I’m sorry to pop your bubble but while Denuvo sucks for consumers, it actually works at least on the PC front. Many cracks you would see require emulators since the pc ports are pretty solidly protected. Like Total war warhammer 3 is still uncracked after 2 years.

I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I’m glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.

Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I’m really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn’t, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I’m not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.

Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.

Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand “new” copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many “new” copies around. Also I can’t fault publishers from just “deleting” a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven’t sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren’t even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.

It is funny or sad depending on how you look at it that the fan modding community has done more for VR in these last few years than most of the big names. Then again it does make sense since there isn’t much big money to be earned in the VR space right now. Hell while not a big fan of what Meta is doing with titles, they appear to be the only ones paying out a premium to have games developed for them resulting in a closed garden but for some indie devs, it actually pays the bills.

Can’t wait to see what 2024 has for VR since with the release of the Unreal engine universal VR wrapper, we will likely see a boom in VR mods at least for the Unreal scene. Great job to all the mod developer out there putting so much effort into the medium.

In some ways I agree, people love to tear each other down but one of their examples is around “Genshin Impact players”, Like cool you can enjoy those games but god damn them getting popular is fucking scary to me as a gamer since it means Gatcha gaming is coming to the west and I’m sorry to all you Genshin impact player but those mechanics are some of the most cancerous things in modern gaming. The huge gambling aspects, paying for power, just the constant daily grinds, etc. The same is said for sports titles and other things. So people use it as a “Har har I feel I’m better than you” but I think there is a fear of such monetization catching on. We as gamers should be fighting against these things because we are becoming nothing but a god damn piggy bank for these large gaming corporations, who are trying to make us gamblers. Its honestly the reason why I try to stick with the PC market and indie games since the biggest problem area is the AAA scene since they are trying to extract the most amount of wealth. I want a developer to succeed and I think there is a fair place for monetization in the gaming scene but right now a ton of devs (realistically publishers) don’t respect players and their money.

I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).

You know ignoring your comment that the war has been going on for 3 years. Its only been a year and halfish maybe closing into 2 years. Its laughable that a country like Ukraine whom’s military budget before this was several fractions of Russia’s is able to hold them back in open fucking warfare. I know you are gonna say whatabout Vietnam or “War on Terror” but those were insurgencies (ignoring the ethics of the US being in those wars since really we shouldn’t have been) the US and Nato trying to capture territory typically goes smoothly as we seen in the Gulf War and Desert Storm basically being called the 100 hour land war

Isn’t that the sad part about gaming media/journalism. They are all for banking on the drama about “no appreciation for the devs from the vgas” but chances are their front pages are filled to the brim with things announced during the VGAs. While they do nothing to really highlight the actual meaningful award shows for game developers.

But we already have award shows that are like that, we have DICE awards, BAFTA Games Awards, GDC awards. This event is clearly just a commercial for many publishers. Noone is forcing devs to appear here. Hell I think it would be fucking great some devs just don’t appear just to snub this award show. If the audience actually cared about recognizing developers they would watch the other 3 awards, this event is just about the hype machine and game trailers.

I mean it isn’t but sort of is at the same time. It firstly depends on what kind of kickstarter it is. There are many ways where its just a system for a publisher to gauge interest in the project. Those are typically just preorders however many others are just throwing money into a well and hoping something comes of it. I get people’s hatred of crowdfunding and it can easily be a trap. Where a ton of people are just there to get the money and leg it or who are simply too incompetent to use the funds properly. Hell even experienced developer can be too incompetent, double fine studios/Tim Schafer is a poster child for this. While I love their work, they had a horrid run with crowdfunding and I guess it should have been expected since they are always late and overspend on their budget when they were working with publishers.

Now with all the negatives said, I think crowdfunding in all its forms can lead to wonderful project that simply couldn’t have existed due to a lack of interest by publishers. Hell I doubt we would had Baldur’s Gate 3 without crowdfunding and this isn’t talking exclusively about BG 3 since the Divinity Original sin games really got the ball rolling for Larian Studios. Crowdfunding can lead to the rebirth of genres once thought dead.

You are good mate, this stuff just always happens where it gets a bit annoying. We see this in the drama cycle where news comes how X person is an awful person or did something wrong. We know about Y events that happened in the past so people try to draw Y events around this new bit of news but we don’t really live in a fictional world where all these plotlines/events all culminate into something satisfying. Life is a rather complex thing and it makes it feel so small when it all culminates into every event we the public know about a public figure have to fit into each other like a complete puzzle when huge portions of a public figure’s life is typically shrouded in mystery.

Okay Completionist started 2011 or 2012, he has a costar named Greg and it seems they met at college and were friend. Greg played the comic relief of the show at the time. Fast Forward to 2015, he leaves unexpectedly. Then fast forward another 2 years when in 2017, Greg I believe with lawyers told Jirard the completionist to unlist all the episodes Greg has appeared with. That is basically the story of Greg. It seems there were issues with extended work periods that didn’t gel well with his schedule and priorities and good for Greg understanding that since choosing loved ones over work is rather important. It seems Greg got shafted because Him and Jirard had a falling out and there was no formalized contract between them since he expected friends to look out for each other. It sucks but I consider money to be a part of the equation with the removal of those old episodes since he didn’t like the company using his image to earn a profit.

Also take this with a grain of salt but apparently he also made a post about it on reddit in the past with these lines

“It is extremely difficult to move on from a project that I helped create for so many years. Not only were we building the show as a creative outlet but, also as a source of monetary stability for the both of us. Both of these are no longer true for me. While we may have not put in precisely equal hours on the show, I believe that had Jirard and I’s mind not morphed into one for four years, TOVG would not be what you see and enjoy today.”

