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NotAPenguin, do games w CD Projekt recommends starting a new game when Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 drops: 'starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience'

Finally coming out of early access!

llii,

Now I only need to wait until the game is <= 20 € on disc.

kitonthenet, do games w The recent criticism of Linus Tech Tips, explained

The obsession with the fact that GN didn’t reach out for lmg’s response to the story is extremely rich given that ltt didn’t give billet labs that exact same courtesy

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

I mean Billet sent them a unit for review. That implies they’re expecting to be reported upon. Now, LTT half-assed the reporting and then accidentally put the prototype into their auction system, but I’d say “damning reporting” is an expected possible outcome of sending something to a reviewing org to be reviewed that doesn’t require special notice.

Nibodhika,

However they sent a 3090 GPU and a prototype cooler for that specific board, which they mounted on a 4090 board which has a potentially different layout and was not tested.

Imagine they were a small company , whose first product was the LTT screwdriver, and they had sent an early prototype to a YouTuber who complained that none of the bits he had laying around worked on that screwdriver, so no one should buy the LTT screwdriver because it just doesn’t work. When people complain that they weren’t doing the product justice by testing it with the wrong things they replied “I’m not spending money retesting a screwdriver that no one should buy because it’s useless”. Then turned around and sold the prototype at an auction. Then when people complained they said “we didn’t sell it, we auctioned it for charity, and have already sent money to replace it” having sent the email agreeing to pay seconds before saying that stupid excuse.

They did a LOT of wrong things there, a bad review is the least of the problems. For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product. And this is a house of cards, as soon as one review can’t be trusted, no review can be trusted. Can you assure that they used proper protocol when testing other things if they can’t even use the GPU that was sent together with the cooler? And that when people point this instead of retesting they just dig themselves deeper into “we’re right”… Plus you should watch the GN video, they point a LOT of inconsistencies and errors in other videos, showing that the cooler is NOT an isolated thing.

freeman,

For all I know the product is in fact shit, but because of their methodology, plus all that they did afterwards, I can’t trust that they would ever produce an honest review of the product.

Or any product for that matter.

Nibodhika,

Yup, the house of cards I mentioned in the phrase immediately after that one is because of that, which is why I said:

as soon as one review can’t be trusted, no review can be trusted

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

I mean yeah I’m not arguing that point. Maybe calling that “half-assed” is an understatement when they were clearly showing their whole asses on that effort, but still:

Billet sent a unit to get reviewed, and the reviewers made a review. A grossly incompetent review, but a review. I don’t see why that would be worthy of special notification. Losing/selling the prototype was just a further demonstration of that incompetence.

Whereas if you’re going to do a long-form report on a group’s involvement in an event, it’s considered good form to reach out for comment.

Either way, imho the Billet story has kind of been eclipsed by the Xeets by their ex-employee about the toxic workplace.

Basically, Linus’ company is a complete trainwreck and he has no credibility on fixing it since it seems like the disastrous culture is his own fault. Sitting and saying “this is fine, I’m taking care of it” to every disaster while pushing for more and more content to the point that quality slips to legally actionable levels is piss-poor leadership.

Nibodhika,

I understand that point but my counter is that if someone sends you a product/video in private to review you have more reson to contact them about what you will say before you do than if the product/video is publicly available.

Do you think LTT should contact the companies that they do secret shopping before releasing the video? Any comments that they might have won’t change what happened on their experience, and any promises of improvement won’t prevent them from publishing the video so it’s kind of pointless.

Even if GN had contacted and they had explained what they already explained, the GN video would be the exact same with an added part for LTT’s response, which LTT is perfectly capable of doing themselves, and would do regardless of GN’s video.

kibiz0r, (edited )

I’m glad GN didn’t reach out. Linus emailed Billet Labs 2 hours after the GN video with an offer to reimburse them for the prototype, so that he could claim that GN got their facts wrong. But we have the receipts!

That was the nail in the coffin, for me. Making mistakes is fine, even big ones. I understand that Youtube is the devil, and it’s easy to fall into a trap of shoveling nonsense out onto the platform. I’m honestly sympathetic to that. If Linus said “You’re right, quality has suffered cuz we’ve been going too fast. We need to take another look at this.” I’d be completely happy.

