member since 18 Mar 2024 19:05
Wario64 linked because the original is gated. This would be part of the 1600 layoffs coming over a 12 month period. My guess is any studio that’s about to ship a game, like Gears of War: E-Day, is going to be targeted most.
Reworking Marathon and restoring “vaulted” content to Destiny are the highlights.
Always good to get another data point of how much money it costs to create how much video game, and how that was accomplished.
I’m glad it’s highlighted on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown in particular, because that was the first game I’d bought from Ubisoft in years, and the extra launcher deterred me from considering buying any of their other games for a long while still. EA still has launchers on older games like It Takes Two and A Way Out and Dragon Age II and Inquisition that create obstacles for LInux compatibility and offline play, but newer titles like Split Fiction and The Veilguard no longer have the extra launcher problem. It’s good to see Ubisoft following this trend, and hopefully they can stop standing in the way of their own success.
Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours / month
Game Pass Premium: 10 hours / month
Game Pass Essential: 5 hours / month
And if you’ll allow me to editorialize, there’s a popular enough conspiracy theory that these platforms want to funnel you into cloud gaming for constant subscription revenue. I think the Why We’re Making These Changes section is exactly why these services will never be able to deliver that service at a price people are willing to pay. It’s expensive to provide this service, and they’re making sure they don’t lose any money on it by charging at least what it costs to provide.
Hi, folks! I was happy to finally get my domain set up and directing traffic to a couple of hosted services. Unfortunately, my domain only works from external networks and not my own. I can ping my domain from my internal network just fine, and I can see a response time of 0.12ms against my public facing IP address, but putting the URL into my web browser to hit my web apps just times out. If I run the test on my phone, same thing; however, if I disconnect from wi-fi and do the same thing over cell network, the page works as I’d expect. My friends are able to access my hosted services via URL as I’d expect.
Given that I can ping the address and it resolves to an IP, I’m guessing this isn’t a DNS issue. My OPNsense setup is that I’ve got my 192.168.1.X VLAN and my hosted services are isolated on the 192.168.10.X VLAN. The 1 VLAN can reach 10, but 10 can’t reach 1. I can still use my hosted services via IP address and port, but I’d rather just use the URL and hit my reverse proxy so that I don’t have to change the server address while navigating in and out of my apartment on my phone.
I’ve got two goals here in resolving this problem.
I’d appreciate any help you folks can offer!
EDIT: I believe this is solved? @redlemace@lemmy.world correctly identified this as a NAT issue. The same solution appears to resolve goal #1 and #2 at the same time. This is the part where “solved” has a question mark after it. I basically just went to the traffic graph in OPNsense and compared it before and after streaming a video. The VLAN 10 traffic matched the LAN traffic, and the WAN traffic appears unmoved. Because my new NAT rules (which I picked up from redlemace’s link to OPNsense documentation) are applying the port forwarding to the WAN, VL10, and LAN interfaces, I don’t believe the traffic ever leaves my home network when the destination is my external IP address. Of course, if you have reason to believe I didn’t actually solve my issue, feel free to quote some part of this paragraph and point it out to me. Always good to learn!
Even if it’s not your cup of tea, perhaps this and the video that just went up on Netflix (and will come to a YouTube near you in 5 hours) will squash those fears about this game not having a proper GTA campaign.
Personally, Vanguard anti cheat and a lack of real ownership made this a no-go for me. I’m very in the FGC, but everyone I know that still plays the game, hates it. I don’t know why they do it.
I opted to link to Wario64, because he already pulled out the stuff we’re interested in from a pretty dry report. The next Kingdom Come is expected to be titled “Salvation”, and based on the development timeline, I would expect it to reuse some characters and locations from KCD2 but probably not Henry of Skalitz.
I think the servers will be kept on for Destiny as long as it’s cashflow positive. In a world where you’re not building new content for that game, it could be a long time, and it may outlive Bungie.
The problem with Destiny 2 is that its dev team was anything but lean.
Honestly, if they are hiring people back, I don’t know how you sustain them with such reduced revenue. It sounds more like false hope to me.
Marathon did not hit, and they laid off half the studio.
