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Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: SamVision on January 24, 2019, 02:56:23 pm

Title: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: SamVision on January 24, 2019, 02:56:23 pm
Disgusting, why would anyone support EA projects after all the damage they've done.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 04:13:57 pm
Disgusting, why would anyone support EA projects after all the damage they've done.

I wish I knew.  I'm sure these folks will enjoy their acceptable product.  Acceptable is about as good as EA can do.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 24, 2019, 04:32:55 pm
EA published Titanfall 2.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: 0rph3u5 on January 24, 2019, 04:40:38 pm
Disgusting, why would anyone support EA projects after all the damage they've done.

Ask the people who buy FIFA, Madden etc ... and those people who pour their money into the microtransaction for stuff like Ultimate Team.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 04:44:42 pm
EA published Titanfall 2.

I never played that one just because I don't pirate games anymore and the outcome of EA getting money from me is unacceptable.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 24, 2019, 04:58:35 pm
Your loss, weird video game ideologue. I'm sure not getting your $5 will cripple their evil march.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 05:16:08 pm
Every little bit helps.  Gotta get Star Wars away from them so we can get some good Star Wars games. 

I shouldnt have to explain how EA is a plague on game development.  Every studio they acquire is the next Maxis.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: 0rph3u5 on January 24, 2019, 05:28:23 pm
Gotta get Star Wars away from them so we can get some good Star Wars games. 

Cute
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 07:58:54 pm
Just get rid of this thread.  Either people know, or they are dead-set on repeating their mistakes.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: jr2 on January 24, 2019, 08:06:37 pm
I mean, you could always try getting any decent EA titles on the used market?  eBay etc  -- I'm seeing $2.99 + free shipping for Titanfall 2 on eBay as the cheapest price.  EA doesn't get your money that way.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 09:16:13 pm
I guess there's nothing stopping me from doing that, but I'd have to go out of my way to make accounts on new sites, and I have enough games to play as it is.   From what I hear, Titanfall is more or less a regular shooter, just with mechs on the side anyway.  Fortunately, there's a non-online Mechwarrior game coming up this year!
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 24, 2019, 10:18:32 pm
Man who ethically refuses to give EA money eager to buy game from PGI
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 10:32:24 pm
No, my hate for EA is totally emotional.  They killed my Sim City, and I'm gonna kill them back!

What's PGI done that you don't like?  I never paid attention to them before because I never wanted my Mechwarrior to be Online
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 24, 2019, 10:41:35 pm
Well, that their use of the Star Wars license is questionable is not exactly a controversial opinion.
That they have trouble making any Star Wars title that isn't Battlefront or a mobile game is rather confounding both from a fanboy and from a business point of view.
It's almost like the use of a license and the current policy of making few but high budget or many but cheaper micro-transaction vehicles rather than games that stand on their own are just not compatible for some reason.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 24, 2019, 11:12:13 pm
No, my hate for EA is totally emotional.  They killed my Sim City, and I'm gonna kill them back!

What's PGI done that you don't like?  I never paid attention to them before because I never wanted my Mechwarrior to be Online

(https://i.imgur.com/4yx6trd.jpg)
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 24, 2019, 11:37:55 pm
Yes, that is why I did not want my Mechwarrior to be Online.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Novachen on January 25, 2019, 01:07:12 am
No, my hate for EA is totally emotional.  They killed my Sim City, and I'm gonna kill them back!

Well.. i would say, you are totally wrong, because Sim City was killed by Maxis itself.
Actually no one was forced to develop a new Sim City, nor it was instructed to create a city building sim with always online.

Additionally, it does not make any sense to develop a Sim City totally independend from the "The Sims" Series, which is one of the biggest and most successful gaming trademarks ever.

Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4 both had integration features with "The Sims" and "The Sims 2" respectively... why the last Sim City does not use any interlink features to "The Sims 3" or the then-already announced "The Sims 4" is a question that only Maxis and not EA can answer you.

In EA's point of view it does not make any sense to exclude the big grown "The Sims Store" for a Sim City release, where they can create and sell invidual Buildings, Streets etc. together with community assets that are free of charge. If EA had more influence in this game, they would try to make the "The Sims" community interested for Sim City... actually they did not.

It would make sense, to move your "The Sims" family into the city you are building in Sim City, especially with the new neighborhood system of Sims 4. At least this was how they did it with Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4.

With more EA influence Sim City would be a different game, i am absolute guarentee that. Because the way this game was released and works in the first place, can not be in mind for a company, that is interested to maximaze the income. To exclude "The Sims" completely would be the most idiotic decision ever if you want to earn money...
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on January 25, 2019, 03:02:09 am
Disgusting, why would anyone support EA projects after all the damage they've done.

I can only speak for myself here, but I am not going to apologize for being interested in things that look interesting to me. Yes, EA is a giant evil corporation, yes, they have and will continue to make decisions that benefit their shareholders to the detriment of the market as a whole, but at the same time: The number of publishers/developers that aren't, on some level, doing the exact same thing on smaller scales is very, very small. Even Turambar's employer will happily do things that are pretty bad for us as consumers (the Epic store, for example, not having room for tech support forums, or pulling Fortnite mobile out of the platform stores...), yet I don't see him quitting his job over that.

Yes, it absolutely does suck that we haven't had better Star Wars games come out of EA, but.... I am not exactly going to weep over games that never really existed.

Meanwhile, EA, while being scummy as ****, also occasionally produces very interesting games. Mirror's Edge Catalyst (despite not being very good) was very cool to see. Titanfall 2 is, by some margin, one of the best (if not THE best) single-player FPS of the past decade.

I don't particularly want to give EA money (I don't want to give money to any corporation), but at the same time, that's the only way I have of rewarding a company to catering to my interests.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 25, 2019, 06:13:46 am
EA published Titanfall 2.

They also published Titanfall 2 in the same timeframe as the new Call of Duty and Battlefield 1, dooming it to compete against much bigger names, including those from its own publisher!

It's a really good game though.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Aesaar on January 25, 2019, 08:58:07 am
Just get rid of this thread.  Either people know, or they are dead-set on repeating their mistakes.

Buying games that look and frequently are interesting.  Yes, truly, what a mistake.

And tbh, Origin continues to have a better return policy than Steam does.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on January 25, 2019, 09:04:22 am
There's also the matter that many good studios have been gobbled up by EA, but continue to be generally good studios.  BioWare (Edmonton, at least) continues to make generally if not exceptionally good games, and I'm not about to punish local employees who turn out products I've enjoyed playing - despite some flaws - because their studio happened to get swallowed by a douchebag publisher.

And for that matter, despite all the hate it got, I've arguably spent more time in MEA's coop than ME3's.  Both have flaws, but the fact that I kept playing them means they were generally fun, which is why I generally buy games in the first place.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 25, 2019, 10:15:08 am
I got the impression that Bioware was already declining by ME2, with the important writing talent having left.

Also, I don't understand how you can place the blame on Maxis for the end of Sim City.  If EA wasnt their overlord, they never would have gone for the misguided idea of an 'online' sim city, which is what forced the tiny map sizes and oversimplified gameplay.  This was back when EA was putting multiplayer on EVERYTHING even if it had no business having multiplayer.

Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: 0rph3u5 on January 25, 2019, 10:40:37 am
Anyone else think this discussion would be improved by a little Cliché Phrases Bingo, or is it just me?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: SamVision on January 25, 2019, 10:59:58 am
Whoa why did you make this a thread? I was drunk and just blurted out my feelings. I still don't plan to support Anthem, but to each their own.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 25, 2019, 12:29:29 pm
I got the impression that Bioware was already declining by ME2, with the important writing talent having left.

Patrick Weekes is still at Bioware. Karpyshyn was always bad, and I'm guessing you don't know who Chris L'etoile is or what he did.

I doubt EA did SimCity Last any favors, but the Glassbox engine was 100% Maxis' idea, which forced the tiny map sizes and oversimplified gameplay.

It's so easy to point to bad things EA has done I don't know why you need to make up new ones.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Rogue Assassin04 on January 25, 2019, 01:17:11 pm
Well... EA destroyed Criterion Games (Which made NFS HP2010, NFS MW2012, Burnout, Black) which used the efficient Chameleon Engine, which was way better than the FrostBite 4 (the standard engine of theirs for *all* the games, originally derived from Battlefield series)

The Chameleon Engine had so much potential for NFS series, while it took Black Box studios a lot of time to make the Tank Handling code to a Car Handling code. This caused a lot of time to develop NFS The Run (2011) which marked the end of Black Box Studios.

The NFS MW2012 actually had a story mode and cutscenes where the old characters would re-emerge and make big impact in the story, but then EA didnt give them the full time, and they launched a Multiplayer only NFS MW2012.

The Link:
http://needforspeedtheories.boards.net/thread/1485/mw2012-thread
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on January 25, 2019, 01:25:09 pm
"This game would be full of fantastic content if the greedy publishers hadn't made them push it out early" is a take you should always be sceptical of after Star Citizen.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on January 25, 2019, 01:28:17 pm
Whoa why did you make this a thread? I was drunk and just blurted out my feelings. I still don't plan to support Anthem, but to each their own.

Because your comment spawned a bunch of others, so it got split.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Rhymes on January 25, 2019, 03:27:46 pm
What I don't get is why EA is so fixed on Frostbite being the engine for everything going forward--it's an engine for big badass Battlefield games, not for RPGs or whatever else EA wants to make today.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 25, 2019, 04:15:56 pm
What I don't get is why EA is so fixed on Frostbite being the engine for everything going forward--it's an engine for big badass Battlefield games, not for RPGs or whatever else EA wants to make today.

AFAICT it's entirely because they own it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Buckshee Rounds on January 25, 2019, 05:55:16 pm
"This game would be full of fantastic content if the greedy publishers hadn't made them push it out early" is a take you should always be sceptical of after Star Citizen.

I got Wing Commander 3 for free on Origin and I can't remember why. Still to play it. They also gave away free games to anyone that preordered Sim City, which I wasted by picking Dead Space 3, but which was at least a AAA game.

Anecdotal I know, but it's certainly an example of decidedly non-evil behaviour. I get that they're relentlessly monetising their games and setting some bad precedents for the industry, but it seems like they're a symptom of a wider problem.

If anything the mobile games industry is way way ****tier.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on January 25, 2019, 06:15:20 pm
Well they gave you free games because they needed to undercut Steam to get a toehold in the games market, and free is a very competitive price point. Here are the respects in which both sides in this thread are right:

— EA is a horrible company that has **** up a lot of good franchises and studios by pushing them into a hyper-aggressive, big-budget big-monetisation business model. (They also treat their workers much, much worse than the consumers but this is standard across the entire industry.)

— Refusing to buy EA games, even good ones, on that basis is pointless, will effect no change and is basically just internet posturing. Telling other people to do the same is very obnoxious.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on January 26, 2019, 12:50:55 pm
I had no idea Titanfall 2 had dropped so much.  Yes, I gave EA my money, probably for the first time since BF3.  I no longer pre-order games or pay more than $20.

And yes, EA is evil from a consumer standpoint.  So is Activision, who was my favorite publisher of Atari 2600 games.  So is almost any other company answering to shareholders.  These companies are not friends of their customers.

I forgot where I was going with this.  But i have a new game to play in a few hours when the download completes!
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 26, 2019, 01:22:48 pm
The consumer outrage against Battlefront 2 did seem to make a difference, and one the whole industry noticed. That’s good.

At the same time EA also published Titanfall 2 which had incredibly unobtrusive MTX and tons of free content. So it’s not purely publisher determined.

My biggest grudge against EA is for killing Dead Space.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: starbug on January 26, 2019, 03:07:20 pm
Whats EA done now? I know they have been recently cancelling games left, right and center that are still in development. Can't remember the last EA game i got, think it was ME Andromeda. Which wasn't a bad game, just not a Mass Effect game. My biggest grudge is for killing the Dead Space series, changing it into an action co-op game for the 3rd one ruined it. Its meant to be horror not action. Also the mishandling of the Command and Conquer series.

Also for canceling KotOR 3. I have just actually watched a vid on BIOWARE and EA, regarding SW. It turns out that Bioware have tried a couple of times to do KoTOR 3 and each time EA has refused.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Aesaar on January 26, 2019, 04:55:04 pm
The outrage at hearing a game got cancelled always amuses me.  As if there's no possible way a cancelled game could be cancelled because it wasn't going to be good.  No, no, games are only ever cancelled because publishers hate good games.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 26, 2019, 05:24:36 pm
Materialistically speaking: all EA is doing by cancelling games is declining themselves a chance to get your money.

Also materialistically speaking: Freespace 2 was a mistake. It absolutely failed in what it was created to do, which is make money for Interplay. Yet here we are.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 26, 2019, 05:36:28 pm
The outrage at hearing a game got cancelled always amuses me.  As if there's no possible way a cancelled game could be cancelled because it wasn't going to be good.  No, no, games are only ever cancelled because publishers hate good games.

Sometimes, but Bioware has been a tried and true developer of single player narrative games for a while, it's kind of difficult to think a new KOTOR made by them would be bad so there must be some other reasoning behind EA's refusal and given that they seem to focus on games with a multiplayer component it's perfectly possible they fell into trends, first multiplayer as something that's needed to sell the game to everyone and later as an excuse to cram in microtransactions and later on lootboxes.
Of course it could also be that the Old Republic period came under veto from Lucasfilm because they want to make movies or cartoons set there sooner or later, who the hell knows.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Turambar on January 26, 2019, 05:58:07 pm
'Bioware' not being able to make KOTOR despite wanting to make KOTOR is among the many signs that make me think that Bioware doesn't exist anymore, and is just another part of the tumor on gaming that is EA.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: jr2 on January 28, 2019, 10:38:05 am
Materialistically speaking: all EA is doing by cancelling games is declining themselves a chance to get your money.

Also materialistically speaking: Freespace 2 was a mistake. It absolutely failed in what it was created to do, which is make money for Interplay. Yet here we are.

I mean, putting aside the fact that they borrowed AMD's marketing department for FreeSpace 2...
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 28, 2019, 01:10:24 pm
It would still have to compete with Half Life, Unreal and Quake. It's about as hopeful as expecting Titanfall 2 to compete with Battlefield and Call of Duty.

We live in this weird world where in several cases games as a cultural medium are bettered by companies making bad decisions. People being angry about games being cancelled is part of that, because those people are invested in games as a cultural medium rather then as an industry.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 28, 2019, 01:24:09 pm
Joysticks were a mistake.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on January 28, 2019, 01:30:59 pm
Joysticks were a mistake.

Evergreen post right here.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: jr2 on January 28, 2019, 02:05:16 pm
Joysticks were a mistake.

Evergreen post right here.

Hmm.   Compromise?   https://www.lexip-gaming.com/products/Pu94
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 28, 2019, 02:11:03 pm
Joysticks were a mistake.

That's what she said.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on January 28, 2019, 06:26:32 pm
I never would have played FreeSpace, MechWarrior, Starlancer, Crimson Skies, Dark Star One, Jane's WWII Fighters, or any other flying or mech game without a joystick.  I tried Freelancer and did not enjoy the mouse controls.  I don't need Star Citizen levels of immersion, but a joystick really adds to the experience for me.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on January 28, 2019, 07:00:24 pm
I never would have played FreeSpace, MechWarrior, Starlancer, Crimson Skies, Dark Star One, Jane's WWII Fighters, or any other flying or mech game without a joystick.  I tried Freelancer and did not enjoy the mouse controls.  I don't need Star Citizen levels of immersion, but a joystick really adds to the experience for me.

It's not that joysticks are bad; it's that building a game around a specific peripheral that not everyone may have or want to have is a bad idea.  FSO is perfectly playable with M+Kb too.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Buckshee Rounds on January 28, 2019, 07:56:17 pm
I never would have played FreeSpace, MechWarrior, Starlancer, Crimson Skies, Dark Star One, Jane's WWII Fighters, or any other flying or mech game without a joystick.  I tried Freelancer and did not enjoy the mouse controls.  I don't need Star Citizen levels of immersion, but a joystick really adds to the experience for me.

It's not that joysticks are bad; it's that building a game around a specific peripheral that not everyone may have or want to have is a bad idea.  FSO is perfectly playable with M+Kb too.

Well Guitar Hero would disagree with you there. There's something about joysticks specifically that limits wider appeal.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on January 28, 2019, 08:32:06 pm
I never would have played FreeSpace, MechWarrior, Starlancer, Crimson Skies, Dark Star One, Jane's WWII Fighters, or any other flying or mech game without a joystick.  I tried Freelancer and did not enjoy the mouse controls.  I don't need Star Citizen levels of immersion, but a joystick really adds to the experience for me.

It's not that joysticks are bad; it's that building a game around a specific peripheral that not everyone may have or want to have is a bad idea.  FSO is perfectly playable with M+Kb too.

