Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC's that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
Well yeah because this is capitalism, and those lost jobs will be lost forever, and everyone who was working them will suddenly have no source of income with nothing to replace it. Instead of taking care of those people, they’ll just be collateral damage.
Sounds like the problem is with our economic system. There are ways to fix that. Even ways to fix "capitalism" so that it isn't necessary, without changing the fundamental concepts of freedom and personal property that people are so worried about.
I'm speaking primarily to Americans with that line since they equate all of those. I'm not going to get into a debate about how accurate it is, the main point I'm making is that there are ways to decouple the economy from "needing to have jobs" that don't require changing the fundamental nature of society (aside from the "need for jobs" part, of course).
The most annoying thing about the cities performance issues isn’t even the performance issues. It’s all the gamers who overnight became experts in game performance that are ranting and raving online about how they obviously know how to optimize games more than professionals. It’s so tiring at this point.
Any software engineer with real professional experience can tell you performance tuning is a nightmare. It’s going through millions of lines of code checking for places you can allocate memory a bit differently. Checking collections and going back to your CS classes to make sure you’re using the best data structures. Watching performance tools and debugging for hours on end to catch that one place that slows down a bit.
People here, Reddit, and everywhere are just so tiring because they act like it’s so obvious. “Oh it’s the teeth”. “If they would have done X”. It’s honestly just so disrespectful to the full time engineers who no doubt have had those thoughts months ago. If items like this were simple, they would have done them already.
I give completely respect to the engineers who worked on this, and I respect Colossal Order’s push to still release early. As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable, I’m happy they released now.
I largely agree with what you’re saying but I’m going to add… If you get to the point of release and you’re off 300% and not 15% … you screwed up.
There definitely aren’t easy answers to these kinds of problems but there are steps that should be taken along the way to prevent them. Getting to the end and then addressing any and all performance issues is a recipe for disaster.
You don’t want to be making major architectural changes at this point in the process. You want to be dealing with hiccups. Throwing hardware at the problem and “optimization” only go so far.
Cities: Skylines II is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements. With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.
Then why the hell do you release the game? So it's another rushed game and that is you can blame the devs for. That is what upsets me personally the most from all those drama.
It's shocking how you guys defend the release of unfinished games. The game needed a delay and that would be better for the company and for the gamers. When will companies learn from this?
They literally said why. Because a lot of players, like myself, don’t care about the performance issues and are happy to play it. That those who wanted to start deserved to get it early, and that by delaying it only punished us. And they’re right, like I said I am enjoying it, there’s a huge discord of people enjoying it. If some people just absolutely can’t handle 30fos then they are welcome to delay it for themselves and not buy it until hardware catches up
As someone who is enjoying the game, zero crashes, and in my opinion completely playable
Not gonna lie, something tells me your opinion would shift within seconds if your computer wasnt working you a little extra magic to make this sentence true.
Willing to throw my hat into the ring here and say that I haven't even bought it yet because I know my pc can't handle it. I will wait for performance patches (or look at finally upgrading my 5 year old pc)
I also think they've done everything right. They called it out BEFORE release, but released anyway for the subset of players who can play, with the promise of improving it for the rest.
The ones who can play it got lucky, the ones who can't and are all pissed about it are the same ones who would be bitching if it got delayed.
Honestly they should have put it behind the beta window under the caveat that the “beta” was just bug fixing.
But Ive kinda noticed a trend where people who say that everyone else is overreacting, and that people are throwing tantrums over nothing, are pretty often people who have a spendy machine that brute forced past all the issues.
Like people who say “minecraft doesnt have a memory leak issue, just install a bit more RAM!” You havent solved the problem, you exist in a situation where you cant notice the problem.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.
(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)
I don't think the issue is with people deducing something is wrong with the game. The issue is people sayings "It's definitely the fuel pump - why didn't you give it a larger pipe?" because the windscreen wipers aren't working.
Recognising an issue vs diagnosing it vs. figuring out a treatment. You can notice chest pains and shortness of breath, perhaps make an educated guess that it could be a heart attack, but it’s going to take an expert to diagnose whether that’s actually the case and what course of action to take.
There’s a big difference between looking at a game and saying there seem to be some performance issues versus baselessly pretending that you know what the specific cause of those issues is.
That’s not a fair comparison. I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati, when they didn’t build a masarati. They built a van. I don’t need to go 100km/h, I needed something that could carry all of these items I have. And for me, that runs fine.
