Information overload, no tutorial, closed it down, haven't touched it.
...I'm starting to think that not bothering to give the games a proper name other than the semi-meaningless and off-putting acronym for the game genre is actually the most appropriate name they could have.
But Dota 2 isn't an acronym. It is the game's proper name.
Like I said: they didn't bother to give it an actual name. :P
At any rate, the Double Fine Kickstarter thing has slowed down at about $1.5 million. Shafer said on twitter that the last few games they did had budgets of around $2 million each.
My paycheck is coming in the 16th, which is when I'll be making my donation.
DoW2 is sooooo fun but matchmaking is shit and it makes me sad. I love its frantic, actiony feel.
I'm always poking for a partner. I want to share the misery of my newness . Or perhaps find a good player to show me the ropes. Look up Voltaere on Steam. Avatar is Max Payne, just like Kadoken.
Might do that when I get the chance, but I haven't had the opportunity to really sit down with DoW 2 for a while.
Project L2P (basically a "learn to play DoW2" community) has a Steam group that sometimes hosts community nights and things, and they've usually got mans hanging around in their chat channel. Might be worth looking them up.
This groups mission is simple. To gather tolerant, like minded individuals with a passion for Dawn of War 2, willing to take the time to answer the questions of newbies, and to take the time to play with them and put their lessons into practice.
This group is open to anyone willing to teach, as well as anyone willing to learn.
Stop by the Group chat to get acquainted. Many friendly people willing to give advice, and join you in battle await you!
The L2P Chat Guidelines:
1.) Personal flaming of any kind will not be tolerated. Keep it civil.
2.) Balance discussions are allowed. Rants are not.
3.) No posting of links to inappropriate images or videos.
4.) Phishing is a bannable offense. No prior warnings necessary.
So is that why so many games run at not even 720p?
It's because developers want to use combinations of effects, models, texturing etc. that look amazing at a decent FPS, and the console doesn't quite have the power to do that, so they make what is seen as a smaller sacrifice.
If the difference is between running the game at 1080p without HDR lighting and 720p with it...some devs will choose the effect.
I don't know if that's a good example of a real choice they make. It's likely stuff like supporting no AA vs. supporting 2xAA, or 20 FPS vs. 30 FPS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we still see some 720p games next gen, because there are always some effects you can pull off better with a compromise on resolution.
FLoating-point Operations Per Second.
Fancy way of storing numbers that are very large and very small. There's a lot of special cases so floating point math is the hardest on a computer, and it's used all over for 3D graphics.
It's because developers want to use combinations of effects, models, texturing etc. that look amazing at a decent FPS, and the console doesn't quite have the power to do that, so they make what is seen as a smaller sacrifice.
If the difference is between running the game at 1080p without HDR lighting and 720p with it...some devs will choose the effect.
I don't know if that's a good example of a real choice they make. It's likely stuff like supporting no AA vs. supporting 2xAA, or 20 FPS vs. 30 FPS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we still see some 720p games next gen, because there are always some effects you can pull off better with a compromise on resolution.
On the converse, this is actually why some games, particularly ones out of Japan, sometimes look "worse" than others - I know the PS3 Atelier games are like this, because Gust absolutely insists on allowing the games to run at 1080p. This does, of course, cripple their memory usage to such a degree that it's difficult for them to even do complex shadowing. Meruru in particular shows that Gust has talented 3D artists at this point, but since they won't dip below 1080p, they're very limited in what they can do on the screen due to the memory limitations of the PS3.
We can still expect to see a lot of sub-1080 games on the 720 and PS4, I think. Filling the screen with pretty effects is always a great way to draw in teenagers and the like, and they often don't care as much about resolution, so long as it's still some kind of HD rez.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
So what, exactly, is a flop? And I had no idea the term was around for this long.
Is it anything like this?
No, it's more like this
This is sad truth
Would have also accepted, "Capitalism, ho!" in response to that.
So the key question Sony has to figure out is why isn't the PSV getting any attention? They need to address what people don't like about it. If the problem is the wrong kind of brand recognition though, they're kinda fucked. Let's see how this whole North America launch goes though, maybe they can abandon the Japanese market.
