Game musings and news

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Mongrel
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 22, 2021 4:57 am



Whatever you're mentally picturing of when seeing that headline, the details are even worse. Much worse.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:34 pm

Ars has the most detailed Playdate writeup I've seen so far.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Friday » Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:30 pm

Mongrel wrote:

Whatever you're mentally picturing of when seeing that headline, the details are even worse. Much worse.


As if we needed another reason to never give Blizzard money again after their China bootlicking censorship bullshit.

Seriously, at this point, if you ever give Blizzard money, you just don't give a shit about human decency.

I honestly hope this fucking burns down their whole company and kills WoW and Overwatch and every other game they run. I don't give a fuck.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Grath » Thu Jul 22, 2021 6:23 pm

The problem is this is a gaming-wide or even tech-wide endemic problem, it's just that Blizzard's creeps went all the way to the top and they got caught.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 22, 2021 6:28 pm

Grath wrote:gaming-wide or even tech-wide

Bigger.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jul 23, 2021 12:30 am

Incidentally,
“The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today,” the company said

sure is a strong and confident defence! :V

"We have been extremely cooperative with the DFEH throughout their investigation, including providing them with extensive data and ample documentation, but they refused to inform us what issues they perceived"

"We didn't deliberately obstruct their investigation!"

(allegedly)
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Fri Jul 23, 2021 6:16 am

I vaguely wonder which of those companies did the most to poison the other, but it couldn't get this bad without both 'cultures' being broken at the core.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 27, 2021 1:50 am

I mentioned I'd put up a summary of the state of Path of Exile in Jackchat tonight because a couple people were interested, so uh, here ya go. It still ended up as a longpost, hence the spoiler tag. If you just want to get to the really crazy parts, scroll down to "Current State".

⇳ Click to Expand Summary
Path of Exile; or "how to flame out your game in a truly spectacular fashion."

So, Path of Exile. Diablo 2/3 clone ARPG. Starr and I finally quit 4 months ago, which is now two leagues ago (latest one dropped last weekend).

It would normally just be another story of a game slowly dying to the usual demons of greed, cruft, incompetence, ego, more greed, and greedboners, whose survival was in no small part due to a severe lack of competition in the genre and many bizarre critical failures by would-be competitors (e.g. Wolcen, a game which went live with an infinite-duping exploit which utterly destroyed its economy on the very first day and which they refused to roll back even though it was still just the first damn day). But PoE is now killing itself in an unconventional enough way to be both baffling and a little entertaining.

Background:

The company which produces PoE is called "Grinding Gear Games" in New Zeland. Never was a name more appropriate! A small company by industry standards, they're still the largest game company in NZ. GGG regularly claims that NZ immigration law restricts their hiring (mostly bullshit), so this means they have an EXCEEDINGLY small talent pool to draw from.

The original owner, Chris Wilson, funded it's creation and hired staff who "shared his vision" (albeit from within that tiny talent pool). Chris is on record (in bits and pieces) as having only ever played one video game for any real length of time - D2, in college - and very badly at that (as Brent said "How the fuck do you play D2 BADLY?"). That experience became his vision for a game of his own (likely built with RMT money). As of this post Chris has not played "his" own game in 5-odd years. He also sold out his shares to TenCent several years ago, but remains the chief designer and CEO.

PoE leans towards the grindy and technically challenging side of ARPGs, where random death is expected and never completely preventable no matter how skilled you are (LIFE IS TOUGH, BITCH). Its flavour is the sort of teenage "grimdark" aesthetic that just means lots of dark colours and shitty, emotionally-stunted writing, the sort of comic ineptitude that ended up creating a world where one of the storyline bosses hides in a pocket dimension (filled with BLURRRD!, naturally), which is technically hidden up his own ass. A charitable person would say this was as intentional gag.

Friday suggested that Chris Wilson is the type of guy who, if GM-ing always sees himself as being in opposition to his players, and IMO that is very much an accurate assessment. He may in fact be a genuine sadist, but more on that below.

There is a permanent league where your items from temporary leagues accumulate. Most players only play the temporary leagues, which gives everyone a clean start on even footing every three months, with a new gimmick each time, of course.

