This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I could never get much into online gaming because it’s a full time job keeping up with the meta and if you are not highly skilled you are just cannon fodder.
I’ll stick to single player games. And for the most part, I’m just playing retro games these days.
Modern games kinda suck half the time. Only good things I’ve played in modern times are the resident evil remakes and some indie stuff.
Modern games kinda suck half the time.
I've said this before in other threads, but here I go... What's popular right now is battle royale shooters, and that's a shame, because battle royale shooters all suck. And yes Epic, you are largely to blame, as you make one of the most popular entries in this terrible genre.
If there's any worse game mechanic than frantic inventory management while under fire, I have yet to see it. At least in chess boxing they pause to take their turns between rounds.
Also, winning feels good, I think most people would agree with that. But if the game hosts 100 players with teams of 4, that means 4% of players get to "win". Compare to CoD or Overwatch, where in most game modes 50% of players get to win.
And just as a side note, I don't think Epic has solved anything with some new voice chat system. Because it's not new, discord already exists, steam already has integrated voice chat.
In Battle Royales I don't think people think they are losing until they die. Compared to Over Watch and CoD where you can feel you are losing early on. I think that's the hook for a lot of people, basically a winning feeling the majority of the time.
Maybe it's because a lot of new games coming out today are buggy, micro transaction filled pieces of crud?
Exactly Everyone i knew was excited for killing floor 3 but it wasnt what eas promised so we just dropped it.
Ark 2 never even came out.
Dune needed ark server manager like feature.
I could go on but point is games not delivering what previous games had. So why bother.
You forgot poorly optimized and the idiotic anti cheat engines.
Have you considered, hear me out, that some players just hate playing with other players, because being insulted breaks immersion?
All the other micro transaction fuckery you do on top just makes it yet more unappealing.
"We think giving the players funny hats that cross over will make them play Fortnite more."
Big Monty Python's Meaning of Life energy here.
Or maybe not everyone wants another FPS with gamble boxes?
How the fuck am I suppose to make new friends when I can't consistently connect with people unless they are already my friend?
Yeah, you used to get to know the players and come back to certain servers because of the community around them. There was one TF2 server I played on for a while that had a guy who played exclusively melee Heavy with extremely throttled Internet, causing him to teleport around. You don't get guys like Magical Fisting Heavy anymore.
I played TF2 from release, to the month they implemented matchmaking. Technically they left the ability to host and join specific servers, but those emptied and never came back. I was now essentially only allowed to pay with strangers.
I joined again for the Halloween event, thinking my tradition of playing hours of Mann Manor could still be enjoyed at least. After all, it was a special event, and I knew others would join the 24/7 Manor servers like they had every year, just like me.
Nope. They were all empty. Everyone still only joined matchmaking. I miss my server-friends. Mostly it was just acquaintances, but sometimes I'd make a real long-term friend after we'd find eachother at an event IRL.
As is almost always the case, the algo that optimizes, doesn't optimize for what I want or need, it optimizes for what an unfeeling corp "needs". I want less downtime, sure, but not at the cost of meaning.
Just needed no sbmm, can't rematch against the same ppl anymore
For real. Everyone already has their friend group, their clique, whatever. They often say they are open and welcoming, and sometimes are for a while. They don't try to get to know the newcomer, regale then with stories of their already set in stone group, and make promises they have no intention of keeping. Newcomer leaves, and they don't even notice or care to reach out, and if they do, it's purely performative and there's no follow through because they already have their group.
You can still do that in many games.
It's just organized unofficially in Discord groups. And... yeah, Discord is mandatory :(
It is impossible to satirize this guy
Damn it, who anthropomorphized satire and let it run a company!?
My question is.....how are they still in business???
Until Tim Sweeney does something about Tim fucking Sweeney I am good thanks.
Epic shared plans for “portable content, codes and economies” between UE-developed games, with Fortnite slated to be the first real proof of concept. In Fortnite’s case, portability will allow cosmetics obtained or purchased in-game to be used in other UE games and vice versa. Additionally, UE6’s cross-game social link feature will allow players to be connected to one game, but voice chat with people playing another.
The first part seems like a new concept we haven't seen in other games. Buy one skin, use it everywhere. I bet they're going to fuck it up with their greed somehow, but it's a neat concept and provides more value to people who buy skins.
The second part, and last sentence, is basically just discord, team speak, etc. I don't buy or use Epic's stuff, but if I understand it correctly, some dumbass thought it was a good idea to only allow voice channels for people playing the same game 🤣🤣🤣
Buy one skin, use it everywhere.
That's how they tried to sell NFTs in games to us iirc. Buy a gun skin or obtain a specific gun in CoD and use it in another game. I dunno how that was supposed to work, but I remember that marketing spin when they were trying to make them a thing.
It's a technical nightmare. It requires exponential levels of labor for every cosmetic and legal agreements with disparate game owners. Sure, I make an asset in my game for a skin the player bought in your game, who keeps the money?
