Gaming News

Mr Crispy

HTC China's President may have revealed that L4D3 is on the way (to VR at least). See the slide labelled "2020 VR Trends".

https://twitter.com/AGraylin/status/1218144775255183360?s=20

Zero-Cool

Darch Nemesis wrote: »

HTC China's President may have revealed that L4D3 is on the way (to VR at least). See the slide labelled "2020 VR Trends".

https://twitter.com/AGraylin/status/1218144775255183360?s=20

What a weird prediction unless he is panicking and backtracking.

https://twitter.com/AGraylin/status/1218280308090359810?s=19

ERG89

Darch Nemesis wrote: »

HTC China's President may have revealed that L4D3 is on the way (to VR at least). See the slide labelled "2020 VR Trends".

https://twitter.com/AGraylin/status/1218144775255183360?s=20

The guy had LFD3 instead of L4D3....

Mr Crispy

Zero-Cool wrote: »

What a weird prediction unless he is panicking and backtracking.

https://twitter.com/AGraylin/status/1218280308090359810?s=19

Ha, interesting.

Edit: And now pretty much quashed by Valve (PCG).

Mr Crispy

Hmm...

Following on from the HZD-coming-to-PC news, Naughty Dog are apparently hiring programmers that have experience in DX12, Vulkan, and both AMD GCN and NVIDIA GPUs (DSOG).

EoinHef

Darch Nemesis wrote: »

Hmm...

Following on from the HZD-coming-to-PC news, Naughty Dog are apparently hiring programmers that have experience in DX12, Vulkan, and both AMD GCN and NVIDIA GPUs (DSOG).

I think this is great,if crossplay becomes the norm i dont think id ever buy a console over PC again with console exclusives coming to PC.

Only reason i have a console is to play with IRL friends

CastorTroy

https://kotaku.com/dad-builds-custom-xbox-adaptive-controller-so-daughter-1841098866

A father has adapted/is adapting the Xbox adaptive controller so his daughter can play the Switch.

I'm not overly familiar with the adaptive controller. But how much work do you think it would take for Sony and Nintendo to adopt it for their own consoles? Probably harder for Nintendo due to motion controls in games.
Would be great if this was something the 3 companies could work on together on.
I know it's not a product that's well known and Microsoft didn't really make a big deal out of it, really.

J. Marston

That's a heartwarming video.

Skerries

Dying Light 2 delayed

https://twitter.com/TechlandGames/status/1219288610211614720

Sonics2k

With the amount of games being delayed right now, is it possible they're pushing them back while they work on updating them for the next-generation consoles?

Shiminay

I think there's an element of that and also a very public backlash against crunch that's forcing some companies at least to rethink just how intense a crunch period they put their staff through.

Cordell

I cant see why they would hold on to a game that's ready (or ready to be released) unless they are payed to do so. Not only that, but if they release it now they can sell it again for the next gen consoles...

johnny_ultimate

Delays in a lot of cases potentially mean more crunch, unfortunately It’d be nice if that wasn’t the case and it genuinely was to give workers a break... but CD Projekt Red came right out and admitted there’ll be more crunch because Cyberpunk was delayed. Given what I’ve seen reported about Naughty Dog, could likely be similar there for TLOU2. I would hope the anti-crunch sentiment is having some impact in studios, but I wouldn’t imagine it’s the primary motivation behind delays.

In general delays are a consequence of AAA games simply becoming ever more complicated beasts with endless moving parts: they’re just incredibly difficult to develop. That’s tied with increasing pressure for highly polished games (not so long ago jankiness was much more widely tolerated), plus the demands of shareholders resulting in unrealistic release date announcements in the first place.

Shiminay

I've always felt that marketing people get way too much power in determining when a piece of software that they know literally nothing about developing comes out. Of the budget for a big AAA title, between 40 and 50% can be allocated to marketing which seems bonkers given what's being produced, but that's the nature of the beast. As long as marketing people control so much power of a project, you'll always have bosses telling the other department heads that they need to meet Marketing's deadlines, and no one else's.

GhostofKNugget

Shiminay wrote: »

I've always felt that marketing people get way too much power in determining when a piece of software that they know literally nothing about developing comes out. Of the budget for a big AAA title, between 40 and 50% can be allocated to marketing which seems bonkers given what's being produced, but that's the nature of the beast. As long as marketing people control so much power of a project, you'll always have bosses telling the other department heads that they need to meet Marketing's deadlines, and no one else's.

Gaming companies wouldn't spend that money on marketing if there wasn't a return on it. It obviously works. Look at how many people are willing to jump on hype-trains when the games are two or three years away from completion.

I doubt it's marketing departments that fix deadlines, businesses target certain times of the year to get the best possible return on their game and maximise shareholder profit - marketing departments and pr companies are just there to ensure that they get most profit possible by building up the profile of the game.

Retr0gamer

Shiminay wrote: »

I've always felt that marketing people get way too much power in determining when a piece of software that they know literally nothing about developing comes out. Of the budget for a big AAA title, between 40 and 50% can be allocated to marketing which seems bonkers given what's being produced, but that's the nature of the beast. As long as marketing people control so much power of a project, you'll always have bosses telling the other department heads that they need to meet Marketing's deadlines, and no one else's.

Deadlines are needed though. When I was doing game development pretty much the biggest part of the project management was getting to a point where you can predict a launch window and then working around that release date cutting content or features to meet that deadline. **** can happen. Network code not up to scratch. Changes to the development platform or APIs throwing up extra testing or new bugs.

