athena-plays-games - Tumblr blog

[athena-plays-games]

I think its really weird that Last of Us remake for PS4 has a remaster for PS5.

I don't quite know how to explain but it feels a lot like trying very hard to gain more from a successful game, without making a new success.

Just saw some speculation about a Horizon Zero Dawn remake and it made me think about it.

It's not like either of these games needs a graphical change anyway, they're already modern games that look like modern games. It feels like they think all their games can reasonably offer is better graphics and prettier screenshots.

[athena-plays-games]

Idk if it's a hot take but I want to like Read Dead Redemption 2, but the game is so bogged down by its ridiculous need to be as realistic and tedious as possible that it's actually insane.

There's too many systems that actively punish the player for not playing the game the "right way"- keeping your weight up, but not too much!!! Clean your gun or else you take a debuff!!! Take three whole minutes to loot a body!

I see the appeal of the world and the writing- but the gameplay and the complicated and annoying extra systems and overly long animations all feel made to pad out the run time of the game, just extra fat on the steak, you know?

[athena-plays-games]

https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/CallofDuty_Matchmaking_Series_2.pdf

Here is a link to the study!

Skill Based Matchmaking has always been a blessing for me, who gets very frustrated losing, and who didn't get to play a lot of shooters until I was already almost 19 years old. (Most people my generation had been playing them while we were in middle school or even elementary)

It's always been noticably more fun to play with people on a similar level to you!! I'm only having fun obliterating someone if they also have a fair chance at obliterating me! It's only fun being absolutely stomped if it's someone who is at a similar skill level to me!

I don't want to play Halo against a tryhard wannabe Esports celebrity, I wanna play OddBall and kinda suck at it against other people who just wanna play OddBall and also kinda suck at it. I don't wanna spend an entire game in a loop of die, wait to respawn, walk three feet, die. That's not fun. Games are meant to be fun.

I've been wanting to talk about this study for a while, but couldn't ever put it into words myself.

Soaking this in

If you don't know what this is, here's an explanation: Both Fortnite and Call of Duty employ something called "Skill-Based Matchmaking" (SBMM for short), and it has become the bane of a certain subset of players who very vocally yell about how it is ruining multiplayer games.

In short, the game secretly and quietly keeps track of your "skill level." Even if a game has both ranked and unranked modes, it is always tracking this skill level stat that reports back how quickly and easily you're getting kills. When you connect to a new match, it tries to group you with players near your skill level.

The idea being you start with zero skill stat, and by playing the game well, your skill stat levels up until you eventually plateau and you are forever playing the game with people that are just as good (or bad) as you are, within some level of variance.

This means if you're one of these career streamer guys or a Youtube clip compilation sort of dude (or both), then you very quickly get put into high tier matchmaking pools with all the other career streamers and wannabe esports pros. Hence the very loud, very vocal complaints, because if you're one of those guys, the idea of having a "casual match" goes away. Everybody is always firing on all cylinders and you're expected to do the same in order to keep your rank and not look embarrassing to your captive audience.

So Activision apparently ran an experiment per Charlie Intel (article here) where they reduced SBMM's effectiveness, meaning the big fish pros and the little tadpole casual players were thrown into more games together.

The result was a sharp uptick in players rage quitting matches early, some even quitting the game entirely and never coming back. The report notes that while player retention for players with a high skill rank was improved, they make up such a small percentage of the player base (apparently less than 1%; the article has some grammar problems) that servicing them really doesn't make sense.

As it turns out, low level players don't want to get hopelessly destroyed by wannabe esports pros. And those pros make up such a small percentage of the player base it doesn't make sense to keep feeding them more low level chum, even though they are the hungriest for it. As more and more low level players permanently leave the game due to frustration, it turns into a wasteland where high level players are getting mad at each other until they also get frustrated and leave as well. SBMM ensures long term health for a game's multiplayer ecosystem.

And being a Fortnite player, it's so validating to hear this. "SBMM is ruining multiplayer" was always a narrative coming from streamers and youtubers who were frustrated by having to actually TRY instead of being able to score easy clip compilation fodder on clueless newbies.

Enjoy sticking to your smurf accounts now, I guess.

[athena-plays-games]

Hi! I'm Athena and I'm very passionate about video games! I wanna review and talk about games on a place where I have my thoughts organized and not bogged by unrelated things.

I'm in my 20s, she/her.