Technical Issues:

PoE as a game has faced a number of technical challenges over time. Mainly, that the game code is known to be horrifically bloated spaghetti, the result of years of shit stacked on shit ad infinitum. The game itself comes as a single sealed file, which is currently just shy of 70 Gb. It is the single largest file on my computer by an enormous margin. What takes up that much room in what's a Diablo clone? No one's quite sure, even the devs, as it's more black hole than black box.

The three-month league system also means that content is pushed out whether it's ready or not (well, there's only varying degrees of "not ready", really). Early League is typically unplayable due to severe and numerous bugs. If you play leagues from day one, you are not a beta-tester, you are a pre-alpha tester. Also probably a masochist who enjoys staring at load screens and BSODs.

Up until recently, when they finally broke down and got a few in-house playtesters, Chris proudly insisted they never do any testing (!) other than some sort of automated code pass-through. Of course, the in-house playtesting did not improve anything.

The graphics are a total shambles. The designers deliberately use poor visibility as a crutch to raise difficulty (or, frustration, rather) - Imagine hundreds of overlapping grey enemy effects on grey ground... INTENTIONALLY (or w/e colour... blood red, rusted brown, you get the idea).

Also, PoE is a loot game so everything is lootsplosion, most of which is utterly worthless, making filters mandatory. Yet items which are hidden by filters (filtering is incorporated into the game itself) are still being rendered *somewhere* in the engine as you play.

Hilariously, the sound is also somehow linked to graphical clutter and overload (yet most items do not actually have drop sounds!). No one's quite sure how, they just know the witchcraft where you can sometimes improve performance significantly by editing the game's .ini to shut off all sound. CODE SCIENCE! MAGIC!

The end result is a game which uses a 20-year old isometric graphic style, with 1-inch tall characters, muddy (often literally) sets and only two walls rendered in any area, no camera angling and only a small amount of zoom, yet performs SO poorly, that even the best machines of [current year], with specs with 64 Gb RAM, 8 Gb GPU, and a top-of-the-line processor, MOBO, and SSD can struggle to run it without severe stuttering, even on "medium" graphics settings.

Balance and Design Philosophy:

The game has long had issues with using RSI as an actual game mechanic. The game has hundreds of currencies, many of which drop as shards (from 20 up to 300, especially for newer currencies) which must be combined to form actually-usable orbs or w/e, even low value ones. So filters often filter out most low-end currency and shards as well as items.

This is extremely intentional on Chris' part - and he has stated so many times. Causing your players physical injury is a power move to weed out the Real Harcore Gamers from the literally limp-wristed sissies. As a loot-based game and an intensive one at that, even some of the most basic mobs can drop a dozen of items with hundreds or even thousands of drops present at times, almost all of which are utterly worthless, not even as vendor fodder outside maybe the first twenty minutes of the storyline.

This ties into the fact that the game leans hard on padding out content with mechanics which actively waste your time. Extensive forced backtracking, complex procedures to "juice" areas to make them worthwhile to do, crafting based heavily around long-shot RNG and spam elements (RSI again!), and so on.

Chris' attitude also imparted a design philosophy which states that if a player finds a way to have fun in a manner Chris did not explicitly anticipate, then this is Wrongfun.

As a result, GGG subscribes to an extremely negative "nerf EVERYTHING" balance model where actual buffs are extremely rare. Patch notes and updates are events of fear and loathing as you can reliably expect 90% of it to be bad news, with hundreds of minor and major nerfs and perhaps a dozen buffs, if at all. Most "buffs" are actually just new power-crept items or skills, which are eventually knocked down. They even enjoy taunting players in the patch notes with lines like "existing versions of this item can be updated to new values if you really want to for some reason!" or in one particularly infamous example a beloved skill getting his with the third nerf in a row accompanied by text that actually read "(this is a buff)."

People are above all, not allowed to get comfortable with a build. Even modestly successful builds which last for 2-3 leagues without any game-breaking features at all are guaranteed to see the hammer for multiple leagues afterwards.

To be fair, forcing continual change can be a valid design philosophy which actually works and is enjoyed by some players, but GGG does so in a purely reactionary way, with unused skills and builds left untouched and unsupported, which is part of why so much of the loot is worthless: Most of the items in the game are now the wreckage of old builds and old versions of the game.

