CIWS-30

It’ll prevent indie artists from having their work plagiarized over and over without payment from indie “devs” who honestly shouldn’t have the right to exist as “developers” if they can’t afford to actually hire artists and such.

It’d be one thing if they made an agreement to get assets from artists for cheap or for free as a favor, but just plain putting them all out of business permanently by letting a machine steal their work forever is another thing entirely.

Not shocking. I just hope people learn from this and react by not getting into the gaming industry until the shortage of workers forces it to change. Same thing with the entertainment industry outside of gaming at large.

The way the movie / tv industry treats most of its employees who aren’t at the very top is just horrible, and if people didn’t have such stars in their eyes for Hollywood and such, working conditions would be so much better all around, along with pay and mandatory breaks.

I’ve been in the entertainment industry, and so has my sister. It’s amazingly how terrible people are treated, including crew and lower end actors, and all for a product that’s not really necessary or all that important for the survival of the world. People don’t think about it, but we’ve been around for MILLIONS of years without TV and Movies. Sure there were plays and such, but it doesn’t take much for humanity to amuse itself. Simple conversations, board games, some sticks and balls… if the writer / actor strikes kept going on, and new content stopped coming out, it’d suck at first, but we’d get used to it.

From the grapevine, it’s less that it sucks, more like it’s meh. 7/10 and all that. Exactly what you’d expect from Skyrim / Fallout 4 in space, but somehow more bland in terms of characterization and storyline.

Same Bethesda shallowness and jank. People who just like exploring a big universe and doing repetitive stuff mindlessly will enjoy it, people who want more choice and character interaction with a compelling story probably will not.

It’s kind of like the old Bethesda / Bioware split, except that Bioware’s basically dead now, and Larian’s doing what they used to do, but possibly better in some ways. Then there’s Obsidian who used to be like Bioware / Bethesda but better in the past, but nowadays they seem content to just try to copy Bethesda while adding some “quirkiness” and hoping it’ll work.

You’re right, and I upvoted you, but one issue is that unless people buy AMD cards anyway, they’ll never have the research funds to ever match, much less beat Nvidia in the future. All things being equal (and they usually are for my needs) I tend to buy AMD over Nvidia to keep them in the race, so that GPU’s don’t turn into a monopoly. As it is, the duopoly we have now (excluding Intel, which I’m not sure will continue making consumer GPU’s in the long run) isn’t great for consumers right now.

The only reason AMD GPU’s are even as good as they are now is due to the research money they got from Ryzen taking the fight to Intel.

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other’s supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia’s turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

Sad, because I was a fan of them and bought all their games from Saint’s Row 1 all the way to Gat out of Hell (although not in chronological order) and got Agents of Mayhem for free somewhere, but think they’ve made some bad moves lately.

I think it all started going downhill from Agents of Mayhem, and them screwing up with the reboot of Saint’s Row was probably the nail in the coffin. I wish they’d just made Saint’s Row 5 instead, with wacky time travel shenanigans and a more polished set of superpowers.

At the point where they decided to “reboot” to something old school and grittier (TOO old school, imo) they really didn’t get what their fanbase wanted, and what new players who’d only heard of and experienced Saint’s Row 4 would get excited about.

They could’ve probably taken Saint’s Row up to 6 entries if they’d just iterated on the formula from 4 and possibly Gat out of Hell (I wouldn’t know, I got distracted and didn’t play it after I bought it, ironically). Similar to how United Front Games (the developer of Sleeping Dogs) could’ve probably stayed in business if they’d just made Sleeping Dogs 2 instead of that horrible “free to play” multiplayer asset flip of some of the least interesting elements of Sleeping Dogs 1.

Glad they’re taking a break, and hope things work out for them. Making games is tough, and making games like this which are more on the niche side can’t have been easy, especially since the profits probably weren’t stellar either.

Honestly, I mostly don’t agree with the term “Early Access”, if you’re charging money for it, it’s released. If people are paying to play it and it’s in an incomplete, buggy state, then they’re not only beta testing and co-developing a title, they’re PAYING to do so. They’re paying to work, which is even worse than working for free.

I don’t know many, if any games that are really worth doing this for (with exceptions like Larian Studios and Baldur’s Gate 3 and the Divinity Original Sin series) because most games honestly shouldn’t exist. There are way too many games and way too few people to play them. It’s similar to Movies, TV, and Music. Most of the creative media out there should not exist and have no customer base or interest.

