All I wanted was for 3/4 of the main characters to be normal Minecraft skins, such as the shrimp series of skins, and the 4th to be some horrendous creation that only Satan himself would use on Minecraft. They then proceed to play bedwars with actual 8 year olds and lose.
A new shooter that Sony launched a couple weeks ago and have subsequently cancelled and is offering refunds. So basically an astronomical waste of money.
Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.
Ontop of all of that, it was also just clearly a corporate cash grab where the people who made it either didn’t feel strongly about it or they didn’t get to put their soul into it as much as they wanted.
It’s not just bland, it’s a cold and calculating kind of bland. Like being served nutrient paste, but it’s not even flavourless instead they added artificial banana flavour so now it’s both depressing and makes you feel sick.
If we reword the question as "Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to be a mediocre experience?" then my money would be on "yes". Bethesda generally seem to aim to make games just as good as they need to be to make money. Capitalism over creative expression.
If the game is good enough to get people to buy it and consider buying the next one, that's all the effort it's worth putting in (as far as publishers are concerned). It's not a new approach, they've just had a lot more practice at it than game developers/publishers had in the '90s.
Temper your expectations as unless you're willing to buy a few million copies yourself, they can't justify the cost of caring what you think.
...and no, I do not approve of this system one jot. It's gross and antithetical to creativity. I'm glad we have a lot more independent developers who aren't as beholden to neoliberal capitalism these days.
Not the same, but Into The Breach has become the one game I regularly return to. The ruleset is so simple and everything is laid out, including anticipating opponent moves. Just a great series of small puzzles
I personally found the Inscryption scratched the same itch, albient in a different way. Its a very different game, being a sort-of narrative driven, Slay the Spire inspired card game. I won’t go into too much detail, given that spoilers, mechanical or narrative, take away a lot from the game, but I found that Inscryption did a great job of juggling a bunch of different mechanics to ensure I constantly had new tools to master, while also encouraging more lateral exploration through its plethora of secrets, and drip feeding story fragments to be peiced together as I progressed.
I loved Inscryption and thought there’s no way his other games could top it, but holy shit… The Hex is an absolute MASTAPIECE. I’m so psyched for his next Pony Island game.
I quite liked the vibe, but got frustrated about the artificial progress blocks. If you’re a competent deck builder it’s pretty easy to build a deck that beats the game master, but then you get to a point where he just throws infinite enemies at you and you are forced to lose.
I get it, the gameplay requires you to lose a number of times, but it just turned me off from finishing the game.
Your character doesn’t speak per say, so you usually are limited to gestures for interacting with other players.
The stone refers to a series of items thatve been around since dark souls 1 where you drop a magic stone and a voice comes out saying the line. In dark souls 1 and some others it was a rock you dropped and it broke open making sound, so the “stone” term stuck.
In elden ring it’s called a “prattling pate: ‘voice line here’”. Your character blows into it like a flute kinda and the line is spoken.
Basically the guy showed up, said “damn ur fashion is on point” then left :)
In the game, there are stones that you can find, and when you use them, they say something. There’s no voice chat in the games, so these can be used to communicate
For PC, I would personally suggest looking for a controller with two things. Number 1, Hall effect sensors. Eliminate stick drift entirely with that alone. Number 2, replaceable joysticks. If the sticks last a long time, then the controller is expected to last longer. I just think having a way to replace work rubber is a good thing. Personally, I have loved Gulikit. My controller also happens to work on switch as well. Here is a link of you are interested in checking it out. Note that that is the controller I have, but you should definitely look at the different models. My controller has lasted about 3 years now. I used to go through PS5 controllers in about 6 months.
That is a totally fair question and one that I simply overlooked. Technically you can buy Gulikit through Amazon. I personally appreciate that the cost of it doesn’t go up over like a regular controller. Scuf did me dirty, I had a scuf for all of two months before the lb button fell apart and they refused to repair it. That thing cost me $185. This controller cost me $70.90 and has lasted me about two years. Here is a link to the Gulikit store on Amazon. I do recommend making sure it is from that store. I don’t know anything about it, but there is a AKNES store which sells gulikt controllers. amazon.com/…/BCC8C06B-7BF5-4D6C-A9A0-6290B8091F02…
On an unrelated note, if you have joy cons with stick drift (who doesn’t have these) then Gulikit also sells just the stick modules so you can fix it for good.
Amazon still does that dumb shit where they allow them to sell a dozen different products on the same listing. And the names are all mislabeled so I don’t even know what product I’m looking at.
Honestly found the rdr2 story forgettable, had a lot of fun with the individual missions though. I dont expect a great story from gta6, just a massive open world with lots of stuff going on.
