What ever happened to the graphics engine update that was supposed to come in around the release of AOC?

It is pretty brutal there have been, what, four total Five Nights games released in a single calendar year?

At the same time, they're a decent price, people love them and you can't hate on the guy for finding success. It's just, in today's gaming world where more people are paying attention to predatory, anti-consumer practices in gaming, this stands out a bit and catches a lot of flak that the bigger companies deserve much more.

This guy will have released four separate games in, what, a year and a month?

They appear to barely improve upon the previous release yet he sells that as full (indie) titles.

Well, grats to him for printing money like this but when AAA devs do something even close to this they get crucified for it.

You experienced it in other games? Fantastic. This is the game I experience it in. Am I dumb for enjoying something you don't enjoy?

Could you possibly be that pompous?

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Mar 24, 2015, 13:01:

Wetworks24 wrote on Mar 24, 2015, 09:40:
1 million people paying $20 for a game that's going to be free in several months.

This is what amazed me... it's fine to want to play H1Z1, but wtf, wait a few months and play it for free, maybe? Instead of paying to be a beta tester?

Come on now, gaming community!

I've been hardcore PC gaming since the mid 90s. I've been in more closed alphas and betas than I could even recall, and I paid to test H1Z1. I have faith in the long term direction of the game, and I don't mind contributing to it. What I wanted was a game that takes the zombie survival design, makes it a bit more fun, on an engine that runs better than the Arma engine, it's delivered that 10 fold for me so far.

I mostly play Survival, not BR. There are tons of Survival servers, with tons of players on them. BR is fun, but my love for the game is in the base building aspects of it, and the long term PVP. In just the last few weeks, my group has feuded with a very large Taiwanese clan, three different groups of players similar to us, and most recently, we started getting into skirmishes with a large group that has a massive base near us. Finally we had enough, walked right through them, blew the lid off of their base, and made it our own.

Winning BR is fun, and feels like a nice accomplishment, but nothing compares to telling an enemy that had been talking shit to you, that the base they and their group had spent days building, now belongs to you.

I imagine the streamers are mostly playing BR because that's what gets views.

Anyone who enjoys the survival gameplay is playing it or looking into relevant info about it, not watching a streamer play it.

Basically, most of what I see in this thread are people who genuinely don't have a leg to stand on, spouting off shit they read from knee jerk reacting children on reddit.

I don't really know where this whole "only kids buy this game" garbage comes from.

I play with a fairly large group of guys all over 30, and the vast majority of players any of us run into are adults.

You hear the occasional squeaker but they are few and far between.

There are a lot more Asian (Taiwanese and Koreans from what we've seen) playing than young dumb kids.

I was using this ghost tracker app at work for a laugh one day, had it on for about 20 minutes, phone got insanely hot, took off the cover to see it had actually singed the inside of my phone cover, and the back of the iphone.

Why is it that people don't consider the completely insane logic behind the concept that Pro-GGers are doxxing and threatening women as a means of silencing them?

It hasn't silenced a woman in two months.

It has only made the Anti-GG crowd louder, more angry, and more dedicated.

It has done irreparable damage to the GG 'movement'.

It has directly profited and improved the career of the targets.

It has brought exponentially more negative coverage from mainstream media each time it happens.

At this point if you truly believe GGers are behind these actions you are by proxy admitting you also believe they suffer from Munchausen syndrome.

When things like this happen, especially consistently, you have to use common sense and basic logic to begin thinking who benefits from it to get to the bottom of it. Even if you believe the reasoning that GG truly is this anti-women in gaming movement, GG has not benefited from these actions in well over two months now.

Cmon guys. We're all smarter than this. We're all more skeptical and we've all seen way too much bullshit on the Internet to believe the lazy narrative here.

The media coverage of gamergate, and the narrative being pushed against gaming and gamers in general proves a lot of points I personally have believed for a long time.

The lack of female gamers over the years (until recently) had everything to do with social acceptance and nothing to do with gaming being some kind of boys only club.

Who was chasing girls off of the Super Nintendo? Who harassed a girl off of a Sega Genesis? What anonymous death threats were being slung against girls playing Playstation or Xbox 1?

