ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 7 days ago

Of the ones I’ve played, Elden Ring. The biggest aid for new players being that if something’s too tough, you just go somewhere easier and come back later. The opening area has a boss roaming a field designed to teach you exactly that lesson.

ampersandrew, 15 days ago

Hopefully the last game Id makes before Microsoft closes them is a good one.

ampersandrew, 21 days ago

So Redfall was set up to fail, and you make those people fall on the sword, and then Hi-Fi Rush is a game people clearly want more of and could have stood to cost more than $30, and you let those people go too instead of hitting the ground running on a sequel? What is wrong with you, Microsoft?

ampersandrew, 24 days ago

It highlights the crucial flaw with Tekken for me: you have to just memorize how to defend everything your opponents can do to you rather than being able to intuit it on the fly. Which moves hit high/medium/low/overhead or track horizontally? There’s no language to it; it’s just done on a per move basis for balancing reasons, which means it would take me forever to get to the part where I actually get to think and play the game. This string, mashing 3, has highs, mediums, and lows all built in, plus it low profiles some counter attacks from opponents. This bot would beat me, too.

ampersandrew, 25 days ago

Why does this response just feel like it’s a restatement of what people already have the right to without addressing if they’re taking any action or not? Their mobile phone example even remains usable, whereas a lot of these games do not.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

Judging by how Sony is doing even though they clearly “won” with the PS5, it looks like consoles as we know them are not long for this world, and that seems to be the idea Microsoft is pivoting around.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

I expected Helldivers 2 to be good, but not “unforeseeable appeal that knocks out back-end servers and leaves players in a weeks-long login purgatory” good

It continues to boggle my mind that people will take this objectively bad thing built in to the game’s design and turn it into good press. Being unable to play the game you paid for is a bad thing. They could have let you host the game yourself. Yes, even the dungeon master part that Joel does. That they don’t let you not only leads to login problems with unexpectedly populous launches but also an expiration date that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t even have when it comes to online multiplayer.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

It just makes economic sense.

The data suggests a sharp shift in consumer behavior — far from the cable era, when viewers largely stuck with a single provider, as well as the early days of the so-called streaming wars, when people kept adding services without culling or jumping around.

Yeah, turns out when the monopolies are eliminated, people get more competition and a better deal on the consumer end. It’s why I’ll never understand people who say streaming services became as bad as cable.

One option for slowing the churn, executives think, is to bring back some element of the cable bundle by selling streaming services together. Executives believe consumers would be less inclined to cancel a package that offered services from multiple companies.

No, I’m less likely to cancel a service that’s worth what you charge for it. Be happy you got one month out of me, and if you want more, offer me more value. Putting serialized shows out week by week doesn’t do it for me either, because I’m just going to wait until the season is done to start watching it anyway.

Price sensitivity is also a factor. Americans with a streaming subscription are spending an average of $61 a month for four services, an increase from $48 a year ago, according to a new study by Deloitte. The increase was due to higher prices, not additional services. Nearly half the people surveyed said they would cancel their favorite streaming service if monthly prices went up another $5, the study said.

Mystery solved.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

There was an article from years back, I want to say around 2019 or so on then-Gamasutra, about how it was already too late to stop the bubble from bursting because all of these games are trying to get everyone’s attention (I’m having trouble finding it now). Now the bubble is bursting, and big games these days have dev cycles of about 5 years, putting us right here in 2024. Get dev cycles to 3 years or less so that you can actually react to changing market conditions, and charge a fair price for a good product. Maybe sequel it or otherwise make regular old expansion DLC. That was sustainable. No one even makes a multiplayer game anymore unless it’s intended to be rigorously competitively balanced or suck up all of your time and money through grinding.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

Epic Games has been clear about seeing Steam as a direct competitor, and has done everything from giving away free games to paying for timed exclusives to entice players.

Yup, that’s everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It’s an unsolvable problem if those things don’t work.

This is supposed to be how competition in the marketplace works

In case the above sarcasm wasn’t clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.

There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.

Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.

I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it’s Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren’t truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don’t support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

It is an excuse for Valve, because their business is selling thousands of games that do not have ARM-native builds. No action of Valve’s made Steam worse for Mac users. An action of Apple’s did that. At some point, it’s not worth it for Valve to update their application to be better for a platform that’s actively hostile to its business partners.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

games back then were also more focused on quality

This is selection bias. You remember Metal Gear Solid, but do you remember Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft? Do you remember Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero? Bubsy 3D? The million-and-one licensed games that were churned out like baseball cards back then?

and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money

If we’re going to say that a full-price game today costs $70, Metal Gear Solid would have cost the equivalent of $95. Not only that, but that was very much the Blockbuster and strategy guide era. Games would often have one of their best levels up front so that you can see what makes the game good, but then level 2 or 3 would hit a huge difficulty spike…just enough to make you have to rent the game multiple times or to cave in and buy it when you couldn’t beat it in a weekend. Or you’d have something like Final Fantasy VII, which I just finished for the first time recently, and let me tell you: games that big were designed to sell strategy guides (or hint hotlines) as a revenue stream. There would be some esoteric riddle, or some obscure corner of the map that you need to happen upon in order to progress the game forward. The business model always, at every step of the medium’s history, affects the game design.

“Value” is going to be a very subjective thing, but for better or worse, the equivalent game today is far more packed full of “stuff” to do, even when you discount the ones that get there just by adding grinding. There are things I miss about the old days too, but try to keep it in perspective.

ampersandrew, 1 month ago

There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.

ampersandrew, 2 months ago

Sinking ship or not, word was that Wizards’ cut of BG3 was over $90M. $100M was the entire production cost of Baldur’s Gate 3. If you could fund an entire other massive video game for the cost of what you paid your partner for licensing, I’m sure anyone would be rethinking that deal. At this point, they don’t need the D&D license any more than BioWare needed the Star Wars license after KOTOR.