ampersandrew
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world
- Comment on PlayStation State of Play Returns June 4 8 hours ago:
The word was they cancelled their marketing, which doesn’t mean a delay is definite. When Concord wasn’t going well, they just put it out and hoped for the best despite a beta with terrible metrics, and…that’s an option again, where they’re not throwing good money after bad.
- Comment on Garfield Kart 2 – All You Can Drift – Teaser 9 hours ago:
Those “What’s New” updates are so easily abused. If you played multiple games in a series, every single one of them will post an update about the latest game, so you’ll see the same update like 5 times. Or, if you’re Street Fighter, you’ll pretend that it matters which one of your fictional characters currently has a birthday, and that will litter the feed until you click on “show less”.
- Comment on PlayStation State of Play Returns June 4 9 hours ago:
This would be the last exit that makes sense to either delay Marathon or cut their losses and let it die a quick death.
- Comment on James Bond Game From Hitman Dev Has a New Title, 007 First Light, Official Reveal This Week 1 day ago:
Close! That was Agent Under Fire, not Nightfire. It’s one of my favorite multiplayer shooters, specifically with nonsense like the Q Claw, Q Jet, and moon gravity turned on. Nightfire really pared back on the stuff that made Agent Under Fire ridiculous, and it was good for different reasons.
- Comment on Star Wars Jedi director’s new studio is making a Dungeons & Dragons action adventure 1 day ago:
I’m questioning if there’s ever been a good D&D video game adaptation that wasn’t trying its best to just replicate the tabletop experience, and then I’d ask if it’s worth trying when you could just continue to make good replications of the tabletop experience.
- Comment on James Bond Game From Hitman Dev Has a New Title, 007 First Light, Official Reveal This Week 1 day ago:
And hopefully they do away with those unlocks being tied to a server of theirs.
- Comment on Tango Gameworks is back with a new look... and a new website! 1 day ago:
From the press releases at the time, it appears the new owners only have the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, not their other IPs like Ghostwire or Evil Within. If they had to be choosy, Hi-Fi Rush was the one worth getting.
- Comment on Had a take about Supergiant Games that recieved a lot of pushback fromy two longest running best friends. 2 days ago:
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
- Comment on ‘We tried and it didn’t work out’: CDPR co-founder says it shouldn’t stray from AAA open-world RPGs 2 days ago:
How did you feel about Baldur’s Gate 3? Because the structure of the maps in the first two Witcher games are what most of the genre is like.
- Comment on ‘We tried and it didn’t work out’: CDPR co-founder says it shouldn’t stray from AAA open-world RPGs 2 days ago:
Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren’t open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There’s something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 2 days ago:
That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 2 days ago:
It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 3 days ago:
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 3 days ago:
Always has been.
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
- Comment on MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today 3 days ago:
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 3 days ago:
I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic.
- Comment on Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans 4 days ago:
There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.
- Comment on MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today 4 days ago:
Rivals of Aether II is a more realistic contender to Smash. It had a really good turnout at Combo Breaker this year.
- Comment on MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today 4 days ago:
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
- Comment on Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says 5 days ago:
Yes, all of them. Wouldn’t hurt to fit more Deus Ex DNA in the game either.
- Comment on MindsEye boss claims game's negative reaction ahead of release has been paid for in "concerted effort" against studio 5 days ago:
Mindseye is $60, and it’s much easier to stand out from the crowd when the crowd is all the way back in 2010.
- Comment on What are some good cooperative shooters? Hidden gems? 6 days ago:
I guess I just don’t see what it offered that Gears of War didn’t, and I thought Gears was much better.
- Comment on MindsEye boss claims game's negative reaction ahead of release has been paid for in "concerted effort" against studio 6 days ago:
I mean, if it’s a technical mess, that’s one thing, but I think this looks great. More importantly, we really haven’t gotten many games like this in so, so long, and I’m hungry for it.