This prompted me to look into their history, and yeah, looks like they were basically a super-group formed out of employees from names like Apple and Atari and were big right out of the gate.
I was mainly just thinking how EA Sports games have been a thing for as long as I can remember. Even when video games was a small industry, they were still a big fish.
Say what you will about the monetization strategy - there are a lot of valid criticisms to make - but the changes made to the core gameplay with OW2 and moving to 5v5 made the game infinitely better to play.
5v5 with reduced CC and shields >>>> late stage OW1
Hard disagree. Late stage OW (post 2020) was pretty balanced after they nerfed double shield. Now the game is too chaotic and more dependent on DPS than it ever has been. Also they seemed to have doubled down on burst damage and one-shot heroes, I want to shoot whoever thought Soujourn was a fun addition.
There were decent metas for sure after double shield got nerfed, but the game just feels better with 1 tank imo. Teamfight wins are more consequential and fights don’t drag on as long. There’s more space opened up for solo carrying.
A criticism I have is that tank counter picking has become more powerful than I would like.
I can’t imagine going back to 6v6 anymore. The trade offs are super worth it imo.
PS yeah Sojourn was busted for way too long. She’s in a pretty good spot now though. They also dialed back Widow’s effective range and obviously got rid of doom 1shots.
I played OW1 as my main game from launch to 2-3 years ago. I came back for OW2 then quit again after a month or two…but…
Late stage OW fuckin sucked, man. If you were a tank player who didn’t play hog you were basically solo tanking the whole game while your co-tank (hog) went flanking. Things may have been different in top ranks but the It was absolutely the least fun era of OW1 for me.
OW2 at launch was an unbalanced mess for sure but things felt great after the sojourn nerf. Every character is viable for like the first time ever.
Stop with the bad takes. If they actually worked on anything during the OW1 content drought that didn’t just make em a quick buck, we might have gotten a better experience. Someone higher up saw the dwindling player base and went with the cheapest and laziest way to squeeze a couple extra bucks from what’s left.
There was so much that could have been done to bring people back, but each time they’ve either done the literal least, lied, or axed it.
They went 5v5 cause it was the choice that had the least work required to get people to tank, but now if your tank is bad you’re pretty much going to lose. They could have kept 6v6 and reworked all the tanks kits.
Blizzard has made every choice so far that says Overwatch is going to be sunset. It’s sad to see something as great as OW1 turn into what it is now. Especially when there’s a lot that can be done to fix it the right way.
Makes me wonder how the current dev team feels about everything that’s happened and how they really feel about the decisions being made currently. Cause Invasion is pretty mediocre so far.
Removing a tank completely ruined the balance of the game. There's no reduced CC, infact they added more. Shields was the only main problem, but they could have tried splitting tanks into main/off tank roles to stop double shields, but the whole freedom is what was great about the game, the game started going downhill when they added Sombra, then fell off a cliff with Orisa. They were adding new heroes for the sake of it and not because the game needed it and that is what fucked it.
The design philosophy now is to try and make every character feel strong to play no matter how horrible they are to play against, so people will buy skins for them (or buy the new heroes).
The flash was just replaced with a new long range nade that slows enemies and disables abilities, which is worse CC to play against than a stun if you got within 3m of him. Doomfist, wrecking ball still have entire CC kits, they added more CC to orisa, who now can push players, knockback players and pull players in and slow them. Junker queen pulls players, ramattra slows players, soujourn slows players, There is objectively more CC in the game, for every bit they removed, they added more. CC isn't objectively a bad thing, the most annoying thing in the past was Mei, because she slowed you and froze you, now she just slows you. Being knocked about, slowed or abilities disabled is the most annoying form of CC to play against and that is what nearly every new champ has and what older champs have been reworked to.
Playing tank the last 2 years of OW1 was fucking miserable. I exclusively played tank since season 3 but it made me quit. I’ve put OW2 down, too, but yeah…gameplay wise it got fun again (once they nerfed sojourn).
Whole lot of rose-tinted glasses about balance in OW1. Who the fuck was having fun in the Hog meta besides Hog players? And HOW LONG did that last? Part of that is because they diverted devs to OW2 but every balance change they made to make tanking more fun was a failure outside of giving Rein his passive.
OW2 is slightly worse than year one OW1 but so much better than the bullshit in late OW1. Am I gonna play it again? Hell no. But do I think people are giving honest reviews about the actual gameplay? Also no.
I’m morally opposed to their mtx model but it didn’t affect me as I never cared about skins. The thing that really made me quit was that f2p brought in a ton of young people and it became obvious that I was no longer the target demographic.
Playing tank was shit because they had shit tanks for a two tank meta. They didn’t need to remove the second tank, they could have rebalanced the tanks instead
That’s fine for comp, but it means learning a new hero involves completely screwing your team in QP for days.
If it were up to me? They went in the wrong direction to solve a real problem. There are twice as many DPS heroes, so do 2-2-4 (2 tank, 2 support, 4 dps) comps. Nerf ult generation across-the-board by about 25% so that you’re still getting the same number of ults happening per-game, spread across more players. And give more DPS heroes off-support powers like Soldier and Sombra. And do more to punish barrier-heavy play, like Symmetra does, or just nerf the barriers.
Offer a 1-1-2 (1 tank, 1 support, 2 DPS) mode for comp for people who want a really hardcore experience.
If someone makes a new kotor game but uses the same extremely janky DND 3.x rules I am going to search my house for the monkey’s paw. That would make me so mad.
Please don't use the money's paw. It will almost definitely change the game system to FATAL, and I do not, under any circumstances, want to roll for Zaalbar's anal circumference.
Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro, which says Larian’s “mega hit” RPG, having driven around $90 million in revenue in the last year, is a good sign for more video games to come from the D&D license.
I don’t know them, but this seems like they have understood that D&D is beneficial to their purse.
Hasbro wants more games but that doesn’t say Larian wants or has been contracted for more. It’d be dumb for Larian to at least not make an expansion. Though I do understand expanding the level cap is super difficult and a LOT of spells will need to be limited in scope.
In short, at 7th to 9th level spells shit get stupid really fast.
In any case, the sweet spot of the 5th edition ruleset(which Larian vastly improved upon) is levels 5 to 10. Under that and you're too squishy, over that and you start getting into the plane shifting and just outright death spells.
Larian said they were releasing a complete game. I honestly hope they don't release an expansion. The ending was great, and I don't know where you go after. An expansion past the ending would almost cheapen the whole game for me. After a huge build up to the fight of the netherbrain. It wouldn't feel right to continue after that.
And only getting to 12th level felt fine. I don't think it needed to go higher. Mine abs my partner's characters were beasts even at level 12. So it doesn't feel like it's necessary.
Huh, so this is what happens when you passive-aggressively diss your customers’ reviews and tell them “no, it isn’t our fault our game feels dated and like a step down from what we had before, you guys are just playing the game wrong”…
I'm not surprised about this. The game was developed entirely around what it would have rather than around what the player would do and you can tell.
I can imagine the initial pitch meetings, with everyone going "whoaaa it will have hundreds of solar systems and biomes whoaaah" and no one going "ok, but what does the player do in them". A few other guys enthusiastically saying "There will be spaceship building and you will get a crew and explore with it" and not a soul in the room thinking of "ok, but how will we make space travel work within our current systems and technology? Can we make it substantial?". And this way of thinking probably permeated every second of development for the first few years.
The game is chockful of vestigial systems that they had obviously intended to be more significant and in depth, but ultimately decided not to develop further, yet still maintained in the game in a manner that only harms the game. The fuel "system", the contraband "system"... So many examples of stuff that doesn't add anything to the game, yet was still maintained because man-hours and money went into it I guess, and because the "and it will have that and that" mentality tool a priority over player experience, player agency, and actual game design.
If I can circlejerk for a bit, this is one of the reasons why Baldurs Gate 3's release and success is so timely. How many areas, how many biomes, how many systems, how many quests and how many square kilometers does that game have versus Starfield? 30 times less? 50 times less? Yet it had an overwhelmingly positive reception where Starfield didn't because its elements put player experience first. Yes it has less quests, but most are super modular and super reactive and not afraid to let you solve them in janky or silly ways that go out of the suggested solutions; yes it has fewer areas smaller in size, but you are constantly coming across stuff to do. Etc etc etc.
I'm really hoping that that contrast changes design philosophies just a tad in the future. Start with how a normal hour for your player looks like. Confirm that your technology can deliver your vision before committing to it, experience be damned. Don't reach for the stars, because contrary to what they say, it won't at least get you the moon, it will just leave you stranded in the middle of bumfucknowhere in space.
