably a couple dozen people, but scaling up to even that will take months since the one person currently in charge has to do a lot. And it’ll almost fully pause work on the project for a while.
Cause if there’s one person, they’ve got to find all the candidates, do all the hiring, then bring people up to speed.
The real problem is if the person who made it doesn’t have the skills to manage even a small group of people.
I don’t understand the complaints about the expansions for these games. Ok, there’s a lot of them? But they’re generally good. And if you don’t want them, just…stop updating and stay on whatever version you liked?
And unlike most, they make it easy to play an older version. Did I like a particular patch better and hate all that’s come since then? Easy to roll back to it. What do people want…for them to not put out expansions?
Metroid is an interesting example. In some of the games she definitely counts as having no personality or character, but overall in the series she’s been given a story and characterization with personality. Zelda games are in a similar boat; Link shows little personality in most of them but does have an established overall story and personality.
In cases like those two I’ll consider them, but the lack of personality in game is a point against them regardless of the gender involved and honestly that’s discouraged me from playing many games like that (including both those series) for a long while.
Way I see it, modern games have no excuse not to either let me create my own character or give the predefined character a strong personality that shows throughout the entire game.
When the protagonist’s character, personality, and story is significant, then that’s fine. If I’m playing a game like that I’m not playing a generic character that could be either and therefore should absolutely be a choice.
I’m fine playing a game like the Witcher, Red Dead 2, etc, cause those are the stories of that guy.
Where I won’t play is games that give you a generic protagonist with little to no personality but restrict you to male only, or even I suppose female only, although this is incredibly rare and I haven’t run across it myself.
Nice to hear. I just don’t play games that don’t have female character options, unless the character actually matters and has a personality that is a major part of the game, like say, Geralt. I leave old games some leeway, but nice to hear they’re fixing that in this old one, means I’ll probably give it a try just based on that alone.
Sort of. Except all the shelves have weird lips on them to keep you from grabbing the product easily, you kinda have to wrangle each item. Also it’s layout and design is archaic and super hard to navigate. And on every aisle there’s these little 3 inch steps that you have to go up and down and constantly trip on, or your cart gets stuck on them and you have to lift it up or drop it down. And then if you do manage to buy things, their support is terrible; at the other store if you need help cooking they have a 24 hour recipe hotline to help you out, but this one promises the same, but you actually wind up on hold for hours half the times you call.
So they got tons of free samples, but all their products are kinda a nightmare.
Odd comparison, and internally inconsistent. They criticize KOTOR for having only one decision that affects the overall story, but fail to consider that SWG had zero decisions that affect the overall story.
It is true that as a multiplayer game there are theoretically more opportunities for roleplay in SWG, and if they’d focused on that it would make more sense and be more consistent.
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it’ll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
The mods made under these rules seem guaranteed to be shittier than others.
Appearance and armor mods are out - no Bodyslide. Vast amounts of mods are dependent on SKSE, so those are out. A lot of the coolest stuff these days is possible only with SPID and other such frameworks for mods to use. Those are out.
So, either this will cause a significant decline in mod quality if modders actually try to build for it (to say nothing of the cost - even at $0.50 per mod some of my installs would cost $500+)…or most modders will ignore it, and it’ll go unused, cause it’s too hard to make good mods under these limits.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
Ah, I recalled he didn’t win, I suppose I should’ve assumed it was settled, that’s usually how that goes down.
Personally I think he should’ve lost and had to pay CDPR’s legal costs, the whole thing was absurd. He admits he made a stupid mistake but wants money out of them anyways despite having been an arrogant shithead to start with.
The lead writer for Mass Effect 3… I suppose it’s possible he learned from it, but I question whether the person who wrote (or at least had to sign off on and approve) the ending of ME3, which killed the franchise and disappointed most players should be allowed to ever do anything related to writing again…
Yeah, if I remember correctly. He sold the rights straight up to the developers of the game, no royalties or percentage or anything because of his anti-game bias, then when the game was successful and that decision bit him in the ass, he tried to change the deal and get more money out of them. As I understand it he lost and still receives no revenue from the games.
Even then they’re still benefitting him tremendously because while he was popular in Poland, it’s the games that have really made his work popular overall, and people are buying his books and all because of it.