Liam from Gaming On Linux doesn’t seem confident, but I don’t see them call it out explicitly.
Without a crystal ball, I can put about 99% confidence in a future where Bungie continues to charge for microtransactions like they always have, and they won’t take a route like No Man’s Sky of being a single purchase. With a crystal ball, I could give you 100% confidence.
There was a car interstitial that was throwaway, but the parts I was talking about were one where you chased a plane and one where you ran a garbage truck through an alley like a tank, both of which are pretty on-brand.
Wow, I didn’t know that. Those sections are just supposed to be moments that feel cool and stitch together other parts of the game, so they help pacing, but that game’s use of vehicles in general was pretty underwhelming.
Like how they build up the entire game that you get to use this really fancy car in Q branch, and then it’s only used for a glorified turret sequence. It smelled a whole lot like the scene they wanted to make wouldn’t run well and had to be cut.
It wasn’t even that difficult! That meme had been circulating for years, but it only took me like three tries.
And Xbox.
Destiny was running the studio into the ground regardless of Marathon. Behind the scenes reporting says it had been a while since Destiny turned a profit, and by the time The Final Shape came out, the damage was already done. The reason they’re not continuing with it is that it just burns through money.
They’re reworking it into something else now in an attempt to salvage it, but for me personally, unless that involves being able to host the server myself, I’m not giving it the time of day.
How is this being written as some sort of success story?
Because this is still somehow better than what Sony is doing, as they have no plan for backward compatibility with your disc games. I agree that people portraying this as a success story are very shortsighted.
They’re quite different, but I think the more you try to adhere to classic Tomb Raider, the more visceral distaste you’ll get from people about how poorly those old games controlled. The puzzles in that reboot trilogy, though they often could have benefited from multiple additional steps to make them more interesting, were better than anything in Uncharted, since Uncharted loved to just give you the answer out of a magic notebook rather than let you solve things yourself. The second and third games in that TR trilogy were better about this than the 2013 game. The Legends era of Tomb Raider didn’t have much in the way of high highs, but there were definitely very low lows, and you end up with RPG skill trees in the reboot trilogy so that you can both A) decide how much optional content you want to do but also B) have a tangible incentive to do it, unlike what SkillUp pointed out in Wolverine’s progression elements in how those systems can be thoughtless.
As for chasing trends, they did a bit, but it became a real ouroboros when Uncharted 4 added a mechanic or two from the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy into its kit, and at least if TR was going to rip off some stuff from Uncharted, the combat in those three games was the best across either franchise.
I’d also recommend that recent Indiana Jones game, if you haven’t played it, speaking of ouroboros.
All of those things were in the reboot trilogy, and those games hardly played themselves.
It was a total loss on their books either way, so it sure looks like free to play would have failed exactly as hard.
Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.
This used to be pretty standard! If it weren’t for all of Blizzard’s other nonsense, I might applaud this.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games ever, but I have no faith in modern Blizzard to make a game that isn’t wrapped in trappings that would piss me off. Back in 2010, it was extremely annoying that the game required an internet connection and made us go through all sorts of wacky solutions just to have a LAN party. Nowadays, an online-only game is a non-starter for me. The story in SC2 jumped the shark after the Wings of Liberty campaign anyway.
It wasn’t damage control when the size of Concord’s loss was leaked to the press.
The weird one to me is that, if they’re going to cancel a Kojima game, they still haven’t cancelled Fairgames/Break-In/Project Espresso. One of those two is far more likely to break even.
Yeah, it’s not new, but it’s gotten more egregious, and everyone keeps pulling from the same bag of tricks regardless of how much sense it makes. Uncharted has a lot of climbing bits because it’s riffing on Indiana Jones, but why is James Bond doing the same climbing bits as Nathan Drake? And why are they so simple that my inputs hardly matter because the only path through the level is so telegraphed that it’s visible from space? Games need downtime between action sequences for pacing reasons, and while I could tolerate it in Gears of War because of their brevity, our answer to this problem needs to be more sophisticated than just holding up on the analog stick.
