Difficulty settings are wack. Normal is too easy and hard is way too hard. The slider literally goes from 1x/1x damage taken/damage dealt to 3x/0.6!
This was my only real complaint, other than them taking the noise cue away from lockpicking! I’ve really been itching for an elderscolls game with modern graphics and QOL so I’m super happy.
As for the lockpicking I learned something recently from a video and now I never break a pick. I can’t believe I never knew this:
Basically when you hit one tumbler there are the 3 drop speeds right? You push it up and it falls either slow, med, or quick. They “switch” between those three speeds when the tumbler falls back to the starting position.
If you hit a tumbler up and HOLD up (I’m on controller), or whatever key is up, then the tumbler will bounce slightly in the fully raised position. When it’s like this it will be remaining in the “fall speed” from when you first triggered it. We want it to be the slow fall speed so basically while it’s bouncing if you see any spring between “bounces” it’s too fast, let it fall to the starting position and try again.
If it’s bouncing and you can barely see any movement at all let alone any spring then it’s in the slow position, that’s what we want. When it’s like that watch the lockpick and when the lockpick is moving upwards trigger the lock with whatever the confim button is for you. It should always work!
As for the lockpicking I learned something recently from a video and now I never break a pick.
I noticed this myself today! At first I thought lockpicking was random and I broke almost all my lockpicks, but I noticed a subtle cue for when it’s going to lock in place. From what I understand the middle speed has a chance to work or break your lockpick, but the slowest speed is guaranteed to work.
other than them taking the noise cue away from lockpicking!
Noooo! I loved Oblivion’s lockpicking system. Got so good at it that one time I tried doing it with my eyes closed and was able to lockpick purely using the sounds. It was so fun and intuitive. Haven’t played the remaster yet but am sad to hear that they took those sounds away, lol.
Physical copies are kinda besides the point in terms of ownership and preservation. Just because you own the disk, doesn’t mean you have access to the software on it. DRM, as well as the laws that make it viable, have been around since well before media was sold digitally. Physical copies of the Crew are no more playable now than digital. If you want to be able to keep your games, you need to buy DRM-free, whether that limits you to digital-only or not.
On the other hand, if you want to actually own your games, we need to massively rework copyright law. The fact that a company can sell you a software licence, but add dozens of arbitrary restrictions on when, how and why you can use it is absurd, nonetheless the fact that its always non-transferable and revokable by the company for any reason. None of that should be legal.
Exactly a digital revolution is so needed for the sanity of humanity honestly. But speaking about that, there’s symptoms already that we somehow need to solve already… So yeah, not going to happen and tech giants continue to feast :(
PlanetSide 1, the MMOFPS that was the former record holder of “Most players in an online FPS battle,” which was eventually surpassed by PlanetSide 2.
In its heyday it was a fascinating sociology study.
During EU prime time, players would self-organize into squads of about 10 players. They would apply light pressure to the entire map simultaneously. Territorial gains would be made by attacking undefended bases.
During USA prime time, players would self-organize into platoons of about 30 players. They would press a few strategic locations with medium force. Territorial gains came from fixing operations (using a small force in an easy to defend location to keep a large population of opponents busy) and local numeric superiority at lightly defended bases.
During Chinese prime time, players would group up into a singular mass. Everyone just ran face first into the meatgrinder. No territorial gains were made.
I regularly play gw2 and in it there’s a mode called world-vs-world that’s a three way team “bigger” scale battle (bigger than 5v5 pvp) that often has hundreds of players in (I’m not sure exactly how many, I just looked it up but there’s little concrete information because it looks like the devs change it over time, but I’m guessing like 300 total players per map that often gets maxed and you have to queue for).
Players can spend a chunk of gold to enable a toggleable commander status tag on their entire account (you get 1 gold for base dailies, costs 300 gold for tag). In WvW, those commanders often lead larger scale pushes for claiming territory over a ranked “tournament” that ends and resets each month.
I’ve noticed it’s also an interesting sociology study, but from what I’ve seen, the Chinese commanders do coordinate and split up and do pincers and stuff. It seems like one big zerg isn’t as effective since yeah you’ll take what you go for no matter what, but it’s all about allocation of resources and fighting the actual battle… and that takes actual work, when a lot of people are just interested in farming out crafting materials, currencies, achievements, or other reasons. Which is fine, but part of me wants to see the game mode go 100% and see what it’s capable of.
Depending on time of day around the world and when people are awake or home from work, there are huge spikes in activity.
