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Quick feedback on the experience of casually browsing to your steam page: the trailer that autoplays spends the first ~20s being mostly just black. First person view of running and then hiding in a closet, then black, then a very dimly lit room, with cuts to what looks like the player inspecting a doll. I can’t have sound on right now, so I don’t know if there is interesting audio happening.
I highly recommend those first few seconds of the autoplay trailer showing something more compelling. IMO the best case outcome for someone in my shoes is, I see something in those first few seconds that makes me go “oooo, hell yeah, that looks interesting” and I click Add to Wishlist. Instead my first thought was “there’s no way this has just been black for 20s” and checked my brightness settings to see if I was missing something.
Hah well luckily I’ve never seen anything close to a 60 gap squeeze. But if the game is half decent, then there is story being conveyed during that time, not just the shimmy. TLOU has a few sections where you’re squeezing through a cramped wall that most certainly hides loading, but at the same time your character is hiding from an enemy, or some emotion other than bordom is trying to be conveyed.
Obviously I’m not arguing in favor of slow shimmies, I just think the better, well funded devs with the resources often come up with much more immersive excuses for hiding the loading. So at the end of the day, we’re just asking the overworked, under funded, possibly less skilled devs, who are often already crunching for a due date, to also think about how their game will run on hypothetical bandwidths of future hypothetical hardware. That’d be nice, but if they had that time, then they’d just spend it making the experience less boring on current hardware.
Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.
It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).
Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.
surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.
You would rather see a loading screen every 40ft than have them hide asset streaming?
Yes it’s overused, but that just means they need to get a bit more clever with their slow-downs. I would take them over a loading screen any day.
I played through Elden Ring, and while it’s not my personal favorite game, it is objectively an excellent game. I never finished any of the DS games, they were too linear for me.
To say that all the wins are based on luck and no skill is objectively false. The most extreme ER enjoyers regularly clear the entire game, entirely naked, without ever once being hit. That means the mechanics are highly deterministic and thus completely learnable. And for the record, spam rolling or spam attacking is the quickest way to die in nearly every fight. If that’s the strat you went with, I could see it being quite the slog.
I agree it doesn’t offer a “power fantasy”, it requires the player to observe, learn from failure, and develop a plan. If you don’t do that, I agree, it can be a very infuriating game loop. But I would argue that’s not the game’s fault.
I agree that sometimes the camera is a total pain to deal with vs the scale of the enemy.
Most games don’t market themselves as a “souls-like”, it’s typically a comparison the gaming community makes, but also it’s definitely over-used to just mean “hard game”. That’s not what I would say makes a souls like. THE “souls like” mechanic, I would say, is the notion of dropping “souls” on death, and having to retrieve them without dying again. Which means there are definitely turn based souls likes, and I would not consider the Megaman series “souls likes”.
But IMO it’s experience vs simulation. If you want your game to inevitably shuffle you through an experience that you will inevitably get through, that’s totally fair and one aspect of gaming that I think closely mirrors film or literature. I would put excellent story experiences like TLOU in that camp. But if you want a game to put you through a simulated challenge which tests your resolve, subverts your expectations, and evokes emotional responses in a unique way that I believe only games can, then the souls games offer one slice of that experience.
There is difficulty to be had but not once was it unfair or anger-inducing. A boss defeating you is a lesson to move on and come back. The movements aren’t you just rolling around and hoping you don’t get hit like another annoying series I won’t mention again.
That is a perfect description of Elden Ring.
Every extra person using all these AI tools is only adding to the issue.
No, literally the opposite. They are going to do this until it is not financially viable. The more frugal and conscientious people are with their AI, the longer it is financially viable. If you want to pop the bubble, go set up a bot to hammer their free systems with bogus prompts. Run up their bills until they can’t afford to be speculative any more.
They’re mostly not AI specialized, though. That’s why they’re so inefficient and why their demand contends with consumer hardware in the first place. Which makes sense, because AI is still in rapid development. They don’t know what the right answer is yet, but they know they need a bunch of fast memory and parallel processing.
The AI specific hardware being added to GPUs is still pretty general. CUDA cores are just parallel compute. Tensor cores are for doing parallel compute with fewer bits of precision. Yes, there are niche applications for fp16 and lower, but rendering is one of those applications.
We also need to accept that this isn’t the crypto bubble, this is the dotcom bubble. Like it or not, there is a real advancement in technology happening here, and it’s not going away. The bubble will pop because there’s far more money being invested per unit time than can be returned as profit per unit time, not because the tech is a farce. Yes, 99% of AI applications right now are a farce, but that 1% are giving us actual useful abilities we simply didn’t have before. Point being: our world after the bubble pops will still make use of AI, so any hardware over-production will still be useful to the general public for AI applications.
