Quake3World

I think there's a bit of a plague in modern games where developers are now making games for streamers rather than the gaming public.

Mat Linnett wrote:I think there's a bit of a plague in modern games where developers are now making games for streamers rather than the gaming public.

How so? Got any examples?

Apart from Doom Eternal?
Well, quite a few MMOs / "Games as a Service" have rebalanced to cater to streamers, such as Guild Wars 2 and arguably Destiny 2. A lot of the focus in these games is now on raids and "World Firsts", to the detriment of the rest of the game.

Guild Wars 2's entire balance has changed to to prolonged criticisms from its most popular streamers. Ironically, they've actually made the end game easier by continuously asking for all classes to have access to all tools all the time, and the developers have bought in to this, resulting in gameplay focussed on flawless execution of long skill rotations in order to bypass mechanics and reduce the chances of team members dying to effectively 0.
This is in stark contrast to the more action-based game it used to be.

While I don't play them myself, I'm pretty sure streamers have an outsized influence on many of the Battle Royale games like Fortnight.

Then there's the recent Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate, which was given to streamers first (as a marketing mechanism), and then turned out to be ridiculously difficult even on the lowest difficulty.

I also think that's why I didn't gel with Divinity Original Sin 2, where I'd loved the first one. It was balanced for "hilarious" co-op shenanigans on Twitch / YouTube, but was an unfair, unbalanced mess in single-player.

The engine looks powered up.
That dismemberment feature looks pretty realistic!

Nowadays, lower spec PCs can't run well playing this game.

I think there's some GPU beaten this game, maybe a 3080 RTX at very high settings?

LegendGuard wrote:Nowadays, lower spec PCs can't run well playing this game.

I think there's some GPU beaten this game, maybe a 3080 RTX at very high settings?

I played large portions of Doom Eternal on a laptop with a GTX1650 and a 1080p screen. Most of it ran just fine without the need to dial the graphics down to shit.

Yeah, despite my misgivings with Bethesda's version of id and the direction they took with Eternal, I can't criticise their coding chops at all.
The recent versions of id Tech perform flawlessly and seem to be incredibly scalable.
I mean, Carmack built an awesome foundation, but he's been gone long enough that the current programmer/s deserve a lot of credit for just how good the engine is.

Performance is not a problem when playing these games.

Just a shame we'll never see another open source release of the code ever again.
Gotta protect those rights!

Mat Linnett wrote:Just a shame we'll never see another open source release of the code ever again.

On one hand that is a loss, but with engines like Unity and Unreal Engine being available for free, you could easily make the argument that you can build literally anything you would ever want to, despite them being proprietary pieces of technology. You could argue about the ethics behind it and how id's engines going the FOSS route is the best thing to do, but realistically, even a complete source release of idTech 7 wouldn't be very helpful to indie studios, let alone hobbyist developers.