To be fair, they are too big.

They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.

My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.

100%.

I got the first Korean 1440p “overclock” monitor, and 60-> 110hz was like night and day many years ago. Sometimes it’d reset from a driver update (as the graphics driver had to be patched to work with overclocked DVI back then), and I’d immediately notice even poking around the web.

Some with phones. I got a Razer phone 2, and 120hz was incredible. I went from that to an iPhone 16 plus (60hz), and it feels sluggish to me.

Another caveat is that 120hz is more “convenient” and less stuttery for most video. 24fps does not evenly divide into 60, but it does for 96 or 120. An once you start seeing choppiness in video, your eyes can’t unsee it.

…Isn’t this a bit ironic, considering GTA’s/RDR’s writing of (loosely) “plain folk’s plights?”

It’d be like CDPR going all in on DRM/corpo surveillance tech. And NO, CDPR Bot, that was not a suggestion!

I answered elsewhere.

But a friendly warning, OP: you will get downvotes for using too many emojiis on Lemmy, heh.

Minecraft is gorgeous with a few mods. Or, more practically, a good modpack.

It’s also quite complex (with a good modpack).

And building requires a lot of mouse precision. And other kids their age are probably playing it. TBH among all these answers, it’s the obvious choice, if you ask me.

Aimlabs is quite literally a mouse precision training game. It has different ‘tests’ and courses for different skills.

Very effective in short bursts, but your kids might find it boring after awhile.

That’s basically all large fandom/hobby subs now, in my experience.

And yeah, don’t forget the shallow memes or fear of arbitrary banning.

Want to use equipment? Grind chore for the XP to meet the level requirement.

Want to beat a quest handed to you early? Grind XP

Want to complete side quests? All of the boilerplate fetch/kill quests.

I mean this respectfully, but you were holding it wrong.

First off, Odyssey was too big, but I enjoyed it! The voiced side quests were great, especially those heavily involving Kassandra. The Atlantis DLC was sublime. But:

• You don’t worry about equipment beyond your level!

• Leave future quests in the journal!

• Fetch quest? If you’re bored, skip it! TBH I Cheat Engined some money in.

Odyssey requires no grinding, as it has waaay too much filler as is. It is a game that’s utterly miserable if you give into completionist impulses, but pretty neat if you don’t.

…Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t particularly enjoy the combat, and the main story is so dull I don’t even remember it, aside from the Atlantis bits. It’s not a masterpiece. But I remember the experience of trekking across Greece quite fondly.

JC2 multiplayer was tons of fun.

They could make a mod for a newer game to drive up sales. Not like a hardcore game mode, but a big sandbox to mess around in.

Nah, this is an ongoing thing for me, for years across different Nvidia machines… Besides, my 3090 is on a riser anyway.

It wasn’t dramatic running Proton in Linux, within a few percent, and I mostly only tested modded Stellaris and Rimworld which are kinda weird examples.

I mean, does anything in The Finals or this game feel like slop?

This was a few patches ago, but I tried to get modded 2077 faster, and could not, at least not on my setup. And I really tried because I need every drop of FPS on my aging 3090.

…That, and I had some HDR problems anyway.

For reference, I’m on W11, but neutered severely. No defender, no background tasks, services or anything, and a bunch of power plan tweaks. On the linux side I’m running CachyOS. Tested with GoG Cyberpunk, can’t remember what patch, but it was on a shared NTFS partition, and CachyOS Proton on the linux side.

Yep, I just switched to those. My impression is the kernel bits are open, but it still connects to a proprietary blob.

…I am not an expert, correct me if I am wrong.

Not well though.

In virtually every instance of gaming I’ve tried, Nvidia is measurably slower on Linux than Windows (where apparently that’s not the case with AMD), with the sole exception being Java games like modded Minecraft and Starsector.

That, and (on my 3090 desktop) I still hold my breath wondering if Nvidia will make my setup blackscreen. And I’m not even using it for display out! This will continue to be a fundamental issue with the drivers closed source and separate from the kernel.

