Lefthandofgod
85517
1146
100
Sep 20, 2023 9:29 PM
Lefthandofgod
85517
1146
100
meergull
Speaking of good resent games, OTXO is great, it's like Hotline Miami, but better
demoncatmara
Wow I'd never heard of that one! Love Hotline Miami, it's so damn good.
shiftingbits
This is what happens when you replace “Creative Vision” with “Corporate Vision.”
BigBidiza
More like when you replace "historical vision" with "nostalgia vision".
Whatwhatsomethingbutt
Game developers then: We're going to use repetition and ridiculous difficulty to mask how short the game actually is. Game developers now.... ok, I guess this one is still sometimes the same.
Dionysus187
Every time I play an old game I remember fondly it immediately snaps me to reality. The original Doom was boring repetitive garbage but given the relative comparisons at the time it was a masterpiece.
demoncatmara
It's repetitive but I think it's pretty fun. Lots of new content too
Tielatto
People want these massive worlds with days of content then bitch and whine when the game needs space. They want ultra-realistic graphics and endless complexity then cry when a decade-old machine can't run the games. Can't win with unpleasable nerds wearing nostalgia goggles.
Ronelyn
And most of these are publisher-level issues, not dev-level. No time or money for optimization, choombata!
Cptbluebeard7
Seriously, but the thought process for this is as deep as "indie devs can do no bad, AAA studios R evil"
drinkthederpentine
Maker of this meme never had to install special sound drivers in the 90s. God help you if you didn't have soundblaster
ChristopherHallett
Please, take a seat. This is ENTIRELY due to corporate, not the devs.
TheCriticsWereConciseItOnlyTookFourLines
Back when you had to turn off the turbo switch and go back to 4.77 GHz so that the game wouldn't run too fast
thisisjunk
MHz my friend. Lemme just overclock my 286 to modern chip frequencies... and, it's on fire.
TheCriticsWereConciseItOnlyTookFourLines
Fair enough
AleksandrBlazkowicz
None of this shit is game Devs and has come from the invention and inflection of the executive class.
cvleest
Just to be clear, most of the game developers agree with you. We also don't like this trend, but most of us gotta pay the bills and would much rather be working with a small team on a passion project but don't have the funding to make it happen. My point is, don't go too hard on the gave developers themselves, we very often get abuse for decisions made well above our pay grade by the business people. Most of us are just trying to do something we love and pay all our bills.
Lefthandofgod
I know, I really do, and I feel for many of you guys, but COUNTERPOINT: Halo Infinite. 5+ yrs spent fucking around aimlessly trying to build a new engine to support future games, only to end up with a complete unintelligible garbled mess of spaghetti code, nightmarish eldritch documentation or lack thereof, massive tech debt, worst netcode in the entire history of the franchise, complete lack of features that even Halo 5's version of the BLAM engine already had at launch.
cvleest
Yeah, that is true. The old saying of too many cooks in the kitchen. If you get a team that is big enough without strong leadership it goes downhill very quickly. I've been in that situation several times. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Etc. No one usually is specifically to blame, those are unfortunate instances and I can tell you first hand how demoralizing it is to work at a place for years knowing it's a giant pile of failure.
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gypsyspot
Ohh, I'll start a union and fix all of my work problems. What a simple fix. then I shall fix the environment and political corruption, maybe cure cancer during lunch. I have an actual easy fix for you, if you dont like the game, don't play it. Either way, don't be a dick to the devs.
GriffinMann41
What a terrible opinion. Motherfucker, they need jobs. Yean unionizing is important, but it's hard to do when you already struggle.
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cvleest
Lol, you clearly just want to be angry, and that is totally ok. The world isn't black and white though, and we should try to direct that anger appropriately. I agree that needing a job doesn't excuse 'shi@#$ness' but is the guy who's job it was to make a mailbox asset, or a tree, the one you should be angry at? I can guarantee you they were never consulted on if the game should be micro transaction or a battle pass, or if it should be a 500gb download, or any number of other things.
cvleest
I think unionizing would be great, but that still wouldn't put me in any kind of position to greatly alter a companies business strategy.
