There’s plenty of better deep dives on YouTube, but basically it’s a system in Shadows of Mordor (and moreso in Shadows of War) that would take a random NPC you were fighting and were joined by (or almost killed,) and elevate them thematically. If one knocked you down there’s a chance they would pick up your sword and break it, smack talk you, and walk away. That guy, of his name was Doug, became Doug the Sword Breaker. Never time you saw him, he’d get a short introduction and a quip or two to remove you of who he was.
If you died, since you were a spirit they’d just mock that they already best you before. But if you were killing them, they might get a scene where they manage to get away to amplify the story. Or maybe you’ll just kill them. It was random and happened with random NPCs, elevating them in the enemy army.
I believe in the second one you could even mind control someone, and take out the people above them, and have a spy in the upper ranks.
Imagine an action game with some Crusader Kings plot drama happening.
Honestly I think there’s probably enough prior art to get away with using whatever you wanted from it. But a) I’m no lawyer and b) I’m not risking millions of dollars making a game.
The nemesis system patents and Namco’s loading screen mini game patent are two examples of why game mechanics and features should never be granted an exclusive patent.
Of course Namco’s patents expired in 2015 at a time when seamless load screens had become the industry standard.
Who knows what the gaming landscape will look like when people are finally able to get their hands on the nemesis system again?
I’m currently enjoying a Skyrim playthrough that uses the Nemesis mod. It doesn’t have ALL of the features that the shadow series does of course, but I’m really enjoying it!
Ooh, I started a new VR playthrough recently, without a concrete plan (well, beyond joining the Brotherhood, because Music of Life by Young Scrolls is amazing).
The ability to pause should be a requirement for single player games. Not being able to pause long cut scenes, combats, etc. is so frustrating when nobody else is impacted.
Any game completely opposed to pausing for whatever design reason should instead be required to have a minimum of 30 seconds between pauses to allow for interruptions while playing without it allowing for rapid pauses to impact game play. 30 seconds minimum is because of how many interruptions are immediately followed by another interruption by kids/spouses/parents/pets.
I’m sure I have seen it before, but I can’t think of a single game that lets you pause during a cutscene. It really sucks for turn-based games where you need to watch whats happening when it’s not your turn in order to respond correctly.
I remember a game I used to play years ago that had no ability to pause, so what i would do is alt+tab to the task manager and suspend the process, and then resume it later. Obviously that’s way more clunky than just hitting a pause button.
I have played a lot of games where pausing the game to get to game menus pauses cutscenes, generally ones where they use in game assets to do the cut scene. I would have to check to confirm, but I think BG3 let you pause by going to the menu and there was also a separate option to skip the cuts scene.
Definitely played a lot with unskippable cut scenes too. Mostly avoid those games now.
It’s been a very common feature for the last few years and has been very rare before that so it really depends on when you started playing new releases. I’m in my mid-30s and pausing mid-cutscene definitely happended after I stopped being excited about my birthday.
Cutscenes especially. The pause button should pause cutscenes, with an option to skip the cutscene on the pause menu. The pause button should never just outright skip the cutscene. It should always pause the cutscene.
So many times as a kid that my mom would walk in and start talking right as a cutscene started. And when I’d go to pause it, it would just skip the entire fucking cutscene instead.
Yeah, pause and skip should be separate things. I have some games pm PC where the ESC key pauses and brings up the menu but to skip the scene you have to be watching it and then hold some specific button like mouse 1 for a couple of seconds to skip. Those are my favorites because I have time to reconsider skipping!
Oh yeah that was the worst. Game devs really shooting themselves in the foot with that design.
Once paused, should it just be a single button? Maybe a menu with an “are you sure? Y/n”, or maybe a hold down one or two buttons together for a couple seconds like on consoles?
Yeah no-pause feature was cool for one or two games as a gimmick, but Jesus h christ I’m an adult now and sometimes you need to freeze everything RIGHT NOW and single player games that you can’t pause are stupid as hell. Like I get maybe not pausing for accessing gear menu. But then at least give us a separate pause in case I have to run to the post office or take a business call or something
Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.
I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.
These anti-cheats don’t even work. Anyone can go out and buy a hardware DMA card with an FPGA on it, which is basically a modern day Action Replay. It has full access to RAM without touching the OS and cheaters like to use them to get around anti-cheat.
yeah, i haven’t done tech support in a hot minute either and had to look up some shit too. All that makes sense, although I don’t recall it existing in the early 90s when I actually thought I knew what i was talking about.
You just put me on a rabbit hole of looking at what FPGA means. Are these cheaters buying their cards already made? Learning such magic to cheat in games seems very weird.
