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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOPtoGames@lemmy.worldA New Guilty Gear Game Has Been Canceled
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    5 hours ago

    The earliest this project could have started was 2018, after they made Dragon Ball FighterZ. Before that, ArcSys was on no one’s radar. The code that Tokon is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt built on debuted in Strive in beta form approximately 1 year ago, meaning that the project was probably not in ArcSys’ hands until after Strive launched, in 2021, at the absolute earliest. Sony had limited partnership arrangements with ArcSys at this point already, with PlayStation themed color palettes for characters in the game. But 2021 is also still likely to be too early, because Dragon Ball was still getting considerable attention, and GranBlue had just launched fresh into a world where it needed to be reworked for rollback immediately, because the market demanded it, eventually resulting in GranBlue Fantasy Versus Rising. So my best bet is that it started development in 2022.






  • That Tainted Grail game that just came out this year is supposedly the indie Elder Scrolls. Maybe you’d argue that’s AA, but that’s still a symptom of how our standards have shifted. Games like Resident Evil are also abundant these days; not so much like Resident Evil 4 in particular, but RE4 was an experiment that split the difference between old Resident Evil and modern third person shooters.


  • Reminds me of this post on Bluesky. These ads were wild at the time, too; even some that predate this era. There was Fear Effect, which was basically marketed entirely on the back of the game featuring lesbians when that was taboo. There was Rayman standing at the urinals with a guy in 9-5 business attire presumably staring at Rayman’s dick. The Neo Geo “You need a pair of these” steel balls “to play one of these” ad. Plus the shockingly racist European white PSP ad; that was a billboard, not a magazine ad, but it had “video game magazine ad energy”, in this case with “(negative)” at the end of it.






  • I loved it, but I rarely use it anymore these days. Often enough, trying to remap the inputs on it errors out in the Steam Input interface, and I’ve gotten tired of fighting with it. I also never used the left pad for anything and would have preferred an actual D-pad. The right trackpad, especially when paired with gyro controls, is so much better than a right stick for every function you could use a right stick for, and I’ve put it through its paces; but that only works when you can map an actual mouse. Often times, the game will explicitly switch between “controller mode” and “mouse and keyboard” mode, and I hate playing with a controller but seeing keyboard glyphs. Also, due to my preferences, and where the market has headed lately, there have been very few games coming out where I need to “aim”, which is where the Steam controller beat a traditional Xbox controller by the widest margin. So unfortunately, between the software being a pain and there not being a compelling reason to bother putting up with it, I haven’t been using my Steam controller lately.



  • I’ve been looking for deathmatch shooters for a long time, like what we got from the late 90s to the mid 10s. There are very very few. I don’t care if I or anyone else move on quickly, because I primarily want to play with my friends, and the deathmatch mode typically came alongside a campaign and maybe co-op modes. That’s not a prisoner’s dilemma, and the market hasn’t really been making games like that anymore. Same for things like arcade racers akin to F-Zero or Burnout.


  • I think there’s also an argument to be made that all of this desire to suck up our attention has made it more difficult for the same developers to market their next game, since their potential customers are all preoccupied with something they haven’t stopped playing. It’s extremely natural for most people to fall off of a game after its initial release, and it’s definitely going to happen once they take their thumbs off the scales.


  • I think the incentives matter. Diablo II is about making number go up, but Diablo IV has an active incentive to slow you down and make that number go up at a certain rate so that they can upsell you again later. And rather than taking a hardline position, I’d at least ask the question out loud: Is it possible to have a business model for a game other than selling a good product at a fair price and not have it eventually evolve into something gross? Maybe the old shareware model, which is basically just a demo, but other than that, I’m not sure.


  • Loot boxes, for example, aren’t inherently predatory; they can add an exciting and rewarding surprise element when balanced with noble intentions.

    When you sell them, they’re unregulated gambling that children can access.

    When designing a battle pass, a designer must answer questions like “How much faster should a premium player progress compared to a F2P player?” and “How long should it take for a player to finish the battle pass?” I’ve seen designers balance it fairly, like by requiring 30 minutes of daily play to complete the free track or $5 to unlock the premium pass.

    I still don’t see a way that this could ever be anything other than creating an incentive to play the game for reasons beyond the game being fun, no matter how “fair” it is to the person needing to spend money or not. They’re still artificially creating another body in the matchmaking pool that creates value for someone more willing to part with their dollar. If your player base dries up when you stop offering your battle pass incentives, I’d say that was some artificial retention, and it’s kind of gross.

    I definitely didn’t need more reasons to hate live services. The business model has always affected the game design, and a lot of the author’s bullet points could be seen as far back as the arcades, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a better business model for all parties than “sell a good product at a fair price”.