I ran into a lot of “AAA disease” when playing through 007 First Light recently, where the game has a lot of walk-and-talk and doesn’t respect your intelligence, but it’s a criticism that doesn’t permeate the entire runtime of the game. I didn’t realize how much worse it could be, but Ralph makes his case quite clearly in this video.
I’ve never heard of a Game Pass exclusive game. Care to name one?
I only got into some of this genre lately, because the right twist was applied to it. I’m playing Palworld now, and it was quite fun until about level 60, at which point I’m feeling like I need to turn up some sliders to adjust the economy, because it slowed way down. It’s janky, it’s buggy, it crashes from time to time, but it’s fun. Enshrouded comes out in 1.0 later this year, and I’m looking forward to it, but I doubt it plays like Palworld. I’ve played Factorio and Satisfactory; liked the former a lot and didn’t care for the latter, but they don’t feel the same, and there’s a lot of variation in how the two of them handle their central loops. I played the beginning of V Rising with a friend and only fell off due to scheduling; it doesn’t feel like any of the above either. There are a lot of variations on this genre out there.
Given your distaste for the genre, whichever one you might feel is “luxurious”, you probably haven’t played. Minecraft also has the benefit of working in precise squares/cubes.
Systems-driven games tend to have more bugs than ones where all of the solutions are finite and predetermined.
I’m not. It’s a statement of fact, and I don’t see the point in pretending it isn’t.
Seeing as Lemmy does nothing different than Reddit on a fundamental level, it’s no surprise we see the same problems. We’re just partially shielded from some of them by way of being a smaller community.
And posting genuine news about what is going to be one of the biggest gaming events of our lifetimes just gets downvoted here. Come on, people; it’s clearly relevant. You don’t have to upvote it, but then when people downvote anything they personally dislike, you end up with people who only get their gaming news here saying, “I’ve never heard of [one of the biggest games of the year].”
That was a different company.
Cloud play is one feature of Game Pass, but for most, I suspect the main draw is downloading a game and playing natively when it’s an option. It’s not a surprise to me that 96% of players are not playing more than 15 hours per month on cloud.
Pretty thorough breakdown, and I’d agree with most of it. Some paraphrased bullet points though:
Perhaps stealth isn’t doing well right now because of all of those bad stealth sequences in non-stealth games that are otherwise great
Possible, but I doubt it. The late 90s and early 00s was full of those too, but that was also simultaneously the height of stealth games. I think it’s just that fads come in waves. Underground racing games were hot when The Fast and the Furious started. World War II shooters were popular after Saving Private Ryan, and modern military shooters followed when a lot of the target demographic either fought in the war on terror or knew someone who did. Dungeons & Dragons and a lot of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue only exist because The Lord of the Rings books made a huge impression on people. If something in the cultural zeitgeist comes along that would make a good stealth game, there will be more stealth games; at this point, the last James Bond movie was 5 years ago, and the next one won’t be for a while still.
A good compromise we landed on rather than perfect wallhack vision was to mark targets
Perhaps, but I’m even kind of sick of that, too. I played a good portion of MGSV without tagging and found it perfectly playable, largely because, as he acknowledges in the video, you can scope it out from any angle from far away before you make your approach. This is something the original Deus Ex and Ghost Recon: Wildlands do well too, even though the latter also does the trivialized target marking. I don’t mind some light wallhacks when you’re up close to simulate the character’s hearing, like in The Last of Us. If we found ourselves in that stealth situation in real life, we’d have pretty good three-dimensional awareness of enemy locations just by the way sound bounces off the walls, and I think it’s okay to represent that in some way. I think the marking target mechanic is so prevalent because Ubisoft made a large number of games featured in this video and inspired more still; and Ubisoft for the last decade and change has been a company that made an efficient machine for churning out games that used a lot of common mechanics between multiple franchises.
Playing through 007 First Light right now, a lot of my most common grievances are in predictability, but not of the enemies. There are a lot of context-sensitive actions, and while this game has a sort of tutorial that we’ll be talking about for years, it did a poor job of explaining those contexts to me. I had similar issues blackjacking guards in Thief, and there’s that guy-on-the-couch section in Splinter Cell that he highlights in the save scumming section that you could describe much the same.