And, as we saw in Starfield, that means you get yet another annoying load cutscene.
You got the analogy backwards, it’s “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.” The thing is, they didn’t aim for the moon, they aimed for the stars and somehow missed.
As you rightly pointed out, the game lacks focus. It’s not a procedurally generated exploration game like No Man’s Sky, it’s partially procedurally generated, and they didn’t commit enough to make it compelling. It’s not a space shooter, but it has occasional space battles, but they didn’t commit enough to make that compelling. And so on. It’s a game with a lot of ideas, but no direction. It’s like they threw in the kitchen sink thinking that it would be fun, but all the dishes are chipped and mismatched.
You got the analogy backwards, it’s “Aim for the moon. If you miss, you’ll end up among the stars.”
waitwaitwait I swear to you on the grave of my budgies that I have always seen it the other way around
I'm worried now. What other things do I have a warped understanding of? Has my life been a lie until now?! Is Starfield actually secretly a great game?!
I don’t even think they aimed for the stars, they built a building and then “aimed for the planetarium” that they shoved in that building that wasn’t built to hold a planetarium.
There are some people that think cloud imperium games (star citizen) is aiming to sell their game engine (see: starengine video) and personally I really hope they do. Then all these so-called “AAA” publishers can be as money hungry and lazy as they want and we’ll still have an amazing platform for devs that actually give a shit to work off of.
There’s a lot of detailing what the author did to try to investigate the issues. That’s interesting, but if one just wants what he found, one can skip to the end, which summarizes the results:
So why is Cities: Skylines 2 so incredibly heavy on the GPU? The short answer is that the game is throwing so much unnecessary geometry at the graphics card that the game manages to be largely limited by the available rasterization performance. The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games. Similarly Unity’s virtual texturing solution remains eternally in beta, so CO had to implement their own solution for that too, which still has some teething issues.
Here’s what I think that happened (a.k.a this is speculation): Colossal Order took a gamble on Unity’s new and shiny tech, and in some ways it paid off massively and in others it caused them a lot of headache. This is not a rare situation in software development and is something I’ve experienced myself as well in my dayjob as a web-leaning developer. They chose DOTS as the architecture to fix the CPU bottlenecks their previous game suffered from and to increase the scale & depth of the simulation, and largely succeeded on that front. CO started the game when DOTS was still experimental, and it probably came as a surprise how much they had to implement themselves even when DOTS was officially considered production ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started the game with Entities Graphics but then had to pivot to custom solutions for culling, skeletal animation, texture streaming and so on when they realized Unity’s official solution was not going to cut it. Ultimately the game had to be released too early when these systems were still unpolished, likely due to financial and / or publisher pressure. None of these technical issues were news for the developers on release day, and I don’t believe their claim that the game was intended to target 30 FPS from the beginning — no purebred PC game has done that since the early 2000s, and the graphical fidelity doesn’t justify it.
In even shorter form:
Highly-detailed models coupled with a lack of lower-level-of-detail models for viewing at a distance.
Limited culling (avoiding drawing things that aren’t actually visible onscreen).
Some gambles made on external work-in-progress software that turned out not to be ready at release time, forcing the developer to implement their own solutions.
As if an unfinished release wasn't bad enough, the whole 30 FPS justification just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Given their prices for their games + DLCs this should have not been necessary.
I haven’t been following the issue or played the game, but to me, it sounds like they could probably put in short-term fixes for some of that – if imperfectly – without a lot of trouble.
I don’t know how much time the typical player spends zoomed in in the game, but if it’s like C:S1, I imagine that the answer might be “not very much”. Frankly, I have a number of games where the developers have spent time modeling and building rendering for stuff that I never look at, because I’m spending time looking at the high-level overview. Cold Waters, a submarine sim, could completely eliminate the 3D rendering portion of the game, all of the 3d models, and it’d have little to no impact on how I play the game, because the only thing that particularly matters for playing the game is a 2d sensor plot and some insets showing numerical data. This is what I’m virtually always seeing when playing the game, whereas the promo screenshots and video mostly show the 3D views. I don’t know what the situation is for C:S2, but frankly, I didn’t really ever pay attention to individual characters in C:S1; I’ll only click on a person to get an idea of what many people in the city might be experiencing with travel difficulties. I don’t really care what they look like. It’s vaguely-nice to have little specks crawling around, makes the city look a little more realistic and maybe gives some idea of where congestion might be, but it honestly doesn’t matter that much, because I’m looking at the city from high altitude. I suspect that C:S2 would be completely playable if they at least had the option to render every drawn character as an untextured rectangular solid, maybe drawing the closest one or two if zoomed in.
