In my opinion one of the greatest games but also one of the saddest. If you already own the game then I highly recommend all the DLC as they all bring some interesting scenarios to the game.
Played it pirated years ago. Not really looking to play again tbh because it’s so sad, but I’ll buy it discounted for supporting, I back then liked the very original angle of playing with trapped victims instead of army.
Knowing what I know, I am assuming this image was standardised and then normalised (fancy stats algos to keep things in the same visual range) while stitching it together, and the final product enhanced a lot of colouration (saturation). They’re subtle or undetectable to the naked eye, but they exist. They are reflected in the different minerals present. I’ve done this stuff (raster stitching) with different imagery. Op was active in the comments with info, but I didn’t read up on it.
The colors don’t match what a human eye would see, but without going into a philosophy tangent, color is extremely complex and a huge part of what a human sees is your brain doing representations and mapping that isn’t perfectly represented in the physical object being observed. In this photo the saturation has been increased (versus a human eye) because it helps show the geological differences on the lunar surface. The reddish areas are high in iron and feldspar, and the blue-tinted zones have higher titanium content. Instead of thinking of the color as “real” or “fake” it’s probably better to think of it as a tool, to simulate if you were a super human with the ability to adjust saturation and detect metal composition with your eye. Usually when a photo like this is shared by researchers and scientist all this nuance and exposition is included, but then journalist and social media get a hold of it and people start crying “fake” without an understanding of what the image is trying to accomplish. TL;DR - The image isn’t what a human eye would see but it isn’t just art to look cool, the color and modifications have physical meaning and serve a purpose.
From what I read, it didn’t even just suck, it was practically fraud. They knew how many sales they had and only stood up enough servers to support around 200 players.
thab’s been trying to beat “The Last Dance” for a few days already, it’s really fascinating to watch. And even barb finished one level, then said “fuck this garbage” and spent the next days finishing Paper Mario and complaining how boring it is…
Old timer here… Diablo 2 has a story with an atmosphere that sucks you in. In that sense Diablo 3 was a real disappointment.
Now, if you’re going for Diablo 2 it’s the remastered version you want. The game is like 20 years old and not made for widescreen so it really feels dated on a modern screen. Also, prepare for isometric pixel graphics.
Grim Dawn also has a mod called Reign Of Terror that lets you play the entirety of Diablo 2 in GD, complete with classes, skills and items! It has some differences because it's built on Grim Dawn's systems, so it has the dual-class system from Grim Dawn (with similarly laid out skill trees), item affixes work like Grim Dawn, etc, but it feels great to play! And you can combine Grim Dawn classes with D2 classes, D2 classes with other D2 classes, or just play the D2 campaign with a regular Grim Dawn build. It's great!
Another option is to get Grim Dawn, and then get the Reign of Terror mod. It’s basically Diablo 2 recreated almost completely + some extra content.
But since you’ve never played Diablo 2, I’d recommend playing it first in some form (D2R or PD2) so you can appreciate the storyline (and the epic cutscenes) - and then play the Grim Dawn mod.
The Crucible is the weakest - it’s just an arena mode, but it’s got a lot of utility for speed leveling new characters + some QoL for existing ones.
Ashes of Malmouth is the direct continuation of the base game’s story, adds Necromancer and Inquisitor which are both very well-loved masteries, and you need it for Forgotten Gods anyway. The zones are a bit meh - great overall mood but you spend a lot of time in cramped corridors.
Forgotten Gods adds Oathkeeper (very fun) and tons of huge new zones with a refreshingly different vibe to the rest of the game. And you can go to this expansion’s zones from the start! (Except that you probably shouldn’t on your first playthrough, you’d get destroyed and you probably want to focus on the main story anyway.)
I’d wait for a sale and get them all if you like this genre, or just base game + AoM if you just want to give it a shot (and technically you could hold off on AoM until you’re close to the end of the campaign).
i only played a little of both. i like titan quest for the story and mythology, but grim dawn seems more refined and modern, it’s actually by the SAME team (today i learned)!
I'm aware, but it will likely be mechanically similar. If it turns out to be a Bloodlines 2 situation, I can always just stick to the first game and Grim Dawn, maybe V Rising. And all of that is assuming that as I spend more time in Titan Quest I still enjoy it.
The gameplay is very good up until level 40 and is definitely one of the more complete early access games.
So far I have not encountered any game breaking bugs, but the game itself does have tons of jank.
Now I am currently level 47, and can say that leveling from 40 to 50 is a hella grind and takes a lot of time and resources. Mainly time, as getting end game pokeballs takes a massive amount of resources that only pals can harvest, process, and then craft.
Also, the end game bosses are quite beefy and hit like a truck.
For what it’s worth, if you customize the difficulty of your game (which you can do at any point, including after reaching the 40s), you can change most things, including resource drop rates and how much effort it takes to mine them, xp rates, Pal encounter rates, capture rates, etc.
I had a similar experience as you; by the time I hit 42 or so, I had the capture power maxed out, and most eggs were not giving me anything interesting, and I had the whole map revealed, so exploring had lost its luster and I was not enjoying the thought of grinding out another 6-8 levels to start being able to tackle some of the harder challenges in the game; I set the XP rate to x4, and doubled the resource rates, and it pretty much solved the problem for me.
Obviously if you’re playing on a server this isn’t an option, but if it’s just your own single player game, consider trying it; you might find some settings that smooth it out for you.
