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ampersandrew, do games w Ubisoft patch Splinter Cell Blacklist after 12 years to add achievements
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

They ought to patch out the need for Ubisoft’s launcher. Same goes for EA’s back catalog, for that matter. At least EA’s newest releases don’t come with the launcher.

leave_it_blank,

Doesn’t EA still require the steam launcher?? I’m not up to date anymore. What kind of DRM do they use now?

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Even when you buy their games on Steam, there’s an EA launcher there in addition to Steam. This is the case for It Takes Two, for instance, but not for Split Fiction. Split Fiction only uses Steam if you bought it on Steam.

any1th3r3,

You’re right, they do - this Steam DRM-free games list shows Jedi Fallen Order is the most recent DRM-free EA published game on Steam afaict.
Same goes for DRM-free games on the EA app.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Jedi Fallen Order says right on the Steam page that it incorporates EA DRM.

any1th3r3,

I can’t confirm for Steam, since I only have the game on EA app, but the game’s wiki page on PCGW shows the same DRM-free info (with correct launch steps).

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

I believe it was added after launch. I distinctly remember trying to play this game on the Steam Deck on a train with no internet, and the EA app complained about it and wouldn’t let me launch the game. It’s quite possible that this can be sidestepped by specifically putting the Steam Deck in offline mode, rather than just severing the internet connection, but I didn’t know to try that at the time, and it’s definitely DRM.

leave_it_blank,

So just that I understand this correctly: I need steam to buy it, but after that it launches without steam after I download the installer? Like on gog?

If yes, holy shit, I would have never expected this from EA!! Last time I checked this company was pure scum, but this is a surprisingly nice move!

any1th3r3,

Not exactly, you need Steam to install it, but then per PCGW’s wiki:

DRM-free when launched directly via <path-to-game>\SwGame\Binaries\Win64\SwGame-Win64-Shipping.exe while EA app is not installed.

leave_it_blank,

Bummer… Thank you, I was seriously considering buying it this evening, thanks for the heads-up!

Bezier,
@Bezier@suppo.fi avatar

Wait what, I can play EA games without their shitty launcher now?

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Only the newest ones. They haven’t gone back to remove the requirement from their back catalog, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Split Fiction don’t require it now. Meanwhile, Madden 26 still requires it, so I guess it isn’t universal.

Bezier,
@Bezier@suppo.fi avatar

Oh, that sucks. I’m only interested in their back catalog.

NutinButNet,

I think that’s why they’re doing it only for the new ones lol. Nobody cares to play their new crap so nobody is noticing

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Split Fiction is definitely a game people care about, and disappointing numbers for a Dragon Age title is still several million people.

pycorax,

EA’s games that released on Steam after Origin was a thing still launch a mini EA launcher when you press Play on Steam, much like how Ubisoft’s does on Steam. That’s at least how it seems the last time I tried it with Fallen Order.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Right, but that extra launcher causes problems, so I tend to avoid games that still have it. It’s why I still haven’t played A Way Out but played Split Fiction.

pycorax,

Yea I get that, just wanted to say that EA has the same issue too.

absquatulate, do games w The specter of a GTA 6 delay haunts the games industry: 'Some companies are going to tank' if they guess wrong, says analyst

This is so strange. Wasn’t it not long ago that studios were crowding into very specific release windows ( usually november iirc ) so they could maximize initial sales? Maybe the digital release era has changed things. I mean, I get it if your game was in the same niche or smth, but “companies might tank” seems a little much.

Either way, if this is true, eoy 2025 is in for a dry spell when it comes to new games.

Edit: Also I find it hilarious how all these “industry analysts” keep popping up suggesting ominous things despite Rockstar not saying a peep about the game besides the trailer. Almost as if they were paid to do it.

tonytins,
@tonytins@pawb.social avatar

Sure is a great way to stir the pot, that’s for sure. This article raised my eyebrow so much I just had to share it.

lorty,
@lorty@lemmy.ml avatar

Over time they realised that, while holiday windows or whatever have high sales, if there’s a better or more popular game coming out then, yours will just be forgotten.

That said, most “industry specialists” are just glorified influencers, so take it with a grain of salt

EncryptKeeper,

They aren’t crowding into those windows because competition helps their sales, it’s because they expect the biggest shopping period of the year will result in more sales than they lose. And there’s a reason only the biggest titles release in these windows.