To my eye, all of the moves Xbox has made lately is to package up something that someone else can afford to buy off of Microsoft’s hands, and that includes selling them a subscription service that brings in more money than it costs. That’s only conjecture, but it seems to fit.
I think they’re hoping to make a profit off of what they’re charging rather than loss leading.
Because this is more like a side benefit to Game Pass. Most people are playing locally, not cloud.
It reads much more to me like trying to package up Xbox as a business that isn’t trying to loss lead so that someone else can afford to buy it off of Microsoft’s hands.
More like, “Of their Game Pass users, very few use the cloud gaming feature, and even fewer of them would exceed these limits.”
Why? That’s something only the market leader could hope to get away with, and they’re not the market leader in console or PC.
Correct. Only cloud.
Of course not. It’s expensive. That’s why Stadia isn’t still around.
I edited the post to spell that out now. But it really only ever made financial sense for both parties if it was a value add on top of what you already get with Game Pass. We all know how OnLive and Stadia worked out.
Yeah, maybe that’s in the paywalled article that this one cites, but it was only via summaries I saw elsewhere that I realized EA might not own them.
Leveraged buyout. Any dev still on payroll is a liability, and it’s not like these guys make Ultimate Team. EA’s got a lot of debt to service.
EDIT:
Actually, they might not be wholly owned by EA. I’m uncertain of the relationship here. It could just be that the developer stretched their budget down to the last second, before they’re paid out.
Uncertainty around the TTRPG’s performance is to blame.
TTRPG does not apply here. They meant it’s a tactics game.
I’ve still got to peruse reviews to see if it’s for me, but it’s looking likely. If you want to put your money where your mouth is and show that there’s demand for DRM-free games, it’s also available day 1 on GOG.
Yeah, it’s on my to-do list for my domain registrar, but the above was in relation to OPNsense configuration, which I found a solution for.
It does sound exactly like this. However, I’m concerned about following these instructions when my external IP isn’t static. I still have yet to set up DDNS (I believe is the term, for automatically updating my domain’s DNS servers with whatever new IP address my ISP gave me), but this looks like it’s entirely IP driven.
EDIT: Actually, I just realized OPNsense has an alias for that, so I’m not sure why their own manual didn’t recommend it. I can just set the value to “WAN address”. It works! That’s step #1 down, and now I’m curious about step #2.
My local DNS only seems to set up IP address routing, so I’m not sure how to hit my reverse proxy with the subdomain I’m interested in and have it route accordingly; or even just skip the reverse proxy by having that URL internally route to an IP address and port, because there’s nowhere to put in a port.
It looks like another GTA, but I like GTA. I hope they lean more into the agency that comes along with heist setup missions rather than not, but even if they don’t, I’ll probably still enjoy it.
I pasted the text and possibly fixed the original link, so you get the images I left out? Please test.
‘A Love Letter’
Over the past decade, CD Projekt Red has been the only developer to come close to matching Rockstar’s level of open-world immersion. Among its games, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt set a standard for open-world fantasy, and Cyberpunk 2077 proved that games could leverage the talent of Hollywood stars like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba. Their writing set a high bar for blockbuster games that Grand Theft Auto VI will be measured against.
Rupert Humphries, Rockstar North’s senior vice president for narrative, acknowledged that conspiracy theories became more mainstream during the game’s decade-long development. But some of the seismic events during that period — President Trump’s rise to political power and the coronavirus pandemic — will not be directly addressed.
“We run the risk of dating ourselves in a sort of awkward way,” Nelson explained. “So we have to look at things and go, What is going to have a timeless sort of quality that will speak very easily to relatable sort of human folly and foibles and will be remembered as part of this time?”
Social media certainly fits the criteria. Players will be able to learn about the world of Grand Theft Auto VI through an in-game feed known as Snapmatic, on which influencers, celebrities and friends of Jason and Lucia will share photos and videos.
One of the game’s writers, Michael Wiafe, said, “I think if we can make a story about humanity where you are poking fun at greed and hubris and all these sorts of things that we can all agree are problematic, then I think that is a unifying thing.”