I never played much PlanetSide 2 because at the time my pc was a potato and I was still wrist deep into counter strike. Would those maps ever end? Or was it also like a perma-sisyphean timeless battle? Was there ever a winner?
In PlanetSide, there’s just one big map that never resets.
The team I played with would try to bring the front line to a bridge before logging off for the night. Contested bridges were notoriously difficult to cross, so you could count on no major territorial changes happening while you sleep. The zerg was content to snipe across the bridge all night, and when organized Ops resumed the next day, the bridge would simply be bypassed by mass airlift.
IIRC, there have been a few times when one of the three factions controlled the entire map, but it never lasted more than a few minutes. During the PlanetSide 2 beta test, one side came close to taking the entire map, but the whole game crashed because the entire population of all three factions was trying to pile into the same base at the same time. They eventually implemented a mechanic where if too many people were in the same place, the ones who arrived most recently would be teleported to an adjacent map tile.
Valve is in the business of selling PC games. Moving into a new market wouldn't be trivial, and Google has put up a lot of barriers to make it especially difficult for a third-party app store to challenge their monopoly.
They support games for Windows, Mac and Linux. And I’m sure they would support them for PS, Nintendo and Xbox if they weren’t created with explicit intention of not allowing that sort of thing. Android is the only market they could feasibly enter and choose not to.
Moving into a new market wouldn’t be trivial
No but it also wouldn’t be that difficult for a company with Valve’s resources, and would be extremely lucrative.
Google has put up a lot of barriers to make it especially difficult for a third-party app store to challenge their monopoly.
Why would you think that? Of course it would be difficult, it's a massive undertaking.
Amazon and Epic have both tried to launch their own Android storefronts. Neither one has been even remotely successful. Amazon will be shutting theirs down soon.
For the reason I mentioned in the OP. Because it’s been done before, several times. Including by Epic, with a fraction of Valve’s resources.
Amazon and Epic have both tried to launch their own Android storefronts
Everything I’ve read about the Amazon store indicates that it sucks on every level, for all parties.
The Epic Store is only a few months old. And they can’t even make a decent or profitable app for PC so I’d be very unsurprised if their mobile app is also trash.
4.5 You may not use Google Play to distribute or make available any Product that has a purpose that facilitates the distribution of software applications and games for use on Android devices outside of Google Play.
I’d wager the majority of Android users have never downloaded an application other than from the Google Play Store. Even among those who would try, a large amount of them would probably get scared off by the “unverified sources” popup Android gives you if you try to install an app in another manner.
That’s like saying Amazon has a “barrier” to online sales because they refuse to allow Target to sell products on their site for free. They’re competing services, why would they allow that?
I’d wager the majority of Android users have never downloaded an application other than from the Google Play Store.
Developers most often distribute software outside of official repos in Windows and MacOS, and they do so successfully.
It’s not that hard, you just follow the prompts on the screen.
The average person has never had to install Windows or MacOS, they buy a computer with it pre-installed. And they buy phones with Google Play pre-installed.
We’re not talking about installing an operating system. I’m not suggesting Steam create their own OS (although they’re also doing that). We’re talking about installing an app.
I’m saying it’s easier to sideload apps on Android than it is on Windows and MacOS, where it is the primary distribution method used by average people every day.
That's very much not true then. Have you ever tried to set up a third party store like F-Droid?
Android requires you to dig into the settings before you can install third party APKs, and gives you several big scary warnings about it. If you download an APK from the web browser, it will then prevent you from directly opening it, claiming it's to protect you from malware. Instead you have to open the file browser and find it in your downloads folder, then you can install it from there. Finally, it will give you even more big scary warnings about letting any app that isn't Google Play have permissions to install its own APKs.
I’ve installed them all. FDroid, Obtainium, Aurora, Accrescent, along with a slew of other sideloaded independent apps, on several devices. That’s not how it works.
If you sideload an app, a pop-up will ask if you want to enable the current app to install the new app and give the typical warning about malware that you’ll get on any OS (for good reason). You click the pop-up, it redirects you to the proper location in the settings app, you toggle the switch and…that’s it.
Damn, how long has it been now? A decade? I’ve been playing this game almost as long as Minecraft. And just like Minecraft I feel a little guilty having only paid for it once. It’s worth twice whatever they’re charging.
This is one of the best pick-up/put-down time wasters. except it’s not a waste of time, it’s stays very fresh and engaging.