Capcom made the decision years ago to release in February/March because they know a November window will drown them.

SomethingBurger, do gaming w The PlayStation Network outage proves PC gamers were right to resist its mandatory sign-in requirement

But… the defenders of multi billion dollar corporations told me that I was a crybaby for not wanting to create an account at a company who has had several outages and security incidents over the years. I can’t believe they were wrong.

LucidNightmare,

Yeah, some of the Steam reviews on God of War Ragnarok were almost exactly like this.

“Oh, no! You have to use a third-party login to play your game! Get over it, it’s a great game, who cares about you having to go out of your way to arbitrarily create an account for a platform you’ve never used before!” - essentially.

Fucking shit eaters.

cavemeat,

God, I remember the Helldivers 2 fiasco. I can’t believe people really thought having to make yet another login was tolerable or a good thing.

CapitalType, 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'
@CapitalType@moist.catsweat.com avatar

Doesn't owning something mean you can sell it? That doesn't apply to GOG, though.

UndercoverUlrikHD,
@UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev avatar

Put the installer on a USB stick and sell it.* I assume you’ve never gone back to the electronics store where you bought your dishwasher and expected to sell your used dishwasher there.

fartsparkles, (edited )

But that’s against the User Agreement with GOG. You don’t have that right, DRM or not.

GOG are not selling you something you own, just like the rest of the gaming platforms. They just give you the right to download and keep DRM-free installers (for the most part) for games you license / purchase.

I like GOG, don’t get me wrong, but you don’t own anything you buy from them, you just possess. Ownership means you have control over that possession too which is only really true of a minuscule fraction of FOSS games that are licensed with MIT-0, 0BSD, Unlicense, CC0 or some other public domain license (which doesn’t include GPL, MIT, Apache licenses).

UndercoverUlrikHD,
@UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev avatar

Ownership in terms distribution of digital software is a bit funky I guess, but from a consumers point of view, there’s really nothing GOG/game companies can do once you got the installer. You’re effectively owning the bits on your hard drive and there’s nothing they can do to control what you do with those bits. I guess from a lawyers perspective it may be different, but in practice there isn’t much.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at with the licenses though? A game licensed under MIT would be free to share, attribution shouldn’t be much of problem.

fartsparkles,

MIT still has copyright attribution which means you don’t own it, just have lots and lots of rights. You own the code, but you don’t own the name etc.

MIT-0 is public domain, there is no copyright by the creators, that right is assigned to all of us. You own that content and idea. It’s why anyone can use Sherlock Holmes and do anything they want with the character as he’s public domain. You don’t have to call him Schmerlock Hoves.

But yeah, for all intents and purposes to the thread, you’re right. MIT etc you can sell the code/binaries so gives you practical ownership.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

By the definition of this California law, they seem to count as offering ownership.

Alsephina, do gaming w Disco Elysium's narrator is going to stream Disco Elysium to raise funds for Palestine

What an absolute gigachad

Dagnet, 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

Oh yeah, I have no doubt that Larian saw no need to block that feature but had their hand forced, they always were extremely modding friendly and welcoming of player made content

luciole, do gaming w The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit
@luciole@beehaw.org avatar

Have some empathy for megacorporations. They’re moral (lol) entities just like you and me. /s

pbjamm,
@pbjamm@beehaw.org avatar

Corporations are people my friend!

inb4_FoundTheVegan, do gaming w Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but still finds it mind-boggling some take it at face value
@inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world avatar

My first viewing I did mostly take it at face value. But in my defense, I was a dumb 11 year old kid. It wasn’t until Neil Patrick Haris came out in full SS uniform that I started asking questions.

magic_lobster_party, do games w The RTS genre will never be mainstream unless you change it until it's 'no longer the kind of RTS that I want to play,' says Crate Entertainment CEO

RTS games demand so much time and patience from the player to learn. What’s the proper build order? What’s the best unit composition? How many workers should get allocated for each resource? These things aren’t always obvious. And you don’t have time to read all descriptions because the time is ticking.

Not to mention good APM and battle tactics.

Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.

A_Random_Idiot,

Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.

They demand so much time and patience. Whats the best weapon load out, where to move to be safe from fire, how to avoid enemy snipers, trying to figure out the excessive complexity of what WSAD does.