But to lie – not just by words, but by actions – in order to cast doubt on the people who are trying to give you a reality check and get your work back on track… That’s really bad.

cybersandwich, (edited )

deleted_by_author

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  • kibiz0r,

    I did watch the response video before commenting. Did you read the forum post? He said it’s all settled, it’s just gotta go through the bean counters now. But the fact that he emailed them immediately before posting proves that he knew it was not all settled.

    What if they replied “Actually, you can’t just reimburse us for that. The manufacturing process that produced it is being overhauled and we won’t be able to replace it for at least 6 months and we’ve got conferences to demo at between then and now. We need you to get it back.”

    SabinStargem, do games w Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman

    Videogames are the cheapest and most durable form of entertainment, ideal qualities when you don’t have a job and resources to keep you busy. This fucker wants people to never escape being in misery.

    rayyy,

    The goal is to get those “young men” out there in the job market struggling to make ends meet day after day so their boss can buy his second vacation home and new yacht. In the meantime Republicans will point to some group or minority as the cause of their woes. It’s a win, win for them.

    athairmor, do games w Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman

    So, they want to take away healthcare young men don’t have so they’ll get jobs that don’t exist. Sounds like a conservative plan.

    sugar_in_your_tea,

    The jobs do exist, and I’m pretty sure the young men are working them, but the jobs also kinda suck.

    BartyDeCanter, do games w Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you'

    Now can we get proton support for GoG that is as convient and reliable as it is in Steam?

    MentalEdge,
    @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

    Remember when they said Galaxy would get linux support? That didn’t happen, and that promise got quietly retracted…

    That said, Heroic is unofficial but has worked quite well.

    brrt,

    Heroic giving GOG an excuse not to get their shit together.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    If you buy through Heroic, Heroic gets a cut. So it creates a data point that they can use to see how big that market is, so they know what they have to do to get 100% of my sale in their own pocket.

    Banichan,
    @Banichan@dormi.zone avatar

    Dafuq is a proton

    officermike,

    A proton is a positively charged subatomic particle doing in the nucleus of an atom. But in this context, Proton is a translation layer that allows games that were built for Windows to run on Linux.

    _Sprite,
    @_Sprite@lemmy.world avatar

    it’s what people on linux use to play windows games on linux

    Blaiz0r,

    That’s Wine

    IronKrill,
    @IronKrill@lemmy.ca avatar

    Are you being purposefully obtuse? Proton is based on Wine yes, but it is it’s own distinct project.

    Draghetta,

    Yes, that is the upstream. Valve’s downstream of wine is called proton.

    ulkesh,
    @ulkesh@lemmy.world avatar

    Lutris + GE-Proton + umu works. If you use GE-Proton as the runner, Lutris automatically uses umu to launch the game which launches within the Steam Pressure Vessel container.

    You can manage GE-Proton downloads using Protonplus. The latest version, last I checked, is GE-Proton9-15.

    Aceticon,

    I’ve been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn’t work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.

    For me at least it’s actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a “firejail” sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can’t do with Proton.

    It’s a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it’s Wine.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    Proton in Steam is absolutely easier. Lutris just automates work that some other user did, and if you’re doing it in something like Heroic launcher instead, you have to figure that out yourself. It often involves things like installing other Microsoft components that are bundled with the application on Steam, and in one case, even though the game was verified on Steam, there was no Lutris script, and I just couldn’t get it working on the GOG version.

    Aceticon,

    Proton too just automates the work that somebody did in the form of install instructions, same as Lutris.

    The difference is that those making the install scripts for Proton are paid for and you don’t get the option to fix them or make your own, which means that there are in fact fewer games with Steam install instructions (i.e. Steam Support) than games with Lutris install scripts.

    Further, there are fewer things you can tweak in Proton and they’re all either changing the proton version or some badly documented text parameters that get fed to its command line, whilst Lutris actually has most such options in menus: the learning curve for just starting a game is lower in Steam that in Lutris when it works but the learning curve for fixing it when it does not work is lower in Lutris and sometimes you simply don’t have access to change what’s needed to fix it in Steam but you do in Lutris.

    If you use Lutris with its GoG integration the experience is generally the same kind of Click & Play as Proton of Steam and whilst the rate of problems seems to still be a bit bigger in Lutris, surprisingly (at least for me) it’s not by much.