This could be a random poster and not be Greg, seeing as this is their one only post. I just don’t think its a huge leap that money and friends typically don’t mix well. Money breaks bonds in so many different ways and its a prime reason why I don’t like dealing with loans with friends or family. It really rarely ends well.

I think this is a bit revisionist. You even say the real answer, Greg likely wasn’t getting a cut he thought was sufficient, he had a falling out with Jirard probably due to said cut not being enough. So he requests Jirard pulls down content that has him included because he doesn’t want the man profiting off his work. Its a mixed bag and I can see both points of view but lets not include “new bad thing happens, this is the ‘true reason’ ________ left” moment. Its no secret that mixing friends and money can easily lead to a falling out, I just find it silly whenever there is drama we have to add our own conspiratorial twists when we already have a very logical reason why X happened. Unless Greg chooses to confirm this is the reason why he left its pointless to assume its this way, hell even if he does confirm it we have to keep in mind, people are willing to lie to get seen far more favorably and jumping onto a dogpile is pretty easy. Greg hasn’t really kept an online presence, so I may actually believe him far more than if it was another content maker doing this because there is far less to gain from this.

Hell arguably in the top 10 VR games that is an “actual game” (instead of the typical sandboxes afforded to vr).

I mean the big part of why I want the steam version is the mouse control (also waiting for adventurer mode, which is something I did actually play with original ascii DF with tilesets later down the road), yes yes I know its slower but when you are learning a new game sometimes its just easier to take it slow like that. Yes typically ascii games do have tilesets with them at least the ones I know of CDDA, DF, and ADOM, its just people want things to be “good” out of the box. They don’t want to faff about for 2 or 3 hours to get the “optimal” experience.

Have you seen Aurora 4x? It is probably one of the deepest 4x space games on the market to this day. The problem is it looks like a spreadsheet and I’m sorry but when people are focused on gameplay only style games, one of the things that get dropped off by the wayside is the user experience and the UX. It is fucking efficient as fuck once you have it down but when you are trying to learn the system, its a bit of a cliff to overcome and if you don’t have a ton of time to game that can be quite the burden on someone. Seriously for newcomers it can seem a bit counterintuitive that capslock/shift dramatically change what actions you can take (talking from personal experience was very thrown off by capslock actually have an effect on what you are doing since shift + key is pretty normal for rts/stuff).

I’m going to be put on a cross but I disagree. Its a balancing scale, one shouldn’t ignore all other aspects because they favor one, its fine to prioritize one over the others but there shouldn’t be a huge gap between them especially in the AAA field. Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example. It is one of the most mechanically deep games around and I think its wonderful at what it does but it is almost unplayable for most people until fairly recently because most people don’t like Ascii. Hell even something like Aurora 4x is very mechanically deep but looks like a glorified spreadsheet, everyone has their breaking point and unfortunately for me Ascii is that out. I think many people throw away graphics since the AAA likes to glorify it too much but I think for a soulslike game, graphics need to be the 2nd most focused aspect because I consider animation quality a big part of graphic budget and I’m sorry a soulslike where there aren’t good animations is a very bad soulslike. Predictability and reaction are a huge part of that subgenre.

Edit: Everyone has their own values on what they are looking for in a game and its specific subgenre, the recent debates about Cities skyline 2 shows this where people are some reason fine with a game like that being targeted for 30 fps. While sure its playable, I think we are in a modern era of gaming and 60 feels it should be the standard everyone shoots for.

I mean depends on where they are from. If they are from the US or Europe they would be fucking idiots but if they are Chinese, Russian, etc they are basically untouchable and it will merely be a game of whackamole.

Edit: welp did a Whois on their website and seems its from Arizona. So yeah nevermind my top comment, if this is truly a company stationed in Arizona they really fucked up.

They can ban them from the forums of the franchise and if you get this style of ban you can also lose access to uploading things on the workshop. So a prolific modder gets banned in this manner, it could basically mean the mod are static/dead (ignoring the ban may just already kill the enthusiasm for modding for said game)

I mean asymmetrical warfare is a messy affair. Hamas gets new recruits who are angered about their family and homes being destroyed. Big nations typically don’t win these kind of engagements in the modern era because at least to modern sensibilities we don’t really want to see pointless slaughter and genocide, this isn’t to advocate for it, quite far from it but historically typically you would have to be ruthless to subjugate people but thankfully modern sensibilities say that is pretty fucked. So really this will either end up another “forever” war or one of the sides will be wiped out entirely.

I think their point is they did this in the laziest way. MGS2 and MGS3 are just the HD collection ports they made back in 2012 with maybe some bug fixes. MGS 1 the thing they were working on only goes up to “1080p” with 4:3 resolution. This is just a fundamentally worse collection that is meant to collect as much money as possible seeing as the Legacy collection was just a better package. They are clearly just going to sell a Master Collection Vol 2 with maybe MGS 4, peace walker, and the other ones ( a bit unfortunate we never see ports of portable ops, twin snakes (yes yes its just a worse 1 but I think its still a valid part of MGS history even though its the odd duck), and the MG acid games)

Edit: don’t even get me started on some of the content that gets cut out due to licensing issues. We as players will never see Metal gear online 1, Snake vs Ape, and the guy savage stuff from MGS 3 alone. Hell there was also that pro skater mode for MGS 2 that never made it over with the hd collections.