I agree that building a PC game around a specific peripheral to the exclusion of M+Kb is a bad idea.  I've tried some console to PC ports that almost require a gamepad, as they are nearly unplayable on the mouse and keyboard that virtually every PC already has.  But it is also a bad idea to focus only on M+Kb and specifically exclude those peripherals.  People who already have a joystick or racing wheel or gamepad want to the ability to use them.  Freelancer is probably a fine game, but having that choice taken from me pissed me off so I never gave it a fair chance.  I would enjoy Ace Combat Assault Horizon more if it natively supported a joystick instead of just a gamepad. 
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 29, 2019, 05:32:06 am
I never would have played FreeSpace, MechWarrior, Starlancer, Crimson Skies, Dark Star One, Jane's WWII Fighters, or any other flying or mech game without a joystick.  I tried Freelancer and did not enjoy the mouse controls.  I don't need Star Citizen levels of immersion, but a joystick really adds to the experience for me.

It's not that joysticks are bad; it's that building a game around a specific peripheral that not everyone may have or want to have is a bad idea.  FSO is perfectly playable with M+Kb too.

Well Guitar Hero would disagree with you there.

And where is Guitar Hero now?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on January 29, 2019, 06:01:40 am
I preferred rocksmith 2014 edition.   I get to use my real guitar.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 29, 2019, 12:29:51 pm
People who own and want joysticks will always be in a tiny minority so as long as a game is viewed as 'a joystick game' it's kind of ****ing itself over.

Plus coding peripheral support for joysticks is AWFUL. The guy who did Enemy Starfighter/House of the Dying Sun has vowed to (probably) never work on another space sim because having to deal with joystick bugs was so bad.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 29, 2019, 01:56:38 pm
People who own and want joysticks will always be in a tiny minority so as long as a game is viewed as 'a joystick game' it's kind of ****ing itself over.

Plus coding peripheral support for joysticks is AWFUL. The guy who did Enemy Starfighter/House of the Dying Sun has vowed to (probably) never work on another space sim because having to deal with joystick bugs was so bad.

I think it's just that the death of the spacesim and the more accessible flight simulators has basically erased all the know-how about programming for a joystick, so few people know how to do it and when most developers need to do it they have to learn from scratch.

I remember that the joystick bugs in XwVM were solved rather quickly using the same libraries HoTDS used, the more problematic were from Thrustmaster for some reason while "older" models like mine worked pretty much from the get go, the only other major issue was the throttle slider axis which for a while never quite got to 0 or 100% for some other reason.  But that was also because they had people with various hardware testing it to find the problems early and never worried too much bout programming for the shoulder buttons/triggers throttle which is usually the most problematic aspect of programming with only gamepads in mind.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on January 29, 2019, 02:03:14 pm
XwVM = X-wing Vs Marvel?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 29, 2019, 02:33:55 pm
I think it's more that joysticks destroyed space sims than vice versa. God bless Xbox controllers, that's how I replayed TIE Fighter and Xwing Alliance recently.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 29, 2019, 03:32:21 pm
XwVM = X-wing Vs Marvel?
X-Wing Virtual Machine, an ongoing attempt to recreate X-wing in Unity, I helped with some Joystick testing back at the beginning of the project.

I think it's more that joysticks destroyed space sims than vice versa. God bless Xbox controllers, that's how I replayed TIE Fighter and Xwing Alliance recently.

I don't deny X-wing Alliance was ruined by requiring a stick just to boot up, but there are plenty of people who played X-wing and Tie Fighter with mouse and keyboard. It's more that for some reason people feel more immersed by controlling a real person that moves like a skating tank rather than controlling a vehicle that moves in a semi-plausible way.

Besides, aiming with thumbsticks sucks no matter the genre, it's a compromise at best compared to a mouse or a joystick.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Mongoose on January 29, 2019, 07:08:25 pm
If joysticks killed space sims, then how are hardcore racing sims that often support four-figure customized setups still alive and thriving?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 29, 2019, 08:17:48 pm
Because, like NFL games, they appeal to a hardcore audience with a very specific interest in a real world thing.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 29, 2019, 09:28:16 pm
Because, like NFL games, they appeal to a hardcore audience with a very specific interest in a real world thing.

You could say the same thing about flight simulators.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Mongoose on January 29, 2019, 10:44:03 pm
So I guess my follow-up question is do you think that the lack of a "real thing" makes space sims all that different?  And if so, why?

And with the joystick-programming issue, was that mainly because of the sidelining of DirectInput, or because hardware manufacturers can't manage any sort of consistency?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 29, 2019, 11:51:53 pm
Because, like NFL games, they appeal to a hardcore audience with a very specific interest in a real world thing.

You could say the same thing about flight simulators.

Sure, I'd say the same thing about flight simulators. You've got your Asseto Corsas, your Falcon BMS, your DCS. They're all firmly in the enthusiast/hobbyist category.

So I guess my follow-up question is do you think that the lack of a "real thing" makes space sims all that different?  And if so, why?

I think joysticks did the commercial success of space sims no favors, and that any modern space sim would absolutely need to be built for gamepad. And yeah, I think the lack of a 'real thing' makes space sims different. The motive to learn every switch in a Falcon 4 BMS cockpit is that it's real. The motive to play X-wing is that it's fun and makes you feel like you're in Star Wars.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on January 30, 2019, 03:51:11 am
I remember going from wing commander 3 to x wing collectors cd,  and reading the controls in the book (back when games had good amounts of documents full of juicy lore (homeworld had the best)) and thinking "holy crap that's a lot to remember compared to wing commander! !"   But yeah it was great for immersion.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on January 30, 2019, 04:32:30 am
If joysticks killed space sims, then how are hardcore racing sims that often support four-figure customized setups still alive and thriving?
Because you can also play those with controllers just fine. Racing sims enable the racing game peripheral industry, not the other way around.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 31, 2019, 06:57:30 pm
AC7 PC has apparently been review-bombed into the groun by HOTAS users because it's not compatible with their peripherals. A wonderful signal to send about the value of doing PC ports!

(joysticks were a mistake)
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: IronBeer on January 31, 2019, 07:37:52 pm
(joysticks gamers* were a mistake)
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on January 31, 2019, 08:14:42 pm
AC7 PC has apparently been review-bombed into the groun by HOTAS users because it's not compatible with their peripherals. A wonderful signal to send about the value of doing PC ports!

(joysticks were a mistake)

Not just HOTAS, it doesn't recognize even the sponsored AC branded Thrustmaster ones, it doesn't recognize any Dinput device.

On Reddit Bamco made known that it's a bug.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on January 31, 2019, 08:36:41 pm
A wonderful signal to send to developers to do PC ports right.  PC users generally expect to be able to use a mouse to navigate menus, and to be able to use something other than a gamepad for gameplay.  They want a PC game, not a PlayStation game on the PC.

It does sound like maybe the controller issues are a bug.  I hope so; I would love to pick up this game sometime but I likely will not if I can't play with a joystick.  And I hope that if it is fixed, all those reviewers go back and update their reviews.  :)  Wishful thinking, I know.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 31, 2019, 08:48:40 pm
Yeah, I'm sure that's the signal they'll receive.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on January 31, 2019, 09:43:12 pm
LOL true; I'm sure how they will actually take it is "Screw those picky PC players who want to have it their way.  We are not Burger King.  We make enough money from consoles to not have to deal with this crap." 

One can dream, right?  To paraphrase a passage from Seth Dickinson: "A lot of people believe that the whole thing's a problem of communication, fundamentally solvable. Players argue that if only they and the developers could just figure out what to say, how to save face and stand down, they could find a joint solution. A way to give the players choices in control while preserving the developer from economic collapse and the threat of  extermination from coding inputs for multiple devices. It’s the Ubuntu dream, the human solution."

 ;)
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Mongoose on January 31, 2019, 10:05:09 pm
AC7 PC has apparently been review-bombed into the groun by HOTAS users because it's not compatible with their peripherals. A wonderful signal to send about the value of doing PC ports!

(joysticks were a mistake)
Perhaps if the PC version devs had, y'know, shipped the game without bugs rendering game-branded hardware incapable of working, this wouldn't be an issue.  I'm not condoning review-bombing, but that's a pretty glaring thing to miss.

Seriously, Battman, what is your malfunction with joystick users?  If that's not your control preference, fine, use whatever you like, no one cares.  But why slag off on a group of users who just want to play with the controller that feels most natural for them (and if we're being honest, for the genre as a whole)?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 31, 2019, 11:32:53 pm
Because chasing after joystick users is a bad idea for mass market games, and because joystick users are insufferable when mass market games don't support them. Enemy Starfighter was a real learning experience in why people don't make space sims any more.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on January 31, 2019, 11:33:53 pm
But more of the pro-FS principle of 'how do we make this game work comfortably on gamepads' and 'any notional FS3 would need to be a gamepad-first game.'

e: on MWLL we had to cut in-client joystick support because it made the game randomly CTD :gamedev:
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Mongoose on February 01, 2019, 01:31:47 am
There is a massive middle ground between "chasing after" and "actively attempting to alienate," especially when you're dealing with an interface technology that is quite literally decades old.  It's not like people are asking them to get room-scale VR working perfectly here.  Hell, from what I've read, the game doesn't even support using a mouse to navigate its menus, which is a pretty damn low hurdle to clear.

