Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. Consoles will break down. 50 years from now there’ll be too much history to keep making copies of everything worth saving. If we do want a video game preservation law, make it digital.
Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than ~20 years, or if the parent company goes under. Online games should be required to make an offline mode patch before shutting down.
As a related example, my parents have a bunch of bookshelves packed with everything they bought over the years. And as a kid I never touched any of it because the books had become all gross and yellowed. Physical game archives will last a couple decades longer but in the end it’ll be the same result.
didnt even think about that… but how do university libraries for example then keep up their valuable - or even more interesting - their non valuable old inventory? Never thought that degration was THAT potent
CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a “physical copy” of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.
Earlier this year, I was in a similar predicament. I actually told Triss that I loved her. However, that only works if you take advantage of her while she’s drunk at the party. (She falls down while drunk and after you catch her, you can randomly kiss her.) I didn’t and locked myself out of romancing her early.
I would have lost many hours of progress by going back and frankly, I didn’t want to go for that choice. I cut my losses and went with Yen. Since then, I finished the whole game, DLCs included, and I don’t regret my choice. She gets a lot better later on and I came to appreciate her. Her quests are good. I just think the game does a poor job introducing her. I don’t care for either the books or the show and I’ve only played Witcher 2 once on release. With my first playthrough of Witcher 3 only starting last year, I knew literally nothing going in. Up until I could romance Triss, Yen was annoying and arrogant.
I think this criticism is fair to be honest and is one of the things that’s sort of swept under the rug a bit in discourse about Witcher 3. I definitely think the pacing is off just as you mentioned. I’ve heard other people regret their choice of Triss because they had basically locked in her romance already by the time you start doing stuff in Skellige with Yen and start seeing what she’s like.
Personally I think the Yen/Geralt dynamic is a lot better than with Triss, although it’s got its own troubles (nobody is perfect). I like the banter between them and they feel more like a proper couple.
The game as a whole also flows better with Yen as your romance choice in my opinion and to me it feels more like the Triss romance is an afterthought yes. A bone thrown at those who desperately can’t stand Yen.
Geralt (in the books) is deeply in love with Yen and is also bound to her by literal Djinn magic, so it makes sense that he’s always hot for her in the game and I think the attention paid to the Yen side of things is a desire by CDPR to anchor their game in the preexisting lore.
If you’re not dead set on Triss or wildly opposed to Yen I’d say go with it and do the Yen romance. It’s very suitable for a first time playthrough imo.
I really do think they should have flipped the timeline for the two in W3. Even players of the first two games don’t really know Yennefer that well, so her proper introduction to the player comes very late, all things considered.
Not being immersed in their backstory also doesn’t really convey how messed up it is that Triss got together with a man who lost the memories of the woman he was in love with (a woman she knew).
DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.
A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.
Is there another meaning to “PSA” that isn’t “public service announcement”? It confuses me being in the title as this entire post is written as a suggestion / CTA, not a PSA.
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]
M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.
Those will outlive you.
You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.
GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.
But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.
Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.
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.
Is this a law that specifically only applies to AAAs, or are we just shutting down literally all of indie gaming? If the former, how do you legally draw the line between who is and isn't allowed to release digital-only titles? Even just basing it on the size of the company would effectively mean that large publishers may only release large projects and never smaller budget titles.
Fingers crossed this is just due to particular weather in the screenshots. The meshes and textures look great, but the post processing immediately threw me off. At least that’s something easy to fix via Reshade and mods.
GameCube games MSRP was 49.99. Adjusted for inflation it is $79.30. The reason things feel so expensive is because you get half cooked broken DLC ridden games as the norm and a large portion of income goes toward housing, transportation (cars specifically), food and education.
Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.
If Nintendo always made games that didn’t need dlc or got free updates, didn’t require Nintendo online for full functionality, or had to pay a 30% platform fee, it would make much more sense for this price. I don’t believe for a second they won’t make a profit at $60 for their mainline games.
You’re also forgetting maybe the biggest factor: library selection. We used to have a lot of choices, but not literal thousands of choices across all our platforms. If we only had our choice of a few hundred games, $80 might sound more reasonable.
theres also the chance that at least for TTYD, that was a players choice version of the game, which retailed for 20$ new. since its 2006, on the wake of the Wii
That’s a fucking wild bill if you are not from the US. One would almost think you are being scammed (I am talking about the deceptive structure of the bill, not the values).
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