So what, exactly, is a flop? And I had no idea the term was around for this long.
Is it anything like this?
No, it's more like this
This is sad truth
Would have also accepted, "Capitalism, ho!" in response to that.
So the key question Sony has to figure out is why isn't the PSV getting any attention? They need to address what people don't like about it. If the problem is the wrong kind of brand recognition though, they're kinda fucked. Let's see how this whole North America launch goes though, maybe they can abandon the Japanese market.
Well, the PS3 and PSP both did better in NA than Japan, so I don't see why that won't repeat.
In short, that’s what happens to any game. Especially games made in Japan since the majority of them aren’t relevant to markets outside of Japan. There are always processes between product development and marketing in U.S. and Europe. All things considered, it’s part of the issue of making games in Japan. The game development in Japan typically is made horizontally where all assets are made in parallel, so it’s difficult to figure out what the final state of the game is going to be.
The western style game development is typically a vertical slice. So in the very early process, the team tried to create a small piece of the experience that resembles the final product. What happened with Demon’s Souls was until very late in the game’s development, we were not able to play the game through. There were framerate issues and the network was not up and running. We underestimated the quality of the game and to be honest, the media in Japan did the same.
For my personal experience with Demon’s Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game. I said, “This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.” So I put it aside.
Luckily, third party publishers, Atlus in North America and Namco in Europe [stepped in], and it really became a great hit outside of Japan.
We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making.
It's interesting to note that there's one area of Japanese game development where this isn't entire true: indie/doujin stuff. Since the best/only way for them to advertise is to put together a demo and show it off, they perforce HAVE to build vertically and have a functional game before all of the content is complete. It's part of what made Recettear so good, I think - EGS was able to get the core of the game working and then iterate like mothers until the game was fantastic front to back. Territoire is shaping up the same way, they keep iterating on the demo and are doing stuff internally and it all looks absolutely sweet. It's something I hope will propagate upwards if/when some of these guys, who are starting to see real success and money, begin getting "proper" industry jobs or really establish themselves as studios and set an example.
Of course, I could also go on about how horizontal development in traditional Japanese dev environments is hobbling them, but I think the rest of that quote kind of speaks for itself.
SpaceDrake on
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Of course, I could also go on about how horizontal development in traditional Japanese dev environments is hobbling them, but I think the rest of that quote kind of speaks for itself.
Huh, I had no idea that was the typical method of Japanese development. I could see how that would definitely be horribly crippling for any sort of large project.
I wonder if that's why the writing generally seems so bad? If you do everything at once, you don't really get to refine things or get them sent off to be localized when that phase is finished. Is it genuinely possible that most of the pieces of cringe-inducing writing are a result of the devs genuinely not having a chance to see how badly it all turns out for the final game? Because that would explain a lot as to why writing in Japanese games is so legendarily awful outside of Japan; can't be easy to make a good book when every chapter is written by a different person, put together all at once, then rapidly translated into another language.
Also can't help but wonder why they would stick with a system like that. Western development isn't the height of perfection or anything, but it seems like pretty standard common sense to be that you incrementally build a large working game by modeling it from a smaller version, not try to do everything at once so there's no proper way to review everything.
I wonder if that's why the writing generally seems so bad? If you do everything at once, you don't really get to refine things or get them sent off to be localized when that phase is finished. Is it genuinely possible that most of the pieces of cringe-inducing writing are a result of the devs genuinely not having a chance to see how badly it all turns out for the final game? Because that would explain a lot as to why writing in Japanese games is so legendarily awful outside of Japan; can't be easy to make a good book when every chapter is written by a different person, put together all at once, then rapidly translated into another language.
Well, localization is usually handled after the game goes to gold master or later (Square-Enix sometimes runs it in tandem because their staff is massive and they can afford to pay for "wasted time" if something goes awry or content is cut), so in-tandem translation squeeze isn't really to blame. It does help explain why a number of Japanese games are frankly not well-written even in Japanese, though. Remember: in the end, a translation has to depend on its source material to be good. And if the source material isn't that great to start with...