KingORedLions
Organising and unionising doesn't change the fact that games require a lot of money to build, and the entities that have that money have neither the developer, not the customer's interests at heart. I'd love to start making smaller indie games completely independent, but here's the kicker - I'm not a millionaire and I can't pay five or six salaries for 2-3 years. That money has to come from somewhere, and that's where publishers come in.
KingORedLions
If you want AA games, then you're looking at paying 50+ salaries. If you want those big detailed adventures like Red Dead Redemption, God of War, or high end racing games like your Forzas, then we're talking hundreds, sometimes thousands of salaries.
MelodyLightfoot
Please don't equate Developers with their Publishers and Executives. Developers WANT to make good games, but they are working 65 hour 1/
MelodyLightfoot
days for 10 hour a week wages, under the thumb of over paid rich fucks with no interest in games while a sword of damocles hangs over 2/
MelodyLightfoot
their head close enough to give them a shave everytime an exec takes another unearned bonus.
KiwiGameDev
:( yeah
megatausj11
to be clear most of these issue are management issue, the insane crunch times terrible working cultures and avaricious executive managers are killing games. The needless drive for "better" graphics increase the space needed while we are loosing games with unique art styles, also this increase technical difficulty of games but people want them to be release at the same if not faster pace this makes games worse, non of this is the fault or aaa devs just the C suite and the Gamers tm
apLundell
I dunno. Modern games don't expect me to use a boot floppy because their game won't run if there's an operating system loaded.
Alfadorfox
And then can't play Mass Effect 1 (16 year old single player game) because the EA servers are down.
WhereIsMyAppleQuava
Friend are you using Origin or E.A.? Cause there are ways around the latter.
nicetomeetyouimdad
🏴☠️
Cutwail
They also actively engage pursuit against revival project.
chrisjfinlay
The fact that @OP thinks coding in assembly makes a program multi-platform tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about their grasp of development. Coding a game in assembly makes it PLATFORM SPECIFIC.
lotsofleeches
Lmao this is bonkers and ahistorical. I used to need special boot disks to use, having to restart my computer to load optimized startup programs, for like half my games.
Widgetboy
Rock and stone, brothers.
gman003
Also that "shooter that only takes up 97KB" isn't really a game, it was a demoscene contest entry, has maybe ten minutes of gameplay if you really stretch it (.kkrieger, if you're interested). And fitting it into that size required some creative programming that led to bugs like "you actually don't take damage from most enemies". A feat of programming, sure, but hardly a fair comparison. Most contemporary games were several gigabytes.
UncleMeaty
Yeah. .kkrieger uses some incredibly clever programming tricks to make it so small, but it really is more of a tech demo than an actual game.
thisisjunk
If we're talking shooters, Wolfenstein 3D (with all 6 episodes) takes up 2.35 MB. Doom was 2.39 MB.
gman003
Also, one of the devs on .kkrieger, who has a fascinating blog, now works at... Epic. Makers of Fortnite, and UnrealEngine, and all that AAA shit. Doing work on compression to make games smaller because *these games would be even larger otherwise*. In this case it is *literally* the same dev.
sohowsgoing
Remember Alf? He's back... in Pog form.
mward1984
I mean, you say AAA developers but really this is mostly just Activision.
thedarkcanuck
There's a game on the Steam page called Ready or Not (SWAT shooter) that sells for I think $40. It's a decent game, currently in early access and probably always will be. They're selling a DLC package with a few extra guns for $90 dollars. Yes, you read that right. 90 fucking dollars.
Eldroidio
Wont be in early access forever, and the DLC is a supporter pack as the game is funded purely by players and they have no publisher.
SkittishLittleToaster
There's more vitriol in these comments than I'm accustomed to here at imgur.
