People here really love pouring cold water on this, don’t they?

Starfield wasn’t my favorite, and I was disappointed with quite a few things about the game, but I still enjoy it. At least it isnt permanently tethered to a server that Bethesda can shut off at any moment. Its good to see them.not completely giving up on Starfield, but I do wish they had listened more to feedback and given the game a true 2.0 update that improves it more.

Not exactly the words I would have chosen to say that, but I understand the sentiment.

The only reason I might be okay with this is if this was a way for the platform to try and guarantee that the game actually releases and isn’t just vaporware. I doubt this is the actual reason for it, but that’s the only understandable reason, IMO.

Good. Hope all of Nintendo’s software patents get rejected. Gameplay elements have been ruled to be not protectable. Only things like trade-dressing.

Cloud RAM. Just download more RAM.

It is amazing to me that these prices keep going up and the companies making them are not going out of business. You and I both know that not enough people are buying these for them to survive if they aren’t at profit margins over 100%.

Being unable to emulate PS2/GameCube/Switch in this day and age at $150 USD is a deal breaker. I understand not doing Original Xbox, but the other three are very well developed on Android and Linux. There isn’t a reason that shouldn’t be possible other than “profit margins are too small if we make that possible at $150 USD.”

I mean, the little R36S can run up to N64/PS1/Dreamcast for $30 USD. The next generation up does not warrant a $120 USD price increase.

Yeah, but they actually provided a real service in exchange for that subscription.

Meanwhile Sony pays studios to NOT develop games for other platforms, which is HORRENDOUSLY anti-consumer, and Nintendo I dont even have to talk about.

Microsoft isnt the consumers best friend, but out of the big three they are the least bad.

Wasn’t it found out that this isn’t actually true? Correcting the typo doesn’t result in the AI actually functioning any better, IIRC.

If tall it took as one typo fix, how come Gearbox never fixed it? How long would that fix take, like three seconds?

Which is why I maintain my order of least to most consumer friendly gaming big three is:

Nintendo < Sony < Microsoft

For all its flaws, Microsoft is the leash anti-consumer, because they don’t have exclusives anymore.

Hoping DDR3 prices go up so I can finally sell the 128 GB of RAM I have been saving “just in case” lol

Everyone downvoted me when I said Sony would keep increasing prices when they had no real competition. Nintendo dropped out, and Microsoft seems to be having no interest in competing, so now we are seeing exactly what I said would happen, happen.

Okay look, as much as I hate Nu-Marathon and NeoBungie, it was only a few in-game (most likely placeholder) textures in a beta build of the game. Anyone trying to claim the entire game was stolen has no idea what they are talking about. It’s wrong that it happened but in the bigger picture, it’s a very minor issue compared to other things with other games.

As a side note, and as an artist myself: Artists do not “own” an art style. Marathon’s art style is not stolen. Brutalism in graphic design existed since the late 1990s. Monet doesn’t “own” impressionism, Dali doesn’t “own” surrealism, Warhol doesn’t “own” pop-art. They never have. Anime and manga have been using that art style in their design and marketing for a very long time. Anime being a pretty big influence on Bungie during the time they were making old Marathon, Halo CE, and most obviously, Oni.

To be fair, in driving games, you dont really want to be changing a whole lot about the driving model once everyone agrees its perfect. Good driving mechanics are always good, and bad driving mechanics are always bad. The only thing worse than bad driving mechanics is when the previous game had perfectly fun driving physics and the next game changed it, making it objectively worse.

Which happened to Need for Speed. A fun arcade racer with predictable physics, Underground 2 had perfected the driving model Black Box had made. Slidey enough to make entering a drift feel easy and controllable, but still predictable enough to master over time. Then in Most Wanted they changed the driving model and added insane amounts of grip for some reason, making the driving model feel more like Mario Kart. Then every game after that one got progressively worse, until we land at the absolute bottom of the barrel games made by Criterion, who make all their driving models feel like they came from a mobile game with tilt controls. Like Unbound.

I dont believe a driving game with good and fun driving mechanics needs to really change anything other than the map, music, and adding cars for subsequent games.

Every game must be over-the-shoulder action slop, or nobody will ever buy them!

~ Game Executives

Nintendo definitely learning the wrong lesson from this:

• The Right Lesson: Maybe we shouldn’t released an expensive console, with only a handful of new games and tons of repeat releases that are $70 (and suck) especially in a really bad global economy, and some of those games dont even have a real physical copy, and stop treating our fans like they are literally Hitler because they are passionate about our products.

• The Wrong Lesson: People must not want powerful hardware and physical games anymore.

Save your game first though.

Ending ◬ (white up pointing triangle with dot) came from the 3C3C1D DLC. You likely played the Game of the Yorha edition of the game which had the DLC included.

The true ending though…

The lyrics are designed to evoke a feeling, but not confuse the player with actual lyrics they might understand (especially if the song is playing while characters are talking in-game).

To do this, the songwriter just created nonsense words that made the sound they wanted, and later on called it Chaos Language. That way they only had to record the song once for all localizations. Its not a real language though, because it doesn’t have any grammar rules or anything.

They did sing some songs in multiple real languages though, which typically play during the end credits.

I am the same unless the content added as either years later or is a massive nearly game changing update.

Highly dependant on the game and the content.

NieR Automata has you get 5 endings and see the credits roll at least twice in order to actually get all of the story, and the content is actually very different. Like the credits rolling isnt treated as the end of the game, just a way to break up the pacing.

But if the game is highly repetitive, extremely linear, and exactly the same on subsequent playthroughs? Nah.

I don’t consider them tedious, but I generally dont end up doing all the side content, I just played the game and occasionally did the side quests between main story quests, so I wouldn’t be able to give you a good assessment on that.

