MudMan
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That’s not what that says.
It says “if you can’t get the other thing (…) AND your frontal lobe is too squishy to cope with the FOMO”.
I’m not saying you need to buy both, I’m saying if you’re an adult you can live with a cool thing existing and you not needing to have it immediately without resorting to taking sides based on marketing bullet points like a toddler.
Sure! I mean, why not? Hell, release the game DRM free in the first place on all platforms, huh? Why did we have to wait a decade and buy it twice before we could get the DRM version of any part of it, after all?
But you weren’t complaining about it yesterday and you’re way closer to the right outcome today. I would much rather have a DRM free version of some part of that game than not.
Wait, does it? Oh, man, it does! I actively remember the praise, where did I get so much Mandela effect from this? I didn’t even think to look it up, I was so certain.
In any case, here’s to being actively wrong and still having made your point. Eternal is the lesser game in general, and I have played it much less, but it’s still telling I straight up forgot and invented an alternate scenario about it.
Nobody did. It was one of this weird wave of interesting multiplayer setups that just didn’t have the competitive cleanness of the established stuff and nobody ended up caring about.
It was midly interesting to try out once, but let’s say there’s a reason they didn’t do a MP mode in the sequel and every reviewer praised that choice.
Ah, so my first reaction is “what actual indie developer who knows what they’re talking about excludes BG3 from AAA”?
Turns out not this one, apparently, since the creative use of quotes seems intended to obscure that “AAA schlock” is not from the dev, it’s from the journalist rehashing a quote from an article about a quote from a podcast. Speaking of schlock.
Anyway, I’m on the fence about the core point. I agree on principle that “dumbed down” doesn’t make things mainstream. I agree that this is a lesson the industry insists on refusing to learn, even after The Sims doulbing as architecture software, WoW casual moms playing with a dozen UI mods, Fortnite core players building gothic cathedrals in five seconds and Roblox containing entire gamedev teams made of unpaid children.
Whatever the mainstream wants, “simple” has nothing to do with it.
Do I think BG3 means somebody should fund Pillars 3? Yeeeeah, not so sure. BG3 works because it was the literal best time to be making D&D stuff, because it had two extremely beloved brands propping it up, because it’s a sequel to two extremely well received, accessible CRPGs that both did a lot better than Pillars to begin with, because they were both focused on multiplayer and free-form systems instead of straight-up literature. Nuance matters here.
And then somebody (a lot of somebodies) gave Larian two hundred million to make it, so it also looks at least as good as anything Bioware ever did during their heyday. That’s probably why BG3 has 140K players on Steam right now and Avowed has 1K and never peaked past 10K.
There are lessons from BG I’d love to see the industry learn. I want them to learn the right ones, though, because if they go ahead and invest another nine digits in the wrong thing then we WILL actually have to wait another 30 years for another game like that.
Subscription cost/value is hard to measure because you can get promos and sales plus you’re receiving a bunch of games as part of the package, so… sure, that’s 80 bucks a year for basic and what? 120+ for the higher tiers, but how much that is a straight add to the cost of the hardware does depend on how much of that money you’d have spent buying the games new (or still signing up to Game Pass if you were eyeing an Xbox instead, I suppose).
So that is valid back-of-the-envelope math, but not really accurate.
Plus the “only play offline” scenario is still a viable use case. I cancelled my PS Plus and Xbox Live subs because I only ever played offline games on consoles.
“I wouldn’t recommend one ever” is just not a reasonable stance today, and I don’t know if I’d say you can build a PC that “demolishes a PS5” for that money. What GPU would you need to do 4K60 or 1440p120 upscaled on AAA? The B580/4060 tier won’t cut it, you need one step up. A 4070 shows up for 650 bucks on my local Amazon. The 4060 Ti for 550. Current gen AMD is more expensive than that.
