duane

If there's a "best" option, let alone a "required" one, it doesn't belong in the game.

that's way easier said than done. the life cycle of any online game is someone finding a dominant strategy that the developers attempt to fix, and if they manage it then someone else finds a new one, and it just repeats ad infinitum. and single player games are only better in the sense that there's not nearly as many people try-harding them into oblivion... normally.

xyz I understand what you're saying, but I struggle to figure out how something like "horse balls shrink in cold areas" (an actual example from RDR2, that took a surprising amount of resources to accomplish) could ever do any of that. if there is a line to cross, that game leaped over it with acrobatic prowess.

        samuraidan Some dudes wanna play with their movies. Other dudes like their alternate realities to be a close cousin to ours. Others just want a puzzle to play with that has a pretty coat of paint. Ultimately if the machine can take it, someone gets paid for the work and someone enjoys it, I never saw the harm.
        Besides that, shrinking horse balls was an awesome PR move. Do you know how many sites were talking about that?

            The thing is, the huge $500 million dollar AAA games are a small portion of the games released. The vast majority are smaller indie stylized games.

            If you go on Steam and just look at what's advertised on the front page, you see what big companies like Ubisoft and EA have paid for. But if you search out stuff you can find anything you want. Itch also has smaller more boutique games.

              I know my previous post sounded like I'm chocolate ignorant. But I'm a former fellow addict. In my time, I did everything. From hyper quality to canola oil sludges. But, as typically is the case with reformed addicts, I guess I now turned into an anti chocolate zealot.

              Long ago I was working on a gig far far in the aforementioned chocolate kingdom of Belgium. We went to visit the historical city of Brugge. It's dr. Evil's birth town but also a very picturesque place. During 6 hours I spent there, I ingested at least half of the lifetime allowance of premium chocolate mass. At the time I thought I was in heaven, but, as I came to realize years later, that were just sugar induced ephemeral endorphins doing the "thinking".

              It's worth mentioning here that the density of chocolate and pastry shoppes in Belgium is borderline insane. Every small town and village is oversupplied with chocolate. Pastry baubles fall out of windows. I remember wondering how the hell they're all staying so, ehm... relatively, thin.

              Many winters have passed and I went on the top of the mountain to meditate on chocolate incarnates. During one of the exhausting white chocolate fixated sessions, the divine providence settled upon me, thus I was granted the full fathom of the chocolate spectrum, and a realization that there's no true fulfillment to be found inside it.

              There are two orthogonal axes that constitute the spectrum. The cocoa axis and the sugar axis. If you go far down the cocoa axis, into the high flavor zone most "quality" chocolates claim to be occupying, you end up in the bitter area, because, duh - bean butter is bitter. And bitterness is one of my least favorite things. So you need to compensate on the sugar axis. But then you enter the diabetes quadrants. If you minimize on both axes, a third axis of fat and flavoring needs to be introduced, expanding the spectrum into the vast vegetable oil goo dimension. And in that dimension, as @packrat already concluded, a truly happy place is nowhere to be found either.

                           Sugar
               ^
               |
               |
    Yucky      |      Yummy 
   Diabetes    |     Diabetes
               |
               |
---------------+----------------> Cocoa
               |
    Meh?       |
  Need to add  |      Yuck!
     3rd       |      Bitter
  artificial   |
     axis      |
               |

                xyz
                I have nothing. You're clearly more sagely than I.
                Though, I still disagree. Bitter is yummy. As I speak, I am drinking a mocha. How much sugar is in it?
                2/3 a gram, and yes, I measured. It's a left over habit from my baking days.

                  I went to Hershey Park as a kid (it's the Disney Land of chocolate). They sell Hershey bars at the gift shop, except they make them there, and it's like 10x better the quality than the ones you get at the supermarket. So good.

                  packrat I also saw a bunch of articles complaining about how much they had to crunch to get everything done. in the context of those articles, the previous ones about how much work they put into features that don't add or change anything gameplay or even visual wise (who's actually gonna look at them during gameplay?) feels really slimy. not to mention most articles about AAA games have been paid off for years now, so it probably wasn't even natural PR.

                  cybereality I will agree with the caveat that it can be very, very hard to find stuff that's not good at advertising itself. steam tags are unreliable at best, a lot of good games don't sell well for a myriad of reasons so they never end up on lists, steam curators are a meme at this point I'm not sure why they still exist, and itch is mostly demos. ...a lot of which are for games that never got released. I'm someone who tries really hard to find hidden gems and games people forgot about that are still worth playing and it is not easy. on any platform. discoverability's a pain in the rear end!