Depicting a wide cross-section of society meant on-the-ground research for Rockstar — visiting racetracks and night clubs, riding along with police officers, meeting with owners of gun ranges. To make the game feel as authentic as possible, Nelson said, the studio interviewed people who were respected in all types of neighborhoods; Rockstar hired some of them as well.
Humphries said he was proud the game showed all parts of life in Miami and South Florida. “Everything is there, and you can take this ride through it, and that is something to escape into,” he said. “It’s a sort of critique, but it’s also like a love letter.”
The plenitude in the game’s extended trailer put me in mind of capacious 19th-century novels and films like “Nashville” that presented a maximalist vision of human activity. Toward the end of my visit, Garbut, the series’s art director since Grand Theft Auto III, stopped by and emphasized the lack of visual shortcuts. “You can see these vehicles from the top of a skyscraper and then parachute down and see that it’s the actual vehicle you saw there,” he said. “All these things cascade all the way down.”
Similar rigor was applied to building the game’s nonplayer characters, known as NPCs. Their behavior in Grand Theft Auto V, Nelson said, was quite simple: If you bumped into someone and he dropped an object, he would forget about it and walk away.
To make this world feel more believable, Rockstar built a new team of writers, directors and producers in Los Angeles that focused solely on creating more realized NPCs. Rather than use procedural generation to algorithmically mix and match body parts and clothes, the developers went for a bespoke approach.
“We art-directed each individual one of them,” said Garbut, who with Nelson also leads development for Rockstar Games.
Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar said, has well over 600,000 animations, compared with 55,000 animations in Grand Theft Auto V and 300,000 animations in Red Dead Redemption 2. Garbut emphasized the new game’s human-made craft.
“Every room in the game, somebody thought about this,” Garbut said. “Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them. That whole thing has been made, and built, and photographed, and placed in this random room in a random building in a huge city, in a world.”
Transformative Play
The inside of Rockstar North’s building in Edinburgh, which once housed a newspaper, is an architectural stunner. Its vaulted glass ceiling, ribbed by thin steel supports, floods the interior with natural light. Backlit panels around the ground floor depict characters from Grand Theft Auto VI.
During my visit, Phil Hooker, a head of development for Rockstar Games, reiterated that the goal was immersion. “We wanted, whether you’re on mission or off mission, for it to feel the same so you wouldn’t really see the structure of the game underneath,” he said.
His comment brought to mind James Joyce’s famous dictum from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
It is a lofty comparison. But the ambitions of Grand Theft Auto VI are great.
“All of it is a bit of a moonshot,” said Nelson, noting that Jason and Lucia may go from shopping to getting food to robbing a store to escaping on a motorcycle.
“Having that all work dynamically has been incredibly challenging,” he said, adding: “For this story to really work, though, we needed to do it. It wouldn’t have been enough for the player to just have them as a couple in a few sort of scripted date missions. Not for the way we want players to connect with these characters.”
From time to time during Nelson’s demonstration, he would call out imperceptible details he felt should be addressed, such as an NPC reacting too slowly. There are plenty of action set pieces in the game, he said, but some missions will allow for a greater number of approaches, which adds a level of unpredictability that is difficult to test.
With Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar hopes to retain cultural influence for another decade.
“We’re trying to reflect a sort of crazy, warped version of this American state and city — we always try to do that,” Nelson said. I asked what he would say to my literary friends who were not into gaming but were interested in this particular game. He replied, “I think this story has — if you want it — themes of hopefulness, elements of sacrifice versus selfishness, and it plays out asking questions about whether love can survive through this storm.”
Humphries said the series’s games were powerful because they gave people moments of serendipity.
“They’ll be driving down the street, the sun will hit a building in a way, and there’s a song playing on the radio,” he said. “There’s a sort of transcendental moment there. It’s transformative. And I think that with the tools we’ve got now making this new game, you could have that moment on a rooftop bar, or in a nightclub, or on an airboat in the swamps.”
In the last decade or so, this became more common so that they didn’t have to make 3 SKUs of the same collector’s edition and could also sell these items to digital purchasers. But in this case, there is no disc, so how hard could it be to ship these things with a download code for your $400?