Community MetaSteam | June 2024 - Let's conquer this kingdom with some pure hearts

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MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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After BG3....Dragon Age has such a high mountain to climb. I feel kind of bad for them. Everyone is gonna judge and compare this game like crazy. Inquisition was shat on hard when Witcher 3 came out shortly after. Now there is other games like Elden Ring and even FFRebirth.

Anthem and Andromeda pissed off a lot of people too so BioWare doesn't have a lot of room for error. Hopefully The Veilguard is good. Inquistion had a lot of fun things in it but a good chunk of that game was very forgettable.
All their good fantasy writers left after DA2, newer devs have only worked on Inquisition (I doubt most of those devs would be remaining at this point).
I have no faith in them.

I have never felt this way about a (mainly) single=player studio ever. That's how badly Bioware messed up for over a decade.
 

STHX

MetaMember
Sep 20, 2021
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Is Summer Game Fest the Best Thing to Happen to Gaming—or the Worst?
“These shows are really ****ing expensive,” one insider says, referring to both Summer Game Fest and the Game Awards. According to pricing details shared with me by multiple marketing professionals who requested anonymity, running a trailer during Summer Game Fest’s main show this year cost $250,000 for one minute, $350,000 for one and a half minutes, $450,000 for two minutes, and $550,000 for two and a half minutes. They also say that last year’s edition of the Game Awards featured the same pricing tiers.
 
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Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
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I for one hope that every single announcement leaks and that these glorified 2 hours commercials crush beneath their own weight (and I'm not even talking about the advertisements within the advertisements).
I don't even understand why the gaming industry has this kind of secrecy and unhealthy hype around working projects. Directors and producers on the film industry will say "we're making the next Tranformers, we'll start filming in june", fucking Marvel has their theatrical release dates up to year 2077. Same goes for music and literature; I repeat I don't understand why knowing Capcom is making a DLC for their multi-million dollar broken fantasy-action-rpg and their commercial is gonna air friday or whatever is considered "spoiler".
Yeah, it's quite silly. Also because almost every single "unexpected" success story in gaming these days shows that this kind of secrecy is in no way necessary to succeed.
I really wonder if anyone has done any sort of actual research or study on this (which, to me, would be a large part of the job of marketing departments at publishers) or if everyone is just going with it because that's the way it has always been done.
 

Nabs

Hyper˗Toxic Pro˗Consumer
Oct 23, 2018
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Looks sick:



lmfao is Echo Generation finally coming to Steam? It's been 84 years.
 
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manchego obfuscator

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Steam page hasn't been fully updated yet, but this is finally coming to Steam on July 10, approaching three years after its Windows Store/PC Game Pass release. Also getting some QOL changes like combat rebalancing, fast travel, and a quest tracker, all of which it very badly needed, lemme tell ya

 
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yuraya

MetaMember
May 4, 2019
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The pope getting the bag. Honestly I can't even be mad. He put together several good shows after the death of E3 and these shows have millions of eyeballs on them every year. Everything was working against him and he still pulled it off.

Make the pubs pay and its likely very worth it. 250k for a minute seems like a decent deal and 10x more effective than the stupid TV commercials you see for games. I remember Suicide Squad was running PS5 commercials earlier in the year and yea can't think of bigger waste of money than those useless 30 second spots.
 

Stevey

Gromlintroid
Dec 8, 2018
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The new Dragon Age will most likely suck, like everything since Origins has.

Shame really because Origins is so good and the series deserves decent games.
 

dex3108

MetaMember
Dec 20, 2018
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The pope getting the bag. Honestly I can't even be mad. He put together several good shows after the death of E3 and these shows have millions of eyeballs on them every year. Everything was working against him and he still pulled it off.

Make the pubs pay and its likely very worth it. 250k for a minute seems like a decent deal and 10x more effective than the stupid TV commercials you see for games. I remember Suicide Squad was running PS5 commercials earlier in the year and yea can't think of bigger waste of money than those useless 30 second spots.
My big issue is that compared to E3 Summer Games fest has much lower production. I mean look How E3 looked like back in a day.

