NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

[Black]

Nothing says "retro" as the fucking bobblehead merchandise that was introduced with fo3.

 

[FeelTheRads]

"Key Vault Dwellers reveal the story behind the series that set the world on fire."

Cynical me thinks that the line is missing "as determined by Bethesda Softworks", but considering that MCA has appeared previously in Retro Gamer, the old guard may get a look in for this one.

Well, considering they stuck that shitty Bethesda bobble-head in the picture, I wouldn't be too hopeful.

Also, Fallout is not older than Diablo.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Darth Roxor]

fucking virtua cop

I've had the "SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOO" shouts from the civilian moving right in front of your sights imprinted in me head for 20 years now, and I hear them each time I see anything close to that in any game/movie.

 

[LESS T_T]

Ars Techinca's War Stories video about the origin of Serious Sam and how the crate-less demo saved the game: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018...most-didnt-happen-until-crates-saved-the-day/



Transcript: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-cont...d45d-dc9b-46b1-b781-12ac4d8d7845mezzanine.txt

 

[Don Peste]

"Key Vault Dwellers reveal the story behind the series that set the world on fire."

Cynical me thinks that the line is missing "as determined by Bethesda Softworks", but considering that MCA has appeared previously in Retro Gamer, the old guard may get a look in for this one.

Well, considering they stuck that shitty Bethesda bobble-head in the picture, I wouldn't be too hopeful.

Also, Fallout is not older than Diablo.

It covers the whole franchise, but I don't think there's any new info. Newcomers would like it. It has cool screenshots. But I guess most of the magazine is about that, cool, nostalgic screenshots.

It starts with Fargo's recollection of Fallout 1, and uhm... I think it's quite different from what Tim Cain has always told...

“I had been a post-apocalyptic fan since I was a kid,” Brian Fargo tells us, “And Wasteland was my first attempt at bringing something to the genre. Shortly after finishing the Wasteland game, Interplay became a publisher and we no longer created games for other people. I tried to get EA to license me the rights back, but I was unable to succeed despite trying for many years. I finally decided we’d do our own post-apocalyptic game and call it Fallout”.

Sitting down with the development team, Brian Fargo and his crew at Interplay analysed what made Wasteland tick – what it was about the then- decade-old PC RPG that had kept people playing it so much over the years. “It was a matter of getting a small team to start bringing the project to life. To breathe humanity and charm into the game,” Brian remembers. “We created a sensibilities document that spoke to points such as moral ambiguity, tactical combat, a skills based system and the attributes system. After we nailed down what was important, development went off and began working on ideas that hit the touch points.”

Actually, Tim Cain goes after that, and he briefly tells what really happened.

Boyarsky about Fallout 2:
..."it had become a project pushed by corporate desire rather than personal motivation, with an exceedingly short development timeframe for such a huge project, and a leadership vacuum in the wake of Tim and co's leaving".

"We had no idea any of t his was going on," says Chris Avellone. "Next thing we knew, Feargus was calling an emergency meeting in Black Isle and rapidly passing out area designs for Fallout 2, splitting the game areas up amongst the available - and even unavailable – designers. We all got drafted and got to work. I was working on Planescape: Torment at the time, so my double-duty on two RPGs began".

“It did feel like the heart of the team had gone,” he continues. “And all that was left were a bunch of developers working on different aspects of the game like a big patchwork beast – but there wasn’t a good ‘spine’ or ‘heart’ to the game, we were just making content as fast as we could.”

“I think the loss of Leonard and Jason accounted for a lot of the loss of the dark tone,” Tim Cain explains. “And my personal rule of ‘no jokes or cultural references that made no sense to the player who didn’t understand them’ was thrown aside after I left development.”

 

[taxalot]

 

[Life of the Party]

Why are video games still so cheap in spite of inflation and the escalating costs of development, marketing, publishing, etc?

I recently stumbled across this old ArsTechnica article that includes a rather shocking image of an Genesis EB ad from 1993 with prices adjusted for 2010 (even before inflation, one of the games is $65!):

https://imgur.com/a/jEepOFE

In 1993, 25 years ago, games costed around $50 - $65. Adjusting just for inflation, and not rising production and marketing costs, those games would cost $75 - $100 in 2010. Now, I realize that retailers took more liberty in raising prices back then to make a profit than they do now, but there is still a dramatic difference between then and now.

