Because using tricks is just much better right now. Realistic reflections and lighting can also have negative effects on the overall look of a game. It can make it look uncanny.

Stay focused on raster performance please! Don’t waste time with all this ML shit!

Ignoring all the problems, sure. You could get through it, but there were lots of bugs and inconsistencies. I played again recently after all the patches and while it was much better, it still had it’s fair share of issues. The overall game, lore and story is very good, though I think DOS combat is far superior for a video game than DnD.

Nah, Larian will jump the gun, release too early and have another bug infested game. They need to reduce their scope, actually take their time and make a great RPG. BG3 was too much for them, a smaller more refined experience would have been amazing.

Not exactly no, they are directly involved in the process. They pick which outlets can vote, so you immediately have conflict of interest.

As a fair awards show, its fucking awful, but as we know, thats just the facade to selling people new products. It’s just advertising, hyped up.

Also media publications are often biased anyway as their entire business relies on exposure, which is infinitely harder to get if you are critical of games. Nobody is gonna slap a 5/10 on their product.

Not to mention its always games with money behind them, there’s lots of actual quality games released that never get a mention, let alone a nomination, because they simply werent published by a big company. They have fucking DLC nominated instead of games if the big guys didnt release anything that year.

The awards are done by the big studios anyway, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, EA, Ubisoft etc, thats the jury, it always has a bias. Anything else only wins something if its so popular that it has to. It’s just a AAA circle jerk mostly.

But its not about the awards anyway, its about advertising.

It’s just a big advertising show yeah. Like E3 but with all the soul and community sucked out of it. I dont know why anyone cares.

Depends what generation you ask, because a lot of the CoD audience now, never even played Black Ops 2. Which I agree, was the last good game, I’ll give credit to BO3 for it’s amazing zombies experience, with mod tools on PC, which was a surprise.

Problem is, Treyarch were the only competent studio after all of IW left. So they have been constantly called in to help to clean up the mess the other studios keep making.

Now development on the games is split across Activision studios all over the world, so the chance of there ever being a coherent self contained experience again is basically zero. Their scope got too big and they couldnt find the right people to take it on.

Back to back releases isnt the problem.

Remember the “Call of Duty games are DLC” jokes? Well that is literally what they have become. There’s no soul in them anymore. They are just a vessel to sell skins.

That’s the point, it doesn’t matter. Enjoy any you want.

Todd just wants “his” Fallout games to be the most liked, to stroke his ego.

Also side note, sales never works as a metric because the gaming industry is constantly growing, any game released now sells much more than it ever would have 5, 10, 15, 20… years ago. Regardless of quality.

I mean the set has missed the mark, from that image in the article. So I’d be pretty disappointed if I was a dev.

The fact of the matter is it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean it was a good game or something was done better (which is what Todd is looking for, validation), because some people liked it.

Discord unfortunately “just works”. It’s simple for people to add someone, type to them, call them voice or video, stream their screen. I don’t think anything else does this as well as Discord, so it’s borderline impossible to convince anyone who isn’t a nerd to try some new option. Discord need to do a major fuckup to start an exodus.

If Teamspeak didn’t sit on it’s ass for a decade, we all would probably still be using that.

That’s the least of it’s problems.

This is just each patch note for Discord. It’s so hard to move people off it though, ughhhh

Also, Valve with every other company should already have been ordered to stop operating in Russia by their respective countries.

I like to think I hold myself to a higher standard or at least just a standard. General consumption, I’m not sure, but for video games, people standards have dropped significantly, the masses accept a lot of bullshit and even defend it.

It’s very much consumer these days, people buy literally anything marketed to them.

You are arguing something different. We all agree billionaires shouldn’t exist. You don’t need to try to topic flip to try and let us know. This was simply a discussion about the term monopoly and it’s definition.

I never mentioned Amazon, but it’s really no comparison, even the FTC in the USA has filed suits against them for monopolistic and illegal behaviour.

Ive never seen an advert for Steam myself, outside of on their own platform or a video on their own YouTube channel. They sell largely through word of mouth. I suppose recently they offered journalists to visit their HQ to show off their new hardware.

No, Google pays off other browsers to use Google as the default search engine, among many other actual monopolistic practices. Steam does none of that and simply provides a product.

