I was a huge fan of Breath of the Wild when it came out and played the hell out of it. At a certain point, it felt like I hit the logical end point and there wasn't much else to do. When I started playing Tears of the Kingdom, I got exactly what I wanted which was more Breath of the Wild. I'm still playing ToTK and really enjoying it.

Tears of the Kingdom is more of a lot of things. The expansive world of BoTW was expanded even further upward to the sky and downward to the depths, the combat is better, the annoying mechanics are remedied, there is far more to experience, there are many more missions and things to collect, and there is far more customization and sophisticated use of the systems invented by Breath of the Wild. As I've been playing it (many more hours now than I played BoTW), I've been thinking about why I don't love it like I loved BoTW despite it me having more fun with it.

It's not uncommon to be disappointed by ToTK, and I've listened to many negative reviews. Oddly, I agree with most of what they say short of believing the game is bad or really failed in any way. I think ToTK is doing a different thing than BoTW. While ToTK fixed many mechanical issues from BoTW and added so much that BoTW might as well be obsolete from a gameplay perspective, ToTK completely lost the vibe that BoTW had which was that game's primary strength.

Breath of the Wild is mysterious, melancholy, and beautiful. It's a game about exploration in every way. Through the experience Link learns where he is, who he is, and the context of what is happening in real time with the player. The world feels especially dangerous because you start with literally nothing and you don't really know what's going on. The intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to the game are all to do with exploration. Seeing a century-old battlefield littered with the weapons of fallen soldiers amidst the ruins of a village totally reclaimed by nature is a particular kind of emotional experience, and there are many such experiences throughout the game. Unfortunately, there is only so much to discover and once the map is filled out, the cutscenes are seen, and Ganon is defeated, there isn't much to do after that but poke around the world for its own sake or test your patience with the annoyingly difficult DLC.

Tears of the Kingdom, a continuation of the story, is not so much focused on exploration. In ToTK, exploration is one of the many fun activities the player can do. The overworld is the same with some minor differences such as a network of caves, and the skyworld and underworld are filled with treasure and beauty but not much in the way of themes or emotional resonance. Far more so than in BoTW, the world of ToTK feels like the player's personal playground to experiment with and relax in. It's just not that serious.

Unlike in BoTW, it's easy to forget the main antagonist is even a problem in ToTK. The game is more interested in world building for its own sake. For example, the people of Kakariko village are far more concerned with local archaeology than the potential doom of the world. Most characters in the game are more concerned with their low-stakes slices of life than Ganondorf politely sitting in the castle and not threatening them at all. No one is in any real danger. Groups of villagers attack monster camps with ladles and pot lids and not one bad thing can ever happen to them. The tone from the previous game is obliterated, but it's fun, and I don't think this is a bad thing. I am ok with the focus shifting from discovering the world to greatly expand the capability to goof around in that same world.

I would say that BoTW is the meal and ToTK is the dessert. Many people were disappointed that ToTK wasn't another meal of the same quality as BoTW, but personally I'm ok with having dessert.

How did this all happen? After first touching base with our team and ensuring our interest, the team at Gunzilla Games secured the rights to Game Informer. From the start, the new owners insisted on the idea of Game Informer remaining an independent editorial outlet; they felt just as strongly as our team did that the only path forward was with an editorial group that made 100 percent of the decisions around what we cover and how we do so, without any influence from them or anyone else.

Game Informer now operates under an entity called Game Informer Inc., and our intent is to continue to focus on highlighting the coolest games, celebrating the history and legacy of the gaming industry, and shining a spotlight on the creators and players who are charting its future. I am deeply grateful for the trust and enthusiasm from the team at Gunzilla Games; they see the same potential in Game Informer as our team does, and their encouragement to do so ethically and free of outside pressure is laudable.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/23565790

Hello! I'm currently working on a research paper for my English composition course, and we were given free reign on the topic. I decided to do my topic on the history of queerness in gaming, and I'm not only talking about queer characters, but also the gaming community too. So far, my major sources focus on things like:

• Demographics of games with queer characters (which identities, created in what country, what year was the game made, etc.)
• I want to try to find more stuff about trans, enby, and ace characters as I feel their representation is a little underepresented
• Opinions of queer and non-queer gamers on queer representation in games
• How fan interpretations, fanon, and external content (like social media posts) is important to gaming too
• What games do right and wrong with representation, especially when it comes to "non-gendered" character creators
• How localizations/translations are sometimes used to censor queerness. Also about how queerness can be seen differently around the world.
• Some info on Gamergate, but that's not a major focus of the paper
• A pinch of info about feminist gaming, but not necessarily lesbian-women-only gaming

I want to make sure I'm hitting what people find important to explain and teach to others, as the goal of this paper is to be read by anyone who's curious to learn. So if there's any topic you deem extremely important that shouldn't be missed, please tell me! Also, I'm a little more knowledgeable about JRPGs compared to popular western games, so character recommendations to bring up are appreciated greatly.

