Katana314
@Katana314@lemmy.world
- Comment on I chose the penguin 2 minutes ago:
I mean…isn’t this something Word does well?
It continuously autosaves to a temp document, so if it crashes, next startup it finds the autosave and presents it as an option to you.
Like, I’m all for criticizing Word, but pick truthful critiques. Its Find bar has a broken scroll, the OneDrive sync feature often crashes silently, and half its menus are stuck in 1999.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 11 minutes ago:
The way in which Half-Life maintained a continuous viewpoint over long stretches of gameplay and landscape was always so immersive to me. Games like God of War and Dead Space did something similar, but Valve had an additional challenge.
They almost never take player control, instead relying on mere hints of where to loo; they even have the character sequences scripted for wherever the player was standing. That all usually took a lot of their effort.
I could be biased because I even enjoyed toying with their choreography tool, which let you layer simple gestures together; so without making a new animation, you could have someone both lean forward and nod right, and point their thumb right.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 17 minutes ago:
On enemy variety, I see the critique of games like Zelda: BOTW and even realistic games like Hitman. Something those games have in common is very well-made enemy AI that presents you many ways to defeat them.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 is currently 100% for its 20th anniversary 12 hours ago:
Half-Life: Alyx spoilers
It’s gonna be wild watching Valve try to explain that Eli was brought back from the dead in a prequel game that took place years before Half-Life 2, that 90% of their fans couldn’t play.
- Comment on End of a love affair: news media quit X over 'disinformation' 1 day ago:
The only annoying bit of this is that I’ve seen Steam labeled as the latest hive of unregulated social networking. Valve has often been very hands off in their moderation, which allows for some pretty extreme far right types to post content and conspiracies in bubbles around Steam Community.
It could be a good thing, though, could lead to Steam also getting positive change.
- Comment on Game of the day - Return of the Obra Dinner - did you enjoy it? 1 week ago:
This was my experience. There’s a certain motivation missing in a lot of mystery games where the result is going to be something highly inconsequential.
In Ace Attorney, you reveal a mystery’s real killer, and get to crumple their ego. To me, that’s a hard high to beat. I got the early, “bad” ending in Obrah Dinn and didn’t even care to keep going for the rest. I was getting no satisfaction in filling in forms from deaths we already know every interesting detail about.
- Comment on Ghost of Tsushima - I've heard it's a nice game, but it overstays its welcome. Do you agree? 1 week ago:
If there’s one thing that got me tired of it, it’s that it’s much cheaper from a game design standpoint when all opponents are killed, any unique characters you’re meant to save are already dead (don’t have to animate them) and all gameplay is combat.
It makes the game a bit depressing sometimes when it’s a lot of missions around arriving too late and mourning the dead.
- Comment on Patient gamers, what are your favorite OSTs? 1 week ago:
I’ve started recognizing when a section of a game feels baller, but it’s 99% because of the soundtrack. They can have the most generic basis for an emotional scene, and then as long as the music nails the mood it could be just blocks on a screen.
Final Fantasy XIV has had awe-inspiring tracks for the finales of each expansion since Shadowbringers; pretty much starting at the final zone through the final dungeon and trial.
Ace Attorney always gets it with its confrontation tracks; it could just be two people arguing in a hallway and it turns the battle of words into the most epic thing.
I’ll also give a shout out to Ori and the Blind Forest / Will of the Wisps. For both of those, it’s not just a few banger tracks for the exciting moments; even the downtime tracks are so memorable.
- Comment on In the era of remakes and remasters, what niche game would you like to see receive the treatment? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux 2 weeks ago:
Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.
Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.
- Comment on Professor Layton Games, what's your experience? 2 weeks ago:
I’m generally a fan of Ace Attorney, but I didn’t like PLvAA because of how over the top the plot twists are in Layton games. I feel like the TVTrope equivalent is something like “A wizard did it”.
- Comment on Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages 2 weeks ago:
It’s not just trust of the game developer. I honestly believe most of them just want to put out profitable games. It’s trust that a hacker won’t ever learn how to sign their code in a way that causes it to be respected as part of the game’s code instructions.
There was some old article about how a black hat found a vulnerability in a signed virtual driver used by Genshin Impact. So, they deployed their whole infection package together with that plain driver to computers that had never been used for video games at all; and because Microsoft chose to trust that driver, it worked.
I wish I could find an article on it, since a paraphrased summary isn’t a great source. This is coming from memory.
- Comment on An Update from PlayStation Studios (Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios are closing) 2 weeks ago:
The funny thing is, I hear that Concord at least worked on a basic level. It was visually high fidelity, guns worked, and it wasn’t terribly buggy, which is more than a lot of popular releases can say. But, of course, it offered nothing new and the character design was terrible.
- Comment on Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression 2 weeks ago:
Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it’s not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.
Basically, fighting games don’t have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There’s fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don’t require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don’t involve much decision-making.
I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don’t know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it’s basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.
- Comment on Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression 2 weeks ago:
Some games that come to mind:
Dead by Daylight has an issue with killers that keep their focus on one of the four survivors, ignoring the core objectives and other players. Worse, it often works well. There are many videos out there of experienced teams that find karmic counters for this practice, helping the victim escape the killer to some completely unknown location on the map, and often leaving the killer late-game with little to work with.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a 4v3 horror game), on the other hand, developed some issues where the prevailing strategies for the victims involve stacking up abilities that let them ignore attacks so there’s no need to hide or move slowly. It ends up taking long enough for the family members to even strike them down that some will brute-force objectives right in the family’s face. Part of the game’s issues is, the maps are developed to be relatively tight, so there’s fewer places for family to check, but it also made stealth strategies relatively ineffective.