I will say that I have a new(ish) gaming rig, built about 3 years ago. I do think minimum requirements are jokingly out of date, and those needed to be upped to not mislead people. I don’t think even a 1000 series GTX card could play this on minimum settings, let alone a 900. It’s better PR just to be up front and say “Look, those cards just aren’t going to cut it. If you can’t play day one, we’re sorry, but we’re excited to see you at your next upgrade” rather than lie and say it’ll be fine.
I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.
Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.
I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,
I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.
I mean, you kinda do, though. You have no idea what’s going on under the hood in Divinity versus Baldur’s Gate. Even if the graphics are similar and the UI looks the same, there could well be much more complex systems involved. Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.
That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:
Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)
Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.
I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.
In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.
(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)
The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (…) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware.
You cannot directly compare PC specs with those of a console. TLoU was made by Naughty Dog who are well known for squeezing absurd amounts or performance out of console hardware. The way to do this by leveraging a platforms specific strong points. The engine is very likely designed around the strengths of the console’s hardware.
PCs have a different architecture from consoles, with different trade-offs. For example: PCs are designed to be modular. You can replace graphics cards, processors, RAM, etc. This comes at a cost. One such cost is that a PC GPU has to have it’s own discrete RAM. There is a performance penalty to this. On a console things can be much more tightly integrated. I/O on a PS5 is a good example. It’s not just a fast SSD, it’s also a storage controller with more priority levels, it’s also a storage controller that interfaces directly with the GPU cache, etc.
Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.
You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”,
No, that just supports my theory. Graphics settings usually scale really well, that’s the reason they are adjustable by the end-user in the first place. Those should not cause any of the issues you are talking about. The problems lie in parts that take advantage of certain architectural differences.
A hypothetical example that highlights a real architectural difference between consoles and PCs:
Say you have a large chunk of data and you need to perform some kind of operation on all this data. Say, adjust the contents of buffer A based on the contents of buffer B. It’s all pretty much the same: read some data from A and B, perform some operation on it, write back the results to A. Just for millions of data points. There are many things you could be doing that follow such a pattern. You know who’s really good at doing a similar operation millions of times? The GPU! It was made specifically to perform such operations. So as a smart console game developer you decide to leverage the GPU for this task instead of doing it on the CPU. You write a small compute kernel, some lines in your CPU code to invoke it. Boom, super fast operation.
Now imagine you’re tasked with porting this code to the PC. Now, suddenly this super fast operation is dog slow. Why? Because it’s data generated by the CPU, and the result is needed by the CPU. The console developer was just using the GPU for this one operation that’s part of a larger piece of code to take advantage of the parallel performance of the GPU. On PC, however, this won’t fly. The GPU cannot access this data because it’s on a separate card with it’s own RAM. The only way to get to the CPU is through the (relatively slow) PCIe bus. So now you have to copy the data to the GPU, perform the operation, and then copy the data back to system RAM. All over the limited bandwidth of the PCIe bus, that’s already being used for graphics-related tasks as well. On a console this is completely free, the GPU and CPU share the same memory so handing data back and forth is a zero-cost operation. On PC this may take so much time that it’s actually faster to do on the CPU, even though the CPU takes much more time to perform the operation, simply to avoid the overhead of copying the data back and forth.
If an engine uses such an optimisation this will never run well on the PC, regardless of how fast your GPU is. You’d need a lot of years of ‘hardware inflation’ before either doing it on the CPU or doing it on the GPU + 2 times the copy overhead is faster than just doing it on the GPU of the console with zero overhead.
In fact, things like this is why Apple moved away from dedicated GPUs in favour of a unified memory model. If you design your engine around such an architecture you can reach impressive performance gains. A good example of this is how Affinity Photo designed their app around the ‘ideal GPU’ that didn’t exist yet at the time, but which they were expecting to in the future. One with unified memory. When Apple finally released it’s M-series SoCs they finally had a GPU architecture that matched their predictions and when benchmarked with their code the M1 Max beat the crap out of a $6000 AMD Radeon Pro W6900X. Note that the AMD part is still much faster if you measure raw performance, it’s just that the system architecture doesn’t allow you to leverage that power in this particular use-case.
It’s not just how fast the individual components are, it’s how well the are integrated and with a modular system like a PC this is always going to cause a performance bottleneck.
Even just modding I’ve noticed a lot of extremely confident opinion-giving that’s equally uninformed. I think people just like to feel like they have some special insight, so they tend to run with whatever the first narrative they hear is and stick hard to it. It reminds me of all those little bullshit factoids people love to repeat, like that daddy long legs are the most venomous spider but are incapable of biting people.
