This isn't meant to be re-opening gamergate or any other controversy, I have just come here to rant.
I will get past the brand new game that needs a 6 gig patch before you can play it online... Or the PS5 that is meant to let you load games remotely by the App, but never actually works until you press the PS button on the controller (When you get home)

I am surprised at how generally buggy and terrible serious titles are...
I am a CoD fan (Judge me for that, I feel you)
Every time I go to play the game it says new server settings detected press X to exit
Then it loads the new server settings then says press X to exit and load the settings
Then you have to click something else to get back in... I mean what the hell is with programming so sloppy.

I also enjoy playing online Invasion except the game mode Invasion has been stuck on the same map Sa'id for about a month....
Numerous complaints online but still not fixed.
These companies must be a shambles.

Worst part is, a lot of people defend stuff like this. Cyberpunk released in an inexcusable state that wouldn’t fly in any other medium and people defended it.

CoD is the worst, I love the gameplay but it’s constant hard drive jogging and “update, restart required” just ends up with me deleting it so save space every year.

Aside from the switch, discs making no difference in install size has me baffled at people that even bother with physical copies. “But my collection” as if its a trophy case.

Jun 1, 2023 2:42:18 GMT System said:

Worst part is, a lot of people defend stuff like this. Cyberpunk released in an inexcusable state that wouldn’t fly in any other medium and people defended it.

CoD is the worst, I love the gameplay but it’s constant hard drive jogging and “update, restart required” just ends up with me deleting it so save space every year.

Aside from the switch, discs making no difference in install size has me baffled at people that even bother with physical copies. “But my collection” as if its a trophy case.

I bought a PS5 Disc edition...
First game I got was Ragnarok and after installing it, straight away it needed like an 8 gig update.
Weird thing is, that this is a game I only play offline, why upgrade the whole game before you let me enjoy my offline experience?

In the gaming community we see this as the norm. Almost all games need zero day patches, and even with them launch with massive bugs, and crashes. Generally wide launch is replacing beta for many AAA studios. Why pay for playtesting when you fans will do it for you for free?

Like when Vampire Bloodlines and Fallout New Vegas launched they were considered absolutely unacceptable. These days games routinely launch just as bugged.

What gets interesting, is this really is only really limited to AAA games. Your one man indy game usually launches rock solid.  They also tend to do early access beta launches to bug test and iterate with the community based on feedback.

Seems like with the last gen, console users are getting what PC users had to deal with for over a decade in terms of broken games and massive patches.

Companies are blaming the lack of being able to crunch as much, or in places where you can crunch, claiming people just are not working hard enough during the 100+ hour weeks.  

After we tolerated 360 and it's many rrod issues, companies knew we would never bitch too much and keep buying so...

I thought Shin made an interesting point the other month. We were talking about the X Box era and how gaming peaked in this era. Developers had a better understanding of 3D design, we were seeing some amazing physics engines and yet games didn't have these ridiculous budgets so they could focus more on the game than getting lost in the weeds. What you're seeing now is these big publishing companies pushing developers to breaking point on these games so you're not getting quality products and they'll rush them out unfinished with a view they'll add content later (if at all if Overwatch 2 is anything to go by).

So to your example Incy, we didn't have these problems 20 years ago because devs usually understood their scope and hadn't figured out a way to monetise their games. Sure games could still be janky or rushed but not to the extent they are now because they couldn't just rely on a patch to fix it. In a way, I kind of miss it because I love finding out how broken some of these old games were.

I think it's a miracle that we haven't seen more Fallout 76s. Even something like CyberPunk 76 was more like the recent Star Wars where if you had the right rig you could play the game with only some minor issues. However if you played the game on PS4 or XBone it was virtually unplayable which is why I think the reception was so mixed.

I just think it's the nature of the beast and once the industry grew and became more global you were going to see more cynical design choices. It's basically come full circle to the arcade games where they'd make games as difficult and obtuse as possible to suck as many quarters as they could.

Couple of things that go against game development as of late

1) COVID-19 pushing back development timeframe. Considering big AAA games take years to bake, this was a big dagger that the gaming industry is still somewhat trying to rise from. 
2) Crunching/hard deadlines instilled by higherups where tinkering/technical fixing isn't allowed until after the game comes out.
3) Having to cater to the "last gen" market of PS4/XB1 so that development has to not leave those gamers behind. Nintendo Switch is also not a technical juggernaut so you can arguably lump that here too. 
4) More open world games and game length being padded to warrant the full $60 or $70 pricetag, with these big project games comes the risks of glitches & stuff not working.