The one guy mentions not having to sit through a startup sequence every time you want to play a game. That is some seriously stupid shit to have around in this day and age. Nobody needs to be told about the developer, the publisher, the graphics engine, speedtree, Havoc, and AMD every damn time a game starts. Startups need to be start game, menu screen, the end. None of this intro crap. And companies that make that stuff unskippable need to burned at the stake.
Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
edited February 2012
I guess it speaks to my own pettiness was that one of the first thing that struck me about Skyrim was that, when you boot the game up, all you had was a (short, but unskippable) Bethsoft splash followed by the menu. No long middleware credit screens, no giant ESRB logo (remember that your game experience may change online!), no "Don't turn off your goddamn system when I'm saving, you fucking idiot" message, no press start enter to continue nonsense. Hell, rename BGS_Logo.bik and the startup becomes instant.
I guess it speaks to my own pettiness was that one of the first thing that struck me about Skyrim was that, when you boot the game up, all you had was a (short, but unskippable) Bethsoft splash followed by the menu. No long middleware credit screens, no giant ESRB logo (remember that your game experience may change online!), no "Don't turn off your goddamn system when I'm saving, you fucking idiot" message, no press start enter to continue nonsense. Hell, rename BGS_Logo.bik and the startup becomes instant.
It's a little weird.
Skyrim in general was a weird sort of non-standard release. No pre-order bonuses. No online passes. They were refusing to discuss DLC until after release and had promised mod support would be following.
For anyone seeking holes in Activision’s seemingly bulletproof Call of Duty franchise, there was a chink in the armour exposed in NPD US January sales figures released late on Thursday.
Sales fell nearly 50 per cent year-on-year for the world’s best-selling video game in 2011 – that’s comparing the performance of the latest in the franchise – Modern Warfare 3 – with its predecessor, Black Ops.
The numbers are surprising because MW3 eclipsed Black Ops sales on its initial release.
Activision reported $775m in global sales of the game in its first five days of availability in November – exceeding the record of $650m set a year before by Black Ops and $550m two years ago for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
But while console sales for MW2 were 658,000 units in January 2010 and Black Ops sold 750,000 units a year ago, MW3 sold only 386,000 units in the US last month.
“As a result, MW3 sales to date are now essentially flat versus Black Ops last year,” said Cowen and Company analysts in a note.
“We now expect MW3 to sell through slightly fewer units than Black Ops across its lifetime.”
...
But Activision can point to growing digital success not reflected in the NPD disk-based software numbers – it revealed on its earnings call on Thursday that 1.7m paying subscribers had been rapidly recruited to its new Call of Duty Elite online service.
It has also shown an ability to replace waning major franchises with new IP – Guitar Hero is no more, but the toy-based game Skylanders is looking like another success, while it said yesterday it expected great things from a new property developed by Halo creator Bungie. World of Warcraft subscriptions declined in a dry year for releases for its Blizzard division in 2011, but it plans several launches in 2012.
While noting a good pipeline of games, analysts at Macquarie Securities downgraded Activision’s shares to a neutral rating on Friday. “While we still like its long-term potential, investors in the video-game sector look for near-term catalysts and we see few,” they said in a note.
“Dark clouds and negative perceptions are hanging over the group right now,” they added, commenting on video game stocks in general.
Such perceptions are being driven by the continuing underperformance of the traditional disk-based business. NPD reported home and handheld console software dollar sales were down 38 per cent year-on-year in January to $356m, compared to expectations of a 22 per cent fall by Cowen and only a 12 per cent fall to $505m predicted by Wedbush analysts, from $576m in January 2011.
NPD blamed a lack of software launches and poor hardware and accessory performance. With only the launch of the PlayStation Vita handheld console this month, and the Wii U, expected later this year, there seems little else to interest investors in the short term other than progress in digital sales.
Wow. January must have been a terrible month.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Is it me, or is that blog blaming an entire drop in the industry as being the reason why the game dropped 50 percent year on year, and avoiding the possibility of franchise fatigue? Like the game had its boom, and from here on out it may perform pitifully?
