Most people won’t budge. It doesn’t matter if Win10 is unsupported or isn’t getting a security update, I reckon a solid 40 of 43% will just stay on it until programs they use stop working.
Basically my plan until I can scrounge enough money up for a new computer. My current one literally won’t let me upgrade due to some component/driver it lacks.
For some of the hardware requirements, there are edits you can make to get it to install, but you do have to also force it every time there is a major release, minor updates go through fine.
Definitely you should look into Linux, it’s really gotten quite good. Especially if you don’t need games with anti cheat.
But if you just want to use Windows 11, it’s super duper easy. Just Google “download Windows 11 iso” and grab the iso file from Microsoft website.
Then download Rufus.
Then pop in a thumb drive that’s at least 8gb. Open Rufus, select your thumb drive and the iso, then choose the option to remove windows requirements, then click start.
Backup your files on Windows 10, save them somewhere. Then pop in the thumb drive and install windows 11 fresh.
The requirements aren’t actually required. Win 11 runs fine on all sorts of hardware. Support stops at 8th Gen Intel, but I’ve installed it on 5th Gen. My work laptop is 2nd or 3rd Gen. It’s fine 🤷♂️
Technically less secure? Yeah, in some ways. But it’s miles ahead of running unpatched windows 10 after September.
Oh shit this is actually really helpful, I might end up doing the Rufus USB route when I get my stuff back up and running (apartment flooded and I have to wait until the finish fixing my ceiling before I can plug everything back up.)
Yeah I’m just going to stick on Win 10 for a while. Apparently the enterprise version is getting support for longer so maybe I’ll see if I can get on that.
Yep, I feel like people overestimate how much anyone cares about official support or security patches or whatever. People will assume it’s fine until they’re either forced out or something goes horribly wrong.
Regular folks will most likely let it be if possible, until it’s time for a new PC anyway.
Yep. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but valve dropping support for windows 7 was what made me switch to linux. Until the computer stops working for the average user, they won’t change.
Tes 3: Morrowind, every NPCs can be killed and of course if you kill some of them before they got usefull to progress the main quest you are locked.
At their death there is a notification message like “you fucked up, you can reload or continue to play in this world forever doomed”. BUT, in my first playthrough some broken mod I installed was hiding this message …
Also, in the same game you could lose quest item and be unable to finish the main quest. But that kind of require you to be stupid on purpose, because it’s obvious what item are important.
EDIT: found the in game message: " With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Hey man, Morrowind quests don’t hold your hand! It’s not like there’s a minimap and some big ass marker over his head saying “don’t kill and rob this half naked dude who looks like a skooma addict in his tiny studio apartment because he’s secretly the spy master for the main faction in the game”! I was young! I chose violence!
It was some small QoL changes in the UI and menus, recommended by my friend who recommended me the game. I don’t remember exactly the changes but there was nothing big added or changed in the gameplay
Good news. You can still beat the game if the “thread of prophecy is severed”, but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get “almost back on track”. And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
Yes indeed, I know what you are talking about. But I would not really consider that the “normal” ending as described by OP. Even if the ending scene itself is exactly the same, it’s a very different path and clearly a much harder one.
OK hear me out: Minecraft in survival. For real. Nothing jump scares like a creeper going “psshht” in your back, telegraphing that you’re about to die in a destructive explosion. As you walk a narrow path over a chasm of lava in the Nether, the wail of the Ghast might make you fall out of sheer panic before it even shoots at you. The Warden is a special kind of scary too, as it’s nearly unkillable and will detect you by the noise you make. It sounds kind of silly but there’s plenty of players making the remark that Minecraft survival is basically horror.
And it’s all in a child friendly, non gory, voxel style.
Yeah that shit scared me when I played it at 40 years old. It kind of wears you down when you walk around in dark caves for hours on end.
Another alternative might be Subnautica. It has some jump scares but mostly it’s just the Deep Unknown that gives you chills. Few things in that game are actually dangerous.
Aw man, preparing for the nether and writing down my coordinates, terrified of ghasts and facing blazes for as long as I could stand it. I still prepare for any excursion from my base like a packrat.
While we’re at it with non-horror games: the level that introduced the flood in Halo CE really gave me a scare. I don’t know what it says about me, but I invited a friend over to play that level with me, lol. It’s a bit of a reach not being a horror game, but a great game with some tension here and there.