And while the "mass market" may not care either way about joystick support, the smaller enthusiast side of the sales bell curve provides a great deal of value as well, particular in generating and maintaining enthusiasm and interest in a title.  Most developers don't tend to be in the habit of driving away decent percentages of their potential market.  Surely Bandai Namco had to realize that there's a pretty large overlap between "people who play flight games on PC" and "people who own stick/HOTAS setups."
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: starlord on February 01, 2019, 03:59:44 am
At this point, I believe answers could come from third party joystick mapping programs like joy2key.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on February 01, 2019, 04:06:07 am
Because chasing after joystick users is a bad idea for mass market games, and because joystick users are insufferable when mass market games don't support them. Enemy Starfighter was a real learning experience in why people don't make space sims any more.

I fully support joystick users getting pissed off if a company happy to bilk them for joysticks branded for this specific game (http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_US/products/t-flight-hotas-4-ace-combat-7-limited-edition) cannot then be ****ed to actually make the two products work together. Whatever your views on joysticks in general they have every right to demand a working product for their money.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on February 01, 2019, 04:17:48 am
And while the "mass market" may not care either way about joystick support, the smaller enthusiast side of the sales bell curve provides a great deal of value as well, particular in generating and maintaining enthusiasm and interest in a title.  Most developers don't tend to be in the habit of driving away decent percentages of their potential market.  Surely Bandai Namco had to realize that there's a pretty large overlap between "people who play flight games on PC" and "people who own stick/HOTAS setups."

On the other hand if you actually listen to what Battuta's saying you'd realise that this simply isn't true. Joystick users are a small group, joystick users who are too stuck up to just play a good game on other input methods if necessary smaller still, so there's not actually that much value to gain from joystick support. Worse still, they're majorly fragmented across different manufacturers and models and so cost disproportionately more to support than kb+m or gamepads. He's just given two examples of games where the developers concluded that joystick support was a net loss. If Bandai had just said the same thing and come clean that there would be no HOTAS support I'd have no sympathy for the joystick users whatsoever.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 07:23:39 am
Because chasing after joystick users is a bad idea for mass market games, and because joystick users are insufferable when mass market games don't support them. Enemy Starfighter was a real learning experience in why people don't make space sims any more.

I fully support joystick users getting pissed off if a company happy to bilk them for joysticks branded for this specific game (http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_US/products/t-flight-hotas-4-ace-combat-7-limited-edition) cannot then be ****ed to actually make the two products work together. Whatever your views on joysticks in general they have every right to demand a working product for their money.

I agree! Trying to make joysticks for this game was a MISTAKE!
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 07:25:53 am
There is a massive middle ground between "chasing after" and "actively attempting to alienate," especially when you're dealing with an interface technology that is quite literally decades old.  It's not like people are asking them to get room-scale VR working perfectly here.  Hell, from what I've read, the game doesn't even support using a mouse to navigate its menus, which is a pretty damn low hurdle to clear.

Assault Horizon didn't either and it was a pretty darn good PC port anyway. Hell, I don't think MGS5 supports mouse menus and it's a great PC port.

There is no middle ground between 'chasing after' and 'actively attempting to alienate' because, like you said, the interface technology is decades old. Joystick support is a nightmare and will not work unless you put a ton of time and energy into it. And even then everything will break for no reason.

Quote
And while the "mass market" may not care either way about joystick support, the smaller enthusiast side of the sales bell curve provides a great deal of value as well, particular in generating and maintaining enthusiasm and interest in a title.  Most developers don't tend to be in the habit of driving away decent percentages of their potential market.  Surely Bandai Namco had to realize that there's a pretty large overlap between "people who play flight games on PC" and "people who own stick/HOTAS setups."

If they want AC7 to be successful then I imagine the overlap between "people we hope will buy this game" and "people who own stick/HOTAS setups" is very small, because "people who own stick/HOTAS setups" is very small.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 01, 2019, 08:10:41 am
"people who own stick/HOTAS setups" is very small.

I agree, but everyone on Elite Dangerous Social media seem to go ape**** for HOTAS and i'm like "Whyyyyyy? M+Kb for life".

On a similar note though, i'm really tempted to get PSVR for AC7.......i'd get the Firewall FPS for my wife too but would it justify the expense?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 08:26:04 am
Because chasing after joystick users is a bad idea for mass market games, and because joystick users are insufferable when mass market games don't support them. Enemy Starfighter was a real learning experience in why people don't make space sims any more.

I fully support joystick users getting pissed off if a company happy to bilk them for joysticks branded for this specific game (http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_US/products/t-flight-hotas-4-ace-combat-7-limited-edition) cannot then be ****ed to actually make the two products work together. Whatever your views on joysticks in general they have every right to demand a working product for their money.

I agree! Trying to make joysticks for this game was a MISTAKE!

They technically didin't, they are cheap pre-existing generic models with an Ace Combat sticker slapped on them and they seemingly didn't bother to plug one of those to one of the dev's computers to see if it worked.

Next to make you happy no racing games on either consoles or PC will support steering wheels, don't worry.

Besides, any griping about hotas prices when a frigging Xbone controller costs 70 euros sounds incredibly stupid to me.
"people who own stick/HOTAS setups" is very small.

I agree, but everyone on Elite Dangerous Social media seem to go ape**** for HOTAS and i'm like "Whyyyyyy? M+Kb for life".

On a similar note though, i'm really tempted to get PSVR for AC7.......i'd get the Firewall FPS for my wife too but would it justify the expense?

I can understand a pad but I can conceive m+k for a flight game at the moment.

And the worst thing is I probably woudl use a pad, but mine is out of commission at the moment and I'm still waiting for the spare part to fix it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 08:29:28 am
Racing games get full press showings on the stage at E3, they're not a dead genre.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 08:38:27 am
Racing games get full press showings on the stage at E3, they're not a dead genre.

Even those that don't do have wheel support though, frigging Strike Suit Zero had some basic joystick support but a triple A game studio couldn't spare an intern to see if at least their sponsored devices worked?

Also, xbone gamepads nowadays often cost more than a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro which is ****ing ridiculous, but people who have sticks are the ones that spend lot of money now?

PS: also Dinput seem to be buggy in general with the game, Dual Shock 4 users reported problems with some of the buttons that disappear when using Steam's Xinput emulation.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 09:34:26 am
I'm not surprised the game has peripheral issues, they apparently spent nearly a year of development getting the VR **** working (thus why it spent so long in release date limbo). You gotta triage out features that aren't as critical for launch.

Aren't xbone controllers like $50? That's not a lot. M+KB works great in FreeSpace and Elite, it's how I've always flown.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on February 01, 2019, 09:48:23 am
Again, Bandai deserve absolutely no sympathy or defence for not supporting hardware that they sponsored, or said that they’d officially support. If they don’t have the decency to tell HOTAS users that they’re not supported then they deserve to be review-bombed. You have a good point generally but you’re a fool to throw out solidarity with other consumers over it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 09:51:51 am
Like I said, having officially supported/sponsored peripherals was a mistake, and they shouldn't have done it. Focus on making a good gamepad game, it's what your mass audience is going to use.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 10:15:01 am
Assault Horizon had no issue with joysticks. Like any reasonable PC port any dinput device would work just fine if you rebind the buttons. Nobody's asking for a gamepad-like preset experience with joysticks but having dinput support and key rebinding is the bare minimum.
It's not like your software will see a dinput gamepad any differently from a dinput joystick, they both look basically the same in the game's eyes. If you're not supporting dinput you're not supporting a lot of PC gamepad setups including any playstation controller. If you do support dinput and allow for key rebinding then any joystick can be made to work just fine.
For example I can boot up Nier: Automata right now, rebind the keys, and play it with my racing wheel. This obviously doesn't mean that a 3rd person action RPG has racing wheel support. The game doesn't really know or care what kind of device you're using, and that's true for pretty much any game that supports dinput.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 10:28:12 am
DirectInput is dead, though. XInput is the current API, and that only supports the XBox Controller's feature set. For a lot of games, especially older ones or those built on custom engine, supporting both apis or just DInput is not a big deal.

The thing is, AC7 is built on Unreal 4. Unreal 4 does not natively support DInput. Draw your own conclusions from that.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 10:34:55 am
Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 10:51:28 am
Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.

