It’s written in Brainfuck, but it’s really really good. Trust me, bro!

Are we remaking Attack on Titan?

Absolutely this.

If we’re going to take a Metroidvania as an example of this lesson, let’s take Environmental Station Alpha. The game has a ton of potential as a good Metroidvania that is buried in a thick armor of speedrunner-level difficulty. I have never seen a Metroidvania be so stingy about health tanks, and this game desperately needs all of the health tanks you can get. It stinks of a developer team playtesting the hell out of their own game, and making difficulty decisions based on years of their own self-testing experience.

When you release a game with a Normal difficulty, no Hard difficulty, and then are forced to create a Easy difficulty after release, you know you’ve fucked up.

Here’s how you do it: You can playtest your own game, but that one gets the “Hard” label. If you playtest for a Normal difficulty and you can’t imagine how to create a Hard difficulty, the difficulty range is completely off. And Hard doesn’t mean “only people in the double-digits can beat it”. That’s not even a scale, or just reserve that for some “Impossible” difficulty, if you want to get to 5-6 levels, like Doom does.

Normal should be some reasonable setting based on how others playtest the game. Get some expectations from your playtest audience in terms of the kinds of games they’ve played and beat before. Are they complete noobs to any sort of fast-paced gameplay, or have they beaten other Metroidvanias or games like Cuphead? Based on that, figure out whether the advice they give you applies to an Easy or Normal difficulty curve.

You can’t just, independently, as a single person, “have your own game engine”. It has to be designed for a specific type of game, with a specific style. You don’t have the time or resources to develop one that is an omnibus toolbox.

Even then, people should be using Godot now, especially indie developers. Spend the time and resources enriching an existing open-source game engine.

They have to kick off kids from their game, legally, and nearly all mobile and online games that have any way to spend real money will be doing the same within the next year.

Good. Gambling is illegal for minors under the age of 18.

I don’t think even IGN has much of any critical/cultural/marketing value anymore so good luck to any other website

IGN, the EA of games “journalism”.

that somehow instead of a yes/no is instead an article of 20 paragraphs saying nothing

That we’ll later summarize with another LLM.

Good job, reporter! You’ve done your work to signal boost an AAA game for corporate profits without managing to actually add any new information!

Games “Journalism” 2025!

I was watching a video recently from Coincident about a demo from Okuplok running through his own map.

Wow, this “journalist” had no idea what games programming was like back then. Yars Revenge even used its own code to display the neutral zone. There were a lot of creative tricks like that to save on memory and CPU.

Tanks!

Had a ton of fun with that one when I was a kid.

Imagine going back to exclusivity with gaming consoles. PCs, and by extension, Steam won the console wars, and Nintendo is just trying its damnest to hold on to the last gasp of gaming exclusivity.

My god… stop giving money to these guys and holding on to this Sunken Cost Fallacy.

I’m not trying to frame this in the context of the lawsuit, even though that’s the point of the original article. The Crew’s nonfunctionality is just a consequence of our lack of ownership.

Perhaps this article would explain things better than I could.

Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty

No. That’s not true. Otherwise people wouldn’t be reciting this phrase over and over again.

Consumers want to fucking own shit again! Renting everything is the entire fucking problem.

A studio that has never produced a finished game, yes. They have to prove themselves and demonstrate that they can actually release a finished game first.

Otherwise, we have zero evidence that they are going to follow through with their broken promises.

You said “Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to make a profit.”

Even in my wildest liberal dreams, I can’t invent a sentence so brazenly unrealistic. If you don’t want corporations to make a profit, you basically don’t want corporations at all. It’s pointless to even frame things in the context of capitalism at that point.

Capitalism is an evil and shitty system. Just say that, instead of trying to redefine what capitalism is.

Stop cherry-picking. GTA’s development cycle is atypical.

Also, the key thing about that is the number 6 in its name. It’s the SIXTH game! Out of the FIVE that they released! They get to have a big large studio and spent an asinine amount of money on a new game because they already made millions on other released games.

This may help. And this.

Perhaps the real problem is the length of copyright. The direction copyright has gone is the exact opposite of the speed of technology.

Star Citizen, of course. SQ42 is just an extension of those hopes and dreams.

Neither have been in development as long as modern AAA titles

That’s false from every interpretation of the sentence.

