I fell out of love with Team Fortress 2 after they murdered the art style with the cosmetics and extra weapons.

I didn’t realize it at the time but later on I fell further out of love with it for its role in normalizing lootboxes. In retrospect we should have shut that shit down as hard as horse armor was. Tribes: Ascend and TF2 were patient 0 and 1 in the pandemic. It was seen as acceptable at the time since the games were free, but we didn’t anticipate the broader effects it would have.

It happened to the Playstation, though not for use as workstations usually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Although Valve apparently already takes anti-scalping measures with the Steam Deck, so maybe it could work out in that way (as in, each steam account gets a limited number of purchases, TOS against trying to bypass that limit, etc).

it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that

If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay-effecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.

Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.

At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?

Initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000

That’s not bad at all. It’s something that basically every library could have. Imagine that level of distributed redundancy for hundreds of terrabytes worth of information, in a medium that essentially lasts forever.

Assuming it really is coming out at that price of course.

IMO the combat mechanics shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the developers were terrified of making a player-character that wasn’t a demigod that can slaughter an entire army.

I still think Dishonored 1 & 2 are both really good games, but its like they made Portal but just let you break the walls of the test chambers and walk right through if you felt like it.

The person that came up with that phrase is in charge of a game series with dialogue that makes your skull physically reform into a fedora.

Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?

I’ve played Gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.

EDIT: also, I’m not a Nintendo lover, actually pretty much hate them for issuing takedowns of fan games and let’s plays.

The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In Gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them to fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike Source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.

In addition to that, TotK takes Gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.

And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for Gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.

I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.

Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).

It’s not AI, it’s neural network models

These used to be called AI before people decided that only LLMs and Diffusion models were AI. Both of which are types of neural networks.

Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.

I mean I’m bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they’re too corpo.

I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.

This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.

It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.

To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.

I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.

So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.

Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.

Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.

But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?

Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.

When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct?

Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).

Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.

So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.

At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was that without these elements the player was much less likely to explore of their own volition (not just because its the opposite direction of a waypoint) and think about the level design. Speaking of waypoints I remember the first group of people really complaining that the arrow in Bioshock is even more egregious than waypoints, though IMO the way it encourages you to unthinkingly follow it is actually quite thematic.

Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.

I have actually played Portal. I had a section where I mentioned that Valve games were an exception to this sentiment, then I deleted it and forgot when I wrote the last part of my previous comment.

But anyway, I’ll admit that I was really thinking more about the time period from 2005 to 2015.

So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games. They did do some very innovative things when they first came out, but just like modern military shooters took regenerating health and the two weapon limit from Halo while leaving behind all the other gameplay mechanics that made that work, so too did many games adopt the open world and the general way you interact with it, while removing anything interesting. By “the way you interact with it” I’m referring specifically to the map unlocking, the collectables, the village / territory faction control, and the “heat” system that spawns enemies depending on how much attention you are generating.

IMO those sorts of games were very much the other side of the coin from CoD-likes, and the problem was that while the extremely linear levels of CoD-likes were too restrictive, these open world games had no structure at all. In games like Blood, Quake, or what have you, encounters are designed to flow in a certain way, with each one having its own flavor and favoring certain approaches over others. In some games you can even think of enemy encounters as a puzzle you need to solve. Level design and enemy placement of course form the two halves of encounter design. In good games this sort of thing extends to the structure of the game as a whole, with the ebs and flows in the action, and different gameplay happening in different sections so the formula keeps getting changed up. But in games where the level design is an open world that let’s you approach from any angle, and where enemy placement is determined on the fly by a mindless algorithm, there is no encounter design. At the same time the way enemy spawning works is actually too orchestrated to have interesting emergent gameplay. For example, if an algorithm made an enemy patrol spawn an hour ago, and the player can see it from across the map, they can come up with their own plan on how to deal with this unique situation. If the player gets one bar of heat and the algorithm makes an enemy spawn around a corner they can’t anticipate that at all, its just mindless. This has implications for the gameplay itself (no enemy can be very tough or require very much thinking or planning if you’re just going to spawn them around a corner) but also, as previously stated, the entire structure of the game.

