Putting the game out to pasture after years of neglect… Sad that they’ll never restore the actual game to its pre-matchmaking glory days. Hopefully this will result in a proper vanilla experience, but it’s pretty painful that the actual game (which will always attract the most players) is being left to rot like this.
Look into TF2 Classic. It’s essentially ~2011 tf2 with just a few different items and game modes. No stupid hats, manageable and balanced weapons. I love it! Been playing for years now with no bot issues. I believe it will be added to the official steam store sometime soon
Yeah I’ve touched both TF2 Classic and Open Fortress in the past. They’re certainly better than post-2016 TF2, but a) they have very low player-counts, and b) they’re definitely not trying to be vanilla TF2. Each has their own unique vision and balance.
edit: Okay I played TF2 Classic for a couple hours last night and actually it does feel a lot like the good old days. A couple of the new weapons feel either over- or under-tuned (namely the Heavy’s AA cannon is crazy strong while the Demo’s TNT feels pretty bad), but having such a manageable amount of alternatives keeps each class pretty grounded. One of my complaints about modern TF2 is how almost every class can be played so differently – it’s good for player freedom, but bad for instantly recognizing what you’re up against.
I believe it will be added to the official steam store sometime soon
Assuming nothing explodes, yes. The devs have confirmed they’re working on porting TF2C to use the newly-released codebase and plan to release on Steam now that they’re legally allowed to do so.
Might not be “soon” though. I suspect porting will take a lot of work.
I think it’s a pretty good deal. As a dad who has limited amount of time to play, I’ve had an Xbox for 16 months and bought it with game pass.
In that time I’ve played > 50 games and played about 15 of them to the credits.
In that time I’ve not actually bought a game. At the new price of $20 is have paid $320 which is the cost of about 5 or 6 games, Maybe 10 or a 11 if I’d aimed for sales.
I mean console games are always more expensive. There’s always something amusing about getting about 20 good games for five bucks on PC. Also epic games is still trying to bribe us with free games.
What drivers issues, don’t consoles require just as many updates? I distinctly remember console update taking upwards of a half an hour to install like 300Mb. Refusing to update would log you out and disable digitally purchased games. It often killed the mood when I just wanted to play some games after work, the steam deck filled that spot nicely.
Besides I use Linux so my drivers are built in and updates are unintrusive and take no time to apply. I have it set to remind me once a month, I get a little icon in the taskbar and I apply them before shutting down. It takes like two minutes.
I’m not judging if you like console but modern consoles are just as annoying as any other internet appliances. They need updates, they need regular Internet access to work, they can’t really do anything else, when it shits the bed your expected to throw it away get a new one, and often have tack on a monthly fee for basic features.
I need a computer so instead of splitting the cost between a computer that won’t be too slow to do any real work and a $500 game console I just get a more powerful computer and justify the cost with the money I’m saving.
That does sound like a pretty good deal. The thing is, it used to be a fantastic deal. And judging by the way they are acquiring multi billion studios and IPs left and right it’s clear as daylight that they want to monopolize the market and keep the subscription model for a long time, which means the deal will get ever worse. So yeah, this pricing change was definitely expected.
I know right. I get about an hour a day and was quite shocked as I just went back through my achievements to see how much I’d actually played in that time.
and it’ll require some crazy grip that makes the player look like they’re having a seizure, while slamming their heads into the p2 controller dpad to cause a buffer overflow.
@PerogiBoi@jherazob it would be interesting but require a lot of development to make sure the NPCs either didn’t know about spoiler information which may break the plot or don’t just hallucinate answers, which may mislead the player.
“How do you get through the haunted forest?” “You need x item to get through the haunted forest” “are you sure?” “Yes thats how heros get through the forest” the item in question doesn’t even exist in the game or has no bearing on the quest.
You might be interested in inworld.ai/origins , a detective game where all the characters can be interviewed in natural language and respond with AI. They seem to be doing a pretty good job so far
@Ferk@jherazob@PerogiBoi good point, unreliable narrator is one thing, but could harm game enjoyment especially if it’s unintended or harmful. It’s one thing to retell the history of a region with a bias or mis-remembering events, or characters lying because it’s their nature to lie “evil character” but it would get annoying if every character could convincingly just make up unhelpful rubbish, or spoil a plot twist in the game.
@Ferk@jherazob@PerogiBoi I’m not arguing against LLM or conversational AI in games, it could really breathe life into a game if your choices really could have organic responses, but these tools have a lot of pitfalls that scripted responses don’t have, and the dev team will need to be aware of it to not have unintended consequences.
Such AI integration will be separated into categories of “pre-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools during development” (e.g., using DALL-E for in-game images) and “live-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools while the game is running” (e.g., using Nvidia’s AI-powered NPC technology).
Both are covered by the policies the article talks about, and both were arguably against the rules previously
I agree. I am not a game dev, but I have considered making a game before. I do have programming experience. I just started a Godot tutorial today.
The tutorial focused on how to use the interface for the most part. I will not continue the tutorial I was using as it was video, and I really prefer to read. I’ll see if No Starch Press has a book. I typically like the books they publish.
Update It does not look like they have a Godot book. I will keep looking for one.
OG Xbox - nVidia GPU - never gets a price cut and is discontinued almost immediately after 360 releases (with an AMD GPU from which MS never looked back at nVidia)
PS3 - nVidia GPU - Only got small price cuts very late, discontinued almost immediately after PS4 release (with an AMD GPU from which Sony never looked back at nVidia)
Switch - nVidia SoC - never got a real price cut either (though Switch2 is also an nVidia SoC)
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
I just recently bought a PS4 for $150. So being able to play most modern games (with the exception of any new games 2025 or later) is a pretty good deal :)
Yeah, I’m planning to get a PS4 or maybe PS4 Pro as well. It’s a great deal considering the large library of games, many of which can be bought physically for relatively cheap.
arstechnica.com
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