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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me

    It just… can’t appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?

    Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),

    Dude… Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon… and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.

    I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.

    Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?

    I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget “should” be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then… EA done fucked up.

    To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.

    Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.

    Then don’t pay for it? Again, you (and I) don’t fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.

    You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways

    Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren’t massive layoffs every week?

    Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.

    Again. If you actually CAN make the “jack of all trades master of none” (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but…) game… you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are “mostly happy” and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are “ridiculously happy” (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2’s week two sales were 17 million in 2018

    They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.

    Let’s actually break that down.

    Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.

    Ubisoft… is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren’t the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.

    CO also is a game that came out of the “infinite money” of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which… is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.

    Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?

    You wouldn’t because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.

    The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.

    AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).

    Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days…).

    Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.


  • I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can.

    And they do.

    I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (…) At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about

    So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.

    Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”

    MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.

    Doesn’t matter. It might not be a 100% amazing game but it was still a 90% amazing game which… is still really fun.

    Because

    all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.

    Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.


    Again, just to be clear: Very few studios can pull this off. We all make fun of RGG for how much they reuse everything but… that drastically lowers costs and lets them get out a solid 30-70 hour game once or twice a year. And studios trying to turn an A game into a AAA game is literally how THQ died.

    But Rockstar is… well, a bunch of rockstars. They CAN do that. They do this through a lot of abuse of labor and manipulative marketing but… it works.


    And, to be clear. I actively disliked what I played of RDR2. I found GTA 5 to be “fine”. But me thinking the games are worth getting on sale for 20-30 doesn’t matter when you have the population of a small country immediately ready to buy it at launch multiple times.



  • Aww, the dot world news mod team is gonna be so happy to know that the FBI is protecting their precious teslas.

    Which mostly speaks to why this is “a good idea”. People vandalizing swasticars was effective. It was a comparatively low effort action that people could do on their way to work or while out drinking with the gang. And it did an amazing job of putting the fear of labor in all the tech workers who “will just ride out the next 4 years”. They couldn’t just say “I am one of the good ones” anymore.

    So… get rid of that and we go back to “This is horrible and I really do care about whatever issue we think matters this week. But if you worked just a bit harder you would be able to afford groceries so…” that we see EVERYWHERE (even on this site).





  • Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don’t even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.

    My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don’t have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don’t like something and you can make informed decisions from there.


  • Yeah.

    There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with “game preservation”. I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.

    Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with “No DRM” to boot. And… overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.

    Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for “video game preservation” without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the “feel” of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are “just” writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.


  • The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.

    For a release starting “from scratch” with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of “I don’t care who uses this support library” and “I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain” and so forth.

    Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was “close enough” to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.

    I dunno. I won’t at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are “defending modders” while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.



  • Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:

    Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.

    Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.

    spoiler

    Basically, the first act of the movie is (re-)awakening Neo so all the marketing makes it feel like a reboot of 1. Except then it takes a pretty big shift as we find out that everyone who fought in the original wars is old and retired, if not dead. And The Machines want Zion to return as a power source except a faction of The Machines believed in Neo and fought, leading to basically the premise of the MMO where there are two big factions. One wants to return and the other wants to stay free. And a key part of The Matrix is that it requires a Neo and Trinity to provide just the right amount of rebellion (which is more power) but to torment them so that they can’t ever move on and have a happy ending.

    And the rest of the movie is basically The Kids rescuing Trinity and Neo and Trinity both having The One powers. Culminating in basically a repeat of the ending of 1 where they challenge The Machines and fly off into the distance. All while a fucking ska cover of Rage’s Wake Up plays.

    And… that is kind of what made me really like the movie even if I really fucking disliked watching it? Because… we (GenX/Millennials) fought our fight and… what did we accomplish? The world is a shitty place that gets shittier by the moment (exponentially in 2025…). We choose to go back to our cages because we are too afraid of the world outside of it and our lack of comforts. And that is what the movie was about. Humanity escaped The Matrix because of Neo… and Humanity went back in because the outside world is scary. And Neo and Trinity are going to have to fight our war again and maybe we’ll care this time but we probably won’t. Rage Against The Machine should have been the anthem of a generation and it mostly was ignored or loved by the machine de la Rocha et al were raging against.

    And… that is also the thing that gets too real. Because we have a generation that were inspired by what we did. But… what fucking kid even cares enough about Rage to want ska covers? Much like… what kids actually care enough about The Matrix to want a sequel? The sequel is still for the crowd that largely didn’t learn the message of the originals.

    So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?


  • Mods of the era largely fixed the scaling and the modern day best practices largely are based on that. Mortismal did a good video on Oblivion last year-ish where they talked about it but it mostly boils down to:

    Just stop leveling in (if memory serves) the mid-late 20s. That more or less is what you will get with 60-70% of your levels coming from combat skills and is around where your DPS levels out. The mods of the time basically just tweak the leveled lists to plateau out similarly.

    There was other more stylistic choices (stopping bandits from getting full daedric and glass gear) but that prevented the very common problem of “I didn’t optimize my build and now I can’t clear oblivion gates”




  • DOOM Eternal was very much designed around engaging with all the systems. The problem being… you don’t actually need to do glory kills, crucible kills, grenade kills, etc for the first few levels on the lower difficulty settings. So when you DO get to the later missions… you are now learning how to play the game against encounters designed to push you to your limits.

    Which, weirdly enough, meant that DOOM Eternal was actually best played on Ultraviolence. Because on UV? The first level will take you the better part of an hour (… or two). But after that? You know what you are doing and the rest of the game flies by… until the fucking DLC which is some of the best video gaming I have ever experienced. I remember being physically exhausted after some of the DLC levels and having that “This is REALLY not good but also holy crap” feeling.

    And before people poo poo TOO much on a game that is five years old: DOOM Eternal WAS DOOM 2016 except with a bigger focus on rushing forward to eliminate key enemies rather than waiting behind doors as choke points and treaing it like an early 00s “cover shooter”. And… that is exactly what DOOM 2 did back in the day. Archviles could resurrect anyone and Pain Elementals were endless sources of Lost Souls. So you also had to be ready to push your way into a room to take outthe baddies.


    Not sure how I feel about Quake 202-err, DOOM The Dark Ages. Gonna be there day one because I have been playing DOOM for basically my entire life (I am the guy who still replays the original once a year). But what we have seen so far feels like it was a really big over correction to DOOM Eternal. Which… is also kind of what happened with Quake versus DOOM 2 (and Final DOOM and The Plutonia Experiments and…).



  • Somewhat informed tinfoil hat time:

    In the short term? Nintendo likely have drastically decreased the supply to the US (and Canada since allegedly that was routed through the US in the past?) and are counting on tariffs not changing TOO much over the next 40 something days. Same with being able to route shipments from different countries. So they’ll take a hit but it won’t be more than they already baked in to the MSRP.

    Whereas for peripherals they did NOT already stock up on that in the US and all of those are going to be getting hit by tariffs at varying levels.

    THat said? Going forward? My money is on Nintendo taking a page out of nVidia and AMD’s book. The MSRP of the Switch 2 will remain 450 USD or whatever it is. But Nintendo will conveniently not direct sell those and it will be up to Best Buy and the like to jack up prices to cover it on their end. But hey, Amazon are the bad guys, not Nintendo.