Yeah, he realized that the hook was worth more than the actual game. Why finish a game that could tank, when you could promote hopes and dreams forever?

Do you remember the music from the last Marvel film you watched?

I don’t.

That’s a different kind of problem.

How are the two related?

A user obtains the game through legitimate means by “buying” the game. However, they do not own the game, and are in fact, just renting something. This is despite decades and decades of game buying, especially pre-Internet, equating to owning the game and being able to play the game forever, even 100 years from now.

By pirating the game, a user has clawed back the implied social construct that existed for decades past: Acquiring a game through piracy means that you own the game. You have it in a static form that cannot be taken away from you. There’s still the case of server shutdowns, like this legal case is arguing. But, unlike the “buyer”, the game cannot suddenly disappear from a game’s store or be forcefully uninstalled from your PC. You own it. You have the files. They cannot take that away from you.

The phrase essentially means: You have removed my means of owning software, therefore piracy is the only choice I have to own this game. It’s not stealing because it’s the only way to hold on to it forever. You know, because that’s what fucking “buying” was supposed to mean.

I would relish a lawsuit against EULAs where the defendant somehow sends the prosecutor a EULA in a software package that declares that they automatically lose the lawsuit by clicking Agree.

It would really hammer in the point that fucking NOBODY reads this shit.

Goddammit… get the quote right:

If buying ain’t owning, piracy ain’t stealing.

Because it’s a hack-and-slash Diablo clone. The whole point is quantity of enemies.

If you want Dark Souls, go make another game and call it something else. You can’t just make Starcraft, and then say that Starcraft 2 is going to be an FPS.

Yes, because getting so lost in the skill tree that you can easily gimp your character by clicking on the wrong node is exactly the direction they need to push more towards.

Yeah, it’s not his rockets. There was a lot of hard work behind them by literal rocket scientists.

If anything, the rockets have excelled despite his stupidity.

Look up Soma Transmissions. There was also a bunch of short stories about the game. The one about climbing the big orbital gun to the top really stuck with me.

And there was more characters than just the scary proxy things.

Soma is far far more than a horror game. The horror aspects are secondary to the transhumanist questions it raised every hour you were playing it.

Unepic wasn’t bad, but doesn’t hold a candle to Terraria. It’s still my favorite sandbox game.

The fact that this headline has to call out the studio that made a 30-year-old game speaks volumes as to why they have to lay people off.

It’s been especially bad over the last year. WB is in freefall at this point.

It seems it would be pretty easy to blame this on David Zaslav, but the games department specifically has been fucking up like never before: Mortal Kombat, Multiversus, Gollum, Kill the Justice League. Just name a WB game that came out, and it’s been an abysmal failure, with similar games from other studios doing much much better.

I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.

The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.

Especially from places like RPS and Kotaku.

Huh? For £70 I’m getting

Based on what? You don’t actually know until it gets released. Sure, past history and reputation are certainly things to factor in, but we’ve seen plenty of major gaming companies shit the bed, despite their reputations.

Wait until it launches and the reviews come in.

Release timing is always a critical thing to think about, whether you’re talking about games, movies, TV series, or toys.

The portal gun doesn’t really fit in a Half-Life game. The mechanics of the gun almost demand an enclosed space, with flat surfaces and puzzles that require the player to understand that they’re solving a puzzle. The portal gun would break the outside world too easily, as players figure out how to just zoom past everything, and not follow the linear path that FPSs like Half-Life guide towards. Testing surfaces for game breaks and boundary checks would be a QA nightmare. It doesn’t kill enemies in any useful way, which is the primary function of a FPS weapon.

It is a puzzle gun, in a puzzle game. And that’s okay.

BG3 is the triplest of triple-A. It’s a four studio game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, a major IP license and half a decade of development.

The budget was $25 million for BG3, not hundreds of millions. It is not a “four-studio game”. It’s ties to D&D are far far easier to license than most IP, since it’s literally called the Open Game License.

Concord cost $400 million. The latest CoD game cost $600 million. Starfield was $200 million. The latest Assassin’s Creed was $300 million.

If anything, the AAA guys are still raking it in.

Ubisoft is in trouble. EA is in trouble. Games divisions for Sony, Microsoft, and WB are in trouble. These are all AAA studios, not the “middle of the pack”.