I don’t know about this case specifically, but I own Alan Wake on steam which has since been delisted because of music licenses running out. At least for that one, I still own the game on steam and can download, install and play it normally whenever I want, it’s just that people cannot buy it anymore through steam. If you’re lucky, it’s gonna be the same with the adult swim games.
Alan Wake is actually back on Steam! Remedy was able to work something out with the music rights (the reason why it was delisted) that put it back on virtual storefronts.
Am I weird for not having a backlog? I have games I haven’t played much of, usually because it didn’t click with me, but can’t thing any that I have never played.
I have almost 1000 games. There are certainly genres I own but don’t want to even install. The games that I haven’t played are those I don’t want to play but somehow ended up owning. Probably through bundle deals.
Is the openworld meant for exploring, like pre-Starfield Bethesda game? Yeah i love those.
Is the openworld crafted only for wasting player time, like Ubisoft game? Nah.
Is the openworld crafted as a backstage for the main story but also can be explored, like GTA franchise or dying light? Yeah, those are nice.
Is the openworld only used as a backstage for the main story that doesn’t encourage exploration because it conflict with player urgency, like Metro Exodus? I’d rather not.
Skullgirls - Still the best damn fighting game ever made. I've been grinding for a full decade now, and I'll be entering Combo Breaker 2025 once again this year.
Slay the Spire - The game that ruined all other roguelikes for me. What I love about StS is that it never lets you get complacent, never lets you lean on just one good synergy that will carry you the entire run. You always have to keep adapting, and you have to have a well-rounded deck to deal with enemies that are designed to counter players who try to rely on only one thing. And when I eventually got to the point where I'd had my fill of vanilla, there's so much fun stuff from the modding community to play around with. Packmaster is incredible.
CrossCode - It's been years since I finished this RPG and its colorful cast still lives rent-free in my head. This is a game that is perfect in every way and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Fantastic combat, tons of side content, endearing characters, emotionally powerful story, beautiful visuals, amazing soundtrack.
CrossCode is all about how it plays! That’s why there is a free Steam demo! Go give it a try! Take the best out of two popular genres, find a good balance between them and make a great game. That’s what CrossCode does. You get the puzzles of Zelda-esque dungeons and are rewarded with the great variety of equipment you know and love from RPGs. During the fast-paced battles you will use the tools you find on your journey to reveal and exploit the enemies’ weaknesses and at the same time will be able to choose equipment and skills for a more in-depth approach in fighting your enemies.
Yeah, I took a look because of your comment. Sounds like something I should try. The art is certainly appealing to me. Appreciative that more games are putting out demos lately.
I’m so glad someone’s mentioned CrossCode! Such a wonderful experience from beginning to end. The world really feels alive with every inch of a mal being used to either enhance the story or hide a puzzle! I loved seeing chests and figuring out how to get to them across several maps.
I’m really looking forward to their next project, Alabaster Dawn. I hope it’s just as good!
I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.
Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.
Then you purchased a wrong game and should just play solitaire.
Witcher 3 is absolutely great, but if you just go through only the main quest, won’t explore the world and won’t do side quests then I can see you ending up disappointed.
What I like is that side quests can impact the main quest and even the ending.
But you’ve made a lot of assumptions in your comment, and you’re mistaken about most of them.
I played the side quests. Many came with a good backstory, but that is not gameplay. Nearly all were copy/paste instances from a small pool of tedious tasks. There were a few memorable exceptions, but very few.
I explored the world, as much as one can “explore” something that is fully labeled with point-of-interest markers. They lead the player to a repetitive handful of uninspired encounters, cloned over and over again.
It has plenty of other flaws as well. If you loved it, then I’m happy for you, but I found the gameplay boring.
The strengths I found in The Witcher 3 were its story, lore, characters, and Gwent. Not its gameplay.
Meanwhile, Gwent is a surprisingly well-designed strategy game. So much so that it ended up spun off into a stand-alone version (although I don’t know how good the spinoff is).
Yep. I played an earlier version but it’s the same game.
The key thing that made me notice was the scarecrow cards that allowed you to pick up your units, those make sense in Condottiere as it’s divided in rounds where you fight multiple battles, so it made sense to pick up your units if you had excess power and were winning anyway, save your strength for the next battle in the round, whereas it made a lot less sense in Gwent given its 1v1 nature and fixed amount of rounds.
Mind you Gwent evolved a lot afterwards, I don’t know much beyond the witcher 3 version, which I still enjoyed plenty.
