Arc Raiders feels confused about what it wants to be. It markets PVE vibes but plays like a rough PVP extraction shooter. No real story, constant camping, messy matchmaking, and punishing mechanics make the grind exhausting. The world has potential, but right now it’s more frustrating than fun, especially for solo or casual players.
I really want to like the game but haven’t got a single enjoyable match in like 20 I tried. The graphics and environmenta are stunning I just don’t get the gameplay. It’s like first 10 minutes of a battle royale over and over without the rest of it.
I couldn’t get into predecessor, the matches take too long and the grind for coins to get new characters is slow. As MOBAs go its not bad. But i wouldn’t say great. And i definitely enjoy ARC more.
Baldurs gate 3 is a given. Best game of the last 5 to 10 years for me. Hands down.
Skyrim is boring as hell. It was marvellous when it came out, but its been released so many times and feels too clunky theses days.
Cant comment on dark souls, those games are too hard for me.
Didnt know runescape dragonwilds was a thing but after a quick google i am very interested. :)
Not played killing floor or first descent so can’t comment.
Imho ARC is certainly not a masterpiece but i do feel like a lot of what you dislike about is comes down to your personal bad luck and experience. I have had a very different experience with it, where the PVE has been much more prevalent that the PVP. I dont really follow the story, i just like sneaking around and killing the ARC. I play duos with a few different friends and enjoy the occasional brush with a hostile player. For me it really is occasional. I would say 10% of my matches i get someone shooting at me. And only about half of those end with me dead.
But i fully accept that the same applies to me. My experience of the game is not yours. So i appreciate that my personal view doesn’t impact yours.
Steam has it tagged as a PvE game. I took a chance on it because of the PvE tag. I thought it would be like WOW where you would be able to opt not to PvP. I should have read the reviews before I bought it. Too late for a refund now.
You can tag it on the store page. If enough people do that, the tag shows on the page for everybody. If that happens with enough games, valve sometimes officially adopts the tag.
It’s clear you didn’t actually read the page, or check reviews, or check any of the communities, or do any basic research before buying the game. Your “complaints” can be summed up as “uninformed consumer”. What do you think an extraction shooter even is?
If this were a review on Steam I’d mark is as unhelpful and give it the 🤡 award.
Strongly disagree. The possibility that someone might at any time choose betrayal adds a lot to otherwise PvE lobbies. It is what creates the positive feelings when they freely choose cooperation. If it is just built into the game that they have to cooperate, it is emotionally meaningless. Having the emotional experience of trust and support from strangers is very powerful, and I think it’s a defining element of AR.
No. Even after taking friendly actions over, and over, and over, the matchmaking system will eventually match you with people that PvP. This game is rust lite. I soloed a bombadier, started looting, and heard someone walking up. Said don’t shoot, I can share this loot with you, and the guy killed my anyway. Best guns and gun mods gone. Begin grinding for new materials to craft new guns, mods, and level them up.
That or i got a fairly recent office PC that had an AMD 8700G and 32 GB of DDR5 on ebay for 400 bucks. Slapped in a 9060xt and its a sub 800 dollar build. Didn’t do enough research though and found out the 8700 only has 8 PCIE lanes even though bios and specs list x16. Oh well, it performs well enough for now.
Some friends at work started up a patient-gamer-style Pokémon book club. It’s been four months and we’re almost done Pokémon Black/White (which may sound impressive except that we started with Pokémon Black/White)
My point is: there’s basically an unlimited number of good games that run on old hardware. Not that retro Nintendo hardware is cheap these days, but if you’ve got some lying around…
Not an unreasonable suggestion, the list of Mac compatible emulators is really impressive. Pretty much everything supports M1 Macs, even cutting edge emulators like ShadPS4 and Ryubing (PS4 + Switch emulators)
Maybe $100/year? I prefer games without a “box price”, though I do make exceptions.
Most are free-to-play that specifically aren’t pay-to-win, and play them for years. I’ll also consider paying for DLC and/or “battle pass” systems in them if the content and bang-for-buck is worth it to me.
I think money is better spent on Humble Choice since you can buy months that interest you and skip those that don’t, and the games stay in your library. I prefer to spend money to be able to keep games than pay to rent newer ones.
