lh i forgot hades 2 came out this year. none of the others appeal much to me. i just tend to like the genres that are hard to do on smaller budget. story driven rpgs and action adventure games that aren’t souls like. not platformers, not craft survival, not extraction shooters, not bullet hell. there’s plenty of indie games i can enjoy, but few that i love. and sometimes it’s annoying when indie game fans just assume it’s because I’m ignorant that i don’t live their favorite games.

i hadn’t heard of doronko wanko or another crabs treasure. i might check those out

i am however looking forward to many of the games announced at the game awards this year.

I always hear that, but then i struggle to find indie games that i like. the genres that i like are hard to do with a small budget.

such as?

“a fantastic year for new games”? i couldn’t disagree more. i had no interest in any games that came out this year. i got balatro, and it’s kind of fun, but in a mildly addictive mobile game kind of way. not a “this is a really well made game” kind of way.

to me this was a year of greedy disappointments and corporate bullshit in gaming. this article mentions score inflation being a thing they’re weary of, then unironically puts the latest destiny dlc above 90%. pcgamer is absolutely part of the corporate megastructure that is bad for games and for for profits.

i mean, maybe if you’re a persona fan, but i just can’t get in to those games, i tried 3 of them.

it’s a lot more than puddles looking fancy. it’s the entire lightning engine. like how real light will come in the window hit the wall, the floor, the grass outside, and you, bouncing off of all of that to difuse those colors and tones throughout the room and change as you move. that’s what raytracing does. without it they just have to create different color lights sources in the room to approximate that, or just create a single color light source. raytracing is infinitely less work for the devs and is infinitely better as a light engine.

the problem is the whole industry glommed onto it before hardware could handle it.

i mean, this is also a handled. if we look at the way they name their handhelds then switch 2 may not be it, but switch extra or switch (new feature here) would be very in line with their names. Nintendo ds, ds lite, 3ds, others? Gameboy, Gameboy color, Gameboy advance, Gameboy advance sp - particularly egregious.

sure, but that’s not his fault.

hmm, more like jumping into a new series in a franchise that rebooted a decade later. like saying you can’t possibly like the dark knight because the 90s Batman movies were bad. they’re completely different.

the Witcher franchise is based on books. the games happen chronologically after the books. the first two games don’t really follow the book story. the third one decided to pick up the book story again and can be approached on its own. the first game was the first thing they ever made as a tiny Indy studio. the writing was bad and the gameplay was completely different. it’s so old that it’s from before 3d movement was standardized in games. they learned a lot over time.

you’re not being fair by judging the later games off of the first.

oh man, to judge the entire Witcher series on the first one is intense. they’re all very very different games. you should try the third one on its own.

it’s like saying you don’t like mmos because you didn’t like classic RuneScape in the 90s. or like saying you don’t like rpgs because text based adventures weren’t your thing. not exactly representative.

IDK, honestly. one of my biggest takeaways from cp2077 is it felt like they wanted to do a more guided story in an open world and struggled with the custom character aspect. like how the origins were all basically meaningless after the first 10 minutes.

the frustrating part of cyberpunk was feeling railroaded into a specific character with specific attitudes and ideas. really, they were just doing what they know and what they’re good at creating a character driven narrative based on existing characters. I’m happy to see them go back to that because i think they’re just better at it.

yeah, there’s a disappointingly small number of effects, and that generally aren’t that crazy.

i will never get over them fighting with the community about whether the game had multi player when it clearly provably didn’t.

when this game was announced i literally laughed at how badly overpromised it was. that generation of console would never have never been capable of what they wanted. i told all my friends not to buy it because it obviously couldn’t possibly deliver on even half of its claims. they literally just promised everything you could ever want in a space exploration game. the other games that had tried to do that with more resources, more time, and that required better hardware couldn’t even come close to a quarter of what they promised.

they had to know they were over promising. i simply can’t ever trust them after all of that. also, i don’t often like randomly procedurally generated environments in an exploration game. they just get boring fast without someone crafting an exploration experience with goals and points of interest.

yeah, plus there’s only one launcher, and possibly thousands of games.

it’s one of those things where it does legitimately improve security, but for them to require it the way they did when almost no hardware at the time has it is pretty transparent.

there are plenty of other hardware requirements that could improve security if they arbitrarily decided to require them. they did this for the rain you describe, but have the plausible deniability of saying that it’s for security.

basically, the same bullshit line that’s used to justify half of the bullshit unpopular changes that anyone pushes anywhere.