    For me in Lutris having to go and install Microsoft components using Winetricks is generally only needed for some standalone installer executables, not when using GoG integration.

    Steam is great when it works and a massive headache and pretty limited on what you can do when it doesn’t, whilst at least with GoG integration Lutris is great when it works and still a headache when it doesn’t but not as much as Steam and it gives you a lot more options to try and get it to work, plus the coverage of pre-made installer scripts in Lutris (which is what makes games “just work” in it) seems to be broader than in Steam, including covering older and more obscure titles, plus that coverage is probably growing faster because the scripts are user contributed rather than the work that can be done adding support being limited by how many people Valve (who are notorious for having very few employees for a company that size) hired to work on it.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    Paying someone else to do it and verify that it works is exactly part of why I parted with my money in the first place. At least GOG has a very generous refund policy, but it’s a lot more work on my end.

    Aceticon,

    Oh, absolutely.

    The point I’m making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don’t expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren’t successful AAA titles).

    It’s the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of “giving users enough rope to hang themselves with” (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn’t work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that’s not so for the corporate one.

    It’s what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe’s suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren’t for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).

    That’s why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    But really what I’m asking for, as a customer, is for GOG to do this work for me before I buy. Because it’s all open source, there’s nothing stopping them. Valve pumped a bunch of money into the projects to improve things for everyone, but they’re still doing more work on their end.

    Aceticon, (edited )

    Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.

    But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.

    So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.

    PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.

    If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).

    BartyDeCanter,

    I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’ve set several things from GoG up using Lutris. But in Steam it’s a two step process:

    1. Click Install
    2. Click Play

    I want that level of ease from GoG.

    Aceticon, (edited )

    Lutris has GoG integration and it’s exactly that same 2 step process if you use it (I believe it passes you through 3 screens of options were you invariably do nothing but click “Continue”, so strictly it’s 5 steps were 3 of the are just “Press Continue”)

    The difference is that when it does NOT just work, it’s easier to figure out and there are more options to fix it with Lutris + Wine.

    I even have some weird weird cases on Steam - like Borderlands 2 were Steam would often and randomly, before actually starting the game spend almost 1h doing shader conversions that if you stopped it the game would fail to start (the solution was to force an older Proton version and now you just get random downloads from the Internet that last a few minutes before the game starts).

    IMHO, here too what one sees is the general design philosophy difference between open source software and corporate solutions - the former gives you tons of options and lots of ways to tune it so it looks more complicated to use and has a steeper learning curve but that also means when things go wrong you have a lot more ways to try to fix it, whilst the latter is click & play until things go wrong and then you have very little info and just a few things you can change to try and fix it.

    Mind you, Lutris itself seems to be an attempt to also be click & play (hence why you generally get a steam-like experience if you use its GoG integration) but all the “buttons and knobs” are still there (those 3 screens of options that’s usually fine to just press “Continue” on that I mentioned above) just in case you want to muck about with them, making it look daunting to use.

    MentalEdge,
    @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

    Heroic gets a lot closer in this regard.

    Donkter, do games w 'The gold rush is over:' Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon devs say that big Game Pass and Epic exclusive deals have dried up for indie devs

    Yeah, game publishers are in their “cash out” phase after realizing there’s no competing against steam.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    There is if they’re interested in competing with Steam. Epic made some very competitive offerings for the supply side of things and then provided very little reason for customers to ever shop there, which it turns out is just as, if not more important.

    Lesrid,

    Let me gift games, let me wishlist games to receive gifts. There’s lots of other features I would also like but if other stores had that I’d be much more inclined to use the other stores.

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    GOG does those things, for what that’s worth.

    Veraxus,

    GOG is great. I do wish Epic would improve their platform, though. It’s like they’re not even trying.

    Max_P, do gaming w You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits
    @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

    Some of these are engineered to be addicting especially loot crates and stuff. A lot of them are just genuinely good.

    They mention Minecraft, pretty sure that one was addicting since day 1 and completely unintentionally so. It’s just genuinely fun and you can spend hours in it easily. Same with Factorio.

    Not exactly a new phenomenon, I’ve seen my own parents up at 4am just because they wanted to sneak a peek at the new level they reached. My mom had hand drawn and annotated the entire Zelda 1 map. For a little bit, that NES basically ran on a UPS to not lose their progress.

