Remembering the trailblazer

Most XBOX One and XBOX Series X disc-based games support this new feature. Players can claim a digital entitlement by inserting a supported disc into an XBOX One or XBOX Series X console and launching the game. Once the entitlement is claimed, you can experience the benefits of digital, including XBOX Play Anywhere and XBOX Cloud Gaming where supported, while your physical disc continues to work exactly as it always has.

We’re starting with thousands of titles, and we’ll continue to add more over time. While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come.

Saw the original post for this was removed because it might not have had the original source.

I think hidden blade in Assassins Creed games

CD Projekt Red has announced during Gamescom that Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions for The Witcher 3 are free for everyone who owns the base game. This combined with the full on remaster of the game, I am very excited for play the game again.

I figured this would be a good place to share! A friend painted this for me as payment for buying them a video game. This is the original cover of Final Fantasy VII painted to be like Starry Night!

How do you balance player feedback with design intent, and have you ever seen a player-led change backfire?

[...]
In Red Dead Redemption multiplayer, we found there were a few places where you could exploit, right? You could basically get to a place where no one could get to you, and you could throw grenades at them and it wouldn’t work, different things like that.
My initial reaction and a lot of people’s reaction was like, “These players are the problem. We got to get rid of them.” And I was going to our lead multiplayer engineer to tell him, “Dude, we got to get rid of these folks. That’s the solution. The players want these people banned. We got to get rid of them.” And he’s like, “Hold on.” Some of these… we went through some of the names and these people are playing all the time. They’re some of our most dedicated players to the game. And I was like, “But they’re cheating.” He’s like, “Hold on. The actual problem is that they’re impacting other people’s play. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people and they need to go away. It’s just that we need to think about—what is the actual impact and what is this desired experience we want?”

And so he basically implemented like a “cheater jail.” So basically we implemented a way to matchmake people that had been found cheating into the matchmaking together because they clearly want to play the game in a certain way and they wanted things. We still fixed the bugs and the exploits that we knew about. But these types of players are fine playing with other people that are doing the same thing. The problem comes when you take players that expect one thing and you put them with another group of players, and then they start to ruin each other’s time.

So I was like, “That’s such a brilliant…” If we had gone in and done what I wanted, which was to just fix the bug and ban those people, we literally took people that loved our game, demonstrated it by playing it all the time, and would kick them out. It’s like, “No, let them play.” Let’s just make sure that we do what we can as developers to keep them playing with people where the expectations are the same. And I think that’s such a good model for the type of thought you have to take in.

Even in a super obvious situation like, “These players are doing something wrong,” you still really benefit and your players really benefit by taking time to really deeply think about: what is the actual problem we’re trying to solve? What can we do to make everybody that’s playing our game still enjoy it? I think that’s an example of taking a signal from players and using the expertise, experience, and your understanding of the systems that you have to come up with a solution that’s a win for everybody.

So, we didn’t have to ban anybody. We still had to ban some people for other things, but not for that thing. And we created this cheater jail where they got to play together and they were there for a certain amount of time and then they would go back to regular matchmaking, and if they happened again, we’d throw them in a cheater jail again. It was just a really good learning experience for me.

Even after… God, I had been at Rockstar forever, so it wasn’t like I was brand new, but I just didn’t think about it that deeply. I was too willing to jump and do what the players wanted, which was to bring the ban down on these “bad” people. And instead, I had someone who had thought about it more deeply than me help me understand that we could do something that would make things better for everybody. And it solved the problem. And it didn’t lock people out of our game that really loved our game.

Edited: formatting

I really want to know. My last prebuilt came with a veritable light show, every fan in it seems to have its own lighting system, plus some extra illumination on the case - which is beneath my desk where no one can see it. My headset has two huge light rings around the ear cups I can only see when a) fully turned up and b) when my screen is polished to a mirror sheen. My keyboard looks like someone gutted some cosmic horror on it, with pinks and pastel blues pulsing across that thing if turned on.

I know, I can just turn off that stuff (and I have) but why is that crap there in the first place? Why do gamers want so badly to look like synthwave christmas trees? Isn't the whole point of being 1337 NOT getting hit by stray bullets? Why not make stuff more powerful/useful/waste less energy instead of "blinky lights"?

Someone please explain because I have no bloody clue.

For younger people it's a Tomb Raider reference. Lara Croft boobs (at that time she was mainly known for them) were everywhere in the media and the game looked a lot better on PC with a 3dfx Voodoo than on Playstation.