Huh, haven’t heard of Bezelbub mod, I’ll have to check if its compatible with DevilutionX the open source reimplementation of Diablo 1. I played DevilutionX on my steamdeck, but got stuck in beginning of nightmare as my character wasn’t powerful enough to continue.
It looks so good, and the music is great, and story is apparently fantastic, but I just can not get the hang of the counter/block mechanic in combats, and without it the battles are pretty much impossible.
I came to depend less on the visual cues which are often deceptive and more on the audio ones or counting in my head for dodges/parries. Also invest heavily (basically all your points) into defense/vitality which makes Dodge/Parry misses much more forgiving.
Eventually, even if you only do a smattering of side quests/areas, you’ll get powerful enough to basically ignore the timing mechanics altogether.
Also set it on story mode + auto QTEs. I did that on my first playthrough and had absolutely no regrets. The mechanics of the game are definitely secondary to the experience of the story.
Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.
They didn’t sneak anything and they never will. Looked into it deeply. They used AI assets as placeholders during development. But everything in the shipped game is human-made. No further use of generative AI is expected, since the game awards controversy the company’s management published a statement of banning AI use entirely in their company.
The whole controversy around indie game awards was also blown beyond proportions. A company used a new technology at a time when the tech was new and the debate around it’s use was still inmature. Then dismissed it for it was not good enough. They failed at quality assurance and a couple of textures weren’t deleted. They replaced them as soon at they found out. By all intents and purposes, this controversy does not qualify sandfall as an AI using company, and to affirm so is ignorant of the context of all that went down in reality.
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game
That’s the point. They didn’t thought it was OK and didn’t.
They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
That is exactly what they did, any texture left in the first version of the game was a mistake that was promptly fixed as soon as they noticed it. We have the advantage of judging four years later with new info something they did back then and have since corrected. Ethical considerations must include intent and context, and here there was definitely no intent to harm.
I found it rough near the start, but it gets a lot easier as you go on, once you get more of a feel for when attacks are coming. Eventually you’ll be dodging things you’ve never seen before just on instinct.
Dodges are a lot easier than parries, even if you don’t get the extra AP from it. Fights last a bit longer, but you can definitely plough through most of it even with bad timing. Explore thoroughly in act 1, otherwise you’ll probably be underlevelled for the last boss there. Not really any need to grind mindlessly, but you can if you really need the extra levels.
I haven’t played since I beat it. But I did look into this after I did…
In general, every time the screen zooms in, you need to act. What type is something you learn, but that cuts down on the timing aspect There are also audio queues, like a sort of woosh effect. I don’t play a lot of fast response games like this, so I never noticed until it was pointed out.
I’m still bitter at Steam for taking a bunch of my single-player games off me that I’d already paid for when I moved to another country, and refusing to refund me because I’d already played 10 hours. Also the support guy treated me like I was a criminal for even trying.
There was a time when the swastika was not allowed to be shown in games because of a law in Germany, causing Wolfenstein (the uncencored version) to be banned. Maybe the country in question has similar laws?
That only made it so that you couldn’t buy games with symbols like the swastika. I used to live abroad and moved back to germany and kept all my games.
Some games are region-locked because the localisation is done by building another binary, Fallouts were like that, and some other I can’t remember, maybe it was this
I too am afraid to change region because Valve is very opaque in how they change availability, and there definitely were precedents of games not just being delisted but still available if you have them, but also disappearing completely from you library
I suspect Germany was the reason Kane and Lynch 1/2 was so heavily censored. They even got a bright orange bulletin on the Steam store page claiming that German citizens were unable to purchase or play the game.
Some countries have huge taxes on entertainment while others have nearly none. I’d guess he moved to a county with a higher tax rate and Valve can’t just have people using a VPN to circumvent their local taxes. Valve is left without a way to determine where you were when you’d purchased the game so they geo lock the titles to where you purchased them.
I’d love to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a diverse group of real people and share an adventure together, but have no friends who enjoy games that aren’t mindless slop.
Same with other slow-burn games like Project Zomboid and other survival/crafting games.
I learned to do slop to hang out with others, I even got good at slop like Rivals just to keep social contact alive. But I can’t drag anyone into a game that doesn’t have 2-minute matches filled with flashing lights and colors and gambling mini-games.
