marelooke

X4 is getting relatively good reviews, so I fired up X Rebirth (curious what our resident X-masers think, assuming they're not all playing my favourite video game: "Wait and see"). Reasoning for picking X Rebirth (of all things): it's (supposedly) a dumbed down X version, so I, as a X-series rookie, might be able to ease into a "real" X game by using Rebirth as a tutorial (and X4 might get patched a bit in that time frame too, maybe drop in price some, you know, lots of possible benefits to be had)

Because online means monetization? That's honestly the only thing I can think of. Well, aside from the devs really liking the idea. Which is just weird, since the combat wasn't exactly considered Prey's strong point, which, imho, wasn't an issue with the single player experience (combat never bothered met at all anyway, personally). But if you turn it into a combat focused multiplayer DLC. Yeah, I don't know... Personally didn't much care for the last DLC either, which was rogue lite stuff. Almost makes it look like the DLC are just chasing hypes. As far as I know there's no single player, story driven, DLC planned at all so if anyone still has the game installed hoping for some story DLC, might as well free up some disk space and just hope we'll get a proper Prey 2.

I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish but Tandi had one of the best faces of all time At this point I feel almost obliged...

The Outer World has been in development for quite some time now, I don't think that the Microsoft deal could affect that. Also, Microsoft usually release their games on Steam as well as the Xbox/Microsoft store so there shouldn't be any worries. Given that they are fishing up studios to make "exclusives" it might become a concern (but, as noted, it won't affact The Outer Worlds, tough it *might* affect any sequels, assuming there will be any, I mean, depending on who owns the IP and such). I generally am not that bothered by where I get my games (I have my preferences, of course). If the game is good enough I'll put up with whatever Steam-clone they have (consoles are a no-go for me though). Alas, I also like race games and Forza has resulted in me absolutely loathing the Windows Store. It's just total and utter garbage and the thing hasn't improved in any measurable way between the release of Forza Horizon 3 (2016) and Forza Horizon 4 (2018). Hell, Forza Motorsport 7 still resets my language settings after every. single. patch. (or DLC or what have you, iow, at least once a month), thankfully at least Horizon doesn't rely on the Windows store to get something as frivolous as localization right, but geez...

Well at least her first name isn't Endeavour... Looking forward to this while at the same time being slightly worried about the Microsoft deal now. I mean, it shouldn't affect this game, but any follow ups...

Well darn, that's one creative way to discourage people from submitting support tickets...

Started playing the Prey Mooncrash DLC and...well, what can I say, so far I still really wish they'd just made a story DLC instead of this.

As it stands (one never knows) it's not even in the cards. There were some projects in that direction but none of them were good enough so they all got canned. At this point Valve's thinking (and I tend to agree) is that nothing they could release would live up to the hype that has built up over all these years. Fwiw the (or "a") draft for the Half Life 2: Episode 3 storyline was "leaked" by the (one of the?) writer(s) (who is no longer at Valve) so you could read up as to what at least that person had planned for Episode 3.

That would still be an improvement over its current state

Played and completed Transmissions: Element 120, neat little (free) game set in the Half Life universe. Took me a little under 2 hours to 100% and that's with having to restart a few sections due to bugs, or to get achievements.

As I recall, it was because all items had the same rarity. The company being compared against printed all cards in the same quantity. Cards in most collectible card games don't have the same chance to appear (those collectible sticker books were used as an example iirc), so that in itself won't be enough. From the article I translated way back when: There's no game element to acquiring card packs for physical card games, hence they're in the clear.

