Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoI am really tired of these "retro" look games.
In those days, the games looked pixelated because of the technical limitations of that era (like low res images and 256 colours) and not because the developers wanted to do that...

I'm very sure the devs of those days wanted to give the highest graphic quality they could achieve with the few technical resources they had.

You are right about why the games looked that way back then, but you completely ignore the fact that now these looks are "rediscovered" not as a technical fact or limitation or excuse, but as a style of choice or - like in this case - something to experiment with to achieve interesting results (*).
Nowadays, a look like that is very often a conscious decision, and those kinds of decision generally lead to the best results.
Just like there are still black-and-white movies being made - a conscious decision of style for various reasons, not necessarily to look like "back then".

You also strongly confuse graphical style with graphical quality.
Graphical quality is high if the art style is well-executed and consistent - "everything fits together".
It is rather objective and has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the amount of pixels or vertices on display.
There is no doubt Prodeus devs are going for the highest graphical quality they can achieve, most devs generally do.

Graphical style is something you can enjoy or - like you in this case - not.
But don't confuse your subjective taste with objective quality.
There are lots of styles that I don't enjoy, no matter how well done they are (e.g. I can't stand most anime, ugh).

* Not sure if I like this look myself, but it sure looks intriguing.
They are using 16-directional sprites afaik and IMO that reaches a level of 3D-detail where you might as well just use full 3D animated models to begin with. There are a few too little gaps for the imagination to fill out to work like 8-directional sprites do.
Personally, I rather look at sprites like they have in Ion Fury, the ones in Prodeus evoke something of an "uncanny valley" for me.

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Yeah, that trailer completely fails at delivering that tense System Shock atmosphere.
No idea who thought this music was a good idea.

It is hilarious, sure, but what are they trying to sell here?
System Shock or Serious Sam?

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Quoting: ShmerlI'm surprised their issue was some API integration. I guess achievements and such? Not something I really care about. It's one thing to rely on those APIs for multiplayer game and having trouble supporting multiple backends. Making a big deal out of it for a single player one and then pulling out of the store because of it, that sounds very misguided.

I'm also not fully buying it.
How hard can it be to implement achievements if you have already done it for another game (and GOG & Steam as well).
It's not like these APIs change a lot.

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Quoting: x_wingDoes anyone know which are the APIs that are required by GOG?

I'm assuming they are talking about APIs to interact with the platform features like achievements, game overlay, chat, etc.

I'd say multiplayer, matchmaking, etc. but I doubt that's the case for them.

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Quoting: GuestExcited to see what he does next.

Hoverboards.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf a game just requires you to run Steam in order to run in, what's the big deal? You open Steam, start your game, done. Big deal. I don't see the problem here.

Well, you just probably haven't run into it, so you think it's not a problem. I was on a train fairly recently (before lockdown) and it was a five hour journey. I opened Steam, I had no internet, went into offline mode, and then discovered, infuriatingly, that several of the games I wanted to play wouldn't start, because it had been months since I'd played them on that device, and I didn't have any internet to "prove" I owned them.

Do you really have to play the actual game to prove you own it?
I thought it was like Spotify, Deezer, etc. in that you need to be online like once a month or so and that applies to your entire library.

But I also never keep games around I don't play, always installing/uninstalling them as I need them so I wouldn't run into that problem anyway.

Quoting: scaineI won't go into the old "what if Steam goes under" argument, because I'm a realist and I don't think it's likely. Even if it happens, I have libraries on Humble, Itch and GOG, so it'll be a first-world problem no matter how much I lose.

That's never been an argument to begin with.
So what if I lost my entire library over night with no possibility whatsoever to save it beforehand (not gonna happen like that in any case, but let's assume...)?
Here's what will happen: The (very, very, very few) games I have an interest in playing again, I'll just buy again - in case I have the time for it, which is unlikely given my perpetually increasing backlog. Games aren't expensive if you don't buy them in the dozens-per-month. Online libraries are not physical collections where you'd lose your nice display rack or anything like it.
Or I'll just sail the seven seas - given that I already gave a dev money for the game, I find that morally acceptable.

It would be an inconvenience of varying degrees, nothing that anyone should spend their time worrying about.

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The big thing I wonder about DRM is why they are doing it, if it supposedly doesn't work.
It might be a bit similar to overreactions to a pandemic - if the situation ends up under control, you can say "it worked! Everything is under control", but you could also say "See? Wasn't that bad, so all your measures wouldn't have been necessary".

There have definitely been cases where DRMs totally failed to do their job, cases where they succeeded very well and everything in-between I guess.

How much a game would've been pirated (or bought) without DRM is something only a time traveller could tell us.

Quoting: ShmerlIn my opinion DRM has no justification, it's simply unethical.

That may be a reason to you not to use DRM in your hypothetical project, but ethics in the end matter only as long as nothing more important is at stake, e.g. money.

You're also throwing all kinds of DRM in the same pot.
If a game just requires you to run Steam in order to run in, what's the big deal? You open Steam, start your game, done. Big deal. I don't see the problem here.

Of course, those Windows "kernel driver" things are a whole different subject, but that also goes into anti-cheating, etc.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: razing32Hmm , we seem to be getting a lot of adventure games lately :)
Though - what is up with the graphics - feels like they are all done in mspaint :(

I gotta agree with that.
The art style just seems... sluggish? As in, the artist is just starting to learn the craft and maybe shouldn't be doing an entire game just yet.

Harsh. :grin:

The style is quite simple and cartoonish, but there are worse looking games out there. And some of them are excellent.

Sure, I also didn't mean all of the art. The backgrounds, for example, look very good.
What doesn't work are the characters, the faces, the animations, the anatomy - I've seen these mistakes a lot during my time as a student & teacher at a game dev school. I'm not an artist, myself, but of course saw a lot of artists-in-learning and the "not quite getting human anatomy & movement right" is really exemplary here. Just pause the video at 1:17, for example and look at it - the position of the arm & hand (seems like it's coming out of his stomach), the perspective, the lighting, none of it really fits.
Humans are very hard to get right as an artist, especially in 2D. And being humans ourselves, we just tend to notice mistakes in our depiction a lot ;)
This isn't a style decision, either - except if you assume the characters don't fit in with the rest on purpose, which would be odd to say the least. I think it is really just lack of experience of an otherwise promising artist.

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Quoting: razing32Hmm , we seem to be getting a lot of adventure games lately :)
Though - what is up with the graphics - feels like they are all done in mspaint :(

I gotta agree with that.
The art style just seems... sluggish? As in, the artist is just starting to learn the craft and maybe shouldn't be doing an entire game just yet.

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Quoting: mphuZ

..how in relation to DRM-free gaming that "98-99% of players don't care"

But it's true. Does anyone disagree?

Nobody in their right mind would disagree with that.
People care about being able to play games. In what form exactly isn't really important. Convenience trumps all.

The 10% were very obviously highly inflated expectations, the dev didn't do their research then.
I also bought the game and loved it - but like others, I quickly switched from the linux native version to the proton one, it just ran that much better.
Which is to be expected given the dev has shown no interest whatsoever in dealing with the linux-specific problems. And, well, that was not the latest version of Unreal, and Unreal is known to now have the best linux support out of the box to put it mildly.

Dev is doing the right thing here. They have no investment in either DRM-free-ideologies or linux, are a very small team, etc.
I'm not too surprised that the work of maintaining a GOG presence isn't worth it to them.

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