Up until recently, gaming was NOT socially acceptable. Being a gamer as your chief hobby was looked at as geeky, nerdy, or dorky, all things that have all been negative descriptors. Dorky or nerdy chic only came into popularity in the recent years as the world had to accept that techy type people were the movers and shakers these days. The hipster movement on nerdy outfits helped make nerdy a socially acceptable group.

As it became more socially acceptable, women became more comfortable participating in it. How many girls wanted to join video game clubs in high schools in the 90s or the early 00s? It just did not exist on any kind of comparable level, and the internet and accessibility to communicate was not nearly as established or common then, so you cannot seriously blame it on harassment. No one at an EB games ever stopped a parent from buying a game console because it was for a daughter and not a son. I'm confident in saying that has absolutely NEVER happened.

Now, the media, spearheaded by hipster online media and marketing types, has worked their asses off to make sure gaming is no longer socially acceptable. Instead of isolating the type of lunatics who would send ANYONE a death threat, they just label it as gamers, and they celebrate their friends jumping in on making sweeping generalizations.

then these people, who want to be celebrated and respected as members of the gaming industry, they join in on this, and when people respond to their negativity with equal negativity, it is labeled harassment.

This is all so dishonest, and it sickens me. The threats sicken me. The shit talking sickens me. The lies sicken me. The entire situation is a mess but the media will only focus on one side of the mess and it will not make a better community or society moving forward.

If we don't acknowledge this bullshit as a whole, we will not grow from it. It will just be someone else who is taking the beating, instead of figuring out a way to grow as a community and eliminate the bullying in ANY form.

This is the world we live in these days. It is acceptable to bully and victimize someone if they have been labeled the enemy, and no one is adult enough to understand the flaws in that system. No one is mature enough to be honest about it because just like the witch hunts of lore, people are willing to fabricate complete bullshit toward someone else so that they too are not hunted as a witch.

Gaming is being attacked socially again and people are so caught up in things like "Hey people! We're helping women here!" that they won't acknowledge what is happening as a whole here. In the years that come, anyone who identifies as a gamer is going to be seen with this lens. The lens that the media has painted. All of the progress that was made by celebrities showing off their game rooms on MTV's cribs, the celebs coming out as gamers, the celebs starring in game commercials or voice acting in games, all of that work is being undone before our eyes by things like "If you are a GAMER, unfollow me NOW!" and no one gives a shit.

At the end of the day, being a womanizer who hits on drunk women in a bar on a Saturday is and will always be more socially acceptable in the US than sitting at home and gaming with your friends of any race, age, gender or faith.

Grinding up on a woman in a bar is more socially acceptable than grinding out levels. This is the world we have all lived in for a long time and the turncoats who sold this industry out have ensured that it will continue for the foreseeable future, right as eSports grows bigger than most of us ever imagined and gaming as an industry continues to be recession proof.

Long live the GamerGate era, where a man who leaked a woman's nudes as a means of revenge against her is lauded for his efforts in censoring discussion on this topic on his forums.

Double standards are double standards, regardless of who they are victimizing, and they will continue to make us all look like assholes as long as we are too afraid to speak out against the status quo and point them out.

You know what the worst part is? It actually LOOKS half decent.

Not the gameplay, not the violence or the theme or any of that crap, but the engine itself, the graphics, the environments.

Somehow the Unreal Engine is capable of polishing even the worst turds.

This is worth a download and a play through, I played three matches last night and had quite a bit of fun with it. Quick DL/install too.

It's somewhere between a MOBA and something like Smash TV or that older SOE game, Infantry.

The truly twisted thing is that they find a lot of this behavior online comes from 'normal' people. That's what the internet facilitates for some people's inner creep.

Seeing the outcries of the death of a hashtag these last two days shows such a profound misunderstanding of the way that the internet works, and a completely clueless take on the power and usage of a hashtag.

Happy Birthday! I've been coming to this site since the late 90s, and it's far and away the oldest link on the sites I frequent. Blues has consistently been a reliable source for gaming news and I'm sure it will continue to be that for a long time.

Kobalt, what server and faction are you running?

I only recently started playing after learning of the sailing and commerce aspects of the game, only about 12 levels in but it isn't half bad so far.

I am a bit disappointed reading this information about the land plots.

How does a game boast to be a sandbox when they have an extremely limited number of plots, which are already completely full and getting totally abused?

Really drops the ball for everything that ArcheAge is supposed to offer.