I’m in this boat with you. A few months ago I restarted my Valheim server for friends… And only one person joined me, for all of about 30 minutes. I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a Zomboid server, too, but I know it will be the same. We’ll play as a group maybe twice, and that will be it.
I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.
I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.
I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a server where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order high level gear from discord bots in chat.
Been having a lot of fun with the Exo Rally demo. You go rally raiding in a big six-wheeled sci-fi rover with RCS thrusters, but it's absolutely still leaning towards the sim end of things so you'd better be conscious of the terrain and take good care of your vehicle. The rally raid format (meaning there's not a defined course, just a series of checkpoints you have to reach by whatever route you choose) gives it a layer of strategy too, as you get a limited window of time to survey the stage with a drone before you drive. The demo only has one area and one type of rover at the moment, but the area is pretty big and there are three challenges with different routes each day so there's actually heaps to do given that it's a demo
On a much less serious note, RV There Yet with friends has been really entertaining. Drive your somewhat ramshackle RV across some progressively sillier and sillier terrain, nailing bits back together whenever you launch it off a big drop or a bear decides you have lost vehicle privileges
Heard all the good things about Disco Elysium and found it on sale for the Steam Deck… Could not stand playing a character with traumatic brain injury. I thought I did something wrong generating the character, no, fanbase assures me that’s the way it’s supposed to be… Refunded it in less than an hour.
It was marketed as a game, when really it’s an interactive novel. If you don’t like that kind of experience, you won’t like it.
(But as far as novels go, it was one of the best, the story continues to open up paths and deep-dives into lore and philosophy branching ever deeper and further, while telling a story of personal tragedy.)
This was one I loved, but it wasn’t at all what I expected when I read the Steam blurb. “Be the kind of cop you want to be” or some such nonsense.
But, yeah, it’s basically an existential novel masquerading as a game, and if you don’t like (or at least find it interesting) spending time as the protagonist, then it makes sense to be a hard pass.
Diablo III and IV don’t have a monopoly on the genre. There’s Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the Borderlands games, all playable offline, even in multiplayer. They’re not exactly Diablo, but you’ll hardly get closer than Grim Dawn, and there’s no reason you need to be married to the Diablo IP anyway. That kind of brand stickiness is how you get taken advantage of.
Personally, when something like that doesn’t respect my values, I’m not even finding myself tempted by them these days. Oh, it’s always online? It’s dead to me. There’s a deluge of other stuff to play, including games that are similar but respect my values.
I've played a lot of ARPGs and every one of them has their different flavors. But, I'm a type that wants a specific flavor and trying other flavors just makes me feel like it's not good enough. It's kind of like it's a discount version of that flavor I like. I'm playing a game that's inspired by the game that defined the genre. Just to expand a little, I am not trying to say that the games mentioned are terrible. I've touched upon Grim Dawn and Titan a few times.
But a lot of the time, my mood and feeling always darts for Diablo.
I feel that, Im a huge diablo fan but 4 was incredibly disappointing. FWIW i think path of exile gets the closest to the formula, I’ve also had a lot of fun with early access in poe2
I’m in a similar boat. I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but it looks like some of the old D2 devs are now working on Darkhaven. It’s not out yet, but there’s hope!
I’m a very recent fan of loot games, and I only briefly tried Torchlight 1 as more of an academic exercise to see how the genre evolved over time. There was some special sauce that I observed starting around Borderlands 3 or Pre-Sequel (that I suspect originated in Diablo 3) around class design that was still absent from Torchlight. Other than that, I didn’t form much of an opinion on it.
I’d love to play games like Fortnight, PUBG, and League of Legends (I know, don’t judge me), but they don’t work on Linux, so they’re just a no-go for me. I used to play GTA V Online, but they added kernel anticheat to that too, and now I don’t play that anymore.
I have Windows, but I’m not booting into another partition just to play a game. I use it for compiling my software for Windows users, and that’s already too much of a pain in the ass. I cannot stand Windows. It’s a bloated mess, and I don’t understand how anyone gets any actual work done on it. Just navigating it feels like a chore.
I can’t even play Apex anymore because EA decided Linux players cheat, and therefore, must be categorically banned from playing. All they did was turn off that switch for Proton/WINE support.
didn’t know they added kernel anticheat to gta online, thought they just disallowed linux players. i had 5k hours on it, didn’t really play anything else for almost 10 years. dropped it entirely that day because it’s not worth using a worse OS, and turns out single player is more fun anyway with mods. will also pirate gta 6 and play it without windblows, suck my shrimp rockstar.
