I don’t have it but I’ve seen admin/dev comments on this, with 1.0 release they plan to add offline singleplayer, and currently online is required on character select/launch, but losing internet connection during play will not kick you out or interrupt it.
I’m keeping my eye on it and will probably pick it up when offline singleplayer is added, but that being included is the deciding factor on if I’ll get it or not myself, since it’s just a promise for now and those can be broken.
Edit: apparently its already added according to other replies
Grim Dawn has one major issue IMO: it overuses passives and semi-passive abilities. When I play an action RPG, I want to actively push different buttons to do different things instead of optimizing my primary attack to do a bit of everything.
Funny thing: on your screenshot, it looks like the Play Offline button is greyed out. But it’s just a visual thing and you can totally click on it, right ?
Yes, I’m pretty sure its just because if you hit enter on that screen, it assumes and selects the Play Online button.
Play Online is actually a relatively newish feature as far as I understand. Multiplayer only came around earlier this year, before then your save was only offline.
Everyone's malding over spoilers and not realizing this isn't an actual ending that's coded into the game, it's just a funny side effect of a spell that malfunctioned during the end boss.
People can also apply the slightest semblance of critical thinking and realize most gaming journalism outfits, no matter their questionable quality, will realize they won't last long if there are true spoilers in the titles. Therefore this isn't really a spoiler.
Like they're obviously going to phrase things in ways that get more engagement, which is why it's a crucial skill on the internet today that readers need to think critically and not just accept headlines literally.
I'm not saying it's right, but jfc man, you have to develop skills to engage with the internet you have, not the internet you wish you had. I really feel no sympathy for people who thought this was a spoiler. At least this is a cheap lesson in gullibility instead of a costly one.
If I understand, the argument is that someone who doesn't want to be spoiled for endings should...look at a headline purported to be specifically about endings, and then read the article to see if it's about endings, which they are not going to do because there is an extraordinarily high chance it's exactly what it says it is in big letters, and any failure to voluntarily read spoilers they don't want to be spoiled for is then a failure on the part of the player?
That feels like reaching. Would rather not be mean. I think people stranded on top of zombie infested buildings whose only method of escape is a single in-use helicopter have reached less.
This is just a justification to brush off anyone who opens their mouth at all, because were there a reader who did for some reason want to click on every headline they didn't want to know about in order to make sure they shouldn't have clicked on it, that would definitely still be something that is their fault once they saw anything they shouldn't.
Even leaving aside why someone would do that, the OP made the conscious decision to post it like they did.
They could have tipped everyone off to the clickbait. They could have used a spoiler tag if they didn't bother reading it or wanted to play into the clickbait. They chose to do neither. That has nothing to do with the journalistic integrity of online gaming mags. This was a personal mistake.
I have seen communities be shockingly good about respecting this. The Hades community especially is amazing and, though the game has been out now for so many years the sequel is nearing completion, they'd probably still just give you what bare advice they have to based on your current status and tell you to keep playing because "trust me."
I don't know why the bg3 community wants to pretend it's impossible and out of their hands, while swearing it shouldn't matter anyway. It very well is, and for a game this stunning, it absolutely does.
I think it was implied by “rarest” being in quotes.
edit: at least, I knew immediately it was no such thing because of that, like every other time someone says something while doing air quotes with their fingers.
It’s literally described in the very first sentence:
A Baldur’s Gate 3 player joked that their fiancée may have found the rarest possible ending for the game when Wild Magic turned everyone into dogs and cats for the final cutscenes.
Not really a spoiler. If you proc a wild magic surge on the last turn in the last fight, and it polymorphs your party into cats and dogs, they don’t depolymorph in the end cutscenes. It’s not a real ending, just a funny bug
Don’t know if this counts as an ending proper rather than a funny and very rare unintended effect. I doubt the devs planned for it or even realized it could happen.
There’re no “spoilers” as it’s a malfunctioned spell during the end scene, nothing more. That said, anyone clicking through to an article with “rarest ending” in the title deserves whatever kick in the head they get from reading about an ending scene… 🙄🤌🏼
Unless you've forcibly seen most of them and you can pick out what moments go where because x action, or you have this one singular shred of information that happens to be the integral piece to draw together an entire arc.
Earlier this week, I was listening to music on YouTube and saw a thumbnail that told me exactly what was up with the tadpoles. Not even the title. I don't remember what the title was. It was written on the thumbnail in giant glaring yellow letters.
If I am to play this game. I cannot have access to the internet in any conceivable way. I had thought this problem only extended to forums and news sights, places that were fairly obvious and thus easily avoided, but it's the entire internet when you least expect it.
I'm a third of the way into act 2 and the only teammates whose important plot moments and/or multiple endings I don't know are Wyll and Lae'zel, and that's only because nobody likes them enough to be talking about them.
I have tried to avoid this shit at every turn. It's still a great game. It's fantastic. It would have been in my top 3 if I could have played the damn thing on my own. I fucking love picking things to shreds more than anything else and there are so many pressing unknowns and conflicting motivations that I'd be having the time of my life. You don't understand. I could write a whole thesis on any one of them.