The big obvious example in DayZ is the myth of the ‘alpha wolf’. People have for ages been claiming that one of the two wolf textures (usually the white one, but I’ve heard both) is an ‘alpha’ wolf that’s stronger than the others and will cause the pack to run away if you kill it. This is a complete myth with no basis in the code of the game. One wolf type is a child class of the other and the only difference is their texture.
And yet some people will get extremely offended if you mention this. Even if they literally have never even peeked under the hood of DayZ and are well aware that you’ve been actively developing mods for it.
This is exactly it. It’s more fun to shit on a game release because it gives a sense of superiority. “I know better than everyone else, this game should have been done this way and that way” and bolsters self confidence.
There are without a doubt some really good arguments for things that could be different, but the vast majority of things I read are self aggrandizing people talking about how they all know how it could be better - and that’s the arrogance that really bugs me. That any of us who don’t know anything about the source code could say at all that it should run better.
Saying “I wish it ran faster” is one thing. Saying “I know it could run better” or “Other games run fast, this one should too”, or in regards to this article “lol they did this thing that’s so stupid” and just the self backpatting for figuring it out. Software engineering is hard alone. Gaming engineering on top of that is just ridiculous. I have 14 years of software engineering under my belt and I still know they are doing things in this game that I would not be able to. Anyone who says they know better than the engineers are the same as the people who sat in my CS102 class and told other students they were smarter than the professor. You aren’t. Everyone knows you aren’t. Please stop acting like you are
They’re “overnight performance experts” because there are similar games that run better.
To me it seems that there was a tight schedule and they couldn’t prioritize performance tweaks over features. I mean, if it’s works it works, refactor later so we can jump to the next requirement.
Sum all that up and you won’t know which part of the chain takes most cycles,
I don’t work in games, but I do work in software and the people you describe are infuriating and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to work on a big piece of software. Thanks for the comment.
You don’t understand. I watched a YouTube video/took CS102/have a side project I’m totally going to finish. I totally know just as much as these engineers with 10+ years experience who put the last 5+ years into the project.
Yup. I’ve worked with some really great software engineers in the gaming industry, and they don’t have a fucking clue how to optimize a game, and it’s because optimizing the game doesn’t take a clue. It takes legwork, and diagnostics, and digging, and digging, and digging.
It’s never what you think, because if it was, it would have been fixed already.
We shipped well optimized games, and we did so because the games were (relatively) small, and our engineers were absolute pro sleuths.
The bear fucking was one thing. But the damn genital-less mindflayers even want to jump your bones. This is the horniest game since Leisure Suit Larry!
The fact is, vanilla Bethesda games are as dry as they come. At least when it comes to any form of adult content, even implied. Baldur's Gate 3, on the other hand, is down bad through, and through.
Honestly, I’d imagine the presence of lizard and cat people as playable characters did more for that than a little bit of suggestive in game flavor text tbh
There was some stuff that came out a couple weeks ago I think that said the extreme horniness was a bug and it’s patched now. So they won’t try to jump your bones so quickly and aggressively now, lol.
Morrowind had some pretty crazy implied stuff if you went down the right quest trees and read the little details. Remembering about stripping for Crassius Curio still makes me feel a touch dirty and violated. Telvanni had some rapey stuff going on too.
I’m just thinking of how I have mods for both Skyrim and Fallout 4 that turn every character into furries, and how Starfield doesn’t have multiple races. I’m not sure if modding can add more races because every single mod I’ve ever seen from Morrowind to Fallout 4 only ever uses the same number of races the vanilla game offers. But it would be a little disappointing for there to only be 1 race (maybe 2 if you count robots) for mods like that.
Yeah, I’d be worried about Apple if they ever got serious about gaming other than mobile games. Netflix and Amazon are medium concerns, though there’s a good chance they’d go for mobile games for any sort of gaming push. Google just lost any trust they ever might’ve had with game developers by killing off Stadia.
Yeah, the mess Google made of Stadia pretty much guarantees that, even if they try to get into the games industry again, nobody will have any trust or goodwill towards them.
I don’t play a lot of online games so I had no idea what smurfing is so I looked it up. Hopefully this is a decent definition.
** Smurfing in an online game refers to the practice of experienced or skilled players creating new or low-level accounts to play against less experienced opponents. This allows them to dominate matches and achieve an unfair advantage due to their higher skill level. Smurfing can negatively impact the gaming experience for new or casual players.**
Yeah, this is a very good definition of what smurfing is. Just in case you had any apprehensions. There's a whole discussion about smurfing and other ways people try to ruin a game. Nice job on learning, and I mean that unironically, something new. I could elaborate on how smurfing works and how games handle it, but are you interested? Just don't wanna throw a wall of text at you if you're not.