    For some reason US parents always want to shift the blame to companies for their own failures. It’s her own damn fault she let this get out of control for 10 fucking years. Just like those that park their kids on an iPad all the time and then sues because their kid spends too much time on the iPad and cry out in the news how iPad babies are so bad. Who’s given them the damn iPad?

    BolexForSoup,
    @BolexForSoup@kbin.social avatar

    I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.

    Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.

    Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.

    EddyNottingham,

    Concerning Minecraft, as I know the game it seems fine, playing Java on a survival server I run for friends.

    However, I wonder what the experience is for the other millions of players, on Bedrock, highly popular monetized servers, etc.

    What crappy casino-like techniques are used to monetize Minecraft in those contexts? I really don’t know as I’m in my own Minecraft bubble, but I’m sure there are lots of examples as it’s such a monumentally large game.

    sharkfucker420,
    @sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml avatar

    Hyper monetized minecraft servers can be reeeeeeally bad but i wouldn’t say the offline play is designed to be addicting in the way that most modern AAA games are

    BolexForSoup,
    @BolexForSoup@kbin.social avatar

    Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.

    LemmyKnowsBest,

    What is UPS besides United Postal Service?

    My best contextual guess, me having no tech background, is something like Universal Protocol Server? I dunno

    iAmTheTot,
    @iAmTheTot@kbin.social avatar

    UPS is never United Postal Service. You might have meant UPS as United Parcel Service, or you might have mistaken USPS (United States Postal Service).

    In this context they are using UPS as Uninterruptable Power Supply.

    LemmyKnowsBest,

    Ah! Yes thank you for straightening me out on all those details there.

    YarHarSuperstar,
    @YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world avatar

    Username suspiciously relevant

    XTL,

    Uninterruptible power supply is the common use.

    digdilem,

    I think there’s a core difference between loot boxes, which is out and out gambling, and gameplay. Both can be addictive, but they have very different consequences.

    Gameplay addiction steals your time and maybe your social life, but that’s it.

    Gambling addiction also steals your money. And when that’s gone, drives you to extremes trying to find more.

    dan1101,

    I know a kid that is really into multiplayer Minecraft on Xbox and he is always after his parents for more Xbox cards so he can buy different skins and texture packs. Servers like Cubecraft and The Hive must be making a lot of money.

    Pyr_Pressure,
    @Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca avatar

    The thing about older games and Minecraft being addictive is that it’s sort of fine, because they don’t benefit financially from it so obviously it was unintentional and just because of the entertainment.

    It becomes a problem with these new games when they are subscription based or have lots of microtransactions because the more addictive the game, the more money the company makes.

    chakan2, do games w Helldivers 2 boss apologizes for 'horrible' dev comments, says Arrowhead has 'taken action internally to educate our developers'
    @chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

    It was the patch that got me to stop playing. Why you would nerf weapons in a non-competitive game rather than make poor preforming weapons viable is beyond me.

    It’s akin to Steve Jobs telling everyone they’re holding their phone wrong.

    BoneALisa,
    @BoneALisa@lemm.ee avatar

    I dont know what everyone is so upset about, the shotgun feels fine, the recoil doesnt feel bad, and the mag size isnt a huge problem for me.

    Plus the flamethrower buff and laser cannon buff are super nice. Im usually in favor of the whole “buff everything else, no debuff” but this honestly feels fine.

    Theharpyeagle,

    It’s been rough adjusting to how many overcharged shots it takes to take down a charger, but it’s been a blast running with some flamethrower friends.

    It also gave me an excuse to bring back my rover. No, it’s still not as practical as the shield, but it is more fun.

    False,

    Making all the weapons overpowered to match ruins the intended difficulty.

    entropicshart,

    Lack of further content and wanting to lock the little content they do have behind the premium bonds, which will drive people to buy credits since they don’t have time to grind out the credits needed.

    The_Vampire,

    It’s to keep design space open and to minimize developer work.

    Let’s say we decide to keep an overperforming gun. It does all the things. It has all the ammo, all the damage, all fire rate, all the reload speed. Now, all future weapons have to be made with that as a consideration. Why would players choose this new weapon, when there’s the old overperformer? The design space is being controlled and minimized by the overperformer. Players will complain if new weapons aren’t on the level of the overperformer.

