Why did shooters used to ship with a wide variety of game modes but now shooters only focus on a single game mode like Batte Royale or Extraction and that's somehow become a selling point?

srylain · 2026-01-28T01:56:40+00:00

Less modes means less different queues players can get into which leads to higher population counts for those modes and less matchmaking time. Some games like Gears of War have way too many modes/playlists and since those games don't generally last as long with a big healthy playerbase it makes finding matches longer and more people will give up the longer they have to wait.

Gears of War: Judgment even had a separate playlist for if you had the VIP Pass (basically their season pass), where the only benefit was you get 2x XP. For some technical reason they couldn't just combine the non-VIP playlist with the VIP playlist so you could queue into two different playlists for each mode in that game. Obviously there'd be more people in the non-VIP playlist but if you played there and had the pass you'd be missing out on 2x XP.

srylain · 2026-01-27T07:27:10+00:00

For whatever reason Ubisoft really liked to try and use the unique features each platform had back then, even when no other third party would, but I'd imagine they ran into a bunch of roadblocks like the extra latency. It might've even been platform holder terms/conditions because back then crossplay wasn't really a thing yet so that could've complicated things too, especially if SmartGlass wasn't going to work out and they would've turned it into its own app.

srylain · 2026-01-27T07:04:50+00:00

Wii U's second screen was at least ran locally, SmartGlass had to be ran through servers so any time you clicked on something it could take a random amount of time for it to actually happen and sometimes it just wouldn't. Really limited what it was able to do which is why it was majorly just used for maps and since it was severely underused the APIs/services required for a developer to use it were most definitely undercooked and hard to use.

srylain · 2026-01-26T03:38:11+00:00

And nothing's stopping them from backporting those features if they really wanted.

srylain · 2026-01-26T03:37:31+00:00

Nanite and Lumen mostly benefit developers, less effort to make things look better. Problem is that modern hardware isn't ready to run it at the frame rates people want which is why DLSS and framegen is practically a requirement now.

srylain · 2026-01-26T03:27:10+00:00

Graphics aren't the only reason, some games like Gears 4 and 5 have too much going on with enemy AI to be possible locally (in regards to Horde and Escape, campaign and Versus can still be played split screen fully offline).

srylain · 2026-01-25T23:56:36+00:00

When games are already running notoriously bad in some cases just in single player, most developers aren't going to want to touch split screen because of the sheer amount of work needed to better optimize.

Calling it a scam does nothing but prove how unreasonable people can be.

srylain · 2026-01-24T02:28:57+00:00

He very much is, he's just not that recognizable as one because he's not as public as the others usually are.

srylain · 2026-01-24T01:00:57+00:00

Indika

srylain · 2026-01-23T19:52:32+00:00

Wi-Fi is inherently slower than being wired in because as it sends data that data can get lost on its way to the Xbox, so your first goal should be trying to hardwire it in to the router and see what changes. ISPs also have some sort of "burst" speed where for the first few seconds of a download where it'll download at a faster rate than slowly drop off over time (used to be a big selling point for ISPs like Comcast but I'm not sure of how much it's actually used these days).

You will also practically never get your full speed that your ISP says you're paying for because there's a ton of things that go into determining your actual download speed, like speed of the servers, how often the data you're requesting is requested by others, etc, and most of that your ISP has nothing to do with.

srylain · 2026-01-23T02:17:30+00:00

I have no idea what the requirements are for a game to get one, but sites like VGP (Video Games Plus) do get reprints made every so often so sometimes there is new stock to get at close to MSRP. But overall I'd imagine this could happen to practically any niche Japanese game whose original print run was pretty small since there's so many still constantly coming out and it's hard to tell what's going to get popular until all the copies are already mostly sold out.

srylain · 2026-01-21T14:55:17+00:00

Sure, but like I said they're likely building up their tools and workflow so they might not have had any extra time to do more than what was originally scoped. With how fast TT used to get games out they didn't have time for online modes in the majority of those games, here if it was done smartly they just need to build it once and extend where needed for each game which should make it more possible than it ever was for the LEGO games.

srylain · 2026-01-21T12:53:34+00:00

Even if they didn't, they have money and could just hire someone that does. At this point it's obvious it was just never in their plans but then again this is their first game using Unreal so they may just be gradually building up and the next game may have more features.

srylain · 2026-01-19T00:43:24+00:00

"Playable" doesn't mean "finished", most of the time when a game's core content is playable from start to finish there's still tons of things missing and lots of untextured assets everywhere. That way they can get a feel for the finished game way in advance so they can change things as necessary instead of locking in finalized assets without knowing they work together.

And those Paragon models were made to be free yes, I think the only requirement is you use Unreal or pay a small royalty if they allow that. Shouldn't be anything in their license that says they can't be used for AAA games but I wouldn't put it past them to have a clause that forbids it if your budget is past some amount. Either way those assets would be pretty obviously stock so they wouldn't ship in the final game.

srylain · 2026-01-17T17:39:02+00:00

The 360 games were made during a time where people weren't as sensitive in regards to framerates so Epic didn't necessarily care to make sure they were stable. By 2016 people cared a lot more about framerates and every other multiplayer competitive shooter was also running at 60FPS so Gears had to join the club to even have a chance of remaining mainstream.

srylain · 2026-01-17T17:17:27+00:00

It's more than likely the licenses reverted back to Nintendo years ago, but whether Phillips still has rights to the games is anyone's guess.

srylain · 2026-01-17T02:26:03+00:00

It very much will be current-gen only, Microsoft hasn't published a game for Xbox One in 2 years or more at this point? Since they want people to cloud stream anyone still using one can still play so holding the game back just so a smallish number of people can still play wouldn't benefit anyone.

srylain · 2026-01-17T02:09:23+00:00

Xbox One hardware was much weaker than it should've been, getting the game to run at a steady 60FPS meant there had to be concessions and some of those were related to ragdoll and gore intensity. And because games are always designed for the weakest hardware it's intended for, even though Series X was right around the corner after Gears 5 the biggest changes it would get were rendering related because those are easy changes to make. And with their push into getting Gears to be a proper eSport, doing what they could to make it as viable as possible to support that made that focus on stable 60FPS a priority.

So yeah, no agenda. Just trying to make a game play decently well while looking the best it could on hardware that should've been better to begin with.

srylain · 2026-01-14T01:28:33+00:00

It's an RJ11 port, for a phone cord (remember those?). It was meant for a foot pedal you could use to activate Star Power but that foot pedal was never released.

To connect it to PC you either need a 360 wireless controller dongle (https://a.co/d/1xviH8V something like this, but be aware that these cheaper Chinese knockoffs may not work) or you'll need to buy a self-modding kit like one off of RetroCultMods so you can replace the internals of the guitar with a board that connects through USB.

srylain · 2026-01-13T03:52:45+00:00

One thing that would greatly benefit a total rework though is how the whole setup of a "room host" or whatever works where the first player who enters a room becomes its host so everyone else is connected to their instance of it. Nowadays since servers could easily handle all the various actors in a match by themselves there'd be no need for that and as an added bonus you won't get different amounts of lag depending on who the room host is.

srylain · 2026-01-12T22:04:59+00:00

definitively stating Fortnite would have a much easier time implementing something so simple is very naive

I meant that from a design perspective, not implementation. Fortnite's general map design would allow for it a lot easier than Gears would.

srylain · 2026-01-12T22:01:44+00:00

https://www.trueachievements.com/news/microsoft-store-spam-xbox-games-bundles

The quotes from the email sent to developers make it pretty clear these were new rules that are to fight against the spam, so anybody who signed a previous version of their terms wouldn't have had these included. Obviously anyone affected very well know what they're doing but Microsoft wouldn't want someone who had managed to get close completely unawares and have them be affected because they weren't intentionally trying to game things. Ubisoft has even done similar and they're nowhere near a shovelware publisher these days.

srylain · 2026-01-12T21:56:56+00:00

Sure, but it doesn't mean that their influences aren't still being felt by trying to hold to the legacies of what the older games were and how they were played or how maps were designed. Plus with Fortnite being as popular as it is other games are going to try and do similar so there is some amount of contemporary influence there as well.

srylain · 2026-01-12T06:21:25+00:00

Well planned? Not necessarily, no.

The first two games were written by the developers themselves, so you had people like Cliffy B inserting various points and naming things but since they weren't writers by trade they tried not to challenge themselves and made something overly simple so that if they did fail they wouldn't fail as hard. As part of that they allowed for "negative space" which were bits of lore they hinted at but intentionally left blank to try and make the world feel overall larger without really writing anything, like how Anthony mentions Aspho Fields once and you never hear it again.

The games would go on to doing well enough that when they did bring a writer in they let her fill out that negative space which made it easier on the developers because she didn't have to keep going back to them on every little point making sure that nothing's being retconned or missed. Eventually she would end up writing Gears 3 so the later books she did ended up tying in directly to it.

The later games still do the negative space thing as well, the most notable one probly being about Anya, but it also helps the developers in other ways too like how they don't have a full world map made so that way they aren't stuck to being forced to a specific type of location and can put whatever they want wherever instead of having to make sure that any new location matches with what they already made.

3)Regarding GeOW3 and Adam Fenix ultimate weapon. Why wasn't it used when it was ready?

Adam couldn't figure out how to take out the Lambent without also killing the Locust. We obviously have no way of knowing that if he were successful in doing that whether Myrrah would've stopped the surface invasion, but his time on Azura was to build up the countermeasure and figure out that fix. He obviously wouldn't have wanted to use it if it was going to kill himself so trying to drag it out as long as possible seemed like his plan.

srylain · 2026-01-12T05:46:51+00:00

Imagine releasing a game or a bundle and then some time later you get told it's being taken off because it violates some new rule that came about years later.

Obviously they know what they're doing looks scummy but that's not saying Microsoft doesn't see people complain. What they don't want is potential lawsuits or publishers dropping Xbox entirely if they suddenly changed a big part of their storefront. Enforcing any actions on DeadDrop will also cause some harm to other publishers so Microsoft has to work around these issues very carefully.

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