 
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xinek

日本語が苦手
Apr 17, 2019
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Not to defend the Dorito Pope but the guy got so much unwarranted criticism for the show last year. It was, again, from people who either do not understand reality or just refuse to accept it.
God, thank you. It's just depressing watching this stuff and then going online to find some discussion about it, and absolutely everyone is shitting on it. If you're not interested, don't fucking watch it, and move on with your life. It's just not necessary to go online and complain and criticize from your keyboard. Especially, like you said, without considering reality at all. It's just exhausting, and it's no wonder when people say they're just getting tired of gaming, the industry, and the "community." The negativity is oppressive. I think I may be the only person in existence who actually enjoys watching these shows.

Also, I actually do think about my hypocrisy when I criticize anime.
 
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rickyson33

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Apr 26, 2019
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God, thank you. It's just depressing watching this stuff and then going online to find some discussion about it, and absolutely everyone is shitting on it. If you're not interested, don't fucking watch it, and move on with your life. It's just not necessary to go online and complain and criticize from your keyboard. Especially, like you said, without considering reality at all. It's just exhausting, and it's no wonder when people say they're just getting tired of gaming, the industry, and the "community." The negativity is oppressive. I think I may be the only person in existence who actually enjoys watching these shows.

Also, I actually do think about my hypocrisy when I criticize anime.
or if you do feel the need to watch it at least try watching it in a different way

like I get it I find Keighley's shows boring without doing something to change them up a little too but there's so many ways to watch things nowadays, try being behind a bit and watching at double speed, try being behind a bit and just skipping over stuff that doesn't interest you, try watching a reaction stream instead of just watching it by itself, try doing something in another monitor and having it on in the background etc
 

MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
1,525
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The new Dragon Age will most likely suck, like everything since Origins has.

Shame really because Origins is so good and the series deserves decent games.
Will praise DA2 (only slightly).
I thought the writing was still good, and how they weaved the story/sub-plots around a very small place was kind of great. Magic was dumb down but I loved playing as mage. Kinda biased towards its artstyle too.
 

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
4,214
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Downunder.
Just got my wisdom teeth taken out at once (all 4) and I'm so glad we live in an era with modern anesthesia. How could people even manage back in the 1800s?
With Opium (prehistory?), Morphine (1800s) and Cocaine (1850s)

Getting high is humanity's time-honoured tradition. :flare_bath:
Japanese language only.
Fan translation is in the works from the kind folks at Classic Persona Modding Discord server.
 
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PC-tan

Low Tier Weeb
Jan 19, 2019
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California
My excitement for this not-E3 period has cratered for a couple of reasons;

1. There are just way too many events now. There's about 4 livestreams every day with random selections of indies and smaller publishers doing their own thing. All the information is diffused and it would be an absolute chore to keep up with all of it. And that's before we talk about how utterly bloated and eye-roll inducing so many of these presentations can be. Imagine sitting through another PC gaming show. Or does anyone remember that Realms Deep thing from last year? I do understand that indies need as much exposure as they can get and in the old days getting into a presentation from the big 3 was possibly too hard, but now there are 30 different events and I'm not inclined to watch any of them anymore.

2. Everything leaks. There are no surprises anymore. Stuff used to leak in the past as well but nowhere near on the scale that it does now. These days we have clout chasers like Jeff Grubb and Tom Henderson who will tell you everything given enough time. It's extra annoying when they're trying to be coy about it. Grubb's latest leak is that Dragon Age Dreadwolf won't be at Keighley's show but Dragon Age will be. That's him definitely not revealing a remaster/remake that's incoming. Someone on Twitter shared a clip of that time when Sony revealed the new God of War at E3 a few years ago. No one saw that coming and everyone cheered when Kratos stepped out of the shadows. You just cannot have moments like that these days.

It's a real shame... I actually preferred E3 where all the announcements were concentrated within the 3-5 major shows and you at least had some reason to look forward to what was going to be revealed.




