Community MetaSteam | April 2024 - Definitely there's no rest for the wicked.
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Hellblade's gameplay wasn't anything special so I guess people expect more because they feel that there's room for improvement in that department, plus the huge dev time.
Could've been one of those cases where a sequel elevates a decent first game to something special.
Could've been one of those cases where a sequel elevates a decent first game to something special.
After spending nearly 35 hours in Bannerlord, I've had my fill for now. Game was very fun and interesting in the first bunch of hours, but now it has become quite repetive and monotonous.
Now to playing more of Voidigo and Helldivers 2.
Now to playing more of Voidigo and Helldivers 2.
Sol Cresta is getting a permanent price reduction and also releasing complete edition which contains all dlcs
www.platinumgames.com
Free-Form Shooter SOL CRESTA Gets New “Complete Set” Prices Also Cut for Main Game and DLC | PlatinumGames Official Blog
PlatinumGames is pleased to announce the release of the SOL CRESTA Complete Set on Nintendo Switch, PlayStatio […]
www.platinumgames.com
New goddess reincarnation fifth revengeance trailer
Call of Duty: Vanguard Sold 30 Million Copies, It's Claimed
Despite a lower-than-expected reception from critics and fans, Call of Duty: Vanguard reportedly still sold 30 million copies worldwide.
insider-gaming.com
I agree with everything written here.
Sony lost me because they chase their big, cinematic experience in the expense of their smaller titles. I have mild interest in their current offerings, but they can't convince me to buy a PS5 because of lacking in variety. Hell, among their PC offerings, I have only gotten Days Gone so far and that game was not able to grab me as much as I expected. (Returnal is another one that I want to play, but the price is way too high for an rather dated game).
For all the shits that Nintendo and Microsoft get (rightfully so), their vision as a platform owner on videogames look much farther than Sony's. They actively release and develop smaller titles for their own platforms to fill in the release schedule as well as providing good variety to their customers. Look at Hi-Fi Rush, while being obviously a AA title and shadow-dropped in a January event, it manages to get in multiple GOTY lists in an extremely crowded year filled with great games. It is the victory of talent and creativity. I can imagine that it is a giant confidence boost to the developers at Tango because Tango was only known to be the "horror studio" among MS developers yet they proved otherwise.
I sincerely wish Sony will correct their course asap. They need games that are not AAA cinematic third-person shooty shooty bang bang. They need WRPG and JRPG. They need side-scrollers. They need everything else for the PS ecosystem to stay healthy.
I think it's a bit more complex than just "lower budgets and launch 5 games instead of 1"... and in your examples, most of the games very much were the AAA of their time, Uncharted and especially Mass Effect had colossal budgets for the time, CoD and Battlefield were also power showcases in their way ( including visuals, but mostly cinematography that was unheard of), GTA1 being the only real example.
And it wasn't until GTA3 years later (and the fourth game in the franchise) that the series blew up... by being the ultimate open world AAA experience that had never existed before.
There are multiple factors about the why it works or doesn't, but some companies do tons of AA or even lesser games like Square Enix. And they fail so hard they just canned all of it - but in this situation, it's not because it's AAA or not, just because the games are bad. Harvestella or Valkyrie Elysium just aren't good games.
Lowering budgets is nice and all, but you need to make actually good games in their respective genres, or invent something totally new and good luck with that one.
However I agree that the lack of risk taking is obviously sending publishers to their doom, with 8 years long cycles and hundreds of millions in every project, it only takes one failure for everything to come crashing down (like we're seeing with Warner Bros).
But I would say the two real killers to actually push all those games is not even related to budget, but to almost entirely two things: exclusivity and price.
Helldivers 2 (and that's already a game with one hand in the AAA pie) came out on PS and PC day one, at a respectable 40 buckaridoos price tag. Much, much easier to get into on impulse buy or to gift a friend than the 79.99+season pass+MTX that every AAA under the sun tries to do.
