My most Luddite opinion is that you must pick one

a) the ability to connect with arbitrary numbers of people simultaneously around the world

b) rich, multi-modal, interaction that mutually exposes vulnerability among participants

This was terrible game design. But I squeezed some lemonade out of it. I'll explain

Call of Duty Warzone added a new map, "Rebirth Island". It's a new battle royale island, which is great, but it's very, very small. Super small, actually. They even know this because they currently only have about 50 people on it max.

To "celebrate", they added an "event" with about 15 "achievements" so you could win themed watches, patches, the usual. One of them was that achievement, "BRB", which is "Pilot a Vehicle on the Island for 20 Minutes".

Problems are multiple. First - the island is super small - you have to drive in circles around very tight turns. Also: It's a small space so EVERYBODY shoots at you because they HATE you because you're a jerk in a vehicle on a small island. You're just spreading anger.

So it sucks for everybody.

Cyberpunk 2077 is not fun: a thread

Thanks to someone generously lending it to me, I’ve been playing for the past couple of days. As a Japanese person, its really been nothing but bad vibes for me.

I’ll list them in no particular order below:

Character Creation: lots of presets, little to no customization.

Can’t change the size of any of the facial features (nose, eyes, etc) which really limited options.

ZERO, and I mean ZERO body options. You NEED to look buff, apparently, in a world where every body is possible.

This, of course, doesn’t even touch on the gendered voice options, which many people much smarter than me have covered.

Combat: basically Borderlands.

Weapons are your standard types; pistols, rifles, SMGs, with a rarity level and a calculated DPS. Nothing wrong with this specifically, but unlike Borderlands, its really difficult to tell from a distance if a weapon will be worth it.

There is color coding, but the icon is really tiny and won’t show up unless you’re close enough. A far cry from Borderlands, where gear is very clearly highlighted.

Rarer items allow you to customize them with more slots, but the mods are all +% buffs and difficult to grasp.

At Christmas, many of us are getting new computer games.

With the season, we also turn to nostalgia & looking back on the past. It's often hard to shake the feeling that games of our youth were simply better than games coming out now. Let's explore why that might be (1/22)

"Well, that's clearly because games in the 80s and 90s didn't have any politics and forced inclusivity"

Nope, that's complete bollocks, and nothing to do with why you remember those games so much more fondly

(maybe I should have started the thread with this, lol) (2/22)

For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line between modern and old games at roughly the early 2000s.

For many, the 'golden age' of gaming is the era from the SNES/Genesis to the early years of the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. (3/22)

There wasn't just one thing that made games from that period feel so great. In my opinion, it came down to 7 interlinking key constraints. As development teams & players looked to overcome them, they had to either mitigate or innovate.

Let's look at each of them in turn (4/22)

First up we have:

'Just enough' hardware performance

Games were finally able to look *amazing*, as long as developers knew the limits of the platform they were working on. You couldn't push for realism, so instead you had to commit to an artstyle. Reply with your favs! (5/22)

Hello friends, let's talk about gamer expectations of work/life balance & why they need to stfu.

There's a certain type of Gamer w/ a Hard R that believes their video games are the center of all existence. They've made their identity so fixated on gaming in general, or a game/games in particular, that nothing else comes close.

To those obsessive gamers, those in the game industry should consider themselves privileged to work on such important material. And w/ that privilege comes accepting that nothing in the employee's life is as important as The Game.

B/c gamer identities revolve around a game, they literally cannot comprehend that an employee might have other things in their life. They don't understand that employees, esp devs, have a right to boundaries b/c The Game trumps all.

There's also very little understanding among gamers about how game development, you know, *works* & they usually assume a lot less work is needed. So when combined w/ a lack of belief in employee boundaries, they truly expect immediate results.

I've been banging this drum for years now so do excuse Round 5,796,877 of it but the issue of smaller games only finding a relatively small audience is one the trad games press has been pointing out for a very long time now.

I don't think it hurts to do this one over again but with [whatever media], just it absolutely is a fundamental of the games industry and one an algorithm, sexy presentation or whatever can only ever make a limited change to.

Obviously, this is not a reason to not make that change. Usual Twitter/nuance/context loss disclaimer applies here.

So, anything that can help and doesn't make anyone's life worse in any way, go go go. Fully behind it.

Before everything was "influencer" led (Molyneux save me, I hate that term) - magazine staff knew and dedicating space to indies was something that was done knowing it wasn't what people buying were reading in big numbers.