As for the other games you mention, I want to bring up Bioshock in particular. Its true, that game is a master class in presentation and aesthetics, and a game I would highly recommend, but its actually one of the games that I remember people complaining about when they said gaming was better in the 90s. Specifically the way Bioshock is very dumbed down compared to its predecessor System Shock, both from a general game and level design standpoint, but also because of the inclusion of vita chambers and the compass pointer that leads you around by the nose. (One place I will give Bioshock points though is that it has way more of an ecosystem than most imm-sims with the way enemies interact with each other; it even beats out imm-sim darling Prey 2017 in this regard).

This is admittedly a way more niche complaint than people complaining about QTEs or games being piss/brown, but it was definitely a smaller part of the much larger “games are getting dumbed down” discourse.

I could talk about Crysis and Spore too, but this comment is already really long. I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.

You’re right, as is so often the case when people talk about a decade I’m thinking more of its latter half and the beginning half of the next one.

But in my defense I did say “the mid to late 2000s”.

I have a few more thoughts, but I’ll have to make another reply in a bit.

20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.

Here’s how I see it:
From a gameplay standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that every AAA game was either a modern military shooter, a ‘superhero’ game (think prototype or infamous), or fell somewhere in the assassin’s creed, far cry, GTA triangle. Gameplay was also getting more and more trivial and braindead, with more and more QTE cuts scenes. The perception among both game devs and journalists was that this was a good direction for the industry to go, as it was getting away from the ‘coin sucking difficulty’ mentality of arcade games and moving towards games as art (i.e. cinematic experiences). There were of course a few games like Mirrors Edge, and games released by Valve, but they were definitely the exception rather than the rule (and Valve eventually stopped making games). Then Dark Souls came out and blew all their minds that a game could both have non-braindead gameplay and be artful at the same time.

Now I would say we’ve actually seen a partial reversal of this trend. Triple A games are still not likely to be pioneers when it comes to gameplay, we’ve actually seen a few mainstream franchises do things like using Souls-like combat or immersive-sim elements, which IMO would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

From an aesthetic standpoint: My perception of the mid to late 2000s is that everything was brown with a yellow piss filter over it. If you were lucky it could be grey and desaturated instead. This was because Band of Brothers existed, and because it was the easiest way to make lighting look good with the way it worked at the time. As an aside, Dark Souls, a game where you crawl around in a sewer filled with poop and everyone is a zombie that’s also slowly dying of depression because the world is going to end soon and they’ve lost all hope, had more color than the average 2000s game where you’re some sort of hero or badass secret agent.

Things are absolutely better in the aesthetic department now. Triple A studios remembered what colors looked like.

From a conceptual / narrative standpoint: I don’t think AAA games were very creative in this department in the 2000s and I don’t think they’re very creative now. They mostly just competed to see who could fellate the player the hardest to make them feel like a badass. If you were lucky the player character was also self destructive and depressed in addition to being a badass.

Then and now your best bet for a creative premise in a high budget game is to look to Japanese developers.

From a consumer friendliness / monetization standpoint: In the 2000s people were already complaining about day one DLC, battlepasses and having to pay multiple times just to get a completed game.

Now its worse than its ever been IMO. Not only do AAA games come out completely broken and unfinished, really aggressive monetization strategies are completely normalized. Also companies are pretty reluctant to make singleplayer games now, since its easier to farm infinite gacha rolls from a multiplayer game (although this was kinda already the case in the 2000s).

Overall I think we’re now in a golden age for indie games, and things like Clair Obscura and Baldur’s Gate 3 give me a lot of hope for AA games.

I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:

• Parvati says she’s not interested in physical affection, but I don’t recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she’s better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn’t mean the same thing.

• I also don’t recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?

• how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?

An FoV slider tag might be a good addition to the camera comfort section; I’ve heard many people say that narrow FoVs can make them motion sick.

Its strange to me that there are so many high budget open world games that fall within the assassin’s creed / far cry / GTA triangle and yet it seems like nobody tried to copy the Bethesda open world formula given the enormous popularity of Skyrim.

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