I don’t care much about three effects (depth-of-field, motion blur, and volumetric effects) that he cited as having poor performance (on his system, things which he said disabling caused rendering the main menu to go from under 10 FPS to about 90 FPS). Frankly, the depth-of-field blur in C:S1 I turned off because I didn’t like the look of it. Just turning those off by default, at least on lower-end systems, probably makes sense and shouldn’t be hard.
Putting in lower definition models is a technically-straightforward approach, though it’s going to cost modeler time. But if you are having your system run at 10FPS, that’s unplayable. I’d rather have a game that has buildings that are just untextured, opaque, flat polygonal boxes in the distance – especially if they intend to keep working on the game, since “ugly but playable” is preferable to “unplayable but pretty”. That’s one LOD level, and I imagine that the engine shouldn’t have any problem with that.
As a stopgap fix, I’d personally rather have that and then have patches go in over time to prettify things than to be running sluggishly and waiting for patches to improve performance. Plus, benefit is that you at least have the option to run the game on a very low-end system. Maybe someone wants to run the thing on a laptop without a discrete GPU or something.
Now, is that acceptable to other players? I don’t know. Maybe some people are really upset if they get a game that has pretty screenshots and on their system, it instead has stuff on par with placeholder assets. But I can say that for a city simulator, I’d definitely rather have something that runs smoothly than something flashy. For me, the interesting bit of a city simulator isn’t sitting there admiring the view down a street, but in figuring out how various mechanics interact with each other.
When I look at screenshots of the game, they seem to usually be at street level, looking down the thing. And yeah, it’s all highly-detailed and such, but that’s not how I’ve ever played a city simulator.
First up, meshes and textures are two different things. The former, what this is about, is the 3d model, the latter is the the paint on them. The resolution of the texture usually has no impact on performance as long as you don’t run out of VRAM.
On to the actual question: To a certain degree, yes, there’s usually a settings that changes how aggressive the LOD system is at reducing and what’s the max level of detail is. However, even on ultra most* modern games will still employ some sort of LOD, because rendering everything at max is just so ridiculously for almost no benefit, that it’s just wasteful.
*: Some games can get away without a LOD system, for example a top-down game with a fixed camera distance. There you can directly optimize the meshes based on how far they appear from the camera.
This tracks with my experience using Unity in the past. They like to add a bunch of half-baked new features while simultaneously deprecating old ones that worked fine. Which means you have to choose between using a “worse” feature you know will no longer be supported or using a “better” feature that’s not fully finished yet. When your release window is 2+ years out it is really hard to make that decision.
And they do it directly in their stable builds and label individual features as “beta” rather than keeping them in a separate beta branch which is remarkably stupid. It makes them seem like the features are ready for production when they’re clearly not.
Really wish this level of sloppiness was more well known before the unity debacle. Feels like people didnt want to shit talk the unreal competition before they blew their own foot off.
Yup. I’m just a hobbyist gamedev, but the way they handled these new features made me wary of Unity as a whole, even before their recent licensing fiasco, although that one was the last straw for me.
Every time I checked out a new feature it was barely working and badly documented. Worse yet, these things often didn’t change even after they’ve moved on to the next shiny new thing, leaving the old thing in development hell.
So yeah, in hindsight it’s shouldn’t be surprising at all that even one of the biggest Unity devs have fallen into that trap and botched one of their releases at least partly due to Unitys behaviour.
Yep. Not every game needs to be a huge open world (or in this case galaxy.) Give me tight well written games that are complete on launch, that’s all I’m asking for.
I got this on sale, because I liked the original games premise but didn't want to buy a MP-only game. I've yet to play it though. XD I hope it lives up to expecations.
Helpful hint, it's not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren't because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it's because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.
In pretty much every single technological failure, there's usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.
Have a VP wanting to ram a newly acquired Europe entity through a migration and I am just yelling in every meeting about regulations. No one gives a shit so I’m just making them sign everything they say. CYA in full deployment.