Point I’m making is, if gamers suddenly had to use linux overnight and reviewers benched it, AMD would suddenly appear much more competitive.

Clearly, even AMD wants you to switch to linux, heh.

…I’m not even totally kidding. A mass migration would be a huge boon to their business and leave Nvidia scrambling.

That’s it, sorry.

Yeah, that sounds dreamy. It could certainly work.

And yeah, the problem is not just Microsoft but Mojang. Mojang is an extremely conservative/careful dev, even before they got bought by MS. It’s why the game hasn’t enshittified too bad, but also why development seems to move so slow for arguably the biggest game on Earth.

Collaborating via a repo like that would be… a lot.

Again, it’d be awesome and I think it would work, but it would be a massive step even if Microsoft wasn’t in the picture.

The MultiMC dev came out as a raging anti LGBT, right? That’s why it was forked into Prism (hence the name “Prism”)

Man… there’s been a lot of drama in the MC modding scene.

EDIT:

As pointed out, this is wrong. MultiMC was involved in a separate controversy over distribution, and PolyMC had a dev kick most of the main ones out of the repo, and bigotry was involved in the later.

Thanks for the info.

But I meant the other way around, eg a Java client connecting to the bedrock ecosystem. Is there no way to do that?

I thought it was compatible with a translation layer?

…I suppose that’s a big technical hurdle.

I get that. It’s like saying “just install Linux to run this,” but weird thing is OP already runs Linux and understands Android emulation, so I’m assuming their technical proficiency is enough to install a JE mod. Or maybe the mod isn’t as functional as I assume.

Do you play on a server?

I haven’t found fun modded ‘communities’ since like 1.7.10. All Forge modded servers I’ve tried either seem to be ‘commercial’ servers with zero render distance and basically no community, or ghost towns.

Genuinely curious; why play Bedrock instead of Java Edition when Bedrock is so much trouble on linux? RTX?

EDIT: In hindsight, if this is to play with friends/family stuck on Bedrock, that makes perfect sense. Translation layers might not be as good as I thought.

It has. There have been major rewrites of parts of the codebase, like Sodium, Cubic Chunk, server frameworks, just to start.

Major performance issues, and associated code fixes, have been repeatedly reported to Mojang’s tracker.

The issue is that any major modification is inherently incompatible with other major modifications, hence most persist for one version (or a few) before the devs burns out maintaining it. There are two solutions to this:

• Get Mojang to pull in large optimizations. Thus far, they have been uninterested in this (though some controversy over Optifine may have left a bad taste).

• Pull the changes into a modding framework. Understandably, Fabric/Forge aren’t willing to pull in a huge overhaul they’d have to maintain. Mojang may have similar feelings.

Some modifications (like Sodium) minimize vanilla changes to prioritize compatibility, and are popular to the extent that some other mods implement workarounds for them specifically. But this is rare, and it’s still problematic.

But also a relatively unified, inclusive, and liberal world government? And yes, quite xenophobic, and militaristic, and shady/oppressive with stuff like ONI. And the xenophobia was kind of understandable.

The places in the trilogy were mostly East Africa: https://www.halopedia.org/East_African_Protectorate

In other words, I’m pretty sure the Trump administration would classify the UNSC as ‘woke’ upon deep analysis. Which says a lot.

For those that don’t know, Stability AI is already a zombie, even in the local ML community. SD3 was a flop, they shed all their devs/projects worth anything, and now with Qwen/Longcat SAI is beyond obsolete.

Apparently EA didn’t get the message. They invested in a broken, burning company who’s only decent results are free and old?

…Sounds about right.

Or a rambling 1 hour video.

Why not both? One section for owners, one for pre-purchasers (maybe it has to be in their wishlist?)

It would give owners a clean space, allow pre-purchasers to ask questions, but rob trolls of attention (which is the most important thing).

That’s the issue, isn’t it?

I see this on the internet a lot. People posit things like “wouldn’t it be awesome if these fired devs got together” or “Why don’t they make good stuff anymore? Wouldn’t it be great if somone made a thing like this old beloved thing…”

…Except it’s already happening. Or happened.