Not to defend the Dorito Pope but the guy got so much unwarranted criticism for the show last year. It was, again, from people who either do not understand reality or just refuse to accept it. So many people were upset that ads and promotions got more time than the awards but that's what pays for the whole show to begin with. I remember there was that skit with a muppet that people were unhappy with and it's like, do you think Keighley woke up one morning in July and decided he wanted a muppet at his game awards show? No, he went to someone to ask for money and their condition was that there must be a segment with the muppet. Do you think it was his life's ambition to do a promotion for a 15% Grubhub coupon? No, but that is what pays for renting out a theatre and hiring a whole production team and a whole technical team that is livestreaming the program simultaneously on 10 platforms and so on. Everything in the world got more expensive in the last couple of years. Why would you think that wouldn't apply to the TGAs?

As for prompts asking the winners to wrap up their speeches, that's fairly common in many award ceremonies. Even the Oscars have it. And that's before Chris Judge poisoned the well with his speech the previous year. Even so, Keighley admitted that he could have done it better so the vitriol he kept receiving was ridiculous. And, to be blunt, award acceptance speeches really should just be about thanking your team, your family, your partners and such. It really isn't the place for sharing anecdotes about development and pontificating about other matters. That's part of the social contract of award shows.

And since we're being blunt, nobody who is watching actually cares about the awards to begin with. Maybe the platform warriors do because "Hey my Nintendo game beat your Sony game in the GOTY category" but that's about it. The majority of people watching are watching for the new game trailers. And the proof is that if he tried to do just an awards show without the promotions the whole enterprise would collapse, and everybody knows that.
Based off what you are saying it looks like I was right the. About my second point. About how last year the sponsors just have gotten pissed off.


Right on cue, here's another article shitting on Geoff Keighley right before the summer event


Again, do people realize that Geoff Keighley isn't a game journalist? He does not write reviews or anything else for any site or newspaper. He's not a Youtuber or a Twitch streamer. He's more of an event organizer who organizes three major gaming related events a year (E3, Gamescom, Game Awards). That is his job and his livelihood. Aside from securing funding for the show (including salaries for his staff), it has to pay his salary for the whole year. Who knows what kinds of compromises he has to make just to put on the shows.

What do these people expect is supposed to happen? "Hi everyone. My name is Geoff Keighley. The game industry is shit. The publishers are shit. The executives are shit. Capitalism is shit. Welcome to the ceremony celebrating the industry funded entirely by the publishers and executives who I just called shit. Incidentally, this is the last edition of the Game Awards because nobody who I just called shit will ever work with me again". But hey, at least Twitter will be happy right?

It's so easy to sit in the peanut gallery and launch missiles when you have nothing on the line. You have a problem with him not addressing the war in Gaza in a video gaming show? You should definitely just the raise the million(s) of dollars he does and make your own show and make it all about what you want to talk about. Yes, you are allowed to criticize things you can't do yourself. But if your criticism is insane then it should be disregarded immediately.

Incidentally, the article also talks about how it costs $200,000 per minute to run the show. Or at least, that's what he charges for advertising time. It seems ludicrous to me but it's all in Los Angeles and the world is super expensive these days so maybe that really is how things are.

The thing is that he was a gaming journalist. He was and he did a really great job at it,but that was years and years ago. At least in the west he is one of the few big name gaming journalist, the other being Jason. In regards to Jason, the dude is just terrible (bad takes) but but, he does a great job at providing information, which is why he is now at a big fancy news outlet. Geoff hardly does much journalism at all anymore, the last big thing that he did was for Half Life Alyx but asides from that he now mainly does game award stuff.

Peoples opinions of him seem to have greatly changed after the whole Dorito Pope thing, where instead of proving information about games and other insightful information he was relegated to promoting Halo 3 with Doritos and MNT DEW and also looking at some of thoss videos it looks like it was something that he was uncomfortable. Times have changed and the stuff that he used to do years and years ago is now more common place (sort of) and you have stuff like Noclip and others that have taken the place of Geoff but it's not quite same. The both benefit and bad thing about YouTube is that it's more disconnected than stuff in the past, in the past you had fewer Big news sites and these journalist and other use to belong to some one of them before breaking of and doing their own thing.



