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Me playing Factorio, Third Strike on fightcade, Project Diablo 2, and Warcraft III on w3connect
Ahemmm…project Diablo 2? Go on…
This is a great opportunity to recommended indie games on Newgrouds or itch.io
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.
This is great opportunity to recommend FOSS FPS game Xonotic
It’s a great game !
doom source code + freedoom ftw
Then someone will introduce a “Disable toenail growth” mod which eats even more ram.
Imagine if they used all that resources in do… Fun gameplay. Not trying to be a movie or a simulation of real life. Like just gameplay. 100% gameplay. A game who is not a playable movie. A game with just gameplay. Like a real videogame.
My personal theory is that it boils down to how many people it takes to make games (too many to be useful imo). This is probably a sympton of
“hey, what feature can the new guy work on?”
“idfk make him add toenails or something”
Like those in-game cosmetics that cost real money but represented by a type of in-game currency that can’t be earned by playing the game, instead playing your wallet.
True. I never was able to work well in groups, imagine a work of more than 500 people.
Simulation systems can be very useful assets for fun gameplay, if you make a game that can make use of them. Immersive Sims are essentially all about this. They create a bunch of systems that can interact in all kinds of ways, and then they let the player figure out how to make use of them in whatever way they want.
The issue is these games are just making these systems without any way to take advantage of them. If the nails being long made you better/worse at things, and the nail clippings could be combined with other items to make potions or something, it could actually be a cool mechanic. Just doing it for “fidelity” isn’t useful though and usually just a waste of time/money/effort.
It can also make the incredibly tedious and irritating. Elite Dangerous is an incredible simulation of our galaxy that has terrible gameplay for your average player.
The simulation isn’t the reason for that. That’s just the design of the game. Plenty of people enjoy the Truck Simulator games. Elite is basically the same thing, but for space. Also, I wouldn’t call it a “simulation” of our galaxy, but a simulacrom or representation. It’s not changing. The groups expanding and building in that, the economy, and those systems are simulations, and they actually provide content for the game, regardless of if it’s enjoyable in your opinion.
Simulations that create content are when we should create simulations. Simulations that consume resources and don’t enhance the game should be avoided.
Rimworld is a good example of the depth of simulation making for good gameplay (also dwarf fortress…)
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.
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…
serves the modder right for implementing the DLC before it was released
And doing it for free instead of their $20 charge
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 be 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you like games, work on a crowd-sourced game like Endless Sky.
Or FOSS games like Xonotic
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.
Lol
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!
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
He announced a new game last year, rock dweller.
I feel like games have gotten less realistic in recent years. Like we had destructible terrain on the PS2 with red faction and games today still don’t really do it.
The issue with something like destructible terrain is that if your one and only goal is graphical fidelity, the only thing the AAA companies care about, then it actually becomes a massive resource hog. You’ll need to have artists render each photorealistic way that a piece of a scene could turn to debris. It’s the kinda thing that sounds simple, but could take a team of artists months or even years to accomplish.
If you look at an incredible game like Teardown which really delivers on full destructibility, you can see that they’re using voxels and the game looks a little blocky. It’s the kinda thing you can easily ignore with good art direction though, which Teardown has. The problem is that you need talented directors to conceptualize that, and most of the talent in the Western games industry is being wasted by corps that want to treat developers like single-use plastics and trash them once the current project is out.
I still blame the advent of graphics. Look at final fantasy: up until 10, everything was simple graphics for the most part and storytelling was key. Then graphics began to explode and everything became about the visuals. One of the more modern Final Fantasy, 13, was basically a 30 hour tutorial in the beginning. Just stuck on rails getting cutscenes after cutscene. The same thing happened with other games around that time(roughly when the ps2 launched). Now everything is raytracing this, lighting that, dynamic shadows this.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very cool. But it feels like the AAA focus went towards graphics and it’s taken the Indie scene (and Nintendo, love them or hate them), to keep pumping out creative and "just fun to play’ games.
ETA: To be clear, I’m referring to the ratio of games. I know AAA masterpieces still exist. But games like Crysis used to be the exception, not the norm. Bleeding edge, test your hardware games used to be more rare and now almost every new AAA game is a hard drive, ram hogging behemoth for the sake of its graphics.
