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What advertising though? They didn’t have to pay for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising than Highguard, with Concord getting multiple devlogs and previews across a few Sony hosted events, IIRC.
Even still, its got more legs to stand on than Concord had, which was zero.
I think its serviceable unlike Concord, which required too many changes.
I guess we just have to wait and see if the server is shut down in two weeks. In reality, I don’t think we will ever see as monumental a train wreck as Concord was. Probably ever.
Well its not Concord 2.0. Already has WAY more players than Concord ever did, almost 100k peak players on Steam alone, currently 67k in-game as of the time I am posting this.
I can’t say that 3v3 is the right fit for the game, the maps are rather large for it. But I think with a bit more work in a few updates, it has far more staying power than Concord ever had.
Do you say the same for Epic Games Store exclusives?
The game was delisted from Steam right before GOG dropped this. I am not giving Ubisoft more money for Cold Fear. Since nobody can buy it on Steam anymore, there is no pro-consumer reason that the GOG fixes could not have been given to everyone that already owned the game on Steam as a free update.
Ubisoft wants me to buy the game I already own again. I am not doing that. I don’t care if 2% or whatever goes to GOG for their fixes. I know that more than 50% is going to Ubisoft.
Now this is a classic. Its too bad Star Wars doesnt make more squad-based shooters. Battlefront from EA was pretty trash but also much more arcadey that I had hoped, especially coming from DICE. I wish they had just literally re-skinned Battlefield 4 as Star Wars.
A particularly hard game with more reliance on squad mechanics and teamwork that I have enjoyed playing is Ready or Not.
Its not a game for everyone, due to the developers trying to portray realistic to life crime situations that a SWAT team might be sent in on. Some missions include taking down robbers, child exploiters, terrorists, active shooters, etc. However, it is very satisfying to fully clear a mission with zero deaths, full evidence collection, and see that juicy S ranking at the end of the mission. Its really hard to do it on some missions, though. You can’t take a lot of damage before you die, most times I get hit one time and its either an immediate death or I need to stop the character from bleeding out, which happens pretty fast. You can wear armor but it makes you really slow and doesn’t do much in the tougher missions when the perps stop using the little guns and knives.
You get some cool tools, like being able to see your squadmate’s helmet camera live feed, a camera wand, a battering ram, explosive charges, shields, and door wedges.
Maybe its something you and your friends might want to try after Halo? Though maybe you wouldn’t want another shooter.
Framerate does not look good. Hopefully that is because of YouTube, and not the game.
Looks like they conveniently chose nearly all shots that do not show character faces. Except Richard Ayoade, who looks I think better than the first trailer. Background NPC faces at 0:17, 0:19, 0:20, and 0:27 all look decent, but one of the kid’s faces and one of the background NPCs on the left at 0:27 look off. Can’t tell if that’s just high motion and upscaler/YouTube artifacting, bad lighting, actual bad model, not enough pixels, or some combination thereof though.
I did see what I think was the original main character face that seems to be unaltered/unchanged from the first trailer, which is a bit of a shame. (Looks like they tried to hide it/obscure it because they put a ridiculous chicken hat/helmet on that model during the character creation part that the face was at (0:09) which wasn’t present on the other face models. Double oof because of the male face model they switched to immediately after being literal Gaston/Prince Charming/Hercules face model.) They really did that model dirty especially considering how good Richard’s face model looks here. Hopefully they can make it look more like the actual model its supposed to be based on, or perhaps they can release another trailer showing the main character face choices under more optimal viewing conditions.
I know its kinda crazy for me to.suggest this, but hear me out:
Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition runs nearly perfectly in emulators on pretty modest hardware. Its not very difficult, but has a Games Journalist level Easy mode as well if thats needed. Its a Musou/Warriors game, so its basically mindless button mashing with the flavor of Zelda.
Its a splitscreen game, so you only have to have it set up on one machine. The game has a story mode and a bunch of challenge modes as well to keep things interesting. Wide range of upgradeable charaacters with different weapons that change up their playstyles. And a lot of unlockable costumes.
Downsides:
- Nintendo
- Have to use a controller (not a downside to me, but for sosme it is)
- Getting the game can be a little challenging if you don’t know where to look
- Setting up the emulator can also be challenging if you don’t know where to get the important parts
- Can get stale after really long sessions of play
Upsides:
- No account or extra launcher required, boot the emulator and play the game
- Most emulators have decent to great Linux compatibility
- Fully offline - no randos joining or server outages when internet drops
- Only two players can play, meaning nobody else can join after your partner, and Player 1 controls when Player 2 joins
The only issue could be if you aren’t using a Nintendo controller, the buttons won’t match up, but there might be a mod for that. I know there are input mods for other games.
I haven’t ever had good performance in this games benchmark tool, even at the absolute minimum settings available. Game looks worse than a Wii game and still struggles to manage more than 20 fps in scenes with more than one monster on them screen (Frame Gen disabled, enabled is like 30fps but with the most horrendous second and a half of input lag I have ever seen).
Until it hits 60fps on my system, I am not buying it.
I am curious how much of their growth is attributed to cheaters creating infinite accounts to claim free games so if they get banned on one account they just switch to another one.
Dead By Daylight has this problem where the game was free for like a week on Epic games, and if you play with a cheater in the game (pretty common because the anticheat is nonexistent), its almost always from an Epic account with some random character username.
“Bro just one more post processing technology, trust me, just one more and all the clarity issues are going to be fixed, just one more. One more and that’s it, it’s going to look native, just one more. Just let me do one more, please.”
Literally Digital Foundry for the last like, 10 years.