Couldn't be bothered to look up the actual report, so I'm just going to quote a quote from this BBC article ("Yo, I hear you like quotes so I put a quote in your quote."): Arguably this could be considered a loophole just waiting to be abused and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the video game industry got physical trading card games in trouble due to their greed sooner or later. EDIT: typo

Yeah... I'm gonna need a source on that. As far as I'm aware they simply forked the project and rebranded. It will take a while for them to transition away from the underlying architecture of the library and the game logic built around it. Ok, so I went ahead and read the Wikipedia articles about both Gamebryo and the Creation Engine. From what I gather Bethesda's fork isn't quite that old (< 10 years). Skyrim being the first Bethesda game using a (presumably) lightly modified version of it. So despite its issues I'd say Fallout 4 marked a clear step forward for the engine. Based on what Wikipedia says using it for Fallout 76 seems like it was just a bad idea as the concept of a single player apparently was a core assumption the engine made. I imagine just getting that to work on top of all the networking seems like it must have sucked up all the time of the engine team leaving other quite crucial changes behind, which could explain why, aside from the networking, the engine seems to have barely evolved since Fallout 4. The fact that they put all that effort in leads me to believe they're probably going to want to include some form of multiplayer in future Creation Engine games (TESVI co-op? Not certain how I feel about that), if not then this could have been a very expensive mistake. It would be easy to say they could have built a new engine in that period (I mean, teams have built engines in less time), but... How big is Bethesda's engine team? How talented are the people on there? How about the tooling around it? I mean, working on something you have vs building that same thing from scratch are quite a different ballpark. And of course, while building a new engine, you can't really use it to build anything...

Right, I was wondering about that. It wasn't really clear from the GameBryo website, though admittedly I didn't dig particularly deep. In that case it's a matter of priorities I imagine, and the right ones not being set...

I take it Bethesda doesn't have any control over the GameBryo engine? In which case looking for alternatives might be a good solution if outright buying GameBryo isn't an option (might be a rather good investment given how tied to it they are). As someone who (currently) works on rather old and large applications I shudder each time someone casually suggests just throwing something out and starting over. Depending on the state of the codebase refactoring is usually way more cost effective than tossing everything out (and leaves you with a working, usable codebase while you're doing it), especially since a lot of knowledge tends to be embedded in old code (starting over in 99% of the cases means relearning the hard lessons that were already encoded in the old codebase all over again). Not to mention losing all the tooling and knowledge built around the engine, both inside the company, but (especially in Bethesda's case) also outside the company. I would understand if it was a third party license, but is there any reason why engines are not open source? It doesn't seem like a developer team whose engine isn't selling would keep it to themselves, specially when the result is a vibrant modding scene that will expand the longevity of the games and give them data on player behavior. Maybe the problem with Fallout 76 is that they didn't opened to the modder community; with that amount of user generated content and Bethesda moderating it, they could have had a better release. Although I do have an issue with moderation as it enforces values; I generally like to have a wider selection rather than a sanitized one. Bethesda has been looking at ways to clamp down on the nodding community for years at this point going by their initial Steam Paid Mods. Since Morrowind, their games have been doing quite well on console; which explains the streamlining of many of the features; and modding has never been a viable option on console. I know Skyrim and Fallout 4 are supposed to have "mod support" on console now, but I think it may be limited to the Creation Club. The Creation Club itself is an updated version of the Paid Mods but it is only limited to Bethesda created products; with the launch of Fallout 76 we finally see Bethesda shutting out the modding community entirely for a over year leading to a perceived reliance on Creation Club. Combined combined with their overwhelming reliance on an engine that is close to 20 years old with problems detailed by those more knowledgeable we have a recipe for a great disaster. We will see what happens with Elder Scrolls 6, but I wouldn't be too optimistic at this point. Imho Bethesda (Game Studios) lives and dies by their modding community. Their games simply aren't good enough to stand on their own. Their insistence on sticking with GameBryo is, imho, proof of that. Switching engines and rebuilding their internal tooling and knowledge base would be costly and painful, but perfectly doable. But switching engines and destroying all the built up community knowledge is what would really set them back decades. If they have any semblance of an intellect they might try to nab some of the modding profits (which they are doing), but outright shutting off modding in their single player games would be economic suicide.