Is “Mister FPGA” an FPGA because it can reprogram its “internal logic” to be as the gaming chips from the consoles?
How come people know so much? Dang here I thought being a computer wizard was one thing and you shattered my expectations
An FPGA is essentially a reprogrammable computer chip, or integrated circuit (IC), that can behave as another computer chip. It is widely used in the development of new ICs.
The MiSTer FPGA project uses an off-the-shelf Altera DE10-nano development board, which has a combo FPGA + ARM SoC on it. The OS, USB controller input, and some other stuff runs on the ARM core, and the FPGA is reprogrammed upon launching a core to behave as closely as possible to the original hardware that it’s emulating.
FPGAs can either be pre-programmed or programmed on-the-fly. In consumer hardware, FPGAs and CPLDs (essentially weak FPGAs) are used when you need an IC produced in small scale, or when you need to be able to change the functionality of the IC with updates.
People know so much because they take the time to learn, and it does take a lot of time and patience.
Nothing that takes significant amounts of time to accomplish is easy. Many people go to school specifically to learn about FPGA development (Computer Engineering students specifically).
Yeah, I’d like to think people would focus on other things now that SKG picked up the pace but he’ll most likely be brought up for a long time regardless on what happens with the campaign in the future - even if just as a punching bag for people to feel superior about.
Nintendo when they catch me playing Mario 64 at 120fps and a working camera instead of their intended cinematic 30fps. Also they delisted the 3D mario collection on Switch and killed mario just to fuck with you.
Super Mario 3D All-Stars? Don’t believe it was ever available digitally. They did like two limited edition physical runs, and that’s it. Much like how they released Mario DDR back in the day.
Edit: And yes, fuck Nintendo. Just clarifying it was never really listed on their digital store, anyway…
The compilation was released on September 18, 2020, and was available until March 31, 2021, when it was discontinued and removed from the Nintendo eShop.
Looks like it was on the eshop for a whopping six months. I think that makes it worse to be honest.
They didn’t just “upscale” the sprites, they completely remade the games in the Super Mario World engine.
3D All Stars was the laziest compilation ever. All they did was toss the ROMs and half-developed emulators onto the cartridge and called it a day. The games run worse and have more input lag than they did on their original consoles.
I’m talking about Super Mario 3D All Stars. There is a very noticeable input lag in Super Mario 64. You can see it yourself by quickly tapping the jump button and seeing how long it takes Mario to actually jump. Sunshine targets 30 FPS and often dips into the 20s, despite running at a locked 30 on the GameCube and even being capable of 60 FPS with a mod.
Combine that with the lack of any sort of enhancements or modernizations to the original games and it’s clear that it’s just a really bad collection of ports, plain and simple.
Never owned a Wii but I’m not surprised. As a GameCube owner at the time, I refused to buy one on principle alone. I was beyond pissed that all Nintendo did was overclock a GameCube, throw it in a smaller form factor case, slap a new controller on it, and proceed to break sales records.
/begin ADHD-fueled rant
I wish they would have instead released motion controls for the GameCube if they didn’t feel like designing new hardware, but somehow it worked out for them, despite being the laziest console design ever with the second worst name ever (behind “Wii U”). The motion controls were the only thing it had going for it. (I’ll at least give Nintendo credit for inspiring the concept of motion controls in the living room that eventually lead to affordable VR, if nothing else.)
Lost trust in Nintendo for many years after that. Switched to XBOX 360 and got almost a decade of enjoyment out of that console. But then Microsoft went and ruined a good thing too, somehow managing to fuck everything up, despite buying some big names and now owning some of the most legendary brands in gaming history. They went from making my favorite console of all time, to releasing generic black rectangles with names like XBOX Series One SXT 4x4 3.8L Turbo. It’s like they are intentionally sabotaging their brand so they can go back to focusing on software.
Anyway shit like this is why I exclusively play PC games now. I mean the Switch was cool for the first few years but then they got all butthurt and can’t handle the fact that other people can make a Pokémon game better than them and make their games run better on PC than on their own hardware… So much for second chances—fool me twice.
Sure, that doesn’t leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I’m through with it.
Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.
Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn’t come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.
I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don’t show as playable. I’m not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any advice?
A lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require ‘kernel level anticheat’.
Edit: Check those games out on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.
Not a problem at all. If you do end up having difficulties you might try a different distro, I’ve heard a few people complaining about Mint lately. In theory though it should work just fine.
In my personal experience every game I’ve tried to play works just as well or better than it does on Windows. Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Prey, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 & 76 etc. Even older games like Baldur’s Gate and the Original Fallout work great* :)
In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
Steam doesn’t have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you’ll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
That’s what lets it use Proton for everything by default.
Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC’s like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.
Currently, expanded support includes devices with AMD hardware and an NVME drive, targeted toward handheld devices. Please note, support for all devices that is not officially ‘Powered by SteamOS’ is not final (currently anything that is not a Steam Deck or Legion Go S)
While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC’s, Valve doesn’t recommend doing so.
They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC’s in the future, but it’s not there yet.
If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it’s designed for.
You are correct that it is possible to do, but it’s not recommended.
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.
Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular. I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it. I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn’t used it in yonks. Good luck!
Ditched Windows permanently 11 months ago for Pop-OS and couldn’t be happier. I’ve been a big Linux fan for years, but would always dual boot for gaming purposes.
I’m so glad that isn’t necessary any longer. Almost feels cheating, being Microsoft free with Zero downsides and plenty of benefits.
You may already know, but a lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ it just means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet and will likely still work just fine*, unless it requires kernel level anti cheat ofc
Just so happens I’m boycotting that as well. If I wanted you to do shady shit to my OS, I’d have stayed on Windows.
Edit: *Check the games not listed as playable on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.
I didn’t realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn’t want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.
I find it really hard to boycott Microsoft today. Yeah, fuck windows, office, Xbox. But there’s GitHub and Azure which you just ignore walking the internet
Yeah, GitHub really hurts. Hopefully people will start to use SourceForge and similar alternatives once they realize that Microsoft isn’t just trying to monopolize Operating Systems and Gaming Studios, but the whole damn Internet as well.
SourceForge sucks ass. I’ll use pen and paper to manage my repos before SourceForge.
Forgejo is the best git forge hands down. It’s FOSS, snappy & clean web interface, much lighter than Gitlab to self-host, integrates with a bunch of CI platforms, and instance federation is in the works. It’s like GitHub, but better in pretty much every way.
Cool, I’ll check it out. I’m not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work. It’s nice to know that there is a decent alternative for people who need it.
Not only is it FOSS, but the experience is legitimately better than GitHub.
Also has a super fast & good repo migration & sync system. You can still keep the GitHub repo around for the network effect while porting over issues & PRs.
Forgejo Actions is maybe the only thing worse, but that’s because it isnt one-to-one with the whole GHA ecosystem, even if most GitHub Actions work out the box with no changes.
I’m not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work.
You’re gonna start seeing more of these pointing to codeberg.org in the near future. I have been seeing a ton of important projects move there or their own Forgejo instance. Once federation hits, I imagine a massive proportion of projects are gonna jump ship.
They were probably thinking that by openly opposing it before it collected enough signatures, they would have given it more publicity and hence made more people sign it.
This whole movement really highlights how hard it is to get the word out for me. Fediverse isn't a huge place as it is, relative to other online spaces. But every time SKG related topics surfaces there are always people who have never heard about it and people talking about misconceptions that Ross has addressed many times.
ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.
You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.
You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)
If you’ve somehow managed to avoid Witcher until now, it’s a dark medieval fantasy, 3rd person, open world RPG based on Norse Slavic mythology. Lots of political intrigue, choices that actually impact outcomes in game. Fantastic voice acting, story, soundtrack, and combat/gameplay mechanics. This is one of the best games on the market - if you don’t already have it, now’s the time! There are also two DLCs that are each the size and scope of an entire standalone game - don’t miss those!
I started replaying Witcher 3 a week or so ago. It really is an amazing game. But I will admit that the combat is just ok. It’s not awful, but it sure as heck isn’t great. The magic and other mechanics, I’d also call them just OK, maybe even occasionally bordering on less-than-good. Geralt’s movement, even just traversing or trying to loot things, can often be slippy and weird.
Thing is, all of the other parts that are important for a great RPG and narrative just shine SO much more brighter that they really make up for the very mediocre gameplay aspects. It really is more than the sum of its parts.
Once you get a hold on dodging/parrying/etc, you’ll feel like a damn ninja, especially on harder difficulties; but leading up to that, yeah combat is… OK. Also don’t miss out of experimenting with different builds - one of my favorites optimized using bombs, which later into it makes you a walking B-52 - fun build if you enjoy clearing trash via a wave of pure chaos, then mopping up the stronger guys by way of the sword.
And yeah, the whole package is what counts here: Witcher 3 is a fantastic all around game. It isn’t without it’s imperfections, but they are barely noticeable amidst the tsunami of ridiculously high quality you’ll be hit with from all the other features.