At the moment 360ce doesn't seem to work either at least for me.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 10:55:05 am
Project wingman is also built on UE4 by some bedroom coder in Perth, Australia and it supports dinput just fine, it even comes with deadzone, saturation, and curve tweaking.
It's really not that hard to support it.
If you only support xinput you're basically writing off a huge amount of PC gamepads and every non-gamepad device. Sure, you can use x360ce as a workaround but that's not really ideal.

Yes, it's really easy .... ironically, much easier for RB to do than it is for Project Aces, who have to have the budget to do extensive porting work (which it seems they didn't do or have). It seems to me that, where Project Wingman is built on PC first and foremost, AC7 was built on console first (what a shock), with the PC port being a thing PA kinda got for free just by using UE4.
I'm guessing, and I stress that this is just a guess, PA believed that the branded HOTAS they sold would work well because that's basically the same HOTAS they sold for ACAH (aka whatever the current version of the Thrustmaster HOTAS X is) and because they had coded support for it into the console versions -- and it seems that there are people out there for whom that set actually works on PC.

The PC is always a nightmare in terms of support. The possible configuration space is insane, users do all sorts of weird ****, Microsoft can **** up out of the blue in some obscure way, hardware manufacturers make all sorts of stupid decisions.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 11:15:54 am
Sure, perfect PC support with optimal performance and no bugs on any hardware is impossible and even getting close is nightmarishly difficult. But the bare minimums really aren't that hard and yet ports manage to **** it up(and require fixing by 3rd party modders) all the time.
The bare minimums being:

Arbitrary resolution support
Arbitrary framerate support, with some leniency after 120-144, if your engine breaks past this it's probably fine
Arbitrary control input support(this includes full control rebinding)

If you can't even hit those three then you should really reconsider what you're doing and invest the bare minimum into your PC port so it's not DOA. Most of the time modders can fix these in a few hours of work, professionals should be able to do it in a week(because they have higher standards to hit). Mouse driven menus, detailed graphics options, benchmarking tools, etc. are all nice but nowhere near as necessary as the "bare minimums".

And I don't think PA is quite so stupid that they just "missed" this accidentally. This had to be a "known shippable", there's no way your testers could possibly miss officially "supported" hardware not working or the 2nd most popular PC gamepad on steam being broken(the DS4).
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 11:34:03 am
The bare minimums being:

Arbitrary resolution support
Arbitrary framerate support, with some leniency after 120-144, if your engine breaks past this it's probably fine
Arbitrary control input support(this includes full control rebinding)

Nah.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 11:40:59 am
Nah.
Well I guess you got me there, PC gamers should just lower their standards because the things PC ports(even "lazy" ones) have been doing for the past few decades are now suddenly too hard.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 11:57:06 am
Nah.
Well I guess you got me there, PC gamers should just lower their standards because the things PC ports(even "lazy" ones) have been doing for the past few decades are now suddenly too hard.

Let's take this in order:
- Arbitrary resolution support: Nope. You can cover the vast majority of the market by just offering 1080p, 1440p and 4k.
- Arbitrary framerate support: Nope. 60 hz will, again, cover most of the market. If you cover 120 hz as well, you have all but the most high-spec systems covered.
- Arbitrary control input: Nope. Mouse, Keyboard, Xbox pad. Covers most of the market; Key rebinding being mostly optional in cases where you're designing your game around the pad.

These things aren't necessary by any means. They're good to have, sure, but their absence does not make a port bad, at least IMHO. A good game can survive without them (see: Dark Souls).
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 12:06:44 pm
The Assault Horizon port came out something like a year after the console version, right?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 12:14:41 pm
The Dark Souls PC port is ****ing awful and basically unplayable without Durante's DSFix. It's locked to 30 FPS ffs. Being able to cover the "majority of the market" is nice and all but going beyond that is not exactly difficult.
Letting users set whatever resolution their PC claims to support is simple, you have to go out of your way to specifically restrict resolutions to the three sets that are the most common.

Having an unlocked framerate option is also not hard, especially if you're working with an engine that doesn't randomly break past a certain framerate(like UE4 or almost any modern engine).

Having physics or even game speed reliant on framerate is just bad practice, not only because you can't support HFR monitors but anyone with slightly weaker hardware will have physics issues when their framerate starts dropping.
As for arbitrary control input I'll just leave this here
(https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Steam-Graph-1.jpg)

Only 64% of PC gamepad users(on Steam) are using Xbox pads, if you think leaving 36% of your market is "good enough" then I can't disagree harder. The percentage of PC Nvidia GPU users is actually higher than PC xbox pad users yet I'm pretty sure you wouldn't argue that making your game only run on Nvidia GPUs(not even booting up on AMD) is "fine" because it covers the majority of the market.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 12:29:33 pm
Also for AC7 specifically I wouldn't call the reception on steam "review bombing". Steam only offers 2 options for reviews "recommend" and "do not recommend" or "positive and negative" if you want to simplify them. If you buy a PC game only to find out that the developers have decided to throw you under the bus because your setup isn't mainstream enough then it's entirely fine to push that "do not recommend" button.
You have to own the game to leave a review so review bombing by people who refuse to buy the game because of some feature(like including Denuvo or not supporting X) is impossible on steam, you'll usually find these kinds of bombs on metacritic.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 12:37:33 pm
The Dark Souls PC port is ****ing awful and basically unplayable without Durante's DSFix. It's locked to 30 FPS ffs. Being able to cover the "majority of the market" is nice and all but going beyond that is not exactly difficult.

Not difficult, perhaps (I wouldn't be too sure about that), but whether or not the expense of investing engineering time into adding these features can be justified is based on factors that have nothing to do with the engineering difficulty.

Quote
Letting users set whatever resolution their PC claims to support is simple, you have to go out of your way to specifically restrict resolutions to the three sets that are the most common.

Having an unlocked framerate option is also not hard, especially if you're working with an engine that doesn't randomly break past a certain framerate(like UE4 or almost any modern engine).

Both of those include testing and design overhead (does the UI work at arbitrary resolutions? Does the entire dev team understand which timers to use and which ones to stay away from?). These things aren't hard ... except when your target is 1080p @ 30fps on a console, and you know that you're going to hard lock the game from going beyond that limit on the primary platform. Under those circumstances, things may slip through.

Quote
Having physics or even game speed reliant on framerate is just bad practice, not only because you can't support HFR monitors but anyone with slightly weaker hardware will have physics issues when their framerate starts dropping.
As for arbitrary control input I'll just leave this here

Only 64% of PC gamepad users(on Steam) are using Xbox pads, if you think leaving 36% of your market is "good enough" then I can't disagree harder. The percentage of PC Nvidia GPU users is actually higher than PC xbox pad users yet I'm pretty sure you wouldn't argue that making your game only run on Nvidia GPUs(not even booting up on AMD) is "fine" because it covers the majority of the market.

You know what I see when I look at that chart?

100% of all pads used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 12:48:15 pm
100% of all controllers used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.

Except for that time when Dark Souls 2 players got  softbanned for using x360ce or DSFix because it was detected as an external hook. oopsies daisies.
And even when that doesn't happen only 64%(maybe 68% if you optimistically assume the vast majority of "PC gamepads" use xinput) of users actually get to use their gamepads "as intended", the rest have to hack it and in some cases end up with weird control layouts that can only be changed by changing the settings in x360ce or steam's generic controller support which also breaks menu navigation.

If you as a developer decide that supporting those basic features is "not worth it" then you shouldn't be surprised when players decide your game isn't worth it and leave bad reviews.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 01:08:21 pm
100% of all controllers used are some variety of XInput device (in some cases via 3rd party hacks or Steam itself), aka an XBox pad as far as software is concerned.

Except for that time when Dark Souls 2 players got  softbanned for using x360ce or DSFix because it was detected as an external hook. oopsies daisies.

I am not sure what the vagaries of cheat protection in games has to do with this discussion at all.

Quote
And even when that doesn't happen only 64%(maybe 68% if you optimistically assume the vast majority of "PC gamepads" use xinput) of users actually get to use their gamepads "as intended", the rest have to hack it and in some cases end up with weird control layouts that can only be changed by changing the settings in x360ce or steam's generic controller support which also breaks menu navigation.

All xbox pads are xinput. All generic pads you can buy are xinput. The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games. DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput. The Steam Controller is an XInput device in games that do not support it directly.
That's 95% of that chart covered.

You did see that HOTAS setups do not appear in the chart at all, did you?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 01:24:51 pm
All xbox pads are xinput. All generic pads you can buy are xinput. The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games. DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput. The Steam Controller is an XInput device in games that do not support it directly.
That's 95% of that chart covered.

All xbox pads are xinput - this is true

All generic pads you can buy are xinput - no they're not. Plenty of budget options like Mocute or older Saitek models(which are still being made and sold for under $15) are dinput only. Newer steelseries models are xinput only and Logitech's F310, 510, and 710 come with a selector switch for dinput/xinput.

The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games - This is true, yet AC7 specifically has some major issues with this option like disconnecting the controller when guns are fired and non-working haptic feedback(aka rumble).

DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput - lol wat. DSFix is Durante's GeDoSaTo applied to Dark Souls, it has no options for emulating xinput with DS3 gamepads AFAIK. x360ce can do this with basically any device(including a HOTAS) but you're now using 3rd party hook software which has 0 real support and can get you banned because of the "vagaries of cheat protection" which is why it's relevant.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 01, 2019, 01:26:52 pm
Just wanted to say that the Deadspace 2 port on Steam runs bloody lovely.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on February 01, 2019, 01:35:06 pm
All xbox pads are xinput. All generic pads you can buy are xinput. The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games. DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput. The Steam Controller is an XInput device in games that do not support it directly.
That's 95% of that chart covered.

counting 3rd party support through dsfix as support for dualshocks is just corporate bootlicking imo
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 01:37:51 pm
To people that somehow follow AAA releases regularly and buy day one only to often find major issues: How do you do it?
This is my first day one triple A release in years and it's effing depressing, both the game issues themselves and the discussions around it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 01:43:47 pm
DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput - lol wat. DSFix is Durante's GeDoSaTo applied to Dark Souls, it has no options for emulating xinput with DS3 gamepads AFAIK. x360ce can do this with basically any device(including a HOTAS) but you're now using 3rd party hook software which has 0 real support and can get you banned because of the "vagaries of cheat protection" which is why it's relevant.


I apologize for getting this wrong. I had "dsfix" in my mind as the name of the tool that allowed you to use DS3's under Windows (guess I got some mental wires crossed there), but a couple years ago, Sony actually released official drivers for the things that expose them as DInput devices.

Still though, even removing all the DS3 pads and all the generic pads from the XInput pool only reduces that pools' size to little less than 90%.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 01:46:16 pm
All xbox pads are xinput. All generic pads you can buy are xinput. The DS4 support in Steam makes them look like XInput to games. DS3s, via dsfix, look like XInput. The Steam Controller is an XInput device in games that do not support it directly.
That's 95% of that chart covered.

counting 3rd party support through dsfix as support for dualshocks is just corporate bootlicking imo

Again, apologies for getting this wrong. I'm just human.

To people that somehow follow AAA releases regularly and buy day one only to often find major issues: How do you do it?
This is my first day one triple A release in years and it's effing depressing, both the game issues themselves and the discussions around it.

Most of the AAA releases I bought on day 1 were perfectly playable on that day (sometimes after applying a day 1 patch).

Then again, most of those games I buy I buy on PS4, sooooo.....
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 01:48:56 pm
To people that somehow follow AAA releases regularly and buy day one only to often find major issues: How do you do it?
This is my first day one triple A release in years and it's effing depressing, both the game issues themselves and the discussions around it.

Never pre-order, never Day 1...but that aside, hasn’t this been an unusually smooth AAA (I’m not sure if AC is quite triple-A but whatever) launch? No massive day 1 patch, stable, performs well, no features delayed as DLC? You can pop in the disc/install the DL and play.

The long delay due to getting the VR **** right really gave them a chance to polish.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 01:51:19 pm
I’ve been really excited for this game but I’m absolutely giving it a few weeks and maybe a chance to go on sale, I’ve got plenty of backlog to catch up on. Just good practice for new releases (poor Just Cause fans  :()
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 01:56:35 pm
Throwing 10% of the userbase under the bus is still not acceptable though. And another 20% with DS4s have to use a workaround in Steam's big picture mode that still has some issues. Even disregarding game specific issues like the ones AC7 seems to have you can't set up a circular deadzone(only a square one) which is just annoying and makes precise analog input harder than it should be.

Now add in all of the people with xinput devices(either generic PC pads like the F310 or xbox pads) who aren't satisfied with the pre-set control schemes and want to change them. Whoops, ya can't if there's no controller rebinding.
Better go dick around with vjoy, UCR, and x360ce to map your xinput device to a dinput virtual device then use UCR to remap it and then use x360ce to make that virtual device appear like an xinput device to the game and then dick around some more to make your original xinput device invisible.


But even ignoring those who can technically get the game to "work" with their pads either directly or through Steam are you really saying it's totally okay to throw an entire 10% of gamepad users under the bus because they're not the majority? 10% isn't exactly a small number.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: The E on February 01, 2019, 02:06:25 pm
But even ignoring those who can technically get the game to "work" with their pads either directly or through Steam are you really saying it's totally okay to throw an entire 10% of gamepad users under the bus because they're not the majority? 10% isn't exactly a small number.

It's a decision I'd understand. Not necessarily like, sure, but if I had to decide where I had to spend engineering budget and development effort, that's not where I'd spend it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 02:08:38 pm
So, why is it that the "supercomplicated" and "incomprehensible" CH Control Manager to me is easy to use while what Steam passes for a controller configurator is utterly confounding to me?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Phantom Hoover on February 01, 2019, 02:14:05 pm
You're not 'throwing someone under the bus' by making a product they can't use. If you say up front that your game only supports Xinput then what's the problem?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 02:21:30 pm
I'm pretty sure the impact of the "review bomb" is going to cost Bamco more than spending 20-30 man-hours on basic directinput support and key rebinding would. Even in the form of a launcher with no in-game rebinding. Because those types of basic features are something even the bargainest binnest and indie-est of flight games support.
"But the PS4 was the primary market" is no excuse nor a good business decision. If you're going to invest in a PC port you might as well go all the way, I'm sure all the engineering work and testing that went into making the game run as smoothly as it does was orders of magnitude more expensive than basic controller support would be. Now a lot of that will go to waste because that yellow "mixed" review score will scare away a lot of "browsing buyers" who aren't familiar with the game or the series.

You're not 'throwing someone under the bus' by making a product they can't use. If you say up front that your game only supports Xinput then what's the problem?

Which isn't what Bamco did, they even advertised Thrustmaster sticks as being officially supported, which they now only are through a weird workaround with Thrustamster's drivers.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 02:24:52 pm
So, why is it that the "supercomplicated" and "incomprehensible" CH Control Manager to me is easy to use while what Steam passes for a controller configurator is utterly confounding to me?

The only config you should have to do (outside the game itself) is plugging in your control device, any kind of third party configurator is end user confusion sauce.

As for AC7 controller support, they should've just said 'we are only supporting these pads at launch, and we'll work on patching in other controllers later.'

"But the PS4 was the primary market" is no excuse nor a good business decision. If you're going to invest in a PC port you might as well go all the way, I'm sure all the engineering work and testing that went into making the game run as smoothly as it does was orders of magnitude more expensive than basic controller support would be. Now a lot of that will go to waste because that yellow "mixed" review score will scare away a lot of "browsing buyers" who aren't familiar with the game or the series.

Making your game run smoothly on consoles is a lot better use of time than supporting a ton of peripherals, and probably got proportionately more attention. AC7 has always been a console-first franchise, and if their PC port bombs they'll probably just stop doing them.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 02:43:50 pm
Making your game run smoothly on consoles is a lot better use of time than supporting a ton of peripherals, and probably got proportionately more attention. AC7 has always been a console-first franchise, and if their PC port bombs they'll probably just stop doing them.

According to benchmarks it runs very smoothly on PC as well(a lot better than the base consoles which often dip to the 40s). And this whole "supporting a ton of peripherals" thing makes no sense to me. Supporting a single dinput device is as simple as supporting all of them.

Assault Horizon was a cheaply made port that released at a discounted price with all DLC included and it was far more competent as a port. If you want to laze out of basic features and sabotage your own sales then more power to you. But don't tell me it's a good business decision to do so. But I would agree that not doing a PC port at all is more sensible than going 95% of the way, lazing out on the last 5% and getting "review bombed" thus losing sales.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 03:26:48 pm
Assault Horizon came out over a year later on PC, iirc.

I know Tipul was just a one man dev team but he really made it sound like supporting sticks was far far harder than just supporting pads. So I don’t think you’re right about one size fits all. But idk for sure.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 03:51:08 pm
But... Enemy Starfighter/House of the Dying sun has arbitrary dinput HID support. I can play it by using an F310 in xinput mode, Logitech racing pedals in dinput, and a keyboard simultaneously if I want to.

"full" stick support is tricky. If you want a ton of joysticks, HOTASes, rudder pedals, and other sim **** to be supported out of the box with keys all mapped correctly without the user having to bind everything manually you'll need a lot of work.
But for anything else you just need a dinput wrapper to translate the (up to) 8 axes and (up to) 128 buttons to controls your game uses. Even if the controls only show up as "BTN 1", "BTN74", "BTN5", etc."

