Castling itself (as a single move) is a 17th century balance update. Before that it was done as separate moves. But the only reason castling became a thing was because the Queen and Bishop were buffed in the 15th century allowing them to threaten more spaces. This made it more advantageous to fortify the king’s position than to have him flee.
There are plenty of old engines that have scaled better than Bethesda's. If they can't get it to modern standards after all this time, it's time to toss the engine.
i think that is a bit unfair to bethesda’s engine. all those other engines have achieved their scalability at the cost of extensibility and easy to work with game systems. this manifests most visibly in how mod support works for bethesda games versus games built on other more “optimized” engines, but it affects the core game design as well.
even if id software released their internal tooling to the public, it wouldn’t be all that useful for making the kinds of mods people make for bethesda games, because their engine isn’t built for all the systems-driven game design that bethesda’s is. that moddability is born out of how bethesda has designed their engine, the gameplay systems they built in it, and the tooling that supports all of this.
it’s truly insane just what you can do with bethesda’s engine with relatively little work. and it shows when you compare to games that try to imitate their game design on other engines. the outer worlds felt really static compared to fallout new vegas and skyrim, because it was missing so many of these systems.
bethesda games have a lot of problems, but ditching their engine for something like unreal or id tech would most likely destroy most of what makes their games unique.
I loved the hell out of CP, but it killed me that most of the businesses were spray painted onto the sides of inaccessible buildings and that lots of business was done via vending machine.
Maybe that was the goal, I don’t know.
Huge, living breathing city but you can only set foot inside of a couple dozen locations, and if you go to a place that isn’t currently part of a quest nobody has much to say.
That being said, I haven’t played the latest Dlc and should probably have a fresh play of it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has also done this very well. The build up to finally reaching the city of Baldur’s Gate really is worth the in game hype. The city is massive and the entirety of act 3 is spent within it. They use the standard trick of ensuring you can only visit part of the city, with much of the city being inaccessible but visible. That’s a great way to make the city feel like it’s actually city sized while still ensuring that the part you can explore can be explored in depth (as in, almost every building can be entered and is unique).
As contrasted with the GTA approach where the visitable area is far larger, but you can’t enter most buildings and it’s more generic.
I think it’s pretty hard for an open world game like Skyrim to achieve the way games like BG3 or TW3 do cities, though. After all, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere, which makes it difficult to fake the size of cities. Skyrim also tries to have not one city but like a dozen cities and towns. I feel like if they wanted to make a realistic city, they’d need to really focus on a small number of cities (probably just one city and a few towns). I’m not sure of the Skyrim scale can really allow for cities as detailed as BG3 or TW3.
Skyrim also has far more in depth NPC, which have routines going all the way from waking up in the morning till they go back to bed. That surely adds scalability issues.
They could do a hybrid approach. Have many unenterable buildings and generic NPCs. But I’m not sure that’s a good idea. That’d make things look bigger, but it wouldn’t really be that much more content and it’d kinda waste our time in traveling to the good stuff. Or they could scale things down. They don’t actually need to span an entire province. They could have focused entirely on one city and surrounding area. But it does come at the cost of more limited lore options and a less varied map.
Personally, I like the Skyrim cities. They’re flawed, but very fun. Not a lot of games have the level of NPC detail that Skyrim has and none of them have the kind of massive, open world that Skyrim and Fallout have (I’d love more games like those).
The sad thing is enterable buildings is pretty achievable. They could have an algorithm to generate a generic interior based on a seed at the time that the player enters the building. It’s not exciting, and it would add complexity but it at least would make enterable buildings without massively impacting install size nor save size.
