and then at the same time they combat will be clunky and uninspired plus the writing will be awful.
BUT TOENAILS THOUGH
AAAA toe nails! $100 for the early access pedicure pack of 3 special nail colours. You can purchase the other 7 colours via the nail pass, you’ll gain access to a new colour each month as your nails grow in real-time!
Games soon: modders removed the nail clipping mechanic for a 1600% performance boost (while also adding ultra wide support and removing the arbitrary 30fps cap in cutscenes); however the due to legal action the modder had to take it down or him and his family would be jailed and forced to pay $30 million for harming the company.
serves the modder right for implementing the DLC before it was released
And doing it for free instead of their $20 charge
You joke but this is exactly what people did to play Final Fantasy Origin on release, a mod that made everyone bald because the hair was the reason the game ran so bad lol.
My joke is very very much inspired by real events. SE is notoriously bad at ports. Trying to play FFXVI and it goes to screensaver during cutscenes without mods. Amateur hour, haha.
Oh the new one, my friend had to install razer chroma to finish a dungeon because apparently the game has some connection with it to change the color of the keyboard during that dungeon. Something about it making a lot of calls to that software if it couldn’t find it, ends up bringing the fps way down lol.
That sounds like a neat option, if it was optional…
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This is great opportunity to recommend FOSS FPS game Xonotic
It’s a great game !
doom source code + freedoom ftw
This is a great opportunity to recommended indie games on Newgrouds or itch.io
This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.
Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’
This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. Once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’
In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have
battlefieldCODtarkovCSGOTF2Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.
Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.
So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the inudstry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.
Stay away.
Thank you for putting all these pieces together.
No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.
Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.
Then do that every 2 years.
Maybe the most fucking disgusting part of all of this is that it doesn’t even lead to more money. The shitty western companies are all fucking floundering right now because they have no institutional knowledge, there’s no way to become a veteran game dev at a company that churns through their workforce every 12 months, and suddenly you have out of touch execs at Ubisoft and EA wondering why people don’t play their games. All the innovation that comes from pouring your soul into a project for the long-term comes from indie developers now, and it’s left AAA games feeling as soulless to play as they are to make.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
Counterpoint, you also gave Nintendo in the East pouring kerosene over their accumulated goodwill and lighting it on fire.
Nintendo hates their fans, not their developers. They’re actually one of the better game companies to work for.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the execs in the east aren’t immune to doing batshit insane things. Capcom is on some wild shit with their microtransactions. Konami really feels like they’re just taking a shovel to Kojima’s legacy and pulling out whatever they can. Nintendo is trying to find out if they can legally punch developers in the face.
But they aren’t putting out multi-million dollar flops. They’re not decimating their workforce to increase CEO compensation packages. They’re not getting swallowed up by the handful of fish who are too big for the pond. They’re just being kinda weird, which is a fine change of pace.
If you allow for some cultural differences Nintendo is not really acting all that weird. It’s a conservative (in the original meaning) company in a very conservative country. They play it close to the vest and are very careful about protecting what they feel is theirs to protect.
Don’t get me wrong though, I dislike what they’ve been doing as well and I’m not defending them. From their perspective they probably don’t look at it like that though. For them it’s mostly what they feel like is defensive measures to protect their stuff. I’m certain they won’t stop until they’ve done their best to utterly destroy the emulator market at large. For me at least that’s the only reason I need to completely boycott them.
It fucking sucks, but this is what capitalism comes down to. Hopefully they get some sense slapped into them at some point soon by a judge somewhere.
Konami on the other hand, that shit just boggles my mind. I don’t understand any of the choices they’ve made for a while now.
Even Nintendo games have recently been dropping in Quality. Especially Gamefreak.
Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.
The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.
Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.
Lol
If you like games, work on a crowd-sourced game like Endless Sky.
Or FOSS games like Xonotic
I remember before the first Fable came out, in an interview or preview of the game in one of the magazines I subscribed to mentioned that you would be able to carve your name into a tree and then see it scar the tree as it aged over time, and even then as a teenager, I was like “bull fucking shit.”
They didn’t even have that as, like, a cutscene. Let alone a mechanic.