KiwiGameDev
Think it’s cause this one might hit a little closer to home than a lot. You’d probably see a similar sorta comment section on a meme that made police or landlords seem like the good guys.
Dionysus187
Gamers™ are the worst.
SherMattLockSmith
Since it's release Skyrim hasn't actually released any bugfix patches. Every single bug present in the original is present in the "Special Edition" which released 5 years later had ZERO bugfixes and focused on a purely graphical and content based update.
racknoz
Bethesda be like: Why bugfix when the modding community already did all of it for free?
twobluefish
The amount of rage I have for Bethesda constantly putting out new releases that break skse and then fragment the modding community is hard to express. Stop doing tweaks that your paid mods require unless you actually fix bugs!
undercoverles
This is Publisher bullshit and Producer, not Developer Bullshit. Most game devs would be MORE THAN HAPPY to hone their games, optimize it, make sure there's no lootbox bullshit. But you know where the push for that comes from? Publishers, and then passed onto the producers that cut the useful things out to ensure that the bullshit gets developed instead of bugs. One of MANY reasons i left the industry. Also, the "breast milk" thing stinks of 4chan bullshit, like who is that attacking?
ydwyrd
https://www.dexerto.com/business/nursing-activision-blizzard-employees-say-their-breast-milk-kept-getting-stolen-1717345/
kadaeux
The breast milk thing actually happened at Blizzard
undercoverles
Gotcha, yeah I saw the link below. Weird that it happened, i guess less surprising that it was at Blizzard, but I'm mostly wondering about the context in this meme. Like, are they blaming not being able to work on female employees complaining about something creepy like that? I'll always dislike this meme because of the misrepresentation of past devs and present devs. Like obviously people never played a PC game in the 90s that didn't work because you had the wrong damn sound card.
kadaeux
I think it's intended more as a reference that makes people who have the misfortune of knowing about it go "haha! That's Blizzard!" more of an in-joke within a joke than a generalisation.
ps238principal
The "minimum requirements" bit tells me whoever wrote this never played PC games before the XBox/PS2 era.
Youhavinagiraffe
Not sure when "Then" was supposed to be but Crysis came out 15 years ago and can still be difficult to run on higher settings
Promethianfire
Yeah. I had to shrink the hell out of the window to run Wolfenstein 3D on a 286 and write custom autoexec.bat & config.sys files to create a boot menu to optimize memory to play X-Wing on my Pentium 75.
JohnnyricoMC
When the first games that require hardware acceleration (aka gpu) showed up, it was somewhat controversial at the time. This was still when folks like John Carmack were still writing whole engines on almost their own.
UseTheSource
Maybe you and the others here think about the late 90's, while maybe the artist thinks about games like PC Man, Carmen Sandiego, Soko-Ban which would run on CGA video cards if you wanted to.
Nightchime
Or back in the text-based era.
DorkJedi
Well, that didn't work. time to get extra creative in trimming and load order for config.sys and AUTOEXEC.bat
asimovcascade
Anyone remember QEMM. Was a lifesaver
grimnorseman
Turbo-button, when you need to clock down the cpu in order for it to run the game...
transientmind
I spent many years wanting to punch Bill Gates in the dick for his stupid policy that relied on ‘no-one will ever need more than 640K memory’. Memory juggling with himem was a wholly cruel exercise that should have been unnecessary.
ohbotherwhatdoiput
I loved how every Sierra game required 384+ KB of Conventional RAM when PCs were locked to 640KB and MS-DOS required 200+KB. They advertised sound and mouse controls on the back of the box, never got to use them.
ITellBadPuns
Lol yeah. PC games not needing top-tier specially customized hardware POWERED BY A FORSAKEN CHILD just to run without crashing, let alone actually running decently at all, is one of the few things modern PC game devs are doing reasonably well.
Thrwthrwthrowaway
You didn't need forsaken children. You needed Voodoo.
