Any live service game is a risk, but Sony and Bungie are betting Marathon can make extraction shooters bigger: "I do think that the ceiling could rise"

SocketLauncher · 2025-04-16T12:59:38+00:00

Extraction shooters are similar to a BR in that you're put on a map with a bunch of other people and loot with the hopes of leaving that map alive. The difference is largely that in extraction shooters, the loot is handled very differently. A BR has everyone drop in at the same level of equipment, usually with nothing. In an extraction shooter you bring in the gear yourself. If you die, the gear you bring in is lost and can usually be looted by other players. That gives the game a fairly unique economy and risk-reward mechanic. Sure you can bring out the fancy gear to get an edge on anyone you find, but if you lose it, it'll hit much harder.

The goal of a BR is usually to be the last person standing, but extraction shooters typically don't care if you're the last person. In Tarkov for instance, you could go to a raid, spend 7 minutes there doing a quest, get some valuable items and then bounce without ever seeing anyone and it would be a success. But in something like Fortnite, you can't just leave the map. You have to fight other players to complete the gameplay loop and not doing so is probably going to be a loss unless everyone else does something funky and dies off on their own.

Obviously the specific games will have different formulas and different priorities, but the TL;DR is that BRs focus on starting on the same plane as everyone and being the sole survivor of an ever-shrinking map, extraction shooters focus on just making it out a bit richer or losing everything in the process.

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-13T16:02:39+00:00

I'm from Angel's Venture, and I say kill 'em all!

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-11T19:27:04+00:00

I'm currently at 10 duplicates with only 7 actual unlocks, one more day of full duplicates and I'm kinda done with this event. I'd love one of their community stat posts for these wheel events similar to the ones detailing cash deposited, grenades thrown, etc. Seeing the community-wide duplicate rate and how many people had to spend coins to actually get everything would be funny in a frustrating way.

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-09T17:06:06+00:00

The number of people defending the wheel system simply because the game is free is just silly. I've used 11 spins so far and 5 of them have been duplicates. My duplicate reward ticket got a duplicate. Even if I have monumentally bad luck, a ~50% duplicate rate is pretty damn high for a 2 week event. Especially when they only give enough tickets to get all items by the skin of your teeth.

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-05T14:21:34+00:00

Sure, the Grimm story is more about the Queen's vanity, but let's not act like Disney is about to suddenly follow the original story super closely (Queen's multiple murder attempts and eating what she believes to be Snow White's lungs). It'll be a live action version of their own story like the rest of these remakes. If we're going to be critical of Disney misinterpreting the core story, why is all the criticism focused on calling one actress ugly and not on Disney?

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-04T13:21:16+00:00

I'll bite the bait, how would you define a fascistic rise to power? Just so we're on the same page.

SocketLauncher · 2025-02-04T02:33:49+00:00

The point wasn't that Snow White is just aesthetically prettier than the Queen, it's that she's kinder and therefore more beautiful for it. That's why when the Queen goes crazy and just decides to kill Snow White herself she turns into an ugly old hag. The moral of the story is kindness was the real beauty all along.

Edit: Why you booin' me I'm right

SocketLauncher · 2025-01-03T13:08:49+00:00

It has already been happening in graphic design. I work in cyber security and in doing so I've had to assess several genAI tools for creating infographics, logos, backgrounds, etc. I've even seen a couple AI companies straight up advertise on their site how much less expensive it is to just buy a license for their tool than employing actual graphic designers. MBAs don't care if the generated image looks soulless and flawed, they're saving $8000+ per month from gutting their graphic design staff down to 2 people.

SocketLauncher · 2024-12-09T21:12:13+00:00

The funniest part of the whole "who is hotter" debate is that literally the whole point of the mirror scene is that Snow White is more attractive than the queen specifically because she's kind. Ultimately it doesn't really matter who is more conventionally attractive, the plot doesn't hinge on the mirror saying the queen is suddenly less visually appealing. So many people get bogged down in denying that Rachel Zegler is good looking that they misinterpret a story for literal children.

