Fediverse is worse than Reddit. Mod abuse, admin abuse, disinformation, and people simping for literal terrorists.

  • 0 Posts
  • 287 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

help-circle



  • I always wonder how some big ass studio announcing a title that uses (high quality) 2D or 2.5D graphics would go. Like, pump it full of many hours of great gameplay and gut and / or heart wrenching story, with lovely & beautiful art, in 2025+. No online account requirements, no Denuvo, no micro or macro transactions, just a solid buy to play title that’s a blast to get immersed in. The problem is that suits would not dare to even try this, just like they don’t dare to try anything else that’s not your standard formula customer milking. And that’s how you get the 20iest iteration of generic graphic bliss with hundreds or even thousands of bucks to spend on macro transactions and other pain the ass bullshit. Innovation for the big companies is dead, which is why I focus so much on Indie studios and smaller developers now. At least there’s still some honest passion behind those games.





  • I think we landed in a situation where some people don’t understand the different between graphical style and graphical quality. You can have high quality graphics that are still very simplistic. The important part is that they serve their purpose for the title you’re making. Obviously some games benefit from more realistic graphics, like TLoU Part 2 depicted in the thumbnail & briefly mentioned. The graphics help convey a lot of what the game tries to tell you. You can see the brutality of the world they are forced to live in through the realistic depiction of gore. But you can also see the raw emotion, the trauma on the character’s faces, which tells you how the reality of this world truly looks like. But there’s plenty of games with VERY simplistic graphic styles that are still high quality. CrossCode was one of the surprise hits for me a couple years ago and became one of my favorite RPGs, probably only topped by the old SNES title Terranigma. They both have simple yet beautiful graphics that serve them just as well as the realistic graphics of TLoU. Especially the suits / publishers will make this mistake since they are very detached from the actual gaming community and just look at numbers instead, getting trapped in various fallacies and then wonder why things don’t go as well as they calculated.


  • It’s not that I don’t like realistic graphics. But I’m not gonna pay 100 bucks per game + micro transactions and / or live service shenanigans to get it. Nowadays it’s not even that hard to have good looking games, thanks to all the work that went into modern engines. Obviously cutting edge graphics still need talented artists who create all the textures and high poly models but at some point the graphical fidelity gained becomes minuscule, compared to the effort put into it (and the performance it eats, since this bleeds into the absurd GPU topic too).

    There’s also plenty of creative stylization options that can be explored that aren’t your typical WoW cartoon look that everyone goes for nowadays. Hell, I still love pixel art games too and they’re often considered to be on the bottom end of the graphical quality (which I’d heavily disagree with, but that’s also another topic).

    What gamers want are good games that don’t feel like they get constantly milked or prioritize graphics over gameplay or story.






  • My problem is that I’m absolutely not interested in a story driven wannabe city sim. Same issue I had with that space station game. It just turns those games into a puzzle game that you need to solve in order for you to reach its end, but that’s absolutely not why I play games like this. I’d be way more interested in Frostpunk if it was an open ended game that focuses more on its building and simulation instead of a story. Be more dynamic and varied. We saw very successful survival based city builders like Banished before. Granted, Banished was also fairly simple, but that was also afaik a one man project - and despite that still managed to gain a lot of popularity and replay value. Of course the community making mods helped with that too.

    I think the devs here just fell into the “more of the same” trap with their game.

    For BG3 I kinda hope to see some more persistent & dynamic open world stuff too from the modders, now that the mod tools are kinda unlocked to their full potential.






  • .sh files are shell scripts, they’re comparable to Windows batch files or newer powershell scripts. They can be useful for tools with lots of dependencies which they then download on their own, so you often see them when you want to install something like LLM tools from Github or whatever. They’re easy to put together and easy to edit, even for the user itself, unlike a precompiled installer.