Meanwhile I still play Mount & Blade: Warband. The graphics hold up today, but it’s not like they’re good. But the game is just so damn good they mean absolutely nothing.
Edit: I should also mention I’m young, I’m sure somebody would point out that Warband isn’t old compared to a lot of games, but in my eyes 2010 (which was 14 years ago, that makes my young ass feel old too) is an old game, although I’m going to be honest, I totally thought it was from like 2006
but in my eyes 2010 (which was 14 years ago, that makes my young ass feel old too) is an old game, …
I’m dead. I died of old age reading that. I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
I think your point stands well. You’re playing an older game despite less fancy graphics because the gameplay itself is engaging. 2010 counts as “old” in my book. Anything previous generation and beyond definitely isn’t “modern”.
I agree. FF is an interesting example though. It was always very much about the visuals, even when isometric. But it wasn’t just about the visuals as it seems to be now. The story has gotten less and less coherent over time.
I actually really enjoyed 13, but this new stuff is awful. If I wanted an action RPG, there are better places for that.
Final fantasy changed some core gameplay elements that, unfortunately for me, took them away from games I wanted to play.
I like turn based combat. I liked relatively straight forward leveling and character/weapon progressions. I liked essentially a single gimmicky system like materia. Or the card games in 8.
I hate the full action battles all the time now. It feels like the game is much more intense and twitchy. It ruins the pace of the story for me. It used to be something I would read my way through, explore at my own pace, take a journey. Stories aren’t always fast action, and that’s what I feel like the more modern battle system make the game feel like.
Same. I understand the combat in the earlier games wasn’t great, and it’s was difficult to do something with it. But this direction wasn’t it.
It 100% needed to remain turn/menu based for one.
I agree. I wish that everything wasn’t just decoration, aside from some designated destructible boxes or barrels.
It feels like old cartoons(Tom & Jerry/Looney Toons era) where they drew the background as a muted static cell and only freshly animated things that moved. Objects in games are either entirely real, or just a painting on a texture. We’re still at “if I can touch it, it’s probably important. Otherwise ignore it”.
Unfortunately if you have walls today that get destroyed like Red Faction, you would get people complaining that it’s lazy and looks weird. But to get a wall to break with the standards we have now takes an exponential amount more processing power because not only do you need the walls to break “realistically” but it also has to render the super nice graphics on each little piece of that wall break.
I disagree and counter with Minecraft. Art styles don’t need to be hyper realistic to accomplish immersion.
I counter with all the realism hype about Arma 3. Players were literally talking about the grass and moon cycles. Meanwhile the actual combat simulation part was worse than a game cooked up by the US Army Recruiting command.
I swear if a wall didn’t break exactly right they would have written a 20 page dissertation on it and mailed it directly to the lead graphics artist.
Their existence doesn’t negate the people who enjoyed Minecraft. You basically said “the people who bought a hyper realistic sim expected hyper realism”. Yes, a tautology is a tautology.
Again, plenty of people find non hyper realistic graphics satisfying. An entire Indie catalogue proves this. Games like Lethal Company or Among Us or Terraria or Stardew Valley are huge hits with pixel graphics or graphics from 1995.
Your argument is boiling down to “well someone will complain, so might as well not even try”. It’s very cynical and defeatist. Acting like hype against Arma means no one else enjoyed anything. You take too much from other people’s opinions. Enjoy what you enjoy. Stop basing your opinions on what others on the Internet say.
That’s not it at all. You were talking about immersion and I’m just pointing out that some people see the environment as more important than the core gameplay mechanics. That doesn’t invalidate people who enjoy Minecraft. And yeah the problem is big game companies are listening to those gamers who are basically the squeaky wheel.
The relative success of Teardown refutes this, I think.
That’s actually exactly what I was going to add on to my post but decided against it. I assumed OP was talking about AAA games since those are the topic of this post. There’s plenty of indie games that have less worse graphics with breakable walls.
Battlebit: Remastered before the devs bailed on it, too
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?
Fable 5?
Oi it’s chicken chaser!
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
