Ashtear

Ashtear , 11 hours ago

Much of this isn't unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we've recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

What bugs me the most right now (and doesn't quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone's pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It's starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.

One new, big positive I'm not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn't happened in over thirty years. I'm including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix's recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.

Ashtear , 1 day ago

I've played all of the mainline games over the years, but my only experience with FFXI was a couple of hours of the beta. Tried the marathon as a set of replays several years back and only made it to the start of IX. The load times and the glacial pace of the battles was too much by that point. I think I was planning on skipping XI.

You could also try asking in !finalfantasy and !jrpg.

Ashtear , 2 days ago

Been a while since I've seen that name. One of a long line of very meh Star Wars games.

Ashtear , 3 days ago

Ahh, the tool change is nice. Functionally, it probably doesn't actually change the rate of resource collection, but it did feel bad seeing stuff you can't harvest.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

Which includes the pricing model. Some regions even saw a price increase.

A lot of corps threw out the whole concept of a demand curve over the pandemic.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

I don't have experience with their systems, but I had to go back to the store twice for an Acer monitor. First monitor had a dead HDMI port, second had a gap in the chassis at the top. Don't know why I didn't just go with a different one after the second replacement; it would end up developing a line of shadowing after about 18 months.

Ashtear , 6 days ago

So happy that Persona lit a fire under their asses. They need it.

Best thing that could happen to the genre would be Metaphor selling 10mil copies.

Ashtear , 7 days ago

So what's the top alternative? I've had quality issues with the last two Acer monitors I bought 😭

Ashtear , 10 days ago

Finishing up Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I wish it were polished, but it's still thoroughly scratching the Suikoden itch.

Ashtear , 10 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.

Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It's far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.

Edit to add:

I don't know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don't take my word for it. Here's a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush's director:

It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.

And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:

For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.

Hi-Fi Rush: From a Little Idea to a Very Big Surprise – The Exclusive Oral History

Ashtear , 10 days ago

I see the contradiction. And I'm not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It's a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.

My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of "Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built." We're talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.

Ashtear , 10 days ago

One regime's political-dissident-by-speech is another's dissident-by-drug-addiction. America's "War on Drugs" was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it's a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.

By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.

Ashtear , 10 days ago

Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.

Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.

There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.

Ashtear , 12 days ago

I wasn't big on it at release, but a lot of people were. In hindsight, there was still too much of the earlier DNA in the game: a lot of people just talking at you, and otherwise mostly a focus on driving around and shooting things. It wasn't engaging enough for someone like me that mostly played RPGs.

The move to 3D was impressive, though, and a necessary step for not just the series but a lot of games of the generation. Now that they had a big hit, they were able to take big swings by bringing in Ray Liotta and all the elements to make an amazing period piece with Vice City.

Ashtear , 16 days ago

The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt's (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.

Much of what's going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.

Ashtear , 20 days ago

This was the news to me on this whole mess. I knew about Ark but hadn't heard about this one. Shameless.

Ashtear , 21 days ago

I didn't see that coming, and it's a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it'll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

Ashtear , 22 days ago

Seems things have shaken out (for now) regarding defederation, including less chatter about Threads than there was. I don't anticipate much change on that until the next big influx of users, whether it's people coming in directly through Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin or a new player joining the Fediverse.

Other than that, I've just seen steady growth in my communities.

Ashtear , 22 days ago

I can't speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur's Gate 3's success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There's no huge publisher for Baldur's Gate 3; Larian's a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro's not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There's also the game's pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you're not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.

BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio's first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur's Gate 2, as the Baldur's Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.

Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it's possible no one's going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.

Ashtear OP , 28 days ago

Seems a big chunk of the negative scores are for how bad the Switch port is. I'm guessing the load times will probably never get fixed, but it's wild to me there isn't a toggle for the depth of field (I had to turn it off, it's definitely aggressive).

Ashtear OP , 28 days ago

Not Wrath or Legion good, if the numbers are any indication. While the community has generally been positive, Dragonflight simply hasn't sold very well.

The expansion's over, anyway. They have officially moved the expansion cadence to only two major patches from three.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

We're doing our best!

If you're in a niche community, don't be afraid to put some content out there. Niche communities are generally so happy to see any conversation. The amount of criticism/downvoting I've seen on topics in slow communities has been very low.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I always found the Dreamcast to be notable for being the first console to have polished 3D graphics. I don't consider it part of the fifth generation because I believe those consoles went a generation too early for 3D gaming, at least to the degree their game developers did. The difference between your typical PSX game running at 15 FPS with claustrophobic draw distances and SoulCalibur (or any halfway-decent PC offering of the time) was night and day. You'll hear cynical, lazy narratives about piracy, but that kind of thing was always on the margins in the 90's. It was the rapidly-moving market that would be the problem for Sega in the end, as PS2 and Xbox represented yet another big step forward for nascent 3D technology.

