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This video series sounds like it might be up your alley. Guy documents his attempts to simulate a goblin society and ecosystem.
An emotional box? Enough about my wife!
Hopefully someone with better info than me will chime in (my algorithm occasionally coughs up LOTRO vids, but I haven’t played seriously in some time). I believe that there are two stated reasons for the situation, both relating to the age of the game. The first is that the remaining player base is not big enough to support the number of servers currently offered, and so consolidation will help the game feel more alive at any given moment. The second reason is that the legacy servers are 32 bit, and they want to modernize to a 64 bit architecture. So, two birds, one (standing) stone.
Just came from another thread detailing them walking back the skin=class change. Glad to that’s being fixed, as that’s definitely the most egregious issue, but I’m very disappointed to hear the gunplay is less impactful. That was KF2’s biggest strength imo, esp as a Commando main when I played it frequently. Popping domes in slo Mo was art.
It sounds like they had moved to a more restrictive system. It’s been a long time since I played KF2, so my memory could be suspect, but I recall your “character” being not much more impactful than a weapon skin.
The meat and potatoes was actually what class you picked, which perks you selected from that class (you got a new choice every 5 levels or so), and then what weapons you rolled with. This will be hypothetical because I don’t actually know the particulars, but I think it’s generally illustrative of KF2’s progression design:
Load in, select Demolitionist class, get a +1%/level damage bonus with explosives and incendiaries as my class trait. Hit level 5. Choose between doubling the AOE of my Molotov cocktails or being able to carry two extra frag grenade. And so on. Any “character” could be any class, and could freely tailor perk choices to their liking.
Are you actually proposing incorporating elements of the BR genre (choosing drop locations, looting, encroaching zone time limit, limited respawning, etc) or do you just want bigger arenas and more players in your regular Twisted Metal death match? Cause I don’t actually think Twisted Metal is as suited for the BR genre as you say, but I could be convinced otherwise if you have a take.
It’s a holdover from the early days of Rainbow Six would be my guess. You had like a dozen or so operatives with mild differentiations in stats and traits. Each guy had a “service record” of sorts, which gave a little more context for what was, in essence, the games’ lives system. If I remember right, some of these names were either pulled from or incorporated into the Tom Clancy Universe of novels and adaptations. It was a practically free way to inject some story and character into games that were pretty light on those details otherwise.
Of course, modern Rainbow Six has no need for these things, but inertia is a bitch, and you can be sure some grognards would piss and moan about a “feature” being removed if they stopped including these details.
I’m speculating, and certainly not a business expert, so heaping handfuls of salt comes with this statement: I think part of the problem that led to this is that each game was published by a different entity. Square published 2016, then put the devs up for sale the following year, citing underperformance. IO buys itself out and becomes independent, but needs capital to get Hitman 2 across the finish line. Enter a publishing deal with Warner Bros. That game proves successful enough that Hitman 3 is able to be self-published.
Considering IO’s concept of this World of Assassination trilogy was always that it would have certain online-only or live servicey features, and I assume that publishers often provide the necessary infrastructure for these things, I wonder if the rotating chair of publishers is to blame for making this process so much more obtuse than it needs to be.
Please do not connect multiplayer shenanigans into my Doom campaign. It seems vanishingly rare nowadays to get a AAA shooter with as much, if not more, love put into its campaign mode, if it has one at all. Have your death match LAN parties all you like, keep the dream of the 90s alive and all, but I’m not too proud to beg that it stay its own disconnected thing.
I agree that a flawed product is typically better fodder for analysis than either something “perfect” or “abysmal”, and hey, if the scale works for you, don’t let me yuck your yums. You had the courtesy to explain what the ratings mean, which is more than many such systems give you. I think I am simply preconditioned to equate a ten point system as roughly analogous to school grades, e.g. 6 represents the lowest “passing” grade, so I was taken aback by your system.
