TLDR Bloated staff sizes and poor workflow management means salary costs skyrocket while a lot of people on staff are left waiting for things to do. The article keeps saying the costs aren’t just about better graphical fidelity, but I think this issue is somewhat related because a big chunk of staff are going to be artists of some variety, and the reason there are so many is to pump up the fidelity.

Not that it much matters to me personally. I’ve said before that games have long ago hit diminishing returns when it comes to technical presentation and fidelity. I’d rather have a solid game with a vision, and preferably a good visual style rather than overproduced megastudio visuals. Those kinds of games are still coming out from solo developers and small studios, so it doesn’t affect me one bit if big studios want to pour half a billion into every new assemblyline FPS they make.

In the stealth section there are static guards and patrolling guards. At the bottom of every turn the players pull from a deck of cards which says which of the patrolling guards will move and also a special event- this can be the meter towards the alarm ticking down, some of the guards reversing direction of their patrol, or reinforcements prestaging just off board.

During stealth if a dead guard or a player character is spotted by a specific guard, it will shout alerting other guards inside a certain radius and act according to the combat logic. At this point the stealth section will likely shortly end because of all the negative stealth modifiers.

In the combat section, enemies will move towards and fire at whatever spotted player character is nearest. The combat is very simple, which is balanced by it being very difficult for the players to survive, which means you want to delay combat as long as possible.

Mechanically I don’t think anything changes with the number of players, since you always have 4 player characters no matter how many players.

I personally don’t think it would be as fun solo. You would have more control and precision which might appeal to certain people, but for me the chaos of having other people doing things and having to negotiate a plan where everyone is constantly inputting was part of the fun.

The box comes with 9 different missions, and there are expansions with more missions and player characters. I’ve only played just this once so far though.

The tiles are double sided and I don’t believe we even used all the provided ones for this scenario.

Took me about 7 hours but I was poking around and going back for screenshots. It should probably take about 6 normally.

Why did that scientist say it like that? What was his problem?

I’ve been working my way through Half-Life Opposing Force. It is harder than the base game, but I do enjoy it. It has a lot of ideas like the squad mechanics that would be great to see reworked.

This is a good example. The cartoony graphics work well for Nintendo because it fits their hardware better as well.

For my personal example I can still play Starfox64 easily, but Goldeneye (one of my favorite childhood games) literally gives me a headache to look at. Goldeneye was going for a more realistic look on the engine of the time and aged terribly. Starfox is all big bright cartoon designs.

I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don’t need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I’m thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.

The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.

A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.

Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.

I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.

My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.

Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.

I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.

I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.

Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.

As someone who prefers HL1 it was nice to be vindicated somewhat by a YouTube person agreeing.

Not as much as you’d think. I keep my soldiers faceless and unattached until they are fairly leveled up. By the the time they get customized, they tend not to get meatgrindered. Usually.

I bet the creator of this lazy asset flip is thrilled about this publicity.

Edit: for some reason replies think I’m being sarcastic.

I did a written review of it a while ago, and my conclusion was that a lot of the gameplay was serviceable but not particularly standout, which made it feel a bit bland. There were a number of small things that piled up, with one example being that any time you told a companion to special attack you had to sit through a short cutscene. It had great writing and characters, which makes it the first game I’d reccomend in spite of the so so gameplay, because I thought the character and world stuff was so strong.

While I didn’t have expectations, I think the marketing also greatly mislead other people. The game is structured like a classic BioWare RPG, rather than a modern Fallout game. I also found the marketing connection with Fallout New Vegas to be misleading because there was no connection of actual lead development staff with those games, but instead it was with Fallout 1 and 2. If you know that, and are familiar with the writing and design habits you can feel that difference. Some people may have felt it and been confused or disappointed that it didn’t have the New Vegas vibe.

Live the dream.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/dnf2001-restoration-project

Nothing will ever top the Modern Warfare 2 Infamy trailer.

Imagine it is 2009 and you have no idea what the future of COD looks like, no clue what is going to happen in MW2, and you see this trailer.

I’m incredibly curious if the pulled A-Life 2.0 code is still in the game somewhere. If modders implement it and get it populating in a sufficiently large radius it will really cement this game as a mainstay for a long time.

You probably won’t understand entirely what is happening in the setting, but it’s not like you fully understood what was happening for most of Shadow Of Chernobyl.

You play as a brand new character with no relation to the past games in STALKER 2.

If you can pick up on implications and make informed guesses you can understand the world well enough. STALKER games have always succeeded with atmosphere and vibes rather than tight plot.

to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S

Consoles, and bugs stemming from optimizing for consoles.

They replaced map specific factions with one type of each team (SAS vs Phoenix terrorists) globally in CS2. Which is pretty lame but probably makes it easier to theme buyable skins.

Skins, especially CT skins have long represented real organizations. The game isn’t coordinated with them.

CS:GO they’ve been the CT team for the Dust maps.

This game has an all time peak of 20 players. I don’t think it is exactly reaching a major audience. Pretty obvious it’s a quick low quality game capitalizing on shock value and politics over anything else.

I wonder if it is the best use of a counter terrorism taskforce to seek out a game at all, and such a small fry game at that. This smells of doing something just to justify somebody’s job rather than actually doing any public good.

Counter-Strike.

Removing the bugs from STALKER? Very inauthentic.

Repostin’. Trying out Arcanum for myself for the first time.

“Guns guns guns” Brrrrrrr

Anime waifu weirdos turn out to be weirdos. More at 11.

This is a Senator firing an opening salvo with a vague threat of government action.

Warner also warned, somewhat ominously, that if Valve does not adopt industry-standard moderation practices—whatever that means—it will “face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk.”

Nothing has been done with government force, yet. Maybe he will drop it, maybe he won’t, but at the moment I’m responding to a Senator floating the idea of using government power to wade into Steam forums.

I don’t think anything good can come of the government deciding to crack down on Steam moderation in order to “save the children”.

The current situation of Steam having a toxic forum community in places is better than whatever happens with “scrutiny”.

If I may put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, this recent push to get Steam labeled as an extremist den that needs to be dealt with feels like yet another attack originating from competitors.

Wow this push against Valve kind of popped up quickly and suddenly didn’t it?

Those were both side games. Like how Fallout New Vegas isn’t Fallout 4.

One time I got an “in between” job at a local business. The first day I showed up and the place made me sign a 17 page front and back NDA.

I’ve signed actual, legitimate NDAs. They are like 3 pages, max. Some people are just preposterous.

Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

There’s a danger in any game where it might be largely designed and marketed to be one thing, and then has lengthy mandatory sections where it becomes another.

Poorly made stealth sections are a prime example. Game designers want to change things up, but if the game isn’t made to do stealth, it can easily turn into an annoying mess. There are a few (not a ton, but a few) games where the mandatory stealth sections are well liked, but they were made to carefully take advantage of the game’s strengths and knew when to end.

Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.

Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.