Zagorath
@Zagorath@aussie.zone
- Comment on Tencent's soulless Age of Empires Mobile cash-grab is here to ruin your childhood 4 weeks ago:
Technically it’s a couple of Tencent’s subsidiaries, TiMi and Level Infinite, but yeah. Disappointing that World’s Edge gave the licence to develop a game in their beloved franchise to a company that was always going to produce unplayable crap.
- Comment on Tencent's soulless Age of Empires Mobile cash-grab is here to ruin your childhood 4 weeks ago:
It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.
It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology. They do have a Discord, and I recently noticed on there the official devs are desperately calling for people to give more positive reviews.
- Tencent's soulless Age of Empires Mobile cash-grab is here to ruin your childhoodwww.androidpolice.com ↗Submitted 4 weeks ago to gaming@lemmy.zip | 4 comments
- Comment on Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information 4 weeks ago:
I’ve been very heavily involved with forums.ageofempires.com since Reddit kicked the bucket. I don’t love the fact that it’s controlled by a company with a very obvious bias, but apart from an overzealous language filter they seem to be pretty good at allowing very strong criticism…better than I’ve seen some companies that run their own subreddits be, anyway.
- Comment on X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist 1 month ago:
I might just be misremembering, but I don’t think the fine itself increased, it’s just that their total costs have increased since they have to pay the legal costs for both sides.
- Comment on X fails to avoid Australia child safety fine by arguing Twitter doesn’t exist 1 month ago:
What’s concerning to me is that this Australian court is considering the intricate details of Nevada’s merger law at all. From reading this article, it sounds to me that if Nevada changed its merger law so that an acquiring company didn’t keep legal liabilities imposed by other countries on the acquired party, the Australian court would have decided that indeed, X doesn’t have to pay Twitter’s fine. Which is an insane takeaway IMO.
We should be looking at this through the lens of Australian law only, and trying to figure out what Australian merger process is mostly closely related to the Nevada one which was used.
- Comment on StarCraft 2 production director pitched WarCraft 4 and a Call Of Duty RTS before leaving Blizzard, claims report 1 month ago:
RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre
RTS is a very broad umbrella term. I would have thought a CoD RTS would be more along the lines of CoH in its design than WC3. Though I could see mixing the two to create a tactical RPG RTS.
Because of the broad category that is RTS, I don’t think it’s necessarily right to characterise it as the genre needing to “redefine the genre” or have enormous innovation. AoE4 is an excellent and very successful game, but it basically only has relatively minor refinements on long-lasting staples of the classic RTS genre. And AoE2 is still enormously successful despite being 25 years old this month (with the obvious remastered graphics, newer QoL features, and new patches and expansion content along the way).
I’m not sure I agree with the live-service complaints. Maybe there are some RTSes that went that way, but one that you mentioned was AoE3, and it certainly didn’t. It was buy-once, play forever. (There were 2 major expansions in the same vein as the expansions of earlier Age games with significant new chunks of content in each, but nothing live servicey.) So has been every one of the Definitive Editions (including Age of Mythology: Retold) and AoE4. They do put out new paid content on a regular basis, which is frankly necessary to be able to keep funding bugfixes, balance patches, and server costs. But nonetheless the content has been very well-received by the community, and is entirely optional and doesn’t lock you out of playing your old content at all if you choose not to buy it. I’m not involved in any other RTS games, so maybe they are doing more live service stuff. Shame, if so.
RTS may just be a niche genre. It doesn’t need to change to attract a wider audience, because doing that would be to change what attracts its current audience. And that’s ok. Not everything needs to be for everyone.
Not that there aren’t things that RTSes could do to try to maximise their audience. If the game is esport focused, a good investment in esport prize pools goes a long way, and so does making sure your game is in a high quality state before it gets released—even if that means delaying release. AoE4 is an excellent game today with a pretty solid playerbase, but it could have been in a much better state if it hadn’t turned away a large number of both pros and low-level competitive players by the terrible state of the game at release. I’m also really impressed by the work the Age franchise has done around console compatibility with their main games recently, but I think greater promotion of this fact (for example by sponsoring console & controller–only tournaments) would help in that arena. I’d also love to see a real classic RTS game developed for mobile, which is why I was initially really excited about Age of Empires: Mobile, until the leaks came out revealing that it’s yet another Chinese knock-off like the thousands of cheap mobile games that have come before…only this one tarnishes the brand not just by indirect association/ripping off its assets in ads, but because it’s officially allowed to use the Age of Empires brand. Mobile is never going to have the high level of competition we see on PC, but I think if they put the same level of love and care into a mobile game (designed from the ground-up to be a mobile RTS) that they put into the console ports of their core games, it could be a great experience while on the go, and possibly provide an easier entry point into the genre for some newer players.
