Ashtear

Ashtear , 9 hours ago

Much of this isn't unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we've recently crawled out of it, thankfully.

What bugs me the most right now (and doesn't quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone's pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It's starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.

One new, big positive I'm not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn't happened in over thirty years. I'm including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix's recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.

Ashtear , 1 day ago

I've played all of the mainline games over the years, but my only experience with FFXI was a couple of hours of the beta. Tried the marathon as a set of replays several years back and only made it to the start of IX. The load times and the glacial pace of the battles was too much by that point. I think I was planning on skipping XI.

You could also try asking in !finalfantasy and !jrpg.

Ashtear , 2 days ago

Been a while since I've seen that name. One of a long line of very meh Star Wars games.

Ashtear , 3 days ago

Ahh, the tool change is nice. Functionally, it probably doesn't actually change the rate of resource collection, but it did feel bad seeing stuff you can't harvest.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

Which includes the pricing model. Some regions even saw a price increase.

A lot of corps threw out the whole concept of a demand curve over the pandemic.

Ashtear , 5 days ago

I don't have experience with their systems, but I had to go back to the store twice for an Acer monitor. First monitor had a dead HDMI port, second had a gap in the chassis at the top. Don't know why I didn't just go with a different one after the second replacement; it would end up developing a line of shadowing after about 18 months.

Ashtear , 6 days ago

So happy that Persona lit a fire under their asses. They need it.

Best thing that could happen to the genre would be Metaphor selling 10mil copies.

Ashtear , 7 days ago

So what's the top alternative? I've had quality issues with the last two Acer monitors I bought 😭

Ashtear , 8 days ago

Last time I dipped into Oxygen Not Included, the rocket program was enough to get me to push past self-sustenance. Unfortunately in the end, getting the details of the program right just annoyed me. I don't know if it's me or if the game's just not set up well to handle large-scale construction. Building fuel production ended up being more fun than actually building the rocket silos.

Ashtear , 8 days ago

I think I need to check Nebuchadnezzar out.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is still my favorite in this genre by a mile. Dripping with cultural flavor, and there was really something about monument building in all of the games in this series.

Ashtear , 9 days ago

While I agree that seems the case, there likely has been a corresponding shift in niche communities, even if the effect is less measurable. I don't check in on my niche subreddits often anymore (I've fully moved over to here and Discord), but with some of them, their quality has dipped slightly. Possibly could be chalked up to continuing trends independent of the migration, though.

Smaller communities also require builders, so I'm sure the necessity alone has driven content quality on Lemmy.

Ashtear , 10 days ago

Finishing up Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I wish it were polished, but it's still thoroughly scratching the Suikoden itch.

Ashtear , 10 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.

Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It's far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.

Edit to add:

I don't know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don't take my word for it. Here's a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush's director:

It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.

And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:

For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.

Hi-Fi Rush: From a Little Idea to a Very Big Surprise – The Exclusive Oral History

Ashtear , 10 days ago

I see the contradiction. And I'm not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It's a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.

My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of "Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built." We're talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.

Ashtear , 10 days ago

One regime's political-dissident-by-speech is another's dissident-by-drug-addiction. America's "War on Drugs" was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it's a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.

By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.

Ashtear , 10 days ago

Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.

Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.

There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.

Ashtear , 12 days ago

I wasn't big on it at release, but a lot of people were. In hindsight, there was still too much of the earlier DNA in the game: a lot of people just talking at you, and otherwise mostly a focus on driving around and shooting things. It wasn't engaging enough for someone like me that mostly played RPGs.

The move to 3D was impressive, though, and a necessary step for not just the series but a lot of games of the generation. Now that they had a big hit, they were able to take big swings by bringing in Ray Liotta and all the elements to make an amazing period piece with Vice City.

Ashtear , 12 days ago

It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.

Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.

I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.

The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.