I’ve started playing Chrono Ark, a roguelike deckbuilder I’ve heard a lot of good things about. So far I’ve played something like 3 runs, so only just begun. It’s fun so far, it’s not completely reinventing the genre or anything but each run has been fun and the upgrades seem varied enough.
I’ve also heard good things about the story, and it does involve time travel to play into the looping roguelike nature in a seamless way, but that’s about all I’ve been able to glean from it so far. I’m looking forward to finding out more.
If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.
it’s often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It’s not just that it’s dificult and it costs money, but it’s not preferred because investors abhor risks.
Isn’t this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.
I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).
They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.
Their approach feels like how lot of companies are currently focusing on AI to market to investors and AI data centers directly, and ignoring what consumers want assuming their opinions are of little relevance. Like how Microsoft doesn’t care if people dont want copilot, and keeps talking up the corporate side with the assumption that they know people will use Microsoft no matter what.
Which is much like Epic with them focusing more on giving money to publishers to lock up titles in the past like Final Fantasy 7 Remake from Square Enix over concerning themselves with the demographic of people buying the product.
Its not a consumer focused business model, because the idea of consumers not buying it is impossible to comprehend. Their headlines never seem to be around how its better for the consumer and the benefits to using them over the competition.
Epic approach is the typical venture capitalist run company approach of running at loss then once they get market share start jacking up the prices.
Can’t really trust a company until they are actually profitable with a functioning sustainable business model. We’ve seen it time and time again where even Facebook launched without ads and look at it now.
If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.
There’s an argument for using these services in the early stages because they often operate at a loss in the hope that they will secure a monopoly in the future. The trick is to immediately abandon them when they jack the price up. I recently heard that in the food delivery space virtually no one is turning a profit.
Even worse, it’s costing the food places you order from money. We have a lot of restaurants here that will give you free stuff if you do not use Thuisbezorgd which is owned by Just Eat Takeaway. They also own the American Grubhub since 2021 and are also active in the UK, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.
He literally said Epic’s launcher/store is ready as is, doesn’t need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn’t exist on Linux) and if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
I don’t understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works ™ ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unlikely better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
Same here. I get nauseous playing most first person games so I miss out on a lot. The only thing that sometimes helps is if the game lets you slow down the camera movement.
I’ve heard supposedly that sitting back further away from the monitor helps with motion sickness, so if you have some sort of TV screen that you could hook up the game to, that might work?
My issue was, I did not feel the expected experience of “Each loop, you learn something new.” It was more like, every 7 loops, I might get into the thing I was repeatedly trying to enter; and then it might just be a bunch of random ancient messages that don’t teach me anything. On top of that, I really hated the ship controls, especially when they veer AWAY from the autopilot path to pull me directly into the sun. If the game had been remade without any physics system, and simple direct puzzle mechanics, I might’ve enjoyed it more.
Yah I keep hearing fantastic things about the game, but I can’t connect with the “looping” mechanic and the weird ship/floating controls make it hard to want to keep doing the same planets or whatever again and again.
And I mean, I KEEP trying to get to a place where I’m like “Oh yah, here we go again, lets do this” like with other games and it’s just not happening. I can’t find the fun part. Maybe I’m too old.
I was going to say diablo4 as well. Diablo1 and 2 were some of my favorite games in my youth, but I just don’t want to give blizzard any more money. Path of exile 1 and 2 are good for the same itch.
Also any console exclusives. Bloodborne? Would love to play. Not buying a console. New Zelda and Mario? Same.
Diablo 2 was one of the best games of its type ever, and everything after has just been desperately trying to recapture that feeling. PoE was kind of close, but got a tad grindy. I like when a game just wraps up and you don’t have an endless slog at the end to do completion sub-goals.
I’ve mostly been playing Arknights Endfield. After a while I got my team set up and it’s become a bit too repetitive. For some reason I expected better from this one than other gachas but it ended up being as shallow and boring as all others.
I’ve played a bit of Deadlock, I couldn’t try any of the new characters tho. I’m trying to get back into Rabbit&Steel. I haven’t played in a while so it feels like starting from zero.
I’ve also tried the demo for Magenta Horizon. It’s not my style of game, it feels inspired a lot by Ninja Gaiden, which I can’t get into, but it seems really well made and the artstyle is pretty interesting.
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Aktywne