I tried getting to Hurston, couldn't make it in one jump so had to go through a rest stop. Got disconnected from the server after getting to said rest stop. Was back in Port Olistar when I logged in. Couldn't be bothered to make that long ass jump again. Meh. Might try again soon-ish. UI needs a bunch of work still as well. I seemingly had enough fuel to get to Hurston in one go but the game wouldn't let me for some reason (it didn't bother telling me). Even after getting to the rest stop I should have been able to jump straight to Hurston as I had enough fuel left (according to the HUD anyway), but for whatever reason I couldn't. Not sure if there's something else I was running out of (Oxygen maybe? Who knows...) Still a lot of work to be done there. Fixing the insane travel times, for one, especially if you're just going to punt people back to start on disconnect.

If you'd actually watched the video you'd have known he doesn't call them morally bankrupt for "making a bad game". How else are you going to get all the clicks, tho? By making up something "edgy" the video is supposedly about instead of watching it.

SkillUp's Fallout 76 review dropped. And hoooo boy...

Didn't get any games, per se, but I grabbed some DLC on sale: Prey: Mooncrash (finally cheap enough that I'm willing to get it) XCOM2 War of the Chosen (and tactical legacy pack, came as a bundle, no idea what that is)

The parts about Activision influence near the end are really depressing though. Based on my prior experience of being part of companies that got assimilated I'd say it might very well be the beginning of the end for the Blizzard we've known so far. Why is everyone acting as if the merger was recent? It happened ten years ago! I think you missed the part where I've been on the receiving end of something like this a few times. Depending on management (of the bought company, usually), it can take quite a while before stuff starts trickling through from the "parent" company. Usually once it does it goes downhill pretty fast, relatively speaking at least, these are still "corporations". Sounds like Blizzard's management managed to hold off the boat for a very long time but I expect things to decline at an accelerating rate from this point on out. And the reason why it usually goes downhill fast is that once the culture starts changing for the worse the employees with the option to leave for greener pastures tend to do exactly that. These are usually some of the most talented, or at least well known, individuals as they have the easiest time getting jobs elsewhere. Resulting in the company running worse than before, as core employees are now missing, resulting in more involvement of the parent company which results a nice downward spiral.

The parts about Activision influence near the end are really depressing though. Based on my prior experience of being part of companies that got assimilated I'd say it might very well be the beginning of the end for the Blizzard we've known so far.

They said the plan was to add private servers and instances (as well as modding support) ~one year after launch. So they released a shell of a game and are going to add in the features everyone wanted at launch a year later. I call this the No Man's Sky method. Except that I doubt they'll add in NPCs and something resembling a story after the fact. Given the pace at which the modding community created the tools (and figures out the systems) for modding Fallout 4 I expect "major" mods to start appearing 2 to 3 years after releasing the modding tools (assuming said tools are anywhere near usable) Assuming they won't impose severe limits on what modders can do. I mean, the entire idea of the game was to jump on the "games as a service" micro-transaction train, after all... Buuuut, we have another 2 years to see how this pans out, if they manage to turn the game around somehow (I think the core premise is broken, so I don't have high hopes) we'll at least be able to pick it up for a more reasonable price. That tactic worked fine for Fallout 4 after all. I mean that game's still a broken mess, but modding support turned it into quite the fun sandbox, many of the big issues (that aren't engine related) got worked out and I got it pretty darn cheap too.

Fallout 76 looks like it's shaping up to be the trainwreck everyone who's ever played a Bethesda Game Studios game expected it to be anyway. Now the question is whether the game will survive until modding support gets added (one year down the line) and in how far modders will be able to fix Bethesda's disaster this time around with the always online and stuff...

So do the raids and other MP stuff require organized groups? Or is it like Warframe where you just get tossed in a mission with a bunch of randoms and you just make it work. I rather dislike multiplayer modes/games where things revolve around a so-called "meta", that's just a recipe for toxicity (reason I've not killed many Eidolons in Warframe, kinda requires an organized group for the harder ones).

That should have been "full on intelligence", clearly I didn't invest in INT enough Anyway, mostly playing Warframe's Fortuna update. It's actually really stable for a DE release. I've personally not had any crashes or glitches with major gameplay impact. The hoverboard tricks seem a bit wonky still but that's kind of expected with new systems.