Dark Arc

The latest expansion genuinely did shake up the enemies. They still need to … change something. It seems like maybe they will with the next expansion changing how they present the story. We shall see.

Possibly keep an eye on Diabotical Rogue… Definitely not what you want right now, but it has potential.

It’s a shame, back when they were wikia and just hosted mediawikis with light ads, it was actually a really nice service.

I’ve never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that’s about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they’re a far more “couch friendly” genre.

They also don’t tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where “it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map” and server costs of “it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match” that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.

Live Service:

• https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1172470
• https://steamcharts.com/app/359550
• https://steamcharts.com/app/440
• https://steamcharts.com/app/230410
• https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570
• https://steamcharts.com/app/594650

Never adopted a live service (but a big name):

• https://steamcharts.com/app/1517290
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238840
• https://steamcharts.com/app/1238860

Live service is worse for the shooter genre on “eventual death” … but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven’t and are still trying to compete with the “buy the new game for a premium price tag” (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can’t be charted because they reorganized their game as “everything is under ‘Call of Duty’”.

The fighting games on steam don’t even come close to any of the shooter numbers.

Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or “play with a well known group of friends”), e.g., https://steamcharts.com/app/289070 and https://steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost “live service-like” levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).

Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy … but there genuinely is something to them when they’re done well. They’re often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.

Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this … They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made “extreme changes” vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA’s best chance is “try again next year” at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.

If you’re frugal you could’ve played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would’ve needed to spent $180 minimum.

We’ve had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.

Interesting question… What competitive games from the last 10 years would you consider to be not live service games?

I don’t think Fortnite can be meaningfully preserved anymore than say, Cedar Point can personally.

Live services can also certainly transition out of a live service state; or if the source code is disclosed (per my previous statement) they can be transitioned by the community after they seize operation. Building a game like Fortnite or RuneScape just doesn’t work without it being a centralized “destination.” The experience is about the large number of players as much as it’s about the game play.

Live services are more of a destination than a product … and for match made competitive shooters and things of that ilk … I think that’s fine.

You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that’s very effective at preservation.

Hmm… I’m unaware of this, but I guess it’s theoretically possible. Still it’s a lot harder to emulate x86 + some graphics hardware than it is to emulate a Gameboy.

Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies.

Agreed, but it’s not a silver bullet and A LOT of stuff is going to be shaken up now that x86 is starting to be challenged. For a long time PCs have been entirely operating on x86 (which is arguably part of why Java died … the abstraction just wasn’t necessary). That x86 dominance I think may have given a false sense of security for software longevity.

It’s not even that it’s hard to port the games, but without the source code, it’s just not going to happen.

I kind of wish there were laws where source code had to be released after X years of inactivity, especially for games for the cultural preservation aspect. Like if you have abandoned a game and not released any new content (especially if you haven’t released even any bug fixes/have totally abandoned the game), after 10 years the game code must be released.

I don’t necessarily think it needs to be a release of rights, assets, or anything like that … but being unable to operate a game you’ve bought just because it was built for an older piece of hardware is 👎.

But live service is just purposely killing games that didn’t need to die.

Bad live services are killing (in many cases bad) games that didn’t need to die (and might have been better if less time was spent trying to force something to be a live service that didn’t need to be one).

There’s a big difference between Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League and say… PUBG, Fortnite, Hunt Showdown, WOW, RuneScape, etc

That’s not really true… No closed source software that isn’t actively developed should be expected to last forever. Eventually the binaries will get to the point where nothing will run them.

You also can’t emulate Windows. Maybe you could virtualize Linux and use wine, but even that is a tall order for “forever”.

Typically live service games last a lot longer in terms of new content and updates. There are a lot of recent complete failures of live services though that didn’t make it more than a couple of months … they’re just bad games.

I’d give up any and every gun point in favor of police reform, proper election and transition of power legislation, and climate change.

Actually, I think they have it exactly right. The problem is Republican voters views and priorities have been misaligned with their respective party representatives for at least a decade.

This is no more evident than in evangelical voters jumping through hoops to justify a detestable candidate of poor morals.