Even with older retail practices considered, why the hell are we still only paying $60 for games in 2018?!

People wonder why publishers nickle-and-dime us in paid games, or why most AAA games have three editions around $60, $80, and $100 (which is about what games should cost based on inflation)? Well, creating games costs exponentially more now than it did 25 years ago... but the base price of games hasn't increased in almost just as long. Why is this? Movie ticket price have tripled in that time. Fast food and grocery prices have doubled.

I wonder if we would have such an issue with microtransactions and special editions if the price of games continued to rise instead of freezing in place around 15 years ago. It seems to me like studios and publishers have all these other ways to squeeze money out of consumers because they are selling their games at a loss and need to make up that loss somehow. What if we actually paid what games were worth, and that was it? What if games were sold for a profit at the start?

Just something that's been on my mind lately. I am really curious if anyone here has some inside games industry perspective on this. I've had some limited involvement in the industry, but never at the level required to understand the full extent of how low video game prices impact studios and publishers.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Nice industry shill.

Complete with "I'm not involved in the industry, totally just something that's been on my mind."

 

[Average Manatee]

Games also have next to no distribution or unit cost nowadays thanks to online. Keep in mind inflation is never a set, real thing, but a composite of prices across the entire economy. There has to be things below the inflation rate and things above the inflation rate

 

[Unkillable Cat]

That post has "Greetings fellow gamer persons" written all over it.

 

[Life of the Party]

I posted basically the same thing three months ago.

Where's the gaming industry headed?

For a few days now, a certain thought has been bugging me, and I'm worried about what future holds for the gaming industry. This is all armchair analisys, so I'm looking forward to my mistakes being pointed out - especially since I'm not painting a very bright picture.

As you might realise, games are extremely cheap for luxury entertainment. Compared to games, cinema is short for its high price, books are long for their low price, etc; no other thing costs you as little for the time you spend on it. Even the AAA $60 games are cheap, yet people will still complain about it - mostly because it's a cultural perception by now that $60 is a lot (even though that's actually cheaper than it was 30 years ago, due to inflation). Some of the super-cheap indies skew the perceived "appropriate" prices even lower, as well.

However, budgets for the bigger games are getting higher. Marketing costs increase because of said market being oversaturated. To stand out some of the AAAs might need to have almost half of their budget put into marketing, as is the case with W3 and GTAV, for example. Development itself is getting pricier, too, though mostly for AAAs - VA for everything, 4K textures, super-detailed models and all that jazz has become the norm, and the ceiling is always being raised higher. The unionisation of game developers, while something I really hope works out because it's been long needed in the somewhat borked culture, will also result in higher costs to making games.

Indies don't seem to be hit by that as hard (hell, with ever better tools some of their development costs are getting cheaper), but their problem is of another sort. There're just too bloody many of them. Lots of them are great, sure, but the pool of people playing games grows slowly, and each given person has only a limited amount of time and money he can spend on games. I'd love to buy and play every excellent indie out there, but that just wouldn't work out - and it won't work out for most people, so they'd have to choose. The more are out there, the less chance that yours is going to be chosen and bought. At least Steam is helping out with promoting a culture of "buy, never play".

Right now we can already see there are three main ways to be successful, whatever success means (probably staying afloat and not having all employes stressed out or poor).

• Make a game with a giant budget, a big part of which is marketing, hope that it works out. If it doesn't due to being crap, being overshadowed by another similar game that's just better that came out at the same time, or some other reason, then weep quietly in the corner. See Witcher 3 for a success story, Deadpool for a failure story.
• Be a studio of three bearded dudes in a basement who somehow luck out on making the next big hit that grows based heavily on word of mouth, less on marketing expenses. See Hollow Knight for a success story.
• Make a niche game that appeals to a stable userbase and uses a stable budget, and safely predict the costs and the revenue. Obsidian seems to rely on this; I've worked as part of the development team of Syrian Warfare, a game that heavily adopted that principle.