It’s not impossible to build a functional PC around that purchase, but man, you better be a savvy hardware guy or have one on hand. A quick glance shows my local trusted builders will give you a vanilla 8 Gig 4060 paired with an Intel i5 12th gen and 32 gigs of slow-ish DDR4. I mean, you’ll play some games, they’ll look fine with some tinkering, but that’s barely PS5 tier, let alone PS5 Pro. And that’s assuming you’re plugging that thing into a TV like a bulky, noisy console. Otherwise you’re gonna need a monitor to go with it.
Again, not saying it’s not an option. Absolutely the right move for a whole bunch of people.
But everybody? Sight unseen? In all circumstances? Yeah, nah. When my little cousin comes asking I’m not just pointing him at the cheapo trashcan PC, I’m asking questions. Do they have a laptop in good nick for work/school? Do they have a decent TV/monitor to use with it? What kinds of games do they want to play? It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing the way it was five to ten years ago.
Right.
But right now, to play Fortnite tomorrow for 500 bucks that PC will give you worse looks and performance than a PS5.
I don’t mind the notion that it’s still a better purchase and you get a computer to work and study out of that deal and you have an easier upgrade path and no need to pay subscriptions. All that as it may be.
But it’s not a no-brainer at all and it’s more expensive in the vast majority of scenarios.
I’d be less nitpicky about this, but it actually was true for a couple of years in the Xbox 360/PS3 generations, when consoles were very limited by several parts of their hardware and PC GPUs were amazing value for money. Think 970-1080Ti range.
But that has changed a lot and it’s important to acknowledge that while consoles have become less value by having fewer exclusives and more upkeep costs through online subscriptions, PCs have become less value by an absolutely bonkers bananas insane reduction in GPU availability and value for money. Thanks, cryptobros and AIbros.
It unfortunately takes some thinking and checking options to see what makes sense for a gamer on a budget these days. It’s a lot harder than it used to be across the board, and that sucks.
You can build yourself a PC for less.
You can’t build yourself a more powerful PC for less. Especially since the PS5 Pro isn’t getting a price bump in Europe.
You can barely find a dedicated GPU for less money than a base PS5 at all these days. I guess if you go dumpster diving or are very patient in a used parts website you could technically get there, but it’d be a bit of a project.
OK, so this is weird and that headline doesn’t tell the full story.
So in Europe the only price going up is the non-Pro base PS5 Digital Edition (by 10%, not 25%).
The PS5 SKUs with a disk drive are staying the same. The PS5 Pro price is staying the same. The standalone disk drive price is actually going down.
So… WTF is happening here?
I’m guessing that the fact the US dollar is collapsing thanks to tangerine man and the Euro is quickly becoming a reserve currency and the exchange rate is going up is messing with things in strange ways? Gonna guess that some manufacturing from some regions is currently more expensive to import but maybe optical drives are still being made in the EU so they can eat some of the costs that way but Australia gets hit by both? I don’t know.
Man, what a mess. It’s the dominoes meme but with the US having a shit public education system on one end and Australian PS5s getting more expensive in the other.
I don’t think this is as controversial now as it was maybe five, eight years ago. There are plenty of online games on up-front fees.
What the behind the scenes numbers need to be to support online costs indefinitely will change game-to-game. It’ll probably be easier to make it sustainable if you have this decision made out of the gate, so that probably helped them. We’ll see how they do, the game does seem fun. If anything, Rocket League-but-actual-football seems like a thing that should have happened by now.
Sure.
Again, people seem to be reading this as saying “don’t mod, develop full games”. Not what it says. I’m saying “if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead”.
In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it’s worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don’t like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.
“One or few programmers” is the key part of that, though. I’m not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.
But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you’re spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game… I mean, get paid, man. You’re doing a whole ass job at that point.
I like these, but they’ve been superseded by Windows handhelds for me. Granted, that’s because I have so many devices I use for retro stuff that being able to easily mount a shared folder instead of keeping a million SD cards with the same games is a big bonus and there is just no convenient way to do that on Android (and it strongly depends on your definition of “convenient” on Linux). If you just need the one thing to play a single bundle of old games I’d take the convenience, lower price, small size and long battery life of the 'droid devices.
