Otome-chan

Every time I see something about tinder it’s just worse and worse. why would I want to use it?

yes. I haven’t played the game so idk the details of what’s up. but at 1k+ planet-sized spaces it’s hard to have a team go over that by hand. Planets are large. But I have no doubt that bethesda team was probably super lazy as well.

I didn’t say it’s impossible. Just that it’s harder, takes deliberate effort, etc. For AAA games they don’t bother with that kind of thing because it’s larger expense and larger risk.

The issue with procedural generation is the game has to be built for it from the ground up and in a modular way. AAAs try to make themselves appealing by using novel new high quality assets that aren’t modular.

I haven’t played starfield so idk what they ended up doing, but from the sound of it they have pre-made assets/areas that they then place onto pre-generated worlds in a randomized way.

To make one of these “areas” procedural in itself, they’d then have to code a whole system for that. With AAA/3D the hard part is making modular environments without it looking repetitive or ugly.

My point isn’t so much that it can’t be done in a AAA game. But rather that it’s risky to do (not all players like it), and you have to structure your development around it. Lots can go wrong, there’s stuff you gotta sacrifice to make it work, etc.

If starfield is on the old bethesda engine then that’s even more of a reason. You can’t just plug and play an entire procedural generation thing in there without some fairly large overhauls or just gluing on an unrelated system.

In practice, bethesda probably took the lazy route: using their existing engine without major changes, then just making new assets for it, throwing stuff about a bit randomly, and calling it a day.

That’s the thing about procedural generation is: it’s a lot of effort and sucks up a huge part of the game’s development and comes at some pretty strict costs (repetitive looking environments/gameplay, reduced novelty, larger programming dev time to make it work). It can be done, but for a cost-cutting AAA studio they’re not gonna bother.

You can, but randomizing chests+locked doors is kinda complicated, and the more “interesting” your generations the harder it is to code and the more dev time it takes. And for a AAA game release you can’t really do that.

Key+Lock randomization is something that has been solved, and has been used most notably in procedurally generated zeldalikes. But that’s still niche indie territory, and not used for major game releases.

At a scale of 1k planets you’re going to have to rely on reused assets and procedural generation. At which point people not into procedural generation say that it’s “repetitive”. Especially if you only gen once for everyone and not each run lol.

AI generation of assets and code will theoretically eventually resolve this, but that’s quite a ways off. They’re not even usable for such with human assistance yet. And if you have ai generating the content, it’s not really a human team making that stuff lol.

“1000+ planets are dull on purpose”

No, they’re dull because no human team could make 1000 planets worth of interesting content in a single game development cycle.

The type celebrating nudity in baldurs gate are usually prudes who argue for censorship, oppose nudity and sexual content, etc when it comes to Japanese games. Sane people are pointing out this obvious hypocrisy.

People aren’t allowed to produce similar styles to other humans? So do you support disney preventing anyone from making cartoons?

It’s actually not copyright infringement at all.

Edit: and even if it was, copyright infringement is a moral right, it’s a good thing. copyright is theft.

there’s no distinction. people are just robophobic.

no one’s art is being “stolen”. you’re mistaken.

You should try playing Cattails which is basically exactly that. You play as a stray cat living a regular cat life. You can hunt, socialize with other cats (some are nice, some not), etc. No humans, just cats. The start of the game you get abandoned by humans I think?

ah, then yeah you’re right. it’s possible in theory, but in practice not really. and it’s not even desirable for most.

I don’t… get the appeal? Other than managing pirated games, what’s the use of this?

steam is a storefront, not a game manager.

you absolutely can stream games. It’s doable, it’s just hard. nvidia’s geforce now does game streaming over the internet. On a LAN it could really work well IMO. Steam link also did this on lan.

not super desirable for most users, but there’s an appeal there and it is indeed doable.

drm free isn’t really something you can guarantee unless you’re fine with some games simply not being available on your platform. Some devs insist on it, and if you require drm free, they won’t sell on your platform.

