ampersandrew

@ampersandrew@lemmy.world

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Ah, I see. In a lot of games, tutorial, story, and gameplay are happening all at once. Do you have an example offender that was on your mind originally?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency.

Right, but the style has point values assigned to you. If they’re unchanging, there is a way that will always work best, every time. At a high level (correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m somewhat new to this genre), rewarding style is similar to rewarding variety, juggles, and getting multiple enemies in the same attack. If you go down the checklist of your arsenal, you can always hit the variety. If you know exactly how the enemies behave, you can reliably get multiple enemies in the same aerial combo that the scoring system rewards most. The same actions give you the same output, and one of those score values will be the highest out of all other possible options. One set of actions will reliably always handle the same mob if it’s deterministic.

Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.

That’s just damage. The rest of the fighting game is rock paper scissors. A beats B beats C beats A. At round start, what button do you press? There’s always some option that beats your option, and that’s before we’ve even calculated the resulting damage. Some of what they’re doing is responding to what you’ve been doing, but the rest of what they’re doing is trying to be unpredictable; AKA random.

Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.

That’s interesting. As I said, I’m somewhat new to this genre. The short version is that Hi-Fi Rush got me interested in checking out all of the DMC games (minus the reboot), and 5 ended up being my favorite of that series (but still not as good as Hi-Fi Rush).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Would you mind listing some of those? Because that’s a tough bar to clear.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
The reason they’re in RPGs is the same reason they’re in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you’re rolling with the punches based on what you’ve found.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I’m curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you’re doing?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pet Peeves with Games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Money changed hands, so they have to show them. It’s advertising for the other companies that they worked with, or building up brand recognition for the publisher, etc. In the best case scenario, they mask a load screen, but I’ve found plenty where they don’t even start loading until after the unskippable logos.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
All of new gaming hardware is decidedly less imminent now that this pricing nonsense is going on. Even if the tech exists, no one thinks they can sell at what they’d have to charge for it. It’s going to be a rough near term future for gaming hardware before it eventually levels out. Reports are that consoles planned for 2027 are now looking like they’ll be pushed back.

I’m not super used to calling that “hybrid gaming”, but my wife seems to have no problem playing cozy games on the Steam Deck, almost exclusively on the TV when I didn’t take it with me on the go. And we’re once again back to the best games and the best graphics not being all that correlated. The other part is that even if a random gamer has a Steam Deck, it’s unlikely to be their only gaming PC, and if they want the power to produce that larger image at better frame rates at home, they’ll play on that other PC, and that game will run its best there. On Switch 2, that one device is your only option no matter what. That means that if you want to play one of those beefier titles from the Switch 1, they’re not going to run at better settings ever unless the developer explicitly upgrades them; even then, there’s often the Switch tax compared to buying the same game on PC.

I’m not trying to talk you down from a Switch 2 if that’s your preference, but if someone’s asking me for a recommendation for a gaming handheld, the Steam Deck is going to be what I tell them until I rule it out due to some other need. I definitely wouldn’t start with a Switch 2. The Deck just hits a compelling price with a good software experience and, perhaps most importantly, a library that dwarfs what Nintendo could ever hope to match by following the traditional console model.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t region locking on the NES and SNES largely implemented via the shape of the cartridge? Frank Cifaldi and the VGHF just put out that NES history video, and it had some kind of authentication chip that could only be provided by Nintendo, and it was in the NES but not the Famicom. And on Gamecube, I seem to remember you needed an Action Replay to break the region locking, but I never dabbled in it myself.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I played it all on desktop, but it looks like it got a performance update a month ago and is now Deck verified. Friends of mine played it on Deck before that and didn’t mention any complaints, but I wasn’t fishing for them either.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Most of “the newest games” are well within the spec of the Steam Deck. Of the 4 non-exclusive games nominated for GOTY at the Keighleys, they’ll all run on it just fine. Some of the biggest games of the year end up being the likes of Peak, Schedule I, or Megabonk, and not only are those games only available on PC (at least for a while), but they’re not even pushing the spec of the Steam Deck to its limit. With RAM pricing issues going on right now, high end studios are likely going to target a lower spec. And the companies that can afford to make a game that hits that higher spec are few and far between anyway, compared to the AA and indie studios that made most of the best games of the past few years.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
General availability seems to imply that supply was not a constraint by the time we got to the holiday shopping season.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 Sales Reportedly Struggled Over The Christmas Period⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I doubt the ability to brick your console remotely played too large of a part in this. It’s far more likely the asking price combined with the general economic situation for the average consumer, combined with a worse screen and a lesser launch offering of titles. For my own biases, when you see how consoles have required online subscriptions and how your old games don’t automatically run at higher settings when you buy the new machine, I wonder how much more gas in the tank consoles even have without some fundamental transformation.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
cool
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Quite frankly, it doesn’t. This thread is about the removal of adult content from multiple different places that happens in suspicious proximity to the removal of other adult content, such that it sure feels like it’s all connected.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
So why did Epic also remove the game at the last minute?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
“the stuff affecting adult content on Steam”

You filled in the rest. I didn’t imply that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

No, I didn’t.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.