Oh joy! I do love ranting, so apologies if I run on. You see, smurfing is just as described, 'a skilled player creating new or low-level accounts to play against less experienced opponents'. This happens all over the place, from highly competitive games like League of Legends and Overwatch, to games aimed at casual matches and more classic experiences like Halo and Call of Duty. However, the systems they use and even genres are completely different. I'm sure you can understand that players get used to a game's quirks, learn valuable skills like decision making, metas (an acronym standing for Most Efficient Tactic Available) and prioritization.
However, a lot of games, including the ones mentioned, understand that it's an issue, and it impacts the most important members of that game's community: the new people, as like any game, without new people sticking around, there won't be anyone to actually have a match with, and this is typically a sign that the game hasn't solved that critical underlying problem for far too long.
Games like Overwatch and League of Legends have a hidden mechanic called 'ELO'. Think of this like a numerical ranking amongst all other players. This is a complicated formula that takes into account multiple things, from your individual performance like Kills, Deaths, and Assists that match to other metrics the game might think is important. In a FPS game, this might include your accuracy, or even compare movements to other players. Games like the above mentioned Dota, this might include gold earned, or how quickly you earned that gold. You may also have heard this referred to as 'skill based matchmaking, or SBMM for short.
Most multiplayer games implement this kind of system, whether they declare that overtly, like a ranking system or they hide it to avoid players abusing the system. You may have heard in the past of developers filing copyrights for such systems, and there is a stigma for what this kind of system can do, as the potential for abuse is very real, but I'll leave that for a different time.
Now, games do try to combat smurfing, as well as other bad behaviors to avoid the worst case scenario of a game dying out, but even games in the same genre do try to innovate on approaches to this strategy. Like I mentioned with ELO, it was a system that tried to identify a good player and 'balance out the teams' so to speak. It was a system, in the purest sense, to balance out matches as evenly as possible.
This is part of the reason why if you've ever talked to someone who's played multiplayer games recently, or watched videos about it, they might refer to games with people 'tryharding' or the lobby being full of 'sweats'. Because every game is balanced, it's not like the game has that natural flow to what would be a minorly imbalanced game, so people have to literally 'try harder', hence the moniker in order to win. As an aside' tryhard' is an old term but been kind of warped in recent times because the old focus was that they were too focused on trying harder to win and not enjoying the game, while today's definition more alludes to people taking a game too seriously, which is ambiguous and has mixed connotations, for me at least.
Regardless, These systems are actually kind of varied. Take Call of Duty's leveling system with new guns and attachments being unlocked as you play. Now, a good player might be able to play really good with just a basic gun given to a starter account, but the different guns and attachments do give a edge to that less experienced player, and if the smurfer does stomp as they intended, they'll level up rapidly and won't be playing against newer players for long.
Other games that make use of the SBMM system I talked about earlier take note of the kind of performance that indicates smurfing, and rapidly pushes that player up the ranks until they suffer losses, ensuring that even if they do play a easy game, it once again, won't be for long. That, 'won't be for long' isn't a common reoccurrence by chance, by the way. These systems are mostly used in what would be competitive games as a whole (not going to get into how lobbies are changing as the people who are in them are either adults now, or new children being shown directly what doors this hobby can open, but it is worth pointing out). This is partially because competitive games need that constant influx of new players to keep popularity surrounding the game and interest generated for the competitive leagues that these companies try to generate, as it presents a massive revenue stream if it works out, as Overwatch and League of Legends have shown directly.
Pt. 2 since my response was longer than the 5000 characters alloted for a reply.
Anyways, back on topic, because these games are so competitive in nature, it requires them to have those new players, and to avoid potential newbies from trying it out, the barrier to entry should be as low as possible. Meaning, that most new accounts shouldn't be restricted necessarily from an older account. This seems kind of counterintuitive, but if they make the game where time spent playing directly correlates to their power and ability to dominate, new players drop off sharply as time goes on. Think of it like a brand new MMO that comes out, where if you're not the first one discovering something or being the first in something, some people will just quit because 'there's no point', or, 'I've already fallen behind and can't catch up'.
There are a few games that don't implement the SBMM system like TF2. In these instances, the idea is that if the skill imbalance is too great, players will just leave the server themselves until they eventually settle into a server where games are at the player's intended experience, whether that's a casual just shoot things and have fun, or they opt to test their skills.