Personally, I prefer drm free, but if a platform only has it, and the game I want thus isn’t there, I won’t use it.

cloud saves is nice, but with decentralized solution that gets harder to do. who is “the cloud”?

I’m not really sure how a decentralized storefront would work? Where would the game files be hosted? Do you mean like a federated solution, that shares the encrypted game files around per instance? Or true decentralization where there’s p2p hosting, with the devs having to run their own hosting originally before players pick up the game? The former I could see working, the latter not so much (smaller devs often don’t have a 24/7 server to run for this sort of thing).

In terms of gui/client, I wouldn’t mind one that let’s me manage my games and isn’t “locked down” to a particular company. For instance I have both steam and epic games launchers, why can’t I just have one launcher that works with both storefronts?

In terms of features I want for a library/store client? Options to easily access the game’s install folder. Mod manager if applicable. I’d like an auto-update feature. It’d be nice to have crypto payment options (not as required, but optionally if devs/customers wish to use). I’d like it to be able to track games outside of the storefront. For instance, so I can log what switch games I own (even if unplayable on pc). Easily able to rate games, manage my reviews for them, categorize and curate game lists. Howlongtobeat support would be cool (or it’s own game time tracker). I love seeing how long it takes to beat games, and don’t mind contributing my times (and logging it for myself). Tracking play history (what days/hours, how long, which games).

Steam has a lot of good features. Having a customizable profile page. I wanna be able to quickly share with people my gaming tastes/preferences, have a little customizable profile thing. Find others into similar kinds of games. Groups are cool, but idk why I never feel like it’s worth it to contribute to steam groups (either feeling unwelcoming, or they’re dead lol).

Stream/viewshare options. Along with making it easy to jump into multiplayer with someone (either joining existing play session, or starting one together).

Tagging/categorizing/recommending games is very important, especially for a storefront. Steam’s system is dogshit for finding games I wanna play; mostly because the user tags end up mistagging a game entirely. hentai games show up for the “otome” tag, games like hello kitty get tagged as “horror”, etc. making them basically undiscoverable.

Stuff I don’t care about would be things like those steam items/unlockables, achievements, trophies, etc. So many game platforms do this and I just don’t care. I wanna play the game, with friends if multiplayer, and I wanna find new games and share what I’m into. don’t nag me about some item shit I don’t care about lol.

One thing that’d be cool is having an out-of-game item marketplace for player economy. For instance we see sites like https://nookazon.com/ pop up as a dedicated website. why not have that as a built in feature to the client?

I don’t care for “curators” other than on a user level. I run a steam curator page myself, but I think this sort of thing should be per person/account. Let me recommend a game or put a little thought about it that I can share with friends or others with similar interests.

I don’t care for steam’s “game community” thing. They try really hard to have a sort of mini-social-network for each game where you can post comments or screenshots or whatever. In the end, no one uses it seriously and it’s just spam.

Basically: I just wanna be able to manage the games I own, track the games I have outside the platform, track my playtime, show my game preferences, easily connect with friends, and watch others or jump into game together. Steam does this pretty well in most aspects. They have a lot of fluff but that’s ignorable.

epic games, in comparison, is just bad. the ui is laggy and slow, it’s ugly, there’s no way to curate what I like or categorize things, there’s no way to share my tastes/preferences with others, there’s no way to discover interesting new games. no way to manage mods.

ultimately though: there needs to be games, or a way to track or launch games that aren’t sold on the platform. steam lets you add non-steam games to launch, but it’s awful, annoying, and sucks.

also fix tags/recommendation/discoverability. I like niche stuff that people unfortunately feel the need to troll on, so discoverability ends up being difficult.

The code realize games are pretty good. Also gonna shout out Pretty Princess Party and it’s sequel Pretty Princess Magical Garden Island. They’re both on the girlier side of things but don’t get as much attention as they should.