It requires exponential levels of labor for every cosmetic
Unless all games use the same models and shit so the cosmetics actually are directly transferable because we're only getting "generic variant of the One Game every game is now a generic variant of for the sake of content portability". If you get too creative with your designs, you can't participate in the universal cosmetic sharing and mutual marketing thing all the cool kids do.
I wonder whether the engine will actually lock down your range of options to prevent that problem? Or maybe just heavily discourage developers from not implementing the "One Game" stuff. I'm both put off and curious to see how it'll develop.
legal agreements with disparate game owners
Actually, the "stamp all your stuff from the same mould, and because we own all the things you stamp from that mould, we can freely share them between games and also hold your work hostage" approach would solve that too. If it all becomes too generic to copyright individually, whoever holds the rights to the One Game has freedom to do with his games whatever he wants.
Sure, I make an asset in my game for a skin the player bought in your game, who keeps the money?
The longer I think about this, the more I worry that my One Game joke is the only way to actually make this work, and also very desirable for Epic. That would make it less of a joke and more of a foreshadowing.
Because I'm pretty sure the answer to that question is gonna be "the owner of the One Game". Whoever first published that skin will get a cut of the sales, but since they're so easily transferable across the standard objects you're expected to have used, you don't need to do much to have it transfer anyway. Besides, your skins also get shared with other games, making for free advertisement!
Unfortunately, one game made Nazi uniforms, Epic refuses to ban them because they make good money off it and now you've either got Nazis running around your game or you need to somehow get out of the asset sharing thing.
Okay, now I'm horrified at the prospect of how this might develop.
It's probably my lack of understanding of UR, but how do you have the same skin in multiple games for different character or items models? Are they going to update every game when there is a new skin released or is this somehow done dynamically?
I will start by saying that I have no idea what their plans are and I am not a game or game engine dev.
how do you have the same skin in multiple games for different character or items models?
I think what we'll see is the model and mesh of the skins will be loadable by the game via the engine. I'm assuming they'll have a standard that contains the hitbox and model/mesh to put on the character. Then the game dev could tweak gobally the scaling (as an example) to make all skins fit nicely into their game. Same for guns and such. But game devs who want to opt in[1] to this will have to use the engine API to make it work.
Are they going to update every game when there is a new skin released
I would assume that the game itself won't need to be recompiled or updated but rather the engine will download the newest skins in some common and reusable place. And then the engine swaps one model for another.
[1] my suspicion is that the tech will be licensed to the game makers. Especially if they plan on allowing copyright characters (like Marvel characters).
And again, please take everything I said with some salty grains or something as I am only speculating.
All of that sounds like it makes sense. I'm wondering how do you say buy a fortnite skin for a specific shaped character, then use it in a game where the character model is wildly different. I know very little about game game dev and even less so about how character art is made and turned into a 3d model. It just seems like the skins would have to be individually created for each game. That may not be too bad at first, but the bigger the game catalog, the more maintenance.
I'm very much not the demo for this kind of thing, but the tech behind it sounds interesting. I'm just waiting for them to say they're doing it with AI to take my distaste for Epic and multiplying it tenfold.
There were automation demos by ue If I remember correctly showing different size and types of bodies wearing the same outfits, mightve been reallusion or something else, either way AAA devs would have access to the tools/knowledge to remodel the clothes to fit manually for their game.
Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It's not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.
Guess we will see if GTA6 online fails due to not being in the unreal ecosystem
Rockstar lost me when they added invasive anticheat to GTAV. It was a great game prior to that, but take away something I've been enoying for almost 10 years on a whim and don't allow me to play it anymore because I'm on Linux? Goodbye and good riddance. Not touching anything they put out ever again.
it's already failed for me.
I ain't touching that pile of shit with 10 copies of gta5 taped together and covered in feces...
ALL aaaa slop is dead to me... they will never see a dime from me ever again... no ea, no ubi, no rockstar... if they call themselves AAAA then it's trash.
Pretty excited about gta6 myself but I'm not touching the online mode with a 10 foot pole. It probably won't even run on linux anyway
Maybe consider some of us just want to play with friends and/or spouses or partners.
Reintroduce LAN play and locally hosted multiplayer servers. IDGAF about playing with randos, I just want to play with my wife, and I’d prefer it to not be something that can shut down because the company went broke or didn’t care anymore.
I don't have the personal budget to buy a lot of games. Pay me more and I'll spend more. Otherwise, fuck all the way off
I mean, I get it, but.....unless you work for Epic, I'm not seeing how Epic would have sny say at all in how much you get paid.
It's a demand pointed out the entire capitalist hellscape, of which epic is a part, not them specifically.
Sweeney's a billionaire. He could be pushing for labor to have a bigger slice of the pie. But he won't, because he's a soulless husk.
This guy lives in a very specific bubble on his own.
Obligatory "Fuck Tim Sweeney!"