Still, intentionally smurfing is considered a harmful activity, and while most games try to avoid directly punishing this behavior, there are some, like Dota 2, where it is a reportable offence. Most games do try to take a softer approach to this. I'm of the opinion that this is due to two reasons.
One, they are trying to dismantle the reason why someone would smurf in the first place (e.g. if they just wanted to have fun playing instead of playing seriously) and ensure that the hassle of repeating these steps (creating a new account, going through new account tutorials) becomes not worth it when compared to the pleasure generated from playing that first match, two, or five of easy wins.
Two, I also think it's because that it is a new account. Because there's no good way of ostensibly saying that an account is a smurf before they've even demonstrated the skills that are the calling card of the smurf, it's tough to say if if they're a smurf or a new player. It's hard to say if a new CS:GO account having great aim is because they're a smurf, or because they played 5000 hours of TF2 and the skills are transferrable.
A lot of this is just observations and conjecture with a little bit of actual learning I did when SBMM became talked about due to its implantation in more casual games aiming to be competitive like Call of Duty and Battlefield, so this might not be the most objective piece, but then again, I am just a random stranger on the internet, so grain of salt and all that.
This is part of the reason why if you've ever talked to someone who's played multiplayer games recently, or watched videos about it, they might refer to games with people 'tryharding' or the lobby being full of 'sweats'. Because every game is balanced, it's not like the game has that natural flow to what would be a minorly imbalanced game, so people have to literally 'try harder', hence the moniker in order to win.
I want the matchmaking to find me balanced games as much as possible, because anything else isn't fun. Winning against players much worse than I am isn't fun at all since neither side really learns anything and can't improve, and it's the same for losing against someone who is much better than I am. It's curious that some may consider this 'tryharding' when a balanced matchup also is the most fun, at least when I'm playing a game like a fighting game.
When you're playing a fighting game, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, sure. It's in the best interests to have both sides be similar in skill level so the matches don't end with one side steamrolling. But the games that suffer from completely even matches are the ones that aren't meant to be competitive. This could range from a casual game mode in a game like League or Dota 2, to more commonly accepted casual/ for fun games like Call of Duty. The whole point of even matches means that there will never be situations where skill levels are imbalanced. In a fighting game, that's good since it can let you develop skills and really push your gameplay to shine or be memorable.
But in a more casual game where you're playing with a team of players, it can really hurt if you're attempting to make progress. In the case of Call of Duty's progression based unlock system, not having a game where you have an advantage means that it's difficult for the average player to make progress on certain goals. This could be something as simple as 'get 10 headshots' or 'knife kill 10 enemies in a round'. If you're in an even match, you likely aren't going to be incentivized to actually try for those goals, as by handicapping yourself like that, you give the enemy team an advantage and thus put you even further away from completing that goal.
In the above example, it creates a sort of negative feedback loop, where the only way to complete a goal like this is to basically get lucky. Whether that's just luck from being in the right places at the right times, or from the matchmaking service messing up or accidentally DC'ing an enemy player, the only other method you have besides 'get lucky' is just sheer brute forcing the situation or playing long enough that such a thing happening is a statistical inevitability.
I'm not saying you're wrong for feeling that way, but what I said doesn't really apply to fighting games, since htere isn't a distinction of 'casual' or 'competitive'. By the genre's very nature, arcade fighters are competitive. In other games, if improvement is your goal, you're aiming for competitive play, and that's where SBMM really does shine. In casual matches, it can become a sort of double edged sword. People don't really like losing, but any multiplayer game really will always have wins and losses. The important part is making those wins fun enough to offset the negatives of the losses.
When TOTK came out I was scared I wasn't going to come back Splatoon. They definitely serve different experiences and I love them both. Probably my two favorite on the Switch.
i haven’t come across any yet, there’s sections where you have to run away from enemies and trap them so you can do a physics puzzle in peace, but no stealth so far. i’d estimate i’m only a couple of hours in though
Thanks. I've come across a problem early on; I played a few minutes of it, got slightly motion sick. Had to resort to UUU to change the FoV. This really irritates me, it's 2020+++ and I still need to resort to hacks to change that. -_-
yeah the graphics options in general are pretty lacking. i don’t personally have any problems with motion sickness for traditional video games but VR games always make mee feel a little odd so i sympathise
With Atlus announcing that they are going to add voice lines to all the S-Link level up scenes, I'm guessing that's why FeMC didn't get included. They said this will already have the most voice lines of any Persona game. Adding FeMC's S-Links to that would have been a lot more lines on top of that.
Whether or not expanding the voicing was a better move than not including FeMC is another question entirely.