There is no argument if the statement is objectively true
The Witcher 3’s gameplay was so bad that I couldn’t finish it (the map and the quests’ gameplay part too, but that’s another story). Gwent was pretty cool though
There is a lot of highly critical discourse around the Last Samurai. Not current, because it’s not a current movie, but saying that it’s “okay” suggests you they haven’t looked for criticism.
Also, weary.
Edit: clarity.
Edit2: I have since been made aware by @SkunkWorkz of a different perspective that makes a lot more sense, see comments below.
And even then, there were people who were uncomfortable with a narrative of some heroic white dude coming in to save the exotic natives. Just wasn’t a very popular opinion.
That’s presumably the beginnings of an awareness of why that narrative is problematic. And also of the importance of historic accuracy. His role in the narrative was that of a saviour though. (Also, he survives.)
Yeah but it was the other side of the spectrum. It weren’t right wing racist who were mad but SJWs who didn’t see the movie and don’t understand that the word Samurai in the title is plural not singular.
I’m not sure if The Last Shogun is something different, but if you’re referring to the Shogun series recently adapted by FX, I can say having watched it that it features a main character who fancies himself a superior white savior, but ultimately leads to realizing how completely out of his depth he is.
But it’s like the Memoir of a Geisha problem: since the original work was written by a white dude anyways, how much value does it have as a cultural work?
I thought so too in the beginning. But the English character in that series is more of a… Useful tool that gets used. He has no agency and he never realises it throughout the entire series.
You can downvote all you want, but that is the logical escape the industry will take. They will make the online part of games expensive to pay until no one wants to play it or pays them an absurd amount.
Hey, you do you. Just don't try to sell me a moral high horse about exclusivity. I grew past console wars when the kids in the playground were excited about Terminator 2 coming out. If we're going to bring the conversation back to that level I demand my knees stop hurting in the proces of de-evolution as well.
Any good thing about Epic Store other than Free games?
Why would anyone want to buy it on Epic if it available on GOG, Steam or Itch? Personally, I will never because it didn’t even provide good regional prices.
I don't know, I don't care. I don't often buy things on Epic, myself. Seems to me that "free games" is a pretty big thing to dismiss out of hand, though. That seems like a good thing, free games.
In any case the fact that Epic isn't my store of choice for anything but exclusives and free games also means I don't spend my time posting stuff about how much they suck. That seems like an undue amount of effort and attention for my what? Fourth, fifth favorite online games store on PC.
There's also nothing particularly bad about it. Bit of a simple, feature-light UX. Free games is nice. They are smart enough about allowing third party logins, so you can easily import your games automatically into other, better launchers like GOG Galaxy, Launchbox or Heroic. Seen worse.
Ah, the killer retort of the online argument. "If you don't care about this thing I'm mad about for no reason, why are you explaining how I'm wrong about it?"
See, the answer is "because you whining about it on the Internet bothers me more than the thing you're mad about", which doesn't make anybody involved look good. I didn't say I was a dignified commenter, I said the console wars nonsense is too undignified even for me.
One reason is that the Epic Games revenue split gives more to the developers. That being said though, they do enter exclusivity agreements with publishers all the time, which is anti-consumer.
But MudMan’s comment was more about how the meme denounces store-exclusive games, yet games that are available only on Steam are also store-exclusive.
GOG is a bit of an outlier. They allow developers to list their games DRM-free so their customers can truly own their games. If store exclusivity is the problem, GOG is the solution - not Steam.
Some game on Epic cost more for me than Steam(BTD6, Brotato and some other). If a game is available on Steam and Epic, I will buy it on Steam. If a game is available on Steam, GOG and Epic I will buy it on GOG. If it’s available on itch.io then itch.io.
Yeah. Those assholes. Taking 12% of the gross of a game sales instead of Valve’s 30% at a time when studios are struggling.
That better overlay and browser is totally worth 18% of the total value of a game and shouldn’t go to the employees making the product or into more features. I need my virtual stickers!
Steam also has anti-consumer policies. They just hide it better.
You think the reasen that games that are on both platforms don’t cost 20% more on Steam is because the devs love Gabe?
He’s a fucking billionaire who makes infinite money running an app store that takes a bigger cut of the game’s income than the combined pay of all the developers working on the game combined.
He’s not your friend. He’s a leech running a glorified app launcher.
This is a conversation about steam, the platform not Gabe. Yes, he is a billionaire, yes that makes him shitty, but guess what? Steam is a fantastic service for the end user, and that’s what matters.