@Jdreyer:

One of the best 'criticisms' or counterpoints on the Damsels in Distress episode was KiteTales take on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek

Explores the fact that a lot of Anita's criticism of the characters ignored big characterizations about the 'damsels' and their strength as characters or their importance to the universes the games take place in.


----

@Beamer:

I didn't just mean Leigh's piece, but the onslaught of pieces that are pushing the narrative that 'Gamer' is this bombed out piece of land that is no longer suitable to live on.

That's silliness, and in all honesty, I felt that the attention they put on the term made it far more specific than myself, or any of the hundreds of gamers I personally know from years of hardcore gaming, have ever considered it. I don't know anyone who has ever seen gaming as some boys club. I feel like the lack of female gamers over the years had a lot more to do with social stigmas against gaming and nerd culture than it had to do with gamers being exclusive or elitist.

My beef comes up when I feel like their push for inclusion actually reinforces a lot of those negative stigmas that had been incorrectly placed on this hobby or this community.

Gaming is no more connected to abuse of women than it is connected to real life violence, and as far as I'm concerned, implying that it is is just as silly as implying that playing GTA or Doom is going to make you a psychopathic murderer.

It gives us no credit as people, who can tell the difference. Video game violence to me is as cartoony and silly as Bugs Bunny shooting Daffy Duck in the face point blank with buck shot. It doesn't matter how real the graphics are, because I have the ability to discern between reality and fantasy.

People that do not have the ability to discern between the two did not develop that problem as a symptom of gaming, they are mentally imbalanced or ill, and they would extrapolate the same twisted message from a yoyo as they will from a video game.

As far as Leigh is concerned, I'm far more concerned with her ego than anything specific or recent. Her comments threatening to destroy others careers because she doesn't like their opinions, that kind of thing being slung around in public wouldn't fly in any industry I have ever worked in. If someone at my job was standing in the hall shouting "I WILL DESTROY YOUR DREAMS" at someone they would be written up or immediately fired. Since she has been elevated to some untouchable level, it's completely acceptable for her to talk and act like the same bullies she and her peers work so hard to condemn.

As far as this idea that gamers are sheltered people that soil themselves, well, that's what a number of prominent people in our industry have been repeating over and over again on Twitter for a month now, so, I don't think her message was all that effective.

If you really believe that the people criticizing them are jackasses, you really shouldn't be so quick to celebrate these people you respect dropping down to that level, because they absolutely have and it has been nothing short of pathetic.

I've lost a ton of respect for people I have followed for years. It doesn't matter how stupid things get, sometimes, someone has the be the adult, and that concept passed by the journalists and some of their closest developer pals weeks ago.

Edit: One more thought I wanted to add. I understand that gaming in general has a hostility. I've been in servers or lobbies when people figure out a girl is around and they start teasing or talking shit or making lewd comments. I've seen men say awful things to women as well. I've also seen horrific things said to other men. I've had horrible things said to me. When I was a somewhat public figure in the eSports community a few years back, a lot of my articles were met with vicious insults about me as a person that had absolutely no criticism of the article or statement... but there is a dishonesty in pretending that this is some symptom of gaming, because it's really a symptom of the INTERNET.

I'm on a lot of different communities and forums for a number of different subjects, from various game genres to music to culture to just about anything, and all of them go through the exact same realization that everyone is extremely toxic.

The only thing any of these places really share in common is that they are on the Internet. People take anonymity, even the illusion of it, to say the most obscene thing that comes to mind, and more often than not, they're going to reach for a low hanging fruit that makes them seem like something very specific, but what they really are is a button pusher. They find the easiest thing to criticize you on, the quickest path to a below the belt shot, and they go for it. You can't always boil it down to some neat little label like racist, or misogynist, or ageist or weightist, because they're really just one specific thing. An A-hole.

This comment was edited on Oct 2, 2014, 19:37.

@Redmask The best part is I share a lot of the progressive ideals that these people pretend to care about. I believe in true equality, celebrating our differences as a diversity but still acknowledging that we are one group. I want more of everyone in gaming, because more prospective from diverse backgrounds can only improve the depth of everything. I believe in institutionalized racism and misogyny because I've seen them both first hand. Among other things.

My issue with any of those progressive ideas comes when people believe they can force tolerance through vicious intolerance. It's short sighted, ignorant, and worst of all, hypocritical. I have an issue with people who would rather bury ugly aspects of history or censor or rewrite things that are offensive rather than having productive discussions about it, learning from it, and moving beyond it.

