raccoona_nongrata

If games seem to have a steep learning curve my approach is usually to just wade in and get started.

Sure, I won’t play super efficiently and I’ll make mistakes but that’s all fine for me. I spend all day at work trying to optimize and be efficient, I don’t need to do that in my games unless I happen to find the process fun or rewarding in a particular game.

I think it’s easy as adults to lose our sense of play with video games, but you can cultivate it by just saying fuck it and using your intuition. It’s a game, the stakes are low.

I think ultimately we’re going to end up settling for regional instances for like North America, SA, Europe, Pacific, hopefully Africa etc.

It truly would be a miracle if they somehow mitigated lag between, say, Chicago and Australia well enough for people to play and fight together. But I think there’s simply a physical limitation to literally how fast light can travel that will make that not possible.

That said, I’d be more than content with a few giant regional shards. Though I would be sad to not play with Europeans, the vibe with Euro players is a nice change of pace sometimes. Having a multicultural experience in SC also seems appropriate to the concept of the game, I want to run across people who do not speak the same language.

I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there’s a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it’s doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective.

You’re the one making statements about it taking too long in a general way, comparing it to “normal” industry timelines (or as you imagine such timelines would be, if they existed as a standard).

It’s not subjective that the scope and detail of features in SC and SQ42 have not been seen in another game. My opinion on that has nothing to do with it being “up my alley”. At most you can find games that have perhaps one or two features that already ship with SC, and usually to less detailed degree (ex. Elite Dangerous with its planets and instanced landing zones). Nothing compares, even in it’s unfinished state.

Also, that “8 years” is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that’s reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player.

That’s fine if you want to imagine this, but it’s not something you know. And it does nothing to undermine the point that highly complex games take a long time (especially when you’re working on other highly complex games at the same time). CIG started literally from scratch, so I’m not sure why you’re willing to factor these excuses above for an established studio like Rockstar, but not factoring in the time to literally build a studio from the ground up as a justifiable reason for why something might take a long time. You’re just repeating a trope uncritically.

Polishing and performance in a game do not happen until the last leg of development, CIG has tried to keep SC Live as performative as possible within reason, given the constant changes and placeholder technology coming and going, but it’s under different priorities from a feature complete titled so the degree that they can achieve this varies depending on what they’re shipping in a given patch. Which seems fair to me; we get to play and experience the things we bought as they’re being built, and in return we except some jank here and there for the time being. That’s more honest than getting a supposedly finished game like Cyberpunk and it being a complete mess.

You say there’s diminishing returns, but as someone who actually has played the game for years, the return on features is growing, not shrinking – all the features are beginning to culminate into more than the sum of their parts and systemic cohesion is forming in some very compelling ways. Performance has also been steadily improving. It’s not just these random bits and bobs stapled together, that’s part of the “tech demo” misinformation people just won’t let go of.

It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don’t even know when you’ll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it’s priced to cash in on whales. At least it’s not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.

The reason pre-ordering games is often exploitive is because some game studios will hype people up and then not deliver on what they promise (ex. Cyberpunk). CIG has been delivering. Exploitation would require that people were somehow deceived or taken advantage of.

Every dollar of the couple hundred I put into the game over the years I did so having it fully communicated to me what I was getting into and what I was actually paying for (not a ship or an item, but the continued development of the game). If people can’t be bothered to read the plain language disclaimers that come up at every stage or the many posts and comments across the Internet from other backers setting expectations for people, CIG can’t be the ones blamed for that.

Am I saying the industry should all be kickstarters? No, because it’s definitely something that is prone to abuse and is unreliable. But what we see is that Chris Roberts was *not *out to pull a fast one, he was not out to wring money out of people they didn’t have and get rich quick. He wanted to build a game that was impractical to make within the industry model, and we all wanted it to. Stop trying to make it out like we’re rubes who got a fast one pulled on us, that’s very cleary not the case; we were right to trust Roberts and CIG and we are getting our money’s worth.

It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game.

Ok, so I point out that it’s two games, give an example of another game that took ten years on it’s own with half the features and you just ignore that like I said nothing. This is not a good faith conversation and it’s honestly really irritating.

Right now we’re looking at a AAA industry that’s taking about 5-6 years to make a game

And no one has made anything close to what SC or SQ42 are offering, because it takes a ton of time and resources. There’s a reason everyone’s blown away by these recent demonstrations and announcements, because it’s a quantum leap. The suggestion that one should expect that to happen in 4-5 years is ridiculous, this isn’t a COD reskin. If that were true we would’ve seen a game like SC already, but no one has attempted it. Even a huge AAA title like RDR2 took 8 years and it’s nowhere near the scale of these games, that’s not a sign it was mismanaged, it’s a sign that RDR2 was really labor intensive to create.

But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU.

If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive. It’s not a tech demo, CIG is not angling to “sell the engine and run” or whatever other conspiracies people have come up with over the years. The devs are not on yachts drinking champagne. The money has gone into the games, you can go look at their yearly financial statements; CIG has been delivering on the the game and pledge perks consistently as fast as they develop those features and assets.

And it’s totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn’t exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.

It’s not, because we’re all getting exactly what we paid for. And even you get to benefit from the foresight and investment of backers. The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.” It’s very frustrating.

It’s not really though – two games, and a maintained live version of the MMO one for roughly twice the price of Starfield (which took about ten years itself and doesn’t really come knee-high to what SQ42 and SC are delivering). You could argue that Starfield went “years without a release date” too, it’s not a coherent criticism, games take a long time and their development priorities shift and change. Only difference with Starfield or GTA or any other game is it happens behind closed doors.