Without this ability tools like vjoy and UCR would be useless since the virtual sticks it creates  can have weird and impossible(for a physical stick) layouts.

Supporting xinput pads is much "simpler" because they're all guaranteed to have the same layout so you only need a single control scheme for all of them. Basically, xinput makes "plug n play" extremely easy, while doing the same with any arbitrary dinput HID is nearly impossible. But if you just want basic functionality and let users deal with the rebinding then dinput can work as "one size fits all".
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 03:58:45 pm
Here's what I can tell you on this topic: joystick support for House was a constant source of complaints and such a code nightmare that Tipul gave up on it. For more detail you'll have to go to him.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: FrikgFeek on February 01, 2019, 04:09:58 pm
Joysticks "work" in HODS but they're not "officially supported" from what the dev said on the Steam forums.

Quote
Stephen is right, it was developed on gamepads and KBAM. You can rebind your keys and buttons, but at least until sometime later, you're kinda on your own for support.

Here's how it usually goes with flight sticks and me:

Player: "Hey my stick keeps rolling right, what the hell this sucks!"
Me: "OK, let me try to debug this with you. Do you have anything else plugged in?"
Player: "No."
*spends hours ripping things apart in code, setting breakpoints, swearing*
Me: "I can't figure this out, did you try <suggestion>?"
Player: "Oh I got it working. My fifth rotary was set as axis 1 and it was turned up."

...which makes me die a little every time. :(

The middleware I use is actually pretty good at letting you bind things, and I can definitely make sure that stuff works, I just don't have the time to walk you through weird problems, which is why they're not "officially" supported.

If people find good defaults for their controller and want to share them, I can hook those up so everyone can benefit.

I can definitely agree with this stance. Making proper defaults for every single configuration out there is a horrible pain in the ass and an endless pit of work. But giving players the ability to rebind their controls and letting them deal with whatever weird quirks come up themselves isn't much of a problem.
If BAMCO wanted to make presets and good defaults for the "officially supported" 2 thrustmaster sticks and let everyone else deal with their problems on their own I'm pretty sure the backlash wouldn't have happened. People with rare and unconventional control devices(like HOTASes) are used to this kind of work.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Det. Bullock on February 01, 2019, 06:07:38 pm
In other news: I managed to get x360ce to work with the game, I don't know what I did exactly but I'm not in the habit of looking at a gifted horse's mouth.
I did a few rounds in multiplayer, the first one ending in disaster because the pitch axis was inverted and couldn't be changed during gameplay.

Here's what I can tell you on this topic: joystick support for House was a constant source of complaints and such a code nightmare that Tipul gave up on it. For more detail you'll have to go to him.

My HOTAS works perfectly in HoTDS, binding stuff manually is not an issue. A lot of people thought they had issues because the throttle is both normal speed and afterburner, it took me a while to notice too but after that I could adjust easily. I even posted this on the Steam Discussion forum but I guess by that time he had already given up.

They might as well be officially supported, I can't see how anything that isn't something really weird like some old Force Feedback stick wouldn't work.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: karajorma on February 01, 2019, 06:52:38 pm
Never pre-order, never Day 1...but that aside, hasn’t this been an unusually smooth AAA (I’m not sure if AC is quite triple-A but whatever) launch? No massive day 1 patch, stable, performs well, no features delayed as DLC? You can pop in the disc/install the DL and play.

I believe that's called damning with faint praise. "Unusually this AAA game works when you buy it" indicates that most games don't.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: jr2 on February 01, 2019, 10:49:42 pm
Hmm... @Moderators: Joystick convo split?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 01, 2019, 11:18:04 pm
No

@kara: Yeah but that’s the reality these days. And I think in some ways it always has been. Myth 2 could format your hard drive if you uninstalled it from the wrong directory. A bad launch these days is at least recoverable - The Division allegedly turned into a good game, Diablo 3 was massively overhauled.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Scotty on February 02, 2019, 12:33:26 am
Never pre-order, never Day 1...but that aside, hasn’t this been an unusually smooth AAA (I’m not sure if AC is quite triple-A but whatever) launch? No massive day 1 patch, stable, performs well, no features delayed as DLC? You can pop in the disc/install the DL and play.

I believe that's called damning with faint praise. "Unusually this AAA game works when you buy it" indicates that most games don't.

How many people have you walked through troubleshooting a newly released campaign you've worked on?  I'd wager it's more than a couple as confidently as I would that you'd still characterize them as good releases.  Of all the people in the world you'd think would be sympathetic to immediate post-release issues active modders should be toward the top of the list.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Spoon on February 02, 2019, 08:16:28 am
How many people have you walked through troubleshooting a newly released campaign you've worked on?  I'd wager it's more than a couple as confidently as I would that you'd still characterize them as good releases.  Of all the people in the world you'd think would be sympathetic to immediate post-release issues active modders should be toward the top of the list.
Not all that many with my last release. Probably because we spend a lot of time polishing and double checking if everything worked. Something the AAA industry doesn't do because they usually got stupidly tight deadlines to meet. Probably ~80% of the launch day issues most of the AAA games have, are there by 'choice' (usually the publisher's choice). If you've got upwards to 500+ people working on a game, I don't feel like it's all that unreasonable for the customers to expect a game that is in a working and polished condition.
If you buy any other product, you wouldn't really accept it being in some half working state either.
So not really all that sympathetic tbh.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: karajorma on February 02, 2019, 11:23:16 am
What Spoon said.

I mod in my spare time, for free, with a team of people who also mod in their spare time. And even then I never had any issues with Diaspora or BtRL anywhere near as large or obvious as some of the dumb **** I see in AAA games. I'm completely unsympathetic because if I can do better without the resources AAA has, then why should I allow the shoddy standards I constantly see in AAA?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Firesteel on February 02, 2019, 12:36:30 pm
Spoon's right (and to karajorma's point, not having the absurd deadlines and using a well worn and very stable tech base helps a lot).

I think another, arguably bigger split between us here and the industry at large is the brain drain. Sure there are a ton of people no longer active on HLP but a lot of their knowledge is still here (though how accessible it is does vary). Compare that to the industry churn of about every 5 years and there's little institutional knowledge left at a lot of places. Furthermore, what little does stick around doesn't get taught well because the industry hates professional development.

As I was talking with someone on Twitter about, my weird part time job working with animals and kids did more to encourage professional development than a lot of the game industry ever did. All our trainings were paid (at higher rates than our regular wages iirc) and my coworker and I were able to hold multiple training sessions that we organized ourselves (with our boss's blessing).
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 02, 2019, 01:40:02 pm
What Spoon said.

I mod in my spare time, for free, with a team of people who also mod in their spare time. And even then I never had any issues with Diaspora or BtRL anywhere near as large or obvious as some of the dumb **** I see in AAA games. I'm completely unsympathetic because if I can do better without the resources AAA has, then why should I allow the shoddy standards I constantly see in AAA?

Because you're working on a narrow scope project with a volunteer team on a fairly stable 20 year old code base with EXTREMELY good tools (FRED would make Bungie designers die of envy) and with no publisher imposed and marketing-enforced deadline, on a product that is orders of magnitude simpler?

I ain't excusing it — like I said I don't buy AAA titles day 1 — but, for example, neither BP nor Diaspora nor Wings of Dawn shipped with working netcode despite having 20 years of dev time to get the netcode right. We excuse that because we're mods. In a AAA title that would be a game killer.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Spoon on February 02, 2019, 04:54:49 pm
Poor tools, tight deadlines, unstable code bases.... Those are all issues that the industry entirely created themselves. They absolutely have the budget, manpower and talent to solve all of those issues.

Compare that to the industry churn of about every 5 years and there's little institutional knowledge left at a lot of places. Furthermore, what little does stick around doesn't get taught well because the industry hates professional development.
Also, this is entirely right. The industry is pretty amazing at just constantly reinventing the wheel.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 02, 2019, 05:18:34 pm
I mean, yeah, the industry would be better if it were better. But given soaring dev costs and studios dropping left and right that's clearly not an easy thing to do.

Software as a whole is really terrible but games have it particularly bad.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Spoon on February 02, 2019, 05:52:08 pm
I don't get what point you're trying to make, though. The industry would be better if were better, yes. But until it's not, then players/customers are not allowed to complain/point out that it could and should be better or...? Developers have it rough, so it's fine and understandable that they keep having (almost entirely avoidable) terrible launch days or...?

Soaring dev costs, oh no. Imagine if the triple A industry ran out of money!
Black Ops 4 only made a measly 500 million dollars in its launch weekend. I hope activision will be okay (https://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-ohdear.png)
EA only makes like 1.7+ billion in microtransations a year. ****, I hope they can still fund development costs. Looks like money is gonna be pretty tight.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 02, 2019, 06:03:22 pm
Activision is indeed cutting costs and jettisoning brands it thinks are underperforming.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: karajorma on February 02, 2019, 06:18:47 pm
Because corporations usually only care about the final amount of money they make. What matters is making the most amount of money for the least amount of money spent.

