ampersandrew

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I have done twin-stick shooters like Streets of Rogue and Enter the Gungeon, and I found it to only control better than a second stick.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I loved it, but I rarely use it anymore these days. Often enough, trying to remap the inputs on it errors out in the Steam Input interface, and I've gotten tired of fighting with it. I also never used the left pad for anything and would have preferred an actual D-pad. The right trackpad, especially when paired with gyro controls, is so much better than a right stick for every function you could use a right stick for, and I've put it through its paces; but that only works when you can map an actual mouse. Often times, the game will explicitly switch between "controller mode" and "mouse and keyboard" mode, and I hate playing with a controller but seeing keyboard glyphs. Also, due to my preferences, and where the market has headed lately, there have been very few games coming out where I need to "aim", which is where the Steam controller beat a traditional Xbox controller by the widest margin. So unfortunately, between the software being a pain and there not being a compelling reason to bother putting up with it, I haven't been using my Steam controller lately.

 

An additional post on BlueSky from Danny O'Dwyer indicates that NoClip was actively in the middle of filming a documentary about the making of this game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I've been looking for deathmatch shooters for a long time, like what we got from the late 90s to the mid 10s. There are very very few. I don't care if I or anyone else move on quickly, because I primarily want to play with my friends, and the deathmatch mode typically came alongside a campaign and maybe co-op modes. That's not a prisoner's dilemma, and the market hasn't really been making games like that anymore. Same for things like arcade racers akin to F-Zero or Burnout.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I think there's also an argument to be made that all of this desire to suck up our attention has made it more difficult for the same developers to market their next game, since their potential customers are all preoccupied with something they haven't stopped playing. It's extremely natural for most people to fall off of a game after its initial release, and it's definitely going to happen once they take their thumbs off the scales.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think the incentives matter. Diablo II is about making number go up, but Diablo IV has an active incentive to slow you down and make that number go up at a certain rate so that they can upsell you again later. And rather than taking a hardline position, I'd at least ask the question out loud: Is it possible to have a business model for a game other than selling a good product at a fair price and not have it eventually evolve into something gross? Maybe the old shareware model, which is basically just a demo, but other than that, I'm not sure.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Loot boxes, for example, aren’t inherently predatory; they can add an exciting and rewarding surprise element when balanced with noble intentions.

When you sell them, they're unregulated gambling that children can access.

When designing a battle pass, a designer must answer questions like "How much faster should a premium player progress compared to a F2P player?" and "How long should it take for a player to finish the battle pass?" I’ve seen designers balance it fairly, like by requiring 30 minutes of daily play to complete the free track or $5 to unlock the premium pass.

I still don't see a way that this could ever be anything other than creating an incentive to play the game for reasons beyond the game being fun, no matter how "fair" it is to the person needing to spend money or not. They're still artificially creating another body in the matchmaking pool that creates value for someone more willing to part with their dollar. If your player base dries up when you stop offering your battle pass incentives, I'd say that was some artificial retention, and it's kind of gross.

I definitely didn't need more reasons to hate live services. The business model has always affected the game design, and a lot of the author's bullet points could be seen as far back as the arcades, but I don't think we've ever had a better business model for all parties than "sell a good product at a fair price".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They're firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.

I wouldn't be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there's a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that's at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that's revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they've built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago

It has plateaued some time ago now. That's not failure, but it's not about to become Netflix either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it's orchestrated by museum curators or something, that's still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you've ever been to PAX East, there's always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there's a will, there's a way.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

It's not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.

 

Interesting timing...

 
  • The EU Citizens petition to stop killing games is not looking good. It's shy of halfway where it needs to be, on a very high threshold, and it's over in a month and change.
  • paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: "Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign."
  • The past year has been quite draining on Ross, so he's done campaigning after next month.
  • It will still take a few years for the dust to clear at various consumer protection bureaus in 5 different countries, and the UK's seems to be run by old men who don't understand what's going on.
  • At least The Crew 2 and Motorfest will get offline modes as a consolation prize?
 

Enjoy your gaming. I picked up a couple of things already. And DMC1-4 are now in the Good Old Games program. Steam's sale is supposed to start this Friday, if I'm not mistaken.

 

No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.

 

A lot of it is almost exactly what you'd expect.

 

Not just a mini documentary about where this game and studio came from but also a pretty good look at how it works. I can't deduce what the button configuration is or how that top meter on each character works, but it does seem like active tagging reduces your combo meter and allows you to get greedy with longer combos, at the cost of giving your opponent an opportunity to break the combo.

 

You can see the writing on the wall for FairGame$ and Marathon from a mile away, and this can't possibly instill confidence in the people still working there.

 

Also noteworthy that not only are PS5 sales behind PS4, but the PlayStation's competition has almost entirely disappeared, and that hasn't resulted in more PlayStations sold.

 

Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and he will be the fifth co-owner when he comes back from Disney World. Blight Club and Grubb's morning news show sound like they are returning this coming week. This PAX panel is officially episode #889 of the Giant Bombcast.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

“We think there’s a large audience for compelling stories that don’t require massive time commitments,” 2K president David Ismailer said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer a game like Mafia: The Old Country in our portfolio, and to provide a linear highly-polished narrative experience that can easily complement the other more persistent games our players also love and engage with on a more consistent basis.”

So wait, is this that thing where AAA publishers think shorter, linear action games are inherently worth less than shitty bloated open world games? Like how Hi-Fi Rush was $30 and Redfall was $70? I mean, I'm not complaining about it costing less, but it's so weird, if so. Going by the store page, it seems like you do have to travel places, implying open world in some capacity, but maybe just a small open world? Cynically, is this them pricing a game lower than usual that they know is bad?

EDIT: Confirmed via FAQ, this is a linear action game and not open world. Optimistically: great! Most open world games don't make great use of it, and I'm here for the crime story anyway. Pessimistically: there's a good chance they salvaged a bad open world game into a wonky feeling linear game with open world vestiges, like Ride to Hell: Retribution, and the low price is to just get any kind of return on a project that produced a bad video game. I hope it's the former!

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