I think there's less risks being taken by game developers as well but people go where the market dictates so that means sadly less risky big projects are done. 

Jun 1, 2023 15:16:02 GMT Blindy said:

Couple of things that go against game development as of late

1) COVID-19 pushing back development timeframe. Considering big AAA games take years to bake, this was a big dagger that the gaming industry is still somewhat trying to rise from. 
2) Crunching/hard deadlines instilled by higherups where tinkering/technical fixing isn't allowed until after the game comes out.
3) Having to cater to the "last gen" market of PS4/XB1 so that development has to not leave those gamers behind. Nintendo Switch is also not a technical juggernaut so you can arguably lump that here too. 
4) More open world games and game length being padded to warrant the full $60 or $70 pricetag, with these big project games comes the risks of glitches & stuff not working.

I think there's less risks being taken by game developers as well but people go where the market dictates so that means sadly less risky big projects are done. 

What was the last big industry shifting game? PlayerUnown Battlegrounds?

It seems like every now and then we'll get meme games like Among Us or Goose Goose Duck but it's been ages since the industry had a Mario 64, Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter, Final Fantasy VII etc. which basically dictated where the industry was headed.

That probably adds to the malaise, but I still think there's a ton of quality good games coming out. Hell two big franchises just came in with awesome entries in Diablo IV and Street Fighter VI. We're eating good, even if incy is being screwed over by Activision.

You guys are experts here so call me a trick ass mark but can you tell the difference between ps3 ps4 and ps5? Like truly.

Jun 1, 2023 16:22:44 GMT @ness said:

You guys are experts here so call me a trick ass mark but can you tell the difference between ps3 ps4 and ps5? Like truly.

Only after I take my rose tinted glasses off. When I have them on, even N64 games are crystal clear wide-scran 4K 300FPS master-pieces. Even when I just received my PS4, the difference between Yakuza 0 (PS3) and Final Fantasy XV (PS4) were striking. This was only amplified when I switched to 4K HDR and you can see every nuance. The PS5 hasn't had too many opportunities to show off yet, but Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was easily the best looking game of all-time when it was released.

Nintendo on the other hand is a completely different story. If you tossed up a 2012 game next to a 2023 game and I'd have a difficult time.

It's a combination of video games becoming increasingly more complex and resource-hungry, and the age old problem of software companies being pushed to unrealistic deadlines and being compelled to ship out products that are not even close to being finished. This practice seems to be becoming more common and accepted, so it's happening more often. Probably some structural/management issues within the big game developer companies too.

I'm sure Lionheart has a ton of anecdotes about why game quality is terrible on release. He's right in the thick of the industry.

The biggest jump in quality was when output went digital with HDMI.
Everything after is a matter of degrees, I have a 4k 65" TV and the PS5 looks MUCH better than the 4.

The single largest change was the ability to patch on consoles. Now you can do that, you can release a game buggy and fix it later. Before this there was a lot of incentive to release a game perfect. Now who cares if it releases broken if you can fix it later. And in the past they would delay to bugtest, now bug testing is the first thing cut to get a game out early.

And this shit been going on way before COVID.

For Ness, PS3 was one of the most powerful consoles made, but awful to program on. We never did get to see the full extent of the powers of that. People were buying them used though to build supercomputer clusters, including the US military. The cell processor in it was a fucking beast.

PS4 is a mid level PC, like the new xbox.  Used standard PC parts and was far easier to program on.  PS5 was a PS4 with better parts.  PS6 will be the same.  No more experiments with bleeding edge hardware like that insane cell processor.  Most stuff in these is standard PC gaming parts.  Xbox doing the same style upgrades.

Jun 2, 2023 7:35:51 GMT iNCY said:

The biggest jump in quality was when output went digital with HDMI.
Everything after is a matter of degrees, I have a 4k 65" TV and the PS5 looks MUCH better than the 4.

Biggest jump is ray tracing, but we still cannot fully support it on even the best hardware.  Once we can fully support this without a performance hit, will get an insane visual jump.  Which will look glorious on your 4k or 8k TV.  Believe PS5 will support 8k natively.

Jun 3, 2023 11:55:57 GMT c said:

Jun 2, 2023 7:35:51 GMT iNCY said:

The biggest jump in quality was when output went digital with HDMI.
Everything after is a matter of degrees, I have a 4k 65" TV and the PS5 looks MUCH better than the 4.

