I’ve been playing Dagger Directive, which isn’t an old game but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it. It’s an intentional throwback to the original Delta Force games. I bought it on some sort of early sale, but even full price it’s only $20.

If you like the original Delta Force or Ghost Recon games, this has a similar vibe with missions where you can select the time of day to start, and are then dropped in wide open maps. I’ve been having a lot of fun turning the HUD off and playing night missions. The game takes into account how night vision goggles interfere with looking down sights, which in turn makes things like IR lasers and dedicated night vision scopes useful. I’ve seen community complaints (some of them more recent than the newest AI update) that suppressors don’t do anything regarding enemy AI, but I’ve had a lot of success with them and think people might be having wrong expectations on how silent the guns are going to be and/or how oblivious enemies are going to be.

The weapon selection is fairly good and getting expanded with updates. The scope system gets some flack, but it is an intentional recreation of the Delta Force scope system.

For the most part I’m ambivalent about it, although now that red dots have been added to the equipment they use the same picture-in-picture window that magnified scopes do, which makes red dots actually kind of useless for close range fast paced fighting (which is the entire IRL point of them), and I’d actually recommend using no attachments or using an IR laser with night vision instead of using a red dot in the game.

The sound design sneaks up on you. Things will be quiet and boring one second, and then your audio is filled with terrifying cracks and whistles of gunfire as an enemy machinegun ambushes you the next.

Gameplaywise, Blacklist is okay. It does fall into the game design trap of allowing players to go through levels with variety of approaches, including guns blazing in many cases, and it often has scripted sequences and setpieces that are combat heavy which dilutes the intent of the original games.

Yes, the new voice and younger look for Sam is jarring and never stops being jarring.

It’s not a “Christian game”, its a game where the setting is a violent, fractured place and Christianity has a large in-universe footprint, influencing factions.

Iron Tower Studio games makes quite good RPGs.

How would you, in general terms, construct an arrangement between a publisher that is funding development, and a developer? How would the agreement hold a developer to certain standards without any kind of time or budget limitations?

I’m not trying to be cute. If a publishing company gives money to a developer who is a separate entity to make a game, they’ve got to have some kind of contract. If there is no timeline or total budget written into the initial contract, how could a publisher pull out of that agreement?

If the answer is going to be “publishers can just pull out when they feel like it” then that’s neither adhering to the “let devs develop ‘until it is done’.” philosophy that is the entire point of this hypothetical restructure, and it for practical terms it does impose a deadline based on the publisher’s patience, except now that deadline is not expressly clear and simply defined.

If publishers can’t simply pull out on a whim, then without some kind of limiting factor that denotes a failure to perform where by a specific time a publisher can point to that failure, it can’t really be functional contract. Saying “the game must have x, y, z features” but never putting a time or budget limit in place means the developers can never have failed at implementing the features because they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

In a publisher fronting money to developer situation, without a fixed time limit (or money limit, which functionally translates to a time limit) is the publisher just infinitely on the hook to pay for dev time “until it’s done”?

Let’s look at the initial comment in the chain:

all game developers need to put their foot down and say “it’s ready when it’s ready.”

No marketing deadlines, no “crunch time,” make the game until the game is made

It isn’t saying publishers should be more flexible about deadline delays, it is saying there simply shouldn’t be deadlines at all.

Shoveling infinite money at a developer who tells you it will be ready when it’s ready is the Chris Roberts model of game development. While it certainly produces interesting results, it is unrealistic and undesirable to expect it as the standard.

Games that are developing well but need a little more time to fix issues should be given flexibility by publishers, but at the end of the day there are stretch ideas and content that has to be cut. Doing that cutting and keeping the project focused is what a lead on the dev team should be doing throughout the entire development. If a game has a realistic deadline given the expected scope and the dev team comes back and says they actually need another year of production, then it is worth looking into if that extra time is going to make the game a year’s worth of investment better or not.

Publishers are considering return on investment. In a model where they are providing the game budget to the studio, every delay means more money out of their pocket. Case by case it might be worth it, but just allowing developers to infinitely say it’s “almost ready, just one more delay” isn’t reasonable.