On the acquired side, currently going through integration. We had a looking date to cutover a major portion of our systems and it was absolutely only a fail forward situation if it went south. Surprisingly, they recognized and listened to us saying it wasn’t ready and needed more time…got us six more months but definitely a rare moment from my experience in IT. Hopefully a sign that the new company knows what they are doing.
I can side with what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how forgetting something in the name of profit in other industries has anything to do with the pace of game development.
It fails downwards. And I know that doesn’t make sense but when you push something through as fast as possible everything below it falters.
QA is garbage, QC is garbage, development becomes garbage because of those fast timelines because something has to be cut. You can’t do everything you need to do with shorter timelines - and that’s where it becomes “in the name of profit”.
Just that it’s fairly similar across other industries. It’s a pretty common thread in most industries when people try to force things through without planning properly.
Also I wasn’t ranting about other industries, just making a note that it occurs everywhere. Profit for profit sake has made a lot of industries worse, including the gaming industry.
Edit: do you think QA/QC and development work only occurs in the gaming industry?
Many modern AAA games has become glorified toilet paper rolls. They tried to keep manufacture then in hopes to milk everything possible, then when you are at the end of roll they hype and sell you a new one. Make them feel like you absolutely have to play the next installment to get a closure or something new branching out.(prequel/sequel/reboot/timelines/etc.)
It was unsustainable at the pace and amount pre-covid, unhealthy for hardcore gamers as well. We have to actively not buying and playing new games cause I can play certain amount per day/week.
With covid and post covid, I actually finished more games compare to before. Well, the extra 2 hours not needed to commute I can do whatever I wanted.
What a relief. He must’ve dipped as soon as he saw where things were headed in Russia. I wonder where he got asylum? But at the same time I hope I never find out, for his sake.
He only needs to never come back, and for him it’s easy. It’s not yet that stage when they smuggle people back, rn they just clean up cultural landscape from ‘traitors’ to make it 100% sterile. Music scene is already like that.
As I heard it, the fact that they were heavily implying (and often delivering) versions of the emulator that worked with as yet unreleased games for Patreon backers exclusively while the 'open to everyone' version was not as compatible, is what probably did them in.
It would have been pretty hard for them to argue that their emulator was for legal means when they were constantly telling people to pay up for the Patreon to get access to builds optimized for games that hadn't yet gone on sale. If they had just kept the public in parity with the Patreon and just coincidentally had performance uplifts on upcoming games before they dropped, they'd probably have been fine. As it is, they painted a pretty compelling picture that they were "pay for piracy" and that's where the lawyers probably told them to take a deal and get out.
It’s was naive of them to think they could get away with making optimizations for games that haven’t been released yet as long as it’s behind a paywall. As if Nintendo didn’t make a Patreon account and sub to them to collect evidence for their case.
The moment they even touched the ROMs of unreleased games they were engaging in piracy.
Sometimes, just sometimes a company also patents it so no one else can use the terrible idea, not even them. Sony has done it a few times in the past. They patented yelling at ads to do something iirc.
Only if no one challenges it, which is a big problem.
Patents are supposed to be given for new ideas, and also a certain degree of non-obviousness.
In the event that something has been done before by others, it should be open and shut to challenge the patent, but it still costs money. So it’s often easier not to, and the patent doesn’t get challenged.
You can’t argue me into believing the game is fun when it’s just… overall not that fun compared to other Bethesda efforts.
To be clear, it’s far from an outright “bad” game, but I’m still frustrated that I spent $70 on the fucking thing. If you charge that much, it’s completely reasonable for me to have high expectations for your game.
I enjoyed it but I also know that it wasn’t “great”. But I’ll admit that I got it on game pass and I’m a BES nerd, so that probably elevates it more. Had I paid full price my attitude would probably be very different.
And that’s why I never buy on release. Studios have consistently rewarded waiting for months to a year since you’ll pay a lower price for a better product.
The only reasons I’d buy at launch are:
I’m a game reviewer and somehow didn’t get a free copy
I’m a streamer, so that’s the cost of doing business
it’s an MP game and I can’t convince my friends to play something else
I play almost exclusively SP games, I don’t stream, and I am not a reviewer, so it’s in my interest to wait several months for patches and sale prices.
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