Seems like gaming piracy is really dying this time for sure. Most sites are compromised and untrustworthy, big teams are retiring, the one remaining denuvo cracker that i heard of is apparently psychotic... It doesn't seem like it bodes well
Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own. In a decade or two people won't even believe we lived in the wild west era of internet where you could just get stuff for free without a subscription, online connection or drm.
When people run out of money to pay for a billion subscriptions, companies will have to think hard about their business model. I don’t think the current trend can last forever.
Look at the fragmentation of streaming services. Piracy is on the rise again because of it.
That's why I said gaming piracy before, I don't think denuvo can protect media files (yet) and those are less likely to be malware or cryptominers anyway. So I think that aspect is safe for now at least, but rip gaming.
Looking at the world rn, I dont think things have a tendency to get better on their own
This is called a recency bias (I think lol) - you’re looking at the world rn and assuming its trends must continue. When you look at history you see that there are ebbs and flows, and that stasis is rare. If you focus on certain things, you may certainly decide we’re in a downtrend. There will always be an uptrend afterward. And vice versa
That's way too big of a generalization. The fact is that technology advances and makes other technology obsolete, and the pirates are dwindling while DRM companies are getting more and more money to fix the issue. It is not going to just magically reverse at one point. If anything the people are just going to get more accustomed to it like they have already with copyright laws, subscription services and simply not owning anything digital anymore.
The second thing you're not addressing is how long the "ebb and flow" takes anyway, if gaming piracy has a resurgence in 50 years then I don't think I'm gonna care much about it by then lol. Blizzard games aren't getting cracked anymore and by the time they do, if ever, I'm not going to care about them.
The fact is that technology advances and makes other technology obsolete,
Yeah, it happens on both sides, it’s an arms race. It will swing the other way eventually - it always has and always will
The second thing you’re not addressing is how long the “ebb and flow” takes anyway
That was intentional. There’s no estimating a timeline, but with the development of technology it’s not unreasonable to expect a reversal even in a decade. Anyway, if you’re trying to ward off doomerism you’re not going to do it by only looking at what you stand to gain
Precisely the reason they'd be worth cracking I'd say. Anyway that was just an example, same goes for many EA / Ubi games for which it's just a matter of time before are perma-online or under denuvo.
Isn’t just piracy that’s dying, in my opinion, it’s gaming itself, or, at least, gaming as it used to be.
Besides Denuvo being a technology so bad that actually makes the original game worst than a copy without it, everyday comes with tons and tons of games with a pay-to-win approach or some kind of PBE. The only new, original and fun games nowadays are the indies, and it will be that way for a long time, as the industry seems to focus more and more in the mobile market since it’s already bigger than the PC and console together.
Gaming is definitely not dying it is a huge market. I don’t agree with the direction it’s heading though. But there are enough games released to keep my interest.
I expect all games to be bad by default now and don’t let myself get hyped up at all anymore. I waited on the edge of my seat since before the first teasers for CP2077 and still haven’t bothered to play it. I backed Star Citizen in 2013 lol… Was disappointed by Fallout 4 and 76 too, as a huge Fallout fan. I don’t remember the last game that legitimately lived up to my hopes and expectations. Fallout New Vegas I guess.
Yeah, I played it on release. Been trying it again lately with mods and it seems much more polished. The writing quality is still a pretty big disappointment, and the yes/yes/yes/no chat system.
For sure, indies are where it’s at. Most of my time gaming has been on indies for many years now. They are actually willing to do interesting things instead of chasing trends and money.
Occasionally you get large studios doing things like Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s rare. Larian and FromSoft are about the only studios I trust to make good experiences that aren’t designed by the business team to make as much money as possible.
I agree that is clearly broken and overused in many games but if we were able to actually control the walking speed on PC with a keyboard similar to what is possible with a controller, it would probably be more bearable tbh.
SMB3 was an absolute banger and revolutionised the platforming genre while making the hardware run things it had no business doing, so much so that even id Software took inspiration from it.
World just improved the formula in every single way though. Far from ragging on SMB3, World just took an amazing game and polished it up beyond what was expected.
Sorry, that’s not correct. SMB3 was released in 1988 in Japan. It was delayed in North America until 1990 and released in the same year as SMW, while Nintendo of America ironed out its Super Nintendo console launch.
Super Mario World, in fact, started development as a port of Super Mario Bros. 3.
They’re interesting but aren’t used in novel ways. Leaf is great and Cape expands on it. Frog is entirely optional, Tanooki and Hammer are nice upgrades to Leaf and Fire Flower but don’t meaningfully change how you approach the game, the Shoe exists for a single level gimmick, and the map items are all little shortcuts to play less of the game. SMB3 does not use its unique tools to build new kinds of puzzles or present alternate paths through a level they just make the challenges a little easier.