    Now, let’s say we have ten weapons with one clear overperformer. Now, we can either nerf a single weapon to bring it in line with the others, or buff nine weapons to attempt to bring them up to the level of the overperformer. Assuming the balance adjustments of each weapon are the same amount of work, that’s 9x the effort. However, if we assume we do this extra work to satisfy players, now we have ten overperforming guns and players find the game too easy, so now we also have to buff enemies to match. However, the game isn’t designed to handle these increase in difficulty. Players complain if we just add more health to enemies, so we have to do other things like increase enemy count, but adding more enemies increases performance issues. It’s a cascading problem.

    I consider nerfs a necessary evil. It’s absurd to ask developers to always buff weapons and give them so much work when they could be developing actual additions to the game. Sometimes, a weapon really does need a nerf.

    Delphia,

    Thank you so fucking much.

    If you want the game to have long term viability, you have to have nerfs. Otherwise in 3 years everyone who has been playing since day 1 has a mech with a gattling cannon that fires nukes and is fighting gods.

    Tattorack,
    @Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

    Average anime protagonist progression.

    tb_,
    @tb_@lemmy.world avatar

    Cough Warframe cough

    peak_dunning_krueger,

    Also, I’m not sure how much this applies to helldivers specifically, but from what I’ve seen, teams didn’t really teamwork. Because they didn’t have to.

    This can be very bad because if it follows these steps:

    1. game is easy, no teamwork required, players learn to play the game without teamwork
    2. game gets harder, but some people can still manage solo, complain about “newbs” and tell them to "git gud"
    3. game gets even harder, now it’s impossible to play “quasi solo” but the environment is no longer fit to learn teamwork in the context of this game. “How” to work together effectively.

    Then people will complain, justly, that they don’t have the tools and methods to beat the challenge. Which is correct. They don’t. But you can’t just tell people to “go play easy mode and learn the game”, when they are “max level” and put 40-100 hours into the game.

    Of course the synergy tools still have to exist and I’m not knowledgeable about helldivers whether they do.

    There is no good choice to “encourage” teamplay, except via creating “natural” funnels that people will “end up at” “organically”, and putting a challenge in front of them that they can only work with teamwork. But that means the challenge has to beat them, until they get it. And that may never happen.


    One game I have found exceptional as a case study for what is “overpowered” and what isn’t, and why, is magic the gathering. All the “code” is public. The complaints are public. The bans are public, and explained. So if anyone here wants to nerd out about balance and doesn’t know mtg yet, there is a rabbit hole for you.

    Katana314,

    I remember an incident in Red Orchestra where we were on a tank map. A teammate hopped in a tank. So, I did too. He jumped out of the tank and into another; so I joined. He jumped out and started shooting at me, basically insisting I get my own tank. Apparently, his level of tactical sense and reflexes in a tank vastly outweighed the value of having a second player in the gunner’s seat; even though the game was realistically meant to depict tank crews cooperating.

    Lesrid,

    It’s a common issue with lots of team play games. The other player decided that it was better to have two people operating separate mortars than to have one of them provide small arms cover on the flanks of the tank.

    Helldivers 2 has a similar problem where some players can help other players reload their larger weapons at a much faster rate than typically; however the player base decided that it’s better to fan out and each operate the weapon solo because shots do not need to be made so rapidly and clumping together increases the odds both players die.

    Tick_Dracy,
    @Tick_Dracy@lemm.ee avatar

    Left 2 Dead 2 wants to have a word with you 😏

    GTG3000,

    Preach.

    The game does have a bit of a balance problem, but as usual the players are not the best at designing the solution.

