I’m not denying that buggy games exist and that some big mistakes exist, but there’s a lot more games that are bug-free enough to be playable (I don’t believe any game will ever be fully bug free as they get more complex) than are unplayable. That’s all. I’m not defending the ones that do get released either. Though I’ll say it’s the fault of executives and not the actual developers. At the same time, there are specific scenarios where I get it and would defend it, but they’re rare and don’t really apply to AAA games (needing to release the game to stop from going out of business, and it’s only defensible if they still fix the issues after the fact. This obviously doesn’t apply when the decision to not push back release is for shareholder revenue instead).

Edit: my point is Cyberpunk 2077 is not the norm.

Because most games do work at launch and the initial sales are what drives development and more games. If it fails at launch, it didn’t matter how many folks buy it at $20, it’s not getting a sequel.

And what do you even mean by “sustainable” in this context? Obviously it’s sustainable at the other price as well, otherwise they’d stop doing it. I mean, let’s be glad most developers aren’t like Nintendo at least.

I mean, even if we accept that, it’s far from the normal. At least in regards to Jedi, it again, made the news cycles because of how buggy it was. Think about how many games come out a year, hell even a month.

Not saying buggy games don’t exist. Just that they’re not the norm.

Is it the new normal though? Pretty sure this is widely known because of its issues. I don’t think we’ve had anything reach those levels recently.

I got farther than you, but felt all of those things didn’t really improve or feel as fun. The weapon breaking is annoying. I feel like it’s too quick.

Edit: I eventually gave up after the ‘first’ boss (I know you can do them any order, but water blight is generally considered the easier one to do first).

Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

So I wasn’t totally right in that it doesn’t all come from Bing, but it largely does.

If I recall correctly, DuckDuckGo uses Bing’s search database (not search itself, just the database).

It’s worth the weird name if you care about maintaining privacy rights.

I blame that on Kbin.

I honestly don’t know how that interpretation was possible in the given context. It was mentioned in direct response to someone saying “Divinity of sin 2” and I corrected it.

Yes they do. They used to buy exclusive rights back during PS2 days but eventually both MS and Sony realized it’s cheaper to just buy the studios. Sony has only a small number fewer acquisitions than Microsoft. Both companies have always bought exclusivity.

Sony and Microsoft used to pay for exclusives without buying the studios. So there’s no real meat to the argument that “oh, the games were always exclusive because first party” or whatever. The consoles didn’t really buy that many game studios until relatively recently in gaming history. They would pay a studio to not release on other platforms. This whole buying studios thing was just cheaper in the long run. So there’s no real argument to be made about Sony just making better first party games. That’s what they do now given that they own the studios. Both companies are guilty of buying out studios.

Exclusives pre-dating the PS1 was more out of lack of technology. No cross platform tech really existed. There wasn’t a lot of crossover. Many platforms didn’t last more than a generation or two. There wasn’t even much cross over in the kind of games. If you liked fighting games, you bought a Sega over Nintendo for example. With the PlayStation, they competed against Sega first, Nintendo as more an afterthought. Xbox came in later to compete against PlayStation 2. The Nintendo 64 was just a different class, and even later, the GameCube. With Xbox and PlayStation, they had similar amounts of power and restraints (an N64 cartridge could not compete from a technical perspective against the storage of discs, plus multi-disc games could exist, not really feasible with cartridges) plus abstraction technology was more advanced and one could more easily write cross platform code. Now, you either had to pay for an exclusive or simply hope they only had the intent to target one platform (whether through preference or resource limitations). So the console wars really started to heat up after the death of Dreamcast and mainly between Sony and MS. Exclusivity wasn’t via first party existed, but not to s great extent beyond their flagship games.

So, tldr, exclusivity has always been acquired via money and buying them. It’s easy to say it’s about developing better first party once those studios were bought outright to begin with. That’s how most first party titles exist now.