This is a very terrible take. Arc Raiders has aggression based matchmaking. If you want to play PvE you can almost guarantee that. Play 10 games on a free loadout, shoot no one ever, defib a guy or bandage someone if you can, help them kill arc, extract peacefully. Tell the in-game survey you like it when you get out peacefully and tell it you hate it when you don’t get out because of pvp and you’ll super quickly find yourself essentially playing pve.
For the last two weeks I have played hundreds of rounds solo, talking in mic to anyone who walks by, and have been shot three times. In literally hundreds of slow to fast rounds, almost always a major map condition, Stella Montis or otherwise.
Most of your points are equally as bad, but like this alone is easily disproven.
I just need someone to remake TLoU Factions on a free to play multiplayer network. Genuinely baffled me that ND didn’t include it in the remake.
TLoU Factions is everything I want in a multiplayer PvP “Survival” game.
In Factions, your performance earns you “supplies” which you use to grow or shrink your base over 12 matches and “events” happen in which your performance over three matches is evaluated to again grow or shrink your base.
Every 12 matches, the base resets and you start again. But after a while you stop caring about the base (because all the achievements tied to it are unlocked) and you start playing for fun and the perk system allows for a lot of skill expression and niche crafting.
Players can naturally become ninjas with smoke bombs and shivs, or healers/gifters, snipers, brawlers etc. and the parts systems is balanced in such a way to provide a comeback for weaker players/teams where necessary but in a way that’s fair.
The game-to-game gameplay is the same though: 1) fight for map control and rotations of lockbox spawn points that contain crafting items for each of your teammates individually - centre one holds the most/rarest items; 2) craft items to help your battle - these persist on death after crafting; 3) Complete the team objective: eliminate the enemy team or capture their stronghold.
It’s the best fucking loop, I can’t really describe it and I really wish I didn’t need PS Plus to play it.
As you already have a Mac, have you looked into Crossover?
So far as I understand, the work that CodeWeavers do with it is the basis for what Valve have done with Proton, so it’s the closest you’ll get to Proton on macOS. I’ve seen people running RDR2 on Macs with it. It’s a reasonable outlay, but it could be a useful tool for running a whole bunch of Windows-only titles via Steam.
There is also Whisky, which is to all intents and purposes, a free version of Crossover, albeit (intentionally) a couple of Wine versions behind so as to not detract from what Crossover does. I’ve used Whisky a bunch to play Windows games on my M2 Macbook, and while it’s not been perfect, and will likely struggle with brand new, AAA games, older titles should work nicely.
Ultimately, I don’t really use my Mac for gaming these days because it’s a bit of a headache compared to just firing up my wife’s old PC that I’ve put Linux on. But I recognise I’m lucky enough to have that option.
the buttons on the switch and ps2, the asymmetry of the ps1 and switch, the logo on the ps4, and the lack of pixellation and strange proportions of the 360 and ps3. also the fact that only some of them have controllers depicted.
Sorry again, I know I responded below and not trying to just fight for now reason, but pointing out these different things you’re identifying that actually strongly suggest these aren’t AI, or aren’t indicators of AI or not either way.
For example, Switch asymmetry. This is how Switch directional and gamepad buttons look. It should be asymmetrical, and AI probably wouldn’t get that right like it is in the graphic. You can even see the color-distorted remainder of the “-” and “+” symbols above them, blurred to hell from terrible resizing.
Things like proportions and whether controllers are depicted are just choices either a human or an AI could make.
And by far the most obvious: many of the Pixels are not square, or misaligned with the grid pattern, and they also have wildly different sizes on some of the consoles
Which is AI-generated? It looks to me like real pixel art (except the 360) very lazily resized in a non-nearest-neighbor fractional scale and anti-aliased to mush.
Sorry, none of this is a clear indicator of AI. The “latent noise” you refer to is perfectly consistent with compression and resizing artifacting and noise. Proportions are often off when making “chibi” icon-sized consoles, but notably, they are consistently or coherently off. Other features are strongly suggestive it isn’t AI. For example:
All of the controllers have consistent layouts, including the correct number and orientation of buttons, player indicators, etc (e.g., the Wii controllers).
Consistent diagonal step effects, even if blurred from poor resizing (see the PS4).
Consistent text for all system indicators that is legible without AI artifacting, even if blurred from poor resizing.
The fact that the 360 and PS3 (didn’t notice initially) are not even pixel art suggests they just grabbed random icons from the web, not ran them through AI generators.
Ok - Yes, Adobe does have insidiously integrated AI tools. But again, nothing you point to here is strongly indicative of AI, and again, just consistent with sloppy & lazy resizing (which you could just as likely see pre-2020, before AI). Adobe also has a very extensive stock library which may be where these came from.
There are some really hard to spot AI generated materials possible now, but the sloppy inconsistency here is - conversely - an indicator that they don’t care much what we do or don’t notice so wouldn’t be spending the time to generate something with all of the consistent details (see list above). Instead, the consistent details suggest human-created versions based on the real systems.
What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.
For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.
If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.
I don’t understand you defending ai art, but here, the extremely obvious odd coloring texturing the surface of the ps1 would be enough for anyone to notice, but the generation error in the top is proof. This smudge line is where the ai failed on its final pass, likely to do with clipskip or whatever crap open ai uses as this is clearly open ai’s image model.
Why are you defending ai art so hard, what do you get from defending a massive cooperation?
Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.
I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).
The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.
I for the life of me cannot believe that a nsfw account is arguing with me about confidence while not giving an inkling of evidence themselves. You know nothing of AI “art” and it shows.
Here is a ps3 i generated from chatgpt just now, it details every single thing you stated. The prompt was: “Generate me a Playstation 3 pixel art image”
If you aren’t willing to give even an inkling of proof to your claims, or even try to show proof when talking about jpeg errors then you have no grounds to stand on.
You are defending ai art, weather you realize it or not.
buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.
Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.
maybe i do then because i just keep staring and thinking “how in the world did anyone sign off on this mess”. if it’s not ai, that makes it even worse.
they’re ass because they’re inconsistent, have aliasing issues, are obviously stretched/squashed, are put against a noisy background, and in some cases are just wrong.
and no, if the name was not on it i would not assume that the ps4 was a ps4. it looks like a modem. and the 360 has a keyhole for some reason.
There’s also this project trying to get linux in a vm to run games on a mac(and also trying to install Linux on a mac, but I assume it might break macOS since bootcamp isn’t a thing anymore, so the vm route is probably the better option):
(I haven’t tried it since I don’t own a mac, just happened to find it when another friend who does have a mac was asking for similar advice to you previously, but he didn’t end up trying it either)
Oh and another option could be to try to find emulators that run on mac, and maybe play some older games exclusive to a platform you didn’t previously own, or that you missed playing at thier time of release. Or buy an older second hand console that has games you haven’t played before…
Fairly certain that Asahi doesn’t yet work with M4 chips, such as in the new mini. Or if it does, it’s not officially supported, so will be a generally poor experience. I mean, my M2 Macbook supports Asahi, and while it’s generally incredible what theyve been able to achieve, it’s still kinda stunted given how much software simply won’t run on that architecture.
From an colleague of mine, who bought an M1 Macbook Pro when they were new; he told me that there was a Wine fork (don’t know the name sadly) for Apple silicon which kinda worked with most (older) Steam games, not as nice as Proton on x86-64 Linux, but good enough for his game tastes. Don’t know if it’s still maintained or not…
and a lot of mac games that came out before apple silicon simply will not run. and ive had mostly poor results trying to run games with crossover and whisky.
your best bet is to stick with the limited selection of games that have native apple silicon releases. and with native releases on my m2 mac mini im still experiencing some pretty bad input lag.
some strategy games like rimworld and stellaris are good options.
I’d be interested to see how sales of the steam deck compare. Sure, it’s a pc not a console, but the whole thing is to bring pc gaming to console gamers so I’m interested in the comparison.
EDIT: based on a quick search, 4 million as of this time last year. I did not find anything more up to date than that. Looking that up made me realize that it would be nice if this chart had a date on it since two of the consoles in the chart are still in production.
I think people think it runs way fewer games than it does. I keep updating proton, etc, and like 99% of my games work. Hell, I have all my DS and Switch games on there.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne