Ashtear

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Games in What is the point of Xbox?

Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.

Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.

There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.

Ashtear , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to Games in Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio

There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.

Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It's far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.

Edit to add:

I don't know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don't take my word for it. Here's a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush's director:

It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.

And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:

For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.

Hi-Fi Rush: From a Little Idea to a Very Big Surprise – The Exclusive Oral History

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Patient Gamers in What's your favourite era for video games?

Local multiplayer--especially couch co-op--is a lost art. I definitely miss it.

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Patient Gamers in What's your favourite era for video games?

It's not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.

Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA development itself all trace back to innovations from that time. Historically, it's a massively important time period for video games.

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Patient Gamers in What's your favourite era for video games?

It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.

Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.

I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.

The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Games in Controversy and Censorship

The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt's (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.

Much of what's going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.

Ashtear , 1 month ago to Reddit in When did reddit turn Facist?

Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.

Ashtear , 1 month ago to World of JRPG's in What JRPG’s will you play on May. What games did you finish last month?

No JRPGs finished last month, I was super duper busy. Didn't even finish Yakuza 0! I dabbled a little bit in Unicorn Overlord but it hasn't grabbed me. Might be one of those games I just keep nibbling at for a while.

However, I jumped right into Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and am having a good time after a pretty slow start. I'm about 30 hours in (maybe less than halfway through the story?) and so far I'm putting it around the quality of the first Suikoden. It's similarly unpolished, but the good stuff's still there.

Intending to finish that one and maybe jump back into Atelier Ayesha this month.

Ashtear , 2 months ago to Games in Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking

I didn't see that coming, and it's a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it'll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

Ashtear , 2 months ago to Games in The wild successes of Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 send a clear message: Let devs cook

I can't speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur's Gate 3's success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There's no huge publisher for Baldur's Gate 3; Larian's a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro's not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There's also the game's pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you're not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.

BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio's first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur's Gate 2, as the Baldur's Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.

Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it's possible no one's going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.

Ashtear , 2 months ago to World of JRPG's in Is there a Jrpg you could always play?

Rude sisters!

My most replayed one is probably Final Fantasy VI, although I think as I've gotten older I've come to love FFX just as much. Four replays later, the game still makes me super emotional.

If I could put Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure into one mega-game, that would definitely be a candidate, too.

Ashtear , 2 months ago to Patient Gamers in How to revitalize this sub?

In my experience, having a weekly sticky like that is essential for engagement. There are plenty of people here, they just aren't making threads. If you get people in the habit of dropping by once a week, they are more likely to post.

I'd also make the suggestion to scale the rule back to 6 months from 12. It's a good idea in general for a slow community and there were multiple big games that came out in that month 7 through 12 time period. Can always change it back when the community is active. /r/patientgamers was 6 months until semi-recently.

That said, this doesn't have to be a carbon copy of the subreddit. I liked the Meme Monday suggestion that was posed. Anything to drive engagement.