That's also the only thing that more or less works for Microsoft, Sea of Thieves or Grounded, etc. And where Ubisoft failed hard with their really good Prince of Persia game, yet again not on Steam, and a hefty 50€ price tag in a genre that never goes above 30.
The one thing I don't agree with is that publishers need games in varied genres, not that it is not true in absolute, but I don't believe that every one needs to do a bit of everything. Focusing on one aspect is not a bad choice, not every company can make Steamworld, and some genres will never be as popular as some others - even if it's particularly obvious that console execs don't even understand what people want (lol CRPGs being dead, lol sandboxes being a fad).
But that doesn't mean you can just keep repeating the same shit five times a year, just looks at Creative Assembly melting down.
Development costs need to go down, but to do that it's not just making the same games but not as good looking with worse gameplay.
I would honestly prefer if publishers got together and put their foot down when it comes to game budgets. Just make it mandatory across the industry that you get 50 million and 2 years to make a game. Not a penny more unless you are making dlc. And if you need more money than that you start working on a sequel. Force devs to plan around that cost and time.
Obviously you make some exceptions to devs who earned it like R* and CDPR. But the rest of the AAA industry needs to revert back to the PS360 era when we got entire trilogies in one generation.
No more of this 6 year 200 million bs with additional 100 million for marketing. Just fuck off with all that. I would take smaller open worlds and not some absurd level of graphics/animations. It would be worth it for the health of this industry. Maybe ride it out until AI can speed up dev process or wtvr. There needs to be a normalization or pullback of some kind.
Because its pretty clear at this point that all the major publishers (2k, Ubi, EA, WB, Xbox, Sony) have fallen into these stupid traps. And their best teams are suffering by putting out mediocrity. The pressure for games to sell 10+ million upon every release is also not fair or realistic.
You need to be able to abandon ship much earlier so these situations don't happen. Cancelling a game after 2 years and moving on to other work is still much more efficient. And with talented devs + project coordinators you get in the habit of creating quality games without a collapse.
Its a good thing Japan hasn't fallen down this hole yet. Although you are starting to see it with FromSoft and how long it took them to make Elden Ring. But they immediately bounced back fast with AC6. And for a dev like that you make exceptions regardless. But you look at Capcom, SEGA and even Square...They've all been great at releasing B-AA games this past decade. And even their A-tier stuff gets put out much faster than what Western devs are able to do.
Obviously you make some exceptions to devs who earned it like R* and CDPR. But the rest of the AAA industry needs to revert back to the PS360 era when we got entire trilogies in one generation.
No more of this 6 year 200 million bs with additional 100 million for marketing. Just fuck off with all that. I would take smaller open worlds and not some absurd level of graphics/animations. It would be worth it for the health of this industry. Maybe ride it out until AI can speed up dev process or wtvr. There needs to be a normalization or pullback of some kind.
Because its pretty clear at this point that all the major publishers (2k, Ubi, EA, WB, Xbox, Sony) have fallen into these stupid traps. And their best teams are suffering by putting out mediocrity. The pressure for games to sell 10+ million upon every release is also not fair or realistic.
You need to be able to abandon ship much earlier so these situations don't happen. Cancelling a game after 2 years and moving on to other work is still much more efficient. And with talented devs + project coordinators you get in the habit of creating quality games without a collapse.
Its a good thing Japan hasn't fallen down this hole yet. Although you are starting to see it with FromSoft and how long it took them to make Elden Ring. But they immediately bounced back fast with AC6. And for a dev like that you make exceptions regardless. But you look at Capcom, SEGA and even Square...They've all been great at releasing B-AA games this past decade. And even their A-tier stuff gets put out much faster than what Western devs are able to do.
