Tony Hawk: Battlepass

A new map isn’t gonna name everybody stop playing the old ones, look at Counter Strike’s de_dust from 1999, people still play that map religiously even if there are new ones. The old maps were balanced and refined, and have been replaced with a completely imbalanced one. They’ve should’ve been available along side the new one.

I’m running a 1080 Ti, can still do most modern games on high - ultra on 90 FPS at 1440p. Played Hunt maxed out for years no issues, now I got everything on low except textures and barely scratch 70 between compounds. Searching the Steam forums and reddit shows similar complains from other people with even better hardware than mine.

Before I was finding players 2 seconds after I pressed search on Europe servers, now, even though player numbers skyrocketed after the patch, I can go make my self a cup of tea, come back and it’s still hasn’t found anything. Maybe it has something to do with my MMR rank.

Speaking of, you’re right, I noticed the rank changes before the patch. I was always a 4 Star player, sometimes dipped in 5 Star after a good match, sometimes dipped into the 3 Star. Now I’m effortlessly sitting at 6 Stars. How do I know I improved skill wise if I’m already sitting at the max possible rank? Why are mediocre players like me suddenly bundled with sweatlords, who presumably are also 6 stars?

The skins now have rareities that determine their price, this came with the new update.

I’m not talking about minor bugs. The reason why I uninstalled is because if the boss gets killed in my compound by me or anybody else and I open the map, my game freezes and crashes on a regular basis. I validated the game files, I’ve updated my drivers, etc. It is straight up unplayable. I open the map on accident and I’m out. Again I’m not the only one with this problem. This is not some minor bug, this is absolutely unacceptable for a PvP game with permadeath. But that’s the reality of this new shitty Hunt.

That’s why DayZ has open experimental servers running months in advance, and their push to official is largely bug free. But, oh my, Crytek wants a big reveal for big update, who cares about playability, buy our Battlelass.

The best to come of this update was Port Sulfurs new single.

How was that even an upgrade, they removed 2 maps, tanked the performance, increased the matchmaking time tenfold, reduced server performance, screwed up the ranking system, increased skin prices and introduced countless new bugs and crashes. If anything this was a huge downgrade.

They should’ve left Hunt the way it is and released Hunt 2, but they didn’t have the balls because they knew nobody would play that shit. I guess releasing good old fashioned sequels to multiplayer games is bad for business, especially if you’re such an incompetent dev. No, the new school way is to shitify you game in the name of a next gen update, and straight up deny everybody the ability to play the old version, see Overwatch, CS:GO, Squad, Warzone and now Hunt.

And don’t come at me for saying Crytek is incompetent. Incompetent is the most polite thing they can be called. What they’be done is straight up malicious. You know how I know? Because you could sit me down, 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and my whole job for months would be nothing but to come up with the most dogshit UI possible, and I couldn’t even come close to what they’ve decided to release. They must’ve had a whole TEAM of “experts” working 24/7 on that.

I swear I wish Steam would introduce a new rule. 2 hour refund window resets after every major parch, just to put the devs and publishers on a leash, when it comes to fucking up the product people have already paid for.

Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make. I bet my soul on that Concord was quickly thrown together in the last couple years by temp diversity hires and 3rd party contractors, or at least the version of Concord that we got now. I love that one of the devs said that “a lot of talented people worked on it”. If it really took them 8 years to make that is the oppsotite of talent. In 8 years I could probably get get a double masters in programming and game development and make a better game myself.

Yeah I agree.

I don’t think you understand what chaos in terms of gameplay means. Chaos comes from unpredictability. On maps like shipment unpredictably goes out the window.

“What’s gonna happen if I round this corner?” “Prefiring” “What’s gonna happen if I stay in this spot?” “Grenades.” “What’s gonna happen if I rush?” “Spawnflip”

That’s it, there’s all there is to this map. That’s no chaos that’s pretty much as deterministic as it gets. What people mean by chaos is “If I 5 kills, I chain killstreak and big number on scoreboard.”

I can only speculate on why but speaking from over a decade of experience, leave it to the respective gaming communities to always pick the worst, most uninspired maps every time.

