tartyron

Arkane is a gigantic bummer, I recently played through their whole catalogue last year, save Arx Fatalis, and it really was a great experience, I just wish it wasn’t a swan song. I know the Blade game is still happening, and there is still an Arkane studio with some of the people going over, but this doesn’t bode well.

I know it’s likely not as drastic as this, but it almost feels like video games are winding down to a tiny nub, and there just won’t be the kind of investment to keep any sort of real economy going, at least for quite some time. There will still be small passion projects, but if everything that isn’t self or crowd funded has to be a mega hit or it kills your studio, and maybe even a mega hit will kill you because it’s not a guarantee of continued investment, then what the fuck is left? There already isn’t much of a middle tier anymore. Eventually investors will get so jumpy that even low risk will still be too risky. It’s almost seems like peak video games has hit as far as investment is concerned, and it’s all diminishing returns from here as the executive suite cannibalizes their companies for person golden parachutes. There is already lots of talk about the talent drain due to the instability of working in the industry. Hell, following the industry news when I was younger made me realize I never wanted to work in games, it seems like hell. So with fewer investors, high attrition on experienced devs, a hard sell to get new deva interested in joining the mess, what the hell else is left to be created? Evony, that’s what. Match Mansion or whatever that killer grandma game was called. Tiny, terrible games that extract money from suckers and need hardly any staff to maintain.

This retraction feels worse than any other period in aware of other than the early 80s game crash. And that recovered, and this will too eventually, and there will still be creative games to some degree through it all, but I could see this becoming a generational shrinkage in the games industry, something we will be feeling for years, and will starve the market for a long time.

Apologies if this is well-trod territory, but I can't seem to to get anything other the active live streams to play on the site. All achieve, as recent as this week and as old as quicklooks form 2010, either give a black screen with a play button that doesn't work, or on chrome and edge, the play button will make the screen go black, and then do nothing. I've tried these with ad blocks on and off, multiple browsers and a wide dataset for testing, they just all broke. Is this happening across the board to everyone? Are these archives just gone at this point except through manual download per video?

I also resisted Helldivers until just about 2 weeks ago. My first impression was quite good! The guns felt good, I got matched up with some good squads, I was gaining samples and metals left and right. It was a great first day.

Then the second day happened. I got a constant stream of rando dipshits that just wandered around getting killed for no reason, the missions revealed themselves to be extremely repetitive, and the progression curve slowed tremendously.

And that’s pretty much continued since then. The vast majority of my friends don’t play video games at all, and the ones that do are not multiplayer people (and normally I’m not either), so playing with anyone with the mics on is out because I’m not allowing randos to invade my ears. And playing with this randos is not good enough. I tried playing solo but it’s either too boring in low difficulty missions or too overwhelming on higher difficulties. So I think I’m done.

Helldivers 2 was glorious…for one day.

I’ll be honest, I noticed the stars on the PSN store or interface, tried to follow their explanation of what the stars were and did not come to any understanding of the program at all. They did not, at least at the time I first looked into it, make it clear what exactly they were or how to get them. This forum post has done more to explain the program for me.

It seems that it’s not really worth bothering with anyway, though. Especially for me, as I barely touch my PS5 anymore except for exclusives I’m interested in, which seem farther apart than they used to be. I even ended my PS plus subscription, which I had for nearly a decade, because this generation of consoles has not really had the juice for me. Doesn’t look like this stars program is worth spending more time on the console either.

@zombiepie: the problem was that it was piping up too often, like front page, pop up, enter preferences, go to game mess mornings, pop up, enter preferences. Multiple times on the same visit from page to page, that’s why I started the thread. It’s actually a little better now, I get it only when I first come by for the day, it seems to stick for 24 hours or so.

Hey there. The past week or so, I’m getting cookie notifications to confirm my choices over and over again. I recall this happening before a while ago and it got fixed after being discussed on the forums here. Just wondering if it’s just me.

Ooof, those conservative monster inserted ads seem to be able to sneak in there even after all the settings are set. I listen to another podcast that is largely hosted by trans people and somehow some anti-trans ad about high school sports got in there.

I kinda miss the days where all podcast ads were just read by the host, so you didn’t have to worry about some sketchy stuff slipped in by the algorithm.

@bigsocrates: I did just mean consumables, in-game currencies, and skins and whatnot. If it’s a proper story and content DLC, I do buy those often enough, though not if it’s been too long since I finished the main game and have moved on.

I think a big factor for me as well is that 99% of online multiplayer interactions I have are negative, so I really avoid playing online with a few exceptions. In addition to this, I typically tend to have non-gamer friend groups, so I have never really had a social hang game. I did lose about three months to Destiny 2, but I was unemployed and my partner at the time also played it, so we were in the same house together when we played. In college my roommates and I would play Soul Calibur 2 and Mario Kart on the GameCube, but that was also couch multiplayer, not online.

I think that lack of associating games as social in my brain is a large factor. That and I tend to prefer story content over gameplay loops, and I don’t have the drive to “git gud” at multiplayer exercise C’est either, and same that for Single player SoulsBornes where the summoned players can’t talk.

So yeah, I guess I’m just old. Which is both culturally and mathematically true in my middle age.

For me, it put into perspective that I’m an outlier in how I engage with games. I describe myself as a gaming locust, or a serial gamer. I play probably two to three games at once, and when I finish one, I immediately start up a new one, constantly moving and leaving a trail of games in my wake. In some ways, I am the kind of consumer companies want, but I seek constant novelty, always anting to see and experience new things or new takes on things, so I rarely engage with long term live service or MMO style games and I never buy micro transactions.

I mostly thought this was how other folks play games, probably because when I saw things like the GB staff, they were laying a constant rotation of new stuff too. But they do due to it be their job, whereas I am just a sicko. Learning that kind of percentage just plays the same thing over and over for years and years is weird to me, but I realize that might mean I’m the weird one. Just playing Fortnite again and again, no matter how good their content flow is, just seems dull to me.

@brian_: It's like 10 things I wish I new before starting Palworld" type guides. One guide in particular got a lot of criticism because it was literally just saying what the in-game tutorial does, nothing more. Real "press the A key to type the letter A" type stuff.