They’re not made so people can enjoy them, they’re made because of the creators’ desire to make them. It leads to the atrocious workplace conditions and exploitative labor the entertainment industry at large has, and why it’s so difficult to unionize or get fair wages, hours, or treatment. Even with the actually good games, there’s way too many for people to actually finish in their lifetime. Now add the mediocre and bad games, and it’s exponentially more impossible.

Honestly, given how toxic Destiny 2’s monetization can be, along with its FOMO, I’m not surprised. That + the grind was why I quit. It got tiring and repetitive, especially the buy to play seasons.

Not surprising, but disappointing. The premise was interesting (first person magic shooter) but the execution was tepid. The presentation / atmosphere, the generic graphics, the dopey dialogue, the lack of an interesting story. A lot of the success of games like Halo is how the world sucks you in with its atmosphere and storyline, I think developers really underestimate how much that matters in a single player game. Cinematogrophy is important, the feel of an experience is more than the simple gameplay of moving a character around and pushing buttons.

To be honest, hating the sequels makes it less likely that you’re a prick. They weren’t that good at launch, and now that the “new movie smell” has worn off, now people have the time and perspective to see that they aren’t actually that good.

If they were any other sci-fi movies that didn’t have the “Star Wars” name in front of them, they probably would’ve bombed.

This trailer… was okay? I don’t know why, but it kind of felt like a more modern version of Communist space propaganda. Very by the numbers, predictable, and a little corny. The game’ll probably be alright (most likely just Fallout 4 with more sci fi + vehicles in Space with less trashy looking environments) but this trailer’s not getting me very excited.

I’ll probably wait a few months for the bugs and issues to get ironed out and give it a shot on Xbox Game Pass. Plus, the longer I wait, the more mods get made, and the mods are what really make Bethesda games good.

Geforce Now has been good the few times I’ve tried it (note that I have Cable internet with a direct ethernet connection to my computer and I don’t use wi-fi) but there’s just barely enough latency that those who are latency sensitive can notice it.

Fine for slower paced games, but potentially an issue for faster paced ones depending on how hard they are.

Don’t they have a legal obligation to release this game due to financing they took which would force them to pay a huge penalty if they didn’t release it?

Don’t get me wrong, I think they could still salvage this into an okay game, I just don’t have my hopes up that it’ll be a good one.

Last Ubisoft game I bought was Far Cry 6, which was better than I thought it’d be, but it was still not great, and I dropped it after I finished the campaign. I feel like Ubisoft doesn’t know how to make original feeling games anymore. They stopped experimenting, and it shows.

Kind of, but more “slightly amusing” than funny.

I skimmed that article, but from what I remember, in 5th Edition you’re only limited to only one bonus action per turn. Meaning that stacking that many bonus actions is probably a bug rather than a feature.

Me too. If the sales aren’t high enough, Microsoft may reconsider and decide to sell it on the PS5 (probably with some DLC included) a year later or so. It cost them a whole lot of money to buy all those companies, including Bethesda, and they’re going to eventually have to recoup a profit from those purchases.

If that means releasing on Playstation again, I think they’ll do it rather than risk losing money. Even Disney has learned with Disney+ that having your own exclusive platform and not sharing isn’t great business sense. It costs them a lot of money every month to host everything and produce content, and if they don’t license out that content to competitors, they can’t make their money back.

I can see Microsoft learning the same lesson. Especially given that Disney+ hasn’t been profitable ever, and now the red ink is starting to catch up with Disney. If keeping big games from big studios starts losing Microsoft a lot of money, I think they’ll fold, at least partially.

This crap has sent me back to physical stores. If they have it in stock, I don’t have to wait for it to ship, I just drive there and pick it up. Same with returns too, and exchanges. Same day.

Plus, I can trust that the company itself has probably looked at and tested the products, and has a real product and not a fake. I doubt I’m the only one going back to brick and mortar as well.

Too true. What’s bonkers is that rules on this vary state by state. You move across state lines, and sometimes it feels like you’re in an entirely different country. I used to favor “States’ Rights” and flexible, empowered local governments who could respond to nearby challenges more surgically than a larger, more lumbering government bureaucracy further away.

Looking back, I see that now that I was naive, and that what I had was an ideal, and wasn’t the reality. Republicans always seem to turn “States’ Rights” and “Local Authority” into a way to flout sensible Federal laws and do horrible shit like this instead of what they claim to be doing.

Makes me think of the Privateer / Elite style X spaceship games, but that’s probably because of my personal bias towards games like that.

Everyone else would probably think Porn or the X-games first.