Anybody still putting money into this is a sucker. For 50mil they should have had some game out and ready
Fuck, the entire time SC was worked on we had Elite Dangerous get funded, released expanded and crash and burned. No man’s sky launched from being “Sean Lied People Died” to the biggest redemption story in gaming and Starfield went from a twinkle in Todd Howards eye to complete. Two Everspace games. Rebel Galaxy 1&2. X4!! Fuck me.
What happened to Elite Dangerous? I used to play quite a bit before I had to move and ended up on horrible internet. I've finally got good internet but haven't gotten back into it yet.
Last I played, the arc was humans attempted firing a weapon targeting Thargoids and it failed. Thargoids got mad and attacked human systems in the bubble.
There was also some unhappiness around their spacelegs expansion and the subsequent end of development for console versions. I stopped playing since then not because of any problems but because I got into other games.
I was on Xbox (where my friends were). Once Odyssey flopped they cancelled any new updates to the console versions and after a couple of years haven’t No Man Sky’d Odyssey yet.
It’s my point of view that they created so much friction in the gameplay loop that players generally prefer logging to get their materials or whatever they need, and FDev’s policy is “sure, whatever,” because then they don’t have to improve the gameplay.
Wow… I played just long enough to buy a Dolphin, never got out of the first few systems, it was before Beyond’s release and I found the loop to be boring after about 15h…
One thing the others didn’t mention: They released a multilayer expansion, if you try to play in co-op the game crashes, they announced they wouldn’t fix the issue so they basically wasted resources on developing a game mode that doesn’t work and still made it a selling point.
Exactly. Star Citizen has been in development so long that not only have other developers already had the chance to jump in ahead of them, the genre's brimming with games now!
They had such an advantage going into this, how do you fuck up a golden ticket so badly??
They’ve made $600M. How is that fucking up a golden ticket? They’ve all been getting paid well for years. The people who spent money are the ones who don’t have a finished game. That probably doesn’t matter to the people who’ve paid off a large chunk of their mortgages in the meantime.
Sure, they've got money from all the good will they're soaking up, but at some point that good will and money will dry up...
If/when they finally do release a game, it's now got to not just compare to a whole full genre of games, it's got to be better than them in order to get that good will back.
Who cares about good will? If they release and people get pissed at the finished product then “shutter” the studio, take everyone to a “new” studio and work on another game with the experience and cash you got from SC
Since backing SC I’ve met my wife, got married and had three children. Two of which are already going to school. It’s crazy how much you can accomplish in 13 years. I wonder if the game will be done before my oldest turns 18.
The difference is that Dwarf Fortress only released on Steam because they had financial worries due to some health scares. They decided to release it on steam and charge for it but they wanted to deliver a major overhaul of the UI to justify selling it, even though people wanted to pay them for years.
DF has been in development for 20 years but it’s essentially a full game that they’ve been making better. Yeah it’s buggy (they simulate so goddamn much of course it’ll have bugs), but it’s at least a full experience that you can replay many times and never have the same experience.
Star Citizen does not deliver a full game, it’s just a glorified tech demo. It’s cool tech, but it’s not worth playing in my opinion.
Dwarf fortress was released and being distributed and successful before steam existed, the recent release was to attain more financial security as the devs age and have to deal with medical bills related to aging, failing bodies
It’s a DRM scheme to protect against piracy. Over the years I saw more and more shitty titles use Denuvo on release because God forbid someone steal their cash grab. A lot of titles that are of quality usually do not see the need for Denuvo.
Therefore, nowadays, for me Denuvo serves as an indicator of a potentially shitty release. They slap Denuvo on top of it so that they can pump & dump.
Maybe I’ll buy the game when it’s on sale, but for now I am too skeptical, especially since slapping additional DRM on an already DRM’d game (it’s multiplayer only and always online, unlike previous parts that allowed offline play) does not make any sense to me.
Edit: Seems the below statement was factually incorrect. Oops!
It’s a very obnoxious and heavy-handed approach to anti-piracy measures. It slows down games, kills framerates, gives users a whole host of other performance issues, and just makes the experience worse overall. It’s a product that doesn’t even seem to care to improve, because they make their money from publishers, not the people who buy and play the game. Many people hate it, and I believe it’s absolutely justified.
There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.
There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.
Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:
It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.
It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.