No, it is not equivalent. A full build in a cartridge is playable beginning to end. It may be missing bug fixes, tuning changes or expansions, but it is a full game.
The Switch in particular has games that look physical but aren’t, and nobody should consider those physical releases, but physical games that actually are physical games aren’t equivalent to digital releases just because there is additional content that is digital-only. You lose me there, that premise is just incorrect. And even if it wasn’t, preserving the 1.0 vanilla version of a game is as relevant as preserving the all-bells-and-whistles last patch with all DLC. Ultimately for full archival purposes both are relevant, so I’d rather have one of those frozen in carbonite than neither.
Now, I agree that DRM-free releases are a better way to handle this than DRMd releases, and I do agree that jailbreaking and backing up digital copies of DRMd releases is crucial for preservation.
But that is neither here nor there. For practical usage, as a sustainable artefact and as a preservable snapshot of a media release a physical version is absolutely crucial.
Yeah, well, that’s why game engines are a thing. I didn’t pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.
Maybe I’m too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.
Well, no, I’m lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn’t own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I’ve answered my own question.
I am very confused now.
So you’re okay with DRMd digital purchases as long as they keep the servers up? But you’re angry that indefinitely working cartridges don’t include patches and DLC in the cart? Even though ultimately the content not included in the cart is literally delivered the same way as the digital purchases?
What?
I mean, what?
I would get it as a user preference thing, in terms of what you prefer right now or what’s convenient to you right now, but from the long term preservation angle it is the physical release that takes it every time, patches or no patches, DLC or no DLC. Absolutely every current system is flawed and absolutely jailbreaking and piracy are needed for full preservation as the system currently works, but in what world is a company arbitrarily choosing to keep servers going a better solution than standalone physical versions?
You are extremely opinionated about this in a very inconsistent way and it’s just so confusing.
TAA only looks worse than no AA if you have a super high res image with next to no sub-pixel detail… or a very small screen where you are getting some blending from human eyeballs not being perfectly sharp in the first place.
I don’t know that the line is going to be on things like grainy low-sample path tracing. For one thing you don’t use TAA for that, you need specific denoising (ray reconstruction is sometimes bundled with DLSS, but it’s technically its own thing and DLSS is often used independently from it). The buildup of GI over time isn’t TAA, it’s temporal accumulation, where you add rays from multiple frames over time to flesh out the sample.
I can accept as a matter of personal preference to say you prefer an oversharpened, crinkly image over a more natural, softer image, so I can accept a preference for all the missed edges and fine detail of edge detection-based blur AA, but there’s no reason decent TAA would look blurry and in any case that’s exactly the part where modern upscaling used as AA has an edge because there’s definitely no washed out details when using DLSS when compared to no AA or SMAA at the same native res. You often get additional generated detail and less blur than native with those.
You think this is a more antagonistic conversation than it is. I absolutely agree preservation isn’t about the ten big games that mass audiences (or big speedrunning communities) care about.
But, again, we’re grading on a curve on the user side and for the real silver bullet for full preservation you need publishers and public organizations instead. As a user I want access to physical media that runs offline and stand-alone (or DRM-free digital copies). For actual preservation I want it to be mandatory to deposit a public copy of both client and server code in some public organization and for studios to have at least a best practice to keep fully version historied archives of both code and assets.
But even on the consumer side, if I’m going to be frustrated at someone it’s going to be to the worst offenders, and from what we know of it at launch, and from this angle the Switch 2 is far from that.
Oh, come on, speedrunners cherrypicking patches is hardly the litmus test for preservation.
The Switch is easily the most preservation-friendly console platform of its generation, even if it is unfortunately by default. It has also turned out to be the most officially preservation-friendly Nintendo platform in a good long while, if only because its unexpected success forced a robust backwards compatibility scheme, which in turn forces server compatibility and likely longer support than anything else since the DSi got.
Am I happy about that state of affairs? Not really. Am I grading on a curve at this point? I sure am. It’s not a black and white thing.