The real problem is crunch culture built into this project scheduling. It's pretty much 'we can reach this deadline with the USUAL 1 year crunch period for out employees, or possibly extend that if it's looking a but behind'.

Shiminay

Oh, I'm all for Deadlines, you can't develop software effectively without them (and I am in the software development business) - look at the nonsense that came out about Anthem with their talk of "just apply that year of Bioware Magic" to make the thing work cause there was no clear management or deliverable deadlines by the looks of it.

My contention is that these deadlines should never, ever be impacted by people who aren't actively involved in creating the product. It's increasingly difficult cause you seem to have to spend so many millions generating enough hype to make these things a success and one can't help but feel that if the industry just stopped with all this nonsense (it won't), they'd be better off for it. "When it's ready" works for some and you can still effectively build hype for something that's a work in progress even if it doesn't have a firm release date.

If they stopped trying to juggle which financial year something comes out in and appeasing investors (they definitely won't) then we'd also be in great shape. The numbers are just too big and the publishers have taken over so much of the market that it's hard to ever see it changing.

But we can dream of an industry that isn't the epitome of late stage capitalism

Retr0gamer

True. A game should come out when it's ready and there's far too many games just sent out to die when it would be much better to wait on an appropriate release date. I mean one that sticks out in my mind is Resonance of Fate. A fantastic but niche JRPG that Sega sent out in the release window of FF13 and Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey. You had the more mainstream JRPG audience covered by FF13 and a more hardcore audience covered by SMT:SJ. It was always going to be a flop. Would have been better to hold off until a quiet time in summer.

Nintendo are the only company that does this right. They will and have sat on a product for months or years waiting for the correct time to release their games. Nintendo games rarely lose value because they are high quality but it's also because they release them at the right time and pretty much know how many units to produce so as not to oversaturate the market.

On the other hand they have sometimes sat on a project so long that the time to release it never comes up... see Starfox 2

What's ended up happening is there's a big rush to meet xmas and then another rush afterwards to meet March for the end of the US fiscal year. I can only imagine the **** that these developers are getting for missing march as the higher ups and money men will look bad to shareholders and for tax purposes.

Zero-Cool

Holy **** what a blast from the past, Kingpin is getting a remaster and coming to pc and consoles this year. I loved this game when it first came out but i can't see it aging well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_kgepGyro

pixelburp

Not sure the HD remaster has made this look better, or worse.

Zero-Cool

pixelburp wrote: »

Not sure the HD remaster has made this look better, or worse.

I hope that is the 'original graphics mode' or else will be very hard to play. They should have just rebuilt it in a new engine. If not, would want to be seriously cheap.

Retr0gamer

I tried to play this game about 5 years after it was released and even then it felt very dated. Combat was very punishing and the wibbly wobbly distortions in the character models were vomit inducing. Add to that was the actrocious try hard script that was bluer than that annoying song from a few years ago with the blue aliens.

Would like to give it a go as Xatrix turned into a pretty decent developer (well after the god awful redneck rampage) before they got swallowed up by the activision Call of Duty machine. the environment designer was also the guy that went on to create City 17 and Dishonored's Dunwall.

Smiles35

The demo wouldn't play on my PC way back then. The audio from the sound folder I was able to get at and used for some mixing when I was using the likes of Ejay and Fruity Loops.

Zero-Cool

Smiles35 wrote: »

The demo wouldn't play on my PC way back then. The audio from the sound folder I was able to get at and used for some mixing when I was using the likes of Ejay and Fruity Loops.

Aw the soundtrack was absolutely class and Fruity Loops, what a legend of an app

Smiles35

Zero-Cool wrote: »

Aw the soundtrack was absolutely class and Fruity Loops, what a legend of an app

Absolutely. It's still going and owned by the same crowd in Belgium. That's amazing in itself.

Shiminay

Yea, in a world where everyone and his dog uses Pro Tools, FL Studio seems to be doing very well.

one armed dwarf

Apparently the Cyberpunk delay could be due to it just not running on base consoles
https://www.altchar.com/game-news/cyberpunk-2077-delayed-because-of-current-gen-consoles-new-source-claims-aRRcH8e4RHYT

According to a Polish insider Borys Niespielak, the main reason for Cyberpunk 2077 delay lies in current-gen consoles, which are reportedly not powerful enough to run the game properly.

Speaking in a podcast, which you can watch below, Niespielak says that the original Xbox One console is not powerful enough to run the game properly and apparently, Cyberpunk 2077 performance on the console is "extremely unsatisfactory"

As for the source, over at Discord, Polish players are pretty confident in Borys Niespielak, who seems to be as renowned as Jason Schreier in Poland.

Just sounds to me like all those NPCs and general density of the environment might be causing stress to CPUs.

SolvableKnave

one armed dwarf wrote: »

Apparently the Cyberpunk delay could be due to it just not running on base consoles
https://www.altchar.com/game-news/cyberpunk-2077-delayed-because-of-current-gen-consoles-new-source-claims-aRRcH8e4RHYT



Just sounds to me like all those NPCs and general density of the environment might be causing stress to CPUs.

If true, would they be willing to cut it from current gen release (avoiding poor reviews due to said issue, or a reduction in environment assets to accomodate current gen systems), and just postpone to end of year and work it as a next gen launch title for both systems?

ERG89

Surely this would have came up a few years ago & not 3 months out from release that it runs like sh*t on a console/s. They can't be that unorganised surely.

super_furry

So.......Switch port confirmed?