So, I went back and tried to look for a source, but you’re right. Thanks for informing me! From the few sources I read, those issues were debunked, exaggerated, or due to bad implementation. I want to add that I still don’t like the idea of Denuvo (or any other DRM) on digital media that I purchase, but that’s a different topic.
Honest question here. Could it be possibly that as they improved their DRM with more triggers and methods that it has started to impact performance since 2016?
As Empress was cracking Denuvo, I wouldnt be surprised if they started to quickly add extra defencive measures compromising what could have been optimised in the past.
I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.
Denuvo in particular causes performance issues. And drm in general just gives the paying customer an inferior product when the pirates will just just get the better version.
There have been instances where it worsens performance. My computer is mid tier-ish at this point (3070, i7 10700k) and I haven’t noticed any poor performance from games running Denuvo (latest I tried Dead Island 2). It’s likely worse performance loss on older systems, but those older systems probably can’t run new AAA games well as it is.
I think most people don’t like the fact that it takes a while to crack games running Denuvo, so they’re not able to be pirated for that time.
Why are we still preordering AAA digital video games from multi-million dollar corporations?There is no incentive to preorder AAA video games anymore - long gone are the days of midnight launches for physical games.
Cyberpunk 2077
Returnal
Forsaken
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
Fallout 76
Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition
The Last of Us Part 1
No Man’s Sky
Etc. ad nauseum
All of these games came with a half-assed apology from the publisher and how “this wasn’t their intention”. Yes, it was absolutely their intention. They released a knowingly broken game and charged us full price for it. They already got our money and laughed because they know we’re too stupid to do anything about it and that they’ve trained us well with “fear of missing out”.
How many times do us gamers need to get burned by video game publishers until we learn our lesson?
Stop rewarding and encouraging their predatory behavior. Opt out of this abusive practice by not preordering and voting with your wallet. Let them earn your money, so “they can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”.
I focused my mind and routed energy into my right index finger. I used my finger to maneuver my mouse wheel to gently complete a scrolling action to shift the web page up, but only ever so slightly. This maneuver allows me to find my comment quickly where I provided the answer.
Exhausted, but not yet beaten, I steeled my mind to locate the hyperlink to this comment. I did this by right clicking and copying the link to my clipboard
“not yet!” I screamed defiantly. I was not yet beaten. I had one final thing to complete before my journey ends - I need to provide this link to you.
With my last breaths, I channeled the last of my energy to complete a paste action to provide you the hyperlink to my comment.
Exhausted, spent, and my life force drained, I present to you my last hoorah. My greatest achievement. I provide you with the hyperlink to my comment. Cherish this moment.
Now that I have completed my assignment, I can now retire from this realm. My journey is over, and I’m proud of myself for being able to help you. Good luck in your journeys, and always remember me as the person who delivered you my comment. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your patience. I can retire, satisfied.
Pc had issues when it came to that platform, things like crashing and inability to launch the game. But that’s nothing compared to its debut on PS5. When it came to PS5, sometimes you’d lose your save file.
All those problems eventually got patched. When games get patched and they’re stable, that’s when it’s time to buy (especially because you’ll get a “definitive edition” for less money than the sorry state at launch). I like being a patient gamer when it comes to AAA games.
The comment was talking about broken games. If a game is broken, you will find out in two hours. If the game sucks and you buy it, it doesn’t matter if you pre-order or buy 6 months later.
It really depends. There are some fan-fucking-tastic games that I did preorder, like FFXVI, Metro Exodus, SF6, TLOU:2 (I didn’t like the story, gameplay + graphics saved it for me), Zelda: TOTK, Elden Ring… the list goes on.
I preordered Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, a physical Switch cartridge. I took a gamble with that but I decided to risk it since: Nintendo has a stellar track record of creating almost perfectly optimized first-party games throughout their entire history, and Zelda’s been in development for over 5 years. That was the exception I made, and I guess I got lucky. One day Nintendo might sully their track record. That’s probably when I’ll stop preordering physical Zelda games if they ever lose my trust.
When you preorder these other games, you certainly have to calculate that risk. Cyberpunk 2077 was made by a developer with a wonderful track record of producing fantastic video games. A lot of people trusted them and preordered, and those with lower hardware that met minimum requirements got burned while those that had superior hardware were fine. A gamble that didn’t pay off too well at launch when people trusted a stellar publisher and developer.
Regardless of the game, it doesn’t make sense to preorder digital titles. There will always be ones that knock it out of the park, but if they do release a wonderful game, certainly buy it but don’t preorder it. Reward them with your money only after they prove they’ve released a good game that’s worth it’s cost. Else, we continue this cycle and publishers will continue to repeat the same behavior without consequence.
All of us got burned with an expensive lesson. But it was well-learned. Now, you won’t get burned again and are a smarter customer thanks to games like KSP2.
Yes, and yes. It lacks a lot of features, the performance is terrible and it has a tonne of bugs. It’s like taking KSP and swapping the times when it glitches when the times it doesn’t. That’s how bad it is.
Unless I’m missing something here, this website does not provide a link to the original source and adds little to the discussion. They don’t even refer to them by their full name.
This is considered to be very scummy behavior not just in games journalism, but in journalism in general. If you can’t do your own coverage, at least have basic respect for the people who can.
What’s worse is that the title states this as fact when the original article claims it’s rumors from close sources, we don’t actually know when it’s coming or if dev kits are widely available.
Don't you see. The Switch 2 may have an LCD or an OLED screen! It also may, or may not, have backwards compatibility with the first Switch! It also may, or may not, release in 2024!
How can anyone not be potentially excited about these things that may, or may not, be true!
SEO centric content farms are a cancer on the internet and on information in general. We have the capability of democratically crowd sourcing the absolute best quality information out there, and make it available to anyone in the blink of an eye.
Instead we have an army of bots lazily rehashing half-content found on forums and reposting it as misconstrued fact, while battling with other bots for the top third of google’s increasingly godforsaken, ad-ridden search results page. All so us poor sods can be interested in something, search for it, and be consistently disappointed in the results we get back while our data is sold to people who will actively work to make the situation worse.
Denuvo has become a very strong indicator to me that not the game devs are calling the shots during development, but the Excel-sheet-business-suit-monkeys are.
Only some business-fool would look at a proposal to buy that piece of performance-guzzling crap and go "Hey, then everyone who'd be a pirate otherwise will buy my product and spend money in muh cash shop, that's totally worth the investment", ignoring the immense drawbacks for paying costumers.
especially in a frickin' coop-shooter where piracy will never be as big of a deal because people want to play together with others on your frickin' servers anyway....
Yeah, I don't get it -- the game is essentially online-only (not sure if you can play with bot teammates like the previous titles, but that wasn't too enjoyable anyway). Why pay for Denuvo as well unless you're out of touch?
Well, you can play "offline with bots", but, unless something has changed since last I checked, it'll be always online, which means that even if you want to play offline you need a constant connection to their servers anyway.
Almost feels like they're going out of their way to see how many features that harm users they can add and still be able to sell well...
If this is real fuck you Nintendo, so bull shit for not just making it oled. There’s a $50 difference right now between the regular and oled variant which could 100% just be worked into the new switch pricing. You just know they’re releasing the oled model 1-3 years after launch so people buy again.
You obviously haven’t discovered 4k nature channels on an oled then, I keep it on while I work and then look up and see all kinds of beautiful scenery and it calms me. I’m being legit when I say it’s life changing. The reds and blacks are amazing.
I get you, but there is much value in learning to appreciate - truly appreciate - the smaller things in life. A good roast of coffee first thing on a cold winter's morning can be life changing, at least in its small part and moment. Many of us spend many hours with our televisions, and a great TV can also be life changing. I find life much more enjoyable when I appreciate the thousands of wonderful moments in between the traditionally "life changing" ones.
Then vote with your wallet. Don’t buy something for more money, which have inferior features to the last generation product. This is clearly a case of monetiseing exclusivity and FOMO to sell you something which was not designed to last.
Switch emulators have weird stuttering, frame rate, and various issues. I should know I tried to emulate them. It was a mess. Also, a lot of people really don’t want a handheld with all the hassles of a PC. People like consoles because they’re simple. Hence why the switch has sold like 150 million, and the steam deck has sold like 1.5 million.
Switch has been out a lot longer and has a bigger company behind it. I don't think anyone ever expected SD to catch up in sales. However, the SD has clearly had an impact on the handheld market. And without tinkering, it functions way more like a console than a full PC.
And I don't know what setup you used for switch emulation, but I've emulated several switch games with perfect success. I certainly mostly play my switch games on switch, but I've put a handful on the deck for travel and it's been great. Along with my 3ds games since my actual 3ds went to electronics heaven.
I'm probably in the minority, but I don't mind a cheaper LCD model. The only time I see my switch screen is when I'm moving it from my living room dock to my bedroom dock. The only time I really use portables is like 8+hr flights, literally sits hidden under my TV 24/7 rest of time so I don't really need it to have a fancy screen. As long as both models have the same dock performance, I'm fine with it.
The people here really don’t understand Nintendo. They want the console to be as cheap as possible to get it to the most hands as possible and then make the real money on the games. Mom and dad see the price tag isn’t too bad and pull the trigger. Everything has a cost, including an OLED screen Vs LCD (presumably IPS).
Sales: 5.22 million standard Nintendo Switches, OLED 7.69 million units, 2 million Switch Lites. unit sales were down -21.3% year-on-year due to the global chip shortage, though the OLED Switch almost doubled its sales figures compared to the previous FY. 2023 - techspot
I have a switch lite. It costs me $140CDN used (as opposed to $250-$300 for an OLED). No complaints. Just wish I could play games like RDR2, Ubisoft on it.
Weren’t there rumors that they actually meant to release a new model years ago, but between the Pandemic and the Chip Shortage, they couldn’t get what they needed?
That said, with things like the GBA SP, the DSi and the New 3DS, it isn’t off-brand for Nintendo to release minor improvements along the way.
I’d bet money that the dev kits are just LCD, and there will be a huge revision between the dev kits and the finished product. Historically early dev kits look nothing like the actual console.
If you cared about visuals, you wouldn’t play in a handheld, in the same way that if you want to watch high quality video, you don’t watch it on your phone either.
The additional resources it needs are wasted on such a tiny screeb
IIRC payday 2 had glacially slow progression at launch. Now what if you could simply pay some (more) money to skip those boring early levels this time around?
I looked into it some more and it seems there was a “shady” script you could use to grant yourself any piece of paid dlc you wanted, so The Money People probably asked how they could ensure that doesn’t happen again and just didn’t care about the drawbacks for regular people.
DRM is part of an anti-cheat solution. Just like not being F2P is
If authentication is not properly checked, spinning up new accounts to evade bans becomes trivial. This is why so many live games will be “buy to own” or have different tiers in matchmaking that boil down to “spend five bucks on anything to play the real game”. And same with DRM checking for pirated copies.
The other aspect is regional restriction. Not sure if denuvo specifically does this, but you can pretty easily check what region a game was purchased for and what region it is playing in. If all those dirt cheap Brazilian copies are being played in Kansas? Report an error. It prevents people from exploiting regional pricing while still allowing those who have ridiculously low purchasing power to buy anything… and it mostly just screws over people who travel.
Overkill blew all their money with that WW2 spin off. And it crashed so hard there was a John Cleese shaped crater where it hit rock bottom.
They were only able to make Payday 3 with significant external investment. So basically, PD3 is going to be a gutted and whored game since those investors will get significant say what goes into the game. Denuovo just being the most obvious right now.
I think the singleplayer, aka the important bit, is going to be good. Leaks looked pretty promising. Probably not going to be as revolutionary as people expect after 10+ years of hype and speculation, but still probably a top tier video game surpassing their previous titles in many aspects. Online is probably going to be biggest shitshow of all time, though. Microtransactions, FOMO, subscriptions, battle passes, the works. Every bad thing about games as a service packed into one, with the additional bonus being that Rockstar can’t program a multiplayer to save their lives, so it’s going to be peer 2 peer, with the shitties netcode and matchmaking possible and absolutely zero protection from hackers. You know, like their last two multiplayers.
I was an original backer, I’ve played various iterations over the years and it really takes a lot of rose tint to find the game as it is enjoyable. The core loop isn’t even in place yet. The systems that do exist and work are interesting, the graphics and aesthetics are top notch, in parts, and at times it feels like we’re going to get something revolutionary. But then you play for a while and the unfinished jank gets to you, it’s not very fun. It’s cool, it’s impressive, the scope is insane and you can get lost in the vastness of space in ways that other games just can’t even approach. But it’s not fun. You can make it fun with friends or by setting up your own goals disjoined from the gameplay loop. Like try and jump a vehicle into the cargo bay mid flight or see how tightly you can race around asteroids. But if you just play the existing little loops it sucks. This is of course my subjective opinion. You might love the bounty system and the combat. You might love the salvage runs and transport missions but to me it’s like Euro Truck Simulator which is about the most boring shit I can imagine. And both the space and ground combat just isn’t even remotely as good as other games that just focus on that, which is understandable but I’m always left with this feeling of “will I really enjoy the finished product?” And I’m not sure. The game they said they were going to make in the Kickstarter, that game I would’ve enjoyed. I loved Chris Roberts games as a kid, but this monstrosity it has become? I just don’t know.