    • Railgun was overpowered, since it did literally everything without any risk. The funny thing is - you can still do things it did before, you just need to actually use the unsafe mode.
    • The armoured bugs are a bit overtuned, the devs have announced they will be looking at them, but just giving you an OP gun is not a way to fix that.
    • Shield was probably alright as it was, but the current iteration of armour doesn’t really make up for the lack of it.
    Rakonat,

    Did you ever played Payday 2, where powercreep made us go from guns with all the best attachments could maybe kill the toughest enemy in the game in half a mag, or about 15 shots, to the devs needing to implement 3 (technically 4) more difficulty levels with new enemies that were just old enemies with more resistances or 10 times the health as their stock launch counterparts, and those things dying in 2 hits from all the meta build weapons. All because they kept introducing more powerful weapons, more attachments that made launch guns more and more obsolete, and general more power creep through skill tree expansions and entirely new jobs for perks. The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage and even using stuff you could get only from the base game and free updates left every weapon feeling samey with the same tactics being used and things not in the meta utterly ignored by anyone playing end game content. Because instead of reigning in the things that overperformed and broke the balance curve, they just kept powercreeping new items into the game.

    chakan2,
    @chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

    The player counts for that game dove off a cliff after players realized each DLC was just pay 2 win garbage

    And what exactly do you think is going to happen with this game?

    Rakonat,

    You’re missing the point. Player counts for that game dived because despite fairly regular new content and replay value, the meta and power creep pushed all players into using very similar functioning builds with everything that could be considered an alternate playstyle being so underperforming many people couldn’t even make them work in the 2-3 difficulty range. HD2 has much better variance in maps and enemies, so as long as devs keep the trickle of new content and powercreep under control this game easily has a 6-8 year shelf life. Community will trickle downwards like all games do as they age and new games pop up. But as long as the devs don’t fall into the trap of caving to vocal minority of players demanding any exploits they find stay in the game, we could easily have 100k-200k regular pops a year from now.

    gmtom,

    This is a dumb take.

    If there was a gun that 1 tapped every enemy in the game and had infinite ammo and maybe even auto aimed for you, that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn’t it?

    Would you not want that gun to be nerfed or would you want every gun in the game to become a 1 tap super weapon?

    surewhynotlem,

    that would suck a lot of the fun out of the game wouldn’t it?

    Good thing you get to choose which gun you use. I personally would love that weapon. I’ve got two kids and a full time job. I need a nerf mode. The rest of y’all can use whatever other guns you like. But give me the BFG and let me have my fun.

    EtherealMoon,
    @EtherealMoon@lemmy.world avatar

    This game has like ten difficulty options. If you need the BFG on easy mode then you probably are just bad at videogames.

    surewhynotlem,

    So what. Let me be bad at video games and still enjoy it. Not everything needs to be a side hustle, maxed out, semi-pro, rise and grind. I just want to have a hobby, even if I’m shit at it forever, because it’s fun.

    You should try it sometime. It’s a much less stressful and actually enjoyable way to live.

    Prinzigor,

    Yea, that’s why difficulty easier than “impossible” and “helldive” exist, so that you can enjoy the game on your time.

    But when other players want their guns to be of roughly equal value, so that they don’t feel pressured to not take the meta, that’s not a bad thing imo

    LordKitsuna,

    That’s what the difficulty mode selection is for. If you want an easy One-Shot experience just play on the easier modes. Overpowered over tuned weapons just create assholes in the higher difficulties kicking people out of games for not taking “the correct” load out.

    Those of us with a little more time or a little more skill or a little more both enjoy the harder difficulties actually being… Difficult. Imagine that, the correct place to give people the ability to have a Nerf mode is in the difficulty slider which thankfully the developers have done!

    Instead of complaining about weapon balance just turn down the difficulty and enjoy your easy experience

    gmtom,

    Nope, I want a balanced sandbox. If I went into a lobby and everyone was using the 1 tapper (because why wouldn’t they) Then the game would be way too easy and I would have to do closed lobbies and go out of my way to find people that want to run the game without the 1 tapper, just to have fun.

    If you’re bad at games you can just play on easy mode.

    asymmetric,

    Bad straw man argument

    chakan2,
    @chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

    Eh…it’s sort of a valid argument…however…it’s like instagib in unreal. It was one of the funniest game modes in the game.

    Instagib on low level enemies would be fun as hell…then the boss spawns show up and obliterate you…that’s how I thought this game was going to go.

    Now it’s really a game of find more ammo and run from anything with armor until your strategems recharge.

    asymmetric,

    No part of that guy’s comment is valid. He’s not even the barest bit subtle about how badly he is distorting the facts.