Besides the loss of FemMC, let's not pretend "The Answer" portion from FES was not at least......questionable to some.
Besides a few parts (catdog from hell), it felt more like a recycled afterthought that kind of left a stain on the original's point/ending. At least how I felt and some others.
That's fair. I guess my main problem is that I'm not sure if the content was cut for artistic reasons or if it's because they want to add it into some "complete" edition later.
Gameplay-wise The Answer might have been pretty tiresome, but this would be the perfect opportunity to improve it on that respect, if we are talking about polish. Story-wise, seeing how the ending of Persona 3 affected all the character is a great addition. The Answer should definitely have been in it.
These companies aren’t in the business of making and selling games they’re in the business of increasing company valuation on the stock market. You can’t convince them not to do mass firing, it’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to cut costs and rapidly increase valuation. You’d need the law to protect the employees.
Some industries are known for being predatory though, so it’s hard for workers to change anything when an industry can prey on an endless pool of applicants lining up to pursue their passion.
And consumers are not reliable beyond bad press. Strong unions are the best hope, but that is much easier said than done.
Yeah, but in the numbers we’re seeing that’s of limited weight in negotiation. I’m not saying unions are bad, just this is one situation they struggle to counter.
Here, if there are enough workers, then they don’t need to join a bigger, external union because they have enough weight to change things.
Otherwise, smaller companies where there isn’t a lot of workers, they can join a bigger union that has a lot more weight.
A union isn’t magical, but it’s a great first step towards better conditions. But taking that first step is hard because workers have a lot to lose, especially if working in the US.
Admittedly, most of the “Mostly Negative” Steam reviews seem to be reacting to the fact they exist at all, without considering whether they’re actually critical to your progress in the game or not (for clarity, they are not).
I didn’t know we were only allowed to write reviews based on things critical to your progress. I didn’t know how many companions you have or what your character looks like weren’t critical. I bet if we searched even a little we’d find a RockPaperShotgun review of “non critical” game features.
I get what they mean. A lot of the MTX seems to be items that you genuinely would find very readily in the game. Paying simply gives you a type of “very easy” mode if you’re for some reason inclined.
It’s a…. Strange decision, as it makes the game look bad. But by all accounts it doesn’t really impact the gameplay of the game. It’s just like giving you the option buy Phoenix Downs in Final Fantasy with real money. You… can. You really don’t need to, 98% of players won’t.
It’s goofy more than anything. I guess I’d rather have it rather than day 1 expansion packs like Mass Effect had.
Especially ones like Minotaur who just started commenting on Lemmy 3 days ago…
What timing.
Edit: don’t forget that sometimes people post in defederated instances and sometimes app developers for your lemmy app are so behind that shit isn’t even loading for you properly anymore
I again, never said anything about conspiracy, was just pointing out what I was able to see. Like I said in my other comment, I can only see shit you’ve been commenting up to a day ago. So either the app I’m using is busted as fuck, your instance is busted as fuck, or some other option - but I’ve only ever commented on what I was able to see.
Hopefully you understand where I’m coming from here.
I saw this same thing with games like Dead Space 3. They included a cash shop, very likely hard-pushed by some asinine executive. But, you could tell by playing the game, the majority of developers likely tested with that feature off. Was it a fun game? No, but resource starvation was not the reason for that.
Basically it feels like the hands trying to microtransact for singleplayer games are not the same as the ones designing those games to begin with. It still deserves negative attention, just nuance.
You are basically betting on the developers being bad at their jobs and not being able to do what they are clearly trying to do, which is making people but microtransactions.
“They” is far, far, far too encompassing a word. If you’ve worked in any organization such as this, especially these days, they involve so many different companies (yes, more than one studio works on a game now) with so many different teams all under a publishing studio whose head may never have even played any of this genre of game.
So, a developer in one studio is often just trying to make a good RPG in their debug build (and insists no/light fast travel for world-immersion reasons), and only hears over the grapevine “Wait…they took the complaints about no fast-travel and made it a DLC? That sounds terrible, gamers will hate that.” Multiple people across the credits can have varying intentions.
The thing is they made these features as part of the core gameplay then charged for them. It isn’t like you’re paying for a boost or game mode or special companion or something. You’re given the option to earn these features through playing a single player game or pay money and get them faster.
Literally carving out chunks of the base game and offering them up for money as if it is added value. The only value is saving time IN A SINGLE PLAYER GAME. If your single player game has elements that are so tedious or cumbersome that people will literally PAY MORE MONEY to get them on their terms you purposefully built a worse game than you could have.