I know from the hard core gamer audience that discusses this stuff online there is often this vibe that nothing should be cut from games. People look at various interesting cut content and lament it for not getting enough time, but there is always going to be cut content.

If there isn’t a lead on the development team putting their foot down to control the scope and focus the team, and a similar push for focus by a publisher you get a meandering unfocused project that goes over budget.

In the solo/small amateur team dev, self-publishing model that ROI pressure isn’t coming externally from a separate publisher. It is means solo devs are making their first games usually on a budget of nothing, as a side project to their day jobs. In some cases like with Concerned Ape it turns out great. In many cases development comes out tediously slowly, like with Death Trash. In innumerable cases the games just die.

In cases like Wasteland 2 it was a full professional team working full time using crowdfunding. An alternate model, but still limited by budget pressure. There was no publisher to pay back, but when the crowd funding money was gone, it was gone. That game did come out and it was enjoyable, but clearly it wasn’t “done when it’s done” levels of polish by the team since they used the profits from the game to release a “Director’s Cut” which was a whole polishing pass on the game they simply couldn’t afford the first time.

The above comments were talking about how this policy should apply to every game development project. Which is a nice thought, but not realistic for every situation.

That’s more or less how I feel about the first game. I really liked the setting and characters, but found the gameplay underwhelming. Combat was especially boring, which made me go towards stealth or dialog resolutions just to skip it, except the game had a long chunk where fighting the local wildlife was the only option.

I don’t think anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price out of customers by using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.

For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.

Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.

Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.

I don’t feel bad about playing retro games because it’s not like Nintendo gets a cut on N64 games on ebay or that I got from people I know. The N64 is the newest Nintendo system I have any interest in, so I dodge all the issues of supporting the company.

That’s all of them.

Perfect. I don’t notice any lag.

FWIW, I don’t like the sequel games nearly as much so maybe the development overall of the first game was better.

I’m not a hardcore collector. Most of these were kept by me or scavenged from people I know who were clearing old stuff out.

If I ever sit down and get through all the games to the point I’m bored of them, I might try and find a reasonably priced copy of Majora’s Mask though.

It’s a great game, it feels right on the N64. The PC version to me just feels off.

It’s got great missions, and I really like the variety of fighters. It even has the Naboo fighter as a secret, which blew my mind to see before the movie was actually out.

Honestly I never really liked it single player. The Star Wars podracer game keeps me way more engaged. The customization really helps.

‘Architectcracy.’ Which is more or less, “rule by architects.”

I’m playing Caesar 3. I’m absolutely terrible at it because planning out the city is about following the esoteric rules of the game rather than logically laying the city out.

I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.

This was built inside of Unity.

My Steam recents:

Everything that’s got a finishable campaign here I’ve completed, with the exception of MCC where I only played Halo CE and ODST to completion.

To put the headline in perspective:

Despite all the numbers being down, Black Ops 7 was still the best-selling game in terms of units and revenue in Europe for the week ending November 16 (its launch week). Battlefield 6, it’s main competition right now, came in fourth in both units sold and overall revenue.

Even with huge drop, COD is still raking in cash. While I personally think the current direction of COD is terrible, these sales numbers are unlikely to be some kind of fundamental course correction wakeup call to the publishers.

I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.

In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.

And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

I am now.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

No, it’s from here:

https://terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html

Yes it is. Drog’s patch is the universally recommended patch that fixes bugs and has a lot of optional changes like adding new playable races, removing annoying sound effects, and more evenly distributing party experience instead of a per-hit system.

If you’ve played Halo CE, playing the Ruby Rebalance is still worth it. You’ll probably appreciate it more with the vanilla experience fresh in mind.

The Halo: CE mod is very tastefully done and improves the game. There are a lot of invisible tweaks like making the assault rifle more accurate in short bursts and tweaking spawns (the Library level is much better) as well as visible changes like adding ODSTs where it makes sense, adding new enemy types, and a few new to CE campaign weapons like a usable energy sword.

The new enemy types include a lot of new flood forms which makes them less of a slog to play against. There’s elite zealot flood still carrying energy swords, which are terrifying.