581–590 of 798 posts
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Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.
Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time - Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center - it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.
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Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…
There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot of them DRM free on Humble or Gog. I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club, Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the big AAA shops.
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I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable. I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well.…
If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine. When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.
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For me, The Outer Worlds was right there with Witcher 3 as one of the best games this generation. It really does feel like Fallout, but perhaps somewhat less open world when you're actually on a planet b/c of map boundaries and enemies too dangerous for your level to keep you on track. The diverging story lines and open space travel (once you get the requisite navkey to be able to land) compensate for that somewhat.
While it IS a great game, it's REALLY short. I've been hoping for a surprise DLC to expand the content. (There are several other planets in the galaxy map you can't travel to. Hint, hint.) I hope the game did well enough to get a larger treatment in Outer Worlds 2.
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Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical integration. When publishers were publishers and developers were developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was healthier competition. Even if there were a lot of abusive deals struck. Now that we have giant, integrated publisher + development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step out of that structure to publish a popular indie game. It feels like news s…
It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood. Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities. It feels like game development went the reverse way.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
[2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-of-hollywo...
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I feel the same about the movie business. Indie films can be awesome, but some kinds of movies are hard to do without a large budget.
Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value other things like democracy higher.
[citation needed]
The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30 years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say what you will about working conditions in the US in the 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-feudal economy and society".
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When you hear stuff like this, the acquisition binge that so many companies go on starts to make sense.
When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd be broke several times over with that sort of lack of focus and inability to release games outside of what seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)
Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games.
Valves strength is that they a have a structure that allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks. This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ growth.
They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you consider the rest of their output are beloved classics.
Granted they have a good few money printing machines to help them work like this but I would argue that they have these money printing machines because they have the ability to experiment, because of their structure.
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Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical integration. When publishers were publishers and developers were developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was healthier competition. Even if there were a lot of abusive deals struck. Now that we have giant, integrated publisher + development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step out of that structure to publish a popular indie game. It feels like news s…
It feels like the video games industry has done the reverse of Hollywood. Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a single entity to a system where production, distribution, and exhibition were done by separate entities. It feels like game development went the reverse way.
It showed what kind of profits you could make off yearly refreshes of software, while minimizing development costs.
Why would an MBA take a chance on new IP when they have the above as an option?
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>had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. No kidding. You want to keep a guy like Carmack in the family in whatever capacity you can, because he carries such deep respect in the industry. It was a stupid thing for ZeniMax to burn that bridge.
Carmack's pull as an individual among tech folks, is unrivaled in gaming. I can bet that many people would willingly taken pay cuts (or more-likely skipped on pay bumps) to work for a team led by Carmack. Almost all of the other pop-culture figures in game development such as Todd Howard, Kojima and the like are designers, producers or story writers. Carmack is the only one that is a proper coding guy. ______ Maybe C…
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Every game has somebody who loves it. Even that terrible Superman game. Fallout 4 wasn't total garbage, but it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim.
> it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim In what way? And how is your opinion better metric than my opinion? You have data to back it up?
Fallout 4 suffered from quest repetition/duplication, an emphasis on combat over other rpg driven approaches to play and a relatively low ability to effect the world as the player.
It's not a bad game per say but it's a mediocre rpg. It was arguably more disappointing given how incredible an rpg New Vegas was despite not having been finished properly.