                        I hate how most AAA games go for hyper-realism in their graphics, that's for sure. It just makes the games more exclusionary to people with less-powerful hardware.

                        But when it comes to gameplay aspects that's just personal preference tbh. Some genres are built specifically to be realistic as possible (simulator games) or at least realistic as playable (Escape from Tarkov, Arma 3, etc.). Others sometimes implement a small number of these "realistic features" into something called an immersive sim.

                          HavenHuski I hate how most AAA games go for hyper-realism in their graphics, that's for sure. It just makes the games more exclusionary to people with less-powerful hardware.

                          Conversely this is a huge boon for indie developers who aren't artists but are very capable coders, since they can rely more on premade asset packs of particularly the photogrammetric type assets. Since they will be decently consistent and not clash with each other. At least for static environmental art assets this can bring huge time and financial budget savings.

                              samuraidan steam tags are unreliable at best
                              samuraidan itch is mostly demos

                              And if you think steam's tags are bad you should see itch's. Shovelware devs purposely miscategorize their 'games' and there's zero enforcement.

                              samuraidan discoverability's a pain in the rear end!

                              Absolutely. Making a commercially viable (indie) game is only half the battle. Attractive graphics (i.e. "sufficient realism") go a long way though!

                                    DJM arent most games about escaping reality?

                                    Only mundane and uncool parts of it. I'm sure you want a gun in Normord to look gritty and make real sounding pows, instead of firing golf balls and saying "thankyou for contacting our customer support".

                                        I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed the abuse of tags in game searches, so I'm not just going crazy, the thing that gets me it's not just some scammy asset flip developer doing it it's often the big publishers abusing this as well, alternatively I think Valve is causing certain games to completely ignore the search results regardless of your store preferences. City Skylines for example keeps popping up when I search for games despite me owning the base game among other things.

                                        To stay vaguely on topic, that's my problem with 'realistic' games these days, most of the time the realism mechanics they introduce purely from a gameplay perspective are often tedious busy work. I brought up Witcher 3's beard growth as an example because if you want to keep the look of Geralt the way you want you keep having to break off from the main storyline and side quests since there was no way aside from through mods to turn it off. Why exactly did the devs think this was a good idea? That kind of thing really annoys me, it's like if they introduced a pissing mechanic and you have to go and piss every 3 hours of in game time and if do it in front of witnesses you'll get fined or arrested. It might seem hilarious at first but you'll quickly realise you're going to have to deal with this all the time and it will get in the way of the actual game.

                                          Lethn it's like if they introduced a pissing mechanic and you have to go and piss every 3 hours of in game time and if do it in front of witnesses you'll get fined or arrested

                                          This is a good idea for central mechanics of a weekend jam game 🤔
                                          Especially if the theme was... well... realism.

                                              Megalomaniak

                                              If I didn't have somebody working with me who already understands 3D modelling and animation that would be what I do lol.

                                                xyz The annoying thing is it would probably work well as a meme game LOL.

                                                • xyz replied to this.

                                                    Lethn With an addition of realtime moustache and mullet growth and hyper-realistic walking speeds, I think it could become a hit.

                                                      HavenHuski Oh yeah, that was a big part of the reason I pretty much gave up on PC gaming in 2002 apart from emulators.

                                                      That and I got the original Xbox for Christmas that year.

                                                        Lethn That kind of thing really annoys me, it's like if they introduced a pissing mechanic and you have to go and piss every 3 hours of in game time and if do it in front of witnesses you'll get fined or arrested.

                                                        Pay attention to the games in the The Sims series.

                                                          samuraidan spawn individual audio streams with each shot so it stacks, so you can contact multiple customer supports.