The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don’t have the hardware right now.
Literally yes they do, because even though they don’t have the latest and greatest hardware, they have some money to spend. That’s the argument being made: until now the assumption was that new hardware would get cheaper over time, and people would gradually move to new hardware. Devs spend years making games, and historically bank on that assumption so that when the game comes out, it has the largest audience available to purchase it.
The fact that it looks like that won’t be the case in the near future means devs have to shift their behavior to accommodate what their playerbase has, i.e. continue developing and optimizing the same hardware.
That said, this is all temporary. Whether they widen the pipeline, or the AI bubble bursts, in 2-3 years there will be a deluge of hardware hitting markets. (Provided trade/actual wars don’t get in the way, which is the bigger concern imo).
For the record, the science shows that Destruction Therapy is not effective at actually managing anger, and may actually cause more harm long term, as you’re normalizing that behavior in your brain.
But as for why we don’t see more games along those lines, I don’t know. It does seem like a genre that would sell well right now. I remember there was a series of desktop games when I was a kid called Stress Reducer that would give you a set of animated weapons to “destroy” your windows desktop (an image of it).
Yeah, I am interested in understanding your world view, and am trying to ask direct questions about it so I can understand it better (such as how you arrived at your definition of escapism), but if that’s not something that interests you, and you’d rather stoop to ad hominem jabs (like telling me I’m drunk, or to touch grass/look at trees), then we can call it here. Your call.
Escapism: Using any method to interpret reality instead of directly facing said reality.
Interesting. I’ve never heard anyone attempt to define escapism like that. Where are you getting this definition?
Or from the other side, what word would you use to mean,
habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine
Hopefully you agree that “purely imaginative…escape from reality” is distinct from “any method to interpret reality”.
If you’re looking at a picture of a tree and using your imagination to marry it to the real thing, that is escapism.
What if I told you that looking at a real tree is an act of using your imagination to marry it to reality? Consider that humans looked at the moon and stars every day for centuries before we understood what they were in reality. Some people still do to this today.
Regardless of whether you’re considering something in front of you or a concept in abstract, if you’re attempting to grapple with the nature of reality, you are most certainly not engaging in escapism.
This feels like you’re doing the “qualityslop” troll lol.
I think you could make art that is escapist in theme, but by definition escapism is any effort you make to “escape” your reality, or the reality of the human condition. In contrast, the value of art is that it gives us a way to communicate about our reality and/or the human condition using a language that lives past literal interpretation.
Art doesn’t help us to escape our reality, it specifically embraces it and helps us understand and communicate about it. Art is the opposite of escapism.
First off, not all video games are escapism, just like not all film is camp. The genre of science fiction is only as good as the philosophical thought problems and potential ethical dilemmas it poses.
Once you get past thinking of Christianity as a uniquely negative force in society, and instead see it as another fiction on the pile of stories humans have invented, it’s intellectually interesting to think about the political and psychological impact that all our various religions have had on the trajectory of our species, and could have as our technology advances.
Fantasy often depicts Inquisitors brutally persecuting sorcerers, which is historically accurate for Christianity 300-700 years ago. Why shouldn’t SciFi attempt to explore the evil we see in Christianity today, but set in the distant future?
Technically you could do this with any two games, it’s just a matter of how you map the representation of one game within the other. And afaik, every important mechanic in mc was done elsewhere first, mc just put it all together in one sandbox.
The only grounds msft has to sue on would be assets and likenesses, which hytale doesn’t (shouldn’t) use any of.
That’s an insane claim to me. HL2 set the bar for worldbuilding. From the guy muttering “don’t drink the water” in the train station, to the people and vortigaunts building homes in the sewers, to the stick legged stalkers waddling around the citadel, HL2 took “show don’t tell” to heart. It was the most immersive experience anyone had played in a video game up to that point, or for years after.
I’ll grant you that other games have learned a lot from it, but I would say the vast majority haven’t. Games still come out today where everything needs to be spoonfed to the player literally for them to stop and process what they’re looking at, instead of just running and gunning mindlessly.
When you say HL2 can be boring and nonsensical if played today, the first thing that comes to mind are all the people who turn movie subtitles on, and then for 75% of the runtime their eyes are in the bottom 1/3 of the screen, not taking in any of the visual information the filmmaker is putting in front of them. Like, yeah, HL2 is quite boring when you’re not looking at it.
I haven’t seen any issues with year in review, I’m curious what you’ve seen.