Yeah, this looks awful to use. It’s okay on the Deck because that’s a mobile device and has a lot of functions it needs to satisfy on the go. For a dedicated controller? Why the hell would you prefer this over the better ergonomically designed SC 1 or literally any other console controller?
The original Steam Controller was great for games that didn’t support gamepads… and came out within like a year of “hey, we can actually map CRPGs, grand strategies, and RTSes to gamepads pretty well apparently?”
The Steam Deck is awesome because it is a best of both worlds. Sticks for games that map to those and trackpads for navigating the OS/Steam and for games that don’t map well to sticks. And a gamepad form of the Steam Deck would be awesome, if only for letting those of us with fewer brain cells to only learn one scheme for a game rather than two or three.
This… is not that. Mechanically it is there (and it is a good ad for pcbway or whatever) but the ergonomics are just complete trash. The Steam Deck itself has shockingly awesome ergonomics (and is a great isometric exercise because that thing is a brick) because it is like holding a large hardcover book. Shrink that down and you are just straining your wrists . It is why basically every gamepad has flared “wings” these days. It softens the angle of your wrist while you hold it.
All fair points. I can definitely see the appeal of wanting the same functionality that the Deck controller brings, as I myself really enjoy the extra flexibility the trackpads and back buttons provide. But the ergonomics in this example just looks awful and feels really reminiscent of the original Xbox controller.
Hopefully Valve will decide to release their Ibex soon. I do like that this is a split controller, but the ergonomics don’t look great compared to the leaked Ibex image.
The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.
It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.
Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.
That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.
If you want to know about crap licenses to movies, there was a 8bit game for Blade Runner, but the developers couldn’t obtain the rights to do it. However, they were able to gain the rights to another part of the film.
The box art for the Blade Runner game states in rather small text on the cover, “video game interpretation of the film score”. Yes, they got the rights to the soundtrack!
Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.
What “Mojo” are you talking about? The downfall and enshittification? Is that the “mojo” you want other companies to replicate? I fucking hate games “urinalists”. Nothing but shit, paid opinions and nonsense.
Funny how all of that is straight up solved with any package manager or even git itself (with submodules) for free and yet gaming community is protecting some proprietary burning heap of garbage.
The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.
Exactly! No venture capitalist has ever taken something that could be monetized but wasn’t, bought it out, and then proceeded to monetize it into irrelevancy before…
Cool hope they do a decent job moderating the servers they run and limiting malware exposure. I also hope they’ve taken steps to prevent themselves being used as a host for malicious entities to distribute malware to third parties
The reason that they require an account is because if they did not require user side authentication then it would be trivial to upload obfuscated malware and then use Nexus as a host to distribute it. If someone uploads malware to a random S3 bucket or random VPS or random shared server and tries to use it as a malicious host, the owner and operator will notice a massive bandwidth spike Nexus won’t notice 30,000 downloads.
Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.
They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.
Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.
There are JS based torrent downloaders. That would work for the normies to get files, but you’d still have to find a way to convince people to host files on the backend. It’d probably take a full-on desktop client wrapper with an embedded torrent client but that’s a pretty hard sell for the average nerd if you’re upfront, and probably a harder sell if you’re dishonest about it.
The issue with using torrents is longevity. You’d still want/need traditional storage backing it all. Don’t want some mod to become lost media because nobody is actively seeding it.
Epic has been trying real hard to remove the mojo tho. I have 1000+ hours in Rocket League, very few of those are from after Epic hyper-enshitified the game.
How about getting rid of casual Snow Day. I got on a year or so ago and you couldn’t even play Snow Day as they moved it to some rotating schedule where it was swapped out every other month with some other game mode. Who does shit like that?
For me, it started when they took the non-standard maps out of competitive play.
I’m guessing you’re talking about the old neo-tokyo map. I felt it was a bit chaotic for ranked myself, so I liked that change. But Epic is still trash, don’t get me wrong 😂
In case you didn’t see the trick further down the thread - you have to make sure to install the windows version of the game that runs with proton. Then you can connect to online matches. Installing the linux version is a trap; frankly, they should just delist it at this point.
FYI, playing the Windows version with Proton is often better than native Linux versions. I almost always at least try using GE-Proton, even if a game has a Linux runtime.
Not long ago I tried to log in for the first time in a year or two, and I was stopped by a big long TOS agreement that promptly made me switch to another game
I have a friend who does game QA. A lot of the time issues this major are caught, documented, and then management decides the extra delay to solve it isn’t worth the effort because “it’s not going to impact enough people to matter”. Then, once a firestorm erupts due to public backlash, they try and blame it on QA.
My friend has gotten very good at ass-covering, and makes sure every issue ticket is very explicit, not only in terms of what the issue is, the cause, reproducibility, but also how likely the average user is to hit it just to avoid blame.
TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
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Aktywne