My big issue is that compared to E3 Summer Games fest has much lower production. I mean look How E3 looked like back in a day.

(I can't remember if I already asked this question since I started this post hours ago but never posted it) But what exactly is summer game fest and how is it different from E3? Wasn't E3 mainly a big convention (which itself originated form the exist of another convention before it) and it was mainly industry people that would go and show of their games, the press would be there, and just like a lot of older conversations, journalist and others would get posters and other promotional art at these booths and use that to cover the game along with their experience there. These devs/publishers would also have conference where they would show off trailers for upcoming games and these videos would eventually make their way online (was it always broadcast live?) that's the general idea of it. But what about Summer Games Fest? I'm guessing that there is no physical location and it's mainly the later part of them doing a live stream. That will cost money but what other stuff do they need to do as well? Nintendo Directs are just pre-recorded videos that get uploaded online and just get direct to the information that people are looking for right? Which I assume Nintendo would like since it cuts down on cost and also it feels genuine? Indie Live Expo takes place in a physical location, they show games, talk about their sponsors and have live performances, while also being broadcast in 4 different languages. Is there a reason why this one is not a big hit? Or is it because it's too long? During an Inconvenient time and how it's just indie games and not a AAA game from a well know developer.

There is other stuff that I want to rant about but that's at least covers the tip of the iceberg.
 

Gamall Wednesday Ida

Just a loon, apparently.
Dec 4, 2020
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With Opium (prehistory?), Morphine (1800s) and Cocaine (1850s)
Let's not forget the almighty Booze.

-------------

I did a few RL1 Radabeast fights, the last thing left in my RL1 solo run.

It's not too bad, but... I died three times to the beast's stupid rings attack. Once there was maybe 7% HP left.

I'm not certain I ever got hit by it at all before today, in however many dozens of times I fought that thing across all my runs. I was almost surprised to see it could in fact deal damage. Weird. :LOL:
 
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Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
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All their good fantasy writers left after DA2, newer devs have only worked on Inquisition (I doubt most of those devs would be remaining at this point).
I have no faith in them.

I have never felt this way about a (mainly) single=player studio ever. That's how badly Bioware messed up for over a decade.
The thing about good writers is... it doesn't really work with 10-year development cycles.
Either you are passionate about it and despise that your vision for the story isn't coming out for a decade with constant changes
or it's just a job for you and you make whatever.

Writing the story for a game shouldn't take longer than 6-12 months. Narration, lore, and story shouldn't get affected by longer development cycles (apart from waiting for the developers to finish the outline of the game or development changes that need rewrites.

We had fantastic stories in the 90s and 2000s in games that took 12-24 months to develop.
 
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Cacher

Romantic Storm
Jun 3, 2020
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Been hearing a lot of praise for Mad Max. It's dirt cheap right now and is supposed to run well on the Deck. Anyone here have a good time with that one?
Played it on PC. It was a fun Ubisoft-style open world game. Repetitive gameplay with breathtaking scenery and great car combat. If you like the movies you will like the game, too. There is an unobtainable achievement because of online server closure.
Steam page hasn't been fully updated yet, but this is finally coming to Steam on July 10, approaching three years after its Windows Store/PC Game Pass release. Also getting some QOL changes like combat rebalancing, fast travel, and a quest tracker, all of which it very badly needed, lemme tell ya

I played it on Game Pass and it was pretty bad. Dialogues end abruptly and inactive party member not gaining experience is dogshit when the game does not provide a means to grind level. Hopefully they will address all these things in this new version.
 

Sobatronix

MetaMember
Mar 9, 2021
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Moving to Lithuania soon, which is on the region restricted list for Sony games. :(

Can they be played at all? Recently bought Helldivers 2... Will it just be a digital paperweight now?
You can play Helldivers 2 if you bought it beforehand. But not GoT of GOW Ragnarok. They have such hard locks that they've even refunded my GoT preorder unilaterally. I recommend that if you have a friend in a country with no restrictions give them your account so they can buy a game for you (with a payment method from that region) and change your shop region. I did that now I'm in the Spain region which has all the games (At least I think so)

PS: If you change regions to an unrestricted one you won't be able to pay with your regional payment method so you'll need to activate Steam keys or add funds to your Steam wallet via Steam Wallet Gift Cards for that region.
 