I really wish Mini Motorways wasn’t locked to Apple Arcade. Can you hear me, Dinosaur Polo? RELEASE MOTORWAYS AS A BUYABLE APP!
Portal 2 was way better than Portal, which felt like mostly a really extended tech demo or proof-of-concept. Portal 2 felt like an actual, full, fleshed-out game.
365 days is probably my goal. A good year sounds great, after that i plan to reevaluate whether i can afford to keep doing it with my time so i don’t accidentally fill my schedule to much
I think a fair amount of survivor games like Vampire Survivors and 20 minutes til dawn are intended for just one hand. Then there’s every turn based strat game like Civilization and stellaris, along with every turn based RPG out thete
Sort of, it’s got Moo Moo Meadows which is originally from the wii game I think. That’s also a great one, and the music really slaps, but the n64 tune has that sweet sweet banjo plucking. It always takes me back!
Unlike Nvidia they will not be artificially restricting production. It’s already in backrooms and shelves they’ve been bringing them over from manufacturers for months now. There will probably still be some scalping but it’s expected to be enough supply to actually meet demand.
AMD have said, the 9070 series is going to be up to 4070 ti performance. Leaks have also shown the performance between 7800XT and 7900XTX, so you can trust these numbers of course.
As for the price, AMD can say what they want, but how they’ve handled this launch so far doesn’t sound promising. A vendor, who has the cards already, speculated about the price, and it was horrible.
Things have changed since then, but until AMD has released concrete numbers, all these leaks are useless.
I also don’t know what you mean with the artificial restriction of production of the cards. Because NVIDIA is mainly producing AI cards for servers and workstations? AMD will be doing the exact same thing, since that’s where the majority of the money is.
With the 5070 at a 550 MSRP I wouldn't be suprised to see AMD matching that for similar performance. Given all the delay shenanigans it'd be shocking for them to deliberately wait for the 5070 info and then launch with a more expensive part.
How much you end up having to pay to get one is anybody's guess, of course, as MSRP is increasingly meaningless. Since they've had cards with retailers for a while and have been delaying there may actually be some stock at launch, though. We'll see.
The idea that it would "smoke the 5070" and "nearly match the 5080" is probably just fanboyism or they wouldn't have ducked out from directly pitching it after the 5070 reveal (and if they had a 500 dollar 5080 competitor they wouldn't be cancelling their high end cards this gen).
In any case, it's immensely dumb to fanboy for multibillion dollar chip manufacturers. I just hope people can buy good, affordable GPUs from multiple manufacturers at some point. I own GPUs from Intel, AMD and Nvidia and would really want them all to remain competitive in as many pricing segments as possible.
Oh, they're absolutely not retaking a huge chunk of the dedicated GPU market. I think what's realistic to expect if they have a good launch (readily available stock, competitive performance and price) is that they may regain a couple points of desktop install base and at least get to sell that they're moving in the right direction instead of abandoning that space altogether. Maybe some growth on handhelds and competitive iGPUs for laptops and tablets so it makes sense for them to continue to develop the gaming GPU business aggressively at least.
I dont fanboy, I chase value. My house is a mix of AMD/Nvidia/Intel/ARM and I use the right architecture wherever I can.
If im guilty of anything its Hopeium but honestly all the leaks I have been following show suggest that the 9070 and 9070 XT will offer same or better performance vs 5070 class cards at prices far below street cost. Nvidia’s MSRPs are a lie and the market shows that. NO AIB can produce these cards for the prices Nvidia has them selling at without rebates on the back end. Thats why you saw a very small number of MSRP models and no plans to restock. Everything else out there on the market is over MSRP.
We know AMD has stock in back rooms and warehouses, we have the pictures and confirmation from rank and file staff at places like Microcenter. We also know that AMD’s Instinct MI series is not selling as well as Nvidia so they are not as incentivized to divert silicon to higher margin products.
So, yeah it might be another round of shitty nvidia prices and stock, but we wont see the same scalping for AMD, and the value offered by AMD will embarrass nvidia once you turn off DLSS. Why else would they lie and say the 5070 matches 4090 performance other than to try to sell as much as they can before the 9070 forces them to drop prices.
That is a rather astonishing mix of really granular quoting of more or less accurate facts and borderline conspiracy theorist level misinformation. You rarely see this stuff outside political channels, I'm... mildly impressed.