Cape, P-Balloon, and Yoshi are much better utilized.
SMB3 does not use its unique tools to build new kinds of puzzles or present alternate paths through a level they just make the challenges a little easier.
This is extraordinarily wrong!
There are secrets that you need specific power ups to get to.
Raccoon/Tanuki are used to fly to secret areas or break blocks with the tail
Fire is used to melt blocks in the ice world
Frog can swim against strong currents
If you start some levels with an invincible star from the map, it will cause some blocks to drop a star instead of a coin, letting you chain invincibility through the whole level
Tanuki and Hammer aren’t necessary for anything in the main game, but they are for some e-reader levels where they can break blocks that can’t be broken normally
This is almost nothing, though. The secret areas are a handful of coins, or an extra power-up, or a magic whistle. Three sections of a water level or a wall of ice in one world is not a puzzle nor an “alternate path” in a meaningful way. E-reader? The niche peripheral adds a tiny bit of extra content for the GBA release of the NES game and that’s among your best arguments?
SMB3 is very good for what it is and a technical achievement but ranking it above World is pure nostalgia.
making the hardware run things it had no business doing,
Speaking of hardware limitations, Kirby’s Adventure plays like a mid gen SNES game, I have no idea how they got it running on NES. I need to play through it again
Kirby’s Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you’ll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.
What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn’t one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn’t support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game’s iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES’ two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.
I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It’s still my favorite NES game bar none, though.
Programming all the copy abilities had to be a nightmare. Not only the graphics but the controls for things like the wheel & hi jump, the pallet swaps for the Freeze abilities, the environment interactions from the Hammer… it’s a ridiculous amount of content by today’s standards and it was made over 30 years ago.
Then add in cutscenes (all in-game engine, but still), between level overworld sections, mini-games… It’s baffling!
Half of that game would be DLC/premium content if it was made today.
I hate Microsoft but I also hate self-described “Libertarians” complaining about free speech because it usually means they want to spam slurs and white supremacist bullshit without pushback.
I replied to a comment like this somewhere else, so I’ll just paste this here
Take this with a grain of salt, as I’m a commoner on the server.
While freedom of speech means you can yell whatever racial slurs you want, it doesn’t mean you are free from consequences. When you start saying bigoted stuff on the chat, you will be targeted by players and get /ignore’d.
I would advise you to make your own judgement by reading the chat logs on Discord or IRC, but not everybody has that amount of time. Some people said vile stuff here, but every time someone says some weird stuff, it always gets backlash, and it definitely isn’t a nazi breeding ground.
Also I’ll add this, Most of the server staff and community are queer and from different backgrounds, slurs aren’t taken kindly here.
While freedom of speech means you can yell whatever racial slurs you want, it doesn’t mean you are free from consequences.
This seems to be the MS stance as well, and they seem unwilling to associate with that kind of speech, so they want to cut that connection off as a consequence.
MS isn’t telling them not to speak. MS is telling them to take their speech somewhere else.
Mojang as well? Because MS employs hundreds of thousands of employees making their own decisions and owning their own work. I don’t see how Minecraft has anything to do with the poor decisions made on Azure.
That aside, the fuck does Halo have to do with Mojang? Unless you’re saying it’s the Xbox people as a whole I guess, which makes a lot more sense to me. I saw a bunch of people talking about Palestine and assumed you were just talking about that somehow.
Anyway, none of this really explains to me why they should not be allowed to limit speech on their own platform, regardless of what speech is limited. People can always pack up and go somewhere else. This isn’t the government coming in and arresting some people for having an opinion they don’t like. This is a company coming in and saying they want that speech somewhere else.
Edit: found the Halo reference, had no idea this was a thing honestly with the dumpster fire that is the US government going on.
I am? You’re the one coming out of left field with the Azure issues?
The actual topic is Microsoft games wanting to distance themselves from alleged racist speech while at the same allowing one of their largest IPs to represent one of the most openly racist organizations we have seen in recent American history.
The issue is whether they can limit speech on their platform. Their own hypocracy means absolutely nothing. They are free to be as inconsistent as they want so long as their rules stick to their own software and platforms.
Edit: I should add that “they should allow racism here because they do somewhere else” has to be the most wild argument I’ve ever read.
