What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: Lobotomy Corporation

Final Score: (10*1+9*2+8*3+7*4+6*1+5*2+4*0+3*2+2*0+1*3)/(1+2+3+4+1+2+0+2+0+3) = 6.05

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

This week, let's discuss Elite: Dangerous the latest (and greatest?) sequel to the progenitor of all vidya starshit: No Mans Sky, notably (@MAGAShill), as well as Starfield (I think, haven't played it), Starsector (probably the best successor), and probably in some sense, every single game where you fly a spaceship. I won't go into the whole gory history of Elite, though features in it have made it to most every other space game: shitty procedural generation, the trade of goods of varying and dubious legality, and the seemingly ubiquitous engines - shields - guns power distribution system.

Unfortunately, Elite: Dangerous is hardly what I'd call innovative. While it did have the incredibly large randomly generated universe in common with, and prior to, No Mans Sky, for much of its existence planets were nought but pretty orbs to glance at from the comfort of your spaceship, which admittedly cut down on dev costs. The latest expansion supposedly makes planets into places you can visit, but I haven't, and probably won't purchase it, as it's apparently pretty dogshit. The game also has cosmetics purchasable with real world currency for some bizarre reason, which is pretty offputting. Beyond this, the vast majority of the gameplay loop resembles a simplified take on European Truck Simulator. You mostly travel from station to station, with various cargos, the specifics of which don't matter much. This gets boring real fast, tbh.

Despite all these flaws, this game isn't irredeemable, simply because it has the most detailed model of what a spaceship might look like/function. The asthetics are on point, and it feels properly futuristic in a way that similar games fail at. It even has a diegetic interface, which does a lot towards making you feel immersed. Too bad the core gameplay's shit though. Leave your opinions/thoughts below, and vote in the pinned comment.

Future game discussions:

August 11: Enter the Gungeon

August 18: Fortnite

August 25: Devil Daggers

September 1: Hollow Knight

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

When I was a wee lad, I had a dream that I would one day be a famous writer. Reality set those dreams upon the jagged rocks of life, destroying them completely. Though my novels will not be read by anyone, I figured I could transition into journ*lism. More specifically, gaming journ*lism. I slaved away for years, at first writing for free before eventually making it onto a paid site. I learned a lot there and eventually moved onto other gaming sites where I gained more experience. Today, I have written for plenty of big sites with bylines in most of the popular sites.

I am sad to say my time in the industry has come to an end. I now realize that it is a path that cannot be taken without severe exploitation. Hence I have decided to transition into academia. However, I would like to share a bit about a company I used to work for, GAMURS, and how it is collapsing from the inside-out. What is going on here isn't different from the other gaming site companies such as G/O Media, Static Media, and Valnet. They've all gone down the path of being content mills with little regard for quality or caring about their staff.

The Fall of The Escapist

The Escapist is a popular gaming site that hosted Zero Punctuation, an animated review series that drew in the bulk of the site's traffic. It was hit with layoffs that reached the Editor-in-Chief Nick Calandra who claims he was let go because he failed to meet goals set in place by GAMURS. Upon Nick's termination, 17 staff members left including Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation. The Escapist still exists today, but it is a shell of its former self. Writers such as Brad Lang have left, and it doesn't produce nearly the amount of content it used to. I predict it will be shut down soon.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-following-termination-of-editor-in-chief-nick-calandra

The Fall of Gaming Journ*lism

So why are these changes happening? AI! GAMURS, like other sites, is pushing for more AI content which is cheaper to create. In 2023, it posted an ad for an AI Editor shortly after mass layoffs, leading to an outcry within GAMURS.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230613212914/https://gamurs.breezy.hr/p/3a291acf07ac-ai-editor

This hasn't been enough to stop the wave, and more layoffs have taken place since. The latest wave took place in July and it triggered several articles being written about it as disgruntled ex-journ*lists spoke to news sites. GAMURS is now focused on beating the Google search algorithm which demands high output. This fell on the writers who could no longer take their time crafting articles and instead had to push themselves to meet ridiculous quotas asking for 3-5 articles daily. Mind you, writers do more than just write. They research, do image editing, and sometimes have to respond to editor requests. Nobody can produce at that level and still be effective. And that there is the reason gaming journ*lism is so shit right now and every site just pumps out guides that take less than an hour to write.

The stringent quotas also make it impossible to spend time with a game before reviewing it, leading to lackluster reviews that fail to go in-depth with any game. If you feel like video game reviews have declined in quality over the years, blame Google. Writers don't have time to play games from start to finish AND write for 8 hours a day. Furthermore, not all days are rife with gaming news. Consequently, writers are forced to shit out """news""" pieces and opinion pieces that's nothing but words for the sake of it with enough SEO tags sprinkled in to please the Google algorithm.