I just noticed that Steam has started to limit the number of listed games in one of my favorite views. I commonly go into the metroidvania tag page, select "top sellers" and press "show more" a couple of times to go beyond the consistent top sellers like Hollow Knight and Ori Will of the Wisps. The "show more" button has previously been unlimited where you could press the button as many times as you liked, but the button now disappears after showing 43 titles. This limitation does not apply to other categories such as "top rated", where you can still press the button as many times as you like. I am not sure what the benefit is for Steam in limiting finding top sellers associated with specific tags.
Random thought is random. I still have to finish a Trails game. I really don’t know how to handle the constantly changing npc dialogs. Talking to the whole town every 10 minutes is not my idea of a good time, but then again I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t.
I fail to see the correlation here. If they were bad games with a smaller budget they'd be bad games with a bigger budget. Bad game design isn't solved by throwing money at it.
You have amazing games done by teams under 10 people, all that matters is that the design is solid and the vision is uncompromised. Money helps with the "superficial" stuff like pretty graphics, animations and voice acting. Maybe they are example of bad games because the money was funneled to the wrong places or the wrong things took priority over designing the game. Square is master of style over substance.
Having played and finished exactly one of those games I can safely say that you're not missing much. If you played any jrpg since 1990 you've played those games, they are aggressively derivative.
... that's my point, Suicide Squad with a tenth of the budget wouldn't solve its issues. The quest to AAAize everything means nothing when the base product isn't good, so "just make AA games" is not a solution.
In the case of SE, there's absolutely some wrong decisions, like the complete lack of marketing for 99% of their games, as well as zero support (Nier Automata anyone? But even the Final Fantasy series is still in various states of half fixed, with different issues lingering for years on some platforms!).
But putting the money into the visuals has been one of SE biggest problems, and not in the sense that they spend too much.
Harvestella, the various Dragon Quest spinoffs and so many others are cheap as fuck, and it's felt everywhere, from textures to collisions to music. Now that's one area where even the tiny projects, of say, Capcom remasters, are not failing at.
I love those games (the Sky and Crossbell arcs, not too fond of the rest) but I never bothered with that. If it's not fun for you just don't do it.
Not really.
They always have two teams working in parallel on different projects. Off the top of my head, AC6 was made by more or less the same team that made Sekiro, so that boils down to about 4 years of dev on AC6. ER was worked on in parallel by the other team.
TF2 Voice Actors still having a blast with those characters.
Considering how From doesn't hugely discount Souls games like they used to, what do people think about the Elden Ring DLC pricing? I'm trying to decide if I should pick it up now at a small discount from a site like GMG or wait, since I'm not sure if I'll play it right away.
Capcom is really as safe as most western companies when you look at what they release. The vast majority of their games are sequels of varying levels of safeness. DD2 is almost literally the same game again with many of the same issues it had. Monster hunter is still monster hunter (and at least to me completely baffling that people love it so much when it's just grinding over and over). The RE remakes are very similar to each other and village was VERY similar to 7, just tuned more to action over suspense. They even reuse aspects of those games like having the tall unkillable enemy stalking you through a part of each game.
The few chances they take they mitigate by selling the game to gamepass and then basically give up on selling the game (like exoprimal). The only small games they have are remasters/ports of old games like mega man, ace attorney and more recently ghost trick...I don't think they've made an actual new game on that level since mega man 11 which was 2018 (I gasped when I looked that up I thought it was only a few years ago). I think the key difference that makes people overlook all the issues Capcom has is the safe games they make are "gamer" games whereas the western studios mostly focus on yearly sports games, COD, assassin's creed etc so our communities tend to overlook it.
Under Defeat HD and Mamorukun Curse! coming to the PC and modern consoles. I loved Mamorukun Curse! on the PS3.
Pretty excited for this announcement.
Really glad about City Connection is putting in so much effort bringing these old and stuck games to PC. Though I wish the quality of their ports were better.
Edit: They are only publishing these, but the ports they do themselves I wish were better.
NeverAwake DLC announced
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I hate to go with the consumerist answer, but if you don't intend to use greyer sites, I think that yeah, in From's case, you might as well buy the DLC.