I think it has something to do with the saying in game development “Given enough time players will distill the fun out if every game.”.

If a map gets you kills fast it will be always picked above anything else. It doesn’t even have to be a guarantee, the prospect alone for getting a high kill count is enough. This results in either very small maps being favored (Nuketown, Shipment) or maps with critical chokepoints (Operation Locker (BF4), Metro (BF3,BF4)), Fort de Vaux (BF1)). Also maps that allow for cheap non-counterable tactics to get kills like Base Rape (Suez (BF1)), Vehicle Camping (Golmund (BF4)), Spawn Camping (Piccadilly, (MW2019)), etc…

Generally, every map that rewards unsportsmanlike behavior will be a community favorite.

If I ever were to release a video game I would never allow for map voting. As a player, I’d rather play maps that I dislike every once in a while instead the same 5 maps every time. And as a developer, why should I bother to invests tens of thousands of dollars to make a DLC with maps, if they are never going to be played anyway. The cherry on top is, the community still has the audacity to complain if a DLC has less maps than the last one, but then never play them anyway.

You can also just unequip the gun before firing, but that breaks immersion. If I recall correctly, the XM16 and AK47 became essentially unusable because a soft press aims and hard press fires. But on the Vita the gun always instantly fires if you try to aim it.

I think DLCs are becoming a thing of the past in general. Usually the data for the DLC comes with the main game, you just buy a license to unlock it. I can’t remember the last time I bought a DLC and hat to download something additionally or update my game. I’m not a fan of it, but this is where we are going. This just means that wherever you bought the main game from, you will also have to buy the DLCs, since companies will never accept to share licenses between each other. This is not a Steam issue, this is a developer issue.

I always loved the progression from gathering by hand, to having a farm to grow things and having Felynes to send and gather stuff for you. I was a little bit disappointed that newer titles ditched the farm from Freedom Unite, it had a certain charm that other titles couldn’t match.

I agree the Ancient Forest was a maze. I think the Egg delivery quest always served a very good purpose to teach players a map. You had to try and find a good and efficient route, so naturally you would learn the paths from the starting area all the way to the top.

It just boggles me that these apex predetors all simply chill around the area just to be killed. It should be emphasized that these monsters are usually in areas unaccessible by Hunters. And the area that we play in is their common hunting grounds. And that’s why those beasts of which some are literal gods are so easy to kill, because they are outside of their natural habitat.

It doesn’t make any sense why Nergigante is such a big threat in World, but then you just kill 10 of them casually. And there’s also a tempered version, which somehow wasn’t the main threat of the story even though it would wipe the floor with normal Nergigante.

I always hated that High Rank is outside the main story line. The most difficult monster off the game should mark the end of the main story, not some random High Rank quest.

You’ve picked up on how much easier it is now to get to monsters, and finding monsters on the map. We received feedback that they were kind of difficult to get to sometimes, especially in maps that are very vertical where you have lots of different geographical elements. And, with the introduction of the Seikret, it’s easier for players to figure out where to go, and where to find monsters on the field.

That is probably my biggest critique of recent titles. It always feels like bigger monsters aren’t part of the environment, they are just there to be killed by the Hunter. If getting to the boss is so easy, what’s even the point of having a open world? Why isn’t every fight in an arena?
What also break immersion is the fact that you have to farm a monster like 15 times. By the 5th time your fight, items and approach is so optimized that it is barely a challange, you are just running through the motions. I always wanted fights to be more opportunistic. Instead if selecting a quest with you monster you’d have to wait for it to appear randomly (or even with some provocation). Sometimes you’d have to break of a fight if a higher priority monster shows up or you’re under prepared. Being able to teleport to your item box without penalty takes away all stakes off the fight. You can never run out of ammo, potions, traps etc… Fights should be longer and harder but way more rewarding. You should be able to select which parts you want to carve.
Also the are often times odd outlier quest which have you facing a monster outside its usual environment. But the monsters never change their behavior. Diablos should not be able to burry itself in solid rock, Rathalos should not be able to freely fly in a dense forest with trees, etc.

I’m afraid that this will be another step away for players who actually enjoy the hunting part instead of the mindless killing part.