Ok? But your experience doesn’t change what the number one reason given is though? Sure, I don’t get Pixel phone anymore either because two in a row failed on me, but I don’t go around telling everyone “no one buys pixel phones because they die easily”

If it doesn’t get it

Then we get great titles from other studios that just repackage the same shit day in and day out.

You don’t expect that from Sony so why expect it elsewhere? Sony started this game, gamers lauded them and rewarded them for doing it. Microsoft tried to not do that, and got beat down further than they had when they tried playing that game against Sony. Gamers wanted exclusives. Microsoft is providing that. You voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party and now are surprised leopards are eating your face.

This was a forgone conclusion for awhile now. Folks are just upset because Microsoft has an exclusive that Sony gamers want to play. Boo fucking hoo. I’m pissed it came to this, but gamers did this. I’m angry about it, but I don’t feel sorry for gamers as a whole about it.

I’m well aware of that. That’s why I named it. They said “Divinity of Sin 2”. I was asking if they meant Divinity: Original Sin 2 and if it went by a different name in other markets. I thought that was clear. I’m not sure how you got to think I was asking what it is.

It was expected to be a second release after being a Stadia exclusive. This isn’t judging quality, just impact.

Edit: and let’s not pretend by adding “far below” when it was in the same group. And the ranking isn’t even totally based on expected sales. The asking prices and the levels aren’t in order. You’re misinterpreting one quote entirely incorrectly and trying assuming too much from a chart.

It’s outselling is what caused Microsoft to not deny it. It originally denied it because they had a rule that games needed feature parity with both Series X and S. BG3 split screen couldn’t be done on S. The massive success is what led them to relax the rule. And virtually no one saw this level of success coming from within the gaming industry, including the developers themselves.

Edit: I just realized this is being upset about Starfield.

That is totally the fault of gamers. The biggest reason given for buying a PS5 over Xbox was exclusives. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Sony started the exclusives battle and continually came out ahead. Obviously MS is going to fight. Making exclusives such an important decision in console purchases drove exclusives to be important overall. There’s no sense in being upset that the industrynis literally responded to gamer’s actions and stated motivations.

easily gauge how it was going.

Except virtually everyone got it wrong still. Even the head of Larian thought it’d top out at 100k max. That’s currently it’s average now with it’s max being more than 800% higher.

BG is a big IP, but it’s never had this level of success. Look at Diablo III’s release (similar IP with a long break between games). It had better advertising campaign and still kind of became noise fairly quickly. Game news sites barely covered BG3 until it hit it big.

Microsoft definitely undershot, but it was likely basing it on a lot of the aggregated news as well. It had barely any coverage prior to its official release. This is usually a sign that the game will be mediocre.

Larian is a big studio but its last expected game from its really only known IP was cancelled after being put on hold for four years (granted BG3 was also being developed during this time). It’s biggest games prior to this got at least partially funded on Kickstarter (not a knock against KS, but it’s not generally seen as the sign of a strong studio to exec-types).

I don’t blame an executive for not seeing this coming.

Executives obviously didn’t see this coming. But neither did game journalists or even gamers.

Its a mistake in hindsight, but with what everyone generally knew at the time, it was the expectation of most.

Tbf, a lot of people misjudged it, including Larian. I don’t think a lot of people really believed the “choices and decisions matter” would work as well as it did. Prior to release, I read an article that talked about how it was gonna be neat that the in-game news would update based on your actions. Like, that was the noteworthy function to discuss about the game. “NPCs might talk about your actions in passing to each other”.

Did Microsoft underestimate it more than others? Sure. But pretending like every corporation, including Larian, didn’t underestimate it a whole lot is a bit crazy.

Edit: and isn’t the game Divinity: Original Sin II? Did it have other names in other international markets?

Edit: this was submitted as a response to https://lemmy.world/comment/3615435 but Kbin didn’t seem to actually tie them together. It shows me that it was written as a reply on Kbin, but seems to have lost connection to the comment hierarchy.