I mean fair enough. I think we both agree on a base level. I’m not arguing they shouldnt limit their server, and you’re not arguing that their ICE support is laudable. Think we just started misaligned.
As funny as this is, it’s also a very common logo, being a varient of the Penrose Triangle. Honestly more shocked they didn’t spring for some better graphics…
Yep and honestly I think it’s one of the better Assassins Creed games. It shows that at their best the Templar’s are trying to guide humanity into its future, while at their worst the Assassins are children playing with powers they don’t understand. Mind you that’s within the fact that the Templar’s are power tripping assholes in most games. I kinda wish we could get a Templar equivalent to Origin, perhaps have the Templar’s emerge out of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire after witnessing the Assassins being stupid with an artifact.
Fallout 3 for me works well as a sandbox and less as a narrative driven RPG. I had a lot of fun with it but I know if you went in expecting it to be something it’s not (like the first 2 fallout games) you’re gonna be disappointed.
It got a lot of backwards hate when 76 came out and it was suddenly really trendy to hate Bethesda. This is not to say that lots of people changed their mind on the game, though I’m sure some did, more that people who didn’t like the game got more confident to speak up about disliking it. This is also around the same time the New Vegas became a huge darling in popular opinion.
So, I’m an ardent ‘New Vegas is the best 3D Fallout game’ person.
But… Fallout 3 is not a bad game.
It is fun, it is enjoyable. It has solid game mechanics, it has a good number of well written characters and questlines, it is fun to just explore and find crazy shit.
It has flaws, yes.
But it is far from bad.
It just isn’t as good as New Vegas, which imo, basically just did everything FO3 did, but better, had a better overall storyline, refined and improved on all the gameplay mechanics, added in new gameplay features/elements.
It also had some big gameplay departures from 1 & 2. I’m not talking about being an FPS (although no longer having to worry about accuracy was pretty significant) but the fact that putting on different clothing magically made you more intelligent, and that it was a lot easier to do everything.
In FO3 you can pick all the locks, hack all the computers, pass all the conversation checks, and take on hordes of enemies all by yourself. In FO1+2 you had to pick the couple of things you were good at and not be able to do the other things until your next run.
1 & 2 I played a little bit. NV I 100% on steam a couple years ago and 360 many years ago. I did actually play 4 for about an hour. Was annoyed with how things had changed lol
Not going to lie, I like it quite a bit more than New Vegas. I understand several criticisms that people have, but 3 was by far the better experience for me.
I don’t think that’s right, I’m terrible at games but I still respect women (enough to spare them from interacting with me whenever possible. Same goes for all people really)
More likely higher ranked players finally figured out that keeping harmony within your team does wonders for your chance at winning. The amount of infighting I’ve had to stop just to save my elo is insane, why would i start something just because of someone’s gender.
Perhaps RPG’s with a party, like Mass Effect, Baldurs Gate 3, Fallout New Vegas (many companions with their own stories to find and tag along), Star Wars: knights of the old republic, dragon age.
Some shooters like the later Band of Brothers games, valkyria chronicles or the Mafia series you may enjoy as well.
In Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, there are multiple paths to choose to complete the game, and one option is to choose a fun companion come with you to help you throughout.
Since OP likes open world games, in the later Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4 you can have companions. not the same level of interaction as Bioware-like parties, but it’s something.
also not really an open world game, but in Midnight Suns you’re a mystical hero in a party with some of the avengers, other marvel heroes, and even some villains. there’s a lot of personal interactions with all the members between missions.
The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
I’d like more games to be like FromSoft games. The difficulty is adjusted by what gear you have and what spells you use. None of that turning bosses into bullet sponges nonsense.
Yeah, Sekiro has a pretty adaptive way of making the game harder, if you start a replay and get rid of the charm item, you can’t almost parry, it has to be precise, and if you ring the demon bell everything gets higher life and damage, but drops much better loot.
Just going to ignore the hundreds of levels most players need to accumulate?
Sekiro was the only one that actually respected players time. Players bitched endlessly it was too hard.
If fromsoft actually gave a shit they’d add in adjustable parry windows and iframes and that works cover 90% of the people who weren’t good enough from sekiro. They won’t because they love to be gatekeepers.
I’ve beaten every day since 2 in addition to sekiro, the actual hard game. We’re talking about easing the game for the average population. So yeah if you are in the top .5% of players fromsoft gives a fuck about your time.