The current movement for these progressive ideals actually takes a lot more notes from the methods some of the same things they condemn than they do from any actual progressive movements. That's why you see so much strife between the various waves of groups like feminists.

I take issue with the current state of 'discussion' because it's not a discussion. It's a lecture regardless of the actual legitimacy of the content within the lecture. It's a shunning and condemnation and anyone who debates it is instantly labeled the most ugly and extreme thing imaginable. It's dishonest. It's childish, and it's not productive.

@Beamer: The issue was that the editorial wasn't about misognyny, it was about GAMERS.

There's a difference, and only a true racist or misogynist would be able to appreciate the vicious and vulgar stereotyping and ignorance being slung around.

The issue on condescension is that this started long before GamerGate started, there are recordings of talks from various conferences and conventions where these people are openly mocking their audiences and consumers.

They hate a good portion of their readers. and that is fine, but you have no right to pretend to be victimized when they hate you back.

I don't direct that at the people who are geniunely fielding threats and harassment, but I've seen countless twitter conversations where a Journo or Dev says something unbelievably rude or vulgar, and people respond back saying it's rude or saying those people are hypocrites, and then you see them crying about how their @mentions are filled with harassment.

Everything that disagrees with you is not harassment, and that is how the overwhelming segment of these people have acted.

Ultimately though, your attitude is a major indicator of what a lot of the people who have no interest in the 'female' aspects of this debate are upset about.

You sling mud, you celebrate others slinging mud, unless they are Pro-GG, in which they should have their hands cut off for criticizing or being upset about anything.

"special little flower"

No, it's about the fact that they have used media connections to slander a large segment of people that do not, in any way, fit the bill of what they are saying.

The damage is done at this point however, because the "media" as you said yourself, is an absolute JOKE. They pretend to be journalists when its convenient or when it inflates their egos, but they are bloggers, and in a lot of cases, even blogger is giving them a lot of credit. A lot of them are basically rebloggers.

Journalism does not have to be marketing. It shouldn't be marketing, and the fact that you think it's perfectly acceptable that it is nothing more than marketing while babbling on about your demand for proof of ethics violations says a lot about the legitimacy of your stance on an issue of ethics in journalism.

The fact that people have rolled over and died on topics like this is why so many things are so hopelessly broken. Because lazy people rolled over and died on the issues.

You just bend over and take that capitalism right up the keister. Because you were taught to be a good consumer who only questions things when your marketer overlords tell you to with articles that are blatantly slanted and completely devoid of research.

The EmmaYoureNext scam was a huge indicator of how absolutely awful the media is, gaming and mainstream. All it took was a whois lookup to see that the website was registered by a known hoax marketing team, but gaming websites, culture websites and mainstream media websites simply reblogged the originally article that had been faked by that same hoax team without doing a lick of investigation because it fit the accepted narrative.

Now we just eat up whatever narrative is fed to us. "Gamers are all harassing misogynists who are scared that girls are breaking into their boys only club of video games!"

"Now retweet us, share our articles, and signal boost us as we participate in flagrant double standards while insulting and shit talking others while crying foul when anyone does it back!"

Yes, these are the heroes of our industry. A bunch of people who are just as petty as the trolls they condemn. Mature and inspiring at the same time.

Oh well, ultimately I can just get my gaming news from one of the most consistently high quality news sources for 15 years, Blues News. It just sucks to see a bunch of gamer nerds work so hard to make the words "gamer" and "nerd" insults again.

@Beamer: If Gamasutra is a niche website exclusively for industry professionals why are major brands like Intel running ad campaigns on them?

Regarding people denying issues with game journalism, you should check the Twitter accounts of the journalists and developer cliques that people are speaking out about in the first place.

They circled the wagons and immediately started openly and vulgarly mocking accusations of ethical issues or corruption. A number of them have made dozens, if not hundreds of volatile, insulting, condescending tweets for the sole purpose of goading people into reacting to them.

@Mashiki: Yeah, I know a number of women who are active in gaming communities that are accepted as just another member of the community.

I have never heard of gamer being used as a gender exclusive term until gaming journalists insisted it was.

This comment was edited on Oct 2, 2014, 15:15.