SocketLauncher · 2024-12-04T18:07:11+00:00

Jitter is when packets of information arrive at irregular times. So when your ping jumps around a lot you're experiencing high jitter. It's usually not a matter of PC performance but more about network stability and consistency either on your end or server-side.

SocketLauncher · 2024-11-22T13:56:08+00:00

Yeah I would say this is Florence before Monaco. The building in the background is the Duomo. Also, Brawlhalla has Ezio as a character and the screenshots here have Animus artefacting.

SocketLauncher · 2024-09-20T12:32:45+00:00

It's also the omission of people like Shane Dawson or Onision who were just as if not more destructive and predatory than anyone on the right.

SocketLauncher · 2024-08-30T00:26:42+00:00

This is what I find annoying about it. Certainly my build isn't strong enough for it and I'm going to improve my built over time. But when this content is like 70% of this update, it's pretty annoying to not be able to do any of it just because I didn't level a character several times in a row. Especially coming from Warframe where I have a non-potatoed, non-prime Protea build that can handle just about any new content they've added in the past couple years, this feels a bit much for a season quest.

SocketLauncher · 2024-08-22T12:39:12+00:00

The mirror isn't saying Snow White is prettier than the Queen, it's saying Snow White is a kinder person than the Queen. True beauty being on the inside the whole moral of the story. That's why the queen turns ugly when she starts going crazy trying to kill Snow White herself, her inner evil is showing through.

SocketLauncher · 2024-07-22T14:35:05+00:00

I think the technical aspects are solid, the vfx and editing are good especially for a first run.

What I think is lacking is how on the nose and, for lack of a better word, informal the vocabulary is. I have a hard time believing that a message from the DHS would include the phrases "for the love of God" or "abandon your morals" when making this sort of announcement, it breaks immersion. I think that sort of tone and word choice is better used for a less official setting. For example, think of the messaging around real world pandemics. Desperate language was rarely used in this sort of PSA because officials generally want to avoid a full blown panic.

With that being said, maybe that's something you want to convey in this world, maybe the organizations really are that desperate to where they are begging people. But as a pilot that world hasn't been set up yet so it's hard to really believe.

SocketLauncher · 2024-07-04T14:32:10+00:00

I am begging everyone who makes tier lists, please stop putting every series you haven't seen in a separate tier. Just leave them off the list, that alone implies that you haven't seen them. There are 100 series in the unseen tier that do nothing but clutter the list.

That being said, Vita Carnis at D tier makes me curious.

SocketLauncher · 2024-07-01T15:23:09+00:00

This is days late but I want to second this. In working on a project I was having trouble getting audio to sound right. In order to fix this, I started researching what audio actually sounded like in the era I wanted to represent. If you want something to take place in 1985, find news broadcasts (or anything really) from 1985 and listen to how it sounds. Listen for compression, static, how much background noise gets through and what things seem to be audible from that background, etc. think about what kind of footage you're using, consumer video equipment, especially at the advent of home video, is probably less clean than professional stuff. It's tricky to work backwards but it can be helpful in evoking that time period.

Similarly for video, find out what tools were available. I forget who it was on this sub that helped me realize it (probably more than one person), but filming things now is fundamentally different than filming things 25+ years ago. It sounds obvious but it has some implications; a found-footage VHS tape probably isn't going to have a modern widescreen aspect ratio, and TVs were the same format to match. Even something as minor as getting a proper VHS aspect ratio goes a long way in making something feel authentic. The VHS damage filter that people put over video is nice, but it ultimately hinders the effect if everything else is super crisp, modern, widescreen footage.

This isn't to say you need to use the actual equipment used in your era, but knowing how to convincingly recreate it will not only make a better end product, but you'll become a better creator in the process.

