Over the holidays, I largely took a break from playing games and watched a lot of bad Stephen King movies, but I did spend hours with Assassin's Creed Valhalla in a unique way. Sometimes, I would be in my office and playing Valhalla on my fancy new 4K TV using an Xbox Series X. Other times, I'd be lying on my couch grinding episodes of Ozark with my wife and playing Valhalla on my iPad via Stadia. I wasn't playing on different saves—it was the same game on both. Two different platforms, yet one cohesive gameplay experience.
I don’t understand how a team that decided not to give a game air because of the involvement of one heinous, GG-supporting developer doesn’t consider doing the same for a company like Ubisoft, after this year’s revelations about everything that was done and tolerated there.
Someday there will be a games journo site that is punk and not only isn’t afraid of doing coverage that will cost them review codes, not only steps on the toes of big corporations, but actively stomps on them in an attempt to drive change.
Waypoint… in reverting to Vice Games, has just kind of shown me that it’s another example of how entryism doesn’t work. Change can’t come from within the system.
am I missing something here or what, because “universal games” has only ever seemed like a thing only games journalists care abt because of their jobs? Ive got a switch and a pc I absolutely do not care if I can play the same game on both, lol
cool tech evangelist vertical yall built out of a corpse but come on where are the listicles of startup girlbosses bringing power to the players step it UP
I find it kinda interesting in a more abstract technology perspective and the nature of my living arrangements, but I don’t imagine that the “game you can take anywhere” is a standard use case for a lot of the same reasons that Stadia hasn’t exactly caught fire
I own a Switch and PS4, would be nice to have cross-save on a lot of the indie games that are on both platforms.
The frustration with the site’s editorial direction is understandable, especially the Cyberpunk click articles, but this is a new feature that I do think is interesting to a lot of people and worth writing about.
this reads like klepek copy and pasted this from a press release
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this reads like klepek realises he has to seem impartial but is too tired to make an effort
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a lot of us are renting tiny bedrooms in houses with no communal areas and wearing 2 jumpers but i’m sorry about your office
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this is a very a specific and miniscule tick in the “upsides” column
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bro there’s a million other things we can do that aren’t doomscrolling it’s not the lack of options that make us do this
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15 bucks a month is 180 bucks a year. 180 bucks a year and i don’t get to keep any of these games? nah
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i too am excited to see the final resting place of these corporations’ balls which are descending at an extremely #hype velocity directly above my face
I like the idea but this is also such an incredibly low bar from a tech stand point. They figured out how to use the same save format, host it in an S3 bucket, and then link it to a user ID. There’s nothing interesting happening here other than a company figuring out a basic cloud application. If anything it’s aggravating that not more companies do this when the bar is so incredibly low.
Steams been offering this for like a decade now and you’re just now getting around to it?
in fairness, cloud saves aren’t really the issue here - it’s the one-sub, any-platform crossplay thing which is the big selling point (which is still a bad bargain, given the ramifications)
I used to give some Waypoint articles shit about this before the Vicening and kind of stopped posting here regularly once that happened, but I do think the situation of WP writers having enough money to not have to give a shit about another subscription fee or ever thinking about wanting to play a game from a few years ago again has always sort of hung over a lot of its pieces.
You mix that with the general gamer mindset of dying for big corporations to prove thyself and this piece being written as it is isn’t as much of a surprise that this model is “the dream” since it’s the least amount of thought put into if you have a game or not, regardless of how good or bad a value it is for the player. So of course an even more walled garden is going to seem “easier and cooler” to someone that position because their life is built around consuming whatever the corporate gods have told everyone they must consume this month and then moving on.
Thinking as little as possible about what we consume beyond being hyped to obtain it is like the general ur-goal for lots of corporations, and they’re really good at pulling that off so I mean no wonder the author feels their only choices in life are either being spoonfed games or doom-scrolling on Twitter.*
You’re going to see a lot more movement on this now because of Nintendo’s “success” with limited digital releases where people were angry with Nintendo for 12 hours and then resumed dumping $$$$ into Fire Emblem Heroes/etc.
Very very distant but my blind adoration of anything related to SNK forces me to point out how in 1990 SNK had a memory card you could pop into a Neo Geo arcade cabinet to save your progress and then put that same memory card into any other Neo Geo arcade cabinet or home system to pick up where you left off.
*Social media’s the thing that already pulled off removing all thought from interaction a long time ago but that’s whole other thread.
Having picked up the $1/3 month Xbox Gamepass and dealing with the innumerable, exciting ways it decides to fuck up (local/cloud save fuckery in Ori, arbitrary connection loss, slowing my PC to a crawl, half of the games I try crashing on first launch while Xbox tries to authorize selling my data to the Frostpunk devs or whoever), I personally am content to hold out on subscription services for my games beyond being a glorified demo library.
