If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.
That’s right, it’s exactly what I think, you are one way or another helping a game to be known. The same strategy people talked about why Microsoft don’t shut every Office cracker, they want normal people to use it and get used to it, so companies will use it too, eventually, and they can audit some IT companies, charge a hell amount of money if they use pirated software.
I agree with everything, but I’ll still pirate AAA games, just for the experience. I classify publishers/developers companies like this:
Companies it doesn’t even worth playing to avoid indirect marketing: Ubisoft, EA
Companies that at least it worth pirating: Activistion, Rockstar, etc…
Let’s be honest, the games are good, probably made by some people who love what they were doing, but then it was put behind a shitty business model, because developers are just trying to make a living while executives trying to harvest all the money.
I think as the time goes, developers will start making their choices better, leave predatory companies, start or join indie companies, and I, at the same time, will migrate to a more indie focused gaming.
You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.
As long as it’s communicated amongst the participants. Yes! If anyone could just pause it because they wanna go see a movie now or make a baby? NO!
Solution: everyone in a sessions needs to enable this. So a friends-group can actually take a break for a tinkle. Or that everyone has to enter the menu or such and then the game pauses.
I’m hooked on Nightreign right now. It would be pretty nice if there was a special pause ping you could do that paused the game if the other two players agreed with reply pings.
Pausing in StarCraft allowed any player to pause, and any player to unpause. Additionally, each player could only pause a finite number of times (like 5 per game). I think this could work in nightreign.
The hard part is that there’s no chat in nightreign, so someone will pause and you have no idea if it’s legit or they’re just griefing.
Only thing I’ve been running personally has been Reno DX, to add HDR while not departing from the original look. Nice to cleanup all the colour banding on the dynamic lights in dark areas, such as the constant spotlight on Hornet. And yes, it works just fine through Proton, although I had to install it with a prepped zip file from some Reddit thread.
Here’s my last judge fight if you want to see the results (note that YT only offers HDR output on HDR compatible displays).
I installed one that gives me 1000 rosaries when I press f3. I came to the conclusion that being able to buy things was more about grinding than anything else, and I didn’t enjoy it.
Technically cheating I guess but I don’t think it really makes the game any easier.
I might not be as far (just past act 1), but I haven’t felt the need to grind rosaries (yet). A bunch of times I’d be exploring for an hour and notice I have like 500+ rosaries, and then I get them made into strands till I have to spend them. I don’t think I’ve seen anything on sale for more than 800 rosaries, Maybe it’s different later in the game but at least in the beginning of the game, it doesn’t feel like a chore.
I suppose my experience may be different than others, I’m at the tail end of Act 3 and I have yet to grind for rosaries or shards. I remember people saying I’d need to do that, and I never have.
I do the shard grind but that’s because I love messing around with the tools. Luckily I can farm 500-1000 rosaries relatively quickly and that lets me buy a full stock of shards and a backup of consumables if I do 1k
There’s about 3 different “no double-damage” mods that I’ve tried, for a boss I just couldn’t be assed to try legit, anymore. They all seemed to work, fine.
There was a “respawn outside the boss room, instead of at a bench” mod that I installed for a particular boss (you can probably guess), but I can’t really speak about whether it works, cause I happened to beat it on the next try after installing.
There was an “infinite shards” mod I tried, but it didn’t work at all, and I didn’t see any others, so be wary of that one.
Last Judge runback didn’t really bother me. Just sprint straight out, with a few properly-timed jumps, and you skip every enemy and reach the boss in about 30 seconds.
Bilewater was nonsense, even after learning how to run it perfectly. And I LIKE Bilewater, as an area.
I’ve been playing 7 remake a bit and I know a lot of additions were meant to flesh out the world in what’s actually a really small chunk of the original game. But I found a lot of the additions, though not all, to feel more like unnecessary padding than good fleshing out.
I’d like to have a mod where I could play through the game as the knight and use the bad system from the first game. Just as a way to play it again for fun.
Is it really that bad? I don’t really play metroidvanias, but thought I’d give it a try and have really being enjoying it. You have to go in with the expectation that a lot of fights might take 5-10 tries to learn all the mechanics and build muscle memory. It’s a hard game, but also very rewarding when you progress precisely because it doesn’t spoon-feed you victories.
Also, IIRC, they’ve already released a few patches to tone down the difficulty in some of the tougher spots.
I’m definitely overstating for effect, but yeah, to me, the game very much feels like they wanted to cater to the inhuman speedrunning and challenge running crowd from Hollow Knight, and made things unreasonable for causal/average gamers.
Maybe my bias is in having played and loved Hollow Knight first, but I NEVER felt like I was being given an unreasonable challenge in Hollow Knight. And Hollow Knight, by the late and post game, is HARD. They just managed to balance the difficulty curve so masterfully, that every escalation felt natural, even exciting.
Silksong, overall, did NOT do this for me. The early game felt obnoxiously punishing, the mid-game completely fell off a cliff into easy, once you get a handful of key upgrades, and the late game just varied all across the spectrum.
Come on now, it’s fine to be opinionated on the matter but inciting an unnecessary argument doesn’t do any good. Mods are a great feature and allow many people to get even more enjoyment out of an incredible game.
Many people, myself included, think that Silksong is not balanced as well as it could be.
Anyway, yes there are quite a few mods that I’ve found so far. Balancing out some of the more egregious design choices, and adding some general quality of life changes and time savers makes this game so much more enjoyable in my opinion. The challenge is still there, the game just feels much less like it’s trying to force you to be a masochist.
Also, there are purely cosmetic mods as well for people who just enjoy a different look.
I’m not far enough in Silksong to give an opinion, but: Had this happen with Stellar Blade. I was playing through, actually started to enjoy the story, and it has a series of about 3 bosses at the end, interspersed with cutscenes (not fought in a row, just progressively harder). And they were awesome - challenging, but awesome. I felt rewarded for recognizing the full combo strings and parrying, as well as recognizing opportunities to get attacks in.
I get to the final boss (the “Take hand” one), and it’s a brick wall. Epic and all, but feels like a leap in difficulty for an already-tough game. I keep at it, trying my best, but it gets no easier. It’s also an unsatisfying runback after often barely getting far into the fight. Finally, having not needed it all game, I switch to the game’s built-in easy mode. Even then, it’s a challenge, and I lose if I’m not paying attention to the attacks! But, I can at least recover from those failures, and try to learn more in one go. From then, I’m eventually able to get through and see the conclusion to the story. I recognize I do not hold bragging rights to that final boss, and I’m fine with that. I liked getting to see the ending cutscene, I exhibited as much patience as I could give with the bosses…but any more than that, and I would’ve started to hate the game.
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
RDR is €50 full price and includes all dlcs, €30 atm in autumn sale. AAA games are priced between 60-90 these days. What do you mean it’s full AAA priced
In my head anything above ~40 eur is basically AAA pricing. Personally, I’m not going to acclimate to their new prices being double that. If it’s above 40 it basically doesn’t exist to me.
I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don’t give a fuck (also the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between ethics and morality and insist whatever they do is Good so it is even less productive than slamming my hand in a cabinet).
But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don’t play the games. Because “Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say “Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is going to encourage people who don’t know how/don’t care to pirate things to buy it (and people are going to think you are an obnoxious edgelord).
And yeah, I’ll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective… not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don’t actually care enough to follow indie devs.
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Aktywne