And for the record, that’s not a defense of Nintendo as a company, but there’s a lot of willingness to misrepresent how the actual proposition on the Switch 2 works, and I find that frustrating. I will take a beligerent company putting all its eggs on the basket of a physical-friendly backwards compatible platform over Microsoft’s “your toaster is an Xbox” cloud-driven nonesense any day. Catch me on a good day, I’ll take it over Steam’s “remember you don’t actually own anything” store warning sticker.
Hm. That’s an interesting approach to it, but I think it’s probably too black and white.
I mean, yeah, sure, for complete preservation you need archival and version control. I’ll honestly say that’s only legitimately doable on the dev side. You get into preserving the code and the assets there, too.
But on the user end I’d say that any version that is physically stored and can run offline, be it a DRM-free installable GOG-style or a physical piece of media storing a build of the game is much, much better than a DRMd all-digital release.
Even if it hadn’t been pirateable day one, BotW would live on. Not only are there multiple cart versions with multiple patches of the game, including the Switch 2 upgrade, but all those versions will run on all consoles. It won’t be the most up to date version of the game, but it’ll be playable, and that’s already a lot compared to the baseline we’re setting elsewhere. It’s certainly not a “glorified DRM key”.
But that’s at the top end of sustainability for physical media. The Switch 1 has some carts that don’t include full playable builds and need partial downloads to run properly. That’s a different scenario. If a game needs online auth to unlock the media that’s another scenario. Obviously for online only games the cart IS in fact just an access point. And on Switch 2 there will be carts that act as physical keys only.
But not all of those are created equal. I think acknowledging the differences is important. If nothing else to ensure people are educated about the difference between owning BotW in a cart they will get to play indefinitely versus Street Fighter 6 in a cart that won’t work if the servers are down and they don’t have an installed version stored.
Patches are not downloadable to carts by the user, but they can be added to carts by the publisher in re-releases, which is what I presume they’ll do here. No official confirmation for Switch 2 versions of Switch 1 games specifically, though.
I’m not surprised the older saves aren’t compatible, and it can be a bummer, but hey, at least the game does work, so even if you have to start a new run that’s still a lot more than what you get from a digital download.
I am not aware of the Switch having a per-game build whitelist in the firmware. That seems weird, since it’d effectively brick all existing carts after end-of-life. I am familiar with game carts requiring specific minimum firmware versions to run (so the other way around) and including the minimum allowed firmware package in the cartridge to force an update to the correct minimum version. This has been standard on all physical games on all platforms since as far back as the PSP. If you have a source for the Switch doing things backwards on that front and thus being actively engineered to make all carts stop functioning when the patch servers go down by all means please share it and I’ll be the first to go alert the press, but I think you may be getting that one backwards.
I’m confused about what you’re mad about here. You seem to either be mad about things that have been going on for multiple generations (and incidentaly done eff all to curb jailbreaking or piracy, so I have to wonder what’s the point of even trying for Nintendo, frankly) or you’re not right about how the Switch 2 version carts are meant to work.
That’s not the definition of parody.
I mean, I could tell you were being snarky, but definitely not that you were being snarky as some sort of performance art accusation thing.
Anyway, now we’re just talking about your shortcomings as a communicator and I think we can both agree that’s not an interesting conversation, so… moving on.
See how confusing it is? I mean, for one thing, BotW is fully playable offline on Switch 1 cart-only and presumably that remains the case in Switch 2. Despite being a launch title, BotW is one of the larger titles in the Switch library, but they still splurged for the bigger cart size, so no mandatory downloads besides DLC and patches.
For another, I’m not clear that the title updates will be downloadable in the Switch 2 cart. Switch 1 carts do have an allowance of storage to build patches into the physical copies (for re-releases, later prints, discount lines, GOTY editions and the like), so I assume the build you get in the Switch 2 cart is a latest-patch build. There’s no confirmation on this beyond knowing that the functionality is built into the original Switch format, though.
So no, I don’t think you’re right. I’m not sure about what happens with your saves if you do own the DLC but you don’t download it, or what happens if you try to load a fully patched save from the old game with a downpatched cart version, but I’m pretty sure you can play through the whole upgraded Switch 2 game (sans DLC) beginning to end entirely offline indefinitely just with the cartridge.
How was that your point? You just rephrased the original comment with some different wording.
In what universe would someone have looked at that and gone “ah, some witty commentary on how unnecessarily sarcastic my post was; furthermore, on the inconsistency between my original retort and the subjects of the previous post”.
Did you just forget to write that part the first time? Do you think I can read your mind? How was this supposed to work?
You said “there’s a person operating the AI” and you referred to separating “the tool from the user”.
Please do me a favor and quote the part of that comment that refers to the way the AI is made at all. The point you were parroting was pointing out that the “AI good/bad debate” isn’t a judgement of value of the technology underlying the applications, it’s an assessment of what the companies making apps with this technology are doing with it on each individual application.
I never brought up the user in this. The user is pretty much neutral. The “person operating the AI” isn’t a factor here, it’s some constant outside the debate where we assume some amount of people will use the tools provided for them in the way the tools are designed.
So… ok, hold on, this gets complicated.
If I understand this correctly there are three pieces of software here. There’s the Switch 1 game, which can be digital or physical. There’s the DLC, which is always digital, and there’s the Switch 2 expansion, which again can be digital or physical.
So if you buy the physical Switch 2 box you get a cart with the Switch 1 game and the Switch 2 patch in it, but no DLC. Presumably, if you already own the DLC in your account, that’s the same SKU, because the base game is the base game, the Switch 2 cart just includes the Switch 2 patch file in there.
Right?
So if you want BotW physically for Switch 2 you ARE rebuying the full game, which is a weird thing to do, but if you own the DLC that’s the same DLC for the same base game. Same deal if you buy the expansion separately for your pre-existing game.
If you don’t own BotW (or the DLC) this is saying that’s not unlocked in the boxed copy, it’s available separately.
I think making the Switch 2 version a “GotY edition” pack-in would have been worth it just to avoid people having to do this in their heads to understand what’s going on. At the same time I wonder what sort of weirdness happens if you do own the DLC and they put a different DLC key in the cartridge. I mean, they could always just chuck in a download key for the DLC in a printed card inside the box, but I wonder if you can even build that into the cart and keep the same SKU for the Switch 1 game. I genuinely don’t know the answer to that.
The biggest company I worked for was a great place to be, but they were a US company. I kept going to performance reviews, getting managers give me the “good news, you got the big bonus this year”. My response was consistently “cool, but I’m a base salary guy, I’d rather just keep doing the same job and getting a base salary bump” and they kept being very confused by this.
Good people, good conditions, I had no complaints, but they just couldn’t parse this. They kept explaining to me how big the bonuses could get, I kept not being motivated at all by this.
Best you can do is read the actual text they published. It’s just eight pages.
The actually useful bit of that article is the link to the press release. Oddly, the press release does NOT say what that article says it says.
The article:
Europe’s CPC (Consumer Protection Cooperation Network) confirmed that they’re calling for changes in the way games present their currency.
The press release:
the CPC Network is presenting today key principles to help the gaming industry comply with the EU consumer protection rules related to in-game virtual currencies. (…) The key principles and the Common Position are based on the existing general rules of EU consumer law directives that apply to digital services and digital content provided to consumers, including video games.
I don’t know if it’s a problem with reading comprehension, the increasing deprofessionalization of games journalism or what, but the reporting on this is consistently… bad.
I am screaming into a pillow of art critique frustrations right now.
Okay, look , first of all, that’s the point of magazines, they had more than one person in them. There was both some editorial oversight keeping an editorial line AND multiple voices working together, so you were never railroaded into just the one guy. We called those newsletters and the understanding was they were supposed to be obnoxious.
I don’t disagree that there is good game critique right now. For every ragebaiting, hyperfocused, the-end-is-nigh culture warrior there is someone who actually knows what they’re talking about going “alright, ya chucklefucks, here’s the deal”. But the point is you don’t HAVE to get through one of those to get to the trash. The trash is now algorithmically selected and pushed into your eyeballs, and it’s your job to sift through the recommendation engine to personally decide what level of that you want in your life.