"From what I hear of other sites on the network it was similar", they said. "Our staff writers had to do 85 articles a month, so just over four every work day, and they had traffic goals too, so they were basically encouraged to write about stuff they knew would do well and ignore important stuff like updating older guides, which wouldn't count toward their overall goals."

Another former writer said their quota was "four articles a day". This was "expected across the network for full-time employees, as far I was aware. I know there are bigger quotas at other networks and sites, but I do not care. A quota system never works. It is mandatory crunch that creates a sink or swim environment. Journ*lists should not have to work in such an environment."

"Prior to our acquisition, there was a balance between guides, news stories, and feature pieces", they added. "Under the Gamurs banner, I would say that 95% of articles that went out were guides of this nature. Time and time again, I would see pitches for fun opinion pieces get shot down by the SEO team, with the explanation that 'we won't rank well for that'".

https://aftermath.site/the-gamurs-group-games-journ*lism-escapist-dot-esports

The terminations are brutal and swift, and they come without warning. This happened, for example, with Destructoid's Chris Moyse who has kicked off the site without a day's notice. For those unfamiliar, Destructoid is a popular gaming site that gave rise to a few big names in the industry including Ashly Burch and her Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? webseries. Chris was a prominent writer specializing in fighting games and had a Watchya Playin weekly thread that was very popular.

https://www.destructoid.com/whatcha-been-playing-this-week-destructoid-249/

https://x.com/ChrisxMoyse/status/1673367012037345280

It's Joever now. You can't find full-time jobs in gaming journ*lism anymore. It's over for the consumer as well. Everything they consume is going to be written by AI designed to appease search algorithms and maximize SEO. It's a pity, but that's the way it goes.

I'm not posting any comments because I'm too lazy

@DeforesterCarpathian @Soren @Frank_Williams @Governor @mithrandir @Kang-PrimeTimeline @Bridge

This is a statistical analysis on our fellow dramatards, how many games have you purchased and how many are currently unplayed.

Gonna play revolver first but when I play redemption should I play as released or canon chronological?

I had a really shitty week and i just want something to distract myself

Any Piranha Bytes enjoyers around here?

Looking pretty good so far

The Final Level: Farewell from Game Informer 🕹️ pic.twitter.com/tmrEB2TE7U

— Game Informer (@gameinformer) August 2, 2024

It's over

/r/games thread

https://og.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1eido2f/the_final_level_farewell_from_game_informer

/r/KiA thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/1eidvtd/game_informer_is_closing_down/

!g*mers

how hard is it to make a fictional character attractive

just stop letting random uggos self insert themselves into games lmao

Even without the AI this is sovl vs soulless. Remake looks like a mobile game.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1c13ot2/yep_it_is_ai_generated_crap/

this loooks like our own AI generated marseys. the line is going over the Sistrum. patters with no symmetry.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1e3mhzg/they_are_lying_about_using_ai/ full list of inconsistencies.

6 knuckles https://old.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1e35rbw/usually_ive_been_quick_to_shoot_down_the_ai/

where is this addidas strip pattern coming from? the cape also loses all color and texture bottom right

he is drawing the string and holding the arrow with different fingers

this one is just funny Guess its a mix of AI and stock photos

There have been rumors going around for a few years now that the budget of GTA VI is 2 billion USD. While many people have argued that the person who got that information misinterpreted the data, I am here to state that even if the person who leaked that information indeed did misinterpret the data, it does make sense for GTA VI to have a budget of 2 billion USD.

Here is why:

1. GTA IV took around 3.5 years to finish development and its total cost was 135 million USD with about 1000 developers working on it.

2. GTA V took around 5 years of development and had a budget of 265 million USD with 1000 developers working on it.

3. RDR 2 took around 8 years to develop and cost around 540 million USD with 1600 developers working on it.

Now GTA VI, will have been in development for 11 years with 2000-3000 developers working on it.

GTA VI has taken more than twice as long as GTA V to develop which we take as 265 x 2 = 530 million USD. GTA VI also has at least twice as many developers working on it as GTA V, let us assume a safe amount of 2.5 times the developers working on it, which puts us at 530 x 2.5 = 1.325 billion USD. GTA V released in 2013, so now we must account for inflation which is 35% ( The value of 1 dollar from 2013 is 1.35 dollars today ), which gives us 1.325 x 1.35 = 1.78875 billion USD total development cost. Which would fall within the 2 billion dollar budget expectations.

4. The most expensive game right now, Genshin Impact, cost 700+ million USD so far as per the wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

GTA VI is obviously going to be more expensive than that.

In conclusion:

Development of GTA VI costing 2 billion USD ( 1.8 billion USD at least and 2+ billion at most but less than 3 billion no matter what ) makes perfect sense taking into account the amount of time GTA VI has been in development, rockstars habit of continually upping the budget, and the number of developers expected to be working on GTA VI.