You can play with procedural generated cities and structures here for example to see the potential. Just imagine that instead of a top down map it generates an interior with generic furniture, clutter and possibly loot. Add in different sets of assets it fills in with based on building type and location and verify it generates the same interior every time it gets the same seed and you have a very efficient system for at least being able to enter every random boring building
Alternatively there is a gameplay argument to be made for only being able to enter buildings that actually do something gameplay-wise so you know what buildings you need to enter
I played it for the first time yesterday with my S/O, and we looked at the clock only to realize we had played for a little over ten hours straight… only stopping for lunch/dinner
I mean, any survival game is like that. Hell, just about any game is like that. Eventually you’ve done about all you want to do, and then it’s time to move on. And that’s fine.
I don’t know, games like Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Rust, they all have a lot of staying power. There’s always burnout but I don’t think that Palworld is going to survive to the “We should go back to that” stage.
I burnt out on Factorio after I had fifty ion cannons in orbit and a few battalions of remote controlled mammoth tanks. It got boring after I had finished everything. And restarting was too daunting.
I’ll definitely be back for the big update though. The new trains look incredible.
Personally I do think palworld will survive though. The core loop of capturing pals, leveling, and attribute hunting, is very fun.
Meanwhile BG3 just has one district of Baldurs Gate available and it’s so detailed and jam packed with NPCs that it’s unstable for many people’s computers.
I mean Bethesda’s games are so full of bugs AND barren that I don’t see how this can be an actual talking point. BG3 is running just fine on my 6 year old pc
I’m a RTX 2080 user and everything is ok here. I’ve had more crashes on starfield than bg3 and have had to revert to earlier saves due to broken mechanics which I’m used to in the Bethesda style of things
I ran it with much worse hardware. It isn’t the power of the hardware that was the issue (unless you didn’t try turning settings down). Something else must have caused the crash besides power. Maybe not enough RAM or too slow of a CPU or potentially maybe loading from an HDD and it was too slow? It could also just be a bug with the specific hardware configuration in that computer.
Coop in BG3 is fairly buggy (split screen specifically) , I played with my wife close to launch and we ran into all sorts of performance issues and bugs on a high end PC. Still a great game though, but you can tell that split screen didn’t get a lot of love during development
I love BG3. It’s a very different game from Skyrim though. After all, that city is basically a third of the game. Plus BG3 has all kinds of travel and camera limitations that Skyrim doesn’t. That’s what lets them make the city truly seem like a sprawling city.
By comparison, Skyrim basically lets you go everywhere and it has a far larger map. Skyrim chose the “big as an ocean, shallow as a puddle” approach when it comes to map design. Though NPCs are actually deeper than BG3. Skyrim NPCs have lifes, while BG3 is frozen in a moment.
I don’t know Skyrim wasn’t that shallow. It’s not like most of its locations are window dressing like in an assassin’s creed game. Almost the entire map had somewhat meaningful encounters and mini story arcs
Yeah you’re right. I do think that in comparison to BG3 it’s very shallow, but in a vacuum or in comparison to many other games it’s actually quite deep
Without modifications, Starfields combat AI is set to 20 active users, so youd get a clunky 10v10 at best, but really its probably going to be 15 orcs vs 5 allies and the player character
Its not the worst game in existance or anything, IMO its almost a straight up upgrade from FO4 in almost all aspects. The biggest problem imo is they fumbled the biggest aspect, exploration, ironically in a space game.
It leaves you feeling sorta like Yooka Laylee, who had most of the Rareware team who made the N64 platformers, well except the stage designer, who was still working at Rare at the time iirc. The Stage design was Yooka Laylees worst aspect.
We can’t update games or refactor code to make it smaller bc our bosses demand we constantly work harder, better, faster, stronger. They force us into games that require more expensive hardware bc the entire tech industry depends on people upgrading every other year. And it’s online constantly bc we hoover up player data for our new profit centre where we sell all your data.
And now they made a meme that deflects blame off them and onto devs, who have way more contact w the public than anonymous rich people
Qhile that is true the effects of it were lesser since it was more niche. Plus some of the best games are still in their own weird niche, ive been playing STALKER GAMMA which is a free modpack for a free mod, and help I am being consumed! I DREAM OF REPAIR KITS AND GUN ANIMATION, HNNNNNNGH KILL MONOLITH!
