They all quit, so presumably they’ll attempt to establish themselves as a new publisher. I am.very much hoping for an announcement of that soon. If Annapurna, the parent company, was trying to blend their agencies, it’ll be interesting to see if they can maintain the quality of their productions.

And here’s the itch.io link: https://minusonepublishing.itch.io/frontiers-of-the-mind

He was allegedly trying to meet up with the minor at Twitch-Con, so you may be right.

Yeah, that really brings me back. I had like 4 tokens on Steam to give the game away when they were trying to get more people to play. There was some other hero shooter MOBA a little after that too, by Epic or something. Didn’t last very long and wasn’t all that great, but I still played the shit out of the falcon character that could “fly”. Man, I need to jump into another one of these games.

Oh shit, I hadn’t heard of that. I’ll definitely check it out; thanks for the recommendation.

It was a hero shooter MOBA but with some verticality, so that’s about as far as the Overwatch comparison goes. I had a great time with it. I like traditional MOBAs but don’t have the skill/patience/time for them, so hero shooter MOBAs are the perfect way for me to be able to play them more casually. In my opinion, of the few I’ve tried, Paragon was the best implementation of a hero shooter MOBA; the core gameplay just felt really tight to me.

Or Paragon even. That game was so fun back in the day before it got killed. If anyone can make something that fun again, it’s probably Valve.

Can’t answer as to why you would buy it again, but for me, I thought about replaying Braid recently only to discover that it was a pretty blurry mess. This looks a lot nicer, and commentary on video game design and development can be really interesting to me, especially since a lot of that is kept behind closed doors still.

Cool system; thanks for the run through!

Is it here in the post? I’ve looked all over and can’t find mention of that. There’s the video of the author clearing it, but that doesn’t imply that all levels are beatable.

Sony has already stated they are working on PC support and hope to release it this year: https://blog.playstation.com/2024/02/22/coming-soon-to-ps-vr2-zombie-army-vr-little-cities-bigger-wanderer-the-fragments-of-fate-the-wizards-dark-times-brotherhood-and-more/

Cool idea! I’m not really into survival or tower defense games, but I like the theme and the look of the whole thing. Survival games seem to be getting a lot of attention these days, so I hope you’re able to attract some of that because it seems like a cool idea for those into it.

Hopefully it also gives emulator devs a push to separate out the ROM decrypting piece from future emulators and make them only work with decrypted roms. Then the decryption piece can just be shared under the table, and the biggest piece of development, the emulator, will be protected.

Same; first time in years I’ve let it lapse and I’m realizing that I haven’t missed out on anything yet. It was really convenient when I had the higher tier for a bit there because they had a good amount of indie games I wanted to try. But I don’t have the same amount of time for gaming right now, and I would rarely finish those games anyway.

Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.

I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.

I’m not sure that’s really true what you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.

Wait til he hears there will actually be 3 parts.

Yeah, I think that’s probably best, mate, if the argument is shifting towards “why does being reasonable matter?”

Mate, me asking “how much is reasonable of us to ask of one person?” is not grandstanding; that’s just me countering your point. He has used his biggest platform to address issues in the game industry before, just like you want, so my point still stands: how much is reasonable of us to ask of him? Is it his responsibility to address each issue the industry has or is it reasonable for him to pick and choose his battles?

How do you know he isn’t? This feels like what happened with Kendrick Lamar during the police violence protests a few years ago in the States. NoName calls Kendrick out for not using his voice during the protests to lead people. Photos come out of him at protests, but covered up to be unrecognizable. Then years later Kendrick releases his latest album, talking about his addiction, new children, and nearly ruining his relationship, and addresses the protest thing with a song called Mirror and says “sorry I didn’t save the world, my friend, I was too busy building mine again.”

Keighley has gone to bat for the video game industry multiple times throughout his career. He has spent a lot of energy highlighting the work of developers and what actually goes into making a game. He garnered a reputation for asking real, sometimes hard questions to AAA developers, in defense of consumers. He addressed the sexual abuse horror. How much does this dude need to do until it’s enough for us? Why are we always so determined to hang shit like this on one dude? Why are we so quick to believe that all we see is all that is happening?

I actually enjoyed the game on the whole. If you’re a fan of Myst-likes, you may still enjoy it. But if I remember correctly, that particular puzzle I just looked up the exact solution as soon as I understood how to solve it; I’m not going to let any game waste my time like that lol

Yeah, I feel like we so easily forget that bigger does not mean better. If it’s larger than what the development team is capable of touching by hand, then more often than not it’s just empty or uninteresting space.

How would they even break up Steam? Separate their software and hardware development from the store? Can’t imagine that making any real impact on their practices.

But just because something existed before the Internet doesn’t mean it doesn’t still exist now. You say you’re using pre-90s expectations, but it’s a modern object still - so why would that help at all?

Ok!

Ah, the arrogance of not knowing what you don’t know. Except people are telling you that you are lacking knowledge of mergers, and you’re still demanding that you’re right. So now it’s willful ignorance.

Ah ok, gotcha. Who knows, I might agree once I actually pick the game up. I just don’t want a map filled with what feels to me like filler.

I just started this too! Agreed on all fronts. It’s gorgeous, the combat is refined and a combination of a lot of great old-school JRPG mechanics, I like all the winks and tongue-in-cheek mentions of classic tropes. I was just really hoping the story wasn’t going where I thought it was going. But now that I have gotten a certain bit in, it feels like it’s going exactly where I think it’s going. But it’s such a self-aware game that I hope I’m wrong. Because you’re right, the characters are actually likeable and do at times subvert tropes, blatantly even, like they know we expected them to behave a certain way. Fingers crossed.

That’s really great to hear. I heard an estimate of the game length elsewhere too. I’m really glad to hear that overall it’s generally a tighter experience rather than including a bunch of collectathons.

Yeah, I’m surprised there’s so much praise of the combat. There was a lot of feedback on the combat after the demo, so I wonder if they tightened it up before release.