Every time a new scaling tech or TAA method or whatever comes out, they talk about how it is so good and has next to zero flaws. Then a new one comes along and suddenly they start talking about all the flaws the previous one had and how the new one is “nearly perfect.” And then you look at the footage they are showing and its literally best case scenario, minimal to no camera movement, and little to no large or close objects moving at a high speed. Footage designed to minimize the flaws and maximize selling you on the tech, regardless of how little that is actually going to happen during real world gameplay for literally anybody.
I hate Ubisoft, but I actually do think this was decided to happen before they unionized and is just bad timing.
Decisions to close studios like this never happen so quickly and usually take multiple months between the time the decision is made to the time the actual closure takes place.
It is possible that the studio caught wind that they were being closed and decided to unionize in order to capitalize on the bad PR. But this is all speculation since we don’t know every detail, and both sides will leave out various details to give themselves an advantageous position in the conversation.
I’d rather get whatever the newest/best I can afford when I need to upgrade. The 1080 Ti is tired but it still works well, so I don’t feel enough pressure to spend the money yet. Ive been looking at the 5070 Ti, but the price is still too high having only just dropped to MSRP in my area.
Also, I never trust second-hand GPUs like I never trust second-hand hard drives. Too much money in it for someone to lie about the condition, or whether they smoke or not, etc. Less hassle when I buy new, especially if I need to RMA, even if it is a higher initial cost.
Breath of the Wild was a mid game, and a bad Zelda game outright. It ditched nearly everything that players had come to expect from a Zelda game. Tears was way better, but still lacked the feeling of being a Zelda game. If you removed all the Zelda assets, would anyone be able to truly call it a Zelda game? With Link to the Past all the way to even Skyward Sword I certainly could.
But the effect the games financial success has had on Nintendo as a whole has been devastating. Nintendo is the kind of company that will learn all the wrong lessons and none of the right ones. They are literal Monkey Paw thinkers. They saw the PS1 outpace the N64 and thought “people want disks, okay lets pick this really odd format disk with a tiny storage limit instead of using normal ones.” And then when the Gamecube failed they said “oh, people must not want powerful hardware I guess, lets just sell people the same hardware again so its underpowered this time but add a motion control gimmick.”
So when BotW was a financial success, they immediately believe that all of their big games need an open world, or need to be vast departures from what players expect from each series. It is truly tragic.
Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.
Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.
Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”
I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.
To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.
Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.
Honestly this list reads like the person who picked the games doesn’t actually play games and just listed the most popular/ most talked about games, but to make it not that obvious they asked that one “weird” person groupchat they were invited to once that is full of actual gamers to provide like 3 games for the list lol
I only preorder a game if I know I want to play it right when it comes out and want to be able to preload the game, and if it comes from a developer I know will not disappoint me (FromSoftware, Kojima Productions, anything from Yoko Taro, etc.).
In the past I used to preorder to reserve a physical copy as soon as it was released, but there is generally no need for that anymore. This makes me both happy and sad, because for all the hassle it was, I kinda miss some aspects of the simpler times. In some ways, I do wish the world could rewind to the 2000s.
Early Access is different from preordering because you gain access to the product instantly, and generally can influence the direction of the game in a hopefully positive way. Providing feedback on what works and what doesn’t is an important part of playing and early access game. A lot of people seem to ignore this.
Of course there are always exceptions, but I don’t count on news like this to mean that this project will be the exception.
Metroid Prime and Halo 2 both had excessive crunch and both turned out great, obviously. In Metroid Prime’s case, a management change seemed to fix it in the long term. In Halo’s case, Bungie just embraced the suck I guess, since they still wanted to make Halo 3.
Regardless, these were exceptions to the rule, and I would never expect a project to be an exception, personally.
IMO, any time a game repeatedly fails to meet deadlines, especially so early on in its development, that usually indicates the game isn’t likely to launch in a healthy state. Either the scope is way too big, or the narrative is receiving major changes and reworks, or the people working on the game just wish they weren’t working on that project and taking longer as a result. This kind of situation is rarely good, and even more rarely ends up with a good launched product.
Cyberpunk 2077, Anthem, Mass Effect Andromeda, Halo Infinite, Duke Nukem Forever, John Romero’s Daikatana (although I personally am a bit charmed by this one despite it being undoubtedly bad), and other games are examples of this. Repeated failure to meet production deadlines, lots of crunch forced on the developers, and all for what? The launch product for all of these games was horrendously bad. Some for technical reasons, some for narrative reasons, and some for both.
When I first saw the trailer for Intergalactic, I had mixed feelings. I liked the intended graphics/art style and retro styled tech, the Porsche was a little weird product placement but fine I guess, but the characters and dialogue I personally found both unappealing. The obvious Snake Plissken rip-off woman the main character talked to (blonde with an eyepatch, I can only assume she is some sort of merc job handler) seemed maybe interesting but then she spoke and the writing lost my interest. Upon learning the game is likely to follow some sort of religious theming, I lost all interest in the game. Its not what I want from a video game. So this was pretty disappointing to learn. But now seeing the game is in such a state doesn’t give me great confidence that the final product will be even decent when it launches.
What’s the matter? I thought they were super confident this was going to do really well. Are they getting cold feet and deciding to make changes for fear of bad reception when they don’t quite have enough time, leading to forced overtime?
EDIT: Wait. All of this was for a DEMO? How bad was the game that they needed to work 60 hours a week mandatory overtime just to finish a demo of the game??
I mean, they haven’t released any console exclusives, making all their games available on the competition console, AND they increased prices.
I would never believe if they didn’t say they were doing it on purpose to manipulate market data. Probably to try to push the idea of a cloud subscription-only, disk driveless, hard diskless plastic box.