The thing is, despite running up against the best-selling console ever made, the opportunity was still there for the Dreamcast. Sega bungled their Japan release but had a far better than expected showing in North America, led by a strong launch lineup and an untapped market filled by the 2K sports games. The Dreamcast is a great case study in the necessity of agile marketing; immediately pivoting towards a stronger Western footing after the successful 1999 launch would have put Sega in the position to capitalize on future success. The PS2 had supply issues and a thin library in its early years. Sega also had the foresight to put modems on their consoles, and Phantasy Star Online would go on to be one of the best selling games on the system. The US had better Internet infrastructure and adoption than Japan, and the lack of online service was the one weakness the PS2 had. Sega being positioned to compete with Xbox Live would have dramatically altered the market landscape. Instead, Sega only had one major online title in the end, but even that would come too late. When Shenmue flopped (due to major budget overruns), that was that. The Dreamcast library had peaked, and higher-ups at Sega were already moving to pull the plug.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

It's all sheer greed, too. Paradox has fully embraced the model of releasing sequels with less content than their DLC-enhanced previous games after 2K showed the market had tolerance for it with Civilization. Considering how that already puts them ahead of the curve, it's amazing that Paradox let this game come out in this state.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Not old enough, heh. The cartridges/CDs this commenter are talking about had to have rock-solid code because patching wasn't possible. You'd have to make an entire new print run, and very few games of that era ever had those.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

The base game having less content than its predecessor isn't the greedy part. It's the fact that taking advantage of that market inelasticity wasn't enough for Paradox and judging it acceptable to release a product in this state on top of that.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Paradox and Colossal Order have said they literally ran out of cash?

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Paradox is extremely healthy.

If we're both going to be speculating here, I'm going with the more likely consideration for a publisher with record performance. In early August, they saw an early access game get its full release in an unfinished state to massive acclaim and sales (along with similar, larger trends) and decided to test their market with the same.

I don't even have a dog in this fight; I'm not a city management sim fan. I'm just calling it like it is.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Ya, Nintendo first-party was certainly one of the exceptions. Benefits of your games having ridiculously long tails.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Sometimes we get immediate benefits. It took a while for capitalism to take over the Internet.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Went back to college last year and Joplin's been amazing. More off-topic, but the only thing I wish it had was better search result organization.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I had a lot of fun with Cobalt Core. Much more lighthearted; great soundtrack too.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I sold a copy of Golden Sun to Venus Williams once.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

How has this been? I mostly enjoyed the first Darkest Dungeon but ended up passing on this one because I heard from a bunch of people that it lost a lot of the magic of the original.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Yeah, that's the hope. Thanks!

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I don't know about new IP even. When I saw the list, I found it a bit jarring to see Prince of Persia and Castlevania in an indie showcase.

Ashtear OP , 1 month ago

For me it's the space exploration. Could take or leave the bullet hell stuff.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Yep. I'm on lemm.ee and I don't even think about what content I might be missing.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Ugh, that pull quote.

Even in our press guides, we were not to say anything about Alex’s sexuality, period, at all.

Considering the response to the first game and its prequel, I don't know who the hell SQEX Europe thought their audience was.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

My retro favorites are Rikku (especially in FFX-2) and Celes from FF6. Rikku's the type to light up a room, and it turns out I have a thing for quirky, techie girls from persecuted minority groups which would later come up with Tali'zorah in Mass Effect. Of course, Rikku's more daughter goals than girlfriend goals now that I'm older. Awkward.

With Celes, there have been better, deeper portrayals of depression in RPGs since, but back in the 90's I really appreciated seeing a character that isn't boundlessly confident and has trauma to work through. Love her story.

I also really liked Aranea from FF15. Still feeling robbed that we never got her DLC.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Part of the concern is deceptive/astroturfed content developed as advertising showing up in Lemmy communities. While those same actors could theoretically be based on lemm.ee, that's a lot more work than simply scaling up operations when you're doing it on Threads anyway.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I don't know what's going on with this headline; it's not an awards show, just a showcase. Although I understand how events like The Game Awards blur the line between the two.

Makes me feel like Game News Season (or whatever we're calling it post-E3) is coming up quick.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Yeah, I didn't comment on the quality of the expansion itself because I'm actually the lowest on the game I've been in years. I'm in full tourist mode and have been since Legion. I'll come in for a month or two for expansion launch (three for Legion, I really liked that one), and then again in the last patch for one more month, and that's it. Now that I've been playing different games over the past few years, WoW is really starting to show its age and I'm less willing to let its flaws slide, such as the extremely toxic community you mentioned. There's a global community called WoW Made Easy that started up at Dragonflight launch with a mission statement of being patient in pick-up groups. Considering how massive it got, clearly the playerbase is fed up with the traditional PUG experience.

What's really soured me on the game is Blizzard's continuing divestment in customer service. Toxicity itself is a customer service problem and it takes actual eyeballs to fix it. And they aren't hiring. Just as bad is their newest approach to overcrowding, especially on Classic. Last I checked, their solution to crowded servers is "nothing we can do about it, it'll sort itself out when enough of you give up. no refunds btw."

I'm going to need some convincing to pickup The War Within.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Ah, that kind of price churn has been the norm in (lower case "l") legacy formats for as long as I've been playing the game (25+ years now). It'd be reprints, bans, or just plain old power creep. Those formats have been too expensive/volatile for me for a very long time now.