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Yeah, I’m… skeptical, to say the least. I don’t think any of these sprawling, massively-scoped “everything games” have ever actually lived up to the hype. It’s a problem of pure logistics. Making a game with so many different segments each with entirely unique gameplay loops is essentially like developing more than half a dozen games at once. It’s the problem Spore had - the scope was just too broad, and even with EA and Will Wright behind it, it eventually released as a pretty decent creature creator stapled to four shallow, rushed game stages.
No studio has the resources or inclination to commit to the 10-15+ year development cycle for a single game needed to fit that much scope, and even if they did, the entire game design landscape would have changed between the beginning and the end of the project, which would make major technical and design components of the game obsolete before it was even finished.
I’d put money on this game either becoming vaporware or releasing as a chaotic, disjointed mess with the depth of a puddle. I’d love to see them prove me wrong, but I just don’t see how anyone could overcome those kinds of logistical hurdles.
Humble used to be an event that celebrated and showcased indie developers while at the same time raising many millions for charities. Then IGN bought it and rapidly enshittified it into a bog-standard, for-profit corporate enterprise like any other, and I’ll never forgive them for it.
Do they even give any of the profits to charity any more? If they do, I bet they only keep it around to take advantage of the tax writeoffs.
“Product Degradation” has been the modus operandi for nearly every online service for like 10-15 years now, but it’s the Gamepass price increase is what got the FTC’s attention? Where was the FTC when the movie/TV streaming service market balkanized itself in an arms race to reinvent cable?
Granted, I doubt the FTC could really do anything meaningful to stop enshittification given that corporations are effectively above the law these days, but it’s been blatantly obvious that this was going to be Gamepass’ strategy from day one. If this actually surprised anyone at the FTC, they really haven’t been paying attention.
In that case, I’m still not sure what the Intellivision brand even has left that Atari would want… I guess they could do one of those nostalgia re-release collections of old Intellivision games, but I feel like the nostalgia market for a nearly 50-year-old console mostly known for being a failed competitor to the 2600 is… very niche.
Huh, first I’m hearing of this Amico thing. I don’t know if it really has the support to capture enough of the market it seems to be going for… It looks like it’s trying to go for the “family-friendly, easy-to-use” concept that the Wii had, but the Wii had Nintendo behind it, along with other major publishers making games for it. The games included also look rather… basic.
…Annnnd it’s also a Tommy Tallarico thing. Of course it is. Why on earth does Atari want this?
Did Mario Maker have any kind of safeguards against users publishing troll levels that were just physically impossible to beat? Since there’s only one uncleared level left, I assume so, but I would’ve thought that the easiest way to verify a level could be beaten would be to make the creator beat it themselves before it could be uploaded.
I would’ve expected either loads of unbeaten levels or no unbeaten levels at all, but having only one unbeaten level is interesting…
Id, Bioware, and Bethesda have all been mentioned, and are strong contenders.
Ludeon Studios and Ghost Ship Games each only really have one game (RimWorld and Deep Rock Galactic, respectively), but they’re so damn good and they both have such a strong relationship with their communities that they’re definitely among my favorites at the moment.
I have a love/hate relationship with Paradox Interactive. Their DLC model… leaves a lot to be desired, but I have yet to find much else that scratches the grand strategy itch in the same way they do, and the level of mod support they provide is impressive. I don’t know if I can call them my favorite, but I’ve logged over 1000 hours into EU4 alone, so I have to at least mention it, I feel.
We don’t currently foresee any changes to our funding model, as Homecoming is not required to pay any up-front or recurring license fees. We continue to be overwhelmed by the generosity of the community when it comes to keeping the server online.
It doesn’t seem like Homecoming is having to pay anything for the license, at least. It’s not like NCSoft is able to make any money from CoH anymore, so they may just be taking an opportunity to build some community goodwill for little opportunity cost. If they demanded any revenue for the license, it’d cause community backlash, and a donation-funded fan server of a long-dead MMO almost certainly wouldn’t be able to afford any meaningful licensing costs, anyway.
I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a remake/remaster. If a game doesn’t run well on modern hardware and/or its online features are long gone, a remake can be justified. But to be a truly great remaster, it should also improve upon the original without messing with what made it great.