This list looks like if you asked someone born in the 90s to name every game they could.
EDIT: 43. Half-Life 2: Episode Tow
must be trolling
I'm tired (should have gone to bed hours ago) and scrolls through that quickly and I could have SWORD I saw "So I guess Half-Life 3 got announced" in your post and nearly spit orange juice all over my monitor.
I'm thinking I should go to bed.
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
This list looks like if you asked someone born in the 90s to name every game they could.
EDIT: 43. Half-Life 2: Episode Tow
must be trolling
I'm tired (should have gone to bed hours ago) and scrolls through that quickly and I could have SWORD I saw "So I guess Half-Life 3 got announced" in your post and nearly spit orange juice all over my monitor.
Double Fine has hit 1.6 million. What I'm finding interesting is the number of buyers and how much they donated. I'm trying to use it as an indicator as how many "customers" a downloadable game needs to break even.
25000 donated 15$ or more
16094 donated 30$ or more
3356 donated 100$ or more
900 donated 250 or more
100 donated 1000
10 donated 5000
1 donated 10,000
Those first two classes of donors are key because between 15 and 30 sounds like the most likely "day 1 on XBLA or Steam" price.
Double Fine has hit 1.6 million. What I'm finding interesting is the number of buyers and how much they donated. I'm trying to use it as an indicator as how many "customers" a downloadable game needs to break even.
25000 donated 15$ or more
16094 donated 30$ or more
3356 donated 100$ or more
900 donated 250 or more
100 donated 1000
10 donated 5000
1 donated 10,000
Those first two classes of donors are key because between 15 and 30 sounds like the most likely "day 1 on XBLA or Steam" price.
Yeah, that seems pretty fair. Everyone else paying more is doing so to make a statement about supporting Double Fine or niche games or such.
At any rate, Guinness. I think this was posted before, but their video game "world records" are just getting dumber and dumber:
First HD Stealth Game Remakes: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Trilogy
Most Formats for a Handheld Open-World Title: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
First Downloadable Stealth Games Based on TV Show: Doctor Who: The Adventure Games
Most Expensive Eye of Judgment Card: Dioskuri
Most Prolific Fictional Video Game DJ: DJ Atomika (basically he's in all the SSX games)
Longest Wait for the HD Remix of a Shooter: Radiant Silvergun
Double Fine has hit 1.6 million. What I'm finding interesting is the number of buyers and how much they donated. I'm trying to use it as an indicator as how many "customers" a downloadable game needs to break even.
25000 donated 15$ or more
16094 donated 30$ or more
3356 donated 100$ or more
900 donated 250 or more
100 donated 1000
10 donated 5000
1 donated 10,000
Those first two classes of donors are key because between 15 and 30 sounds like the most likely "day 1 on XBLA or Steam" price.
I wonder if that's why the writing generally seems so bad? If you do everything at once, you don't really get to refine things or get them sent off to be localized when that phase is finished. Is it genuinely possible that most of the pieces of cringe-inducing writing are a result of the devs genuinely not having a chance to see how badly it all turns out for the final game? Because that would explain a lot as to why writing in Japanese games is so legendarily awful outside of Japan; can't be easy to make a good book when every chapter is written by a different person, put together all at once, then rapidly translated into another language.
Well, localization is usually handled after the game goes to gold master or later (Square-Enix sometimes runs it in tandem because their staff is massive and they can afford to pay for "wasted time" if something goes awry or content is cut), so in-tandem translation squeeze isn't really to blame. It does help explain why a number of Japanese games are frankly not well-written even in Japanese, though. Remember: in the end, a translation has to depend on its source material to be good. And if the source material isn't that great to start with...
I wonder if genre-focus/market preferences isn't a part of it.
I mean, in the end, I think we're underestimating how many American games have really bad writing in English. Let's take the current best-selling FPS series, perhaps the best selling series of the last five years: Modern Warfare. The writing, frankly, sucks. It's not really a secret, but by and large, it's forgiven because even good writing would been seen as a distraction from the game's mechanics than a positive quality. So it remains a non-issue.