Enshittification is just another name for the type of capitalism America practices.
Everything gets worse because it’s not profitable to stay good when there are only 147 umbrella corps worldwide. Capitalism doesn’t reward innovation in products when monopolies exist, it rewards innovations in minutiae of existing products.
See also: DLC, Premium Passes, Microtransactions, Seasonal Content, Free-to-Play*, Ads in AAA tier games and everywhere else, Subscriptions, and every other shitty innovation the market (no not consumers, shareholders) rewards.
That’s to say nothing of how these companies extract the value of their employees labor and then lay them off to keep turnover at whatver level the coke addicts in the c-suite have determined is best. Crunchtime, harrassment, fuck man look at Bobby fucking Kotnick and his blizzard shitshow.
All these shitty knock offs of Steam do this and I don’t understand why it is this way. Why Steam never has this issue but every other piece of shit knock off does.
I think Epic is even worse than EA and Ubisoft’s because it also re-requires 2FA nearly every single time despite me using it in the same location it’s always being used and me checking the box to remember me.
Steam probably puts more into security or something and has more confidence in themselves, and the others don’t and they know it and so they have half-assed approaches that put the burden on YOU to reduce their risk.
Wow, I always have to go in and switch it to inverted, it just makes complete sense in my head (probably from years of playing X-wing as a kid) pulling back (towards me) will always be looking up!
I don't understand there are still games out there that do not offer inverted Y as an option. I couldn't finish the Lego Marvel Superheroes game because of that.
Oof, that would drive me crazy and be a refund request. I’ll never claim that either is superior (and I’m sure I’m in the minority for being used to inverted), but not having the option to change it is inexcusable. I don’t know the percentage, but that’s got to be a significant portion of people that are so used to it, they can’t switch!
It was a crazy feeling when I realized it. “Oh whoa, I’m playing backwards. What?” All of my life inverting the controls was the first thing I did in shooters. The break was during my divorce. That whole thing rewired my brain any way haha.
A similar thing happened to me too. I used to play inverted before encountering a game where you couldn’t invert the controls. Now, playing inverted feels weirder than non-inverted.
Steam was considered an abomination when it was released. Drm and a launcher to run HL2? GTFO.
Yet here we are where everyone loves Steam. Its no surprise other companies wanted to follow knowing that in 20 years, a horrible consumer policy could become beloved.
When it was released? Steam ran like shit for me until probably 2017. It’s finally a usable piece of software.
I also prefer steam because steam comes with a lot of benefits. If steam was still just a launcher and nothing more, I think most people would take issue with it today. That’s just not the case, though.
Easy way to manage games, huge sales, support forums, easy way to manage friends, steam workshop, support for pretty much every controller, fast download servers
And one thing that people probably don’t realize, is that steam will work with developers to implement patches. Many times when I play old games I’ll go to PC gaming wiki and see that I need a few patches and mods to make the game work, but the wiki will say that those patches and mods were implemented into the steam release. It’s really nice.
Steam vr has been simple for me, with multiple ways to launch into vr. Either launch the specific game I want to play first in VR mode, or justaunch steam vr and select the game from inside the VR room.
I wonder what you played because it’s the complete opposite for me, I got fed up with steam and old games so I started buying old ones exclusively on GoG because they do come with community patches.
Interesting. I’ve only had Steam since 2017 but currently it’s the slowest it’s ever been.
It takes 20s to start and 5s to shut down on fast hardware. This is 6x slower than the electron-based open source Heroic launcher. It’s also 20x slower than opening a web browser, considerably slower than opening Word, LibreOffice, unmodded Factorio, Kdenlive (a full-featured video editor), Cities Skylines 2 (known for poor optimization lol), or even the 11GB Quartus Prime (used for programming FPGAs) It’s not far off from Windows itself.
The only apps slower to open than Steam are large games, some pro-level software, and the absolutely horrific MS Teams desktop app and Epic Games Store.
Weird. I have a Ryzen 9 5900HX (about Ryzen 7 3700 performance), Radeon RX6800M (15% slower than RX6700XT), 32GB DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB 970 Evo Plus SSD, which is 40% filled right now.
I know a lot of the recent increase in the launch and shut down time of Steam has to do with this stupid splash screen. It waits for the network for about 8s even though I have good Internet, and takes a long time to do other stuff as well.
Do you even use steam? There is reason why its so loved. Everything else they bring is good enough price for me for steam being a launcher and drm.
Only problem I have with steam is worrying what will happen if valve goes bad or disappears in the future. But I hope it has sunk in to them by now that they will get much more money by being customer friendly and nice instead of being pieces of shit like some of the competition. I still hope that gog will become good competitor to steam.
On a functional level, I think the obsession with ownership is overrated. If you collect physical media, for the sake of collecting, sure. On steam though, we all know you’re lying if you say you’ve played half the shit in your library. Maybe a quarter to any meaningful level.
That being said, I love watching the people who think they’re going to have some claim to a mass refund if it did shut down.
I’d say i have 1/4 unplayed games, maybe little less because I have many games that I played before steam started tracking gametime. But most of those are from family share anyway. I find it insane how some people just buy games and never even install them.
And I know there is no way I would be getting anything back if steam suddenly shut down, you are effectively buying a licence to play anyway instead of full ownership. But this is the world we have to put up with and steam is the least shit thing about how game industry works nowdays. Without steam I effectively just couldnt play games by now, which is also kind of troubling. Though if steam never existed and there had been nothing like it, managing all the games would have been nightmare even if you ignore updating them.
Steam will stop working in Windows 7 from the 1st of January.
So decades of games that run perfectly fine on older computers (some lauched as little ago as a couple of years) will stop working if you got them on Steam.
Meanwhile in GOG you can get offline installers which will keep on working forever and ever in the hardware and software the game is compatible with.
Have Steam = be forced periodically to update your computer to keep on playing something you’ve had for ages. (Mind you, the workaround is to use Linux to play steam games, but people should not be forced to install it and deal with it just to play games from the previous generation - which are still fine as games go, since the gameplay is great and the additional eyecandy for more recent hardware does little to improve gameplaying fun - and in fact are not forced to if they got the games from GOG).
You most definitelly traded something quite big for the moderate convenience from Steam, it’s just that you pay it in a delayed way and think “this is great” all the way till then.
Will they stop working, or will the launcher stop working? I haven’t tried all my titles, but I know many of my older games launch fine without Steam kicking them off.
I am waiting to see what happens, since we’re not yet at the 1st of January (it’s for 2024, not 2023 - sorry for forgetting to point it out)
This is about games that check with Steam when they start to see if you’re authorized to launch them, even though it’s not the game itself that needs anything from Steam, and Steam is just the DRM layer.
Steam says they will stop supporting the Steam Launcher for Windows 7, so does that mean only the application frontend stuff (the store, downloading of games you bought and so on) or does it also include the components used by games with Steam as DRM to check if you’re authorized to run them?
I suspect it’s the latter (since Windows 7 is now all of 5% or so of the installed base and the legislation about digital purchases is crap so they’re not forced to refund your for removing your access to the games you bought, so they could get away with it), but hope it’s only the former.
It would be hilarious (in a near insane wierdly laughing kind of way) if I had to use a pirate hacked steam DLL to play my own games from Steam.
So far it’s just a warning from Steam that it will happen on the 1st of January 2024, and it’s definitelly not an issue with Windows: Valve is chosing that the Steam launcher will not be supported in a specific Windows version anymore, and because most games bought via Steam check with Steam on startup in order to start - even when that’s not at all required by the game itself - it might mean (depending of how they do it) that games will simply refuse to start even though the game itself was and still is 100% compatible with that version of Windows.