But I know the answers already. I'm kind of convinced the reason I've found myself so much more attached to side characters like Mol, Oliver, etc. over most of the main story npcs is because they weren't important enough for anyone to ruin them for me.
Earlier this week, I was listening to music on YouTube and saw a thumbnail that told me exactly what was up with the tadpoles. Not even the title. I don’t remember what the title was. It was written on the thumbnail in giant glaring yellow letters.
I wanna find everyone who posts shit like that and str–
<span style="color:#323232;">Wish them a very good time
</span>
I usually avoid that by not getting too hyped up about a game before I play it. It saved my playthroughs of Cyberpunk and Starfield, although Panam’s unwavering heterosexuality and my flatmate spoiling the end of Starfield kinda damaged my interest in both.
I avoid watching any videos about the hyped up new game, so youtube doesn’t recommend me any videos about the hyped up new game
Nothing is spoiled by this headline, it’s just a bug where your characters might not depolymorph after the last fight, and they’ll appear as animals in the ending cutscenes
Yeah, overall it’s fine. It’s definitely enjoyable enough but there’s definitely a lot of work to be done and it worries me when they say they’ll not release the last 3 subclasses until full release when patches are not very stable and entire subclasses with zero testing is… not gonna end up good.
I only really agree with the endgame being lackluster and that’s something that will certainly improve with time as they add more mechanics that get incorporated into Monoliths. The core gear and skill systems are good, which is something that can make or break an ARPG, so saying the developers are unskilled seems a little harsh.
Until it is more fleshed out though I would definitely recommend Grim Dawn over it, which is a game with a lot of content and polish, as well as modding if it’s not enough. I would recommend PoE, but it’s complex enough that it might be better to wait the 1+ year until PoE2 and try that, maybe also learning PoE if it maintains a large playerbase and good support, they claimed they will continue to release just as many expansions for it.
Can you name a few? I’m looking for one that scratches the mage itch of hitting a bunch of mobs with chain lightning without the expectation of online participation, or item refinement.
Looks interesting, but I gotta be honest: when I click on the Steam page and the first thing I see is a cash shop to buy “Epoch Points” for this early access game? That’s an instant turn-off for me. I’m sure it’s not as predatory as what Blizzard did with D4’s monetization, but I don’t want it in my games, period.
Jokes on them. That stuff turns me off. I’ve been playing one iteration or another of Diablo for over 25 years. I mean I take long breaks but I always come back. But Diablo 4, as well as it’s made, isn’t Diablo. I don’t want other people in my games unless they are IRL friends, and while I enjoy seasonal powers because I enjoy the gameplay, I don’t care about the rewards. And I’m just not a big fan of stacking tiny little 1-2% buffs and calling that advancement. When I drop a skill point I want to feel it without breaking out statistical analysis.
I played the hell out of it up until the season and then for about a month into the season. And I think I’m already done with it. Rather play BG3, or replay Jedi, or finish Horizon Forbidden West assuming I still remember how to play. D4 was a good story and the production values are top notch, but it doesn’t have the replayability joy of earlier games.
I don’t think I have interacted with another person on D4 except for a IRL friend I played with for a little while. I’m back to playing D3 and some PoE.
It certainly has been for me. Picked it up a couple of weeks into Diablo 4’s first season launch, after remembering that I had heard some folks on Lemmy talking about it during D4’s open-beta.
Zero regrets on picking it up, feels like I’m actually having fun along the way whereas in Diablo 4 I kept wondering where the fun was at (and that said “fun” was always just a few paragon points away so I could unlock a node that would end up being inconsequential).
I’ve primarily played mage (and it actually feels like a mage unlike D4’s so called sorcerer class…) so while I can’t personally speak on the other classes, a friend of mine has done a lot of experimenting with the other classes and they have nothing to say but good things about the various classes.
It is worth noting that Last Epoch is still technically in beta, and does have some bugs every now and then. But they are targeting their 1.0 release before the end of this year. I’m not normally one who picks up early access games, this one certainly is a nice exception though.
Because some people aren’t idiots, they are gamblers with a real addiction. If you had a gambling addiction today or were part of a vulnerable group with no other outlets this game would bleed them dry and leave them with nothing of value they can sell later when they hit rock bottom. It’s not morons we care about, it’s addicts.
Because in our society we very much need money and gambling sells itself by making you believe you’ll get money. Cosmetics in games has no such issues.
EDIT: as long as you can’t sell them for money a la CSGO.
Paid cosmetics being fine stems from a time where not every other game weaponized FOMO by basically hacking your brain. Yes, it is still easily avoidable by a lot of people, but we shouldn’t allow vulnerable people being preyed on.
Headsets in the thousand-dollar range are plenty good and still not selling. Take the hint. Push costs down. Cut out everything that is not strictly necessary. Less Switch, more Game Boy.
6DOF inside-out tracking is required, but you can get that from one camera and an orientation sensor. Is it easy? Nope. Is it tractable for any of the companies already making headsets? Yes, obviously. People want pick-up-and-go immersion. Lighthouses were infrastructure and Cardboard was not immersive. Proper tracking in 3D space has to Just Work.