Quite the opposite. The reason I suspect there’s something legal behind behavior like this is that it is so laser targeted to this game. Especially when it was immediately followed up by their competitor eager to host the game (which had already removed the content named in Steam’s initial reason) and then changing their mind at the last second.

What I see in common between Horses and Github is that it appears that they see it as a bad idea to explain publicly why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that smells like a legal reason to me.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Exactly. Steam is so laissez-faire about adult content that removing one game, without elaborating, and allowing so many others sounds exactly to me like it violates or risks violating a law somewhere, and so they’re covering their asses, maybe even preemptively. I’m not a lawyer, but their advice is often to just shut the fuck up. Epic sure was excited to host it when Steam declined and then did the same thing. For all I know, the reason GOG can host it but the other two won’t is that maybe GOG doesn’t operate in a country where some law makes that game a problem for them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

What about the last 20 years of Microsoft make you think that adding value to their products has anything to do with their business model?

The part where they tried to make an Apple app store and it didn’t take. The open ecosystem of Windows is the thing that allows it to continue to exist and dominate. And the open ecosystem of open source software actively enhances their ability to sell companies server infrastructure, which makes them more money than Windows does.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I don’t see it. Indie developers would comprise the vast majority of open source projects. Many of them add value to their own products, and they know it, which is why they’re largely a services company now. And the timing is so close to everything going on with adult content in other places.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses. No one’s saying anything about any of it, which feels like that’s on advice from their legal counsel.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 2025 Steam Awards Winners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I haven’t played it, but the same elevator pitch is given every time someone describes it on a podcast: it’s like someone made off-brand Half-Life and merged it with the survival genre. I’ve heard a lot of good things.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 2025 Steam Awards Winners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Limited replayability? It’s top of mind for me when I’m rattling off replayable games.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 2025 Steam Awards Winners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I love the story of that game, too, but being unable to progress at those points makes for a good strategy game while also being antithetical to its message, lol.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Among games with over 10K reviews, Deltarune is the most highly rated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Split Fiction is published by EA.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
Even just split-screen multiplayer has value. Replication is handled by the engine. User accounts are handled by your storefront. Anti-cheat is something you’re thinking about if you’re designing an e-sport, but if you’re just making a fun video game that you might play with friends, it’s a nice-to-have. Why are we even collecting data such that GDPR is a problem? I know these are all things that multiplayer devs tell you they’re thinking about as to why this is so complicated, but we’ve lost the plot here so much that they’re building a game that they’re already expecting is going to reach millions of people without even being sure that they’re going to hit thousands. Which is how we get to an article like this one.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

We’ve come a long way from the days when one programmer added multiplayer into Goldeneye at the very end of development, that could never happen today.

Why? I can’t name a reason why this couldn’t be. Even extrapolating out for added complexity of network multiplayer, maybe it wouldn’t be feasible to add in just a handful of weeks, but if you’re already developing with client-server in mind, the same thing can still be whipped up today in a reasonable amount of time.

Even the rest of your comment makes it seem like if there aren’t thousands of concurrent players weeks after launch that it’s somehow failed as a multiplayer game. The industry has broken all of our brains so thoroughly that most of us can’t remember a time where that wasn’t a goal, and I’m arguing that it’s better if we didn’t make it the goal. If you make a multiplayer mode that you can play with friends, that has bots to fall back on when you don’t, and is designed to scale to very few players in a match, that multiplayer mode offers just as much value in week 1 as it does 20 years later. It’s not falling back on a single player mode, nor is it a failure as a multiplayer game in a competitive market if you build something that can withstand reaching a small audience, like the industry used to. That we used to get both modes in tons of games back in the day is what made these games “the full package” rather than only a single player game or only a multiplayer game, and I reject the idea that one of those two things has to suffer for the other to be good.

Halo didn’t have Xbox Live until the sequel because Xbox Live didn’t exist yet when Halo 1 was built, but it did still have network multiplayer. And that was still very much serving multiple masters, just like its predecessor.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
I seem to recall the reason they dropped the first one being that the tech stack it was built on couldn’t support the number of players trying to play it at once.