VodkaReindeer
And if you have Voodoo you needed to read readme.txt to find out how to make the game use that instead of the shitty integrated chip that your mobo had. Looking at you, Battlezone II.
TheFuckfaceWhisperer
Just press the TURBO button. sheesh, kids these days
FreshwaterViking
Tore down a system once and found a turbo button hooked up to a little number display whose numbers were dictated by jumpers. It wasn't even connected to the motherboard.
apLundell
The person who created this image would cry if you forced him to edit a config.sys file.
lenorath
Gotta reorder your IRQs at boot if you want sound bro
EndocrineResearcher
Yeah, I remember having to go into the game's files and edit shit to get them to even launch.
TheGoatEmporium
Yeah. I'm cool with not playing any new games until they are at least 5 years old. Because as a PC gamer that's how I was raised!
sacul64
Not to mention bringing up the breast milk stuff in a jokey way with modern development is bad taste but the blizzard accusations go back the the old days they are glorifying.
shadowmetachu
I think I waited like 5-6 years after purchasing The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind before I actually had a computer capable of running it above 3fps, lol
gman003
Just going from Doom to Doom II required buying a 486. Which was neither a common nor cheap processor back then! A lot of people weren't even on the 386 that Doom required.
Baronaccio
devilspanker
Not to mention lots of games, when you upgraded to a 486, went too fast to play. Looking at you, Star Trek 25th anniversary.
VodkaReindeer
Just undepress the turbo button.
sohowsgoing
Nothing happened. You got no response.
Eiladar
Yeah. RAM was always at a premium (remember editing config.sys and autoexec.bat files to squeeze the last little bit out?), the release of the 386 processor was a massive change, most new stuff simply wouldn't work on older cpus after that point; and Win95 wasn't quite as necessary (things still ran on DOS - see the Config/Autoexec bit above) but by the time 98 came out, it was pretty much a requirement.
TMccl
Yeah. In fact with how quickly tech was moving at the time I think it was more common to suddenly just not be able to play new games
Zange0
Or old games! Get a new PC and suddenly half your games run at the wrong clock speed or some crap.
RandAIFlagg
I remember not even getting my hopes up when I saw Warcraft 3 at my buddy's house. I could barely play MUDs.
crann
Buying X-Wing Alliance and waiting 2 years for a computer that could run it. Man, I loved that game though.
FreshwaterViking
In 1998, it was "this game requires a processor with MMX instructions." In 2005, it was "this game requires a video card with Shader Model 3.0 and Hardware Transform & Lighting."
Torvucci
I had a game that required a DVD player, and my laptop only had a CD player... Had to wait years to play it
TMccl
That was me with Oblivion when it came out. I got it for my birthday but had to wait to get myself a DVD player and even then I had to console command all the grass away after turning the settings all the way down to play it.
skwint
I played games in the "you booted in the wrong memory mode. You need to reprogram autoexec.bat to play this game!"
Heffe3737
Wing Commander Privateer has entered the chat.
DorkJedi
Fun fact, Star Citizen has been in dev for as long as the gap between Wing Commander and beginning to code Star Citizen.
Heffe3737
Oh Jesus dude.
throwaway12345432
also you need to increase the keyboard buffer
mrputter
"Ok, wait. Does this game use Expanded memory or Extended memory? 𝙷𝙸𝙼𝙴𝙼.𝚂𝚈𝚂 or 𝙴𝙼𝙼𝟹𝟾𝟼? 𝙻𝙾𝙰𝙳𝙷𝙸𝙶𝙷? 𝙳𝙾𝚂=𝙷𝙸𝙶𝙷? I think James knows, maybe I'll phone him."
Zilthai
Oh yeah. Back in the early 90s, I had three different autoexec files that I swapped from just so I could play games, run AutoCAD, or file share with my dad's computer. I think we somehow color-coded the text and made some Soundblaster startup files so we knew what setting it was on when it booted up. What a mess.