ETA a minor note for your consideration: pre designating your ratings as 4-7 sort of boxes you in as a reviewer. I think the premise of “I’m going to examine games whose reception was tepid to lukewarm” is valid and interesting. However, your rating scale operates on a preconceived notion that the reception these games received was correct and that, by virtue of your having selected the game for review, it will be a 4-7/10 game. Of course, I’m sure you’re willing to color outside of the boundaries of that range if you feel moved to do so by a gameplay experience, but I felt it should be point out that even titling your post “Mid Game Reviews: XYZ” is something of an argument, for better or for worse. I know seeing “mid game” and “dark forces” in the title got me to click, again, because my nostalgia for the game overrides any desire to do an objective assessment (which, to be clear, is a me problem, not you). I’m just imagining a post like “Mid Game Reviews: The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time” and the sorts of response that would evoke, even if your review was “idk how this ended up in my queue, this is a masterpiece 10/10”. Do with this perspective what you will.
Thank you for your review. I disagree with your conclusion wholeheartedly, but I acknowledge the role of nostalgia in my personal estimation of the game.
However, I have to know: why 7-4/10? What purpose does that scale serve, especially if a 7/10 is a game “every gamer should try”.
I mean, I get it, you’re focusing on “mid” games, so your scale reflects that focus. But, if the top end of your scale is a game you believe should be universally beloved, well, it’s not a review of a “mid” game anymore. Unless you think that an 8/10 is a game that not just every gamer should play, but every person. In which case, what is a 9/10, or, God forbid, a 10/10?
In conclusion, a Brennan Lee Mulligan rant about arbitrary points systems.
Cause it doesn’t matter if they are still profitable. If you aren’t MORE profitable than your last outing, then you aren’t growing, and if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.
However, I wonder if the premise is flawed here. In 1999, you could probably get a somewhat accurate idea of a game’s profitablity by comparing dev cost vs units sold. However, with live service being the AAA fascination du jour, and Call of Duty in particular having a whole game mode siloed off into the free to play space, I question if “units sold” is indicative of financial success anymore.
Remakes are not inherently devoid of creativity. And, frankly, Capcom seems to have a pretty decent track record when it comes to revisiting their IP, at least as far as the Resident Evil series. Case in point, the remake of RE1 from way back in the GameCube days is, arguably, the definitive way to experience that story. It retained the core features of the OG game, but expanded upon them, and remixed certain aspects to keep the experience fresh, even for a diehard fan of the OG. I would like to have seen the face of someone who played the hell out of RE1 watching a dispatched zombie resuscitate as a Crimson Head for the first time.
More recently, the RE 2 and 3 remakes offer a wildly different experience from their original blueprints, what with the change in perspective and what not. However, rather than overhauling everything about those games into RE4 style action games, as the perspective would imply, they maintain an emphasis on inventory management, puzzles, and evading danger rather than confronting it. This keeps the remakes feeling like the games that they are based upon, but offers a different gameplay experience, one that is less of an ask for modern players to adapt to.
So, idk man. Call me a simpleton lining up to suckle at corporate teats if you like, but I’m pretty fucking excited over the idea of a Dino Crisis remake.
He was dismissed for “gross misconduct” following an investigation into his involvement in sexual harassment. One of the articles has the guy’s lawyer saying it was a sham investigation because he was not involved in it (as in, was not questioned). Which, if this were a court of law, where a defendant has the right to confront their accusers, then sure, he’s got a point.
But it wasn’t that, and clearly Sony/Bungie felt that he was a greater liability than an asset. That leads me to believe that they DID find evidence of wrongdoing on his part, convincing enough that questioning him was unnecessary, and severe enough that they felt they could terminate him for cause. In taking those steps, I’m certain they cleared it with legal to ensure that their case was as airtight as they could make it, especially if there was a 45 million dollar payment at stake.
So, maybe he’s being truthful, and he was a convenient fall guy for Bungie to throw to the wolves during the height of the scrutiny on them. However, until there’s more convincing evidence available than, “well they didn’t ask ME if I harassed my colleagues”, I’m not buying it. Discovery will be interesting.