And people STILL take peter’s word at face value today.
that sounds unlikely considering he hasn’t released a game since like 2017
there was a game made by sega a LONG time ago that had a realistic time progression. No one has ever beaten it and I think finding copies of that game is extremely difficult
as you can expect, making a hyper-realistic game didn’t work out so well. But now there’s lots of games with way too many “chores” RedDeadRedemption 2 has way too much stuff you need maintain.
One of the things that pisses me off about the elder scrolls games is the limit on how much loot you can carry.
Or in zelda breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom, there’s almost nothing but insanely fragile weapons that literally shatter into nothing when you hit something with it more than 4 times.
I loathed the shattering weapons in the first hour of botw, but the next 80-100 hours, I learned to love it, and when totk came with the merge or whatever it’s called oh boy was I having fun.
I made fun of BotW when I first played it, but once I got into it I realized how great it is. You can’t kill all enemies you come across right away. Much like Elden Ring you make a mark on the map and come back when you’re stronger and you have better gear.
I got bored early on and traversed the whole map climbing each tower. In doing so I really fell in love with the style. I recommend everyone struggling with the game do the same. Open the map completely and explore. Later on it’s super easy to raid the castle for infinite end game gear.
Yeah, the durability on every single weapon in BOTW/TOTK could have been quintupled and the game would have been better for it.
It was so bad that you couldn’t even kill a Lynel with their own weapon before the weapon broke. You had to abuse glitches just to make it through the fight with the same weapon they were using against you.
Also 90% of the development time went into making this feature, so a few cuts had to be made in less important areas like gameplay and story.
Sure, programmers that make systemic features like these also write the story
Gamers went wild for RDR2 realistic horse bollocks and shit physics,
So i kinda blame them.
I also don’t care wir RDR2. The game ran well in my experience and it wasn’t getting on your nerves. You didn’t even notice, if you didn’t look for it.
You mean you didn’t twist the camera up underneath the horse and check to make sure the balls behave realistically? And you call yourself a gamer…
No, I don’t think I did.
Your loss lol.
How did you know they’re realistic without lifting the tail on a real horse for comparison?
Maybe the machines don’t know what real horse bollocks look like. That’s why everything tastes like horse bollocks.
…wait, that’s not right
Who’s to say I haven’t seen a horses bollocks before?
I’m perplexed that nobody has mentioned Dwarf Fortress.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Nail
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Body_parts
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:ProfileIn the year 512 Urist Fogmallet bit the finger off Bost Vilegreen.
And you can check 50 years later, and Bost will still ne missing that finger. Quintessential for making a world that lives outside your fort.
The difference is that DF actually gives things like this a purpose. They effect stats. They also don’t waste time graphically simulating most of this. (It used to be none, but now we do have some graphical representations of some traits, like beard/hair style, skin color, etc.)
Excellent point. But also, these things absolutely will bring the strongest computer to its knees given a long enough time or a large enough embark area.
Maybe. My understanding is they have a very minor impact on performance. Line of sight I think is still number 1, by a lot, although that’s been improved greatly recently. Temperature is also somewhat bad. Both of these have fairly large gameplay impacts.
The data connected to a unit doesn’t really hurt performance. It could fill up RAM if it were enormous, but the way I think the data is layed out in memory makes it very efficient to utilize. If you’re performing an action on a unit anyway you’ve got to bring their data into RAM, and it’s all grouped together so it’s one big chunk of data that gets pulled in together and can be operated on.
Graphical improvements have been minimal at best for probably ten years, now. They have to do something. I mean, at least they think they have to do something to justify charging $70 or whatever for a new, AAA game these days.
Fable 5?
Oi it’s chicken chaser!
Then someone will introduce a “Disable toenail growth” mod which eats even more ram.
You know that’s fake cause they wouldn’t add physically interactible objects to modern games
Unless it’s for a quest or achievement. 40 years later you log onto steam, and unlock the hidden achievement “degrade a bag full of nail clippings”
Pretty sure The Stanley Parable has some achievements like that. Like don’t play the game for 5 years then open it again or something.
Yep that one exists. I’m currently working on the 10 year achievement in Stanley Parable Deluxe. It’s good to have long-term concrete goals.
