What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.
Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.
I think the real problem is businesses have to grow. If most big companies weren’t publicly traded then just being profitable would be enough.
Imagine making enough money to pay you and everyone else in your company a great wage one year, but it being bad because it wasn’t more profit than last year.
I was reading a blog post that talks about exactly how much the author is able to put in the public domain. My understanding is that Willingham has a fairly individualized contract with DC that he is grandfathered in on and is rather abnormal nowadays and gives him more control. DC has been trying to, as stated above, “reinterpret” that contract to give them more control.
Essentially, DC may own the rights to the individual products they published, but the world and characters Willingham created can be used outside of those in new or reimagined context.
That creates a significant can of worms in regards to what parts of the character are derived from the source material that is owned by DC. See not allowing sherlock holmes to smile for an example.
I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
Arguably, that’s the whole point. I never played the original Fallout thinking I could play every option. I’ve seen people complaining about “you have to use savescumming or you miss half the dialogue.” No, that’s called “replayability” so when you go back and try as a different type of character, there will be paths you’ll be locked out of, but there will also be paths that were previously closed now open.
that's something I've noticed about bg3 (only 1-2h in) vs the old ones and even ps:torment.
in most of those you can continue the dialog and usually circle back to the other choices.
in bg3 its seems much more like, you say one option you're stuck with it - which seems much better.
i'll be interested to see on the replay - but i guess itll be up to me to play it differently.
Bg3 makes you feel like your choices matter. I havnt progressed very far (10 hours in and mostly exploring) and there have been points in dialog or exploring the open world when I pass a “point of no return”. This is where I can tell there will be a consequence (good or bad) to my choices, but perhaps it’s not immediately seen. I havnt had most of these choices pay off yet, but it builds anticipation and makes me want to see how this will play out and wonder if it will come up further down the line when I least expect.
That’s actually my biggest criticism of D&D. Bards are better choices than rogues or fighters or wizards. Same goes with clerics or druids. sprinkle on a bit of paladin, a couple feats, and some magic gauntlets, and they can invalidate whole swathes of staple fantasy archetypes entirely.
if by better you mean, more fun, i think that's slightly up to you.
you can have just as much fun with a more constrained character who keeps losing dice rolls - it might be harder work though.
no, i mean more empowered to interact with the game world. They have more agency in more arenas of play. You can play a goober of any class and have fun, i agree, but a goober who picks a “better” class will be able to create more comedies of errors beyond “Player fails to hit thing with a big stick”.
That's the issue with how combat oriented D&D is. While there is a wide assortment of abilities between classes and their roles in combat, a lot of non-combat situations are reduced to just roling high on a skill check, not many choices and approaches to be made. There might be the odd utility spell, but even that isn't a choice for martial classes. Because of that, Bards dominate non-combat encounters, with Jack of all Trades and Expertise.
It’s not a problem for a videogame, but D&D5e (actually most D&D editions) is not a balanced game at all. In fact the only RPG that I’ve played and would call balanced is Pathfinder 2e.
So I was not expecting Baldur’s Gate to be balanced at all given it’s based on D&D5e.
Edit: Read the article. Really just another shit gaming journalist. Their whole justification for why the rest of the series isn’t good basically boils down to “I only wanna play boomer shooters.”
I assume most FOSS emulators have a non-commercial license, so if a company is using it to make money they are already violating the law, but who is gonna go after Nintendo for that?
If they had that, they’d no longer be FOSS and instead “source available” and half the community will raise the pitch forks. Best FOSS licence to protect against this sort of thing is AGPL because it’s toxic for corporations. But even that could be used in this case if they had the source on the same computer imo (IANAL though)
The Stardewification of everything continues - can't wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they've taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.
Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?
I had one of the old Alienware Steam Machines. I know it wasn’t a popular answer, but my answer to this was that Windows was atrocious for the living room just like it’s atrocious for handhelds today, and I had easily and cheaply amassed a large library of Linux-compatible games even back then by way of Steam sales. But this wasn’t even the only problem. We only had OpenGL ports rather than lower level and more performant APIs like Vulkan. Running a marquis Linux title like Shadow of Mordor would come with a sizable performance hit compared to the Windows version, even when run on exactly the same hardware, and that would also require a machine that cost $200 more than a PS4 that could run the same game just as well.
As someone who owned the Alienware one with windows 8 (and upgraded it to windows 10, and a 2TB SSD), I'm glad to find anyone else who actually bought one, especially the steam OS variant, and has expertise with it, rather than regurgitating what articles say.
So, funny story, I bought it as the Windows variant, because it was $50 cheaper for some reason. Bloatware subsidies, maybe? My roommate and I tried it for a little while, but using Windows from the couch sucked so much that I put SteamOS on it. My roommate only booted back to Windows to play Hearthstone. I just rocked whatever SteamOS would let me play local, since streaming games from my desktop in the other room wasn’t cutting it for me. I played through KOTOR2 on that machine, on SteamOS, and had a great time.
I was able to overclock it to a crazy level. Played all kinds of games on it between me and my roommate. It was finiky using big picture mode (I ended up buying a dedicated mouse and keyboard for it to use on a lapboard at the time), but BPM gave me trouble with controllers, refusing to quit to desktop, and hanging on launching games occasionally.
A lot of Dell's BS software went the way of the dodo bird as soon as I could get rid of it for similar reasons. The update to windows 10 I also seem to remember giving me trouble. MS didn't consider it supported hardware. But it all worked out and now that thing is my media center PC. It's still running after all this time, which is crazy.
I bought the i5 varriant from ebay for $150 in 2016 that someone I think tried to pass off the yellow ring of death to me, as the system failed shortly after I bought it, BUT, it was still under original manufacturer warranty. I sent it in to dell with no proof of purchase requested from me, they sent my system back fixed, and accidentally gave me another steam controller in the box back, haha.
After getting it back, I wiped windows and have been running Ubuntu on it since then. Still using it as a HTPC right now, though it is getting long in the tooth for web video like YouTube, etc. Probably gonna be replacing it soon with something else, but 10 years of usage for $150 ain’t bad.
Oh, man - I can do you one better. I still have one of these, still hooked up and running. We use it as a game server for some low-requirement stuff… currently Vintage Story.
The failure of the Steam Machine is why Valve hosted Khronos group at their office to kick off Vulkan and funded LunarG etc in the early days to get things moving quickly.
Valve took their time but this new hardware range is based on years of learning and solving the problems from their original foray into hardware and Linux for gaming.
Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.
I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.
I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.
Valve have enabled a critical mass of “target platforms” that enables both the community and developers to get things working on Linux, which all other distros are about to benefit from.
I’m likely going to buy all the new Valve hardware out of principle. The Deck is incredible, but I still have my beefy gaming rig. But my living room wouldn’t mind a Steam Machine (and my girlfriend is definitely after both a Steam Frame and Controller 2.
I’m taking time off work in a couple of weeks and I’m moving over to Linux completely - I too have felt the inertia of dual booting and find myself in Windows far too often.
Gates is on it for sure, i believe melinda split over something similar. and his shitck of trying to reinvent his own image, so the epstein files dont bite him in the end. his vaccine iniative is nothing more than scheme, since african countries has considered the vaccine as part of vaccine colonialism.
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