Not much to say about the wider conversation here, but I just want to chime in to support your position. I read that article you posted, and I was kinda chuckling to myself at the author, who seems to be at least a casual fan of deckbuilder type games, arguing that the devs are wrong, and that the cards were not a barrier to entry. Meanwhile, I’m sitting over here, looking at the copy I have in my steam library which has never been touched, specifically because I heard it was a deckbuilder and immediately lost all interest. This despite the otherwise fairly positive reception the game got, and the hundreds of hours I’ve spent in Firaxis style tactical strategy games.
Sometimes I wish I knew why I have such a mental block about deckbuilding. I think the layers of strategy become too abstract for me to visualize what I’m trying to pull off, and it feels artificial in a way that rubs me the wrong way. Even if a 3 turn cool down on an ability is no less artificial, it doesn’t irk me in the same way.
And for the record, I didn’t buy the game just to never play it, its a family library copy! I’m not that wasteful.
I’m not busy this week, but I have no money with which to purchase anything I find this particular sale. Want to combine powers? If you tell me what sort of itch you are seeking to scratch, I’ll come back with some relevant options I find trawling through the sale listings. That way I can maybe find something outside my usual bubble for myself come the winter sale, and you don’t necessarily need to wade into the waters yourself.
Whether it’s and advantage or not depends on your perspective. If you want the fediverse to supplant Big Tech, then no, having a culture which is not welcoming of outsiders is not an advantantage.
However, if you happen to be a part of Lemmy’s “in-group”, you probably don’t want a bunch of “normies” flooding in and cluttering up your feed with what you consider to be low effort shitposts, or starting drama in the comments. In that sense, maintaining a barrier to entry is an advantage because, in this mindset, if they can’t be bothered to wrap their head around a slightly more complex signup than usual, than they weren’t going to be good members of this community.
Perhaps some will disagree with my interpretation of the two popes (I meant poles, but I’m keeping the typo) of users here. To be clear, I’m not ascribing a value judgment to either position. I think both have valid points, and, frankly, I’m not sure where I come down on it.
Any playersof CoC willing to chime in on the key differences which push that game into a more investigative space than your typical DnD style dungeon crawl adventure? I mean, I assume there are things like a sanity mechanic, as well as an emphasis on player fragility, but I’m curious if there are other systems at play which separate the two RPGs even further.
I suppose I cling to the old adage that a bad game is bad forever, while a delayed game may some day be good. It’s less true today than when Miyamoto said it (No Man’s Sky being the commonly cited example of a game which was able to turn its radioactive launch into a fairly positive experience), but I still believe it’s more accurate than not. I’m picking on a straw man here, but I wonder how many of those “gamers” bemoaning Halo’s long absence also look down their noses at the yearly release mill of sports games. Far as I’m concerned, new games in a franchise should come when the creators feel they have something new to showcase. A new mechanic, new engine, a new plot, whatever. Obviously, the games industry at large is perfectly happy to ok boomer me, and I’m perfectly happy to keep mining through my backlog of games which manage to be fun without live updates.
This article, or corpo propaganda depending on your cynicism, asserts as fact that “gamers” are clamoring at the gates, screaming about the length of time between installments in franchises. That rings hollow to me. If anything, it seems like franchise fatigue is a much more common ailment. However, Lemmy is the entirety of my social media presence, so I am sure I’m not tuned in to the wider landscape.
Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.
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Meh. According to the source you posted, that exchange was simply “my wife found two reports that Apollo Legend committed suicide. If it’s true, I will not shed a tear. I will try to suppress a smile or a giggle.” Yes, considering Apollo’s eventual death, it’s shitty, no doubt.
However, according to your source, that was in a private text to an unidentified party, who I presume is affiliated with Mitchell either socially or professionally. It wasn’t a public post, and it wasnt directed to Apollo. It doesn’t even state that Mitchell hopes that it is true. Just that he’s not going to be broken up about it. I’ve said far more inflammatory shit with regards to the barons of the American insurance industry. Does that mean that I should be found culpable for the death of Brian Thompson? I sure hope not.
Caveat: I only read the source you posted, so perhaps there’s wider context I’m missing.