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?
Being after well received titles is congruent with their Game Pass strategy. Being after as much money as possible would mean they probably should have charged more than $30 for one of the best games of the year.
It’s still got the the 2 minute loop through a level like 1 and 2 but without the money mechanic of 2 and 4 (which I’d say its omission is an improvement). And while Tony Hawk games had to go somewhere after THPS3, I believe 4 is the one where they got rid of the 2 minute loop, which is where the series lost some of what made it so great, IMO. Plus, the levels were an appropriate amount of bananas, and it’s hard not to get hype doing tricks as Darth Maul while listening to “Ace of Spades”.
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.
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
If a little extra jiggle was crucial to the vision, then I’d say they need a better vision, but that’s just me. The commentary I heard around this case in particular is that ratings boards around the world impose a ton of different criteria, and getting around all of them is no easy feat, so that could be to blame.
The sex cards in the first Witcher were particularly egregious. One of them is a woman who sleeps with you as a reward for saving her from being raped.
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.
The campaign is not about getting source code. Though it’s sort of the ultimate way to preserve a game, it’s too high a bar to clear, and in most cases, it’s not even necessary.
You’d have to change how the laws for all of software work to make that a reality, not just video games. And all that’s technically needed to make games work after support ends is a distributed server binary and a change to a client config file to point to it. The engines that games are built on are often not open source, so you’d change the entire business model of the likes of Unity and Unreal (Unreal’s source is available to developers but not “open”). Sometimes source code can even get lost, because it’s not strictly required, just in the way that computers work, to come attached to a compiled executable. The world would be a better place if all video games were open source, and I don’t think open source games are at odds with making a healthy profit (as Doom illustrates), but I think you’d have an insurmountable task of making the entire industry agree to it, as well as a certain amount of the consumer base that drinks the PR kool aid about why games need to stay closed source.
The effect that open sourcing a game would have on cheaters is basically propaganda as far as I’m concerned. Cheating has not and will not be defeated by making a game closed source or even installing rootkits on players’ machines. However, open sourcing a game isn’t necessary to keep it alive after sunsetting it either.
The only kind of cheats you can use on a game like that would be aimbot or wallhacks. But both of those can often be detected using anti-cheat software which acts like a rootkit. So a combination is most often used.
I’d hardly call that defeating cheating, and a rootkit anticheat, while overstepping boundaries in what is acceptable to be done on your own PC, still can’t detect those cheats powered by external hardware, including aimbots. The difference in results between a closed source game with this server authoritative design and an open source one is moot. It’s a bad excuse. It doesn’t mean I’m going to fight too hard for all games to go open source when there are way bigger fish to fry though.
I’m not in the UK, but it’s incredibly hard for me to make an informed purchase as someone who cares about this stuff. My latest strategy is to use the PC Gaming Wiki, because I can’t even rely on store pages on GOG or Steam to paint a full or accurate picture of what I’m buying. Often times I need to hope the developer responds to particular Steam forum posts.
Rumor has it that Yuzu and all of its derivatives violated the DMCA in a way that Ryujinx did not, in that Yuzu was allegedly developed inappropriately using proprietary information from Switch SDKs, where Ryujinx is doing it legit via “clean room” reverse engineering. So Ryujinx is likely safe, but anything using Yuzu code is legally poison.
As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point....
We know the answers to this. First, we got Half-Life: Alyx, which is a phenomenal Half-Life game that happens to be a VR game. Slight spoilers, but to say that Half-Life 3 is promised at the end of that game is an understatement.
Second, if you’ve already played Alyx, Keighley put out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, which has a full timeline of everything they worked on since Portal 2, including cancelled games. One of those games was Half-Life 3. It would have been a game with procedurally generated levels interspersed with static set pieces, which sounds similar to a single player version of that game The Crossing they were working on. If you ask me, that design makes plenty of sense for putting a bow on a series with a time- and space-hopping protagonist in a series that always ends with cliffhangers. It didn’t come together though, so it got cancelled.
Alyx was put together in part because letting all of their employees dictate their own projects was not getting the same results that it used to, so there was a bit more direction with the project than Valve had had in the years prior.
The real problem is that you can’t create content fast enough to reach the cadence that you’d want with episodic content. Even a lot of TV shows have shifted away from predictable scheduling since Valve tried this experiment (and TV, largely, got better since then too).
Long development time per game is still a problem. It means they’re less reactive to things in the industry like new innovations or what players actually want, it means that the people who finish a project are not the ones who started it, and it means that devs get burnt out working on fewer projects by the ends of their careers with less to show for it. I’m of the opinion that dev times need to work their way back to 3 years or so. Morrowind to Oblivion to Fallout 3 to Skyrim was such a better pace compared to what Bethesda put out since.
Maybe, but I’d sooner expect the problem to be remedied by just making games smaller. Starfield had 1000 planets, but it would have been better off if it only had 5, and we know this because The Outer Worlds exists. Lots of other games are open world now that really shouldn’t be and would have better off it they were just a list of missions that you could select from a menu.
BREAKING: Microsoft has closed Redfall's Arkane Austin, HiFi Rush's Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda. | IGN (twitter.com)
Activision rejected Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 in favour of supplementary Call of Duty work, it’s claimed (www.videogameschronicle.com)
A Tekken 8 streamer spent almost a week using a one-button mashing bot to prove that Eddy Gordo is as big a menace as ever (www.pcgamer.com)
That is honestly hilarious from a old, old used to play Tekken player.
Controversy and Censorship
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
UK Government Response to the Stop Killing Games Petition (petition.parliament.uk)
The Government recognises recent concerns raised by video games users regarding the long-term operability of purchased products....
Nintendo DMCAs Yuzu forks on GitHub (github.com)
Unsurprising move. People should’ve moved them elsewhere.
Half Life 3
As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point....
Alan Wake 2 Still Hasn't Earned Back Its Budget (techraptor.net)
Final Fantasy Maker Square Enix Takes $140 Million Hit in ‘Content Abandonment Losses’ as It Revises Game Pipeline - IGN (www.ign.com)
One big project or multiple smallers ones? What do you think?
Todd Howard says Bethesda is focused on finding ways to increase its output (www.videogameschronicle.com)