AMD absolutely does have stock in back rooms, largely because they have been doing a somewhat undignified dance of waiting to see what Nvidia does to decide what they're pricing their current gen at. Most educated guesses out there are that they were going to price higher, were caught on the wrong foot with Nvidia's MSRP announcement and had to work out how to re-price cards that were already in the retail channel. And now Nvidia is in turn delaying the 5070 to interfere with AMD's new dates. Because both of these companies suck.
On the plus side for consumers, there's some hope that the 9070 will be repriced somewhat affordably and that it won't underperform against at least the 5070, if not the 5070Ti. We'll see what reviews have to say about it.
Your summary of why the launch was so light includes some real stuff (yeah, partners struggle to match Nvidia's aggressive pricing and have terrible margins), but that's not why there was no stock of the 5090 (most reports suggest the GPUs were simply not being manufactured early enough to provide chips to anybody. 5080s were both more readily available and less appealing, so they're easier to find, which kinda pokes big holes in that hypothesis. Manufacturing timelines seem to also explain why restocking will be slow.
I'm also very confused about why you'd "turn off DLSS". Are you allowing people to use FSR, at least? That's a weird proviso. The reason they would misrepresent the impact of MFG is obviously good old marketing. Even if AMD didn't exist, the 40 series does and they have a big issue with justifying a lot of the 50 series line against it. With the 5080 falling well behind the 4090 they have a clear incentive for suggesting you can match the 4090 in cheaper cards. This doesn't tell you anything about the performance of the 9070 one way or the other. It does tell you a lot of the performance of the 5080, though.
See, this is why this sort of propagandistic speech works so well, it takes for ever to even cover all the misrepresentations and all this is going to do is get you to double down on some of these unsubstantiated statements and turn it into a "matter of opinion". It doesn't even need to be on purpose, it's just easier to produce than to counter.
Aaaand now I made myself sad.
In any case, here's hoping the 9070 is a competitive option and readily available. They've apparently scheduled that delayed event for the 28th, so I'll be curious to see what they bring to the table officially.
I dont think this is misinformation, just a difference of opinion and interpretation of what is known. I also openly admit that I have a tint on this release because I am really hoping that AMD does it right with reasonable pricing and performance.
As for DLSS/FSR I prefer not to use either because where I actually want faster frames and benefit the added latancy is not worth it, and where I dont care about the extra frames I prefer higher quality details. I find both framegen tech to be a poor service to the end user and thats why I dislike Nvidia’s marketing of the 5070 as equivalent to a 4090 when turning on DLSS. I also dislike their texture compression as an excuse to keep vram artificially low to prevent people from using consumer GPUs for running LLMs.
Ah, so you meant DLSS to mean specifically "DLSS Frame Generation". I agree that the fact that both upscaling and frame gen share the same brand name is confusing, but when I hear DLSS I typically think upscaling (which would actually improve your latency, all else being equal).
Frame gen is only useful in specific use cases, and I agree that when measuring performance you shouldn't do so with it on by default, particularly for anything below 100-ish fps. It certainly doesn't make a 5070 run like a 5090, no matter how many intermediate frames you generate.
But again, you keep going off on these conspiracy tangents on things that don't need a conspiracy to suck. Nvidia isn't keeping vram artificially low as a ploy to keep people from running LLMs, they're keeping vram low for cost cutting. You can run chatbots just fine on 16, let alone on 24 or 32 gigs for the halo tier cards, and there are (rather slow) ways around hard vram limits for larger models these days.
You don't need some weird conspiracy to keep local AI away from the masses. They just... want money and have people that will pay them more for all that fast ram elsewhere while the gaming bros will still shell out cash for the gaming GPUs with the lower RAM. Reality isn't any better than your take on it, it's just... more straightforward and boring.
I dream that the reason AMD delayed their launch and are being so cryptic, is because they saw how underwhelming the 5080 was and decided to make a card (perhaps a 9070 XT) that matches its performance at the price of a 5070 or something.
Now I don’t think that will happen. Their previous market strategies have been very uninspired. But there’s certainly an opening here to make a play for market share and make Nvidia look like greedy fools.
AMD cards are not scalped like nvidea. During the pandemic going to wait outside of microcenter they always had AMD cards available. No one wants them!
I would never expect anything day 1, ever. Scalpers ruined day 1. And though I would be surprised if they were out of stock a week later. Unlike Nvidia they actually want to sell cards.
Unfortunately it’s pure capitalism. No matter what company got paid. They don’t care about it users got the card they wanted, or even if the scalers make a profit or go bust, they already got paid.
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