I mean, this just isn’t true, though. You’re not wrong in pointing out that the scope of sales has changed, but so has the scope of development, as well as consumer expectation. I suspect if you compare the number of man hours spent on a title today vs an NES game, it’s not even a comparable discussion. And then there’s the matter of post-release support.

To be clear, I don’t think a $30 price hike for physical copies is at all sensible, but the arguments being presented both for and against it are incredibly poorly thought out. Everyone presents a single facet of videogame development today compared to years ago and then acts like it’s a “gotcha” that proves their point. The entire ecosystem of game development and consumption has changed so drastically, that any discussion comparing the adjusted for inflation price of games then vs now is just pointless. Art and entertainment are art and entertainment, and it’s impossible to create a de-facto value statement for them, because consumer subjectivity, bias, and valuation is too wide to make objective statements about.

Imo, the real criticism of the matter is that +50% cost during a time of economic upheaval, when the buying power of the middle class is approaching the weakest it’s been in a long time, is going to be received poorly, and probably result in a loss of Western sales. It’s a massive leap, in a single generation, at the worst possible time, regardless of what inflation adjustments tell us.

Oh I don’t have any performance issues. My 3070ti has no issue holding 120 fps (with frame Gen on, mind you). Game plays perfectly.

And I’d be more forgiving of the “15 hour long free game,” but it ate a part of the game I enjoy, made playing that part of the game with friends challenging to the point of feeling not worth it, and it’s required before I am allowed to enjoy the game I actually paid for. Those 15 hours - well, 12 for me - were more valuable to me than the price I paid for the game. 15 hours of work is well into the several hundreds of dollars space. But I already paid over $100 CAD once taxes were in. Why do I also have to give it my time?

Again, great game, but worst on-boot Monster Hunter to date. And that’s saying something, considering World doesn’t let you hold a weapon for the first hour.

Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?

There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.

But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behing hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.

Yes.

This is literally my “message received” emote.

If people thought it was rude, I’d be fired by now.

Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.

I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.

I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.

To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.

Amazing.

Yes? Should I not? “insta” as in instanteous, and “gram” as in a telegram. This is a name rooted in already understood language to give me an understanding of what it is at first encounter. Bard, same, something that tells a story, I’d assume. But I’ve never seen it before so /shrug.

“Lemmy” means nothing to me.

Fediverse is good. “Verse” to the end of anything suggests it’s own ecosystem, or “universe,” and Fedi for federation. Makes sense.

There are a lot of genuine answers to this, but the simplest one is perhaps the best: because who decides which authority is correct?

Authoritarianism is bad because it gives justification to our bias’.

The “good” authorities you think of when you ask this question are authorities not because they are authorities, but because they have the knowledge/training/practice/experiences that give them a greater expertise on a given subject. Authoritarianism supposes that, those things aside, there’s something inherently good about someone in a position of authority. This is factually incorrect.

We (are supposed to) grant authority to those that earn it, and use it responsibility. Likewise we (are supposed to) strip it away from those that abuse it, or fail to maintain strong standards of ethics and practice. Authoritarianism, as a school of thought, discards that process, instead suggesting that the authority is the authority because people need that in their lives. Fuck that.

It’s just meat based ddos.

What a fascinating sentence.

My friend, I respect your desire to believe that the world is a better place than it is, but this is pure cope.

We have no evidence of any of this being a possibility, and you catch a murderer by finding evidence of intent, not waiting for someone to get hurt.

If someone already owns Tunic and is considering this, I would say to just directly donate the money.

Or just like… Donate through the bundle and consider trying out some minor projects created by people who are trying to make something cool? Why turn down access to these games out of some form of perceived superiority? This notion that since you’ve never heard of these other titles they can’t possible offer anything of value to you is kind of a spit in the face of struggling artists of all types.

Yeah, this might be the most egregious case of burying the lead, what the hell.

Please reread. I had to make the game look mediocre (low, not lowest) to have an enjoyable experience on a $750 hand-held PC.

I was getting 60-80 fps on high settings in the beta on my 3070ti, when frame generation was broken. I have not tested on my home PC yet.

The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.

I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.

I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.

I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.

This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.

I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.

Many Steam games are actually DRM free. You can just copy the game folder onto a flash drive, sometimes modify a single file, and then run it from the flash drive in any PC.

You should still buy from GOG first imo, but I wouldn’t entirely count out Steam.

I literally had to look this up just now. Such a high profile game did such a huge thing and somehow I am just now hearing about it? Insane, tbh.

I chose to pirate Minecraft back when Notch was charging $20 CAD for a game in which the health bar didn’t work, and I’ve been nothing but validated by every decision around the game since.

There’s a massive difference between “believing you are the wrong gender is mental illness” and “being born/sorted into a gender that doesn’t represent you causes mental illness.” This is the latter.

Hi-Rez is the king of creating a new game, pretending it’s their “big thing” and then enshittifying it while their good devs are moved to the next “big thing.” They are fad chasers who are constantly in a race to monetize a market and then move on.

I’m glad it caught up with them. Couldn’t have happened to a better company. Apologies to the earnest designers and programmers that got caught in the crossfire.