Technically Steam is not a monopoly, but the way people commonly use the term these days is as simple as “majority market share”.

Technically Steam isn’t a monopoly by actual definition.

What you, and others often mean with the term, is that they hold a majority market position.

This is the key point people are missing.

Valve arent paying for exclusives or anything, they are just delivering a far better product than anyone else. GOG has it’s DRM-free market, but outside of that, there’s nothing close. Even if Epic Games had feature parity, fuck that company.

Fair enough. Seems like my hope for them is slim, I was expecting similar corporate practices anyway, but seems they have bigger problems with development decision making.

I dont know why they chose to chase graphics, it wasnt important for the first game, it wasnt going to be important for the second. I suppose it could have been Paradox controlling decisions.

We just wanted more systems and simulations.

I hope that CO can move on and make some great games.

This is so fucking good for linux gaming

Console market finally crumbling

I’ll just say it because you want me to.

You are very confused. My point is very simple and understandable, yet you will purposefully misinterpret everything I say, just to fit your agenda for the sake of argument.

I already said, if you want to buy skins, go for it. It’s your money. You dont need to get so defensive over that. It’s okay.

Because you are so hellbent on going in circles as an argument strategy, I wont discuss further. Good luck out there.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

This might have been a bad time for you to ask, because I just finished Outer Wilds.

It’s bland. That’s my opinion. If you don’t think so that’s fine, but that is literally what an opinion is. The style is very similar to their old Frostbite games. You can see the EA Star Wars Battlefront in it.

The drones just being physics based isnt all that impressive that it makes the game for me, it’s not exactly revolutionary, similar things have existed before anyway. The gameplay is like you see in a lot of other games, that’s why I think it’s bland. It’s your run-of-the-mill 3rd person shooter, with some basic extraction shooter elements added.

If you enjoy it, fantastic go have fun, doesn’t mean I have to like it and you don’t have to defend the game or your position at all.

No, not at all. Extraction shooters require you to take in gear, which you can lose. Find loot or better gear and extract with it. If you die during the mission you lose pretty much everything, high stakes are required. DRG has no stakes, you just go and complete a mission for some progression.

That is unironically the main reason why it’s third person.

I said the situation is crazy, not a specific person. I dont blame any individual, the strategies used over the years by these companies to sell skins and make consumers complacent are all very manipulative and effective. The people designing the systems and the ones doing the marketing have done a very, very good job.

You seem stuck on artists all being freelance, getting paid on some sort of commission. They are almost always salaried employees like anyone else at the development company.

Weird analogy, paying for a game, something usually worked on for years, is a lot different than paying for a cosmetic change to something. It’s like going to the movies and paying the price of the ticket again to sit in a green chair instead of a red one and being told that’s completely normal and something you should do.

I agree, if skins were sold for $0.50, $1.00, max $5, then I would have less issue with them. I’d still have issue with the predatory practices used to sell them though. Some people are more susceptible to this than others, so I would rather it didnt exist at all.

You buy a game once, have all the content and are not pressured again to spend anything, that’s the ideal scenario, why would I compromise on that?

Games should be a sustainable art form, not gross corporate projects to extract as much money as possible from consumers.

No need to start throwing insults. It takes away from your argument. If you want to pay for cosmetics, sure go for it, but that’s how we got in this mess.

Artists get paid either way, they are not paid on commission of skin sales. Any extra profit goes to the executives anyway, not to the artists. So that entire point is null.

Games existed before with no paid cosmetics, they would exist again without them. This used to be the free-to-play model, but now they realise they can charge you for the game and then again and again for skins. These types of games are designed to extract as much money from you as possible, that’s their entire purpose. They are not giving you extra skins to be nice and then paying the artists more from it. A skin is made one time and sold a potentially infinite amount of times for ridiculous prices.

As I said:

It’s so ingrained it’s actually crazy.

Why would you ever want to advocate for a worse experience? It blows my mind, but that’s the situation we got ourselves into.

The core gameplay loop hasn’t changed between any of the “beta” tests and release.

It’s so ingrained it’s actually crazy. All cosmetics should be free.

I tried it. It’s pretty bland, I already said that. You are allowed to enjoy it, that was just my opinion. No need to get defensive.

(They forgot we used to change what our character looks like for free)