    Nobody is talking about any of these things: a gun that 1 tapped every enemy, infinite ammo, auto aiming, wanting every gun to become a 1 tap super weapon. It’s not even part of the discussion. All of these are imaginary things this person made up. Somehow people are just looking at it and nodding instead of calling out the bullshit.

    gmtom,

    The guy I replied to said it’s always better to buff under performing weapons than nerf OP weapons. I employed a line of logic called a “logical extreme” where I devise an extreme scenario that both follows the original logic and is also an untenable position, thus showing that the original logic does not hold up and therefore shouldn’t intrinsically apply to the realistic scenario.

    Because in both my extreme and the real scenario, you have a weapon that was so good it made most other weapons not worth using and made the game easier than intended. In that scenario you could either go and buff almost every other weapon in the game and then make sweeping enemy balance changers to make them harder in the face of all the buffs, or you can simply nerf the one OP weapon. And I think the more sensible option is clear.

    chakan2,
    @chakan2@lemmy.world avatar

    1 tap super weapon, and introduce a viable challenge to make that obsolete.

    But you’ll just get premium war bond weapons from here on out to close the difficulty gap.

    okamiueru,

    The weapons in premium war bond aren’t really good. Also, if it’s a nudge at the premium part being a money grab… I’m lvl 17 and I have the premium unlocked without spend any real money.

    Boiglenoight,

    I’ve been playing since launch. I played a lot last night. I do not see the problems. I play on hard difficulty. I have a good time whether winning or losing.

    There are players that take the game far more seriously than I and honestly they make the game more tense than it needs to be. They make it feel competitive, in that if I’m not doing what they think a “good” player should then I’m unwelcome.

    I think the vast majority of complaints stem from these players. I lament that another Call of Duty is not coming out sooner so that the community can diminish into relative obscurity, hopefully populated with like minds that view this as a game and not an e-Sport.

    EtherealMoon,
    @EtherealMoon@lemmy.world avatar

    This game has like ten difficulty modes.

    BigTrout75, do games w Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman

    Translated: Adults 18 to 25 are using there parents healthcare and are not paying for the crappiest healthcare being offered at their first jobs.

    sp3tr4l, do games w 'I want to acknowledge that we messed up': NZXT addresses concerns about its controversial Flex gaming PC rental program and commits to taking action

    Here at NZXT, we strive to deliver the best products and services to customers, but sometimes, we don’t fulfill that desire.

    Sure, we spent thousands upon thousands of man hours intentionally designing a pc rental service to rent out falsely advertised, subpar pcs, at stupendously high cost to you, our loyal customers…

    And sure, we’re only issuing this statement because we got caught, and even while apologizing, we are heavily qualifying our actions and emphasizing things we think we so well…

    But what is most important is that we want you to know:

    https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/e688a71a-bea1-4e88-a044-21a6c7c6dd98.webp

    Duamerthrax, do games w 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'

    I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

    Gabe, you created an obligation when you ended Episode 2 on a cliff hanger. You should have just let Marc Laidlaw and the game devs just make more games.

    As long as it had kept the core writers, I’m sure everyone would be happy. Hell, any “innovation” is being handled by the modding continuity. Breadman of Entropy: Zero created a more fun combat loop then any of the HL2 games have. Singularity has a better physics weapons just by being able to use it independent of the selected weapon and making the object transparent.

    SirEDCaLot,

    I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

    Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

    Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

    Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

    Duamerthrax, (edited )

    You know, I knew the next HL game to come out after Ep2 would be a VR title. It was the most obvious direction Valve could go considering Gabe treats the HL series as a tech demo. Seriously, I think out of anyone at Valve, he has the least respect for the franchise. What I didn’t predict that it would a a VR exclusive title and that it would retcon the ending of Ep2 so a character that died(and who’s VA had died), would be alive again. Hell, they didn’t even ask one of the MC’s original VA to reprise her role(or cast into a different character if the age was an issue).

    I have way more trust in the fan community to continue the story. Entropy: Zero took some cues from Epistle 3, so I hope the breadman and the Project Borealis are sharing notes, so the can have a shared continuity. I really, really liked the voiced MC of Entropy: Zero and the combat loop, with more enemy types and weapons was superb.

    SkunkWorkz,

    Unfortunately devs at Valve eventually will be swallowed by the money making machine called Steam. It’s the way the company is structured, the people working on the most profitable projects are rewarded the most.

