Prez wrote on Mar 25, 2025, 14:40:
You know how I sometimes say that whites are often more offended than blacks are by racism against blacks? This is like that. Many marginalized groups, while definitely in need of your support, are a little more sturdy than you might realize. Support, don't patronize. Given this particular case, however, you guys might need to find another excuse to hide your rage behind...

Yes, we know how you sometimes say that.

Nullity wrote on Mar 5, 2025, 13:09:

Apple takes UK to court over 'backdoor' order • The Register.

Ffs, this is still a thing? Someone like Anonymous needs to take advantage of this to get in there and start leaking Parliament member's skeletons. They'll change their minds real fast.

Is Apple's obscene level of greed that shadows nearly every other corporations still a thing?

Yes

Saboth wrote on Mar 5, 2025, 09:31:
At this point it should be obvious Musk and Trump are intentionally crashing the economy (Musk said they would) so that the oligarchs can buy up companies, homes, stocks, etc. for cheap. Doesn't matter to them if millions of people lose their jobs.

or die

runnerct32 wrote on Mar 1, 2025, 12:46:
I think every country is a threat to us not just Russia. Trump, needs to wake up and start to see everyone is a threat to us.

Xenophobic much?

You can't call it a tentpole when you refuse to release it for tax purposes

If this is anything like the thing from five years ago, with multiple button-prompts per item vomited all over the screen, insultingly easy combat, and Uncharted/Horizon style "protagonist has absolutely no filter between their thoughts and their mouth and has to talk aloud to themselves every thirty seconds" then this has as much to do with Gothic 1 as that 2014 abomination had to do with the original Thief: The Dark Project

Stop slapping names on things while refusing to acknowledge the core concepts associated with those things.

Beamer wrote on Feb 21, 2025, 12:12:

NotOneOfUs wrote on Feb 21, 2025, 12:09:
* REMOVED *

That's a weirdly negative way to view the world. "I hope my games don't include people that aren't like me!"

People like you outright cried for a decade because consumers were asking for diversity, and devs were inspired by it. You called it "cancel culture" or forced, when no one was forcing anyone. You're now saying you "hope" the government gets involved.

For all the "free speech," "free market," and "small government," you guys get really weirdly excited when the government tries to tell the market what it can do and the artists what they can make. Unsurprisingly, all you ever wanted was Big Brother to force people to be equally miserable and angry.

The mods here are grown-ups who know how to moderate their own boards and don't need or rely on "reports" to decide what is and isn't BS.

Notice how you don't try to communicate about it, you just immediately state your opinion as obvious fact without considering that maybe you did something wrong. The thought didn't even occur.

Talk to the mods like adults, don't condescend

Xeth Nyrrow wrote on Feb 12, 2025, 10:36:
Definitely a different corporate culture back then. This was before greed induced Reaganomics and the meteoric rise in CEO salaries which probably is why we are where we are now with these gaming companies. It just happens that is when the video gaming industry really started to take off so they look synonymous with the trend.

Reaganomics didn't induce corporate greed. Corporate greed spawned Reaganomics. That level of sliminess has always been part of the videogames industry.

Activision was formed in 1979 (before Reagan) and EA in 1982 explicitly to fight against the big email corporate anti-employee company Atari.

Nothing new.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Feb 4, 2025, 14:13:
This is definitely going to generate a mod from someone that removes this.

Though one of the things about the "realism" claim that I find hilarious is that this takes place ~50-60 years after bubonic plague swept through Europe. There are way too many people alive in the original game. Bubonic plague wiped out ~50% of humanity in Europe. There should be more abandoned buildings, untended fields, hollowed out garrisons, and fortifications abandoned due to lack of manpower. Population numbers aren't going to rebound in that short amount of time.

Yeah, yeah "it's a game". I know.

SINCERELY cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not, so I'm going to treat it as if you're sincere.

The population of each town is measured in dozens.

DOZENS.

The largest military group has maybe fifty soldiers.

And this is in a regionally vital part of Bohemia. The Skalitz mines are not 100% realistic, but there was a HUGE wealth of silver in that specific area of Bohemia.

There's a reason why Bohemia was such a geographic outlier when it came to Electors in the Holy Roman Empire. There's a reason why the original Electors of the HRE were all around the Rhine (Koln, Trier, Mainz, Swabia, Franconia/Palatinate (yes, I'm combining things over a few centuries during the embryonic phase)) and .. Bohemia. Cuz Bohemia had money. A TON of silver. Near Kuttenberg. As represented by the Skalitz mines.

Skalitz, which had, at the start of the game, 142 people.

... And that's too many for you?

Plus, it hit different areas differently. It barely affected Poland, for example.

And Bohemia was hit less severely than the average location in Europe. Cuz Europe, shockingly, isn't monolithic.

If you're going to be condescending, then at least be correct.

The population as shown in KCD1 is perfectly acceptable.

Stink was part of the first one too. And tons of other games I've the last thirty years where stealth was a factor.
Why is this "news"?

What next? News that metal armor is noisy? That torn clothing is less impressive than untorn clothing? That dirt exists?

I've been trying to explain "the publisher is who matters" to gamers for decades.

They don't care to know.

it's almost like there's a reason they're bribing gamers to support their anti-consumer practices

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jan 10, 2025, 02:22:
What the hell is the point of this? How much money could they possibly project they will make with the PSN accounts, vs having this for sale in more countries?

I am sure there is some internal study somewhere in Sonyland that explains these sort of decisions.

