This is my main concern about the game. With tech that moves this quickly, you have to understand that game companies who are established are living on the very edge of that debt.

Like starfield for example. Who knows how old it’s code is from the start of its development. It’s why Bethesda games break frequently and crash often. When you develop games on a 8-10 year cycle, think of how many hardware generations that is. 3 to 4 right? So when you’re talking about building an engine, then running it and building a game, then supporting it, all over the coarse of 15-20 years of coding? It’s a giant mess to program and there’s no way in hell it can be optimized properly.

Not to mention the massive task of upgrading the game as new hardware and new engine features arrive.

I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.

And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.

Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.

Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.

I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.

They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.

The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.

Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.

Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.

I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.

If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.

The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.

That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.

The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.

Anyways that’s my rant.

Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.

I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.

The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.

The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.

And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.

There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.

I don’t think that we need to continue to “think” it’s bad for the games industry. It IS bad for the industry. Period. Very famously, obsidian got less money and lost out on a bonus from the initial release of fallout NV because it didn’t hit 80 on metacritic. We need to stop pretending these scores are objective or reflect anything about user enjoyment of a game. Users maybe, but the critic score is worse than useless. It’s downright misinformation to aggregate critic scores.

Like the entire point of critics is to provide different perspectives on a game. Why would I want their average? The average of their opinion is not the average gamer opinion and it also isn’t the average of the individual readers opinion.

I need no further proof than go look up the last 5 games you played on metacritic and try to guess the critic and user score and get within 5 points each time.

Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:

“ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”

Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).

IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre

I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.

I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.

Ratings. Are. Stupid.

When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.

Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.

This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.

Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.

I’m not a game dev, but from my modding experience it depends on the game.

MOST of the games that have these insane file sizes actually do it to cut down on processing and on load time and reduce pop-in. If a texture or level doesn’t need any decompression, it loads faster. So entirely depends on the asset. So a lot of games do still compress textures. That’s why there’s a discrepancy between the data downloaded in steam and the actual runtime storage requirement.

The 3D models themselves are usually lower space. As is dialog and audio. Though all of those will be mildly compressed probably.

Does the patch size even mean anything anymore? It seems like they just ship out anything that can’t be recompiled on the users end

I was reserving judgement. Just giving reasons to be cautious going into this. Everyone should still be excited, I’m just saying “expect a Bethesda game” so look at their recent games and that’s what you’re getting into probably. With those expectations, you’re less likely to be disappointed

I’m just concerned and will wait for reviews before buying (like everyone should). Bethesda has a reputation for being slow to fix games and having lots of bugs and crashes at release. And even then, they patch them up to being playable and leave the rest for modders to fix.

What makes you think they stick with their games? They fix bugs for about a year or so after release and move on, just like any other studio. They fix stuff in re-releases but you have to pay for that.

Yes but they had an incentive to stay with it. It’s actively profitable. Whereas with star field not so much

You’re not wrong. But I was just pointing out the validity of talking about the semantics of piracy. I ultimately don’t care what people decide to do, just be aware of what it is you’re doing by blocking ads. Which is most of what Linus was saying.

It’s not like you see the ads that have trackers, they get blocked. So it’s still part of the agreement sort of. And you’re also aware that it’s revenue for them. People assume it’s a moral argument, it’s not. You can pirate from absolutely evil people, but it’s still piracy. That’s why I don’t view it as worth arguing over for the most part. I WANT people to realize that it’s piracy but that they’re actually doing something ethical.

After fallout 76, I’m worried. After canceling Prey 2, I’m worried.

I want to be clear still, piracy isn’t a problem or wrong necessarily. I’m not pushing a corporate narrative by saying this, I’m more concerned about creators and other sites that use ads for revenue such as newspapers. So if you want to “pay” a site without money, don’t pirate their content. That’s all. That’s similar to what Linus has said.

But I think this is somewhat similar to asking you for a ticket at the door for a movie. If the “ticket” is watching the ad and they’re asking you to buy the ticket (with premium) or get it from ads, bypassing the doorman would mean it’s piracy. Doesn’t even matter if the doorman doesn’t try to stop you. Doesn’t matter if they don’t pull you out of the movie.

You being the product is irrelevant to the piracy thing. But it is relevant to the moral thing

Purchasing and pirating don’t have contractural agreements. You don’t have to have a ToS to pirate something.

If DuckDuckGo does block the ad in their browser, they’ve done the work for you. And if they do not but instead Google decides to serve it to you without ads in a browser, it’s not piracy to not have ads.

As long as the intended revenue of the content you’re viewing is being blocked, you’re pretty much pirating it. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just a definitional thing.

It is, yes. It’s a separate conversation of if it should be illegal or immoral to keep your privacy this way. But as long as you are violating the intended method of revenue for the content you’re viewing, that’s piracy to me.

I think most people hear piracy and think it’s immoral or illegal, but there are very valid reasons to pirate content such as game and movie preservation.