    Like the team working on In the Valley of Gods has disintegrated after Valve bought Campo Santo. The devs are all working on other things inside Valve.

    Duamerthrax,

    I think that’s the thing that annoys me the most. Sometimes, a game doesn’t get a sequel because sales were bad or the studio was bought out or even went bankrupt. Here, it’s just because the guy running the company doesn’t feel like it. They have a constant stream of free money from Steam sales to fall back on, so why not just let your game devs do something? I haven’t kept up to date, but wasn’t there this huge gap of time where none of the TF2 devs had logged and played any TF2?

    Blizzard, do gaming w It only took two days for someone to unlock a developer mode in Baldur's Gate 3's modding tools, opening up the possibility of custom levels and campaigns

    I wonder how long will it take for modders to recreate BG1&2 in BG3.

    Stanley_Pain,
    @Stanley_Pain@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    I’m pretty sure that was already in the works before the mod tools were even talked about

    SapphironZA, do gaming w 2K removes its pointless launcher from Civilization 6, while also announcing that Civilization 7 players will never have to suffer launching the game twice for no reason

    Take2 is blacklisted for me, for stealing early access money from kerbal space program 2 and then cancelling it, while still accepting money for it.

    I have owned every Civ from 1 to 6.

    The franchise is now dead to me until Take2 is replaced.

    asexualchangeling, (edited )

    deleted_by_author

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  • SapphironZA,

    Yep, civ 2 is my all time favourite.

    asexualchangeling,

    deleted_by_author

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  • SapphironZA,

    I think the moral consensus is, if you own it, it’s not piracy.

    Media owners only want you to think that.

    They abandoned it, you did not.

    notgold,
    @notgold@aussie.zone avatar

    The fact I can’t play civ6 without accepting changed terms means I won’t pay for civ 7 or buy any dlc. for a game I play by myself, that I’ve owned since launch, and 2k have removed my ability to play any more is just the fucked thing about modern games

    Railcar8095, do gaming w Tarkov studio claims it actually doesn't have the server capacity for everyone who bought the game for $150 to play its upcoming PvE mode, still wants players to pay extra

    If only there was a way for dedicated fans to run their own servers for PVE co-op with friends…

    HeavyRaptor,

    Is there?

    GooseFinger,

    SPT with MPT mod.

    Railcar8095,

    No. And considering how they are gatekeeping the feature behind a 250$ purchase, it is very lucrative for them to keep it that way. Unless shit hits the fan and the players decide they won’t pay.

    HeavyRaptor,

    Apparently there is! There is a mod for SPT called MPT (now renamed to fika). It has a github but the download is only available through their discord. Took me a while to find it. Gonna see if we can get it working tomorrow.

    _sideffect, do gaming w Ubisoft is stripping people's licences for The Crew weeks after its shutdown, nearly squandering hopes of fan servers and acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is

    Lmao, fuck licenses; pirate it, and we’ll make our own servers.

    They can’t do shit then

    wreckedcarzz,
    @wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

    Afaik nobody has cracked it as it’s always-online, though I’d be happily incorrect about this is one can slide me some sauce. I’m one of the affected players in the shutdown (still play occasionally) so the ability to continue playing this game would be very nice.

    redcalcium,

    Afaik there is no crack for The Crew because it stored your progress on ubisoft’s server and has no local save data.

    DestroyMegacorps,

    So if we need to somehow pirate it we need to break ubisoft drm and rediect the calls for savedata that are supposed to be sent to the servers to a local storage

    redcalcium, (edited )

    There is a possibility that the game actually has a hidden “production mode” where it allows offline play. Make sense though because the game developers must be able to run the game during production where the server hasn’t been up yet. Research into the possibility of reenabling this mode in retail build seems to be losing steam though. Looks like it picked up some steam again: steamcommunity.com/app/…/4306075118785997064/

    rollerbang,

    It can’t not have local save data. It can delete it at exit, sure, but it needs it to load the game properly. Save game extraction might be more complex, but it is still sent to the local machine.

    Unless it’s a streamed game of course.

    redcalcium,

    Seems like it.

    Save Game Dumper now available

    steamcommunity.com/app/…/4306075118785997064/

    seliaste,

    There are cracks that managed this tho Nfs:World and wangan midnight comes to mind

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