Indeed. Today's problem is that graphical fidelity takes so much of the development time and resources that the rest of the aspects of the game are completely left aside.
Yeah, I can count how many freckles this character has in their face, but that's all these games offer now, and I don't need to count freckles, I can do that in real life. I want to have a good time with the game.
I'm not really sure it's completely like that. In the early 2000's we had "beautiful" games (aka the most advanced graphics that technology could afford) but games were fun.
Devs invested in graphics, but they also invested in innovative formulas, in gameplay... You could tell a game was unique and beautiful.
Today, AAA games are just a checklist of things that must be included (almost none pointed at making the player have fun) with an incredible level of detail that makes every single leave of every tree move independently from the rest.
Indie games don't have shareholders demanding extra-short term profits to please, they can afford to innovate. An AAA game needs to pay the shareholders as fast as possible, and how to do it? Well, the way they do it now; take your cod, or fifa, or whatever AAA ip you want and you'll see how the patterns repeat in all of them.
AAA games are the fast food of videogaming.
They focused so much on hyper realistic graphics that they forgot about the most important part of a game: being fun.
I've sunk way more hours in an "ugly" game such as space haven or balatro this year than in any ultra beautiful (and void of fun) AAA game.
Ideally, it has to be a big publisher that spends a ton of money on it.
In truth, an AAA game can be spotted by a price tag of over 60 €/USD, at least one season pass, 3+ different editions, a huge day-1 patch and a lack of anything that's not predatory monetization of any remaining gameplay elements.
I've been diagnosed at the tender age of 36, because my lovely parents didn't give a fuck about all the signals and the teachers "hints".
Up until then, it's been hell, and I'm not exagerating when I say that I don't know how I made it this far in life. When you are one of the "lucky" ones that only suffer from what is now called "functional" autism (aka there is no cognitive disability), you struggle with most social aspects, you torture yourself thinking you are weird, you hate yourself because it's obvious (only for yourself) that there is something wrong with you that you can't understand.
A diagnosis is not a death sentence but an answer to what is happening in your brain to make it work differently. Now, I am starting to get help, I am asking for acomodations that make my life easier and I understand what is happening in my head. And most important, I'm not ashamed anymore when my "weirdness" leaks out because I understand it.
Whenever I find an obnoxious captcha, I just leave the page after two failed attempt (not really failed, but you know how it is, the system decides that you have to repeat the captcha again).
The problem is with certain services (like GoG) that I've had for years but that lately don't want VPNs because reasons and will keep forcing the captchas indefinitely even when I'm login or redeeming a game. Those are the worst, and honestly? They are only harming themselves with them. I don't buy from them anymore because last time I wanted to login to buy something, I had to go through a least 20 captchas just to login (and, of course, the audio captcha wouldn't work because that would make me "skip" the whole ordeal). After that I decided to go to gog only if there is a game that they are giving away and I really want.
I don't mind when there is one captcha. ONE. But when you use privacy tools such as a vpn, you rarely have to solve one captcha. You need to solve several, at times, losing more than 5 minutes because they refuse to let you in when they see you are on a vpn.
Ads can be blocked, captchas are required to access certain contents, and some are absurdly annoying if they detect you are using a vpn or tor.
Click on all the squares where you see a motorbike.
Failed! There was a fraction of motorbike behind the car in the background that you couldn't possibly see. Try again.
Rinse and repeat, 15 more times.
A supermarket I go to sometimes around a year ago decided to "reorganize" everything. The first day I went there after the reorganization I almost suffered a meltdown. You know where they put the biscuits and cookies?
You guessed it! In the same aisle than stationery and printer ink. I am not kidding, the psychopath who did this, for some reason decided that printer ink was somehow related to breakfast biscuits.
I'd bet money it's the soccer industry.
They are raising prices obscenely and more people are moving to alternative sources to watch it. Those sources are generally IPTVs and the industry is bleeding subs a an allarming rate because (according to them) piracy. Of course, the fact that in countries like Italy, a soccer sub goes over 60€ a month and can be closer to 100€, is not to blame for the users turning to iptvs...
Only soccer is around 60€ a month (more if you want to watch all the games and not just a selection), so do the math
I'm not native italian so take this with a grain of salt. All the acronyms I've heard in italian are pronounced as you would pronounce that word if it was Italian. Weirdly enough, they include a lot of English words (not acronyms) in their daily vocabulary and they pronounce those in English.
TIL. In Italian it's used as a word (not an acronym) to refer to those devices.
You have to be a special kind of stupid to pay for this kind of service with your personal card. But if you get caught a second time then I can't have any sympathy for you.
This situation reminds me of that drug dealer (always in italy) that accepted payments for his merch using his own POS (idk the word in English, it's one of those terminals to accept payments with cards).
They used their personal prepaid card (one registered to their own name and issued by the public postal service) to pay for the iptv sub.
Happy as I am because this shows that there is no crime in watching those streams, I can't but stand in awe at the sheer stupidity of these guys.
I had a hard time figuring if this was satire or not for a good part of the article. The part where the monster refused to go back to their containers was what told me it was actually satire.
Yay! Can't wait for a second one!! Since the last pandemic i always kept reserves on n95 masks and I have a bidet so I'm covered for the most important parts. Let's see how lethal is this one, I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of fun to live in any fascist country when this happens, after all, what could possibly go wrong ina country that denies science during a pandemic? Specially considering the amount of these we are seeing nowadays.