1badmf wrote on Oct 1, 2022, 17:15:
so why is fran stepping down instead of that cockbag kotick? apparently he criticized the email even though he wrote it himself. wtf?

He only criticized it because he thought it would make him look good in the public eye. Kotick will only ever step down if he's actually forced to do so by the board of directors, a new owner or a court order.

And if she actually got an adviser position, she's still getting paid. This is purely about damage control and trying to look like the C-suite and board is listening to feedback from the employees and public.

Prez wrote on Sep 27, 2022, 22:07:
Normally I would balk at the thought of a big corporation recording and storing what people say. But having heard and seen the horrendous things that people say to one another in chat in Overwatch there is no other way there would be any deterrent at all to someone being a complete shit bag. I despise the idea of giving out my phone number to any corporation, especially one as greedy and unsavory as Activision/Blizzard but given how despicable people were in the paid game I shudder to think how bad it could get in the free version if they didn't do something like this.

The real solution is pretending Overwatch 2 doesn't exist and play one of the millions of other games out there instead.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 25, 2022, 13:55:
But, alas, in the US middle management on up have this factory floor management style left over from 70 years ago where "X widgets per hour = productivity" in their intractable brains. Work-life balance to them means sacrificing your life for their work.

It's not just US middle management that does this stupidity. It's a mentality that seems to be born out of a need to measure how efficient everything is and you can find it everywhere in the world, even in places where a healthy work-life balance is actually valued by the leadership.

But it does usually happen when the workload starts generating task queues in organisations large enough to have middle management. At that point you'll get some "bright" manager chiming in with how they just need to set quotas and then monitor the workers. Even "brigther" ones will task the workers with making reports on their workload so they can get an even better picture of why things take so long.

VaranDragon wrote on Sep 26, 2022, 04:21:

heroin wrote on Sep 25, 2022, 22:51:
I think that is what made it great though, the freedom for ruthlessness, risk/reward. Some people hate that shit, but I'd sure love to see a developer with some talent take some of those qualities of UO and apply them to a next-gen game. We lost that with the whole themepark thing but I think there is more of an audience these days for a more "hardcore" multiplayer RPG.

I quite agree. All those carebear losers really ruined the genre for me. I would LOVE a really modern, high production value AAA MMO with a hardcore, soul crushing, PVP experience. Sadly no one will ever make one, because people get really upset when they lose their pixel shit. No idea why it's impossible to satisfy both camps though, just make a game and include the option to create characters on full PVP servers, or no PVP servers....

There are plenty full on PvP MMOs out there. Unless you think something like Mortal Online 2 is too carebear for you.

PropheT wrote on Sep 25, 2022, 22:21:
And I'd disagree with Raph that UO had that much influence on anything. It was a persistent online game, but it drew most of its ideas from past Ultima titles and wasn't even a good Ultima game. I guess it was more interesting as a social experiment than it ever was at being video game or fun to play, though, and that's generally all Raph has ever been interested in anyway.

UO had a major cultural impact which helped lay the groundwork for Everquest and the MMO genre in general. Yes, there were earlier titles, but none of them had as big a reach as UO did, in part due to the internet being much more accessible at the time of UO's release than previous attempts. But also because it was a new release in a highly respected franchise that let you play with other players without having to know specific IPs or BBS numbers.

And yes, a lot of people did skip it due to not only having to pay for the game but also having a monthly fee on top of that.

RogueSix wrote on Sep 14, 2022, 11:50:
I thought no one plays crappy EA games anyway so why is there such a big fuss about their anti-cheat?

Despite what Real Gamers™ say about EA, Ubisoft, ActiBlizz etc. as well as their games, those companies still sell a boatload of their flagship titles to those who aren't as invested in gaming.

Advertising works.

I'm just happy I've not really been interested in EA titles for over a decade.

I'm sure I've missed out on some super-amazing-can't-ever-live-without-it game, but they just haven't been able to make something I wanted. And this move just makes me even less likely to install Origin on any system I own.

PHJF wrote on Sep 12, 2022, 11:48:
It’s an extremely easy fix by way of a simple mod. Don’t make it out to be some herculean task.

I never said it was a herculean task, I said that managers will almost always decide it's way too little gain for the amount of work put in. Even if that work seems nearly non-existant to the end user.

phinn wrote on Sep 11, 2022, 14:06:
Now if only game devs would put an option to switch to the PS button icons in their games on PC.

The controllers icons are actually a bit more work than it may seem on the surface. The Xbox icons are (more or less) freely available on Windows as provided by Microsoft, and the various Xbox controllers each have a special device id so Windows knows what it's handling. So the developer just tells the game to display the images the OS (or rather DirectX) already knows and has handles for.

But when it comes to PS controllers, Windows just sees them as just another DirectInput HID device and there's no built in library of icons. So a developer has to manually detect that it's actually a PS controller (instead of some other brand) and then switch the displayed image package to a non-standard one provided by one of the artists (or purchased), and they also have to be sure the images map to the correct buttons. And before you go "Can't they just provide a menu option to switch instead of detection?" and that's also a possibility, but it still takes some coding and testing. There's also the possibility of just licensing a library which does it, but that (almost certainly) costs money and will not be cheap for large projects.

And the cost of the coders (and possibly artists) spending time on implementing something like this is a big part of why it doesn't happen more often, especially in larger projects with managers trying to squeeze the best selling game out of what resources they have availble. A coder spending time on a "nice to have"-feature that impacts less than a third of the expected consumers (I'm going to have to call you silly if you think PS-controllers on Windows is a larger portion) and potentially introduces new bugs vs the coder spending time on fixing bugs tends to be a very easy decision for a manager.