I got AC:Odyssey during one of the sale cause I dig Greek mythology, had to get cheat engine and spare me the grind for upgrading gears and ship. Like sure you can just keep picking up randomly dropped Epic/Rare and replacement them when you leveling up(there are even player quest that put in specific spot to give you resource for those upgrades, just so other players can farm it) But I ain’t get any time for that, I just cheat engine in max out resource and upgrade my Legendary gears I found through out the game. And you know what? By the end of the game(and I didn’t find every Legendary, like maybe 60~70% of them) it would take me setting the resource to max twice to fully upgrade all my legendary + epic(with perks I like) gears. It would take probably months of my gaming time should I got it on console and can not use cheat engine.
No, upgrade gear is not required to finish the game. But after this experience I decides to never get another Ubisoft AC game nor any RPG on console or with always online feature(which means all transaction are done and authenticated to prevent cheating. ) I’ve done plenty open world, RPG, Monster Hunters without having to cheat. But the recent single player grinding + selling time saver booster pack make me whip out the cheat engine again. And I only cheat those stupid resource gating game that are designed to pad hours in to your play through.
Yeah, they know they are doing though, they are aiming for those that work 9-5 have life and kids and some spare changes and milk them hard. Like this game would take 200 hours to complete fully with X hundreds of hours of post game content that was designed to make your grind, but you can also pay for this [xp booster, resource pack, legendary set, etc] to make sure you can enjoy the post game content if you don’t have the time to grind the game how it’s “meant to be played”.
In my AC:Odessey example, I think at one point the designer might be doing a heavy zelda influenced where you just pick up stuff enemies dropped and the blacksmiths are there for you to repair items broken as resource dump. (which make sense and very fitting of that era and how resource would work) But once that MTX department put their finger in now you have a derailed system. There is a spread sheet that list the hours required to upgrade a legendary piece to which level, and recommended level to get them(as their starting level is fixed and not like the enemy droppped item that matches your level), I saw the numbers and downloaded the cheat engine table the next hour.
Gamers throw a fit when content is locked behind a paywall because it is somehow unfair. Gamers are currently throwing a fit about content not being locked behind a paywall because that is also somehow unfair. Does that make sense to you?
It seems to me that this publisher heard the complaints about the way microtransactions were being implemented and decided to give people what they were asking for and now they’re getting crucified for it. Gamers got what they wanted. If that wasn’t what they really wanted they should have been asking for something else.
I don’t own this game nor have I ever completed a microtransaction in a major title. My spending habits don’t support the concept in any form. You know what my point is and you’re trying to high-horse your way past it. If you want to take a stand refund the game and vote with your wallet. No one wants to hear complaints about the price of cosmetics and getting in game currency quicker. It’s the most first world problem imaginable.
I agree that the way they’ve been implemented in many other titles is annoying so I choose not to engage with them in that form. This implementation doesn’t impact anything so why would you be annoyed by it much less take the time to complain about it?
I dont buy these games, nor do I verbally defend such practices in them. I understand your point, but the real issue is them existing, not the form in which they exist in this case.
The whole "first world problem" is always hilarious when brought up. You can discuss or argue over anything you want, everyone experiences life differently. Just because there's people starving, that doesnt mean you cant talk about capitalist issues either. Its such a shitty dismissal everytime.
You’re free to call it what you wish. Complaining about voluntary purchases in a video game you also don’t need to buy is a vapid pursuit only engaged in by those with an excess of time and money and a lack of real world problems. If you want to waste your time debating the ethics of such a system existing then be my guest but don’t pretend you’re engaging in some lofty moral exercise. You’re just bored and looking for something to occupy your time so you chose to bitch about something inconsequential on the internet.
Making up something dumb to complain about is not the same as telling you to shut up about said dumb thing but I know you don’t really believe that anyway. You’re just trying to get a smug jab in and that’s the best you can come up with.
You are complaining about people complaining, talking down on people to get a feeling of superiority. If you dont like a conversation just move on with your life. Or is it that you have nothing better to do, so you choose to bitch about something inconsequential on the internet?
Upvoting your own comments too :)
I wont engage any further with this, its just gonna go in circles. Have a good one.
I don’t have anything better to do. I happily acknowledge that. My life is going pretty great all things considered, but then I’m not the one pretending to be an oppressed victim fighting a corrupt system via complaints about stuff I don’t need to buy. That’s what you’re doing.