DorkJedi
I learned how to make an interactive boot menu for autoexec. Hmm, playing Quake, that is boot mode 3.
lost901
I did this, too. Had a floppy that booted into a menu with a handful of configurations optimized for various games.
RayneOfSalt
Same. At one point I had 5 or 6 different autoexecs that could be loaded depending on what game I wanted to play.
Ronelyn
Oh, dude, the amount of tweaks to get your sound card driver to load and leave enough extended memory for the game! SO, SO grateful for plug and play. :)
CompilerBreak
"Your sound card works perfectly" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M
Ronelyn
And by the way, this isn't a "You kids have it so good!" rant. It's a "Thank GAWD it sucks less now!" rant. I'm GLAD it's better now, or at least different. :)
f3n1x187
Shit, plug and play wasn't that very plug and play until windows 7 and was still an improvement
FeChefImgur
Now we just go "why has Steam opened so many processes ?!"
ScienceIsNotALiberalConspiracy
"I coded Rollercoaster Tycoon entirely in Assembly so it CAN NEVER USE YOUR GPU."
Hextator
Last time this was reposted, someone correctly pointed out that the game being coded in assembly made it 𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 likely to run on other machines...
onlyhalfghost
to be fair, GPUs were not common when Rollercoaster Tycoon came out, nor does anything anywhere need one to run it.
Darksol439
Assembly programming is famous and notorious for two things being very fast and not being portable. Meaning a program written assembly can only be run on the architecture it was designed for. The Person who made this meme knew that it was small and fast did not know or mixed up higher languages, portability with lower languages like assembly.
mrthewhitee
This is all rose colored glasses BS. When doom 2 came out I had to manually edit my autoexec.bat file to disable loading my cdrom drivers in order to get the game to play on my pc.
Vengeraxe
God forbid if you had multiple CD drives, played around with something dumb like a Zip drive, bought a "bargin" audio card, tried to use a joystick (of damn near any kind). Yeah shit wasnt easier then that for damn sure.
keyblader1985
I don't know why people keep posting this when it gets called out every time (but still getting upvotes regardless).
sleepinggreenidea
It's the same reasons you have people born in the 60s longing for the "simpler better times" of the 50s. Nostalgia for a past that never was
flarflarf
Game Developers Then: cloud saves? no. rebind keys? no. runs on mac? lol no. multiplayer? no. weird mouse? you need to support it in your config.sys. I'm not a fan of the big AAA titles generally but lets not pretend there weren't a lot of really shitty video games in the 90s.
RooGryphon
do you know how to config a 486 66mhz system with 16MB ram to run doom? with proper expanded mem settings
terlandarkmoore
Withbthe right autoexec you could get it to run on 4mb system... not well... but it would run
2074red2074
Controller support? Support deez nuts.
MagicalScientist
"Cloud saves" weren't even a concept outside of the online games where you then just didn't have a save file.
Ambeam
Rebind keys was a thing in most 90s games I played
IconicM
Game Developers Then: Please enjoy tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys for a week before giving up on getting the game to run.
sadurdaynight
Also devs back then didn't have to dick with modern graphics shaders which involved really complex stuff like ray-tracing/lighting, dynamic soft shadows, horizon scattering, rayleigh effects on clouds, realistic physics engines, etc. Dev studios can either build in-house, or get 3rd party s/w to bolt-on, but still have to figure it out. Good game engines like UE5 help incorporate a lot of this, but takes time to "git gud" with it. All while publisher is wanting to puppy mill out stuff for profit
TheFastpaws
Most saves could be backed up to a floppy. Dunno where you get no rebinds but even Master of Orion 2 let you do that. Razor requires me to be online to change my Trinity mouses settings. You are pulling stuff out of your butt mate. Oh and at least the issues of the past were generally hard limitations of hardware. Not because some ass CEO like Kotick forced it in.
thisisjunk
Cloud save? You mean saving to two floppy discs? Rebinding keys (definitely an improvement) wasn't really a concept until quite recently. Macs had (have) two problems: A smaller install base and different OS structure. But, lots of AAA games had Mac versions. Multiplayer appeared almost as soon as modems became common. (before, really) Non-standard input hardware was always an issue before HID. And for that last sentence, remember Sturgeon's law: "ninety-percent of everything is crud".