Looks like a standard F2P mobile game that was purely released on Steam because they're hoping to rope in some additional whales.

Kxmode wrote on Sep 2, 2022, 20:08:

Pr()ZaC wrote on Sep 2, 2022, 18:55:
Morder?

Spanish for "to bite."

And Danish for "murderer"

RogueSix wrote on Sep 2, 2022, 12:31:
Writing ("best" to worst): Shadow, Original, Rise

Overall (best to worst): Shadow, Rise, Original

I agree that the gameplay got better with each game, but I can barely remember which parts of the story goes to which of the first two games. The only reason I can recall what happened in Shadow is that I played it a couple of months ago as opposed to the first two which were several years ago.

Xero wrote on Sep 1, 2022, 21:27:

Bodolza wrote on Sep 1, 2022, 17:10:
SotTR in RTX is one of the best looking, worst written games I've ever played. It felt like they must have fired the writers about about half way through production. At least the actual gameplay was decent.

Quite true that the writing sucked but it sufficed for what it was. I didn't expect much more. I caught the latest movie on a plane ride and couldn't figure out which one had worse writing... Either way, Shadow more than makes up for it with it's locations and graphics. You can feel for Lara in some of those places. I played it w/o RTX so I can only imagine with it maxed out. I'd love to give it another go.

It doesn't need RTX to look good, still it looks a lot better with maxed setting. I only ran it at 1080p60 due to my monitor being limited to that, but my 3060 didn't feel like it was straining at all.

First one was decent, even if it didn't quite manage to scratch the Outrun itch (mostly because it uses closed tracks) but not too far off in the driving feel.

I'd say that any "security leader" who doesn't think the internet in a perpetual state of cyberwar is not worth their wage.

There's been a cyberwar going on for decades now, it just rarely causes enough damage to be considered worthwhile material for media outlets. It doesn't matter if things are done by or against "private" groups, partisans, corporations, state sponsored "private" groups or actual state departments. If you care about digital security there is no reason not to treat the past and current state as a single continuous war against multiple opposing forces.

eRe4s3r wrote on Aug 24, 2022, 03:54:
Well I looked a lengthy lets' play of this, and I am baffled, the city is nearly completely empty, devoid of action, ENTIRELY devoid of emergent behavior previous game had (gang war, roaming vehicles of other gangs etc.) it's like they only made half a game to be honest. If someone finds this enjoyable more power to them. But previously Saints Row games were VASTLY better.

There were times in the game where player I watched stopped and looked around in the city and there was no car nor people anywhere. It was like playing in the post apocalypse.

Now that sounds like a real and valid piece of criticism. The SR cities have always felt "alive" with the opposing gangs (even if they kept to their specific territories outside scripted events).

Verno wrote on Aug 23, 2022, 13:48:
There has never really been a Saints Row identity or vision, it was always a budget GTA clone. SR2 leaned into that and it worked due to the story structure and various ways you could break the game. SR3 was an over the top mess that tries to make people channel their inner teen again, for some people this works but for me it did not. Shame that they didn't seem to have any real artistic goal or vision here, outside of rebooting the franchise. Instead this will likely be the last game for a long time.

SR2 was ok but still basically just a GTA3 clone with a bit of added humour. SR3 had an actual vision for something that wasn't just a clone.

The core identity of SR3, 4 & Gat out of Hell was "Do silly stuff in an open world city." Which is why I rate all 3 of those way higher than any of the GTA titles.

Verno wrote on Aug 1, 2022, 14:10:
Also Microsoft doesn’t really make any must have games either

It's not like there are any "must have games".

There are a lot of games that are great if you enjoy the genre(s) and/or theme(s), as well as several titles that repeatedly show up on various "Top x games of all time" lists. But none of them are "must have games".

There are also a lot of impactful historical milestones in gaming and ActiBlizz certainly has quite a bunch under their belt. Same with Microsoft. But none of those are "must have games" either, regardless of who made/published them.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jul 31, 2022, 10:16:

roguebanshee wrote on Jul 31, 2022, 03:25:

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jul 30, 2022, 15:52:
Obligatory "I am not an IP lawyer" but that looks pretty damning. Hopefully the original artist makes bank off of this theft.

The chance of the artist making a lot of money off of this is low. It basically has to be a 1:1 copy and not just "heavily inspired by" the original for copyright law to be on his/her side. It's very likely that the Activision lawyers went over it before the trailer was released.

You can not copyright a concept, only the realisation of that concept into a tanglible medium.

You think their lawyers went over this that much that they scanned every ArtStation or Deviant Art post? Be realistic. Also the music industry has shown time and time again that it doesn't need to be a 1:1 copy, and Activision already removed the image, so they know they fucked up royally. But yes, they will have way more money and attorneys on their side than this artist, saillin, so maybe he won't get any compensation at all, as you say.

Activision removing the image likely has way more to do with them trying to do a PR salvage operation than them not thinking they would have a winnable case. You can get extremely close and still be on the legal side of plagiarism. Disney has won a couple of court cases where their copies were about as close as in this case, including at least one where they had court proven access to the original work (which is one of the biggest things that can work against the plagiarism being legal).

Of course, Activision can not really afford any negative press in the current gaming environment.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jul 30, 2022, 15:52:
Obligatory "I am not an IP lawyer" but that looks pretty damning. Hopefully the original artist makes bank off of this theft.

The chance of the artist making a lot of money off of this is low. It basically has to be a 1:1 copy and not just "heavily inspired by" the original for copyright law to be on his/her side. It's very likely that the Activision lawyers went over it before the trailer was released.

You can not copyright a concept, only the realisation of that concept into a tanglible medium.