You think a coop multiplayer Assassins Creed would have been good? From the people that dropped AC Shadows?

Anything will get less fun the more often you do it. This is more of an issue when a genre becomes popular and everyone tries to capitalize on this.

To be fair, the character designers for Highguard cooked way harder than the character designers for Concord.

Highguard’s roster has good color separation, decent color palette, and strong silhouette design, making the character designs more appealing.

Concord had issue with each of these. Poor color palette, sometimes non-existent color separation, and silhouettes that were decent on some characters but too similar between other chracters. Concord’s character designers also mistook being able to use texture variation in place of color separation, and that only really works very close up, as far away the texture goes away and its just a fast blob of the same colored pixels. Unfortunately, Concord’s characters were very unappealing, and they required entire redesigns to correct them. Essentially, it was too much work to try to recover, and would have made more sense to completely start over.

Highguard is a lot better off then Concord, even if it needs more work to improve. And I doubt we will ever see as monumental a disaster as Concord ever again.

Such a shame this is in Nintendo jail.

720p 30fps?

Probably a result of living in a highly judgmental global society that would rather form an immediate opinion, even if it is objectively wrong, than spend the time to actually investigate what the facts about something are.

As an example, some people say that any person named in my comment should immediately be jailed. I feel this is a wrong opinion, because any person can be named in a conversation that they aren’t party to. I could, for example, start talking about Mr. Rogers, and he is technically named in my comment. But some people say that the name just being in my comment is enough “evidence” to jail him forever. Rather than spending the time it would take to realize I was only saying “I liked Mr. Rogers’ show on TV,” they want an immediate resolution despite however wrong or inaccurate it would be.

Investigation and research matters, and we live in a global society that villifies this ideology in favor of forming immediate and often wrong opinions about things they spend almost no time actually investigating.

I mean, I remember a time where you were expected to not be able to win a game in a single sitting, and in fact, you might not get all the information about a game in the actual game. We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.

Personally, I primarily blame legacy news outlets and social media for this. But I digress.

Well I suppose thats kinda my point. The headline here is really bad. I understand what they are trying to get at, but they chose to word it pretty poorly.

I love both (personally like Quake 2 better) and consider Quake 2 to be “Quake 1 again.”

Though the visual tone of the game changed, it was still a fast paced action shooter with an identity that was different enough from Doom to be called “just Doom again.” Many improvements were made, but at its core it still felt like Quake. It didn’t feel like I was suddenly playing Mario, or even another shooter at the time like Turok, Heretic/Hexen, or GoldenEye.

I guess I am trying to say I understand what the headline is trying to say, but it doesn’t really do that good of a job.

IMO, a good sequel doesnt have to change too much to be good, and is usually close enough to be called “more of the same.”.

A good sequel is good because of its similarities to the first. Otherwise you end up with Zelda 2, which is widely regarded as the worst of the Zelda games because it changed so much (outside of a small but very vocal minority that liked it). Many movie sequels also try to change too much and end up suffering because of it. Return to Oz was an interesting movie, but I wouldn’t ever call it as good as the original. Aliens and Terminator 2 are both similar enough to their respective originals while still having minor tweaks that led to a good follow up.

So in the sense of a sequel, Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst, but I think it changed too much from the original and suffers because of it. And Blizzards decision to overwrite the original obviously plays a big part in many people’s dislike of the game.

Isnt every sequel “just the previous thing again?”

Steam didn’t do that. Even Super Nintendo cartridges tried to claim in the Terms and Conditions that you legally didn’t own the copy you paid for. It was never contested, and thus we have the current software ownership debacle.

Because Valve has more money that someone winning a lawsuit can take from.

The combat doesn’t suck. Morrowinds combat is good, you just don’t understand how it works when you are new to the game.

The weapon swing animation tells the game to roll Attack dice, just like in a Table Talk RPG like Dungeons and Dragons. Then, if your Attack Roll (with modifiers like current fatigue, weapon skill, etc) beats the enemy’s Armor Class (with modifiers like their current fatigue and enchantments, etc), its a hit. Otherwise, its a miss.

The one thing Morrowind could have done better with combat is communicating the feedback to the player better. Because the game can get the result of the roll immediately, it can then change what animation plays back to the player, so rather than always playing back the same weapon swing animation regardless of result, it should instead choose different animations based on the result. Missed? Play an animatiom that looks like the player missed. Hit? Play an animation that looks like a hit. Hit but damage was blocked? You get the idea.

Perhaps it would be helpful if the game displayed a UI dice result to better communicate this, who knows. I like the game better without floating damage numbers, but they could be helpful to reduce frustration of new players that don’t understand how the game works.

Well according to Frank O’connor, a non-zero number of them hate Halo. Its why they were hired. If I had to guess, from the way they have mistreated the franchise, its more than 60% of them at the least.

Investors are not required to form an indie studio. They are not required to build a fun game that makes a lot of money. Indie studios do not require massive injections of cash. Most indie studios are formed on what is available to the team collectively. It isn’t something that is easy, it takes effort, but it is not impossible. Most indie studios are initially formed with like, less than $20k USD in total investment. Many are just one guy with a budget of $0.

It is more likely that the amount of money that an investor would realistically need to give is considered too small to be worth the PR, but too big to just give away in a whim. Enough that one or multiple studio members could easily take out a personal load to invest into the studio without needing a private investor.

Now, if those people are demanding multiple big six+ figure investments, then they aren’t trying to form an indie studio, they’re trying to form a AAA studio that is publisher independant. Which is an unreasonable ask.

343 has been ruining Halo ever since they were formed, it goes beyond Infinite.

Sounds like a massive opportunity to form a lot of new indie studios that isn’t happening. Or people aren’t announcing it.

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.

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.

Wish us Steam owners could get the updates. Game.was delisted from Steam for this.

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.

Need for Speed Underground 2.

Yeah, I thought they were boasting about how successful AC Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws were?

And ten tiers of UPlay subscriptions!!

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.

Being a backer for the original GPD WIN, it is pretty disappointing to see they have ditched the clamshell design. I thought it was a decent design that could be refined down to a pocketable size, but I guess that will never happen now that its just copying the Steam Deck’s PSP form factor.

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.

That’s probably a lot of lost jobs.

That’s probably for the best any game that glorifies bullying isn’t great for society.

This image perfectly encapsulates what its like two finally confront Lan Di.

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.

Every game after Before the Storm sucked. Even Before the Storm was only okay, not a good as the first game, but holy moly was every game after total garbage.

Interested to know how they are sourcing their DRAM chips, and if they know that pricing something high in a bad global economy and a shortage of supply is an easy way to kill early adoption of something.

As a Stellaris Mod Enjoyer, this is extremely helpful. No more game saves breaking because all my mods updated to the newest version of the games, hopefully.

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.