Classic Controls? The PS2 and 3 controllers had pressure sensitive face buttons used for aiming, shooting and lowering the gun. One of the things that the PS Vita and Switch remake could never properly replicate. I doubt this will be handled well in Delta.

It felt like Rise undid a lot of that. I don’t know whether it’s because of the limitation of the Switch, but Rise felt lifeless compared to World. Monster Hunters problem in general is that after a few hours it starts to feel like a Boss Rush mode and the ecosystem gets neglected. Instead of a Hunter you become a Killer.

Yeah, but why? They would still all be owned by Valve. Or are you suggesting the government forcefully taking away private company assets?

I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.

Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?

Those things put seperatly Steam is far from the best option , except for the store part because that’s their main thing.

The launcher part is just part of Steams basic DRM, some games can be started from their directory without Steam running.

The subreddits and Discord servers for certain games are usually more organized, cohesive and feature better fan made content than Steams Community Hub.

Nexusmods is far superior to the Steam Workshop in every single aspect.

For Reviews most people go to YouTube and watch a video. Steams review system is more an indicator of general reception rather than actual gameplay.

Steam doesn’t try to squich all the other platforms they just provide a convenient alternative to them. So why are all those things suddenly an issue.

How do you even enforce breaking all those things up? Should there be a law that all governments agree on, that states Steam exclusively can’t host mods anymore? Should they be split up into subsidiaries, like Steam Store, Steam Community, Steam Mods etc.?

No, but anything can be grounds for a lawsuit as long as you have enough money to throw out. And given that they are being sued by the government, all bets are off.
That’s my whole point, none of the provided arguments are a good reason for a lawsuit. This has early 2000s “It’s those darn videogames” vibes, except this time instead of saying that their doing it to protect our children, they are openly doing it to get the money.

As far as I know, regional pricing through Steam is completely controlled by the publisher/dev. It’s literally a checkbox for each region and a text field to enter an adjusted price. And Steam has made great efforts to stop regional key trading to prevent people from just buying cheaper keys from 3rd world countries and reselling them.

What the hell are these points?

Steam forces developers to ask for higher prices? Ah, yes, because Activision is so eager to sell Call of Duty for just $20 but big bad Steam is just forcing their hand and they have to sell it for $70. See if you look at their own store where they can set their own prices its… also $70… hmm, that’s weird. Maybe others… nope same prices across all platforms. Almost like publishers can actually freely decide on their prices.

Steam also forces customers to buy DLCs for games on their platform. Well, how else is this going to work? I buy a game on Steam and then call up the devs to venmo them $2 and they send me a DVD in the mail? Or should I make a new account on some other website and get my DLCs seperatly from there? Most games don’t even sell you DLCs, they sell you credits so you can unlock content that’s already in the game. Often times you have to buy those credits trough the devs website and link your account to Steam. That’s already a pain it the ass.

Steam takes 30% of the cut. True, that sound like a lot. Imagine you’re a solo Dev and you’ve been working 9 years on a game. 3 of those years you’ve essentially been working just to pay off Steam. But look at what you get for those 3 years. You get a seperate store page for your product that you can essentially design however you want. You get access to high speed distribution servers all over the world, that also allow you to effortlessly push updates out, the option for regional pricing, the industries most reliable user review system, an integrated discussion and fan art forum, third party controller support (important for people with disabilities), and a refund system. Sure 30% still sounds like a lot, but would you be able to provide all this if you would’ve self publish the game, probably not.

Steam is consistently the cheapest option to buy games on sale. And even if it isn’t the cheapest, at no point in time have I thought, man Steam has this game for $7.49 but EGS has it for $6.99, I better get it on EGS. Maybe on GoG but no where else.

It’s mind boggling to think that through inflation and some shortages almost all groceries have nearly doubled in price over the last 20 years, but a AAA game is still $60, even though the cost of making a game has skyrocketed. Imagine gas prices would’ve stayed the same over the last 20 years and people would complian that gas station sandwiches would tast like shit.

I copied my own comment from a cross post on another instance, so don’t @ me.

And yet it still takes 4+ attemts to join a quickmatch and only they host can use the “remember scope” setting. Where the fuck is all this money going?