For sure! And as much negative I said about the combat, it’s punchy, never drags on, and the enemies you fight are usually all set up well as part of the story. They’re not just random mobs, so even the fighting has good narrative weight even if it’s not the mechanically deepest ever.
This time through, I’ve been making different choices and stopping to explore more and take in more of the world. First time I played it, I had NO IDEA that if you stopped and listened to some npc convos you can pick up quests that way! Doesn’t even really feel like I’m playing it over again, or retreading the same stuff. There’s SO much in it.
It helps if you know the lore, because at the beginning there is a scene where someone asks you about decisions you made in the first two parts. But I didn’t know anything and just guessed. But after that you don’t really need to know what happens before
Witcher 2’s controls are a bit janky, but it’s a solid game in and of itself for the story alone; if you can stomach some pretty bad mechanics to enjoy an otherwise decent product, I’d say start at #2.
Witcher 1 is… so bad it’s kinda comical. I’d just pull up a story summary of Witcher 1 on youtube and call it a day. If you’re a masochist, go ahead and give the actual game a whirl; but I’d recommend modding the snot out of it to at least make your character OP as fuck, allowing you to mostly skip the god-awful combat. But even then, the only selling point is the story, which again you can just pull up on YouTube.
That said, you can dive into 3 with zero knowledge of the previous two and be just fine. There are things that will go over your head, but nothing significant.
I don’t know if it’s just anecdotal, but it feels like a lot of content is moving to Youtube. People make a 10+ min video out of what used to be a paragraph on a wiki site.
I’ll give you my reasoning as someone who used to heavily use Wikis but now heads to YouTube:
As much as I hate the ads on YouTube, the ads on wikis actually make it harder to process and distill the information I’m searching for. YouTube will get there eventually too but for now it is the most efficient way to gather information.
Do you actually keep ads on, on purpose? I know people turn Ublock Origin off for certain creators for youtube, but browsing the internet at large would definitely be a different experience.
Wiki sites are free too so they’d have to be ad riddled…
Yeah I’ve actually had to resort to this a few times with Armored Core 6 specifically. It seemed like Wiki sites just didn’t have the detail for each spot, but did have generalized information for each mission for example. But the extra tidbits for each just straight up wasn’t filled in. I’d google, find a gaming website which had some info, but literally not all of it. It was also in the classic ‘recipe’ style bullshit website where you get through 3 full screens of fluff before what I needed.
I decided I’d help where I could but it came to me after playing two more games in that time that EVERY free wiki site had the same issue. I just don’t remember that problem 3-5+ years ago.
I normally hate turning to Youtube when there's a text resource available, but I've definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.
I'm a mechanic irl, and I have this issue all the time. I don't need a 12 minute 38 second video to show me how to get some particular bits apart, while text and long lost pictures don't work very well either.
Even that feels sketch though. Most of the actual info I really needed had less than 10,000 views. Usually more in the 2-3k range which makes jack squat on Youtube dollars.
Call me an old geezer, but I can’t stand videos for about 95% of all video game guides. They are either too slow or too fast, and include 10 mins of talking for “and the hot key you are looking for is H”.
This is why I only look for the videos where the uploader is showing their screen, and then watch them at 10x speed (using the Enhancer For YouTube addon) with the sound on mute.
I’ve been thinking lately that a lot of people are way worse at reading comprehension than I would have guessed. Like, there’s a large chunk of the population where reading is difficult and uncomfortable. Of course they prefer YouTube.
We’d rarely encounter these people on a text first medium like here.
I can’t stand listening to them. 99% of people doing these videos, any videos, on YouTube have no concept or idea of how to actually talk properly to an audience. I don’t want to have to skip through someone fucking mumbling in an indecipherable accent to find what I need.
Give me written instructions/guides. It’s faster, I can re-read easily at my own pace (fast!) and I don’t get annoyed by someone’s nasally voice. Yes I’m an older one too.
Who? I seriously have no idea who you’re talking about.
I honestly think that the main reason this has kicked off is that up until about a week ago it wasn’t really advertised. I didn’t even know that it started the petition up again, I knew the original one failed because parliament closed and for some reason that meant the petition had to end.
PirateSoftware (Thor) is a streamer and a game developer who is a narcissistic asshole. He’s been very against the SKG petition since I think the start since if it passed he would be forced to keep supporting his games once they fail (it’s happened before) and made a video trying to torpedo the petition some months ago by spreading disinformation that’s easily disproven with a halfway decent level of reading comprehension. Recently the guy who runs the SKG petition announced that Piratesoftware was successful, which caused a lot of big streamers and Youtubers to catch on and call PirateSofware out while endorsing SKG, including MoistCritikal. Since then the number of signings have skyrocketed.
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