For example, the Age of Empires remasters were phenomenal, and the AoE2 remaster in particular basically revived the entire series. Not only did it add a fresh coat of paint visually, proper HD/widescreen support, stability updates, and such, there’s been a pretty solid stream of new content and extended support. And it wasn’t even sold as a full-price title to begin with.
But remakes of games that still run fine on modern hardware, don’t really add much of anything new, and are priced at or near full-price? Yeah, cheap cash grab. There’s no reason to remake a game less than 10 years old.
The problem with the Steam Awards is that they try to get as many people to vote as possible, even if people haven’t actually played the games in question.
People will see a bunch of games they haven’t played, be like “oh hey I at least know the name of that one” and vote for it even though they have no idea if the others are more deserving or not.
SR4 is where the series jumped the shark for me. Turning up all the wacky random insanity worked great for SR3 and helped it find a niche to differentiate itself from other GTA-likes, but trying the exact same thing again made it go from parody to farce. It was very obviously trying so hard to top SR3’s absurdity, but it just went so insanely overboard with it that I got desensitized to it, and it all came across as just plain stupid.
And on top of that, they give you superhero powers that basically make using cars obsolete… in a GTA-like. The vehicle customization was one of the best systems of SR3, but they actively disincentivized using vehicles altogether in 4.
I played CDDA for a while about 5 years ago. I really enjoyed it for a while, but after a certain point it seemed like the devs just got more interested in simulating fiddly minutiae to micromanage in excruciating detail over actually developing interesting new content or fixing existing broken systems.
NPCs were an absolute mess around that time, but the devs were messing around with implementing individual vitamin and mineral meters and making installing bionics more fiddly.
It’s funny that Aftermath is writing about bad game journalism practices when they themselves have an initial “you must register to read our articles,” but then after registration, hit you with an actual hard paywall after a couple of articles.
If they want to paywall their content, that is their prerogative, but they could at least be up-front about it, instead of only telling me about it after I went through the trouble of creating an account.
Yeah this about sums up my feelings on it. The main story seemed alright from what I experienced, and the characters seemed fairly interesting. Better-written than FO4, at least. I was particularly charmed by the PC’s parents that you get when you take that one perk at character creation.
But the exploration just feels… dull and empty. Surveying planets just felt like a chore, and any particular landing spot on a planet was just a few cookie cutter lairs scattered among a bunch of nothing. Didn’t feel like you were actually discovering anything interesting.
It’s kinda crazy how quickly people just… stopped talking about Starfield after release. Like, even if it ended up being bad or disappointing, people would’ve at least still been talking about it in that capacity.
Starfield was one of the most hyped releases in years, at least since Cyberpunk, yet when it finally released, it seems like the entire gaming world played it for a few days, collectively decided, “eh, this is alright I guess,” then moved on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mood towards a game shift so rapidly from massive hype to complete indifference…
Been going through Gotham Knights on Gamepass, it’s solid. It doesn’t stand up to the best of the Arkham series, but it’s at least an interesting twist on the idea, and the Arkham formula still holds up.
Also been on a totally random RollerCoaster Tycoon kick. Haven’t played in years, but for some reason I felt like getting into it again. It’s incredible how well it still holds up.
I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there’s too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn’t 100% ready.
Unfortunately, there’s no real good answer for this as a consumer… If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.
The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it’s not even remotely close to being a reality. I’d say that if the game appeals to you and you don’t mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don’t.
The reason that it’s so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.
I don’t have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn’t really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn’t already provide. If the quality of Steam’s experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don’t really have any complaints about Steam?
Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.
They don’t actually let admins shut down their wikis or remove content from them. They can leave and start a new wiki, but they have to leave the old one in place (for which Fandom could potentially just find new admins), and they can only link to the new wiki from the Fandom wiki for a period of two weeks. With Fandom’s SEO, there’s a good chance the Fandom wiki will still be ahead of search results of a new wiki even after migration. Source
I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn’t all that appealing these days.
I miss Wikia…
Yeah, he led the design. The whole thing was his brainchild, iirc.