Superficially, one of the main appeals of the game is a skill tree which is MASSIVE and theoretically incredibly robust, with hundreds of pathways and millions of possible configurations, but only a tiny percentage of them are viable to even get a player to the endgame, let alone actually do tough endgame content (the "you can do anything with any class! Universal Skill Tree was one of the rare bits of smart design which did draw us in to the game... the other was that the expansion we happened to start with was funny as fuck and atypically well-written). So most leagues are very inbred with only 2-4 truly viable "meta" builds (this in a game with 7 bases classes).

Current State:

It's the last two leagues where things really went full pants-on-head crazy.

Last league they effectively removed all endgame play. Not actually a joke or hyperbole: They literally removed all the remaining means of getting high end loot drops in any meaningful quantity from endgame play, which rendered most previously-endgame areas pointless. They took away the loot in a loot-based game. They also backpedalled and gutted the improved crafting system they'd introduced, for all the worst possible reasons. They'd waffled about it, but were ultimately terrified of players being able to craft their gear properly without too much effort.

On top of that there was a big scandal where streamers were caught being given preferential RNG and queue spaces for launch (which was not actually a surprise), and the response from one streamer, all but endorsed by the company, was "Life's not fair".

With literally nothing to do, most people quit much earlier last league. It still had a normal launch, however, and while the last league had the lowest overall number of players of any PoE league in years, this was still only an overall drop of about 5% for the first two months of league. Point being that they fucked up large, but the game was not in a totally unrecoverable state.

Current league launched last week and that's when things really got "fun".

This league they made drastic across-the-board flat nerfs to every support gem in the game (almost all skills and supports are gem items), with the end power level of 95%+ of the already small proportion of still-viable-ish builds reduced by 40% or more. Cost multipliers of support gems were ALSO raised at the same time (this was already rolled back just today... partially), leaving most skills unreliable to even use if properly supported. Niche builds and quirky builds, already on life support, were toast. The few streamers who built hilarious meme builds and silly things have folded up their tents (RIP Ramyeon PoE).

Also, flask use was basically destroyed (if you know Diablo or its clones, you know how core flasks are to all classes and builds' gameplay) with most numeric values cut by as much as 85%. Even basic movement skills and the movement buff on speed flasks were decimated, so even the feeling of just walking around in areas has become agonizing.

Unsurprisingly, numbers have plummeted. Normal is launch is roughly 150k concurrent players at peak. This one started at 90k and dropped to under 80k in less than a day, and 45k by the end of that weekend, a number which you don't normally see for three months. Nor have they even stabilized. Everyone is just noping out of the game as fast as they game. Even the bot farmers and RMTers are scuttling away like so many cucarachas fleeing a house fire.

Meanwhile Chris Wilson issued a statement that he doesn't care about player numbers, that the game is not intended to be "easy" and that quality of life features like auto pickup are for the weak. He repeated again that his vision has always been for a video game he interprets as "challenging" (and which a normal human would just call "literally physically painful"). Nero wasn't just fiddling while Rome burned, he was actually driving up and down the Appian Way, spraying gasoline on bystanders.

We thought that maybe there'd be a time we could go back and play again. We always enjoyed having a game we could both play together (these can be tough to find), even if it had its warts. But now? Even if Tencent fires Chris (and imagine being in a position where your only hope for a game you played is that TenCent assumes control of it, lmao), the game's probably toast. Once a game sees player drops of this severity, it's almost impossible to get them back.

It's been something else to watch, I guess.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Friday » Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:04 am

GMs are as much a dev as any videogame maker, and it's very very easy to fall into the trap of perceiving your players as "the enemy."

"You're not having fun the right way" goes right along with that view. 90% of all the posts about DnD on the internet (reddit, forums, twitter, whatever) are either GM-sided jokes about "beating" your players, or legitimate player complaints about megalomaniac GMs.

What a lot of GMs (and game devs in general) don't realize is that the GM/Dev is supposed to be the player's best friend. They're there to help out the player when they're struggling, to guide the player to a route or plan or gameplay style that brings them a fulfilling, fun experience. Yes, you create and tune the world they explore, and encountering challenge is and always will be part of what most people consider fulfilling and fun, but that doesn't mean you're "out to get them." I don't know why so many GMs and Devs assume this attitude. Superiority complexes, I guess? Who knows.

Matt Mercer is a great example of a good, friendly DM who looks out for his players and helps them. I actually think he's a bit too friendly with his players and bails them out so much that they never actually learn anything, but whatever. He's still an excellent example of how to do it right.

