twelve hours of meetings yesterday, or, 4 double-booked hours
when you can’t sustain the creative alignment and competence you need across dozens of people the only tool you have is agonizing nitpicking
At a small, human-sized studio, you need developers who are very, very good because they are responsible for making very good stuff on their own. At industrial scale you can’t avoid living in the center of the standard distribution, i.e., mediocrity, and the only counteracting piece we seem to have is micromanaging. It’s three times as expensive per work-deliverable in exchange for half that quality, in exchange for the opportunity to spend a sixth of a billion dollars on scale to outcompete
Yeah, I get it. It’s also important to help stronger enemies stand out from the crowd of weaker enemies. Particulary large enemies like the spider bots and the adaptoids are so large that they get dedicated animations because the regular amount of shrinking would look too obvious for them. But sometimes it glitches and they don’t return to size, and boy does it look funny.
Another takedown related glitch
Another case of phantom lights. It looks like some sort of drop spawned for some reason but got stuck in the wall?
Oh, so the comic collecting permanent stat bonuses are not just some minor throwaway bonus for small collectibles in the story mode but an actual continuing system that’s worth making the main reward of timed content. Looking forward to how a potentially missable gradual increase to your permanent account wide stat bonuses gets balanced.
Look, if you want to join my Asbestos Lady raid strike team you have to have all four issues of One More Day and the complete run AXIS.
marvels actually done tbis in all of their mobiel games, too. honestly the avengers game is just a bunch of systems from future fight given console treatment
I don’t know that I’d particularly call out Future Fight as the source considering they’re all just pulling from long established genre conventions. Future Fight just knows its place as a mobile game and follows the mobile formula and I imagine pulls it off a well as countless other games have. I’ll at least say Marvel’s Avenger tried to be ambitious in its scope of being a full fledged action game that was also a loot game and a GAAS, even if it has failed spectacularly.
When I saw that the Injustice and Marvel Contest of Champions arcade games actually gave you collectible cards for your progress like an arcade TCG I considered getting into them until I saw how boring the cards looked.
I honestly could not tell what I was looking at. It kind of looks like an inside of two rooms? It kind of looks like a wall with paintings on the left side, but even when looking downwards it’s like you’re looking at a ceiling. It was just really weird because none of the other windows I checked had this weird interior to them. I couldn’t figure out why you’d go throw the effort of doing this when most of the ground floor windows are opaque. Unless it has something to do with making that reflection effect in the puddle?
They use that for most apartment windows, right? It’s convincing enough when you’re going fast but the illusion breaks if someone gets close and looks at it. That’s probably why they avoid it on ground-floor buildings.
The texture is obviously…wrong. If the texture coordinates on the door mesh are screwed up (flipped, offset) that could account for why the perspective is off. Maybe the glowing section is an offset allowing you to peek into a nearby texture layer stored on the same image atlas as the normal texture, like a buffer overflow.
I finally completed one of the weekly Priority Missions to see what the unique gear it promised was. It gives me bonus damage when doing Priority Missions. So it’s gear that makes it easier to do the mission you just completed to get that gear.
I’m pretty sure Avengers is not the first game to do this but this is probably the worst kind of the reward you could get. Aside from all those people who are doing the game’s current super hard endgame mission and getting nothing of value because either the game is glitched or the loot tables are just that bad. At least some people have gotten the supposed guaranteed exotic gear, even if it’s glitched and the gear with exotic names are showing up as a level 1 gear with no special perks.
I never played the final game but I imagine it has a lot of the same structural issues. Loot is worthless unless there is something it’s actually building you towards, and I think that’s something both games suffered from. But Avengers has a leg up on Anthem in that it has a story mode that people have generally loved, so people have found some value in playing the game. Anthem had gameplay people liked but there was no game to play. At least Anthem wasn’t as much of a buggy mess. Anthem is also probably still a better Iron Man game because it was designed only around Iron Man.
but it had the same development pressures and a lot of the same problems – development spread over too many people and studios, core combat and movement not suited for both solo & multiplayer experiences, buggy game clients with poor-fitting assets for consoles, terribly over-written and over-produced narratives that exude money and flopsweat
Definitely looks like they got the shader parameters or maybe even the shader itself wrong. The texture looks like SimCity’s variant of interior mapping, where instead of using a full cube map they’re using a flat image with a perspective view of the room but it’s set up all wrong.
I can’t remember if this ever got brought up earlier, but most of your game progress information is saved locally on your console and only some information like your Challenge Card progress is saved on the server. The Challenge Card is like the battle pass; as you gain challenge points by completing daily and weekly challenges you progress up the card and earn rewards like resources, cosmetics, and even some premium currency. You can of course pay to jump tiers too. (Side note: This is also why when people are having items deleted from their account by the buggy game no one is sure if they can actually be restored since that information isn’t stored outside your own now screwed up save)
But since your daily challenges are saved locally while your challenge card progress is saved on the server, what people figured out pretty early on is that you can start a mission when you’re just about to clear a daily challenge so you have an auto-save point there. When you complete the daily challenge it will give you challenge points on your challenge card in the server. Then you restart your save, reverting your daily challenge to incomplete and you can complete the challenge again, adding points to your challenge card again. Repeat ad naseum to cheese the challenge card progress and break one of the central monetization schemes.
I don’t know if that’s been fixed yet. People are still finding ways to cheese the game though. After the most recent patch loot drops were adjusted to make higher level gear and Patterns (the cosmetic drops) more rare, but for one reason or another this change was not in the patch itself but is apparently being dictated by the server, so if you just play in offline mode you get the old loot tables.
I’m a dingus and, despite reading this thread daily and dunking on the game leading up to (and after!) release I picked it up.
It’s…wow it’s pretty weird, huh? There’s so many ways the game comes like 75% of the way to feeling Pretty Dang Good before some other part of it (the need for it to be a Destiny-alike, sorta, monetization, whatever) bog it down.
That said, I’d be the biggest liar if I did not admit that the absolutely visual-less gear does in fact scratch some vein of dopamine. Just a trickle rush from opening a chest and seeing I’ve gotten a new, Blue ribcage for Hulk! Ah, what a thrill!
Anyway, just unlocked Iron Man. Poor Nolan North has exactly one voice for “cocky superhero,” and I heard a lot of it in that bad Deadpool game.