“it’s for security” - no it’s not, as a for profit company chances are pretty good we can prove you don’t actually give a shit about customer date if we look close enough at your practices. it’s for profit.

“it’s for the environment” - admirable thought, too bad that’s not profitable. I don’t believe you mr. for profit company.

“for the kids”- it you have ever tried to talk to a parent after the subject of their kids safety comes up you’ll see why they always do for this in. it’s the deepest, most primal, and least logical part of our brain. most parents become slovering fucking cavemen the second you disagree with whatever they’ve been programmed to believe will protect their kids. it’s just too easy to manipulate people with. if you say you’re great to protect kids I’m instantly skeptical and need a lot of proof.

you may not know which one is next, but this one is clearly there.

i mean, destroying evidence related to the case is a little more than a “procedural violation”. that’s clear cut obstruction and it’s a felony crime.

to me it’s kind of kind the nazi bar thing. if you’re at a bar with 2 Nazis, and you’re not a nazi, you’re still hanging out at a nazi bar.

they fucking adore this frog. no other group has embraced it as strongly or consistently. I’m quite happy to let an old ass meme die because i find it distasteful now that it’s the favorite meme of nazis.

you could repurpose this headline to literally any creative or journalistic industry these days. “x industry is being propped up by underpaid freelancers” is just a fact of life now. it’s just so much cheaper when you don’t owe them any benefits or dignity or anything at all in fact.

better hardware has always been an advantage, but this is more in line with bmw charging a subscription for heated seats. it’s a new stage of nickel and dime monetization. and just because there’s existing ways to use money to gain an advantage doesn’t mean we should be inventing new ones. rich people don’t need the help, and these companies don’t need the money. accepting and enabling them on this will continue to consent to more and worse pay to win features.

this is explicitly and exclusively a feature to improve performance. whether it’s effective is irrelevant. they intend to let you pay to gain an advantage natively in game. a non scummy game would instead try to minimize and mitigate the differences created by hardware, not add new ways to widen that gap.

i couldn’t remember if there was active pvp. i just remember never actually running into it in my time playing.

the base invasion system in metal gear solid 5. it was a risky optional side part, but you would place your best guys and equipment around your base and other players could try to break through that. i don’t remember many of the specifics, but it was kind of interesting.

ooh wasn’t there a post going around yesterday about a bug that actually puts comments on the wrong threads?

yeah no, this is just fixing the wording to better represent the truth that has always been.

this is because a California law recently passed requiring these kinds of purchases to inform consumers that they don’t actually own these games. valve decided it would be easier just to do this for everyone.

this has always been true for all digital games you purchased. the fact that you didn’t realize this is why the law was needed.

thanks California for being the only force fighting for consumers rights in the United States. i can see why conservatives give you so much shit. you do things that matter.

also, there was a religion mechanic, but no religious victory.

I would like it to come out with the same number of win conditions that the previous ones had. diplomacy was a base feature in at least the last 2 games before it. it wasn’t a dlc feature before. they removed it this time, then added it back as dlc. they do shit like that every time.

that’s a weird thing to say about a game that came out without diplomacy or diplomatic victories. but ign has a long history of overating games from waelthy companies.

edit: but also, the way that ign feels the need to praise it for being fully featured at launch when it was still missing a base mechanic really helps my point. they always do this. this may actually be the least bad one they’ve ever done. that’s just a low bar. like the 4th least bad release.

idk man… i guess In today’s market this behavior has become less bad by comparison to everyone else, but I’m not going to ignore the rising temperature of the water in this pot. the whole industry is getting worse. I’m not going to give this company ground to legitimize their greed because the rest of the industry shot past them in shittyness. this was one of the first series to explicitly be scummy with dlc. they helped create the modern landscape of battle passes and gacha bullshit. they were once some of the worst out there…

it was diplomacy that was stripped then re-added this time. in base civ 6 there was no diplomacy. that’s ridiculous. that’s like one of the most core mechanics and win conditions. then when they did add it it was so busted that you’ll often accidentally get a diplo victory on your way to any other victory.

and that’s greedy and why i don’t play that series.