RTS games are much easier to understand. You drag a box around your units, and click the enemy and watch them blow up. You don’t need to follow youtube guides to understand that.

magic_lobster_party,

My point is that there’s usually an easier level of entry for other types of games. You aim and shoot, and you get instant feedback if you succeeded or not. You don’t need to understand advanced meta to get this, although it can help.

For many RTS games it can all be dependent on how fast you expanded your economy, not on how you play your units. You can fail the entire game because of bad gameplay early.

Drummyralf, (edited )

You don’t meed to have any advanced meta knowledge to play most games. There are options like playing against easier ai’s or similarly skilled players.

Look at some Low Elo Legends from the game Age of Empires 2 on Youtube from T90. Most don’t use advanced meta.

Heck, I as a kid never used advanced meta and had loads of fun.

The internet TELLS you that the latest meta is necessary and that you play suboptimally. But they’re just optimizing the fun out of the game for you if you’re not that kind of player.

This mentality is even worse in competetive shooters. People playing the latest “meta” even though they don’t realize they don’t even have the skill to pull that meta off. I wish the “internet” would just let players have fun in their own way. And that playing games “suboptimally” can still be just as fun and rewarding an experience.

/rant

cynar,

I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.

With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.

Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.

One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.

haui_lemmy,

Important addition: the majority of people isnt equipped for this kind of game. Patience and ability to grasp this kind of thing is what makes the computer nerds the computer nerds.

Programming and sysadmin stuff isnt really popular either for that express reason.

onlinepersona, do gaming w Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe': industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios

Before I read this, let me guess: publicly traded or ultimately owned by an entity that is publicly traded?

Anti Commercial-AI license

JaN0h4ck,

Microsoft

onlinepersona,

You’re right. So, the problem is working for a publicly traded company, IMO.

Devs have to either unionize, join private gaming companies, indie gaming companies, or band together and make their own.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Blizzard, do gaming w Fallout 4's most popular mods are now ones that remove Bethesda's disastrous 'next gen' update

The title and the article are overdramaric. On PS5 it’s working great. The issue looks to be messing with mods (which had been expected), not breaking the actual game.

I’m not sure what exactly is the point of installing this update on PC other than a questline and some cosmetics? As this update was mainly targeted for consoles to increase framerate and resolution - which it did better than I expected - and PC players could already do that without the update.

JohnBrownsBussy2,
@JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net avatar

A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.

Blizzard,

Ok, that ideed sucks.

NOT_RICK,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

Works fine for me on Xbox Series X with the exception of a couple of crashes over the course of 3-5 hours. The only issue I see is this should have been an optional upgrade to give the modders time to fix their stuff.

Blizzard,

I only experienced framerate drop in the prologue (in the house in 2077 and in the Vault) and 1 crash during it. Once I was out in the open world, tha game has been flawless.

The only thing I expected from this update was 60 FPS and - if it’s not too much to ask - higher resolution. They delivered that and more. Game runs smoothly and looks much better than I expected, more detailed (and much better than FO76). They also threw in some new content which I haven’t discovered yet so cannot vouch for it. The Enclave paint look great on everything though.

And remember, this is a free update. So I think people are going a bit too hard on Bethesda this time (I know it’s the trendy thing to do). They pissed me off when they delayed the update just to sync it with the show. But looking back from their perspective it was probably the right call since everyone is now more hyped to play the games.

EDIT: And exactly as you say - modders just need some time to update their mods. But you cannot expect Bethesda to have their update checked for compatibility with every mod out there.

NOT_RICK,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve done some of the enclave mission, it’s not bad.

Carighan, do gaming w Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive is laying off 5% of its workforce and 'rationalizing its pipeline,' the latest skin-crawling corporate euphemism for people losing their jobs
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe we should rationalize their CEO with an actual pipeline, to use another euphemism…

corytheboyd, (edited ) do games w 505 Games' parent company lays off 30% of its workforce, says gamers really only want sequels so that's what it's going to make
@corytheboyd@kbin.social avatar

You may not agree, but they are right. We are not most people. They want, and they have, that sweet “lowest common denominator” market, and they will take advantage of that until something else generates more cash. The “lowest common denominator” demand more CoD and whatnot. They don’t care if it’s bad, because them and all their friends will buy it and perhaps even have some fun. The big studios converging on vapid cash grabs instead of creating interesting content is depressing, sure, but hardly surprising in a world where morals and ethics don’t matter, where you can get away with the absolute most heinous, reprehensible acts, and suffer zero consequences.

