Word up homies. That's how the kids are greeting their friends these days. Those scamps. Fellow gangsters, let's get down and kick it one time.
Hey, did you try to charge your EV lately? Hopefully you don't live where it's cold because it didn't work for a ton of people. Just another reason to not own a "self driving" fire trap from mr. nazi, I suppose. Anyway, it's WRUP time.
You better be used to not owning your games by now, because Ubisoft says so. More accurately Ubisoft's director of subscriptions, Phillipe Tremblay said so. In a quote given to The Gamer, Tremblay says you'll be able to access your games "...When you feel like" using Ubisoft Plus. Explaining that even though you're playing via sub you're not losing progress and you still keep your time invested and access to titles you have a license to play. However as pointed out by The Gamer, playing games via subscription only can and does cause loss of access to titles on a regular basis since titles come and go on those platforms often. They site both Alan Wake and The Crew as examples since both disappeared. Alan Wake eventually made it back, but The Crew is gone and will cease to exist at all in March.
This is a troublesome subject because of course we can lose our titles, but the idea of not really owning our games has been a thing for a long time now. Steam, EPIC Games Store etc. all have digital only game purchases and state that it's possible you'll lose access to a license if they decide to pull it. We're all basically renting games long term now as it is. Even physical copies of games often just come with a disc with a partial install to be finished online, or just a code for a digital download. So as tone deaf and condescending as the comment made by Tremblay is, it's not entirely wrong. Sad to say but true. Especially since the younger generation of gamers tend to want subscription time, in game purchases and currency more than fully built, inclusive games now. Here's a Link to Game Rant describing just that back in December. Unfortunately this is just the way things are now aside from a few hold outs.
Generative AI is being used by a whole bunch of developers now. According to PC Gamer 31% of game developers use generative AI now. This is a sort of double edged sword since on the negative side of things AI can replace voice actors and produce generative art with a lot of copy-pasting thus bypassing a human aspect and avoiding paying a person to do those things originally. On the positive side and absolutely a valid use case, AI can and does help massively with coding. Having an AI to help write a code for a specific thing is something it can handle pretty well and has already proven very helpful in development. The positive being an obvious decrease in time spent on coding which should help a ton with those toxic crunch time weeks before a title goes gold and that will alleviate lots of stress in the work place. We can only expect to see that percentage rise, I think.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks pretty rad. Machinegames and Lucasfilm Games under Bethesda have created a new Indiana Jones story as equally based in conspiracy theorist BS as the all the previous games, movies and shows and it looks like a lot of fun. Think, first person Tomb Raider. It's a long ways away yet, but Polygon have a sufficiently claustrophobic article with screen shots and the teaser video scattered between all the ads.
What are we playing?
Greywolfe: "finished off" roguebook. it's a roguelite. and those will stick their claws into you. so you're never truly done. but i did what i wanted, which was beat the third "floor" boss. i didn't collect the last character, because there's a dumb thing you need to do in a specific order and i borked it the first time i tried it. one part of it being dumb is you almost literally have to do a whole new run and get to "floor" 3 of the game again. which is stupid, but ok. anyway. onto other games. i'm now playing/trying shard of spring, an old ssi ms-dos rpg from before ssi got awarded the d+d license. so it's...janky. at best. and slow going, at worst. [there's no way to speed up fights where you're guaranteed to win, for example, which is funny, because literally their game before this had a "autofight" button. so...frustrating.] - so far, it goes. i think this is going to be a kind of 5/10 game for me. but it's relaxing so far, and there's that. [maybe, in fact, a 4/10 game. the graphics are very ms-paint.]
Scrooloose: I've been back in 2017's Prey. It's not like the original but it is a really good FPS with some unique features and it's still holds up quite well visually. And I'm still ass deep in SnowRunner.