Blizzard, back in the day, was willing to simply can games, even highly anticipated ones, when they didn’t meet their standards, even after a couple years of work. StarCraft: Nova, Lord of the Clans…
And Square-Enix managed to take an MMORPG that was already released, tear it down to bare bones and completely rebuild it to make it good, with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.
So it is possible to completely redo something if it doesn’t work out…
I’ve put in 2000+ hours on Civilization IV, Stellaris, and Skyrim, and 1000+ on several other titles. So, since I could quite happily never purchase another game again, and simply play those games until I die, let’s use them as our baseline for what the cost should be, shall we? Assuming they cost $120 each (maybe a little low on Stellaris when you count all the DLC, and definitely high on Civ IV) I’ve played each of them for about 2,000 hours…that means I should expect to pay $0.06 per hour. Heck, let’s be generous! Let’s count Stellaris, with ALL of its DLC, at the price it currently is, without being on sale (except for one that’s at 10% off. I’ve bought most of the DLC on various sales of at least 30% off, but let’s try pricing all games as though they cost this much. That’s about $335. Which still comes out to $0.16 an hour. Not bad, I’ll take it!
Granted, since most games don’t hold me for 2,000 hours, most games aren’t going to get that much out of me. I sometimes buy new games at a $60 to $70 price point. So, the average game would have to hold me for 375 hours in order to make the same amount I pay for it now. Which means in my entire Steam library, there are a mere 12 games that would reach that threshold of getting equal or greater than the $60 I’m willing to occasionally pay these days.
I’m all for it! Most of my games would drop considerably in price, even at $0.16 an hour!
Many criticize the frequent content updates, often cosmetic, as overwhelming. However, it’s optional, and no other industry receives flak for releasing more. I’ve never seen anyone complain about too many Lays or coke flavors.
Lots of people complain when some product they like is no longer available in favor of a ‘new and improved’ product. Remember ‘New Coke’? Patches and updates to games are the same thing, especially ones that significantly change the gameplay.
I, for example, liked Overwatch during certain time periods. That game is no longer available. There’s certainly people who play League of Legends or DOTA that feel the same way, though I wouldn’t know - the game they liked was at a certain point in its development, and since then changes have made it no longer the game they like. Same applies to a lot of MMOs - I liked Ultima Online, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and others, but the games I like no longer exist even though the games technically exist.
The problem isn’t easily solved either - no updates may make some people happy but others will not be happy. The resources probably don’t exist to continue splitting the game and maintaining a stable version of an online game at each iteration, and even if they did, the player base would become too diffuse to be able to actually keep the game enjoyable with sufficient players. But it might be a fair criticism to say that updates come too fast for some of these games, and we need more time between them, or various other things. And there’s nothing wrong with people just griping, even if it’s something that can’t reasonably be stopped.
Most companies are doing this, sticking arbitration agreements in their user agreements. Most of the time it benefits them hugely since arbitration is typically much more favorable to them than court (which is already incredibly favorable to them).
Once in a while it bites them; I recall reading some company where thousands of users started going to arbitration, and that costs them cause they pay the arbitration fees. In that case they tried to weasel out of the arbitration agreement, but last I heard a judge made them stick to it, forcing them to pay arbitration fees for every user that was asking for it.
Might just be me enjoying Nimoy in most everything, or maybe ta just that Civ 4 is still the best of the series, but I really liked his lines in that one.
Lots of memorable ones but “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy” always sticks out as one of my favorites.
People shouldn’t show support for companies that are willing to use this shit.
Also fuck updates. I hate that effect of the Internet on games, where they just keep updating, which also leads to increased laziness on release. I miss the days when you got a game and that was it, what you had was what you had, never to change again unless they release an expansion pack.
I might have been on epic’s side if they had delivered a storefront/launcher at least as good as Steam, then found they still weren’t able to compete and only then decided to try the exclusivity crap.
They did not. They have a launcher/store that is far worse than Steam or even GOG (which is an accomplishment; GOG’s isn’t all that good and yet they manage to be worse by a large margin), and they didn’t even attempt to provide a better product/service. Instead they just started throwing money in order to secure exclusivity.
It shows all they want is to muscle into the market, not provide anything better for people.