GTA VI will be the most expensive game ever made and will easily be the biggest game of the next 1.5 decades, taking into account that based on current trends GTA VII will take 15 years to develop.

Exciting theory:

GTA VI online might be so big that it will crash fortnite and other similar live service games out there.

https://plarium.com/en/blog/highest-grossing-video-games/

Fortnite is already the 5th highest grossing game of all time at 20 billion USD grossed.

Street fighter 2 is number 4 at 21 billion USD and its not like street fighter 2 is selling a lot in current year so fortnite is guaranteed to surpass them by next year.

Dungeon fighters online is at number 3 at 22 billion USD. Again fortnite would easily beat their gross by next year as fortnite is making more than 5 billion USD per year right now.

Pacman is at number 2 at 25 billion dollars which again would be easily beaten in two years.

Space invaders is at 30 billion USD, which would be guaranteed beaten by 2030.

The primary advantage fortnite has is that it is the most successful live service game out there, which gives it a far longer shelf life than any of the other games above it on the list.

Conclusion:

Fortnite will become and remain the highest grossing game of all time for a decade or three.

https://n4g.com/news/2613830/bungie-devs-react-to-more-mass-layoffs-my-whole-team-is-gone

Honestly I was expecting to play destiny 3 by 2020

https://n4g.com/news/2613818/playstation-wws-head-herman-hulst-reportedly-appointed-to-lead-bungie

Seems like Bungie is having fun. I didn't played halo when it was the thing so I have no any memory linked to it so the game looks to me like typical gay star opera human vs high tech race vs primitive yet very strong biological "race" oh I wasn't talking about StarCraft

But marathon now that's sounds interesting and I would like to have an remake of it

https://n4g.com/news/2613764/resident-evil-creator-wants-killer7-creator-to-work-on-a-sequel

There is also talk about killer 7 sequel and that mb happens since they releasing remaster of lollipop and shadow of the darned so mb they make remaster of killer 7

I haven't played the pack yet but I think it's for some degenerate s*x thing you can make the sims do

Idon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympicsIdon'tcareabouttheOlympics

This modder called Zero was known as a chud even before, but this really got under their skin.

Wow I guess I am just political BS to some people. He could have called it anything else and it would be fine. But I guess that would be to much to ask of some people.

"Y'all can't behave"

Some Twitter denizens also didn't take it well:

such a fricking loser. you could've called it anything else, ANYTHING else, but instead being gender neutral is seen as 'political'. this wouldn't even be a bad idea for people who WANT those gendered terms, but you just HAD to be a piece of shit about it!

You know shit got real when someone puts an exclamation mark at the end of their tweet!

Well….guess I will be removing their mods from my game cause what tf is this ?! Could have been called LITERALLY anything else

Yeah, you would totally be fine if the mod was called anything else.

Pretty much all the replies are "Ha, I'm so not mad about this".

Shoutout to the Russian G*merGate group for bringing this to my attention.

Those were the days

This morning, I'm sharing with all of you some of the most difficult changes we've ever had to make as a studio. Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.

That means beginning today, 220 of our roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio's workforce.

These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.

Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.

I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we've navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.

We are committing to two other major changes today that we believe will support our focus, leverage Sony's strengths, and create new opportunities for Bungie talent.

First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.

Second, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.

This will be a time of tremendous change for our studio.

Let's unpack how we ended up in this position; it's important to understand how we got here.

For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. We eventually realized that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly.  It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon.

Additionally, in 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.

After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today's outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were simply not enough.

As a result, today we must say goodbye to incredible talent, colleagues, and friends.

This will be a challenging time at Bungie, and we'll need to help our team navigate these changes in the weeks and months ahead. This will be a hard week, and we know that our team will need time to process, to ask questions, and to absorb this news. Today, and over the next several weeks, we will host team meetings and town halls, team breakout sessions, and private, individual sessions to ensure we are keeping our communication open and transparent.

Bungie will continue to make great games. We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon, and we will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players' expectations.

There will be a time to talk about our goals and projects, but today is not that day. Today, our focus is on supporting our people.

-pete

Joking it's an new controller

Xbox has more controller variation then games because who need games when your controller can have a butt

Give me trailer for new usb c cable that has Xbox printed on it

Edit: looks like my bait got jannied, my apolocheese

Hello does anyone here seriously play any modded Minecraft packs? Specifically the more complex techy/magick ones. For reference, I have gotten the Stargate in GregTech New Horizons.

I'm looking for fun but dedicated people to play with. I have a powerful server box and can do all the setup and maint, but all of my gayming buddies aren't really into modded MC.

Currently i'm really interested in Reika's mods - Rotarycraft, Chromaticraft etc. but i'm struggling to make a pack with them that isn't glitchy and antiquated.

Anyway please let me know. If there's enough interest it would be really fun to play an rDrama modded MC server with a bunch of people! Could do like a village or something.