If you want wireless, one thing to be concerned about is the latency of the gamepad. gamepadla.com tests many controllers for their latency.
Personally, I’ve just gone with xbox with their PC dongle. I only like controllers with the sticks in the xbox/nintendo configuration and the latency is great with their dongle. I also like that it uses standard batteries so I just keep some rechargables at hand for when it runs out. On the downsides, there is no low battery indication on the controller, so occasionally it just dies in the middle of use.
I also use and recommend Xbox controllers. Although I wish I knew about these cool high end brands before I bought. I grew up in a time where all third party controllers were trash, and I carried that opinion for too long.
I read this thread and I saw 8bitdo recommended a lot and I’ve seen them recommended elsewhere. The hall effect sticks seem to be the gold standard.
My main issue with the Xbox controllers (mine are for Xbox one) is the d-pad. It’s not terrible but it’s not even as good as say a super Nintendo controller for fighting games and retro games in general.
8bitdo ultimate v2 via dongle is alright except it disconnects by itself every now and then and refuses to reconnect unless you walk right up to the dongle and try turning the controller on a few times.
If you can get a controller with Hall effect sensor that would be top. Else just get an Xbox series controller and call it a day. If you’re generally ruff with your joystick, you might look into cheaper controller, as all with no hall joysticks might start to drift earlier.
I’m very happy with my xbox series controller but others have less luck. But my mainboard has Bluetooth, so I can easily connect the controller. Some say you need the adapter, but I don’t, probably because it uses the newest Bluetooth version protocols.
The best controller was my original Xbox cable controller. It lasted me 15 years or more.
There’s a portion of the map where you and the gang are wanted dead or alive because of the ferry heist. Entering it for most of the game will get you a maximum wanted level, headhunters will show up, and eventually the game kills you. That restriction is lifted in the final act.
The world opens up once you get out of the snow and settle down in the Horseshoe Overlook camp. You’ll still have linear story missions to do, but you can start those whenever you feel like, and explore as much as you want.
After you beat the story you can go to the area from the first game as a fun little bonus. The main area of the game opens up in chapter 2 after about 4 missions
I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.
Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)
Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!
I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)
Depending on how the legislations now post-DMA go, it might be possible to also handle payments throughout our Portal instead of app stores. The app stores, especially Apple’s, has still a bunch of rules in their ToS about this where they might remove the game entirely if you’re not using their payment system. Android is slightly more lenient on this regard though.
The cuts Patreon already takes (a whopping 14% in total, after which we then play VAT) already affects us enough that I would definitely love to rather have my own systems, but also they offer a lot of convenience to the users that we couldn’t at this point.
But overall it would be great if we could provide a direct payment system straight from Portal, as we could price that one also significantly cheaper than using Google’s or Apple’s systems when we don’t need to pay their cuts. It’s something I really want to do to be able to make the pricing as affordable as possible, and everything depends on if it’s both feasible and allowed by the app stores. But can’t promise this, as there are a lot of factors in play whether it’s feasible to provide our own systems and if it’s allowed by the biggest stores.
When it comes to direct APK downloads, maybe if we can get a good pipeline for those. I think the most realistic option is that we’ll pick the one for an “extra release pipeline” that we can automate most easily to our current systems. Could be Aurora Store, F-Droid or some other depending on what kind of automation options they offer.
I’m not an expert on what automation options they might offer, but I know Aurora Store will essentially just pass through anything you do on the Play Store since it’s just a frontend, and for F-Droid you can host a repo where you place any updated APK to automatically make it available to anyone linked to your repo.
I know alternative payment options are probably a nightmare to properly set up and integrate, so it may not be worth the increased cut of revenue you’d get, but I’m really glad you’re considering it!
I look forward to trying the game when it comes out :)
Oh yeah, I wanted to recommend an f-droid release as well, but thought you had to open your source up for that.
I hadn’t thought of making your own repository where you don’t have to do that \o/
I’m not an expert on the process, but anyone making a custom repo should be able to store the F-Droid repo on GitHub.
It looks like you wouldn’t need to make the app open-source either, as it should be capable of just accepting an apk file. (and possibly auto update from any GitHub releases page, not sure on that though)
Again, not an expert, I haven’t made an F-Droid repo yet myself, so I may have understood something wrong, but it looks relatively straightforward according to their guide
This wouldn’t make it available to users through the default preinstalled repo in F-Droid (which is heavily privacy-focused and limited in scale) but it would allow any user to just click a link or scan a QR code to add your repo to their F-Droid app.
bin.pol.social
Ważne