I think Epic is moving more and more toward making Unreal Engine a film tool. If you’re spending days pre-rendering elaborate scenes, performance is a non-issue.

Don’t even look up anything about MMOs until you’re in the beta.

And don’t get invested until it’s been released for a year.

None of that will protect you from getting burned when the MMO you like dies, it’s just good practice.

I’m not talking about quality, I’m talking about media presence. Shite games are released all the time, but this game wasn’t exciting enough people. And Spiders isn’t big enough to just absorb “no press” and “low expectations” to continue working on a game that probably won’t recoup costs.

While it is sad to see a studio doing AA RPG shut down, I think Greedfall 2 has been kicking around expos for like 3 years and all the coverage of the game has been tepid at best. I’m unsurprised to hear this rumor.

You expect an official release of Tale of Two Wastelands?

Each game will be released separately for 70 dollars and will be disappointing.

I played the demo of the first game but I had never played a Souls game before, so I couldn’t properly compare even though I had some dissonant vibes with the combat pacing.

Glad they made enough to continue working.

That is a really cool idea. I think the problem is it’s just a bit too niche. A good portion of the people intrigued by the narrative and world-building might get stymied by the travel simulation (I’m envisioning both flying and sailing) and the simulation nerds might just skip past the text and story to get back into flying.

It’s certainly something that an indie dev has to shoulder for pure passion of seeing an idea come into the world, and that requires an idea that grabs you. Targeting it as an underserved market will only backfire.

Assuming you aren’t from Ukraine, how much did Ukraine impact your daily life/touch your daily awareness before it became a battlefield? Countries shouldn’t gain more respect just because they’re incorporated as a country, especially when it’s halfway across the world.

(Researched, via Wikipedia and WorldPopulationReview) Missouri has a population of 6.3 million and total land area of ~178K km; larger in size than countries like Greece and Hungary, and more populous than countries like Denmark and Finland and Ireland. So it should be less regarded than any of those countries because it remains a state?

My stance is: either you should believe any population center of a reasonably large size/population density is worth memorizing or you should just memorize the ones relatively important to you.

There are probably distinct provinces in Canada and China outperforming many countries, so why should they exist on a lower tier than a “country”, just because they were persuaded or “persuaded” to incorporate into something larger?

That’s probably true.

Just like I suspect most Europeans couldn’t point out Mississippi or Missouri or Missachetts on the map.

Or even know that “Missachetts” isn’t a real state.

Maybe it’s a US/EU difference, where EU people wanted to be more specific. I was responding to the incorrect claim that nobody uses the the term “eurojank”.

I wonder if they’re really huffing the shit they’re spewing? How much are they getting paid?

While I commiserate with people not wanting to be “typecast” like the other dev complaining about the term JRPG, I’ve never parsed the terms as boxing in devs to their location. “JRPG” and “eurojank” are posthoc titles describing where the collection of features coalesced. Just like Expedition 33 is a JRPG, despite japanese RPGs pioneering the feature set and aesthetic back in the 90s.

“Eurojank” is more aesthetic and ‘vibe’ than genre features though.

I’ve literally never seen anyone call it “slavjank”

Having lots of money earned does not make a person bad.

They never said that. So maybe you’re disagreeing with their reasoning because you don’t know what it is.

They say billionaires are bad because they have a lot of money and don’t use it to help people. This isn’t even talking about billionaire who engage in actually/actively morally wrong deeds to acquire money.

If you produce a product so excellent that consumers give you 1 billion dollars ($1.000.000.000) in pure profit, there would be no problem if you kept a nest egg to ensure your livelihood and then used the rest to provide aid where it’s needed. You would still be a bad person for sitting on it, instead of spreading it to help people that aren’t well off. A person can live very well on $300K pretty much anywhere in the world: that means $999,700,000 is not materially improving your life and you are hoarding it for no good reason.

And they’re gilded in the wealth they’ve fleeced from their workers and their normal, individual consumers.

Prancing and jeering for the AI companies they’ve sold and shackled themselves to.

Props to them for massively increasing scope from the first game.

Bipeds can distinctly kick, punch, and also hold things into those punchers like merch and brand deals.

Bipeds are the ideal form for human propaganda.

I’ve heard it’s SE Asian, not Hawaiian

You can’t force engagment by picking a guy whose name is Matt Booty, Microsoft.

It’s the same thing as stabbing a guy who says “what are you gonna do, stab me?”

You can traverse the majority of both maps, fight random spawns and talk to NPCs, in constructed cities, that have dialogue, trade, and occassionally provide quests.

Besides the dozens of standalone miscellaneous quests, Abecean Shores includes a full palette of faction questlines. Players will encounter some familiar factions from Morrowind, like the Thieves Guild, Fighters Guild, and Mages Guild, but you’ll also find dynamic new factions, including the Itinerant Priests and the Kingdom of Anvil itself. Altogether, Abecean Shores includes over 160 quests, guaranteeing dozens of hours of playtime.