 I'm sorry, but someone who made half a billion dollars on a game that cost them maybe one hundred million to make doesn't get to claim "it would have been too expensive to solve major problems with game design by spending $2m more!" Let's face facts here, the main reason for a lot of problems with the AAA market is simple greed. Many AAA games make the same sort of profit that a Hollywood blockbuster make. And Hollywood is willing to spend large amounts of money to get that. But game companies complain about poverty the entire time and then make massive profits. I'm sorry, but I don't believe it.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: 0rph3u5 on February 02, 2019, 06:23:21 pm
Please dont forget about a capitalist cooperate culture that is allegeric to actual accountability (both outside and inside the boardroom)...

... and, thanks in part to the audience, how high the big players are on technical specs rather than refinments of content etc (compare to how, say a musical, is marketed compared to a game*)

* you dont have to follow my thesis on the similarities between stage and game for that to work, I think
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on February 02, 2019, 10:37:39 pm
How many people have you walked through troubleshooting a newly released campaign you've worked on?  I'd wager it's more than a couple as confidently as I would that you'd still characterize them as good releases.  Of all the people in the world you'd think would be sympathetic to immediate post-release issues active modders should be toward the top of the list.
Not all that many with my last release. Probably because we spend a lot of time polishing and double checking if everything worked. Something the AAA industry doesn't do because they usually got stupidly tight deadlines to meet. Probably ~80% of the launch day issues most of the AAA games have, are there by 'choice' (usually the publisher's choice). If you've got upwards to 500+ people working on a game, I don't feel like it's all that unreasonable for the customers to expect a game that is in a working and polished condition.
If you buy any other product, you wouldn't really accept it being in some half working state either.
So not really all that sympathetic tbh.

HEAR HEAR!  Actually, that goes for pretty much every post after this one of Spoon's too.

The AAA game industry has become used to the fact that they can hype and push an unfinished, poorly tested product and still make enough money early in to recoup their expenses and generate a profit.  From there, they hope they can fix enough of the major issues that may emerge to keep sales profitable for a few months/years after.  The increase in the push for pre-orders (via digital bonuses that cost the publishers literally nothing) and the increasing amounts of DLC that reflect content that quite often should have been in game just demonstrate this.... but if they get enough hype, people fall for it anyway.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on February 03, 2019, 12:09:14 am
I wonder if successful unionisation of the games industry will change that by forcing companies to reconsider the time it takes to develop games.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Scotty on February 03, 2019, 12:35:44 am
I don't think unionization can even happen in that industry until there aren't way more people who think they want to design games than there are jobs for people to design games.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 03, 2019, 02:13:45 am
The star citizen fans of the world don't make it any easier.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: 0rph3u5 on February 04, 2019, 03:53:15 pm
I don't think unionization can even happen in that industry until there aren't way more people who think they want to design games than there are jobs for people to design games.

Read up on the history of the (european) labour movement, Unions were originally build with that exact problem in mind - you known, cause originally unionisation was meant to stop the race to the bottom with the wages of unskilled labourers.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: SamVision on February 06, 2019, 11:18:05 am
EA cashes in on the battle royale plague trend by sacrificing Titanfall on the altar of free-to-play and tossing Respawn into their slave pits.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on February 06, 2019, 12:17:01 pm
Apex Legends is really good, has some of the best aspects of Titanfall (movement in particular), and Titanfall didn't actually sell.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 06, 2019, 12:33:14 pm
EA cashes in on the battle royale plague trend by sacrificing Titanfall on the altar of free-to-play and tossing Respawn into their slave pits.

I love Titanfall and will never touch Apex Legends, but this is a dumb take. Respawn was working on their battle royale before EA bought them, and EA reportedly expected to get Titanfall 3, not Apex Legends.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 06, 2019, 12:33:28 pm
Apex Legends is really good, has some of the best aspects of Titanfall (movement in particular), and Titanfall didn't actually sell.

Uh doesn't AL have no wallrunning at all?
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Grizzly on February 06, 2019, 01:00:53 pm
Apex Legends is really good, has some of the best aspects of Titanfall (movement in particular), and Titanfall didn't actually sell.

Uh doesn't AL have no wallrunning at all?

Sadly no, but it doesn't have fall damage, there's lots of grappling lines on the map and one of the characters can place more of them, sliding down hills makes you go faster, all that good stuff. There's lots of sliding and flying.

There's balloons you rappel up to and then fly down from using some sort of jetpack.

It's imo the best Battle Royale there is right now, and you don't even have to pay for it. Its titanfall origins are really clear - and not just because it's set in the same universe.

Respawn is just really good at what they do and it shows. Also, they are still doing a Star Wars thing and this isn't the last "titanfall" thing they are doing apperently either.

If anything, I'm really happy that such a clearly talented studio is getting the attention it deserves.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 06, 2019, 03:09:45 pm
Tribes sounds more fun.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on February 06, 2019, 03:20:22 pm
Tribes sounds more fun.

Damn, now I miss Tribes 2 worse than ever.  That game was great.  64 players of mayhem.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Spoon on February 06, 2019, 03:32:02 pm
Shazbot.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 06, 2019, 04:01:01 pm
Played it since I bought starsiege.   Ended with vengeance. I heard there's a free one on steam but I've not looked at it that closely.

Shazbot.

Spinfurzor jump ftw.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: MP-Ryan on February 06, 2019, 09:42:16 pm
All about sneaking up on Heavies and shocklancing them into respawning.  I loved T2.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Spoon on February 11, 2019, 05:21:21 pm
Good vid by Jim sterling about this subject (definitely not the first one he's made on this topic)
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Autohummer on February 22, 2019, 03:07:29 am
I can't say anything since I have only watched friends get teamwiped in Apex, but the whole thing smells like EA trying to cash in on the fad started by Overwatch and friends. Not my cup of tea either way.

My own gripe: I can't forgive what EA has done to Westwood and Command and Conquer.... The hiatus between Generals and 3 was bad enough, though those two games were good (3 is much better, Generals plays fine but has a crazy plot that goes to full-on revenge fic in Zero Hour.) Then came Red Alert 3 and the others.... After that I have stopped buying anything from them.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 22, 2019, 03:11:27 am
RA3 was the last I bought, but only because i loved 2 and YR so much that I hoped for a similar game in generals engine.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Autohummer on February 22, 2019, 03:24:20 am
The main problem with RA3 is that I can't take anyone or anything in that game seriously.... Gameplay wise, it's not too bad. RA2 and YR is still the definite Red Alert game for me, logically I went to play Mental Omega, but the campaign mode is stupid hard. It's more like a puzzle game or Chess than an RTS at times.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 22, 2019, 04:28:48 am
RA3 was definitely a disappointment and the pace is wrong but I didnt even look at C&C 3.  Never played the demo.

Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: General Battuta on February 22, 2019, 09:10:54 am
I can't say anything since I have only watched friends get teamwiped in Apex, but the whole thing smells like EA trying to cash in on the fad started by Overwatch and friends.

No it doesn't. EA didn't know they were working on Apex Legends.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Autohummer on February 22, 2019, 09:15:56 am
Re Apex: I see. I don't think I am in a position to suggest any more, given my lack of knowledge in the subject.

Re C&C: Do play C&C 3, it's in my opinion the very last pure-blooded C&C game. There is very little that I can gripe on that game. Storywise, both sides gets fleshed out a lot through ingame codex entries. I heard some Tiberium Sun players complain that it removes the oppressive Tiberium polluted atmosphere, but personally, I find TS's aesthetics a bit too depressing for my liking. Gameplay I think is superior to Tiberium Sun and on par with Red Alert 2/YR.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Aesaar on February 22, 2019, 01:15:44 pm
C&C3 is a great game.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on February 22, 2019, 08:49:03 pm
C&C3 and the Kane's Wrath expansion are the only games that I have completely played thru with all factions. 

I play a Kane's Wrath skirmish nearly daily.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: Colonol Dekker on February 23, 2019, 05:38:59 am
Turns out I'm mistaken- I was thinking of 4/the one with a mobile Base you need to guard....  I've not gone near that one.

3 is the one with nod titans?  I've smashed that one to bits.
Title: Re: The EA-slagging parade
Post by: deathspeed on February 23, 2019, 07:51:38 am
Yep, that's the one.  The Avatar.  I've not tried 4, with the mobile base.  I remember there was an uproar about an always-online requirement for single player, then the real reviews started coming in and they were not good either.