Ashtear , 16 days ago

The first Witcher encapsulates Geralt's (many) sexual conquests in collectible cards. And almost none of the encounters have any bearing on the plot. Having a hard time not calling that exploitative.

Much of what's going on, especially lately, is simple xenophobia. There are arbitrary restrictions on what can be sexualized when Asian character designs are used.

Ashtear , 17 days ago

Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.

Ashtear , 20 days ago

This was the news to me on this whole mess. I knew about Ark but hadn't heard about this one. Shameless.

Ashtear , 21 days ago

I didn't see that coming, and it's a welcome development. If it warps the general PC hardware market enough that devs start optimizing for a standard platform, it'll result in less buggy products at launch. And maybe orienting development towards a relatively underpowered platform will make it easier for those of us dumb enough to that like to spend more on a desktop to hit those 60 FPS targets.

Ashtear , 22 days ago

Seems things have shaken out (for now) regarding defederation, including less chatter about Threads than there was. I don't anticipate much change on that until the next big influx of users, whether it's people coming in directly through Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin or a new player joining the Fediverse.

Other than that, I've just seen steady growth in my communities.

Ashtear , 22 days ago

I can't speak to Helldivers, but pinning Baldur's Gate 3's success on the recent growing popularity of the D&D franchise is beyond reductive. There's no huge publisher for Baldur's Gate 3; Larian's a licensee and an independent studio to boot, and Hasbro's not running massive marketing campaigns for them any more than Disney is for the typical licensed Star Wars game. There's also the game's pay-once sales model, which is something else you get when you're not beholden to publishers or public shareholders.

BG3 was the culmination of decades of iteration by Larian and was the studio's first attempt with a AAA budget. The game has more in common with Divinity: Original Sin 2 than it does Baldur's Gate 2, as the Baldur's Gate die-hards would be happy to tell you.

Calling CRPGs a popular genre is also going to get some laughs. Sure, we might be able to look on this point now in a few years as when CRPGs went mainstream (or maybe not, as the insane amount of choice built into the game set the bar so high that it's possible no one's going to bother with that kind of risky content-making). But by the time Larian started development on BG3, the genre had just risen from the dead after some successful Kickstarter campaigns and was still very niche.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

We’re doing our best!

If you’re in a niche community, don’t be afraid to put some content out there. Niche communities are generally so happy to see any conversation. The amount of criticism/downvoting I’ve seen on topics in slow communities has been very low.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I always found the Dreamcast to be notable for being the first console to have polished 3D graphics. I don't consider it part of the fifth generation because I believe those consoles went a generation too early for 3D gaming, at least to the degree their game developers did. The difference between your typical PSX game running at 15 FPS with claustrophobic draw distances and SoulCalibur (or any halfway-decent PC offering of the time) was night and day. You'll hear cynical, lazy narratives about piracy, but that kind of thing was always on the margins in the 90's. It was the rapidly-moving market that would be the problem for Sega in the end, as PS2 and Xbox represented yet another big step forward for nascent 3D technology.

The thing is, despite running up against the best-selling console ever made, the opportunity was still there for the Dreamcast. Sega bungled their Japan release but had a far better than expected showing in North America, led by a strong launch lineup and an untapped market filled by the 2K sports games. The Dreamcast is a great case study in the necessity of agile marketing; immediately pivoting towards a stronger Western footing after the successful 1999 launch would have put Sega in the position to capitalize on future success. The PS2 had supply issues and a thin library in its early years. Sega also had the foresight to put modems on their consoles, and Phantasy Star Online would go on to be one of the best selling games on the system. The US had better Internet infrastructure and adoption than Japan, and the lack of online service was the one weakness the PS2 had. Sega being positioned to compete with Xbox Live would have dramatically altered the market landscape. Instead, Sega only had one major online title in the end, but even that would come too late. When Shenmue flopped (due to major budget overruns), that was that. The Dreamcast library had peaked, and higher-ups at Sega were already moving to pull the plug.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Sometimes we get immediate benefits. It took a while for capitalism to take over the Internet.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Went back to college last year and Joplin’s been amazing. More off-topic, but the only thing I wish it had was better search result organization.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I sold a copy of Golden Sun to Venus Williams once.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Yep. I’m on lemm.ee and I don’t even think about what content I might be missing.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Yeah, there’s a reason why Youtube thumbnails have all that weird shit. It works.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Part of the concern is deceptive/astroturfed content developed as advertising showing up in Lemmy communities. While those same actors could theoretically be based on lemm.ee, that’s a lot more work than simply scaling up operations when you’re doing it on Threads anyway.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Correcting someone’s English also almost never adds anything to the conversation at hand, which is the literal purpose of the downvote.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