Also, Lemmy defaults to upvoting posts you make. That’s something you should probably know before you criticize people for not going out of their way to downvote themselves. It makes you look kind of dumb to say stuff like that since you could have figured that out for yourself if you thought about it for more than two seconds, which now that I think about it is a pretty good summary of the rest of the things that you’ve said in this conversation.
Why? Is there some kind of real cost to changing appearance or fast travel that it needs to be limited? Or is that there solely so they can sell MTX?
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate 3 right now and you can do both at any time for free. It’s literally a standard UI thing across games with large maps and character creators.
Hey, why even have to buy dyes? The game should give them all to you for free. And supplies can be gathered, you should just get infinite supply packs too
You can get the items for free by finding them or pay barbers in the villages for it instead. Similar to the first game, the first one was just niche so didn’t have a huge crowd throwing fits instead of reading or even playing the game
??? Renting companions of your level has always been free, they only cost rift crystals if they are higher than you. Killing strong monsters and getting your pawn rented give plenty resources.
The character creation tome is easy to get, idk what to tell you.
If you want to throw horseshit to a wall, not this one please. If you had played the game you wouldn’t have even mentioned half of what you did.
Full price games with microtransactions are negative, end of story. Everybody saying otherwise grew up after they where implemented in every other game so they don’t know better.
They got trained, like animals, to swallow that shit.
I grew up after them. I think they’re fine in certain circumstances. If the game is supposed to have free content updates for weeks and months and whatever else after launch then yeah sure, why not
“They only cost rift crystals if they’re a higher level than you”
Ah yes this is additional value and content that you should pay money for, right? It’s not core gameplay to recruit companions regardless of their level like in almost every fucking game I’ve ever played right?
Imagine licking boot so hard that you actually believe this
Rift crystals are an in game currency, you don’t need to pay money for it! I’ve been recruiting companions 1-4 lvls above me all the time, I’m lvls 30 now, with the in game currency. The higher the pawn is you get less exp so it’s not something that you should do anyway.
Imagine thinking that renting a LVL 200 companion is core gameplay. Geez…
This game is an improvement over the first one in almost all sides, with great content. It’s stupid reading all this takes from people that clearly have not played it, let alone the original.
And before you mention the eternal ferrystone from the original, that came with the expansion, not the release.
It’s ok that I can buy in game currency for my singer player game! It’s fine! It’s good actually! Recruiting high level companions, a THING THEY BUILT INTO THE BASE GAME DELIBERATELY THEN LET YOU PAY EXTRA FOR, using in game currency I can buy isn’t pay2win. Recruiting companions isn’t even core gameplay if they’re strong enough, bro.
It’s ok that Capcom sent reviewers a game without micro transactions that were in retail! That’s fine, it’s fine! The microtransactions were paying for now were expansions before so it’s uh…it’s better, yeah. I actually prefer my $70 USD single player games to have gameplay benefitting microtransactions.
You sound like you’ve swallowed the boot my guy. You’re so far gone you can’t see the way back. Glad you’re enjoying the game, though. Sounds like it was worth it to you.
I’m gonna ignore all that stuff you extrapolated from my strawman.
Anyway, of course I’m enjoying it! I loved the original and this is the same and more. This is a great game with BS corporate microtransactions sprinkled in. I agree that the MTXs are BS, but saying that the game was designed around baiting the player into using them outs you as someone that wouldn’t enjoy the first one nor the intended gameplay, so it’s kinda pointless dosucssing further.
Have fun lying to yourself about the intended mechanics I guess.
Rift crystals are earned by playing just like the first game. Their only purpose is to hire higher level pawns, but you earn them when people pay for your pawn or you complete their quests. It’s part of the interplay of players exchange pawns.
Recent Capcom games have all done this where it’s a great game and right on release they stuff a bunch of micro transactions in for in-game currency but you would have to be an absolute chud to buy any of it because it’s so trivial to earn.
DMCV did the same thing with trying to sell red orbs, the primary upgrade currency, but if you didn’t see people complain about it online, you wouldn’t even notice it in game.
Yeah that’s like the whole problem, not a triviality. I’m sure DD2 is fun. Ive watched a lot of it streamed. Seems cool. I’m not gonna buy it because they did this shit, same reason I didn’t buy DMCV and haven’t bought a Capcom game in years. Stop rewarding scummy companies.
“Of course they don’t stop progress… you’ll just be stuck grinding for way way longer with our patented unfun^tm^ systems unless you pay, peasant valued consumer”
I love how in your example “perfect” is not having moneygrubbing microtransactions and the “good” compromise we’re supposed to accept is the microtransactions the chose to put in for no purpose other than money
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