VodkaReindeer
Based on the Starcraft manual Macs also had the problem of their mouse only having one button.
mrthewhitee
By multi-player appearing, you mean they let you peer to peer as long as you knew exactly who you wanted to play with and were willing to configure the setting yourself. Multi-player was exceptionally bare bones until the Xbox came about.
thisisjunk
Gestures broadly at Multi-User Dungeons. (though most were text/ASCII based, graphical MUDs started in the mid-80's)
ToastedEggSandwich
Quake and Starcraft were already hosting pro-level esports tournaments before the turn of the century. Dedicated servers were everywhere. Console's p2p matchmaking actually forced the standard to regress.
Ambeam
Oooh shiiiiiiit. I smell a lan party coming on. (It smells gross but I'm still excited)
ThatRaccoonGuy
This is why I mostly buy from indie teams and stuff. Remember how many people made DOOM? Five. How many people were employed for Terraria? Ten. Stardew Valley? One. Undertale? One. All the companies that we think of as being great back in the day, were great because back in the day it was a small team of active gamers working on passion projects at their own pace.
mrthewhitee
Good for you. I play most of those games too but I'm not going to disparage AAA devs who give me games like God of War or Spiderman. It's apples and oranges, neither is a better model than the other and I want to play both kinds of games.
Ambeam
Agreed
watermelonman122
Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers Please!
IwishKimPinewasmygirlfriend
Came here to say this. When it comes to solo devs, Lucas Pope is a genius
bigfatpanda89
Deep. Rock. Galactic. Rock and Stone ⛏️
electronicbovine
Even Minecraft was one or two devs
lenorath
Undertale was made by by Toby Fox, but with art from Temmie Chang. He did do a ton of the work, but she also deserves credit.
CanThisBeMyUsernameQuestionmark
Another interesting example is the arkham series. Arkham asylum was made by a team of about 38 people if I'm not mistaken
ClessAurion
You are so close to what is true, yet... miss it. Its suits, suits ruin everything. But sadly, suits are also the ones needed to make massive big projects like GTAV or Baldurs Gate 3 happen.
transientmind
The uh… the suits getting largely cut out of the process is why BG3 was good. That’s not the best example to support your argument.
ClessAurion
I can ASSURE you, there were plenty of suits on BG3 development. Literally go to the credits and you can see them all there. All games that aren't indie (and not even that), have suits. Their influence, or how good they are at what they do varies from case to case though, like with everything.
Raszagil
"But you don't understand! Blizzard's still in there!"
ClessAurion
Lol if only
DoucheBaggington
Great example would be the Command & Conquer series. Under Westwood studios, it was phenomenal. Once EA took over...they named their last fucking installment after goddamn Twilight. Needless to say, it was awful.
Radix865
Isn't the remaster collection decent though? Also, aside that remaster the most recent installment was Rivals not Twilight, though I'm not sure if that's better or worse...
transientmind
The remaster is godly. Check out the remaster’s EVA installation on YouTube sometime for a nostalgia injection straight to the heart.
ThatRaccoonGuy
I remember so many games I love being ended because of EA buying Westwood and halting every game that wasn't C&C... *sigh*
thelastmelt
PART of the problem is that engines do a lot of the “work” that was required back in those days, so the barrier to entry was high! Now you can have a person with some funding slap a team together and make a game. Their goal is entirely the money. I’d tell you how I know this, but the company I work for has had a rough week … (no, I’m not important enough to have any influence over the shitty policies)
donkeymoney
Flappy Bird? One.
takhat
Pretty sure undertale was at least 2
ThatRaccoonGuy
I've been corrected a few times. I can't edit my post.