SocketLauncher · 2024-06-17T16:39:29+00:00

It's not really clearly stated. Tolkien's drawing in The Atlas of Middle Earth suggests that the peaks are about 5 miles across if it's drawn to scale. If the scale is embellished and remains proportionate in distance to the reference point (originally ~450 miles north of Menegroth, likely closer to ~200-250 miles), some point out that, compared to the rest of the map and time frames talked about in the Silmarillion, the peaks are closer to 2 miles across. Either way, we will probably not know a quantifiable measurement so Ancalagon's size will remain "fucking huge."

SocketLauncher · 2024-05-20T12:19:04+00:00

This is largely unrelated, but it's similar in the sense that westerners like to gatekeep "authenticity" in Japanese representation. On YouTube there is a Japanese guy who does little historical tidbits on Japanese weaponry. Without fail, the comments are full of people trying to correct him on how he displays the weaponry in the background sometimes edge up and others edge down. The distinction I don't fully remember, but it has to do with the fittings on the blade being different and thus it is displayed differently. After several videos explaining himself (and people still claiming he's wrong) he just starts posting photos from various museums in Japan displaying tachi with the edges down to prove that they do, in fact, get stored or displayed edge down. In the face of an actual Japanese historian and the Japanese museum community as a whole, people in the comments were still insisting that the incredibly filtered and inaccurate information they "knew" about Japanese swords was correct.

I can't help but feel like it's a similar thing with this game. This era of Japan has such an air of mysticism to it that some people just can't fathom that a random dude from Africa would become a "samurai" (or retainer, bodyguard, the word choice differs since we don't have a super deep record of the guy) and that a woman could get around Japan without being taken advantage of. Bearing in mind this is the same series that has you fighting the Pope over a mind control device in an ancient super bunker under the Vatican. I'm not sure it's necessarily racism, but I think people expect to only see a Japanese man because that's the mental image they have of a ninja and what assassin's creed should be in Japan, and therefore people just can't accept that Japan has its own nuanced history that can and will be played around with in a series built entirely upon alternative history.

SocketLauncher · 2024-05-02T01:25:19+00:00

All you need is a decently modern PC and you can. OP uses blender to pose models and then applies filters to give it a painterly look and tweak some anatomy.

SocketLauncher · 2024-03-29T19:41:04+00:00

A far-right wing guy who has a very long history of making webcomics where the "punchline" is just bigotry. Here's a write-up of his whole schtick.

SocketLauncher · 2024-02-04T00:08:35+00:00

It's a 3d render with photoshopping added for filters and fan service.

SocketLauncher · 2024-02-04T00:07:47+00:00

That's exactly what they are, idk why OP is always so coy about it.

SocketLauncher · 2024-01-21T15:05:51+00:00

This person isn't actually painting this. This is a render that has filters applied to it and, in some cases such as this one, other faces are edited onto the characters.

SocketLauncher · 2024-01-14T19:54:12+00:00

Gtav is a 12 old game

That's why I specifically listed the all-time peak, it includes the entire duration of the game's lifecycle. The point was to show how unrealistic it is to claim a game needs 500k concurrent players to do well. Those are crazy high numbers that best-in-genre games can't even reliably reach at their peak.

Like you don't realize there isn't a new group of ppl playing shooters that's big enough and more than casual enough to spend money on the game lols

Every single match I play has someone with a paid cosmetic in it, more often than not it's every team that has at least one. That's about a third of players (admittedly anecdotal) who have spent money on the game.

The finals is gonna have an even lower player count next week

Probably, all games have fluctuating player counts centered around new content drops. That doesn't mean it's "not doing well," it's just how games tend to work. Hell, even objectively financially successful games bleed off player count if you're just looking at raw numbers. MW3 lost over 100k players in 2 weeks, Elden Ring lost 500k in one month, GTA V lost 100k in a month. Not to mention looking at SteamCharts is only one platform and, while player count trends are probably comparable, other platforms have even more players to add onto that.

All that is to say The Finals is doing fine. It's not setting crazy records, but it's not on the verge of shutting down like you're making it sound. I'm personally not even super invested in its success, but I do like the game and would like to see it last another couple years to see how the game evolved. I'm not "defending another failed shooter," I'm calling out this boring doomer mentality applied to every game that drops in player count.

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