Like I say, people are working with false notions about SC and the game industry in general, it was never a suitable target for the hate it got, especially as it became established that it wasn’t a scam, the business model was no more “exploitative” than something like Apex or PubG that make literal billions yearly off cosmetics. CIG has been very clear about what your money is going towards, that the ships and items you get when you pledge are perks, not something that have any inherent value. The majority of them are now earnable in game, barring some ones features in SQ42.

People have their ego wrapped up in the criticisms about the game, they don’t like the idea that they got duped into hating on something by people who profited off their rage. People need to stop trying to save face; they were wrong about Star Citizen and SQ42.

When I’ve had long claim times what it did is forced me to interact with other players. I talked with some players, got a ride with them and had a lot of fun running together.

Something teawrecks failed to mention is that you can pay to expedite your ship insurance claim. And the smaller the ship, the faster the claim. So you can get a fighter or small utility ship back very quickly. It’s not a big deal.

But yeah, if people want to be constantly in the action at any given time, SC will never be that. It’s a universe simulator with rules and consequences.

More remarkable to me as someone who plays and enjoys SC is that it’s finally overcoming the gamer groupthink, not a rare feat.

People had all kinds of false notions about the project passed to them by people who make money off negativity or have an incentive for SC to fail, but it’s just not working any more. Ironically, those same content creators and journalists are now trying to save their credibility by pretending they were onboard the whole time.

It’s all a bit annoying as a long time backer, but if it means some relief from the ridicule and gaslighting it’ll be nice.

Yup, a future of games as a service means gaming becomes more expensive. It only starts out cheap to get people using it, they would never do it if the long term plan wasn’t to raise the prices to make it more profitable than selling digital copies.

I used to be all about controllers as a kid, but as I got more into PC gaming in my teens and twenties controllers became kind of uncomfortable and I can’t really go back.

It might also be all the modern smoothing and aim assist type tech in modern games that are made for console, that stuff always feels unweildly to me. I think it’s part of why I struggle with PC games that are designed with console in mind, it always feels compromised mechanically. But it’s a subtle thing.

I expect any war game or film to be at least somewhat propaganda-ish, though some do it with more nuance than others.

To me the thing about CoD that makes it unappealing is that it’s just really heavy-handed and leans too hard into “war is cool, look how badass it is to murder” while simultaneously trying to pass off the single-player campaigns as having dramatic merit or a serious message. It feels dishonest.

I choose to believe the author doesn’t know what the word cameo means and was too embarrased to ask anyone. In that light it makes the article much more impressive.

I really don’t get why people can’t see Gamepass for the scam it is. Like, people need to understand that as soon as “games as a service” is normalized and the options to actually own a game indefinitely have been displaced, the price of things like Gamepass will start to rise. Microsoft would not offer gamepass if they didn’t see the potential to squeeze more money out of people eventually.

It is inevitable, and it’s always the same slow frog boil strategy.

Best way to settle this issue would be to ensure that the companies that make these for-profit generators are made to profit share with the artists whos labor their models rely on to function.

This would probably help motivate the companies to gather their art more ethically as well, rather than just scraping the Internet blindly, and the end users of the service would be paying for the labor of the original artists.

Guess they must just be lazy and stupid then.

Sure, I was more just responding to the tendency some people have in oversimplifying the development process of any game. There are things that people who aren’t devs do not know that they do not know they don’t know.

Not to mention it means solving for all the extra resources consumed by the content on the planet.

A loading screen lets you load different areas of the game discreetly and make the game performative. This is especially important as Starfield is a single player game, it’s not hosted on a server or anything so it can’t distribute resource load that way, its all happening client side on the player’s system. They would have to simulate the entire world on their PC alone or develop a way to stream the content out dynamically and seamlessly.

This demo from the guy is fine up to a point, but once you start adding in real content it gets more complicated. Not impossible but it’s not as simple as just copy-pasting some stuff into Unreal the way people are making it out to be.

There’s a reason SF took 10 years, and it’s not because the devs were lazy or incompetent or hadn’t thought of something. I’m sure there were a lot of discussions about seamless flight.

My friend was recently accepted to beta test the game, so there’s got to be something there, but this is not an encouraging sign.

Edit: I showed my friend this news and he mentioned he actually never got to test, he got accepted and then they never sent the second email with the key. Apparently not an isolated incident either -_-

Kenshi has a lot of unique elements. It’s sort of like a post-apocalyptic Sims game.

It’s very addictive and is one of those kinds of games that surpises you with how much freedom you’re given. I’ve not really seen anything quite like it.

Honestly, no judgement on Bethesda here, but it sounds like it’s more about retroactively justifying tech limitations they ran into.

A place can have a barren atmosphere and aesthtic while also having content to find, even if that content is more sparse or minimal, suited to that lonely environment. I think it’s more that they simply created more space than they could reasonably populate without taking more time on the game, so they try to pitch it as a feature.

Again, not a judgement on the worthiness of the game over-all, but more a practical observation that they perhaps bit off more than they could chew in that respect.

Yeah, I was interested to see what became of Gamestop after all the retail shenanigans, it was a pretty neat thing to see Wallstreet take a giant shit in their own pants in broad daylight.

But once Gamestop leadership started talking about NFTs being their big strategy to capitalize on becoming debt free etc. I knew it was going nowhere.