I plan to promote a survey about this stuff later on, I just need to get my questions together :). I will crosspost this to other gaming or queer communities, so you might see me there too!

This post is also on Reddit, although due to it being a new account I'm going to struggle to gain traction there with the low karma bans :(

I've spent years wandering many an inhospitable wasteland, so Atomfall's pleasant post-apocalypse is pretty inviting. They've got tea here. And bakeries. And it's extremely green—not because of radiation storms, but because it's all pastures and woods and verdant hills as far as the eye can see. It'd be a nice place for a ramble, if it weren't for the fire-spewing robots, lethal flora, bandits, cultists and conspiracies.

With its '50s-inspired retro-futuristic setting, Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are only surface deep. That shallowness is probably Atomfall's defining feature: it's chock full of systems and obvious inspirations, but it rarely digs into them and struggles to find anything to set itself apart.

What's the going rate for a flight to attend GDC these days? I ask because I'd have loved to be buzzing my merry way about the convention walls when Snail Games USA unveiled this doozy of an AI-generated trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica expansion. I'd give it a solid nine on the "we're not even trying to disguise it any longer" scale. How bad is it? Bad enough that original developers Studio Wildcard hastily and firmly distanced themselves from the project, reiterating that their focus was on ARK: Survival Ascended and Ark 2.

If I had to sum up the trailer in a single word, I would attempt to write that word out with four-day old regurgitated Alphabetti spaghetti, invariably failing to give voice to my flailing disgust before retiring to the corner to fart at god. This would still take approximately fourteen times more effort than whoever got paid to write "like the ocean, but worse" into their phone to tease out the following results.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/18430451

I watched this video recently because I was having trouble ripping a ps1 game from the disc and most of the suggestions I could find were imgburn which is windows only and not open source. Unlike the video I used Brasero on pop os 22.04 LTS. Another thing to note is the emulator I used was not picking up the game at first because you need both the cue file and bin file in the game folder unlike with ps2 emulation that requires just one file.

There’s now an industry-wide union for video game workers in the US and Canada. The United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA) has a mission to bring together "artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers and beyond to build worker power irrespective of studio and current job status."

The union makes its official debut at the "Video Game Labor at a Crossroads: New Pathways to Industry-Wide Organizing" panel at GDC. Workers will be sharing a petition at the event to gain support for the union and to shine a light on the recent glut of industry layoffs. As a matter of fact, the first major issue the union seeks to address is layoffs, given that one in ten developers were shown the door in 2024.

Workers will also be passing around a zine that includes the organization’s mission statement, FAQs and an op-ed. This is a direct-join union, meaning that workers can sign up on their own. This allows folks to bypass traditional unionization processes like elections and employer consent.

What have you all been playing?

I finally finished avowed. I enjoyed my time with it quite a bit but I'm happy it's done.

I also ended up being productive with my backlog and best both Cuphead and Jusant. Cuphead was great but I was ultimately disappointed in Jusant

Hi guys! My newest devlog about my procedural terrain generation game is out now!(this time with text to speech) I hope you enjoy it! I'll take feedback and recommendations in the YouTube comments! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip_p6-1ViVM

What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds, even when they're trying to camp in a corner? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret?

Every match Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system: The more than 150 cards in the game offer a variety of buffs, debuffs, and outlandish abilities with the game-breaking power of old-school cheat codes. It’s an adrenaline shot for a genre often obsessed with creating a balanced experience. Instead, Fragpunk is all about letting players break the rules to swing matches in their favor.

While Fragpunk takes the basic formula of Counter-Strike and Valorant, with each 5v5 Shard Clash match consisting of defenders protecting a bomb site and attackers trying to plant the bomb, matches are much shorter. Quick play is the first to four round wins, and ranked is the first to six. This gives each match an urgency that pairs well with the unpredictable cards and slightly faster pace: You don’t reach a point where you're seeing the same card combinations or rounds grow to be samey, like everyone saving money to slow-push into a bomb site with Vandal rifles in Valorant or snipe down the central path in Dust2 in CS:GO.

I've never uploaded a video before, hopefully this works lol

Former Activision boss Bobby Kotick has filed a defamation suit against G/O Media over a pair of 2024 articles.

A record of a March 11 defamation filing titled “Robert Kotick v G/O Media Inc” can be viewed in Delaware court records, but the complaint itself is not currently publicly available. Courthouse News, which first reported on the suit, writes that Kotick is “seek[ing] damages to be determined at trial” regarding articles on former G/O Media site Gizmodo and current G/O Media site Kotaku about Kotick’s reported interest in buying TikTok.

As context into Kotick, the articles both discussed a California Civil Rights Department investigation into Activision Blizzard that was settled in 2023. The final California settlement makes note that “No court or any independent investigation has substantiated any allegations” and that the “[d]efendants deny all allegations of wrongdoing, liability, and damages.”