Definitely a factor - for games that need one. Doom Eternal, in my opinion, is an example of where an expanded universe, lore and story actually detracted from the game. Some would argue that the increased mechanical complexity did as well, with many favouring the simpler Doom 2016.
I think, as a designer, you're ultimately crafting an experience. It needs to be cohesive and it needs to be compelling. Anything that doesn't add to that need not apply.
Mechanical complexity doesn't necessarily equate to gameplay depth; Nor does gameplay depth to enjoyment. Some of the most enjoyable games have a really simple gameplay loop - just done well. Great game feel, nice setting, whatever. Take it from someone who's initial forays into game design involved the kitchen sink.
Too many/complex mechanics become cumbersome and usually land up being half baked or poorly integrated. The sweet spot, IMO, is in a relatively small set of polished mechanics that can interact with each other in interesting ways to produce a lot of player options. Options that have gameplay significance, and are fun to use.
Platinum Games are good at this. Metal Gear Rising, Vanquish and Bayonetta are all superficially simple and quick to learn; But there're always layers of complexity to the mechanics which provides plenty of room for mastery - and some of the highest skill ceilings I've seen.
do you think the oft-pornographic engagement with modern-day sexy media is exactly equal to looking at a piece of art in the Louvre? is Rule 34 just one big art project?
No, simply pointing out the obvious - that millennia's worth of sexualisation didn't yield the effects we have seen develop only in recent years.
but it certainly is the effect
This is where we disagree; I believe it a symptom, not the cause. Given that tame, wholesome and even modest characters are subject to the same treatment, and that "pornography culture" is a thing to begin with, I'm not sure attractive characters are deserving of my ire or removing them would be of any benefit. Where do you draw the line? How does that extend to film and other media?
Most sexualisation I've seen in games doesn't reach the level of what was common in film or literature growing up. Back then, it wasn't a problem. Amongst people of my age, it still seems not to be. If I were pressed to choose between an android in a maid outfit and the wholesale promotion of degeneracy at a household, institutional and state level, I'd be inclined to assign blame to the latter.
but my enemies don't like this porn
That was intended as a separate point. Simply put, I don't see Lara Croft or 2B, in their original context, as porn.
And what exactly is the point of your cherry picking? Everyday women, aristocracy, queens, semi-divine beings and goddesses all where subject to sexualisation. There's a very long history of people appreciating idealised, even sexualised beauty in non-sexual ways.
So no, I don't think hentai is the same thing as classical art. Nor am I making an argument in favour of it. I just think the notion that people enjoy idealised or even sexualised characters in games solely as a substitute for pornography is retarded. Given that it's the go-to means of dismissing criticisms of the intentional androgynisation of characters, I'm certainly not going to support it, even if we can agree on the excess of porn in modern society.
In their own words:
The author retains the copyright on the submitted material, and their name is added to the site's "Contributor Recognition" section.
It would be worth scraping the site, and setting up an "archival project" complete with at least the appearance of DMCA reporting functionality just to bleed them of 99% of their traffic.
it just makes us look like pornsick retards trying to get our rocks off
No, the bad-faith reframing of a couple millennia old tendency towards enjoying beauty as something base is what does that, and you're giving it airplay.
Take a walk through the Louvre. A sizable portion of its contents are designed to titillate, and do so with far more nudity than you'll find in any game. Should we burn it to the ground in a misguided attempt to avoid what is essentially an insult, designed to shame in lieu of an actual argument?
There are open source implementations of both Morrowind and Arx Fatalis. That should be a no bullshit way to figure out their level scaling.
An alternative, if you don't want to get bogged down with formulae, is just to use a curve. It's designer friendly and quick to adjust, which is great for figuring out early development balance. Something like damage and attribute scaling is going to be dependent on your implementation of game systems - DPS for example is determined by attack speed, which'll likely be influenced by animations.
The console wars weren't entirely bad. Competition is good for any marketplace, and it was up to 1st and 2nd party developers to sell a generation. With direct assistance, their platform knowledge was usually excellent, and a lot of the technical innovation seen was as a result of them showcasing hardware.
Now that the quality of a game is measured in tranny flags and ESG ratings, this just isn't the case anymore. It'll be interesting to see how Stellar Blade goes. If it is successful, and Sony commits to using their 1st party studios to make games that people actually want to play, they might again be of some use. Microsoft will have to follow or fold.
Fortnite coverage, too.
Some parents also pointed out that they do not practice Christianity at home, but they are religious and believe in different doctrines
(((parents)))
They'll inevitably remove it eventually, since it is a recurring cost and of diminishing returns outside of the initial release window.
I have mixed feelings on this one. I like Hideaki Itsuno's games but don't want to endorse Capcom's forays into ESG. Since no-one is actively cracking Denuvo, I'll likely watch for sales once performance improves, as to not endorse more things I disagree with.
Horizon 1 was alright, albeit generic and too girl-boss for my liking. Horizon 2 seems to have gone full sweet baby, with chipmunk alloy to boot.
I haven't played DD2, but I loved the original. It was an interesting take on the ARPG format, with a lot of mechanics not found elsewhere. Relative to its peers at the time of release, it had considerably better combat - unsurprising coming from the designer behind Devil May Cry. DD2, by all accounts, seems to have expanded substantially on all of the successful mechanics of the first, and people seem to be having legitimate fun with it. Despite investment in ESG (black NPCs in a early Mediterranean setting despite being almost entirely absent in the previous game), it seems surprisingly unscathed in other regards - like female characters, which are pretty much what you'd expect from a Japanese game.