That said I really do believe they’re trying to make the best game ever. They just don’t fundamentally understand why we need deadlines and a fixed scope to get things out the door.
I don't think they were chasing newer tech, so much as the development was taking so incredibly long that their current tech had literally aged out of the common gamer's expectations and they HAD to do it over to seem current.
That may be. I do remember somewhere in a documentary that they kept re-developing stuff for different libraries/technologies. I think at least one was voluntary. I can't recall which doc this was, though.
I feel the same way. For the 30 or so dollars I spent as an early backer I’ve actually had some fun times in the game, and I don’t actually think it’s quite the total loss that people make it out to be, but it certainly should be far, far better than it is after a decade and 600m dollars invested in it.
You’re right. And even disregarding always online and/or GaaS elements if it’s anything like the other two PAYDAY games there is pretty much no reason to play it offline. It is a co-op game through and through.
There is no need to do so. "Currently, on the Alpha and Public Test Universe (PTU), all ships and vehicles are given a basic insurance plan that does not expire to facilitate testing. At this time, it requires no upkeep or fee for players to acquire basic ship loss coverage."
I don’t care how you spend your money, but you were the one arguing that the game is only 35 dollars and that almost all your ships were in game and flyable. So it certainly seems like you have spent more than that. So it certainly seems this game is much more expensive to the people that are still most interested in it.
Idiot here. Put in 40€. Skeptical before I put in the money. But I liked the vision and had some friends that liked the game. Played for maybe 40 hours. Had a lot of fun with it. And a bit less fun when it crashed right in a mission. That was 3 years ago. Haven’t touched it since. Maybe I’ll get into it again to check it out. But no hopes for it being completed
The first (and last) time I put in money was in the crowdfunding days. In fact, I did it so early they weren’t even using Kickstarter for funding.
Even though the current alpha is very buggy, I also more than got my money’s worth over the many, many years. I really would like to see the game get finished. But, what’s already there is really impressive.
The game has missed every possible deadline, and there’s every chance it will never be finished. But, the one comforting fact is that it’s missing the deadlines because they’re being too ambitious. Like, they redid the game engine to use 64 bit precision instead of 32 bit because they want it to be possible to drop a wrench at some random spot on the surface of a planet, and have another player fly across the solar system, go to the right spot, and see a wrench sitting there.
I wouldn’t put any more money in today, but I’m still glad I helped fund the game, and because I’ve been able to keep from adding more money, I actually consider my money well spent.
I bought it for a short time. They have a 30 day policy.
I returned it within the week. Its just way too buggy. I dont even care about the pay to play ships, whatever.
But the bugs with missions was awful. The NPC/AI fighting is nonexistant. The flight characteristics were better with n64’s star fox 64. Its just not even close to being there.
Im a sucker for space games. If i want a flight sim ill play elite. If i want a space legs discovery game, ill play starfield. If i want to get stoned and look at weird animals with small heads and cool colors, ill fire up no mans sky.
Squadron 42 has been the primary development focus, star citizen is just the playground made by a few devs with left over sq42 modules - until sq42 launches then star citizen will be the main development focus. Until then, star citizen is just a fundraising platform, I thought this was obvious
I bought the cheapest version a few years ago. Turns out that the game was a tech demo, but a very glorious tech demo. Flying near the cities, to the atmosphere, in space, all were very beautifully done.
As a game, pretty much a failure though. As a money vacuum, pretty good.
I think it was a positive experience as a whole, though. Never experienced anything similar since or before.
Adding DRM to a co-op game is one of the stupidest things you can do. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be adding DRM to a game that is already always-online.
If you do your authentication with online servers properly it is virtually impossible to get the full experience by pirating anyway so the only thing you’re doing by including DRM is taking performance and convenience from paying customers
The main point of co-op games is to play with friends. In order to do that, you (usually) need to connect to the games official servers, which you can’t do on cracked games (for the most part) which makes DRM pretty pointless. It prevents you from enjoying maybe a lazily thrown together campaign and it’s more of an insult than anything else.
Plus, it’s also worth mentioning DRM hurts paying customers by causing reduced performance in-game and also inconveniencing them.
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