I just finished running Sleeping Dogs, and I’m trying to find something new (to me, not necessarily “new release”). If I don’t find anything that catches my eye, I’ll probably try Middle Earth: Shadow of War again.
Teamed up with a couple friends this week and finally finished out Diablo 4: Season 4 by taking on Tormented Duriel. I love Diablo, but it is such a relief to be able to focus on something else for a little bit.
Like Diablo 3: Season 32, lol. I am now worried about the progress I'm making. Yes, it's only been a week, but I forgot how... not good I am in working with the Necromancer's Trag'Oul set. I feel clunky and underpowered, but I don't have the full set yet, so maybe once I finished chapter 4 I'll be able to utilize it better.
Had no idea you could watch whole movies in The Darkness. I learned that when I got way too nostalgic and then invested watching To Kill A Mockingbird. Right now I'm pretty close to the end of the game, but I've been taking my sweet time combing over areas for collectibles. Even then, I'm still missing some, and they can be pretty well hidden. I'm having a lot of fun, but I am ready to pick up the sequel, if for nothing else but less stiff controls.
Been playing The Ascent, a 3/4 looter shooter. Not a particularly deep story, and you are kind of a nameless nobody (so not much of a character arc), but they nail the atmosphere. Each zone has that cyberpunk dystopian feel with lots of NPCs loitering around, so the world feels alive.
The combat is kinda okay. The enemies aren’t particularly unique: the guys with guns try to maintain a distance, and the melee guys zerg rush you. Additionally, there’s a high-low aiming system that doesn’t feel good to work with, but is a necessary part of combat. You upgrade your guns via a finite currency, and as far as I can tell, each gun type acts as your “class.”
Overall, I’m having fun, and I will be playing with friends later on, but it’s not going to be for everyone. Its Mixed and Mostly Positive reviews on Steam are justified.
Tried The Ascent because of just how slick it looked in the previews I saw. And you’re right, the atmosphere is great. But I have a low tolerance for the looter shooter format and I don’t play much online coop, so I got real bored of it real fast.
I’m going forward just to see more of the environment, but I nearly gave up in the beginning for that reason. The gameplay itself is a bit stale, and it reminds me a lot of mobile games with how simple the combat and AI is. There’s also no explicit “Exit Game” option, so when playing on Steam Deck, you have to open the menu and force exit.
If not for the highly detailed environments, I’d think it was a mobile port.
I always wonder this with these brand crossovers that fortnite has become synonymous with. My guess is that it’s something close to “neither” - there is a contract that is signed, but I think because both parties benefit, very little money actually changes hands between Epic and the IP owner.
Car manufacturers get the last say on how their cars are used on any media; and they typically go with licence agreements of some sorts.
The licencing is typically done on a set time frame (which is why most car games that uses real cars does get taken off of stores like 5-7 years later.).
On Fortnite, revenue sharing is done between the IP owner and Epic Games based on how much the said item sells. Since they can this item launch as a limited time sale; this gives a big playerbase an incentive to buy it.
Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.
For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.
In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:
The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.
Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.
For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:
who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
how much is it going to cost players to get the item
are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
probably a lot more
So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.
Continuing with Solasta: Crown of the Magister. As far as I know, it’s based on 5e and level 1-4 were pretty boring, since you can’t do a lot. I’m currently level 7, and it’s better, although still not a lot to do with only one action and sometimes a bonus action. The story is pretty basic, but the characters aren’t very interesting. You don’t have a lot of freedom, at least where I am right now. You can move between specific points on a map, sometimes get into random encounters, and that’s it. Very light on the RP, with almost no choices during dialog, when you can even speak with an NPC at all (only those relevant to your current quest will talk to you). Some parts are also kinda clunky, but I still have a good enough time with the game.
Then I started leveling a new character in World of Warcraft. Expansion pre-patch will drop in a few days, so I’ll check that out.
Also, more Powerwash Simulator. I’m not really a fan of how the later levels are basically just made as annoying as possible, since you often need to stand in very specific spots to blast away some of the dirt, but the crappy movement and aiming really aren’t made for that.
This week I finished Trails in the Sky SC which was good, although I enjoyed FC’s story’s smaller scope more.
Tried playing Sea of Stars, but I felt like the writing was so bad I couldn’t play more than like 3 hours. So I started and finished Chrono Trigger over the weekend which was great and I’m surprised it exists on SNES.
Yet another reason for me to never play this game. It’s full of contextless characters, appropriated and stolen dances/animations, microtransactions and now this rubbish.
Sadly, it remains a great game to play with friends bc even casual gamers understand the appeal. So alas…it continues to take up 60gb on my games drive.
I hope this person tries out real games. Like counter strike 3, halo 1, battlefield 3, call of duty 4 or something like that. Current games kinda suck.
Why is Fortnite not a real game? It’s fine to not like things, and good to criticize Epic for their terrible practices in and out of Fortnite, but saying it isn’t a real game smells gatekeepy to me.
Anyway I finished another game! This time chants of senaar. This game is sooooo good. One of my faves all time id say. Scratches the obra dinn outer wilds itch.
Yeah, really great game. Without getting into spoiler territory, I appreciate how there’s that one thing that every society in the game appreciates and it’s what brings them together despite their differences, most of which were down to (obviously) lack of communication. It’s just this simple, yet emotional touch of humanity that unites them all over the course of the game.
Anyway, as for me, I finished up Song of Farca, which was a fun little experience. Then I played Overboard!, a darkly humourous narrative/interactive fiction/puzzle game about getting away with murder.
Took me a little while, but I successfully murdered the husband, got the insurance, tied up all loose ends, and got a delicious snack as a bonus.
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