You want more than you should. On average, anyway.
With no gatekeepers outside the corpobot gatekeepers there are no concerns but engagement. Hard to get that job done like that, and there’s more unexpected damage downstream from that change.
Am I saying that a heavily gatekept media landscape where the reputation of publications drives attention more than specificity and focus? Eh, I’m not NOT saying that. It’s hard to argue that the societal outcomes have not been great. And while there’s good critique out there it’s dense, and dull and itself heavily specialized. Even after we went digital there used to be approachable, good critique, -not “reviews”, but critique- in loose, ugly blogs written in good humor with sharp observations and constructive approaches. Newsletters, but good newsletters.
Look, I don’t mean it as an insult, but your post is a good example of why there were some positives to having people come for the guides and the “technical reviews” and the personalities and have the rest of the package literally stapled to those. I don’t think much of the print world delivered on that potential before the Internet took over. The website-based world had a better go at it, some people did great work. A bunch moved on to make great games from there.
The pivot-to-video, content-as-a-service social media landscape we have today? Nah. Not by itself.
I was frustrated to seeing this (incorrect) framing here and I genuinely didn’t have the energy to get past the clickbait enough to see if the actual video reports accurately on what has been issued.
This is not new legislation, this is not a legislative change. This is an administrative body that coordinates existing national consumer protection agencies using already existing legislation that has flagged one example of what they consider to be infringement and issued guidance on what it considers infringement in general.
There is no legislative force to this. You could argue that they are just wrong in court and win. There is no court in the EU obligated to follow these guidelines, they are just more likely to keep you on the right side of these agencies, as far as I understand their role.
This is nominally better than the exceedingly crappy reporting that was doing the rounds this week saying that the “EU had banned MTX”, but not by much. The recommendations are very mild and while they’re positive and will block some usual dark patterns if applied they won’t change one bit of how modern games, AAA or not, are monetized.
I’m also less kind than the people downthread. It takes some serious hypocrisy to make a celebratory video about how the EU is finally going after dark patterns while clickbaiting so hard I can see multiple body parts prolapsing from here.
Well, let me solve that for you right away.
You need neither of these things. Games and entertainment are not a priority if you’re in a “this current economy” type of situation.
If you already have one, that’s the right one for the money, probably.
Was Nintendo Life “misrepresenting the value of a Switch 2 over a Deck”? Myeeeeh, not sure. I’ll say I agree with their premise that “Steam Deck fans Seriously Underestimating the Switch 2”. In somewhat petty, immature ways, as demonstrated very well here. Does the Steam Deck “obliterate the Switch 2”? Probably not, no. I’ll tell you for sure in the summer, I suppose. That said, their listicle is brand shilling as much as this post is.
Are these two things different and have different sets of pros and cons? Yeah, for sure. It’s even a very interesting exercise to look at the weird-ass current handheld landscape, because it’s never been wider, more diverse or move overpopulated. The Switch 2 and the Deck will probably remain the two leading platforms until whatever Sony is considering materializes, but they’re far from alone, from dirt cheap Linux handhelds to ridiculously niche high end laptop-in-a-candybar Windows PCs.
If you want to have a fun thread about that I’m game, but fanboyism from grown men is a pet peeve of mine, and even if I didn’t find it infuriating I’d find it really boring.
For the record, between these two? Tied for price, Switch 2 will be a bit more powerful and take advantage of specifically catered software from both first and third parties, has better default inputs, a better screen and support for physical games. Current Deck is flexible, hugely backwards compatible, can be upgraded to a decent OLED screen and has fewer built-in upsells.
And as a bonus round, Windows handhelds scale up to better performance than either, have better compatibility than the Deck and some superior screen and form factor alternatives… but are typically much more expensive and most (but not all) struggle with the Windows interface and lack hardware HDR support.
We good? Because that’s that’s the long and short of it.