If they charged less.fpr the platform, they’d still be raking in more than they can spend while also not taking an extra 20% out of game development budgets versus the competition.
As a consumer I’m more concerned about Epic’s anti-consumer practices than what they are paying devs.
Talking about how much they could charge devs does not change my experience as a consumer. It does not provide a compelling argument for me to use a service that does noticeably make things worse for the consumer.
You think Valve taking an extortionate amount of the budget doesn’t affect you as a consumer?
Games have budgets. With Valve taking as much money as the actual development budget for many games, the end product is significantly impacted. Games are regularly released late while missing features and so buggy as to not work. The extra 18% of the gross taken up by Valve versus EGS could be used to put more resources into the actual game.
Walmart and GameStop provide a physical place, that’s it. The Developer sends them the physical product.
Steam provides unlimited downloads, user forums, automatic updates, remote play, user reviews, Steam workshop etc…
None of these other stores provide these things.
Maybe Epic should charge more than 12% and invest that money in improving their client, or at least do that instead of wasting it on exclusivity deals. Then maybe I as a consumer will give a shit about Epic.
Yeah I love Epic’s cloud saves… Wait… I mean I love their supreme 80% discounts… No wait, I mean I love their integrated friends li… Their API?.. No, I mean their customizable launche…Well, the two free games they hand out once a month are alright.
I love their tags and vast user game reviews the most, myself:
This game that is 🛁 relaxing, has 🌐 diverse characters and is 🐣 great for beginners has 4.7 stars, from the “players in the Epic Games ecosystem.”
It’s the action adventure game GTA 5, of course.
Epic deserves shit for being a shitty company overall. The lower sale tax is great for devs, but most consumers don’t care, because the program is a shitty Unreal application pretending to be a shitty web browser
Valve can definitely lower their sale tax, they get loads of money off trading cards and skin sales, maintenance of that shit is waaay lower than the petabytes needed for games. At least some of the money is spent making better consumer stuff, like Steam deck and increasing the number of games that you can play on Linux with Proton. Doesn’t explain the 30% either way
This happened to me. I tried to force the issue but it never felt the same.
Try some computer-related past-times. Blender is a great option if you want to learn how to work with 3d models. But it’s much more than that, you can use other people’s models and make digital dioramas or animations.
An alternate route leads you into 3d printing or industrial design. Blender is great for organic shapes, but something like OnShape is better for accurate part sizes.
You could pick up some programming, learnpython.org could be a starting point, if you have zero experience.
You could try digital art. There’s a world of knowledge out there for you.
Radiation associated with Starlink satellites was detected at observing frequencies between 110 and 188 MHz, which is well below the 10.7- 12.7 GHz radio frequencies used for the downlink communication signals.
(The original article said 5M radiation, which should be around 60MHz.)
So Starlink is emitting RF in spectrum where they shouldn’t, which is avoidable, but takes effort.
My guess, and I could be wrong, is that this could be related to something other than the radio(s), such as switching power supplies finding opportunistic structures from which to radiate.
Starlink seems like a genuinely interesting and useful technology, in some ways.
But it also seems like it might not be worth having.
I’m thinking they might need to be deorbited, but I’m not confident in that yet. It sounds like it might be fixable in a new generation of Internet constellation satellites.
Idk how long the issue should be tolerated to wait for that, though. And while Starlink has a good amount of customers this kind of Internet is genuinely useful for, it’s still not a lot compared to all the other internet services.
Maybe Starlink deorbiting should come along with an expansion of the traditional communications network. But maybe it would be extremely expensive to reach Starlink’s customers with towers or cables.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an excerpt from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
History Lesson enclosedNowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak. About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big. And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
The meme is because Skull and bones is so bad of a fumble, to also just fumble its name. I picked it up from some review but I can’t remember who it was. Dunkey? Ah too long ago.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.
To be a bit of a pedant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.
I’ve been in the closed beta since February and I can vouch for this game being awesome. It’s been a great way to encourage me to take my dogs on walks and stay healthy. I definitely recommend checking it out.
To the dev, your game has motivated me to learn flutter/dart. I’ve been working with it for four months now and I’m getting close to finishing my first app, so thank you for the inspiration!
Awesome to hear that the game has inspired you to learn Dart & Flutter. Dart is an awesome language, and Flutter is versatile and easy tool for making some great looking UIs! But even more so, it always warms my heart to hear that the game has a positive impact on people’s lives. Keep it up, and thank you again!
Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
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