The first two are getting harder due to reasons I mentioned above. The third is getting harder because innovating without getting out of the niche is harder for each previous innovation, and getting out of the niche is risky.

So costs are increasing, prices are staying the same or decreasing, and where does that leave us? Some change focus to microtransactions, because those don't have a limit of spending per player and that helps make the game stay profitable, but even that's not a panacea - there's partially deserved backlash for that sort of thing and at some point it'll start noticeably affecting revenue. The rest... well, from my point of view, it'll either end up in a lot of studios closing, a increase in price per game, or some concerted solution among the big players that's better than those options but that will require them working together and probably a genius idea or two.

Oh, and gaming journalism doesn't really help, because the fixed scale (1 to 10, 1 to 5, etc whatever) employed by a lot of it doesn't mesh well with the human nature of "if it's as good as the previous one, it's not good enough", leading to 8+ being the only good score by now.

It seems every now and then (once a week?) there's someone on r/games complaining about games being very, very, very extremely cheap. And they're not talking about Underrail and Age of Decadence.

More importantly, it seems to work since now you have for example (post-millennial?) Paradox fans who think it's unrealistic to expect the most basic features as parts of the game rather than a DLC. So when you buy Imperator: Rome you get the map and the actual game is in DLCs. And that's how it's supposed to be.

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Stupid millennial consumer drones gonna stupid

 

[taxalot]

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Hes just salty, he hasnt seen his own in about a decade

 

[Neanderthal]

Hes just salty, he hasnt seen his own in about a decade

Not true, he just has to look upwards.

Boom ching.

 

[Lahey]

https://picosong.com/wLBS2/

lyrics

This is a song called The History of the Courier
And it's not just a list of settlements I've defended in the past
It's a chronicling of my rise, to power!

I fight with guys in football gear
Across the desert plain
I've walked with Boone and his .308
Carla did not die in vain, no!

I've opened vaults, I've killed deathclaws
Even huffed a lot of jet
I've traveled, Big MT and C are my friends
To get back my chip again, rock!

I shoot and I shoot, and the bodies I loot
And I'll shoot with a lesbian mute
And if you say that I cannot shoot
I'll burn your ass to suit, shoot!

Caesar's Legion be psycho, House's ego be great
But the NCR are fools
I team up with a robot and Vegas is ours
The Courier, I rule!

I rule
the wastes, oh God!
A nuclear waste
I'm recyling waste
And I'm home on the wastes
The wastes, yeah
Got shot twice in the face!
The wastes, yeah
Got shot twice in the face!
The wastes
Got shot twice in the face!
A nuclear waste
I'm recyling waste
And I'm home on the wastes
The wastes!

https://picosong.com/w2J8c/

lyrics

Hello?
Are there any new games this year
Bethesda is releasing
Country road, take me home

Listen, wow
I hear it's online now
I can't take the pain
Make a proper game again

Relax, let's hear more information first
Just the basic facts
Can you tell us how it works?

There is no game here worth completing
A distant nuke blows on the horizon
Bet it's only worth playing with friends
The game's smooth, but I don't know what they're playing

When I was a child, Black Isle made Fallout
The game was rough, but I was consumed
Now Fallout's releasing once again
I can't explain, new fans won't understand
This is not what I played

Fallout has become uncomfortably dumb
(Toddposting)
Fallout has become uncomfortably dumb

Okay, they're adding in a story (Todd)
There'll be no more (REEEEEEEEEE)
But it may feel a bit empty

Can we mod it (mod it, mod it)
You can on private servers, good
That'll keep it going for a bit
But only through Bethesdanet

There is no game here worth completing
A distant nuke blows on the horizon
Bet it's only worth playing with friends
The game's smooth, but I don't know what they're playing

When I was a child, I played an RPG
I was a 2D Mad Max guy
I waited for 3, but it was sold
They cannot bring me to preorder now
The soul is gone, it's an MMO

Fallout has become uncomfortably dumb
(Toddposting)

 

[markec]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

ICYMI: This abbreviation means "in case you missed it".

 

[Cyberarmy]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Lord Romulus]

How can he aim a bow with that type of helmet on?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Ninja Destroyer]