That is me operating on the assumption you want and will buy it soon after release anyway.
The grayer sites are actually more expensive! Yeah, it does seem kind of dumb to be hesitant about pre-ordering for the discount. Odds are it will be amazing. I'm just frugal.
I'm waiting until August to see if they finally port it to PC.
Maybe it was just a Switch thing for a year.
8BitDo has recently upgraded most of its gamepads with versions that have hall effect thumbsticks. I can recommend the Pro 2.
Its that or the 2.4 xbox one right? tempted to shy away from BT with my current experience from my old PC to my new one but you never know.
Thanks for this suggestion. Only shows 56 titles for me, logged into Steam on the web browser or not.What if you go like this?
Shows 171 games for me.
Steam Search
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Give it a few months, until August, we shall see
IT'S NOT A TEASE, AUGUST IS THE 1 YEAR MARK
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Hah, it’s something I hate on PC compared to consoles. The fucking controller.
On console there is a controller, and it works. Yeah, crazy.
On PC it will work. Probably. Or maybe the bluetooth won’t. Did you try another usb port, by the way ? Oh, check windows power management settings. No, really, it should work. Most of the time.
I have a problem with my xbox controller. It disconnects. 56 euros for a new one. Or maybe it’s just the cable. Wireless ? Jeez, it takes forever to recharge and to see the battery level you have to jump through hoops.
Trying another usb cable these days, a 3 meters one for TV gaming. Nice having 3 meters of shit in my legs.
On console there is a controller, and it works. Yeah, crazy.
On PC it will work. Probably. Or maybe the bluetooth won’t. Did you try another usb port, by the way ? Oh, check windows power management settings. No, really, it should work. Most of the time.
I have a problem with my xbox controller. It disconnects. 56 euros for a new one. Or maybe it’s just the cable. Wireless ? Jeez, it takes forever to recharge and to see the battery level you have to jump through hoops.
Trying another usb cable these days, a 3 meters one for TV gaming. Nice having 3 meters of shit in my legs.
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The one issue with Bluetooth I had when I started using Bluetooth controllers about a decade or more ago, was connection quality. You get these incredibly cheap adapters that are susceptible to interference, so you can't connect them directly to anything on the PC. Instead I would get an extension cable, and have the adapter about a meter away from the PC, ideally one something slightly elevated. That worked perfectly in my experience, and I very, very rarely run into issues. Sometimes the Windows driver gives out the ghost, but that happens maybe a couple times a year. Reconnecting the adapter fixes that, though.
Does that happen often? Because that sounds like my USB front panel failing, some issues that became much more common and were gone when I would use the mobo ones. Pretty easy to tell where the problem was then, and that wasn't Windows for once.
I bought 1 controller my entire life and all these years later it still works 
Either I'm extremely lucky with my hardware or you're beating yours with hammers if they need so much replacement and tinkering
Either I'm extremely lucky with my hardware or you're beating yours with hammers if they need so much replacement and tinkering
Yeah, no. This is the embodiment of ‘mine works, you must do something wrong’.I bought 1 controller my entire life and all these years later it still works
Either I'm extremely lucky with my hardware or you're beating yours with hammers if they need so much replacement and tinkering
I was rambling more generally but if we keep to my issue…
So : disconnexions. Unfun.
Happens in every game afaik.
Pretty sure it happens on left and right front usb. Who are still suspicious as one is recognized by the ipad and not the other, wtf.
The official xbox usb ’moves’ just enough when connected to the controller for me to be suspicious of it (and wary of buying another pad for nothing).
Trying a big ass chinese usb cable right now, it doesn’t move in the socket. Didn’t play enough to conclude anything.
You are right, front usb are infamous for being shit or badly cabled. I should try the mobo ones. But they are a fucking premium. I should buy a hub.
I bought 1 controller my entire life and all these years later it still works
Either I'm extremely lucky with my hardware or you're beating yours with hammers if they need so much replacement and tinkering
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