The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Iormlund]

As for the game itself: after being finally able to log in for a few hours, my Paladin is about level 30-something. It's a nice mix of melee and spell skills so far.

Combat is definitely Losk Ark's best asset. Pretty easy to pick up for someone used to ARPG mechanics. Otherwise the amount of shit thrown at you when you reach Luterra is worthy of PoE. And I haven't even finished leveling yet.

[garbon]

Oh it's not incomprehensible. It just doesn't reflect well, is all.

But live and learn.

It's more just that Amazon has a reputation for paying well and for being really really really demanding. All justified by "we only want the best who give 150%" or some such, because that's how you get the best results and are the most competitive and all that jazz.

And yet, they kind of fumble this just like other game companies do, so all this "we burn you out because you're the BEST doing the BEST" culture isn't really getting them anywhere further than any other company in this particular space.

Apparently the game architecture simply doesn't allow for easy scaling.

Which some people seem to think places the blame on this entirely on SmileyGate.

But the thing is, as publisher Amazon should have pushed for something as trivial as character transfers to be ready for a global deployment. If nothing else because a) they fucked up already with New World's launch and b) it reflects extremely poorly on AWS itself, which is the most profitable part of the company.

It is possible they didn't think this shit would be so popular?

[crazy canuck]

Other than one small delay on the day it went public, I have had no trouble at all accessing the game. The European servers, by the sounds of it, I had bigger problems. But it is a mistake to generalize that experience across all servers. If I had not been reading languish posts I would've thought this was a huge success.

[Syt]

On the EU servers: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/increasing-lost-arks-eu-server-capacity-is-not-possible-amazon-says/

Lost Ark players in Europe have been dealing with lengthy queues since the game went live in the EU and North America earlier this month. Last week Amazon Games set up a new region called Europe West to help alleviate the strain, although it warned that the Europe West servers would only "reduce, not eliminate, queue times for Europe Central."

Unfortunately, it appears that's about as good as it's going to get. In a new update, the Lost Ark team acknowledged that there's not much it can do for Europe Central itself, apparently because of the game's underlying structure.

"The Europe Central region is at capacity and unfortunately there is no way to increase the number of players per world in Europe Central," Amazon Game Studios community manager TrevzorFTW wrote. "Adding more servers is not possible based on the complexity of all the systems that need to work together."

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Lost Ark does not fully support server transfers. A server transfer option "just rolled out" in Korea, where Lost Ark has been running since 2019, but it's a manual process, run weekly, and doesn't support cross-region transfers, meaning that players can transfer to other servers within Europe Central, but not to the new servers on Europe West.

"Therefore, unfortunately, it is not a viable option at this point for the western version," TrevzorFTW wrote. "But we will not rest until we've exhausted all options."

The bottom line is that the Europe West region will be useful for newcomers and players who haven't progressed very far into Lost Ark on Europe Central, but less so players who are deep into it and don't want to walk away from their characters and progress. As an interim aid, Amazon is offering a second variation of Lost Ark founders packs to players who purchased them so that they can start up new characters in the new region without losing all the startup loot they paid for.

The update also touches on changes aimed at improving matchmaking, reducing gold seller spam, avoiding fraudulent purchases, and improving stability. Full details are up at playlostark.com.

Reminds me of the latest FF14 expansion this year. The game had a significant influx of players in the last two years. When I was playing during summer, there were queues any time of day I would try to log in (usually not more than a minute or two max). I didn't play during the expansion release, but queues were apparently insane, and the population on servers got to bad they had to stop selling the base game and accepting new free trial accounts for quite some while. Adding new servers could have been a solution, but with the chip crisis ...

[Iormlund]

Other than one small delay on the day it went public, I have had no trouble at all accessing the game. The European servers, by the sounds of it, I had bigger problems. But it is a mistake to generalize that experience across all servers. If I had not been reading languish posts I would've thought this was a huge success.

People were logging in before work and using macros to avoid logout timers, or logging in remotely at noon so the queues would be almost done by the time they came from work.
I wasn't able to even see the queue for a straight week. I would get an error and the client would crash, because over 300k people were already in the queue by the time I got home.

And yes, they should've known. Lost Ark is not a new game (and it shows, it's a very polished experience). It has been a growing success in both Korea and the Russian server for years.
And they've built massive hype for it. A lot of streamers (including the biggest WoW name and two of my fav PoE streamers) were talking about it and are now playing it.
Hell, they sold 1.5 million early access bundles before the global release.

[Jacob]

It is possible they didn't think this shit would be so popular?

Sure, but that's still poor planning.

Like... one of the core tenets of modern game development in this day and age (esp. AAA dev) is the pursuit of the massive mega hit. Almost everything is done with a view to make long term viable, massive scale monetization engines.

Being more popular than you expected is a great problem to have, and isn't really more than a short-term problem (or it shouldn't be).

But building a game with an architecture that "simply doesn't allow for easy scaling" is absolutely a fuck up (if true). Now, it's not a unique fuck up, and perhaps not unsolveable... but it's still pretty fundamental thing. Pretty much every game design decision on a game like that is made to - ultimately - build a massive userbase. To (again if true) have the fundamental architecture counter that is just silly (and expensive).

Like... I've been involved in conversations and planning on projects (like Halo: Infinite), and all it should take in an even decently run organization is for someone of mid-level seniority or better (but ideally all the way to the most junior level employee) to say "so hey everybody, what happens if we get twice the number of expected users? Ten times? How quickly do we scale?" and that should percolate up to decision makers with enough power to make sure the project isn't caught out by something like this.