For everyone else your talking somewhere between 50 and 200. I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Modern world of Warcraft has less leveling these days 🤦♂️
Yeah, but the point is that you aren’t just grinding levels. You literally said it yourself, you go explore a different area, you play more of the game (not just grind the same part of the game)
I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Kind of like when you’re lower level in other games and have to level up to beat the boss? Do level 1 gnomes go straight to killing The Lich King in world of warcraft?
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.
I’ve been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
but there’s so many other ways to change difficulty.
change number of enemies and where they spawn change gear and abilities, the Witcher did that one with how the stamina system worked. it didn’t drain on the lower difficulties. horizon zero dawn made everything in the shops more expensive and made the enemies drop less money. honestly, that one also sucked. only served to make the game grindier.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
There are other open source remakes (2004, 2006) but they’re not as popular. I’ve actually contributed upstream to all 3 of the above, it’s a very nice community!
(thanks! I have a lot of nostalgia for Runescape but don’t want to waste months of my life, so I’m considering getting a single player server up and running with a like 10x exp multiplier. Now to decide on 2003, 2009 or 2012…)
I downloaded a single-player server a while ago, 20x XP let me actually experience the damn game, lmao. It was neat, getting to see what I only got glimpses of as a child.
I would say play whichever era you played in the past :P. If you played RuneScape classic, OpenRSC (the 2003 remake) is the best, otherwise 2009scape is a good shout. You could also check out 2004scape.org, their beta starts soon
Idk I still think it’s way more common for remasters to be good. There’s been a handful of bad ones, but they’re the outliers. What’s way more common seems to be bad PC ports in general, which affects both remasters and new games.
Just looking around for some examples: the Phonekx Wright original trilogy was great for me on PC, and the PC remasters are pretty well-received overall. The Sonic remasters from Christian Whitehead were so good that Sega let him make an original game. The BioShock games aren’t really good to replay, but I didn’t really notice anything different on the PC remasters compared to how I originally played them on the PS3.
Ones that I haven’t played yet but have reviewed well: the Legacy of Kain series, the Last of Us 1&2 (you can argue that the remasters were not needed, and specifically the PC ports of those games had rough launches, but the console versions reviewed well and reportedly the PC versions have been mostly fixed). The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are widely considered to be the definitive way to play those games.
The examples I can think of for bad “remasters” weren’t really remasters. The Grand Theft Auto series might be the most notorious for this, because they removed the original PC ports and released “remastered” prior Android ports instead of remastering the original PC or console versions. Silent Hill is another case- Konami lost the original source code so it was, by definition, a remake that they just chose to market as a remaster instead.
Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary: the remaster was way brighter and removed some of the mystery and fear that was essential to the story. Thankfully, they put in a button to use the old textures, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep it in old mode most of the time.
GTA:SA could be run at 144 fps. Just be aware that the whole engine is fps based, so cars will turn at a varying speed depending on your current fps, your physics will go wild and you’ll see cars clipping into roads and shit, and it will be full of bugs.
Sometimes a remaster can basically break the whole thing.
It is often very different though. I know you meant it to be ironic but the quote you mentioned pretty close to something that people actually do say. It’s one thing to remain absolutely pixel-perfect, frame-faithful and bug-for-bug-matched to the original. As soon as you break that commitment, you’re in totally different territory, and it’s risky territory and it’s got a long history of not being received well.
Remastering with more realistic 3d typically destroys the charm of the original graphics, whether lovingly crafted pixel art or low-poly 3d with simple textures, these have places where our imagination has filled in the gaps. I think that something that modern game and art design and remasters in particular often lose sight of, is how important leaving things to the imagination still is, leaving room for people to fill in their own details and become part of the game themselves. It provides an opportunity for the player to have a degree of creative control of the game or to even self-insert to a degree, but at least to interpret the game and the story, and yes even the art in their own way. Not everyone has a strong imagination, some people need more structure and support than others, so it’s a tricky thing to find the right balance for, but there IS a balance, and often classic games have already found it. That’s why they’re classic and loved by a large number of people and why they’re being remastered.
Remasters are walking a delicate line on this. People do want a remaster to add things and add detail artistically and otherwise, and it’s inevitably going to come into conflict with some of the perceptions that each person imagined on their own. In some senses it’s starting from a disadvantage, because it is going to have to provide enough additional value to overcome that inevitable conflict before it can even start to earn acclaim as an improvement.