And there’s just so much noise on the internet, it’s largely unknown to the folks who’d be interested.

To be clear, I’m not blaming OP, and I’ve done the exact same thing myself. But I still find it kind of… sad.

Anyway, thanks, I am bookmarking Exodus and Archetype Entertainment now.

This makes me think of the Ellisons buying Star Trek and Avatar. Why wouldn’t they shutter or castrate two notoriously ‘woke’, expensive, questionably profitable franchises?

Same here :(. Though to be fair, the Saudi’s political leanings aren’t a perfect parallel.

Yeah. There’s domestic pressure for this anyway, unfortunately.

Gundam

The physics of the mechs (from my very sparse knowledge of Gundam) are pretty questionable, lol, which is fine because they’re there to be spectacular.

Hard, relativistic STL sci fi can still get super weird, see: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a

To add to this, Jason Schreier is a well known, and well sourced, gaming journalist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Schreier

But you aren’t wrong. There’s no way to know that via Bluesky unless you’ve happen to read his stuff from Bloomberg and before. It’s almost like Twitter is a terrible format for news or something…

It would be interesting if EA pulled away from lootboxes for their owner’s ideological reasons.

RockPaperShotgun is my go-to, but I also tend to use ‘sorting’ features in stores and stuff.

For instance, on steam, you can filter by tags you like, like ‘co-op’ or ‘base building’ or whatever, then sort by review score to float the best to the top. And sometimes there are external sites like GamePasta (for Gamepass) with similar features for other platforms:

https://store.steampowered.com/search/

I may have better advice if there’s a certain ‘type’ of game you like. For instance, do you prefer coop with mates or an SO or something? Do you like RTSes or sandbox games or what?

You literally named a bunch of old games that absolutely have modern alternatives. From indie ‘retro’ RTS games to Mass Effect (or more dramatic MGS) feeling RPGs/shooters that flew under the radar to great and original puzzle games in the vein of Portal. Have you ever played the Talos Principle or Antichamber, for instance?

Discoverability is a huge issue, because there are so many games. AAAs do skew towards generic MTX junk, but the other side of that is their marketing sucks up finite attention.

I’m sorry, but gamers are so entitled.

We’re flooded with an incredible back catalog and a sea of gems, yet the sentiment is “small devs are fine” is totally ignorant of how, literally the vast majority of the time per the article, these small devs barely make ends meet on their genuinely good passion project.

Or they generalize that all games are junk because they haven’t even made a bare minimum attempt to shop around the sea of excellently organized stores and review sites/databases the industry has, like they expect absolute perfection in a personal TikTok/YouTube feed directed at them, then turn around and complain about paying a few bucks for an indie after dropping $600 on a GPU.

…There really are too many games because it’s so many passion projects now, and that’s… fine. It’s a lot better than the cinema situation now, for example, where indie makers are getting squeezed so hard.

But I still don’t like the entitled culture that hurts the discoverability of these smaller games and feeds the AAA slop conveyer belts.

Not really.

It may be “feel good nice” if you make a few bucks to a few hundred good reviews on a passion project, but it’s not enough to help you eat and pay rent.

And making a game is a pretty massive time sink. Not to belittle other artists, but the bare minimum time/financial investment for one game is higher than, say, a digital art portfolio or an album.

I hate to be rude, but there are literally thousands of great games cheaply accessible to you.

They aren’t gonna be spoon fed to your eyeballs; you have to shop and dig.

I see a lot of folks trying to blame this on Unreal, but that makes no sense in light of other Unreal games being smooth for the visual fidelity, and Gearbox having worked with Unreal for literally forever.

This is all on Gearbox, and their CEO/devs throwing gas in the fire via Twitter.

It’s honestly insane. There is clearly internal dysfunction at Gearbox, yet their CEO and leads are allowed to damage their brand to their hearts content with… no repercussions? WTF is Embracer (their parent) even doing to miss that?