The Japanese market has different genre preferences (especially handhelds), so we end up with a wider dependence on writing than "Do you really give a shit? You're only playing this for the online stat-tracking and shooting guys between buildings." Then again, this is just a theory based on my own observations. Modern Warfare 3 is exactly the same game translated into Russian or Chinese--i.e. bad writing, but no one cares.
Synthesis on
0
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Posts
My paycheck is coming in the 16th, which is when I'll be making my donation.
Might do that when I get the chance, but I haven't had the opportunity to really sit down with DoW 2 for a while.
Project L2P (basically a "learn to play DoW2" community) has a Steam group that sometimes hosts community nights and things, and they've usually got mans hanging around in their chat channel. Might be worth looking them up.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ProjectL2P
http://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/editors/b/gidan_blog/archive/2012/02/11/dad-plays-more-games-he_2700_ll-hate.aspx
The Muscle March one is great.
This suggests how powerful the next PS/Xbox will be.
It's because developers want to use combinations of effects, models, texturing etc. that look amazing at a decent FPS, and the console doesn't quite have the power to do that, so they make what is seen as a smaller sacrifice.
If the difference is between running the game at 1080p without HDR lighting and 720p with it...some devs will choose the effect.
I don't know if that's a good example of a real choice they make. It's likely stuff like supporting no AA vs. supporting 2xAA, or 20 FPS vs. 30 FPS.
I wouldn't be surprised if we still see some 720p games next gen, because there are always some effects you can pull off better with a compromise on resolution.
God that man is a painfully bad presenter.
Is it anything like this?
Fancy way of storing numbers that are very large and very small. There's a lot of special cases so floating point math is the hardest on a computer, and it's used all over for 3D graphics.
No, it's more like this
Duke Nukem Forever.
This is sad truth
Also
On the converse, this is actually why some games, particularly ones out of Japan, sometimes look "worse" than others - I know the PS3 Atelier games are like this, because Gust absolutely insists on allowing the games to run at 1080p. This does, of course, cripple their memory usage to such a degree that it's difficult for them to even do complex shadowing. Meruru in particular shows that Gust has talented 3D artists at this point, but since they won't dip below 1080p, they're very limited in what they can do on the screen due to the memory limitations of the PS3.
We can still expect to see a lot of sub-1080 games on the 720 and PS4, I think. Filling the screen with pretty effects is always a great way to draw in teenagers and the like, and they often don't care as much about resolution, so long as it's still some kind of HD rez.
Would have also accepted, "Capitalism, ho!" in response to that.
So the key question Sony has to figure out is why isn't the PSV getting any attention? They need to address what people don't like about it. If the problem is the wrong kind of brand recognition though, they're kinda fucked. Let's see how this whole North America launch goes though, maybe they can abandon the Japanese market.
ZING 8->
PS - Local_H_Jay
Sub me on Youtube
And Twitch
Well, the PS3 and PSP both did better in NA than Japan, so I don't see why that won't repeat.
Also also, I actually feel compelled to address a point made a little earlier ITT:
It's interesting to note that there's one area of Japanese game development where this isn't entire true: indie/doujin stuff. Since the best/only way for them to advertise is to put together a demo and show it off, they perforce HAVE to build vertically and have a functional game before all of the content is complete. It's part of what made Recettear so good, I think - EGS was able to get the core of the game working and then iterate like mothers until the game was fantastic front to back. Territoire is shaping up the same way, they keep iterating on the demo and are doing stuff internally and it all looks absolutely sweet. It's something I hope will propagate upwards if/when some of these guys, who are starting to see real success and money, begin getting "proper" industry jobs or really establish themselves as studios and set an example.
Of course, I could also go on about how horizontal development in traditional Japanese dev environments is hobbling them, but I think the rest of that quote kind of speaks for itself.
Huh, I had no idea that was the typical method of Japanese development. I could see how that would definitely be horribly crippling for any sort of large project.
I wonder if that's why the writing generally seems so bad? If you do everything at once, you don't really get to refine things or get them sent off to be localized when that phase is finished. Is it genuinely possible that most of the pieces of cringe-inducing writing are a result of the devs genuinely not having a chance to see how badly it all turns out for the final game? Because that would explain a lot as to why writing in Japanese games is so legendarily awful outside of Japan; can't be easy to make a good book when every chapter is written by a different person, put together all at once, then rapidly translated into another language.
Also can't help but wonder why they would stick with a system like that. Western development isn't the height of perfection or anything, but it seems like pretty standard common sense to be that you incrementally build a large working game by modeling it from a smaller version, not try to do everything at once so there's no proper way to review everything.
After the uber serious business of Arkham City, felt like just the kind of game I needed. Even if it does get freaking hard at times.
It did unseat Skyrim for a day, so I can say that it isn't a failure for us, at least.
Well, localization is usually handled after the game goes to gold master or later (Square-Enix sometimes runs it in tandem because their staff is massive and they can afford to pay for "wasted time" if something goes awry or content is cut), so in-tandem translation squeeze isn't really to blame. It does help explain why a number of Japanese games are frankly not well-written even in Japanese, though. Remember: in the end, a translation has to depend on its source material to be good. And if the source material isn't that great to start with...
Compared to
It's ridiculous.
It's a little weird.
Skyrim in general was a weird sort of non-standard release. No pre-order bonuses. No online passes. They were refusing to discuss DLC until after release and had promised mod support would be following.
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/2/call-of-duty-black-ops-crowned-winner-of-greatest-videogame-ending-in-guinness-world-records-2012-gamer's-edition-poll/
That is a terrible list.
Then again, every "Top X Category Based On Opinion" list is terrible.
WHAT
This list looks like if you asked someone born in the 90s to name every game they could.
EDIT: 43. Half-Life 2: Episode Tow
must be trolling
I'm tired (should have gone to bed hours ago) and scrolls through that quickly and I could have SWORD I saw "So I guess Half-Life 3 got announced" in your post and nearly spit orange juice all over my monitor.
I'm thinking I should go to bed.
I could have sword that too, Scottsman.
25000 donated 15$ or more
16094 donated 30$ or more
3356 donated 100$ or more
900 donated 250 or more
100 donated 1000
10 donated 5000
1 donated 10,000
Those first two classes of donors are key because between 15 and 30 sounds like the most likely "day 1 on XBLA or Steam" price.
Yeah, that seems pretty fair. Everyone else paying more is doing so to make a statement about supporting Double Fine or niche games or such.
At any rate, Guinness. I think this was posted before, but their video game "world records" are just getting dumber and dumber:
First HD Stealth Game Remakes: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Trilogy
Most Formats for a Handheld Open-World Title: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
First Downloadable Stealth Games Based on TV Show: Doctor Who: The Adventure Games
Most Expensive Eye of Judgment Card: Dioskuri
Most Prolific Fictional Video Game DJ: DJ Atomika (basically he's in all the SSX games)
Longest Wait for the HD Remix of a Shooter: Radiant Silvergun
http://kotaku.com/5874560/the-10-most-bogus-entries-in-the-guinness-world-records-2012-gamers-edition/gallery/11
Wait for $1 Steam sale WOOO!!
Kind of awesome of people, I guess, though I really don't like adventure games, so, meh
I'd throw $15 towards Double Fine if they did something along the lines of another Costume Quest, their only good game
I wonder if genre-focus/market preferences isn't a part of it.
I mean, in the end, I think we're underestimating how many American games have really bad writing in English. Let's take the current best-selling FPS series, perhaps the best selling series of the last five years: Modern Warfare. The writing, frankly, sucks. It's not really a secret, but by and large, it's forgiven because even good writing would been seen as a distraction from the game's mechanics than a positive quality. So it remains a non-issue.
The Japanese market has different genre preferences (especially handhelds), so we end up with a wider dependence on writing than "Do you really give a shit? You're only playing this for the online stat-tracking and shooting guys between buildings." Then again, this is just a theory based on my own observations. Modern Warfare 3 is exactly the same game translated into Russian or Chinese--i.e. bad writing, but no one cares.
They've done it again, by jove;
What the fuck does that ad even mean
I guess it means she has a date after the fight.