RobotOverlordFromTheFuture
I'd love to collaborate with other game devs who share this vision.
juffowup00
Because at some point leeches jump in to the project and all the effort goes to monetizing -> underpaid production team which need to work harder to make more profits(but not for the team) -> lack of interest -> shit games -> desperately make dlc and other shit to keep players pouring money into the monster they call game.
Muffyns
Undertale was at least 2, Temmy made the art
JoeMangoJello
Careful, I got pretty well lambasted for politely pointing out the benefits of indie games awhile back. There seems to be a dedicated cadre of AAA apologists round these parts.
Excultist
Fuck those guys indie games rock. They have soul
WhyDontYouMakeMe
It's not all trash, but if it were to all be put in one place, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a landfill
ThatRaccoonGuy
Looks like we got one already haha
mrthewhitee
Or perhaps people don't appreciate the pretention of insisting indie games are the only true games worth admiring. Personally, I play both indie and AAA and I would not choose one model over the other. There is value in both and I'm glad they both exist. ConcernedApe is never going to produce a God of War tier game and gaming would be worse without those kinds of games too.
Jack0d
When it comes to indie games vs AAA games, people fail to realize that both of these for the vast majority of games are more or less garbage. It's always those few particularly good indie games or Elden Ring that people cherry pick as an example of said development budget.
JoeMangoJello
I of course wouldn't characterize it as pretention to simply prefer inexpensive games that provide substantially greater R.O.I.
Noob3rts
Completely agree. I will never pay $90 for a video game again when it is not worth it. Baldur's Gate is the only game thus far that I've bought in years worth the cash.
tinydog
And well worth it, BG3 is!
channelranger
I think really what's fucking up a lot of AAA games is the push for more monetization (that's why always online exists, that's also why they don't care if old hardware can play it), more and more technically impressive graphics, and more and more expectations of storage space. Pretty sure no 500gb game needs all that space, there's just a bunch of uncompressed files in it for no reason. Sadly the sexist game dev culture part is... an older problem.
JaceArveduin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16heGLKlTA This feels like it belongs somewhere in the comments.
tekcor
Ark. Not only is it a massive game, its DLC is massive, and uses on-disk caching. It’s not caching if you’re putting it right back on the disk you fucks! I’ve seen an Ark install at 450GB, and the worst part is you can cut that in half by deleting the cache, and the game still works fine. It of course takes that space back because who needs optimization, right?
PectorialMuscles
450GB? Mine from 5 years ago before I uninstalled it was 670GB :) reinstalling it 3 years later fixed the issue, reducing it to 250GB for a month before it was 300GB again.
AFallenDragon
I love-hate ark, it's a great game but so freakishly large. You can actually compress the file size on yourself to help at least & then removing maps that you don't play can help as well. Doing both can drop the size to around 150GBs, which is better but still unnecessarily large. At least you don't need the expansions installed to get access to the dinos or the engrams. That's part of the reason the base game is so large, it holds all of the files assests for each expansion.
AFallenDragon
That was all over the place & I'm a little unamused with my brain right now because of it.
tekcor
Yeah I tried the compression thing once. It’s just not worth it. Have you ever tried to use the dev kit? I have a separate 512GB SSD just for it, and it takes forever to get ready. Launch it then wait 20-30 minutes for it to start functioning. I’m not exaggerating either.
AFallenDragon
I have not, I can't get my head & hands to work together to doodle anything more then a stick figure so I've never tried to make anything with the dev kit.
Tielatto
Ah yes. Every good game was made by ACTIVE GAMERS with PASSION and NO DEADLINES. Of course! ...Or that's just kinda some fucking nonsense and the actual problems go beyond some weak ass 'back in my day' boomer quips.
ThatRaccoonGuy
I remember when the Blizzard devs were like... just people you could talk to and joke with. Also I'm a millennial. Millennials are old now. Deal with it.
Tielatto
"Also I'm a millennial." ...Who asked?
