When maxing out the damage stat just makes your game trivially easy.
Stat systems are hard and prone to optimization problems. But c’mon, you at least gotta test the glass cannon build that you know everyone’s gonna try first.
When the game is such a precious labour of love, so obviously cared for, and constantly improved, that there’s no way the dev has any time left for gaming.
Started the Lies of P: Overture DLC. Rough beginning, getting back into the groove, some bad enemies, that culminated in an absolutely terrible boss fight. Just complete garbage.
You’re stuck in a tiny arena, with a big ass monster, and a terrible camera. You constantly get shoved around, into the walls, clipping halfway into the boss, because of terrible hitboxes, just living life. Half the time I died and couldn’t even see my character, so I had no idea what my mistake was. Did I mistime my block? Or maybe the last block sent me reeling, and I couldn’t react in time? Or maybe I was just on the ground because the hit before that knocked me down? Nobody knows, not even the boss, because his face is inside the wall.
It’s been getting better since then, the next two bosses weren’t as bad, the second one might even be fun with a few tweaks, and the fourth (which I just beat last night) was actually pretty good. I hope it continues like this, and doesn’t go back to the atrocious start.
As much as I absolutely love Lies of P, I've been holding off since I've been hearing about a lot of bugs. Sounds like I maybe need to wait for another patch, unless the patch they released a week or two ago is the only one.
Performance felt a bit choppy at times (need to activate an FPS overlay again to check for drops), but otherwise no bugs as far as I could tell. It’s just that I think the first boss is terribly designed, and I don’t know if stuff like that would get fixed in a patch.
That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.
I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.
Maybe it says more about me than about game pass, but even at 5€ a month it would be significantly more money than I spend on games every year.
Not that I couldn’t afford it, but I mostly play games that are at least 5 to 10 years old, either on second-hand physical copies or heavily discounted sales/keyshops. The most recent game I’ve bought is Elden Ring, even then only recently because I found a cheap physical copy.
Gamepass is a super-obvious telegraphed trap for enshittification. Offer a good value (it is, for the time being), get people dependent on it, then pull the rug out.
It’s the business model that shareholders love and seems to be fairly ubiquitous. Eventually these corporations undergo trial by anti trust as their influence becomes increasingly toxic e.g. Google. The concentration of power into the hands of a few people is a problem with large hierarchies generally, ordinary people end up doing whacky stuff on the whim of someone that you never meet or know in any meaningful way.
The consequences so far have been a warm feeling on hearing the news but I’m starting to doubt that feeling. Shawty, are they playing me like a fiddle?
The first few levels of Pirate’s Life are fantastic imo. Especially that first one when you’re going through the cave and listening to the voiceover… I got chills when I first played it. It was just really fun for me and I can’t really explain why. I liked how they got the original voices to record some new lines for the quest/level too.
And I really like the “DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES” guy.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.
Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?
I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.
I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that's not the case.
I wouldn't consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren't the same thing.
Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don't like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren't full physical releases. It plays Nintendo's game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.
Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.
And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.
Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can't resell or download without servers).
There is a warning on the box for the two that don't include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don't particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.
I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they've done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.
Still working through the Dishonoreds. Almost done with 2 and I’m enjoying it WAYY more than I did back when it came out (and I gave up after 90 minutes).
I would like to get back into Vic3 since I’m hearing lots of good things about 1.9 and the new DLC, but I tend to fizzle out of every Paradox game after 3 hours. Maybe that will change this time?
Since getting an Anbernic something and really liking it, I’ve been trying to use my SteamDeck more but it’s just so not nice to hold or use for more than 30-45 minutes. Alas, I’ve been playing WarGroove (badly) on it.
Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that’s no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I’ve seen. If you’re not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It’s a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can’t squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
Sony has to make a Spiderman movie every few years even though DVDs of the old ones are still being sold, but Ubisoft can just delete games forever and they can never be played again.
Pretty sure it was so publishers (printing press owners) could have a guaranteed profit. Those two things (publisher and artist profits) were correlated at the time. Not so much anymore. Streaming/subscription mentality is like planned obsolescence for IP.
Everything being said on both sides in those screenshots doesn’t really mean much to me without data to show it’s actually the case.
My personal feeling is that I don’t care to own most games in the first place and would be happy getting them all from the library the same way I do with books. Without Gamepass I wouldn’t have played things like Payday 3 or Grounded in the first place because I won’t purchase them. The alternative for me is piracy.
I'm working on Diablo 4 Season 9. I wasn't hearing great things about this season at first, so I held off for a few days until some patches came out, but I have to admit, I'm kind of having fun so far. I have an actual reason to do nightmare dungeons again, and personally, I kinda like the reliquary cosmetics this time around. I'm going with a Druid build, which is a class I honestly haven't touched since season 1, and it's not too bad so far.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne