now on lemmy.world

  • 0 Posts
  • 975 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • I think they’re called that because they postdate the “looter shooter” that combined Diablo-esque “action RPGs” with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. “Looter” without the “shooter” is a much better name for Diablo’s genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

    I’m still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don’t know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn’t also get assigned the label of “boomer shooter”, because then it’ll be harder for both audiences to find what they’re looking for.


  • Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.

    And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?

    That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you’re in a market dominating position like they are.

    Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.

    This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it’s stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can’t ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it’s doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I’m no analyst. There’s certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there’s no Blu Ray copy of it, you’re just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else’s machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.

    Gen Z is coming through and they’re going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I’ve got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?

    And when consoles aren’t so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it’s not like there’s a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.


  • I’m back into Final Fantasy VII, which I’ve never finished before. I’ve been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It’s very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I’ve got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I’m lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you’re trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I’m hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

    I’m replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I’m not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I’d enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

    I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

    Now that I’ve finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I’m back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

    Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.








  • I beat the base game of The Outer Worlds and started the DLC. This game ought to have more eyes on it in the wake of Starfield. It’s just a better version of that game. Each settlement you come across might have about 10 NPCs in it, and each one of them is connected to the other ones via quests that help you form a picture of just what happened here before you landed. It’s excellent.

    I also finished Penny’s Big Breakaway. When you hit a flow state in this game, it’s so, so good, but a bit of jank in the physics and controls for the game hold it back. Like last week, my recommendation is still to wait a few months to play it, in hopes that patches can square away some of these issues.

    And then there’s my usual fighting game shenanigans in Street Fighter 6 and Skullgirls, trying to be the FGC equivalent of “swol”. The Capcom Cup finals for SF6 were a lot of fun to watch despite there being too many Lukes.