ThatRaccoonGuy
You brought up my age. You seem troubled and angry. Have a good one.
Tielatto
I didn't mention your age at all. And it's very odd that you consider someone just saying something to be an indication of trouble.
Tielatto
Also, the Blizzard devs are still just people you could talk to and joke with. They never started recruiting non-humans into that company.
Tielatto
Clowns actually believe Blizzard recruited goblins or some shit lmao
NullNameAvailable
Baldurs Gate 3 has around 400 developers globally, and while not without its issues is remarkably good with none of the modern bullshit we see as "standard" anymore.
DarkBusterBaron
Sure but that's the exception not the rule.
Bazzatr0n
I take no pride in hating the popular thing, but BG3 fell massively short for me. Most of the game is a bad rework of 5e's rules which is an extremely simplified version of 3.5e - a pale shadow of what a TTRPG can be. Then there's the travesty of the RP side - Why is the poster vampire twink attacking me with no graceful resolution where we can be allies? Why is Gale trusting me to choose whether or not he goes thermonuclear but won't tell me why? Why is angy space frog so horny?? 1/2
Bazzatr0n
I played alongside someone that was massively into the game, and my favourite part of the game was how they understood precisely why I did what I did, but was also kind of perplexed about how I ended up in these situations when they were with me through the whole thing. I watched the dev commentary talk about how they wanted to catch players on the expected path and the deviation, and the deviation from even that - and somehow I kept making the fifth choice with the tool and motivations provided
StormBurnX
I had to uninstall three modern, amazing games on steam to make room for baldur's gate (witcher, dragon age, and cyberpunk) but sure go off on how it doesn't have "modern bullshit".
Martraxz
You could say Larian started developing it as a passion project too, they started with something like 50 developers working as an indie dev and slowly grew over time as they built the game
ReignOfError
Also, as much as I love Larian's work recently, don't forget they've had their fair share of nonsense in their past games. They've dropped work on projects that don't look like they'll be successful - leaving games half-finished to go work on new projects and fish for a success.
ReignOfError
And even then, BG3 is guilty of being a bit of a space hog, and shipping with significant portions of the game not working properly and requiring multiple patches to get operable.
NullNameAvailable
Larion Studios was founded in 1996, and this is their 9th completed game to-date (of 11 total). The only reason their success was so grand was building on technologies they've been honing for nearly 3 decades. They are not indie developers.
kadaeux
But they are a “passion” developer, not a “the shareholders suggested we monetise each keystroke”
NullNameAvailable
(looking back on the comment, there's a ton of reasons it has been a success - but I'd call this a AAA game from, nowadays, a AAA studio, that put the experience of the player first, and could manage it because they structured their dev pipeline to prioritize rapid improvement on a stupid complex system above their bottom line)
matshelge
They are a "independent studio" they have no corperat overlord, and have to fund their own games. I don't know what definition you are running with, but that is what a indie developer.
DrOsmium
The size of the studio is not what determines a dev as "indie", it's whether they are owned by another company, and Larian is not.
BioFlayerMedia
And they havent made a bad game :0
Martraxz
I was just pointing out how they started working on it as a passion project with the size of a slightly larger indie dev studio. I know they have more history and more accomplishments than the majority of other studios, but that doesnt change what they fundamentally are and how that effects what they make since they don't have to listen to publishers and meet their demands
NullNameAvailable
But! The fact they had their own way of doing things, their own pipelines for development, and a TON of experience, allowed turning a passion project (because you're quite correct - it started out of passion) into a 3A GotY contender for being a downright solid-as-hell GREAT game, genre be damned.
NullNameAvailable
Which is what, in my opinion, makes them pretty special in the 3A environment - they're not "traditional" in the way they run their business. But they've been tooling this style of game for 2+ decades ("Divine Divinity" of 2002, their "first" game, is in this style) making them downright experts in this subgenre, which is not an indie dev studio. Small staff does not make an indie dev - breakout low budget maybe, but not Larion at this stage.