Reading Too Much Into Everything

A very interesting thread popped up on Twitter. A game developer opined that the reason developers don't talk to gamers is that the gaming culture is so toxic that anything said by developers concerning how games are made will be accused of lying or cheating the gamers in some way.  I read the thread about a day before the story broke on news outlets, so I've had more time to think about the issue than others. And he does have a point. Whenever a video game is about to come out and it has a feature that is unfamiliar, weird or shady, (or had a feature that was in a previous game taken away), the gaming community will rage and troll and launch boring tirades against the developers of that game, claiming they will boycott the game. Then the gamers buy it, enjoy it, and wait for the next outrage to cross their path. If you want a really good example of this, take a look at the outrage surrounding No Man's Sky . Even I wrote about this game, and while I have softened my sta...

Never be afraid to mislabel a product - Rule of Acquisition #239 Jim Sterling has brought up the issue of Triple-A video game companies reaching into gamers’ wallets to yank out additional cash AFTER they have originally paid $60 for a video game again and again and again . He has repeatedly stated that he will stop talking about this anti-consumer practice immediately once these game companies stop doing this. Well, good luck with that, since apparently game companies seem disinclined to stop. Let me be fair to these companies. Businesses exist to make a profit. And I’ve argued before that companies can be as greedy as they want. But I’ve also maintained that they don’t need to be jerks about it. I could go on about this, but for now I want to focus on this video made by Jim Sterling. The subject is how to have microtransactions in games correctly. I will expand on this video by comparing the advice he gives with Star Trek Online, which does all these approaches right. Noti...

Hi, I’m back. It’s been a while (thanks to real life concerns, really sorry about that), but a recent event has brought me back to the internets once again, and that event is the recent release of the Destiny 2 video game. And in my opinion, this game represents everything wrong with the AAA game industry. I will present my case through a unique method; by responding to the comments about Destiny 2’s new way of giving shaders to players. Shaders are color palettes that can be added to your in-game gear. You know; make your gun red, your boots green, your armor gloves purple, that sort of thing. In the first Destiny game, once you acquire shaders, you can keep them & apply them to all your gear. In Destiny 2, shaders are consumable items that you apply to individual pieces of your gear. And once you apply a different shader, the original is gone. Same thing if you get better gear down the road. Once you get rid of the other gear you applied shaders to, the shaders  on...

Whelp, Devin Faraci has been accused of sexual assaults he had apparently done in the past. As I have said before , I never agreed with a lot of what he said, but I respected his opinions. Now I must withdraw my respect of him. Why? Because it's my personal choice to do so. The reasoning behind my decision doesn't really matter, but as a human being I cannot condone what he has done. And no, I will not discuss my reasons here. This is a nerd site, and I am determined to keep it that way. No politics & no religion. I created this blog to be a safe zone for us nerds.  However, one of my blog posts has dealt with Devin, and I felt I needed to address that. While it dealt with his profession and not him as a person, and while I believe in my readers' ability to tell the difference, there may be those who may choose not to parse out that difference due to personal belief.  So I wrote this so that I may assure new & longtime readers who come to this site that I don...

It has been 2 weeks since No Man's Sky came out, so let's look at the state of play in this particular part of the nerdspace. According to Steam, it was the top seller  before it came out, and player count topped 212,000 before it dropped to it's current 3,000 player count. I expect that type of drop on a game like Evolve or Star Wars: Battlefront, because both those games were multiplayer only, had only 10 maps, maybe, and not a lot of content to keep the player's interest. But this is No Man's Sky. It has 18 quintillion planets and procedurally generated wildlife (you can name the planets & wildlife), crafting mechanics, and a story that takes you to the center of the universe. These sound amazing. That is, until you found out that the names you give the planets and wildlife disappear after a while, the crafting mechanics are a little weird (you can feed iron to animals & you have an extremely limited inventory), and the story is dependent upon you kee...

Niantic recently disabled the tracking feature on their PokemonGo game app. After a few days of silence, Niantic finally explained why, saying that the feature was “confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals”. They also said that they had “limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users”. You can read the whole statement here . A lot of articles have been written about this, and I have a lot to say about a few of them. First, some context. Here is the original PokemonGo game trailer when it was first announced last year. Notice at the 25 second mark that the video promises that the app tracks distance to a pokemon clearly and accurately. That’s not what we got though. Instead we got the app showing how far pokemon were by how many footprints (called steps) was shown underneath the graphic. The more steps there were, the farther they were, as this article shows . But then the 3-step g...

Recently Devin Faraci (columnist and Editor-In-Chief of Birth Movies Death) was invited along with other film critics to the Justice League set, currently filming in London. You can read the article on his visit here . According to him there was a subreddit on his visit, with people wondering why he was invited, despite the fact that he was a hater of the Batman v. Superman movie (hereafter called BvS). Devin says his reason right in the article that it was precisely because he was a hater of BvS that he was invited. It was to show Devin that Warner Bros. was learning the lessons that the last film taught them, and that those lessons were being implemented in Justice League.   I find this very interesting. Warner Bros. could have invited any of a hundred film critics who didn’t like BvS to the set, but they invited him. Sure, it’s because he’s a hater, but I think there are additional reasons that go beyond him being a film critic. Before looking at the reasons below, read his r...