ampersandrew
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 2 hours ago:
I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said. Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles? And does it matter how high the visuals score for Bye, Sweet Carole is if they’re leaving a subpar review for the puzzles? That’s what the content of the review is for.
How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review. Publishers can get slimy around it though and turn the knobs to be more nefarious after the review period, which people can call them out for, but much like how lies spread faster than the truth, updates spread slower than initial reviews. What I’d personally like to see make its way into reviews are how much ownership the game actually grants. So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.
But all of this has only been about reviews, and games media also breaks news. Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies. Sometimes we can actually get real confirmation that absolutely nothing is happening with Bloodborne and no one should get their hopes up for anything anytime soon. All of that is valuable, too.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 2 hours ago:
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 3 hours ago:
Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.
Well, it’s definitely not what I want.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 4 hours ago:
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
- More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGCwww.videogameschronicle.com ↗Submitted 5 hours ago to games@lemmy.world | 21 comments
- Comment on 11 hours ago:
As a sustainable video game entity, WB games would be better suited in just about anyone else’s hands. WB has tried to sell off its games division in the past, but they’ve spent the better part of two decades making sure that their game studios produced nothing except for tie-ins to their movie and comic book businesses. I was told straight to my face at a PAX years ago that the pitch process under WB starts with a game idea and ends with, “Cool, now make it Batman,” or “Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.” Then when they tried to divest themselves of games, not only did they have no IP to sell outside of old Midway properties, they also thought the new buyer would love to keep paying licensing fees to WB for the properties attached to these gaming franchises. Bunch of geniuses over there.
- Submitted 1 day ago to games@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on Xbox ditching hardware and exclusive games "makes sense," former Microsoft exec and Blizzard boss says, as "only a moron would continue" making consoles as games go third party 1 day ago:
By the numbers, that demographic appears to be shrinking, not growing. PC has grown while consoles have shrunk.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Surely someone out there is paranoid enough to be wiresharking constantly. Sony games get hit hard in GOG reviews for telemetry that I’d probably never think twice about.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
When they’re new and “incomplete”, it’s no different than how patches used to work for games before clients like Steam. I bought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and I can get updates through Heroic or Galaxy, or I can use the installers for each patch or DLC.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
That’s called survivorship bias.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
It’s only empty if you haven’t been paying attention.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.
- Comment on 4 days ago:
To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.
- Comment on I love stardew valley. looking for an alternative that is made for controller experience. 5 days ago:
My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.
- Comment on Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game - Official Announcement Trailer 5 days ago:
I am looking at metacritic, and your MK9 critic score does not match what I see. Here is the PS3 version of MK9 (84), and here is the Xbox 360 version (86). Did you dig up the score for the PC version that I’m having a hard time even finding on their site? Back when we were in that weird period where console developers were way worse at making PC versions? The 360 version of just about any third party game was the main event back then.
User scores are a non-factor to me, as anyone with any petty grievance can and will just leave a laughably low score, and you’re going to see larger swings for high profile games; definitely more for games that launched in the 7th gen and later, when metacritic was a site that entered the public consciousness. The newer games just plain sold more copies than the older ones, largely on the back of reviewing better than the PS2 era. And MK vs. DCU was MK8, if you’re counting how they arrived at 9, 10, and 11 (Shaolin Monks would be a spin-off), so there wasn’t really a large gap there.
- Comment on From Detroit to Deadlock: Quantic Dream are making a MOBA 6 days ago:
It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.
- Comment on From Detroit to Deadlock: Quantic Dream are making a MOBA 6 days ago:
It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.
- Comment on Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game - Official Announcement Trailer 6 days ago:
The competitive piece is one aspect, they could try new game modes that are not just reskins and points like MK Karting, Chess, Konquest, etc.
They still deliver this. Not those modes exactly, but they’ve always had modes beyond the competitive multiplayer. Their marquis feature at this point, and likely the reason MK games are some of the best selling games of the year of their release these days, is the story mode, and NRS’s peers keep trying to do something, anything, that comes close. The towers are another major driver, but not for me; I really enjoyed the Krypt in X and 11. Between that, the story mode, and versus play, there was absolutely no question that I got my money’s worth out of the game. Sadly, the Krypt was replaced with Invasions in MK1, but I don’t think it was a popular feature with anyone, so hopefully Invasions will be gone from future games.
The modern games all under perform against the ps2 games on metacritic.
Deadly Alliance through Armageddon: 79, 81, 75
MK9-MK1: 86 (9), 83 (X), 85 (XL), 82 (11), 88 (11 Ultimate), 83 (1)
The one you cited as having fanfare for not being shit was after the PS2 games (and 4 and vs. DC) built a reputation of being shit…I’m not sure how that supports your argument.
- Comment on Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. 6 days ago:
The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.
- Comment on Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. 6 days ago:
I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.
- Comment on Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. 6 days ago:
In case you care about the things I care about:
What is the end-of-life plan?
Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I was watching V for Vendetta, a movie about how people allow a fascist government to replace a democracy, because it was November 5th, a crucial political date in that story.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
I know you mentioned this game to me in this community in the last couple of days, and now this update came along and surprised us all. Would you mind confirming if a dedicated server can be spun up for local play only, with no internet? And if so, does the game have bots to fill out a private server?
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Dropping the first bit of proper news on Steam since early 2024 after the release of Battlefield 6 is certainly a choice
Not a terrible one. 4 people can play this game for less than the price of one person playing Battlefield 6. You can capture everyone that’s on a budget or can’t play BF6 due to Secure Boot requirements.
- Comment on Is there any way of trying Battlefield 6 without buying it or paying £17 for a 1 month EA Play Pro subscription? 1 week ago:
Yup, I think so, too. It was too important and influential, and there’s too much of a gap in the market, for that to not happen.
- Comment on PS6 and next Xbox console are both aiming for 2027 release, separate reports claim | VGC 1 week ago:
It’s a night and day difference compared to Nvidia.
- Comment on PS6 and next Xbox console are both aiming for 2027 release, separate reports claim | VGC 1 week ago:
We’ve got tons of new types of games that have emerged over the years, but they sprout up at different levels of system requirements. The games that need the new hardware the ones with the largest development budgets.
- Comment on Is there any way of trying Battlefield 6 without buying it or paying £17 for a 1 month EA Play Pro subscription? 1 week ago:
See, I was way more into the Halo era of shooters that you weren’t as much of a fan of. I’m sure the pendulum will swing back again, but it just hasn’t happened yet. Doom 2016, for instance, was a game I enjoyed, but I was absolutely not looking for more of it by the time I finished it. Metal: Hellsinger was a good twist on Doom’s formula and got me more interested in playing it than Eternal or Dark Ages did. But outside of that, I can’t say I’m too hungry for that kind of shooter. I’m more interested in Phantom Fury than Ion Fury.