‐https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44922

It represents the work of many talented modders over the past years and includes the following features:

• 100+ quests, including new regional questlines for the Imperial Guilds, bounty hunting, and miscellaneous quests
• 290+ exterior cells of hand-crafted landscape.
• 330+ interior cells, including the massive cities of Karthwasten and Dragonstar, towns, camps, and dozens of locations for you to loot in classic TES fashion.
• Specially-modeled exterior and interior assets to flesh out the settlements of the Reach, including Reachman camps, Direnni ruins, and ancient fortresses.
• New books, armor, clothing, weapons, and more.

-https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44921

What is your definition of “some thing to play”? When was the last time you even looked into those regions? Please don’t go around spreading misinformation and devaluing the time, effort, and content produced by dedicated fans if you can’t spare the time to keep up-to-date.

Cyrodiil (Project Cyrodiil) and Skyrim (Skyrim Home of the Nords) are absolutely in a playable state, but those areas are very much betas and the rest of Tamriel doesn’t exist.

What you described as enjoyable isn’t “Skyrim” that’s just the Gamebryo engine. The Companions don’t figure into a physics glitch that rockets you up to kiss the twin moons. Nocturne and the Nightingales aren’t relevant to a horse glued at an 85° angle to a mountain face. You’re just describing mucking around in a less interactive GMod. But people did like the mage who pancaked himself with a jump spell, the woman who is absolutely a necrophiliac, and Glarthir’s deranged quest. Actual components of those games that were done well. We all want them to make the game better so we actually want to experience all the bits that are well done and funny.

The Elder Scrolls isn’t popular because of the shitty engine. It’s memed because of the engine, but the games are generally fun enough to keep playing through the more benign bugs. And, like shared trauma, we all laugh about the bad bits in hindsight.

This is the sort of pipedream, hyperspecific indie project I only want to learn about after the dev’s been working on it for 14 years already, and it’s only 6 more years until it finally releases.

What the hell kinda complaint is this?

I don’t even know how you read those terms without immediately reading the explanation of the game terms that followed.

Quote:

The [f]luid mystic system draws directly from the Spirit Pearl, letting players temporarily awaken special abilities or enhance weapons with EX effects tied to divine water.

Another primary mechanic is Relic Fusion, combining mythic artifacts for new skills. Examples include pairing Hou Yi’s Bow with multi-armed abilities for archery techniques, or using the Palm Leaf Fan alongside water-based traps to control enemies.

Thanks for the TL;DR. The title led me to believe the post was going to be clickbait built off a nothingburger and it seems I was right.

Best I can do ya is Betty Boop with a chef’s knife in the shadows.

87. Where did it show the maximum?

You also didn’t hear about it because it’s not great. I watched a stream of it: the gameplay looks uninspired, like a student project to mimic Burnout, and the visuals would have looked dated in 2010.

But it was functional. So it’s neither good nor bad enough to rave about. You just say “huh”, flip a coin, and either uninstall forever or play every 7 months when you remember it’s on your hard drive.

There is a functional product. I played it years ago.

But it ain’t finished yet, which is the insane bit given the breadth of funds and length of time.

You are in essence gatekeeping enjoying a video game as a concept. Like people must enjoy them the way you envision.

What an incredibly inaccurate statement. I love modding video games, I spend more time modding video games than I spend playing video games. I understand that the vision developers have doesn’t often align with what I want from their product.

I don’t agree that developers should be spending dev cycles making a game functional for a user that turns off any configuration of gameplay mechanics.

Saying you can just set a variable from “true to false” is so laughably misunderstanding what goes into software development much less game development that it sounds entitled. What gameplay mechanics are you even saying should be configurable? All of them? Just turn off the combat in a fighting game? At what point is a gameplay mechanic integral to the genre/experience? And who is the person or persons that decide?

Developers should be free to create what they want, and the end user is free to mod it however they want. That includes, for the devs, not purposefully obfuscating things so that modding is more diffcult.

I disagree because it solely approaches games as some sort of “electronic commodity” and outright despises a development group’s artistry.

Sure, not every game is trying to be art. But games have long gone beyond the realm of simply “entertain me”. That opinion is like saying “books should be made in a way that allows users to change the story whenever and however they want.” It is something you can do but there’s no imperative to cater to it.

I think we should see what it’s priced at before we start making proclamations about the Steam Machine being the “standard gaming PC”.

Indie and AA.

I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.

Maybe I’m suddenly shite at games but parrying feels like happenstance rather than a technique. The block windup is too long for me to react to the quick strike they throw out. It feels like Skyrim combat, from a “battle flow” standpoint.

I have watched video game let’s plays on Pornhub, once. As a novelty.

Luckily I never claimed that I did. And those “one-dude-did-it-all-in-a-week” games are getting eclipsed by things people churn out in a 48 game jam, what’s you’re point?

I can tell you’re just an ornery arse, so I’m gonna dip.

Plus, making games is so much easier that the industry is cranking out more games than ever. Even if the proportion of stinkers stays constant, someone with bad statistics knowledge and an obsession with the negative would notice an increased number of bad games.

Whoa, what the hell. How are you throwing Totalbiscuit and the entirety of GamerGate’s scandals and social furor into the same, offhand pile?

John was strongly opinionated and enjoyed being a bit of a smug ass as his online persona, but he was mainly about making games more accessible by advocating for more, and more inclusive, settings for all the games he played.