Now, if they address it in like a week, or maybe two weeks, then it's just the usual stress and BS of game dev. But if it's a problem beyond that then that's really very poor.

Hiccups are one thing. Having people who want to play your game be unable to for any extended period of time is just burning money, both short term and long tail.

Though to be fair, I haven't followed it closely - I'm just reacting to second hand descriptions of the situation. If they get things under control in the short term, then it's not particularly egregious... but the longer it goes on, the worse it looks on them.

[crazy canuck]

Other than one small delay on the day it went public, I have had no trouble at all accessing the game. The European servers, by the sounds of it, I had bigger problems. But it is a mistake to generalize that experience across all servers. If I had not been reading languish posts I would've thought this was a huge success.

People were logging in before work and using macros to avoid logout timers, or logging in remotely at noon so the queues would be almost done by the time they came from work.
I wasn't able to even see the queue for a straight week. I would get an error and the client would crash, because over 300k people were already in the queue by the time I got home.

And yes, they should've known. Lost Ark is not a new game (and it shows, it's a very polished experience). It has been a growing success in both Korea and the Russian server for years.
And they've built massive hype for it. A lot of streamers (including the biggest WoW name and two of my fav PoE streamers) were talking about it and are now playing it.
Hell, they sold 1.5 million early access bundles before the global release.

All I can tell you is that servers were down a couple of hours on the day it went public on the West Coast servers.  Other than that I had zero problem logging in.

It would be interesting to know why there was such a difference between server regions.

[Josquius]

Besides the point but.... why does everyone want to play this game anyway?
MMORPGs are quite 2000s no?

[crazy canuck]

Besides the point but.... why does everyone want to play this game anyway?
MMORPGs are quite 2000s no?

I think it is because it does not play like an MMO - it is more like the best ARPG I have ever played with really good multiplayer.

[Jacob]

All I can tell you is that servers were down a couple of hours on the day it went public on the West Coast servers.  Other than that I had zero problem logging in.

Yeah, that doesn't qualify as egregious incompetence. That's more like "with complicated systems like this, sometimes things go wrong and then get fixed."

It would be interesting to know why there was such a difference between server regions.

Probably estoric techincal or technical-policy related reason. Could be as simple "it's easy to bring servers online quickly in North America, and difficult elsewhere" due to business policy reasons that are not trivially circumvented inside the organization.

[FunkMonk]

No-spoilers review of Elden Ring from a long time Fromsoft gamer dude: https://youtu.be/kdstSHeoNGA

Seems good 

The Guardian has words:

Video games can be all kinds of different things, representing all manner of artistic ambitions. Most, however, share a common goal: to conjure a compelling fictional reality, filled with beckoning mysteries, enchanting secrets, and enriching opportunities to compete and collaborate. They aim to provide a liminal space in which a determined player can fix that which is broken, order that which is chaotic. By this definition, at least, Elden Ring is the finest video game yet made. Its final gift is the assurance that, whatever monsters lurk in a broken world, with perseverance and cooperation, they too can be overcome – all without losing the mystery and wonder that makes our existence beguiling, infuriating, and fascinating.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/23/elden-ring-review-an-unrivalled-masterpiece-of-design-and-inventiveness

[Iormlund]

All I can tell you is that servers were down a couple of hours on the day it went public on the West Coast servers.  Other than that I had zero problem logging in.

It would be interesting to know why there was such a difference between server regions.

They initially set up two server clusters for NA, but only one for EU (which has a higher population).

They did not make language-specific servers (or at least chat channels) either.

Thus I'd say very little if any thought was given to the region, which is incredibly weird considering the purchasing power of (mainly) Western Europeans.

[Syt]

No-spoilers review of Elden Ring from a long time Fromsoft gamer dude: https://youtu.be/kdstSHeoNGA

Seems good 

The Guardian has words:

Video games can be all kinds of different things, representing all manner of artistic ambitions. Most, however, share a common goal: to conjure a compelling fictional reality, filled with beckoning mysteries, enchanting secrets, and enriching opportunities to compete and collaborate. They aim to provide a liminal space in which a determined player can fix that which is broken, order that which is chaotic. By this definition, at least, Elden Ring is the finest video game yet made. Its final gift is the assurance that, whatever monsters lurk in a broken world, with perseverance and cooperation, they too can be overcome – all without losing the mystery and wonder that makes our existence beguiling, infuriating, and fascinating.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/23/elden-ring-review-an-unrivalled-masterpiece-of-design-and-inventiveness

RPS was also gushing about it. ACG who does IMO pretty decent video reviews is also singing its praises (though pointing out a few issues). https://youtu.be/dJbfm9l1DTk

Kinda tempted, but I also have way too many games and play little at the moment so ...

[Josquius]

I finished Portal 2 over the past few days.
I first played it many many years ago but for some reason dropped it and just stopped playing an hour in.
Played it from the start and yeah. It's good. But very short. Much prefer the arena puzzles where its clear what is a portal surface and what isn't to the bits in the ruined old offices, though they were cool.

[Syt]

Slitherine are streaming upcoming game Regiments - an upcoming "Cold War gone hot" game in the vein of Wargame: European Escalation. The streamer chose to play the Russians. There's only 10-12 viewers, normally they have 6-7 times as many, and Regiments was eagerly awaited by their viewers/customers.

Seems people may not be in the best mood for this kind of game right now (I know I'm not).

EDIT: my bad, it's not Slitherine streaming, but one of their regular streamers, XTRG, viewership seems normal for his channel