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Pixieking

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Dec 7, 2018
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You can play Helldivers 2 if you bought it beforehand. But not GoT of GOW Ragnarok. They have such hard locks that they've even refunded my GoT preorder unilaterally. I recommend that if you have a friend in a country with no restrictions give them your account so they can buy a game for you (with a payment method from that region) and change your shop region. I did that now I'm in the Spain region which has all the games (At least I think so)

PS: If you change regions to an unrestricted one you won't be able to pay with your regional payment method so you'll need to activate Steam keys or add funds to your Steam wallet via Steam Wallet Gift Cards for that region.
Cheers. :)

Currently in Romania (unrestricted country), and have been paying for games with a Revolut account tied to the country, so I guess I could just buy something as soon as we get to Lithuania and it'll assume I'm still in the old country?
 

Sobatronix

MetaMember
Mar 9, 2021
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Cheers. :)

Currently in Romania (unrestricted country), and have been paying for games with a Revolut account tied to the country, so I guess I could just buy something as soon as we get to Lithuania and it'll assume I'm still in the old country?
Correct, if Romania is unrestricted then continue paying with your old Romanian payment method. The store shouldn't change region unless you buy something with a Lithuanian payment method.
 

dex3108

MetaMember
Dec 20, 2018
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Also as far as I know changing regions also means that games that are locked in region you are moving to will get locked for 90 days. After that they are unlocking. If I am wrong someone please correct me.
 
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MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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The thing about good writers is... it doesn't really work with 10-year development cycles.
Either you are passionate about it and despise that your vision for the story isn't coming out for a decade with constant changes
or it's just a job for you and you make whatever.

Writing the story for a game shouldn't take longer than 6-12 months. Narration, lore, and story shouldn't get affected by longer development cycles (apart from waiting for the developers to finish the outline of the game or development changes that need rewrites.

We had fantastic stories in the 90s and 2000s in games that took 12-24 months to develop.
Development for Dragon Age started in 2002 and released in late 2009. Those devs stuck around for the project.

Issue is when your veteran staff leaves, there is no one to mentor junior staff, and that affects the final game.
 

Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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  • Anthem
  • Avengers
  • Redfall
  • Suicide Squad : KTJL
When single player studios were forced to make multiplayer games. Nearly a decade and they haven't learned.


I hope publishers learn (it'd be a miracle if they do) to let studios play by their strengths. SP studios make SP games, MP studios make MP games.
I don't really think the biggest issue per se is SP studios trying to make MP (GaaS) games, though it sure doesn't help.
To me the root issue seems to be poor project management and unclear vision, cause you can also point some big SP flops to that, like I remember reading about how Forspoken got rebooted multiple times during development alongside story changes. Even beyond this often leading to poor results, the sheer amount of wasted time is just madness, especially given the long development times these days to begin with.

Like when I'm reading that the Rocksteady studio head at one point randomly thought "let's add vehicles" to a game that at that point already had a focus on character-specific traversal options, wasting a couple months on it only to shelf it because it didn't work, as devs pointed out at the very beginning I'm just... flabbergasted.
At that point it didn't matter that this was going to be a live-service game, that shit would have been an equal waste of time if Suicide Squad had been a single player game.
That's just incompetence.
 

kio

MetaMember
Apr 19, 2019
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The new Dragon Age will most likely suck, like everything since Origins has.

Shame really because Origins is so good and the series deserves decent games.
I'm going to be that guy and state the Dragon Age was never good, even Origins was mediocre at best.
But looking back at the dark days for RPGs, somewhere between 2003 and 2015-ish, even a mediocre game like that could be considered good when seen in context. Just thinking about it's contemporaries makes me shudder...
Still DA2 and DA3 were even worse.
So DA sucking isn't exactly a surprise, it's expected.
 
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