MudMan

Probably not, but you’re underestimating the value of presets and standards, I think. It’s less about shipping Unreal defaults and probably more about working with a bunch of outsourcing studios or even buying assets from a storefront with some confidence that everything is going to work.

I don’t think it’s as much a AAA problem, where people will have dedicated engine teams, systems engineers and a whole team managing outsourcing and more about smaller AA and indies where people are wearing multiple hats and less willing to deal with anything they don’t have to. AAA will use Unreal for other reasons.

Ultimately it’s the old open source chestnut of someone going “who cares if the UX isn’t as good, it does everything you need it to do with a bit of effort” and proceeding to win that argument into everybody still using the proprietary alternative.

FWIW, Unity struggled a lot to shed the “multiplatform indie engine for phones” stuff and it took a hell of a bunch of active proselytism to start presenting themselves as competitive for other types of things before they decided to poop all over that effort. There’s no reason it’d be any easier for Godot.

Was it missing? I don’t remember that. Did all the DLC make it to the remaster? I kinda remember it did.

EDIT: Checked. The Steam page says it did.

Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.

Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but… yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also… it’s really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.

Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.

Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.

Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn’t see what the fuss is about.

My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.

I couldn’t tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.

I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they’re very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don’t play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.

And they still look great today, too.

It’s telling the guy went “what did Brave do now?”, though.

Maybe telling that we have a couple meme opinions in our head for these recurring arguments and we don’t particularly consider anything else, but telling nonetheless.

Maaan.

I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it’d make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.

No, it cannot.

They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.

Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.

You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.

Sure, and with the GPU sucking up a bunch of juice that’s plenty to get toasty.

It’s just I haven’t been using laptops that do that in the past few years and coming from desktop world it feels so wrong now.

On a 1660 Ti (MaxQ, I presume)? I can believe it. It’s the exact range of game that card is made for. At a glance I don’t see Skyrim AE benchmarks, but notebookcheck has it running Monster Hunter World, MGS V and Rise of the Tomb Raider maxed out at 1080p60ish.

Maybe I’m spoiled by just assuming Windows and Linux benchmarks are comparable by default? I guess it’s no longer a surprise now, so… congrats, everybody?

Also, man, is there something you can do about those CPU temps? It makes me nervous just to look at that 28% utilization at 90C. I’ve been away from gaming laptops since handhelds are a thing and I’m not used to that anymore.

You know the real problem with this conversation?

It is not, and everything I said is sincere and honest.

I mean, unless it’s a confession, which I guess I could believe.

What, you think any of the stuff he said is expected by his base?

It was never about the stuff he said, it was about how you didn’t have an answer to it he couldn’t counter, so you lose and they win.

What you lose and they win about was never the issue, and there is no consequence to it beyond perhaps the opportunity of another argument they may have a harder time winning, but they know how to win arguments against you, so they’re not particularly worried.

Who said “why aren’t you playing it”? I said you should play it. Very different things.

I know why you’re not playing it. It’s because you’re a sourpuss that doesn’t like good games and does like being angry on the Internet.

I’m saying you should change that and play good games. Don’t even need to spend hundreds on them. Just throw a tenner at them on sale, give them a look, maybe.

Also, and I say this with utmost sincerity, I am not a serious person. Wish I was even less serious. I’m a bit too stiff for comfort, really.

Man, you really should play the game if you’re trying to be mad about the additional content. It’s really good and it’s ten bucks on sale right now. Forty to get all the extra content. Well worth it.

The stamps are mostly premium edition filler. There are hundreds in the base game and nobody is particularly mad at the three jpegs they try to sell for two bucks as a way to pretend they added two bucks of value to your premium bundle.

The music pack is pretty solid, though. Lots of licensed anime music. Can’t argue with blasting out Solid State Scouter when playing with Bardock. Just… remember to disable it if you’re going to stream the game, you will get dinged for copyright infringement on Youtube. You want to get mad about something? How about selling people music as part of a game and then accusing them of infringement for streaming the game they paid for? How silly is that?

There is no exploitation in charging different prices for different things. Prices aren’t based on how much a thing costs to make, they’re based on how much people are willing to pay for it. Welcome to supply and demand.

Cosmetics are (relatively) cheap to make and sold at a high margin because they are subsidizing a game that is sold at very low price. Turns out the sticker price in DBFZ with its what, 24 characters at launch is twenty bucks or so cheaper than good old Street Fighter 2 with its eight characters.

There are a bunch of ways we’ve been shaving cost from games to keep that somewhat artificial price point. Selling people who are willing to spend more a bunch of non-game-relevant stuff at a higher margin is just one of them. You are extremely outraged by this for some reason, I am very glad.

Because yeah, sure, I spent like 200 bucks in my copy of the game (probably a bit more, I got the Switch version, too) and I subsidized a number of more casual players that only bought the base game.

That’s cool. I get more people to play against and they get a cheaper game up front. I played that game for 500 to 1000 hours, I spent 3-5 cents per hour. I have no regrets. Didn’t even have to pay a subscription for it, my physical version will live forever and I can still play my Steam copy with forty-plus characters.

You are commited to being mad about this on our behalf, turns out us spenders don’t need your protection. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You don’t have to get it. We’ll pick up your slack.

Which is not to say everything is fair game or that there aren’t predatory practices at play in gaming. It’s to say you’re obscuring those by crying wolf because you like being mad about things and have fixated on this in particular to an unreasonable degree.

I guess it depends on where your line for “gross” happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.

I’m also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?

So I’m not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won’t stop playing, and that’s a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I’m not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don’t make the experience worse. They do, in my book.

But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.

I’m more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.

That being said… man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It’s all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren’t currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one’s wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It’d be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.

Skins are fine. They are entirely optional. Something existing doesn’t mean you must own it.

That’s the part where we’re not going to agree. Well, the maximalist holier-than-thou stance in general. But otherwise, you see things existing as an affront to you personally. This skin was made by someone and put in the game, and so I’m entitled to it, so it either shouldn’t exist or it should be mine.

That just doesn’t track. I don’t feel any more entitled to some random bikini costume than I do to some random statue bundled with a collector’s edition. It’s faff some people may want, but I’m not being attacked because somebody is buying and selling collector’s edition of Cyberpunk for 200 bucks, just like way I’m not attacked by someone buying some in-game costume.

Also, you do know pro football players get bonuses per goal, right? That comparison means different things depending on whether you know that and both are confusing.

Nah, they did it with Youtube videos.

But on the underlying point of “everybody is freaking out about AI things that good old big data had been doing for years with zero pushback” I very strongly agree.

Nah, some thoughts.

But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.

Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.

I am genuinely baffled about why you think that’s worse than “pay me for the game every month or I take it away”. I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn’t make it make sense.