To be clear, I haven't purchased it and won't until, at the very least, performance improves. At which point, I'll mod the ESG out myself if I have to. With that said, most of the complaints levelled against it are embellished or outright fabricated. The steam score, despite the misunderstanding and poor performance, has already partly recovered as a result. To clarify:
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The DRM does not prevent modding in DD or other Capcom games. Being REengine, fairly advanced modding tools are already available (including model swaps and custom scripting in LUA). A mod manager is already out, and as of one day after launch, 57 mods are already available.
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You don't pay for a new game. It's locked to a single playthrough, and given the response, this will likely be patched out. For the time being, there is a save manager.
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MTX exist, but all items are easily acquirable in the first city. No extensive farming required. The purchase window for MTX items even explicitly states this. If you have played DD1, released 12 years ago, you'll know that this is exactly the same as in the first. I don't like it, but it is typical Capcom. You're also especially retarded if you actually chose to part with real money, since it represents close to no advantage.
From what I've read, it's exactly the same as the first game. All mtx consumables are available in the first city for a small amount of in-game currency. Little to no farming is required.
It's shit, but it's the same shit as is found in anything with Capcom on it.
The parts I've seen so far are trash. I don't think the intro had a single white male
This intro? It doesn't look as ethnically homogenous as a medieval European setting should, especially in regards to the knight class. That said, if they don't look majority Mediterranean by candle light, you might want to adjust your gamma settings. The originals art direction was also washed out/generic. I resorted to installing an ENB within the opening hour. Fun game, though.
The upshot is fairly extensive modding tools are already out. Given that they're CC based, redoing NPCs should just be a matter of config editing. I'll wait for the performance patches to come out, and Denuvo to be removed.
Yeah, had much of the same experience with Gab.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I really like the idea of a place where like-minded folks can share resources and help each other along. There are plenty of springboards for woke creators, this could ultimately serve as something similar for our guys?
That, and to network. I'm sure you know how hard it is to find people to collaborate with, especially artists, without pronouns in their bio's.
The scored sub is a great idea - something persistent and easy to find and use. I'd view chat as an alternative for regulars. In that vain, Element is pretty straight forward to use (for alt-tech). Haven't used guilded - how's it fair on the anonymity front?
Primarily, the visibility of Scored is the issue. I separate my CG/gamedev work into stuff I'd use for portfolio and throwaway work (speed sculpts, quick environments and code experiments) as to not dox myself. It's not a bulletproof solution however, and something with less visibility makes that dilemma easier.
Quality tuition is pretty cheap, and general information is readily available.
A community with a decent number of members, built around the idea of sharing progress, getting feedback, playtesting and generally shooting the shit devoid of soyjacks sounds really good though.
Matrix would probably be my choice - essentially non-woke Discord with extra encryption.
The casting of a fossil as Tannis, an archaeologist, is likely the closest it'll get to getting a laugh out of me.
I'm not a huge fan of scanned characters, but I'd argue it's more the insistence on making escapism "realistic" that needs to fuck right off.
what happens is you have retards who don't know what they're doing messing too much with the final result
The games industry is not exactly a meritocracy at this point, but I'd be willing to wager that they know exactly what they're doing. Ugly assets happen all the time due to production problems and budget restrictions. Shouldn't happen with a primary character though. If a major character in a AAA game turns out ugly, odds are it's because someone wanted an ugly character.
The face capturing needs that data to be accurate to the model for it to work correctly. These fucking artists are messing with shit that they don't understand and haven't bothered researching properly.
Motion actors need not look like their characters, and in practice, seldom do. All face scans are post processed, most turn out just fine (when that is the intent). Structural alteration is doable, though skill dependent with the risk of a character looking uncanny - not immediately ugly (when that is the intent). Poor performance capture or processing can result in weird results - but that probably wouldn't explain why the rest pose looks like a mong, would it?
Dumbest shit ever.
Pear body shape just implies relatively full hips with a narrow torso. An hourglass without a widening torso and/or wide shoulders. Not a body as unappealing as rotting fruit, which let's be real, is what they're upset about.
A lot of anime girls have pear shaped bodies - just attractive ones.
Gods chosen paedophiles.
I figured it had something to do with their history of shish kebab-ing them on stage.
Topogun looks very interesting
Right? Take a look at ZRemesher as well - it's still the fastest consistent workflow I'm aware of, though there are cases where you'll want to do it by hand, and that's where Topogun comes in. You'll want to do some clean-up around loop intersections for animated meshes, but considering game models can exceed 100k polygons these days, getting 98% of the way there in a couple of minutes by drawing guides is pretty great.
I really like sculpting and I feel that's ideal for making detailed characters compared to block modelling
Absolutely. ZBrush was revolutionary when it came out, and a large part of why CG took a huge leap forward in the early 2000's. Polymodelling has it's places, but organic detail is not one of them. Doesn't matter whether it's detailing chipped concrete or warped metal, producing gnarled trees or characters, if you want your art to look good outside of "lowpoly" art styles, I'd say a decent grasp of sculpting is absolutely mandatory. It relies more on traditional art skills than conventional modelling, but as you get better you'll find yourself able to sculpt complex characters without references in a couple of hours. Really rewarding being able to make anything you can think of, quickly.
I'd honestly suggest trying Zbrush. It's unfortunately moved to a subscription model, which I'll have to decide on when it gets an update I actually care about (my permanent license no longer receives updates), but nothing comes close in terms of sculpting. It's also pretty great for hard surface modelling where the resulting topology isn't especially important (almost all of it).
Actually replaying it at the moment. It had everything going against it - zero budget, rushed production, tank controls in a 3d brawler and IGN being well, IGN.
Turns out an excellent core gameplay loop and an unapologetic commitment to fun is all it takes to make a cult hit that's still relevant today.