What I don’t want to see is the kind of RTS innovation that leads to completely new genres. MOBAs are fine, but that’s what you get if you embrace the idea that RTS should completely innovate to capture audiences with wildly different tastes: an entirely different genre that no longer appeals to RTS fans.
- Comment on Calif. Governor vetoes bill requiring opt-out signals for sale of user data 1 month ago:
I think he’s talking about Do Not Track? That’s a signal that’s been in web browsers for over a decade now, but because of a lack of legal enforcement has largely been ignored by websites. To my knowledge, there’s no equivalent signal in Windows, macOS, or Linux. Though none of that stops individual app developers from putting in a setting into their app’s settings/preferences. And heck, the bill only required it to be opt-out, so in reality it would hardly have any impact on their bottom line, thanks to the tyranny of the default.
- Comment on Steam Families has officially launched with a big Steam Client Update 2 months ago:
Mastodon link?
- Comment on Stop Destroying Videogames petition heads to the European Union 3 months ago:
have a plan to transition their games into a serverless state
Or a way for communities to operate their own servers.
- Comment on Game of Thrones reportedly has an MMO in the works, nearly a decade after the last one was cancelled 6 months ago:
Amusingly, this is actually a situation where a lack of studio interference caused the problem. They had offered more episodes, which Dan and Dave declined to make.
Obviously, the show was on the decline since season 5, but the precipitous drop in quality in the final season was because D&D were rushing to finish it all off. An extra season being forced on them by the studio might have allowed the final 2 seasons to continue the gradual decline in quality instead of jumping off a cliff like it did.
- Comment on I tested the Age of Empires Mobile beta, and it's a worthless adaptation 6 months ago:
For anyone who see the preview back in February, this is not exactly surprising, but it certainly brings home the reality of the situation—that the preview did not unfairly represent the actual game.
This deeply upsets me, because the Age of Empires franchise is one I really care about. 1, 2, 3, 4, and Age of Mythology are all excellent games, and every one of them belongs in the top 20 RTS games of all time. Microsoft might not be developing this game (that’s getting outsourced to Chinese company TiMi with a history of producing trash mobile games), but they are tarnishing their brand by allowing it to be associated with this game.
But it gets worse. They are apparently also silencing critics of it. Back when February’s announcement came out, some select few creators were allowed to put out videos about the game using exclusive footage of the game, and were told they’d be paid for their role in promoting the game. But they retained editorial control over the videos. YouTube channel Age of Noob put out one such video, and while tempered in its tone, it was largely negative.
Yesterday, the YouTube channel Age of Noob put out a video saying he never got paid, as well as more specifically saying how bad the game was. Today, he put out another one saying he was forced to take down that one (in vague terms—it would not even be clear he was talking about AoE Mobile, if you hadn’t seen the first video). In a pinned comment he also said that after making the second video, he found out he had been removed from the Age Franchise Partners programme.
If this is how Microsoft is willing to treat their biggest game franchise (well, biggest one that they didn’t buy after it was already huge), and the creators that help promote it, that is incredibly disappointing.
- Submitted 6 months ago to gaming@lemmy.zip | 1 comment
- Comment on Hasbro exec says Baldur's Gate 3 "proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games," supports Larian's plan to "take the time we need" 7 months ago:
The fantastic thing about Pathfinder is that all the rules are released to the public, so things like this are completely legal, and thus we get a lot more of them than D&D gets. We’ve got Pathbuilder for creating character sheets, as well as the Pathbuilder encounter builder for GMs (as well as numerous other character and encounter builders—I just like these because they integrate with each other), Archives of Nethys for a very user-friendly rules reference, and on and on and on.
In D&D you have to rely on expensive tools with special deals with WotC (by the gods I hate Beyond and their double-dipping “pay a fixed price for content and a subscription for app features” business model—though the creators behind Beyond have gone ahead and done the same thing for Pathfinder with Nexus, if you happen to like their UX) or ones willing to basically pirate content and hope that WotC’s lawyers can’t get it taken down, like 5e.tools.
- Comment on RANT : The thing i miss from reddit is that when a series or movie came out or ended there would be a big discussion threads. 9 months ago:
I reckon the best shows are the ones that are largely episodic with a serialised overarching story. Where you can pick up pretty much any episode and be cool with it, but where watching it all in order provides the best experience and it has a satisfying definitive conclusion.
- Comment on Blue Eye Samurai is the best thing Netflix has done in years 9 months ago:
That doesn’t help if you want a satisfying conclusion to the story…
- Submitted 11 months ago to community_meta@ttrpg.network | 0 comments
- Comment on What does it look like for a YouTube creator when the audience uses something like NewPipe or Freetube? 11 months ago:
+1 Regular YouTube desktop from Australia, with the tracking part of the URL removed.