For whatever reason eBay prices on the game have spiked dramatically, but you used to be able to get the game disk for Xbox 360 for like, $10. Its backwards compatible.

You could also just download and emulate the PS3 copy of NieR Gestalt for free if you are concerned about not liking it and buy the game later if you do.

Automata was good, but I found myself enjoying NieR (Gestalt, not Replicant) way more. Its older and less refined, but the story was more captivating, and I found the father a more charming character.

Its hard to argue with Russian Tim Curry. He was such a fun pick for that role.

I liked it more. Red Alert 2 was good but I just prefer Generals Zero Hour.

RA2 isnt bad, I just wanted to really limit the list to not repeat a bunch of games from the same series if they werent equally as good IMO (which is why Danganronpa 2 is the only one in its series, for example). I just had more fun with Generals Zero Hour.

Here is my Quality Slop list (I only like them because they are good):

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Metal Gear Solid
• NieR Gestalt
• Test Drive Unlimited 2
• Halo Combat Evolved
• Dark Souls
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
• Half-Life: Opposing Force
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
• Silent Hill 2 (the original, not the remake)
• Super Metroid
• Need for Speed Underground 2
• Shenmue 1, 2, and 3 (Shenmue 3 is probably the worst game on this list, but its still pretty good regardless)
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2
• Age of Empires II
• Command & Conquer: Generals - Zero Hour
• Policenauts
• Panzer Dragoon Orta

Each of these have contributed to my high bar of expected quality for games. Most of these games were made on a very tight budget and schedule, with pretty harsh hardware limitations, usually with a small team of less than 100 people, and are the greatest games of all time. Modern game studios have no excuses for the awful quality they launch games in today with more time, money, more people on the dev team, and lack of hardware limitations.

Okay wait, why the DLSS 5 AI kinda cooking with those casting picks though??

As a Shenmue fan, and even one that liked Shenmue III, I would absolutely play that.

I am considering Tainted Grail, I have heard good things about it. Also looking forward to Screamer and seeing how that is.

Screamer wont be on sale most likely, but Tainted Grail might be. If its less than $30 USD I will probably get it.

If the game is good and I can afford it, yeah

Does the game have a cash item shop? Will they be removing that? I can understand if they are removing a cash item shop or something, that is technically a trade of that revenue for subscription revenue. A little late to the subscription party though, people are wisening up to the fact they end up paying more on subscriptions.

I am not unreasonable though. Nobody ever likes price increases but from the perspective of the business price increases are sometimes necessary to keep up with inflation and cover server costs, etc. I dont know Jagex’s business and financials enough to know if this is necessary for the game to stay online or if it is just greed.

I agree. While DF have always had the technical computer knowledge of the average iOS user, that doesn’t excuse death threats (if they even actually receieved any and aren’t just making the claim up for sympathy reasons) of any kind.

They made their hype video, now they make their pseudo-intellectual analyses to try to appeal to both sides of the equation: fanatics of and against DLSS. The problem is, they never had any credibility to begin with. None of their “technical” videos are detailed enough to be anything more than surface level overviews, which to the average iOS user makes them seem like geniuses, but anyone with real technical knowledge can see that they only know enough to be dangerous because they think they know more than they do.

And Clone Hero.

I can add my name to the list of Starfield fans.

Its not the best game ever, but its not bad. I find I am disappointed by a few of the systems and extremely annoyed at some of the (forced) dialogue options in the game (and often even dialogue options I want but are completely missing so dialogue ends in three variants of the same end result I dont want), but I still have fun playing the game.

At least I can play it offline, without an internet connection / mandatory server connection.

Crazy to me to see people just now waking up to just how underinformed Digital Foundry really is to technical details, and how much they sold out.

This is from two years ago.

Still sounds just as stupid as back then, and sounds entirely plausible as something Druckman would think is a good story.

As a professional AAA game designer of 25 years and an occasional game director

What games have you worked on?

I get what you’re saying, and agree that just showing the money prices is better, but I was just wondering if you knew how this would be considered by PEGI.

Also, deleting currency probably would make it harder to give players free currency, because it might look like the developers/publisher is giving money to the player account and people would demand a way to withdraw money from the account, which I believe should not be allowed. Maybe a hybrid where the currency is free and you can split the difference with a real world cost? IDK. Game devs and publishers gotta make money to pay their bills and the developers, and being Free2Play makes getting money pretty hard without mTX/MTX.

At the end of the day it doesnt really matter that much because parents don’t know or don’t care. Its the same in the US with ESRB. Sure, some stores would refuse to sell M rated games to minors, but most of the time parents would just buy GTA for little 8 year old Timmy and they didnt event know the game content, or didn’t care. So this isn’t really going to do much of anything to publishers in reality.

What about lootboxes you can optionally pay for, but the game constantly gives you free currency for it? Like, you can buy more currency, and one of the ways you can spend that currency is lootboxes, but you also get that same currency for free and that same currency can be used on lootboxes (and cosmetics, for example)?

Can I tell it to get rid of the ads on my Xbox home screen?

Personally, I have never seen LLM generated code that works without needing to be edited, but I imagine for routine blocks of code and very common things it probably does fine. I dont see why a programmer needs to rewrite the same code blocks over and over again for different projects when an LLM can do that part leaving more time for the programmer to write the more specialized parts. The programmer will still have to edit and verify the generated code, but programming is more mechanical than something like art.

However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn’t be optimized or secure. However, this programmer claims to have 30 years of experience, and if thats the case then he likely knows this and probably edits the LLM output code himself.

As I have said before, Generative AI is a tool, like PhotoShop. I dont see why people should reject a tool if it can make their job easier. It won’t be able to completely replace people effectively. Businesses will try, but quality will drop off because its not being used by people that understand what the end result needs to be, and businesses will inevitably lose money.