What Trump, the tea party before him, etc represents to folks that adore them is quite different than what those things are.

I got banned from signal’s subreddit for talking about how telegram works and the case for it.

I mean there’s quite clearly a victim here, the child.

I’ve been reading her book, the truancy thing is interesting. She had data that showed that kids that weren’t showing up at school, particularly young ones, didn’t learn how to read sufficiently well, and then fell behind in school and struggled to catch up, they then ended up struggling later in life, and often ending up either as victims or perpetrators of crime.

So, she used the California DA’s office to enforce truancy laws across California, encouraged reaching out to fix the problems at home if at all possible, and also encouraged reaching out to folks that had been written off as “not caring” (she cites an example of a father that hadn’t been paying child support but upon learning that his daughter wasn’t going to school, started taking his daughter to school every morning, and volunteering in her classroom).

Of course this is all by her account, but that sounds overall quite positive to me.

It’s not really beta quality. I hopped on with my brother just to see if I was interested in the game (we both played black ops, the original back on the PS3). It was actually extremely stable and pretty fun. He noticed a UI glitch but … it’s not like there was even a feedback or bug report button.

It’s just early access with the disclaimer there might be something wrong… Which isn’t that different from buying a release day game anymore unfortunately.

I firmly believe that publishers, in an attempt to cut costs, tell the game studio to not prioritize performance

So, I agree there’s some amount of that. You also have things like Dice (the studio that makes Battlefield) where they lost their veteran development team to poor internal management.

There are also some (now fairly large) studios that are just absolutely terrible at game performance like Studio Wildcard (makers of the Ark games).

while trying to rely on software like super resolution algorithms, to make their games run.

There’s definitely some of this too. I believe the bigger issue is that games have gotten so much bigger and more expensive to develop. Making and shipping a game that runs with 4k textures, dynamic (possibly ray traced) lighting, variable rate shading (instead of manual level-of-detail systems), etc is a lot to get right.

A common thing with any software development is to take advantage of newer abstractions that make your life easier. For instance, I’m fairly confident Hunt Showdown 1896 has moved to some form of variable rate shading instead of level-of-detail (in pre-1986 when you zoomed in on some of the trees they’d literally change shape when they flipped between the models in the worst case; I’ve yet to see that post-1896). Not having to make a bunch of models and having the software “just figure out” good lower-poly models for things that are sufficiently far away is presumably a huge productivity boost. Similarly, when ray-traced lighting becomes the standard a lot of game development will get easier because setting up lighting won’t (per my understanding) require as many tricks. In both cases, it’s both less work for developers and a better result for players with the hardware to run it.

In some instances they reused old game Engines for a new and bigger game, for example with Cyberpunk, Stellaris and Elden Ring.

Old engines aren’t necessarily a bad thing (if they’re appropriately updated) and I think people focus too much on the engine vs the game play. Take Starfield, I’ve heard a lot of people complain about it on forums for copying a similar formula as some of Bethesda’s past titles.

The issue almost certainly isn’t the engine used, but the design choices associated with using that engine (and the decision to not make new things work).

Linux, Darwin (MacOS), Windows, Chrome, Firefox, etc are all long running software projects (as are Unreal Engine, Unity, Source Engine, CryEngine, etc). Occasionally, someone throws out their current product entirely and replaces it, but normally there are incremental upgrades made to provide the new functionality that’s desired.

Smaller developers are doing everything they can to make a game run smoothly. The best example for this is Factorio.

The performance profile of something like Factorio vs Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, or Hunt Showdown is extremely different.

No it’s literally how software works. New hardware comes out, you do more with the hardware, old hardware can’t do the new things and runs worse.

but the performance just keeps getting worse

That’s just the nature of PC gaming; as time goes on games look prettier but run worse.

but I want to see it implemented before I believe any of it is real

As you should, they’ve let players down many many times before (myself included) making promises for things to come that never happen. A prime example is the player owned house rework that was promised in one of the original Rune Fests.

The tick rate improvements and client side prediction they demoed … they said they may never happen; however, let’s face it, they could happen they’re just unwilling to commit to hiring the developers that would be needed to make that happen.

Good to know!