If you build a base on/near a bunch of ore nodes and dedicate it entirely to mining your pals will mine it for you and it respawns daily (passive ore generation ftw!!!)
There is a fairly nice base location near the center of the map that has ~6 coal and ~6 ore nodes, and is on a plateau making it functionally immune to NPC raids. I found it completely accidentally; there’s the 3 wildlife sanctuaries around the outside of the map and they all face inward at different angles, so I was trying to triangulate where they were “pointing” to see if it was leading somewhere. Turns out it was leading to a sweet base location.
This is noteworthy because there’s 4 resources (ore, coal, sulfur and quartz), so you need a base with access to 2 of them if you want to have all 4 generating passively.
For end game, how do you think the spheres feel? Cause I swear to god the ultra and legend spheres have bugged capture rates; no way I am getting the percentages those things advertise.
Lol, I know what you mean. Those legendary spheres say like 80-90% but it feels like a coin flip most of the time. I have had so many fail at like 95%.
League of Legends. I don’t understand the appeal at all. It’s just ugly and not fun. I really tried to get into it too. An old group of friends I played games with all play it. For over a decade it’s been practically the only game they play. They never seemed like they were having actual fun either but they keep coming back. I miss those guys ☹️.
I’ve found games like that too filled with super serious gamers. DoTA is the same but the community is a bit friendlier.
I have ZERO patience so I’ll just storm ahead into battle and try to fuck things up but that’s not a great way to play cos you keep dying and lose time on the board. I tried to get into Heroes of the Storm when it started and the more casual players were a lot more fun but over time it developed the usual crowd of hardcore addicts that ruined it.
Minecraft is pretty good for this kind of stuff, especially Java Edition (has mods, and loooooads of servers, some of which also use mods to drastically alter the gameplay. You can also host your own, free of charge).
If you want to get them something low level cheap, AMD small form factor pcs with integrated Radeon can be had for cheap (easily under $200 if you are patient). One of my kid plays on one of these and with a few performance mods on minecraft does 30fps just fine.
Even raspberry pi 4/5 are amazingly capable of playing minecraft 1080p. I wonder how much better linux gaming support there is on those now since the steamdeck has been a success…
Dead Space. Ammunition is displayed on your weapon, health and stasis on your suit.
Prey 2016 also displayed your ammo on your gun, but had traditional health bars (it was an fpp game after all).
But I like a good HUD if it’s implemented in the story, like Cyberpunk where it’s a part of your augmented eyes, like an advanced Google lens. Doom did the same with the helmet.
Regarding GTA V, I never got to know the city well enough to play without a map. That fucking town was just to big for me. But I remember Vice City, I knew the map in and out, and playing without a map was fun!
Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.
The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.
The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.
As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
By which information? I have no clue what Northstar is, but if you ban by IP or MAC, its pointless.
It's cat and mouse when it comes to banning, even with hwid signatures the cheaters are able to use sophisticated spoofing techniques. Also there are side effects like legitimate players buying second hand pcs that have been banned.
People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.
Unlikely imo, because modern game devs have been killing the viability of that for years. User-hosted servers are gone, crossplay is reliant on SBMM to be realistically possible, and private matches often block players from receiving XP and rewards because they’re worried about FOMO and people getting too much fun without spending enough. Even CSGO got an update in the months leading up to CS2 where they removed the ability to earn drops on community servers, driving another nail into the coffin as one of the last kinds of these games that still retain the mere ability to run servers of our own.
While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.
Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.
For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.
Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.
Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.
But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.
Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.
There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.
A global ban system without a more nuanced approach is a terrible idea. Operators of that global ban system will whitelist themselves, blacklist people they hate, and maybe even backdoor the mod that enables them to ban people in the first place. Server admins have no choice but to either opt into the entire system or have none at all, and both of these options suck. We’ve seen how this plays out already.
Score players by your own criteria, weight everything with different blacklists, greylists and whitelists, etc. and ban players if they exceed a threshold automatically. It won’t be perfect, but email catches most spam emails that way just fine.
No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.
That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.
There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.
Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.
I didn’t describe what could happen, but what did happen in real life. Multiple times.
MCBans is open-source btw, yet nobody checked and changed the source code, as should be expected really. Operators whitelisted alts and friends. Blacklisted server owners who didn’t appreciate that the operators of their global ban list griefed their servers with backdoors.
Another typical example is 3rd-party Discord ban lists. They whitelist their own staff. They backdoor their bots to fuck around with servers. It’s just the reality of global ban lists.
If Erlite doesn’t abuse that trust, then someone with admin access will, or Erlite’s successor. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Email spam filters prevent single trust lists with scores, multiple lists, etc.
I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.
Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.
Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.
If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.
I installed 1,000 old game ROMs for NES, SNES, Sega Genesis/Master System, N64, and PS1. I’ve been reliving all of my childhood games since I got it. Road Rash on the PS1 was one I never played (and forgot existed) until my wife told me about it. What a blast.
Just curious, did you get the Deck just for that? I think you can run all of those on like the Retroid Pocket, which is like 1/4 the price of the deck?
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn’t a fun part of the game for me, and it’s easy for the developer to do.
This saved my butt the other day! I got some message that my current save was corrupted or detected tampering? and to stop playing on it. I was able to go back a couple of auto saves, find a good one, and not have to do a bunch of content over again!
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people's progress. Even then that's not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it's not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn't be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn't really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It's because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don't control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it's played in Ironman that's fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don't want to play differently, that's fine too.
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