Biggest jump is ray tracing, but we still cannot fully support it on even the best hardware.  Once we can fully support this without a performance hit, will get an insane visual jump.  Which will look glorious on your 4k or 8k TV.  Believe PS5 will support 8k natively.

No, biggest jump was digital output and digital screens no other jump comes close

Ray-tracing imo a far larger jump than DVI/HDMI. Move to digital on the PC was gradual in impact, but to ray-tracing is a massive jump as it completely changes what can be done graphically unlike anything we seen before. Still early on in the ray-tracing era so few rigs can handle it, and games still not designed for it. But in a few years it optimization will catch up, and AAA games will be using it heavily.

Jun 1, 2023 21:28:53 GMT Emperor said:

It's a combination of video games becoming increasingly more complex and resource-hungry, and the age old problem of software companies being pushed to unrealistic deadlines and being compelled to ship out products that are not even close to being finished. This practice seems to be becoming more common and accepted, so it's happening more often. Probably some structural/management issues within the big game developer companies too.

I'm sure Lionheart has a ton of anecdotes about why game quality is terrible on release. He's right in the thick of the industry.

Tell him he's not allowed to chime in unless he changes his avatar. No scrubs!

Jun 1, 2023 15:53:21 GMT Big Pete said:

Jun 1, 2023 15:16:02 GMT Blindy said:

Couple of things that go against game development as of late

1) COVID-19 pushing back development timeframe. Considering big AAA games take years to bake, this was a big dagger that the gaming industry is still somewhat trying to rise from. 
2) Crunching/hard deadlines instilled by higherups where tinkering/technical fixing isn't allowed until after the game comes out.
3) Having to cater to the "last gen" market of PS4/XB1 so that development has to not leave those gamers behind. Nintendo Switch is also not a technical juggernaut so you can arguably lump that here too. 
4) More open world games and game length being padded to warrant the full $60 or $70 pricetag, with these big project games comes the risks of glitches & stuff not working.

I think there's less risks being taken by game developers as well but people go where the market dictates so that means sadly less risky big projects are done. 

What was the last big industry shifting game? PlayerUnown Battlegrounds?

It seems like every now and then we'll get meme games like Among Us or Goose Goose Duck but it's been ages since the industry had a Mario 64, Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter, Final Fantasy VII etc. which basically dictated where the industry was headed.

That probably adds to the malaise, but I still think there's a ton of quality good games coming out. Hell two big franchises just came in with awesome entries in Diablo IV and Street Fighter VI. We're eating good, even if incy is being screwed over by Activision.

PUBG or Dead by Daylight, both set their genres for a lot of copies to pick off them. Maybe Rocket League too if you count that Arcadey sort of ESports style game.

For me, nothing has touched Soulsbourne games though. Miyazaki cooked up something real good with that. 

Admittedly, it seems tough to find a new genre that hasn't been touched if not beaten to death so it's sort of tricky to think outside the box. I just think due to budget issues and no major publisher wanting to lose chunks of money, they get less creative and opt to go for sequels of established/proven franchises. I mean this year alone, we've seen the following series put out a game:

Street Fighter
Resident Evil
Legend of Zelda
Fire Emblem
Diablo


And soon:
Pikmin
Final Fantasy
Forza 
Spider Man(Insomniac)

There's a few exceptions like Hi-Fi Rush or Hogwarts Legacy(And that is built off the well known Harry Potter franchise) or Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty but for the most part, it's going to the same well. Maybe Starfield breaks the mold of a true original IP that even though it clicks a lot of Bethesda tendencies, it's still at least something new.

Few great innovations on the indy scene in recent times.

Binding of Isaac really started a roguelike explosion.

Stardew, while derivative, revived the farming game style, and greatly innovated on it.

Slay the Spire started a smaller genre of card based roguelikes.

And of course Minecraft.

Jun 1, 2023 21:28:53 GMT Emperor said:

It's a combination of video games becoming increasingly more complex and resource-hungry, and the age old problem of software companies being pushed to unrealistic deadlines and being compelled to ship out products that are not even close to being finished. This practice seems to be becoming more common and accepted, so it's happening more often. Probably some structural/management issues within the big game developer companies too.

I'm sure Lionheart has a ton of anecdotes about why game quality is terrible on release. He's right in the thick of the industry.

The answer is yes. It is getting shittier, on average.