For a game studio who has done both extremes, look no further than Rare, who released Wizards and Warriors and then Battletoads.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:56 am

I think the part where, if a player somehow has fun in a way the GM didn't plan, the GM takes that really, really personally is particularly poisonous. It's like they interpret this as being deliberately outwitted or sabotaged.

I mean, if the player was doing something munchkin-y or abusing an exploit, sure maybe, but even then that's no excuse to take it personally.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Tue Jul 27, 2021 4:03 am

As a side annoyance for those of us with weaker machines but strong network connections, the stubborn need for third party loot filters renders Gforce Now ususable as a solution because Nvidia don't support any third party mods. The developers have still signed their game up to the service, just so you can see how much better it would run if it wasn't unplayable by design on that platform.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 27, 2021 5:33 am

mharr wrote:As a side annoyance for those of us with weaker machines but strong network connections, the stubborn need for third party loot filters renders Gforce Now ususable as a solution because Nvidia don't support any third party mods. The developers have still signed their game up to the service, just so you can see how much better it would run if it wasn't unplayable by design on that platform.

There was a really funny instance of a game-breaking day one bug being untraceable and unresolved for over a week, several leagues ago.

GGG hadn't tested that league on a machine using one of the most common MOBO/Processor setups of 2019/2020 (I forget what parts, but they had literally failed to test on either AMD or Intel AT ALL) and they literally had to order the parts from a local store and wait for them to come in the mail to build a PC so they could replicate the bug.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 27, 2021 11:24 am

Friday wrote:Matt Mercer is a great example of a good, friendly DM who looks out for his players and helps them.

And easily one of my top three Tygras.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Newbie » Thu Jul 29, 2021 4:25 pm

I could imagine Outer Wilds getting sequels or spin-offs, but I never considered the possibility of an expansion to the base game—it's such a perfect little piece of clockwork that there wouldn't seem to be room to fit anything else inside of it.

Apparently, they found room.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Thu Jul 29, 2021 5:43 pm

Can I even press play on that without spoilers happening

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jul 29, 2021 6:11 pm

having just watched it: I have no idea
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Newbie » Thu Jul 29, 2021 6:14 pm

mharr wrote:Can I even press play on that without spoilers happening


Like the original Outer Wilds trailers, this is going to show you places that exist and things that happen in those places with minimal context. If you watched the first trailers, played the game, and then wished that you hadn't watched those trailers, you probably better not watch this one. Personally, I watched a friend stream about an hour of Outer Wilds before buying it myself and playing through the entire thing, so I'm not opposed to a little visual teasing and hints about what kind of phenomena we're going to encounter.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:01 pm

So with ActiBlizzard in the news for being wretchedly awful, more than a few observers have pointed out that Bobby Kotick was in Epstein's black book.
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Re: Game musings and news

Postby mharr » Sat Jul 31, 2021 5:46 am

The BlizzCon "Cosby Suite" meeting room:

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https://outline.com/CEyjP3

But don't worry about it! According to trufans this is all baseless conspiracy nonsense and 'everyone' was in Epstein's ledger. Doesn't mean a thiiing.

Make the fuckers keep denying it.

I guess companies whose core business plan is financial abuse of the young and vulnerable have coteries of predators running the show? Amazing.

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Re: Game musings and news

Postby Thad » Thu Aug 12, 2021 3:47 pm

SE has a DQ survey up. Asks what Dragon Quest games you've played, which upcoming ones you're looking forward to, that kind of thing.

At the end there's a fill-in section where you can share your general thoughts. I talked about a few things I'd like to see, like more thoughtful remakes of the earlier games with modernized gameplay experiences (and that I hope the upcoming DQ3 remake doesn't have unavoidable random encounters), how it'd be great to see relatively recent entries like DQ9 and the 3DS remakes of 7 and 8 show up on modern platforms, and how I'd like to see western releases of games that have never seen them, like the Mystery Dungeon game with Yangus. And then I closed by politely asking that they please stop using Denuvo, with a brief summary of the usual arguments (doesn't prevent piracy, hurts legit customers, I'm a longtime paying customer and there are multiple times I've gone to buy an SE game on Steam and then decided not to because I saw it included Denuvo). I know I'm just one guy and this is a corporate culture thing that's going to be hard to change, but y'know, couldn't hurt to keep beating that drum.

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