civ 6 literally added diplomatic victory back as a dlc

i mean civ is never really worth buying until they put out a complete edition with all the features they removed so they could slowly sell them back to you as dlc.

that’s the thing though, these aren’t bullet hell either. i agree that the “survivors” branding is confusing, but i don’t think bullet hell is accurate either.

there’s enough of these games now, they need a proper genre title. i legit have a hard time getting people on the same page when discussing these games (vampire survivors, magic survival, deep rock survivors, League of Legends swarm mode, etc…) it usually takes a good 5 minutes before they actually understand what kind of games I’m talking about unless they actively play them. I’ve just been calling them “vampire survivors like” even though i know it’s not the first, it’s the one most people are familiar with.

i think the “survival” part of it is that the only and exclusive goal is to stay alive. The way you choose to build toward that goal is where the gameplay comes in. bullet hell is similar in that regard, but the main goal of bullet hell is to dodge shit to stay alive. the main goal of these is to figure out a build path that makes you kill everything. it’s more like a puzzle than a game of skill. once you get it right you shouldn’t be dodging. i know many people that like bullet hell, but and not these, and vice versa. I’m one of them, i like these games, but not bullet hell. similar on the surface, but the appeal is way different.

my buddy had his keep crashing during the intro sequence as they were running to the vault. when he checked the discord it seemed many were having this issue and that it was fixed by turning debris off.

hmmm idk, i disliked the live action because of the acting and writing on cowboy bebop. i also don’t think three was any reason to make that live action. it felt like a soulles cash grab.

compare that to say the one piece live action, or the last of us series, or even twisted metal. those were all shows that adapted things well while also changing a lot. it’s fine to adapt things to a be medium and tell your own story, just don’t expect a free pass if that story you tell is worse than the material you were given. like the Witcher, for example. that shouldn’t have even been that hard. it wasn’t actually a video game adaptation. it was supposed to adapt the books. but then they just went and did their own story with the characters that just wasn’t very good… certainly not nearly as good as the source material.

i think that’s what frustrates me sometimes. when an adaptation just doesn’t hold up to the source. the cowboy bebop lie action wasn’t that bad, but the anime was fucking incredible. in a few years everyone will forget they even did a live action of it. it just wasn’t really worth remembering.

You can buy back a lot of stuff, but only from the scrap merchant in the border town. The new black cat guy. Valuable things that you sell will end up in his shop sometimes, though I don’t know when or why yet.

baldur’s gate was incredible at this. i think part of that was their mindset wasn’t “how do we make this more accessible to casual players?” they’re mindset was more “how do we make this less tedious and/or annoying for everyone?” like the quick select buffs ui that comes up with every roll. in early access, and other larian games it was still possible to add buffs mid dialogue, but you’d have to like ungroup the buffer, sit then outside, start the dialogue, then sneak them in to hit you with the buff, which might not work right if you already opened the roll interface…

they’ve even added a custom difficulty mode where you can turn off more of their ease of use features. for example, i personally believe the game is better with the “perception check failed” notifications removed. if your whole party fails the perception check, you still know the trap is there… it makes the whole mechanic a bit pointless at times. with it turned off you’ll still do the check, and it’ll still show you if you succeed, it just hides the rolls from you until then.

mod makers need to want to make mods for it first… we can’t just assume that the modders will fix it if there’s nothing worth fixing. multiple modders that have made mods for previous Bethesda games have said they aren’t doing this one.

really? go watch a gameplay trailer then. it’s a whole category that almost every game releases.

hmm idk… the only real reason vr has playeued so hard is because of the high barrier to entry. the tech is fine, but there’s not that many good games because it’s expensive and not many own it.

I’d argue that ai will continue to see raid growth for a little while. the core technology behind LLMs may be plateauing, but the tech is just now getting out in the world. people will continue to find new and creative ways to extend its usefulness and optimize what it’s currently capable of.

basically, back to the vr example. people are gonna start making “games” for it. did one’s free, and everyone is hungry for it. I’m putting my money on human creativity for now…

yeah, often the script writing brain storming season doesn’t really start until you’ve been spinning your wheels for 8 hours going nowhere and now it’s 2am and someone just said “but what if she never went outside”

sometimes we don’t get there until we get a little goofy. I’ve heard it might just be how creatives work.

i think they’ll still manage it with a remaster. they’ll tack on a battlepass somehow…