You can say the exact same thing about PC ports though. The mere act of changing from a console experience to a PC experience means that you are changing the medium and changing that experience. Most PC ports have always had options to support different resolutions, frame rates, color modes, aspect ratios, and more. Not because of some grand artistic vision from the creator, but because the hardware was not standardized the way TV’s are and the developers realized that those options were insignificant details that were best left to the player to decide. Even a lot of console games had options like Widescreen or high-resolution modes in the 90’s and early 2000’s as widescreen HD TV’s transitioned from rare enthusiast items to ubiquitous.
One of my favorite PS1 games growing up was Moto Racer, a pretty generic and unremarkable arcade motorcycle racing game. It originally released on PC, and the PS1 version released a month later. Which, for the 90’s, was basically a simultaneous release. a couple years ago I bought the original PC version on steam because it was super cheap- it sucks and it’s completely unplayable. The controls are just too twitchy. I went and emulated the original PS1 version and… It’s fine, just like I remembered it. The game also had a re-make for its 15th anniversary, but I haven’t played that version.
For games that originally released on PC as ports, I think that the publishers should leave those available. I really hate that Rockstar took down the original PC versions of GTA for example, and replaced them with what they called a “remaster” but was actually a port of the Android versions of the games, which I would say crosses over to “re-make” territory.
In order to get the full, original experience of when PC games first came out I would have to sit at a tiny desk shoved in the corener of my mom’s living room and stare at a shitty CRT monitor that had washed out colors and warping around the edges. The room would be filled with cigarette smoke and there would be other children outside playing with lawn darts.
Even when I emulate games, I usually try to mess around with resolutions, original textures versus HD texture packs, locking at different frame rates, different filters or shaders, etc. I always thought Armored Core was a clunky mess of a game as a kid but as an adult I was able to emulate it and
I appreciate trying to preserve parts of history and culture, but that endeavor will always be limited. We cannot perfectly store an infinite amount of information indefinitely. Society and culture change over time, so we need to be careful when considering the context that art was made in versus the context of when we are experiencing it. I’m not going to learn Olde English and travel to England to handle the Norwell Manuscript to read Beowulf in its original form- it’s not worth it.
Remasters dont necessarily mean pc port (looking at you demons souls). And then theres differences. Even though i think the remaster is worth those differences, there are legitimate lore implications in the differences. And then with something like demons souls, emulating it is a huge pain. Ive given up trying to emulate it on linux. Remasters are not just strictly a replacement for a pc port even if there are times they can be.
The meme is specifically comparing these to PC Ports, so I’m limiting my scope to games that have PC versions. So no Nintendo games either for example.
And if there are lore changes then I would call that a “re-make” or “re-imagining”. Part of the problem is that marketing teams have just chosen to go rogue in terms of what to call what. “Re-master” itself is a term that came from the mastering process of the music industry, to differentiate from “remix” or “re-recording”, so I suppose you could argue that we need a better term overall for videogames. So this means I generally ignore whatever words they decided to slap onto the title screen and focus instead on what the changes actually are.
Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work
They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.
My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.
Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.
They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.
Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.
It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.
No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.
It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.
In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.
But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.
No-one will enjoy where that leads
There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.
You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes
You’d like to think so. But look at Robinhood. Five years ago, everyone was screaming about how it was a rigged game. Citadel Investments was manipulating the options markets. Fidelity was getting insider deals. Everything was rigged. People needed to protest. Close out your account. Yadda yadda yadda.
What happened after that? As far as I can tell, Robinhood is more popular than ever. They’re certainly more profitable than ever. There was never any reform or regulation. Mostly, Reddit and similar big name social media firms just purged all the whinners and inflated the profiles of the shills and hacks.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever
DraftKings has been making money hand over fist. They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on. This isn’t one bookie in one city, it’s an international conglomerate that’s expanded its market share around the globe. It is a worldwide bookie.
Why are you trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?
What good does that do?
You’re not wrong.
But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.
The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.
Am I wrong?
They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.
What the fuck? Lol. They are not cartoony villains preying for the old and weak.
Somebody has made a calculation, that shows that they will make more money from people who takes the deal than they are going to loose money from people who get mad and leave their enviroment.
In the future they will do test how far they can go using a/b test and/or testing different markets.
It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it. They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day. Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.
It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.
For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.
They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.
Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.
Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.
I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?
Suicide Squad.
There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.
Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.
These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?
If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.
The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.
Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.
XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.
IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.
You continue to view everything through your personal lens while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care. There are no amount of times before people will walk away en masse. That much is abundantly clear at this point.
while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care
People, fundamentally, care.
That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.
No-one games because they don’t care.
You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.
I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.
I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.
That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.
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