An old favorite of mine for countering “Rush Meta” is in Team Fortress 2. For single players hoping to run past players to objectives, the Engineer’s sentry locks on to them pretty quickly, and no matter how fast they’re moving, it spells death within a certain bubble. Being automated, it also means no one has to camp for this to stay around. The sentries still die to inexperienced players that are making a unified push.
TF2’s other “rush punisher” is the Heavy - a class with a low skill cap, but a high health pool. He deals ludicrous damage up close, but can’t move quickly. So, he’s most lethal to people that are running at/past him instead of attacking from a distance. He says it right in his intro - he can’t outsmart people. He’s just a strong presence in a push for anyone that doesn’t have a plan to slow themselves down in order to deal the ton of damage needed to kill him. For a long time, in matches where the enemy team stuck to having 3 pyros rushing the frontline, my sole strategy was to pile up on Heavy, forcing the enemy team to consider ranged attackers like Demoman and Sniper, slowing the game down as a result.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 8 comments
- Comment on Grr Windows 2 weeks ago:
My view has always been that: “The most popular OS in the works will always need security updates frequently”. That’s true of Linux as well, if it ever broke Windows’ numbers.
That said, Windows has also fucked that argument by forcing unnecessary search additions and browser defaults in those updates.
- Comment on Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? 2 weeks ago:
The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.
- Comment on New mobile features are sh*t these days 2 weeks ago:
My understanding is that it’s driven by Tiktok, which, being a Chinese company, lives and breathes censorship and forced societal norms.
- Comment on New mobile features are sh*t these days 2 weeks ago:
Say “shit”, not “sh*t”.
Say “pussy”, not “p**sy”.
Say “gay”, not “”.
- Comment on New mobile features are sh*t these days 3 weeks ago:
I know it’s a cringe trend now, but: Downvoted for censorship. Do not keep your memes safe for TikTok!
- Comment on Marvel's Midnight Suns is criminally underrated 3 weeks ago:
I got the impression the writers had read a bunch of niche Marvel comics and wanted to impress with that knowledge. Maybe some fans of those characters actually enjoy that, but it didn’t flow well. I barely had any context for who this Hunter is, who Lilith is, and why they matter.
- Comment on World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store 3 weeks ago:
I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.
- Comment on OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score 3 weeks ago:
There’s no exact point in time at which “the aggregated reviews” are one finished article of news. One bootlicking review site will have its review of a game out in the first 3 hours to be the first place people read. Then, another detailed reviewer will spend a week investigating the game’s systems before providing a more nuanced review.
- Comment on OpenCritic now has user-reviews including pros&cons and shows user score 3 weeks ago:
I’ve found that Steam reviews are especially useless for visual novels and games with anime girls. I am open to the concept of a visual novel, and really enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but maintain 99.9% of them are trash, with none of their excess dialog trimmed down. They all have reviews saying Overwhelmingly Positive though, because anyone who would take the chance to try that genre - a small segment of people - will enjoy it.
I also really wish Steam would implement a Helpfulness system for Guides, since most games have Guide pages that are just filled with meme posts, eg; “How 2 win: Pick OP character, enjoy victory”.
- Comment on Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’ | VGC 3 weeks ago:
I feel like when developers have a good pedigree, they can apply their concepts elsewhere.
Blizzard hadn’t made a shooter before Overwatch, but definitely got it right in so many respects. Bloober team had some mediocre horror games, but was steadily getting better before they made the Silent Hill 2 remake. Valve made just shooters before Portal and then DOTA 2. Heck, easy to forget The Talos Principle, an existential puzzle game is made by the people who made “Uber DUMB MACHO SHOOTER Serious Sam”.
Oh yeah, and survival horror team Tango Gameworks making cartoon rhythm combat game Hi-Fi Rush.
- Comment on Naughty Dog’s next game will reportedly offer ‘a lot of player freedom’ | VGC 3 weeks ago:
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
- Comment on 'It Has Plateaued': Should We Be Worried About Console Gaming's Future? 3 weeks ago:
I’d say even PC, in terms of hardware, has plateaued. Many PC gamers are staying on Nvidia 1080 and 1070 cards, because gaming just hasn’t moved up past that graphical level - and it really shouldn’t, because quite a few human eyes just can’t see much detail beyond then - and developer budgets quite often don’t catch up to make use of all that excess hardware.
This might mean we effectively stay with the PS5, or even the PS4 generation, for quite a long time, while still generating ideas with what we do in that level. Probably the biggest thing we have to do now is control gaming budgets better. Try watching the credits of any Ubisoft game, and think “Someone approved all of these hires.” Meanwhile, rewind to Half-Life 2 and they played through the entire credits of the game during the opening sections without it taking a half hour.
- Comment on ‘Unknown 9: Awakening’ Arrives To 200 Steam Players, Poor Reviews 4 weeks ago:
No…TRUE Scotsman uses Sweet Baby Inc!
- Comment on Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - PC Announce Trailer 4 weeks ago:
Thing is, it is the same requirement as EA, Ubisoft, and to some extent, Valve.
Granted, I think those others have spread their legal agreements to more countries, which has been the main complaint. But they all get to track player data; I’m sure Sony only got into PC wanting that too.