My favorite games right now are Monster Hunter and pokemon, but these flip and flop and change!

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I am not affiliated or sponsored by these games, I'm only reviewing them as I work through my own backlog and libraries. Links to game websites or store pages are to source information and allow anyone reading to learn more. I do not earn money, and again, only post the links or platform information for readers who like that kind of thing.

When talking more in depth about certain games, I'll tag posts appropriately.

I am not here to debate any stupid right wing talking points about games, so if you're here to tell me how much you hate diversity and women and POC and LGBTQ+ folks in games, kindly fuck off and go pound sand.

[athena-plays-games]

This this this

When playing Baldur's Gate 3 on my computer, I went to turn down graphical settings to make it run better and noticed that the low graphics options were NOT better. My computer was overheating, the game was moving at a crawl, and I saw no difference between high and low settings. On a fairly new laptop that I had used to play Warframe, Ark and Borderlands.

There was no way for me to play on PC without risking harming my computer.

guy with 60hz monitor: i am enjoying playing this game

guy with 240hz monitor: Honestly if you were to conceive of the most efficient possible torture in terms of purely causing agony for as long as possible and also have your firstborn son killed in front of you during the torture it would not even be a tenth as bad as playing a game at 60 fps

[athena-plays-games]

This thing my kid adopted in Skyrim activates my instinct to obliterate it

[athena-plays-games]

When Veilguard comes out, please keep it in the back of your mind every single time you interact with Varric and Lucanis that their writer got laid off with little to no warning and that she is and always will be a Dragon Age legend and one of the reasons why the franchise has stayed afloat for as long as it has

[athena-plays-games]

One of my favorite parts of world was observing them.

Walking alongside a Tobi-Kadachi because it didn't mind as long as it wasn't attacked.

Following Anjanath at a distance to see that they mark territory!

It's so much fun, I want to focus on ecology like that, like in World.

my one wish for monster hunter wilds: please, please don't let the monsters be insta-aggro'd when they see you (at least the smaller, lesser monsters).

i wanna be able to watch them interact with each other and their environment. or walk along with them through the map and take pictures of and with them ;u;

[athena-plays-games]

I think every monster hunter player has one monster that is like. Their Mid-Rank Favorite Little Guy. Yeah, the gear sucks, the fight’s easy as hell, it’s only HR3, it only got a variant in the portable version of its home game. But if you make fun of the Royal Ludroth I’ll kill you

[athena-plays-games]

that one fairy every time you hit the pause button

[athena-plays-games]

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.

[athena-plays-games]

This is why the graphics arms race is always a losing one.

It's not always even one or two console generations later, it's sometimes even just a couple year later in the same generation.

Hyper-realism is only realistic as long as it's the most realistic there is.

A strong visual style and great art direction always, always, always ages better, and having a good visual arts direction can also elevate the kind of story you are trying to tell.

The problem with realistic artstyles in games is as graphics improve, the game looks more and more dated. You just don't get that with a cartoony game. A cartoony game is just always gonna look good no matter how much time passes. A "realistic" game is gonna look like utter shit like 1 or 2 console generations later when another one just blows the old one's visuals out of the water.

[athena-plays-games]

I'm honestly so excited about Clair Obscur Expedition 33

That trailer was so well done, and I felt like I had already been on a journey watching it.

[athena-plays-games]

I think it's about time to admit that the reception of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were disproportionate, and the way criticism was presented tended to make any valid criticisms sound extremely disingenuous and frankly stupid.

Comparing a game to the GameCube or N64 will always sound like hyperbole.

Passing around uncredited, very cropped, and contextless screen recordings also feels... Weird? I saw the same clips of the same things, no source, posted everywhere. I didn't see any replications and couldn't figure out who or where they came from. This is important for verifying these things.

Somehow making the release of an only semi related game (palworld) about how much you hate modern Pokemon is also... Kind of weird.

I'm not even sure where it came from but the sudden... Thing?? People had about Pokemon stealing Dragon Quest stuff also made no sense?

Either way, point is- none of this makes your criticisms look good. It makes them look bad. There are things to criticize, but you should try to be honest and represent the things you're talking about truthfully.

[athena-plays-games]

This shot of a giant excavator in Germany slowly making its way to a coal site 25km away. [March, 1999]

[athena-plays-games]

Help I put him in this hat and it's killing me

[athena-plays-games]

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”