I don’t really care though. The indie scene is unaffected by this, and has only gotten better every year for as long as it has been around. It’s fucking GLORIOUS already, and it’s not going anywhere because it’s not run by an oligarchy of publicly traded shitfactories.

Narrrz,

and the open source, free tools for creating such games are getting better almost by the day.

Djennik,

There is still hope in projects like baldurs gate 3

GenEcon,

Which is a sequel…

The best selling new game was Hogwarts Legacy. Which still has a strong IP behind it (which really was the only reason the game was selling so much).

The only game in the top 10 of the best selling games 2023 without being a sequel or having a strong IP behind it, is Starfield.

DrQuint,

Yeah. I’m of the same mind. I was here to witness the resurgence of Boomer and Movement Shooters. Now, we’re in the cusp of the resurgence of RTS. I am very much happy with the state of gaming, without having to focus on sequels.

The last game published by 505 I played were apparently Indivisible, which was trash. I never played Ghostrunner nor Control which basically eliminates most of their notable recent output. I think I can safely say I’ll be fine with my continued ignoring of them as a publisher.

Entropywins,
@Entropywins@kbin.social avatar

Some people didn't like it but I fucking loved Control...great game and worth a play imho

Carlo,

It’s very well done! It wasn’t really on my radar, but I got it for free from epic, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Ditto Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I think the only things I’ve paid for on the epic store are the dlc from those gems.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

Yup. They’ll let smaller studios take risks on new IP and buy them if it’s profitable. They get the wins but none of the losses.

imapuppetlookaway,

Yeah i think we’re in a golden age of indie games. When i want to find a new game, i search youtube for “best indie games of 2018” or 2017, 2021 or whatever. So much great stuff to play made in the last 5-10 years. And so much more affordable. And it feels great to give my money to these devs.

MrMcGasion,

If someone told me 4-5 years ago, that the year we got really incredible sequels to both Breath of the Wild, and that cool new Spider-Man game on PS4, my most-enjoyed game would be an indie Lovecraftian light-horror fishing game, I wouldn’t have believed them.

slaacaa,

Also, making a good game is always a risk, it’s an intersection of tech, business, and art. Control e.g. sold only a few million copies, depsite being widely praised.

If you however want be sure, you invest a lot in marketing and monetisation, targeting a wide audience as you said, and can take a lower risk to make back your investment. Absolutely hate this of course, but luckily there are still good games, as long as e.g. Sony is willing to take that risk to sell more PS consoles, or we get wonders like BG3

Asafum,

Spacebourne 2.

Not polished as it’s still in early access, not amazing graphics, but turning out to be a damn good game that most “AAA” developers wouldn’t even try to make, that was made by one guy (and now a small team of volunteers/contractors lol)

Bongles, do games w Leaked email reveals Phil Spencer's damning verdict on AAA games: 'Most publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago'

Starfield advertised something like “Bethesdas first new universe in 25+ years” (paraphrasing)

That is not a good thing.

JackbyDev,

Hypothetically I don’t see a problem with things like a new entry in Elder Scrolls. The problem (to me) seems more like constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions and for each new console.

Transcendant,

constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions

That’s pretty much Starfield in a nutshell, Skyrim in space. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun game but it’s basically reskinned Skyrim with a few new systems bolted on. I’m also noticing some reused assets from Fallout, pretty sure the noise the scanner makes when opening is the same as opening the PipBoy.

EdanGrey,

I’m quite happy with starfield, but I did notice some reused noises definitely. I’m not sure that I particularly mind though

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow,

And then most of the universe was loading screens

flicker, do games w The official Lord of the Rings special effects studio is making a cozy hobbit game

From time to time, I feel bad for all the people who don't enjoy crafting, fishing, or farming elements in their games now that those things are in every game.

Then I remember that I love them so much that I just get back to enjoying them.

BleatingZombie,

The only thing I’m not a fan of is “base building”. I’m just not creative enough

They either look bland and functional, or just plain bad

theterrasque,

Eh, I still like it. Sure, it might look like an mc Escher painting put together by a blind crow, but it’s my pile of garbage.

funkless_eck,

I always make a homely home for my character as respite from being a murder hobo

and then I make a weird creepy modern art sculpture type thing as thats what you’d expect from the murder hobo

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