If you assume they’re from countries with weaker economies. Meanwhile, I live in the US, and I survive under the poverty line. Nothing about the US is ‘region-locked’, I’m just treated like shit for being disabled. It’s a lack of income first and foremost.
Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.
Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They’ll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.
Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.
Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You’re underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we’ll end up with something similar to Garry’s Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We’ll experience things we’re not familiar with, as long as we’re experiencing them with other people.
Most of what I see as ‘issues’ are personal preferences. Stuff like railroaded dialog choices even worse than Fallout 4, or stiff/awkward voice acting, or landing on planets being randomly generated despite claims otherwise. But as for actual issues, two things stood out to me: spaceship flight is very dangerous because bumping into things has a good chance of bugging the physics engine and killing you instantly (but other times, barely even registering damage). And seeing a player get stuck because they got a bounty without even knowing it, and then the bounty was making them shoot-on-sight by guards and them having no clue how to deal with the bounty. I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple way out of the situation, but without any communication to the player, that’s nothing but frustration. Add in broken NPC pathing/animations (people getting stuck inside objects like bar counters), making it all-too-easy to fall down ladder holes in ships, and horrible performance optimization (with Todd Howard being quoted telling people to just buy better computers), and I think it’ll need a bit of polish before really considering giving it a shot.
Well, sure. And Starfield follows in the wake of Fallout 4’s lackluster RPG experience, offering shallow conversations and the illusion of choice. After Fallout 4, I’m not sure I can get myself to play another game modeled after the same system of “Would you like a quest? [Yes/Yes but sarcastic/One question first then yes/Maybe later]”. If the story is railroaded, Starfield and NMS aren’t too different then - there’s a main quest line, with things to learn and people to meet, and you check off the boxes until it’s done.
But as to whether they should be compared, I think it’s unavoidable. There’s too much overlap, and no other games like it. Games in which you can customize a space ship, explore thousands of planets, make a home base on any planet you want, and are incentivized to explore and find new places and meet new people? NMS, Starfield, Elite Dangerous, maybe Star Citizen. With some similar gameplay elements and a small pool of games, comparison is natural and expected. Nothing wrong with that.
Fair enough, but there’s a difference between reading headlines/articles to make a judgement, and watching actual real-time gameplay for several hours to make a judgement. The only difference was that I wasn’t the one holding the controller. If several hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay isn’t enough to make a surface-level observation, I’m not sure what is.
Plus, I was just saying how what I saw made me feel, and I said I’d rather play one game over another. If we want to talk about unnecessarily strong opinions, let’s start with you attempting to shut down my honest two cents to reinforce your negative worldview. Let’s all be kind to each other, okay? :)
I haven’t bought Starfield, and I don’t plan to, but I watched some gameplay and… Well, the game is a pile of issues. And the few bits that are acceptable are bits I’ve already seen from NMS - and their implementation is usually better than Starfield. So as I’m watching Starfield footage, all I can feel is a desire to reinstall NMS and play that instead… And I’m not even a big NMS fan. It’s not a good sign if your ‘revolutionary’ game already feels beat out by competition that had existed before your game was even halfway in development. Bethesda had all the time and manpower in the world to compete with NMS, and still fell short.
Do you think a “soulslike” is defined by being dark and gritty? I find it odd that you think the inclusion of anything cute or hopeful/friendly would be only a negative. Maybe your preferences are for dark and gritty only, but I assure you that many people enjoy other styles. There’s a charm to there being hope in a dying world, isn’t there?
Besides, I’d say most people define “soulslike” by their gameplay, not aesthetics. Maybe the “git gud” fragile-masculinity crowd needs their unforgiving combat system paired with a dark, ‘masculine’ atmosphere to fulfill their power fantasy, but again, I assure you that many other types of people enjoy those games - especially Elden Ring, which has much broader appeal than the previous souls games.
I’ll wager you’re a toxic “git gud” type that hinges their identity on these types of games, and that’s why the idea of your sacred icon being blemished by comparison to Soulframe upsets you so much. I really can’t see why else anyone would be this angry over a game not being to their preferences. If people enjoy something different than you, let them. :)
/r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it’s no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
You’d wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.
Is it just me, or does the language in this article feel very AI-generated? And this website is only 10 days old, has only one writer, over 10 articles posted every day by that one person, and is being posted here by an account with the same name as the site. This feels strange.
You’d be surprised how many steam games have no DRM other than steam itself. And how easy it is to put in a replacement (open-source) dll that acts as a steam emulator and runs the games without steam. I’d say… pretty much every non-AAA game on steam can have DRM removed this way. It’s such barebones DRM that I can’t really find reason to be angry at it.