I contribute far more now. I already have more posts on Lemmy in nine months than I did in all of the 10-ish years I was on Reddit. My rate of commenting is about the same.

I’ve also changed the way I get my news; I went retro and use RSS feeds now. I do fear there’s a risk of over-curation with a minimum of sources leading to narrow viewpoints. Even Reddit’s news bubble was more expansive than what I’ve got coming in. But my feeds and Lemmy’s bubble are what I’ve got for now.

Ashtear , 1 month ago

Star Wars Rebellion (or Star Wars Supremacy in Europe) had a GameRankings score of 50 but I had a blast with it. I must have had 200 hours in it over the years. As a 4X game, it’s definitely below average, and there’s zero challenge once you figure a few things out.

Where it succeded was by being a bit of a sandbox with a fun license. The soundtrack is phenomenal, there are recognizable names everywhere, and the moment when you get to go toe-to-toe with the Empire after scrapping together a fleet big enough is great. Problem is, it had a rough interface, obtuse mechanics, glacial pacing, and that epic fleet battle looked so bad it probably would have been better off being icons on a star field.

I also think Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (72) and Rune Factory 4 (79) were underrated, especially the latter. I think to this day, RF4 is the best game in its genre (and that includes Stardew Valley).

Ashtear , 2 months ago

I’m not thrilled about the concentration on lemmy.world, and it’s no coincidence that most of my posts are to my home instance and a growing community on lemmy.zip.

I’ll admit to trying to have it both ways, though. I still post on !games because it could be a draw for new users, and I’d rather have a robust population on a concentrated Lemmy than zero growth (and I’m not the type to discuss world news/politics in this setting).

Ashtear , 2 months ago

Said no to my parents more.

Ashtear , 2 months ago

The funny thing about this one is there’s a big chunk of the series faithful that want it milked more, just in a more nostalgic way.

Ashtear , 2 months ago

Unfortunately, the shadow of Voat still looms over this conversation. Redditors are wary of platforms that have a perceived radical userbase, and Lemmy as a whole has been painted as far left.

Ashtear , 2 months ago

You’ve been told why elsewhere, but I’ll reiterate.

It’s happening because you led off with calling transgender persons and their allies irresponsible, immature cultists, with some flimsy attempt to couch your rhetoric.

In the interest of assuming good faith–and I’m really having to stretch to see good faith here–maybe you’re just completely ignorant of the history involved. “You’ll grow out of it in your 30’s” aka “it’s just a phase” is the exact same rhetoric used against gays and lesbians a generation ago, and against any woman in general that dared step outside of the prescribed “get married and have babies” role before that. It’s not a good look.

Ashtear , 2 months ago

Then please, feel free to reframe the statement here. You didn’t even attempt to revise your derogatory language in the other comment chain.

Ashtear , 3 months ago

Great, thanks for the dose of existential dread.

Ashtear , 3 months ago

For a long time it’s been Kiseki no Umi. Composed by Yoko Kanno, Maaya Sakamoto on vocals.

Ashtear , 3 months ago

That’s a new one for me, lol. Then I’d have to get some shochu, and figure out what the hell to do with all the leftover shochu 😅

I just need to make some more okonomiyaki.