Latency is intolerable. Visual quality, scene detail, shader complexity - these are nice back-of-the-box boasts. Instant response time is do-or-die. Some monocular 640x480 toy with rock-solid 1ms latency would feel more real than any ultrawide 4K pancake monstrosity that’s struggling to maintain 10ms.
Two innovations could make this painless.
One, complex lenses are a hack around flat lighting. Get rid of the LCD backlight and use one LED. This simplifies the ray diagram to be nearly trivial. Only the point light source needs to be far from the eye. The panel and its single lens can be right in your face. Or - each lens can be segmented. The pyramid shape of a distant point source gets smaller, and everything gets thinner. At some point the collection of tiny projectors looks like a lightfield, which is what we should pursue anyway.
Two, intermediate representation can guarantee high performance, even if the computer chokes. It is obviously trivial to throw a million colored dots at a screen. Dice up a finished frame into floating paint squares, and an absolute potato can still rotate, scale, and reproject that point-cloud, hundreds of times per second. But flat frames are meant for flat screens. Any movement at all reveals gaps behind everything. So: send point-cloud data, directly. Do “depth peeling.” Don’t do backface culling. Toss the headset a version of the scene that looks okay from anywhere inside a one-meter cube. If that takes longer for the computer to render and transmit… so what? The headset’s dinky chipset can show it more often than your godlike PC, because it’s just doing PS2-era rendering with microsecond-old head-tracking. The game could crash and you’d still be wandering through a frozen moment at 100, 200, 500 Hz.
I think the slightly more viable version of the rendering side is to send a combination of low res point cloud + low res large FOV frames for each eye with detailed (!) depth map + more detailed image streamed where the eye is focused (with movement prediction) + annotation on what features are static and which changed and where light sources are, allowing the headset to render the scene with low latency and continuously update the recieved frames based on movement with minimal noticable loss in detail, tracking stuff like shadows and making parallax with flawlessly even if the angle and position of the frame was a few degrees off.
Undoubtedly point-clouds can be beaten, and adding a single wide-FOV render is an efficient way to fill space “offscreen.” I’m just cautious about explaining this because it invites the most baffling rejections. At one point I tried explaining the separation of figuring out where stuff is, versus showing that location to you, using beads floating in a fluid simulation. Tracking the liquid and how things move within it is obviously full of computer-melting complexity. Rendering a dot, isn’t. And this brain case acted like I’d described simulating the entire ocean for free. As if the goal was plucking all future positions out of thin air, and not, y’know, remembering where it is, now.
The lowest-bullshit way is probably frustum slicing. Picture the camera surrounded by transparent spheres. Anything between two layers gets rendered onto the further one. This is more-or-less how “deep view video” works. (Worked?) Depth information can be used per-layer to create lumpen meshes or do parallax mapping. Whichever is cheaper at obscene framerates. Rendering with alpha is dirt cheap because it’s all sorted.
Point clouds (or even straight-up original geometry) might be better at nose-length distances. Separating moving parts is almost mandatory for anything attached to your hands. Using a wide-angle point render instead of doing a cube map is one of several hacks available since Fisheye Quake, and a great approach if you expect to replace things before the user can turn around.
But I do have to push back on active fake focus. Lightfields are better. Especially if we’re distilling the scene to be renderable in a hot millisecond, there’s no reason to motorize the optics and try guessing where your pupils are headed. Passive systems can provide genuine focal depth.
My suggestions are mostly about maintaining quality while limiting bandwidth requirements to the headset, wouldn’t a lightfield require a fair bit of bandwidth to keep updated?
(Another idea is to annotate moving objects with predicated trajectories)
Less than you might think, considering the small range perspectives involved. Rendering to a stack of layers or a grid of offsets technically counts. It is more information than simply transmitting a flat frame… but update rate isn’t do-or-die, if the headset itself handles perspective.
Optimizing for bandwidth would probably look more like depth-peeled layers with very approximate depth values. Maybe rendering objects independently to lumpy reliefs. The illusion only has to work for a fraction of a second, from about where you’re standing.
Alpha-blending is easy because, again, it is a set of sorted layers. The only real geometry is some crinkly concentric spheres. I wouldn’t necessarily hand-wave Silent Hill 2 levels of subtlety, with one static moment, but even uniform fog would be sliced-up along with everything else.
Reflections are handled as cutouts with stuff behind them. That part is a natural consequence of their focus on lightfield photography, but it could be faked somewhat directly by rendering. Or you could transmit environment maps and blend between those. Just remember the idea is to be orders of magnitude more efficient than rendering everything normally.
I thought the windows MR lineup filled that gap pretty well. Much cheaper than most of the other alternatives back then but it never really took off and MS has quietly dropped it.
Still $300 or $400 for a wonky platform. That’s priced better than I thought they were, but the minimum viable product is far below that, and we might need a minimal product, to improve adoption rates. The strictly necessary components could total tens of dollars… off the shelf.
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