Part of it is indeed that games are becoming increasingly more complex and resource-hungry, in a lot of cases. At a company like Rockstar, they devote a huge portion of their resources to the latest graphics techniques and making sure everything looks top-of-the-line. Which gets increasingly harder to do. They do this because most of the programmers there, especially the higher-ups, are tech junkies that love graphics wizardry and exploring the latest advancements. So they put what they enjoy first. Graphics are nor irrelevant and many fans do appreciate this - it scores them tons of PR points in the headlines too - but the gameplay can suffer by taking a backseat. PErsonally, I don't care much about graphics.

Probably an even larger part of the issue though is that game companies are becoming increasingly more complex and resource-hungry. There are fewer and fewer independently owned game studios left, especially in the realm of AAA. Acquisitions have been occurring like crazy and everything gets gobbled up, in some cases only to be immediately consolidated into another studio and closed down. These big companies just have the money and making money in games is difficult. Big companies also like making more money. And they do not like taking risks.

Video games used to be intrinsically linked to risk-taking from the onset. A large part of their success is due to the father of video games, Miyamoto, pushing for these visionary risks and succeeding. I would also argue risk-taking still results in bettering games because they are a creative product and more of the same not only starts boring people, but copying something generally results in less creative force and strong effort towards actually making it good in the first place.

Video games used to be hard to make. You needed experts. People who were really smart and generally passionate about what they were making. Games are still hard to make, but there are a ton of powerful tools now to simplify the process, get by with decent people, and to push them through with enough money thrown at it. But without those smart, driven people at the core of it all...they will often lack direction and effort.

I have seen firsthand what tends to make a game good. It is the direction of a leader who steps in, continually pushes to make the game better, and doesn't settle for less than greatness. In conjunction with a motivated team who are themselves attempting to push the bar as far as it can go. But what the market has increasingly led to is a group of engineers there to collect a paycheck and an incomprehensible machine as a leader - a corporate company whose heads rarely get directly involved or even interact with the grunts doing the work. The grunts often don't agree with their choices, but they remain silent because doing other than specified isn't worth the effort.

The general effect I believe this has led to is a term known as "Ubification." It's only one example, but it sums up the direction most companies are headed. Ubisoft is most notorious for creating the same games over and over, even across different genres. They reuse the same template. Ever since the first Assassin's Creed was successful, the "Crow's Nest" became popular. They started putting these "Ubisoft towers" in every game to reveal parts of the map and activities. Their games started to become more of a repetitive pattern than unique experiences. They even threw these towers into their racing games! And why not? It worked in one game, why work hard to design something else that the fans might not like? That's the way the higher-ups see it. It's easier to not have to design something at all when there's already something you can copy. Even the legendary Zelda series through the same sort of tower, more or less, into Breath of the Wild.

When MOBAs started getting popular, a ton of companies were suddenly making MOBAs. When PUBG was amazingly successful, everyone had to make a battle royale! Similar to the film industry with remakes and reboots being so prominent, the longer a field exists for...the more it becomes monopolized and creativity starts to fade.

Here's a fun video on Ubification. This guy loves to complain and often brings up non-issues to try and complain about as many things as possible, but the point he makes is pretty good. In this video, at least.

Then Baldur's Gate 3 enters the conversation, a game devs fear will create expectations of quality about. Game companies flipped the fuck out about Baldur's Gate 3 because they do not want to produce games that are polished and complex at release. Nor engaging 80 to 120 hour adventures. They also claim they simply cannot compete with Larian in terms of production, despite many being far larger, well known studios. Ubification and BG3 are like polar opposites, one made by a studio out of love, the other out of love for cash.

Emperor has died from G1 posting and has moved onto his alternative costume...

Aug 13, 2023 18:43:42 GMT @ness said:

Emperor has died from G1 posting and has moved onto his alternative costume...

I was going to say some crazy shit Emperor would never say to disprove this theory, but that's exactly the kind of thing he would use an alt account for...

While I'm on PW, 🤯, you should watch that match I sent you last year.

Could Lionheart be the one to bring 🤯 back?

Jun 1, 2023 2:42:18 GMT System said:

Worst part is, a lot of people defend stuff like this. Cyberpunk released in an inexcusable state that wouldn’t fly in any other medium and people defended it.

CoD is the worst, I love the gameplay but it’s constant hard drive jogging and “update, restart required” just ends up with me deleting it so save space every year.

Aside from the switch, discs making no difference in install size has me baffled at people that even bother with physical copies. “But my collection” as if its a trophy case.

Physical copies are now a must (at least with PS consoles) if you want to replay any of their games in the future.

I can't fire up any of my digital copies on PS3 anymore, says it's expired. Was looking forward to playing NCAA 14 again but now I'd have to download a program onto a USB just to get it to read games that I actually paid money for.