It’s a shame that it’s even considered “radical” since it’s basically a copyright holder upholding their end of the bargain in the promise behind the origin of copyright. To incentivize creative content, a creator is given sole ability to monetize it for a fixed period of time. In return for that protection, the public gets it at the end of the term. Today’s copyright is so far off course that it defeats the intent. There’s no incentive to create anything new if you can keep milking existing content. And the public never gets a return for offering that protection.

It likely ranges. A lot of time the counterfeit is good cheese, it’s just not from the correct region. It’s not like buying a “Soony Walkman” or something. And if you can’t tell it’s counterfeit by how it tastes after the fact, then who is this program protecting?

No, quality is independent of location of production. Proof of the pudding is in the eating as they say. Reputation is tied to the producer. Quality is tied to an individual instance of the product. Thats why certain things have QA tags. This technology doesn’t represent quality. It only verifies sourcing.

Somewhat of a tangent, but can we stop caring about the location where a product was made and focus solely on quality itself? Like, I bet the counterfeiters make a lot of money by producing quality cheese that taste just as good but are just made somewhere else.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair

Not anymore. Now available in the US.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair

Apparently just starting a few months ago, you can get fairphone in the US through Murena.

I’ve owned two Google phones (original XL and the pixel 4 XL) and both died at about 2 years. It may have just been bad luck, but it soured my whole outlook on them.

Kids aren’t the only ones with gaming consoles. And I already countered the idea of putting a console on a different TV.

Again, the price point may be high, but it’s literally not much more than the cost of a screen plus a controller.

Can one use the cloud streaming via their PS5?

Edit: also I don’t think it’s that niche. I see this being a common occurrence in any household with only one high end TV and more than one person who wants to use it. The price point isn’t much more than a controller and a screen to begin with. They should sell the remote play hardware without the screen (just hdmi out) and controller (just include a bluetooth chip to allow controller pairing) at a lower price point to appeal to a wider market (cause portability in the household seems less useful, but just using another TV seems more common)

Did you really just compare an iPhone to some hacked version of an android phone? No shit it’ll perform better. And complaining that you can’t stop yourself from installing bad applications so you need Apple to stop you is kind of a weird flex. Just be a responsible computer owner. Don’t just install anything because it’s there. Be aware of what you install.

And it’s kind of funny how you denigrate the other phone yourself and get mad that someone else did it towards your phone. Dont try too hard defending your decisions.

Just a note to all you can do the same thing with web.archive.org since archive.today (and all its associated other TLDs) is clearly doing with your info. They purposely won’t respond to CloudFlare DNS requests because CloudFlare doesn’t release extra information about you. The Archive owner released some half-assed story about per-country requirements, but DNS is the worst way to enforce that programmatically. So there is something shady there. Archive.today is shady in regards to your privacy. So if you’re using CloudFlare DNS, you’ll just get repeated captcha’s because Archive.today doesn’t follow correct DNS standards.

It looks like support is either up to the developer or simply optimization is up to the developer. They mention that extension devs should start optimizing their desktop extensions for mobile but doesn’t say whether that’s required or simply suggested as a non-optimized extension may not work properly.

But theoretically, any extension at the very least could be made to work on mobile. It appears to be an open system as opposed to now where it’s only approved ones.

A fairly unique game that I’ve played and have never experienced anything like it since, is Doki Doki Literature Club. It’s very easily spoiled, but one must be forewarned it is psychological horror and it’s warning at the beginning of the game is on point. It’s radically different than anything else here, but there’s also nothing like it that I can think of to compare it to. Sure, it’s basic gameplay is “visual novel” but it goes way beyond that. Again, it’s absolutely a psychological horror and it does touch on extremely sensitive topics. So avoid if that sounds problematic, but as a standalone work, it honestly creates a category all its own and I’ll likely never play a game that recreates anything close to it.

And totally different but a lot closer to other suggestions is the game Bastion. Very interesting time-manipulation puzzle solving with a intriguing plot story that doesn’t steal the focus but is still good enough to add value to the game.

Time travel games immediately make me think of Bastion.

Fandom is barely usable at this point. I feel like they’re just relying on no one wanting to put in the effort of coordinating a migration elsewhere.