The point is to steer people towards buying a Playstation. That is the point of 100% of Sony's gaming decisions.

It's planting that playstation seed in their brains. One day, they'll say "hrmm... I already have an account, might as well" If 10% of people who play TLOU2 on PC end up getting a PS5/PS6, it'll be worth it.

Same reason they wait 5-10 years to make PC ports and why those PC ports are usually pretty crappy. "If you want to play the real version, you have to play it on Playstation."

Every
Single
Decision

Sony makes in videogames is based on selling that hardware. They'd HAPPILY lose 10 ten game sales if they get 1 hardware sale.

Zerg wrote on Jan 10, 2025, 03:12:
Don't see a problem with that.

If I don't like it, I won't buy it. Simple as. Complaining about it on the internet won't do shit, as we've seen with Helldivers 2.

Like 99% of games you buy these days on PC have a neat little note on them saying "A free Steam account is required" and yet nobody cares. And if I want to buy from anywhere else, guess what? A free GOG account is required, a free Ubisoft account is required, I could go on all day.

The comparison to Steam was irrelevant enough, but listing GOG proves you apparently have absolutely no clue what you're talking about... or how to argue whatever point it is you're trying to make.

You need an account to *BUY* a game from GOG. You need an account to buy anything from virtually anywhere on the internet. No sane person would complain about that.

You do not need an account to *PLAY* a game you purchased from GOG.

It's like buying an mp3 from somewhere and being able to play it wherever you like vs having to use iTunes to play the AAC file, to use an old example.

Armengar wrote on Jan 7, 2025, 16:08:
Starfield wasnt shitty. Not by a long shot. People just wanted the game to be different, it wasnt what they were expecting.

The game was released relatively bug free and had hours of enjoyment, wasnt too grindy and had quite a bit of fun elements. Easily worth the money.

Exhibit A in "tastes in entertainment are 100% subjective"

Just because YOU found it entertaining doesn't mean everyone "wanted the game to be different" (tho, if you mean "wanted the game to be good" then yes, yes they did, but I suspect that's not what you meant.)

Some things can be quantified of course. And honestly, a lot of the Bethesda magic was quantifiably NOT in Starfield. The star of Bethesda games, especially the further away you get from Morrowind, is the world. Not the writing, the quests, and all of that. The magic happened on the way as you discover 37 things between Step 1 and Step 2.

"I was on my way to do this quest and I stumbled upon this awesome thing and it wasn't until the following week that I finally got to finish the quest cuz I was just so distracted by all the awesome"

Starfield removed a lot of that. That's quantifiable. And, presuming you agree about the Bethesda magic part, it's a lesser game because of it.

Cutter wrote on Jan 1, 2025, 18:05:
HTF is this clown the richest man on the planet? And he's intent on destroying global democracy for the lulz? I'd love to see his psych profile. He must be completely psychotic.

Because he comes from extreme privilege and capitalism rewards sociopathy.

This can't be news to you.

thestryker wrote on Dec 26, 2024, 17:05:
It's not actually the "graphics" per se that are driving up the costs to make games (though things like mocap on everything definitely drive up price). Pretty much all of the real problems come down to bad management. The article mentions Fortnite, but I'd be surprised if that wasn't one of the highest cost to develop games of all time. Epic, like most other big companies, throws bodies at the content problem so you end up with huge development teams to hit timelines.

Anthem is one of the greatest examples of bad management where they kept iterating and throwing out ideas so the game had maybe 12 months of actual development time spent on the final product despite it taking years to get to that point.

Focus seems like something left for the AA space and indie developers these days. I think that's why so many folks who like playing games in general (as opposed to say playing cod with friends and that's it type of thing) gravitate towards that space. Outside of Horizon Forbidden West I think everything I played a lot of/finished came from indie/AA.

To be fair if you include games that weren't published, there were a ton of worse examples than Anthem.

GVMERS on YouTube has a ton of examples.

But other examples that are likely on the same tier as Anthem (mind you anthem is a superb example) are things like DND

But yeah, virtually everything that EA touches is going to be horrifyingly mismanaged.

Back to graphics tho... I'll take artistically well -done over technical power every day. There is still no game that has forests as interestedly convincing as Kingdom Come Deliverance. And RDR2 is still gorgeous with their artistic mastery of lighting that newer games seem to think they can just power their way into.

The marriage of tech and art is where it's at.

Spending ten million on graphical tech and ten bucks on artists to use that tech isn't the way to go.

Mr. Tact wrote on Dec 20, 2024, 08:01:
I saw Stellaris was 90% off so I was thinking, yeah I can do that for $4. Then I saw the bundle for some expansions, and thought "Hmm, maybe?" And then I saw "Season 08 - Expansion Pass".. and said, "Yeah, no thanks -- so much for that idea."

Why?

Are you unaware that it's a 100% perfectly valid game with all free updates if you don't buy the completely optional DLC?

I will never understand the hatred for this content model

Coalfax wrote on Dec 17, 2024, 15:15:
Why on earth is everything political for you people? Its a game and it was garbage. Its being pulled because its an embarrassment to the genre. Its as simple as that.

Get off your damn white horses and stop playing the idiot card.

Idiots don't know how to not play their idiot card. For example, being on a high horse about idiots making everything about politics while not knowing basic grammar.

It boggles my mind that "this animal actually feels pain" is considered newsworthy.

Here's a list of all the animals we are certain don't feel pain: