Dragonflight Alpha - Slug Library, Diablo IV Quarterly Update - August 2022

[Cracked]

20 years ago games included far more than 15 hours of content via free content patches, reasonably-priced expansions, etc.

This post is extremely silly.

Perfect survivor bias on display. Few games did that then (but ofc, you remember those) and games still do it today. But obviously you have to make compromises. You can't have cutting edge 2022 graphics with tons of content for cheap, because that's expensive as fuck to make, every single addition requires months worth of artist time, that wasn't the case back then.

But gamers gonna complain, as is tradition.

[ketsui]

love the name slug, sounds fast and fresh!

[MrFawlty]

I agree. We're no longer in the Golden age of gaming. The meta now consists of replicating the monetization system in mobile games on a PC platform. Those of who haven't lived/played entirely through the early PC games cycle of the 2000-16 are heavily conditioned to accept copious amounts of monetization. The industrial simps, metaphorically subscribing to onlyfans just to subscribe again to get that premium snap. Through hive acceptance of multilevel paid systems, this is what the future holds for gaming. They'll *Gawk Gawk* the PC industry's giants into a gotcha system that preys on weak minds for pseudo gambling.

And the post that follows you is the perfect example of how acceptance of this bollocks has been established.

[huth]

Properly antialiased texture rendering will look virtually identical, it's just that it's a pretty hard problem to solve if you hadn't considered it from the getgo, because you need to carefully select font size for the number of pixels it will occupy on the screen.

And how do you do that when the text scales based on distance? You pretty much just explained why it wouldn't work in this situation.

[Struggle]

Perfect survivor bias on display. Few games did that then (but ofc, you remember those) and games still do it today. But obviously you have to make compromises. You can't have cutting edge 2022 graphics with tons of content for cheap, because that's expensive as fuck to make, every single addition requires months worth of artist time, that wasn't the case back then.

But gamers gonna complain, as is tradition.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Gaming has gotten more expensive since those days. Call it what you want, but it is that plain and simple.

[cateran100]

It's like people have forgotten that 20 years ago you'd go to your local game-selling store pay the sticker price for a new game, and get that new game, and that was that. You play the ~15 hours of content and then the game was over and you wait for maybe an entirely separate sequel at the exact same price to release.

15 hours huhh? 2002..Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, HoMM 4, Warcraft 3..just a few examples from 2002 and your "around 15 hours" content

Do a favour and stop trying to justify monetization in a full priced game...

- - - Updated - - -

Perfect survivor bias on display. Few games did that then (but ofc, you remember those) and games still do it today. But obviously you have to make compromises. You can't have cutting edge 2022 graphics with tons of content for cheap, because that's expensive as fuck to make, every single addition requires months worth of artist time, that wasn't the case back then.

But gamers gonna complain, as is tradition.

For you a few more examples from 2002: GTA: Vice City, Splinter Cell, Age of Mythology, Metroid Prime..Frankly Google is your friend...15 hours..lol...

[Cracked]

And how do you do that when the text scales based on distance? You pretty much just explained why it wouldn't work in this situation.

As I said you have to consider this since the inception of your rendering pipeline. The usual halfsize mipmaps will not work. You have to render it multiple times at multiple pixel sizes.

[vincink]

love the name slug, sounds fast and fresh!

From the Slug website: "Why the name 'Slug'? A slug is what they used to call a full line of text cast as one piece of hot lead by a Linotype machine. The primary function of our software is to lay out and render lines of text."

[Lumy]

Set screenshot format to tga, that disables compression altogether.

/console screenshotFormat tga

Even with quality 10, jpg algorithm will introduce artifacts.

That's slightly unnecessary, images having 10 times the normal size is not a good idea in general for websites and it makes no difference in regards to the font rendering.

Artifacts are indeed removed, although I can't really notice them in quality 10 jpg unless I zoom in quite a bit.

[Cracked]

That's slightly unnecessary, images having 10 times the normal size is not a good idea in general for websites and it makes no difference in regards to the font rendering.

Artifacts are indeed removed, although I can't really notice them in quality 10 jpg unless I zoom in quite a bit.

tga lacks file level compression, so if you resave those images as PNG (in anything more sophisticated than mspaint), you will keep both zero artifacts and small file size.

[Durgga]

Remember in WoW when they required you to pay extra money for mythic tier transmog, but only after you cleared the raid?

No, you cannot remember that because it would be stupid.

Even thinking about supporting the idea of "battle pass" gameplay for a paid game is disgusting. The battle pass model was created with free to play games so the company could swindle money from the whales and idiots.

It is shocking to me that people just shrug their arms and decide this is just the direction we are going in, and there is no other choice but to follow.

[Adcap6]

This is more or less the same exact situation with Destiny 2 and the seasonal pass. However, we are not allowed to purchase the premium content on the pass until like 4 to 6 weeks (not entirely sure what the time frame is) into the season. We pay 10 bucks for each season which includes whatever content is added of course and both the free and premium side of the seasonal pass.

To be clear here by purchasing I mean a seasonal pass owner can finish off the entire seasonal pass once they are allowed to do so, for a set price. Each tier has a price on it btw...we get 100 tiers per season. Do we have issues with this? Of course we do and the exact same arguments are to be had on a daily basis. Since we paid for the DLC and at this moment it is Witch Queen (first season is free in the included price of the DLC). Not entirely sure how it will work here but it all depends upon what is on this seasonal pass, which will make or break the deal. Destiny 2 puts materials, transmogs, armor and weapons in the pass.

I could go on and on but in the end the question is after all this time did we accept the format, yeah we did..is it bad? not really, we accept it otherwise, you don't play.

[8bithamster]

tga lacks file level compression, so if you resave those images as PNG (in anything more sophisticated than mspaint), you will keep both zero artifacts and small file size.

And it would change nothing for the discussion. Shall we move on from "omg screenshot are bad because there are some tiny artifacts and therefor completely unreadable"?

[Hitei]

15 hours huhh? 2002..Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, HoMM 4, Warcraft 3..just a few examples from 2002 and your "around 15 hours" content

For you a few more examples from 2002: GTA: Vice City, Splinter Cell, Age of Mythology, Metroid Prime..Frankly Google is your friend...15 hours..lol...

Wowee, you managed to find... eight games from 2002 with a long play time, and couldn't even actually do that, since the average clock-in for Splinter Cell main story is 13 hours, AoM is 16, and Metroid Prime is 14.

Let's go ahead and look at the top 20 list for software sales. (Main Story - Main+some side stuff)

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2) Take Two 18-26
Grand Theft Auto III (PS2) Take Two 15-21
Madden NFL 2003 (PS2) Electronic Arts N/A
Super Mario Advance 2 (GBA) Nintendo of America 5-7.5
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (PS2) SCEA 37-64.5
Medal Honor Frontline (PS2) Electronic Arts 9-9.5
Spider-Man: The Movie (PS2) Activision 6-9
Kingdom Hearts (PS2) Square EA 28.5-41
Halo (Xbox) Microsoft 10-11
Super Mario Sunshine (GC) Nintendo of America 15-20.5
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (PS2) Activision 11.5-16.5
Yu-Gi-Oh! Eternal (GBA) Konami 15-26
Dragonball Z: Goku (GBA) Infogrames 7.5-11.5
The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (PS2) Electronic Arts 6-8
Yu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel (GBC) Konami 8-9
Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden (PS) Konami 12.5-23
NCAA Football 2003 (PS2) Electronic Arts N/A
Sonic Advance (GBA) THQ 2-5
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (Xbox) Ubi Soft 13-15
SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals (PS2) SCEA 11.5

Look at that, how crazy. Of the top 20 selling games of 2002, 15 are on average beaten in 15 hours or less, with half of those being less than 10 hours. Two of the remaining five are games that do not have completion times because they are just match based sports games. One is a racing game with famously multi-hour long endurance races in its simulation mode.

[crusadernero]

I really dont care for battlepasses, but I can live with them in most cases. It gets annoying in games like Warzone, were certain weapons obviously are FUCKING GREAT so one should get the battle pass to obtain it. So you end up buying several battlepasses every year. Nah, I aint doing that.

I like the way its done in Halo. You buy battlepass, obtain cosmetic shite. I can also complete the battlepass i've bought at my own leisure, meaning I can be dabbling about still in S1 battlepass right now, even though the game has moved on.

I suspect Blizzard will go the FOMO route, cause why not? Force and tempt people into buying the pass is a healthy approach.


Anyway; this all boils down to the most important thing, wether the game is good or not. For most people this game will be over after campaign. Done and dusted.

[Shakzor]

I really dont care for battlepasses, but I can live with them in most cases. It gets annoying in games like Warzone, were certain weapons obviously are FUCKING GREAT so one should get the battle pass to obtain it. So you end up buying several battlepasses every year. Nah, I aint doing that.

I like the way its done in Halo. You buy battlepass, obtain cosmetic shite. I can also complete the battlepass i've bought at my own leisure, meaning I can be dabbling about still in S1 battlepass right now, even though the game has moved on.

I suspect Blizzard will go the FOMO route, cause why not? Force and tempt people into buying the pass is a healthy approach.


Anyway; this all boils down to the most important thing, wether the game is good or not. For most people this game will be over after campaign. Done and dusted.

If i understand the first part correctly, it locks gameplay power behind battle pass?

For Blizzard though, they likely will go the FOMO route, but if it's purely cosmetic only, i think most people can live with that and as you said, if the game is shit, people won't play it anyways, so we gotta wait and see first and foremost.

[crusadernero]

If i understand the first part correctly, it locks gameplay power behind battle pass?

For Blizzard though, they likely will go the FOMO route, but if it's purely cosmetic only, i think most people can live with that and as you said, if the game is shit, people won't play it anyways, so we gotta wait and see first and foremost.

Certain weapons in WZ is hidden behind the battlepass. Some of them have always been well worth getting. That sucks. Cosmetics I dont really care a whole lot about, but theres a fine line there too.. in FPS, cosmetic changes/features in weps do change how they work. Probably not so much in Diablo.

[shadycharacter1]

I can barely see any difference, am I retarded?

[RoKPaNda]

How generous of them considering the game costs 60 dollars.

Honestly the $60 box cost + cosmetics doesn't bother me. I'm far more bothered by things like Path of Exile charging $30 for a single chest piece transmog / the Kirac pass that gives a skin for items that less than half a % of the playerbase will ever even see in their wildest dreams / etc because people justify it with "But the game itself is free (unless you want to trade, or have adequate stash space.)"

[Redroniksre]

Honestly the $60 box cost + cosmetics doesn't bother me. I'm far more bothered by things like Path of Exile charging $30 for a single chest piece transmog / the Kirac pass that gives a skin for items that less than half a % of the playerbase will ever even see in their wildest dreams / etc because people justify it with "But the game itself is free (unless you want to trade, or have adequate stash space.)"

Or the fact that PoE has no good looking items in it by default. Any decent looking gear is locked behind the shop, or occasional events. For me the bar will always be Warframe. That game has a fantastic F2P monetization model that players can literally play around without wasting obscene amounts of time.