There are many hills to die on about what is wrong with the world and I dont think steam is among the first one should choose imo. But yea, there are things that could be better with steam even if I personally havent had problem with it. Its just that valve not being just as shitty as other corporations seems to be the best we can hope for. I rather have them than nothing or something worse.
Over three decades of gaming and almost as much of software engineering means I’m pretty weary of things with unecessary dependencies on an external 3rd party, because they’re bound to stop working when that external 3rd party decides to stop supporting it and/or goes bankrupt.
In my experience this is not a “might happen” thing, it’s an “it always happens” one.
(This was actually a well discussed subject around Steam back in the day when it first came out: all games with DRM that depend on a server on the Internet maintained by a 3rd party will sooner or later stop working when that company doesn’t feel like supporting it anymore, and this is inherent to that DRM architecture rather than Steam specific)
I would hardly call “dying on a hill” to prefer to not be dependent on some external company’s mid-level manager’s decisions about what’s “outdated” for stuff I would like or need to keep on working.
That is true. I shall try to keep your point in mind actually, I should add this to the list of things i need to consider about backing stuff up and preserving things I can that might disappear.
2h of playtime within 2 weeks for a no questions asked refund. A 6 year old game with 0 hours may get a refund once, but Steam will start refusing refunds after that.
To me the most toxic part of og MW2 was all the cheaters. I played mostly free-for-all but you saw it in TDM as well. Two guys sitting in the bushes using “tactical insertion” to kill each other over and over and rack up killstreaks. It pissed me off that they never patched it out or even acknowledged the fact that nobody ever used tactical insertion for anything but cheating.
I had someone cheat against me the other day (without me realizing it, because I don’t have the game sense to tell), then offer a draw in a clearly winning position. I guess they were trying to avoid detection, but I decided that I didn’t want their handout, declined the draw offer, and resigned.
The system immediately flagged them as cheating and refunded my elo, so I guess all’s well that ends well.
It’s the rating system for competitive gaming that was originally developed for chess, but has since been applied to all sorts of gaming, sports, etc. sometimes you might even hear people refer to a game’s matchmaking rating as “elo”, even it’s not called that.
Also, fun fact: it’s not an acronym, it’s a guy’s name:
Oh no, it’s completely free to play. What I meant was that when a game is over, the winning player gains rating points and the losing player loses rating points, proportional to the rating difference between them.
Since I had lost that game, I lost rating (elo) points. But, since the system recognized that it was against a cheater, which isn’t fair, it gave me the points back when they banned him so that my rating would be unaffected.
Games that I’ve played a bit but didn’t finish because I just don’t feel like it but have a story I’m really interested in? I’ll watch a let’s play or summary.
Other games that I got because I thought, maybe, I wait until I’ve finished a game and want something as a palate cleanser. These I’ll give a go and either really enjoy it and finish or do what I mentioned above.
Some I’ve saved because I really want to give them a try and, if it doesn’t work out, that’s ok.
It’s ok to have games you’ll never play. You bought them, or got them via some giveaway, and in both cases supported the devs and studios in the bargain and that’s good enough.
I loved bioshock. But just couldn’t get into bio shock 2. I have infinite and I may or may not get to it.
Sometimes I know a game is special before I start it and so I save it instead of giving it a quick run. Sometimes I end up not liking them, and that’s ok. Other times they’re perfect such as Outer Wilds. A game that is now my favorite game of all time and has held that spot for a few years.
I find that I’m leaning more and more into new experiences and unique stories lately (firewatch, outer wilds) or puzzles (baba is you) or a mix of both (Talos Principle 1&2) but other times I’ll spend hours and hours on something like satisfactory. Get super into it… and then feel like “this was fun, I’ve had a great time, what new experience should I go for now”
I can’t bring myself to finish dragon age inquisition.
Which sucks, it was a fantastic game I enjoyed nearly every minute of, and I wish I had gotten into the series when I had more free time than a hibernating bear.
No idea what it is, I just stopped playing one day and never started it back up, and now I just don’t have any interest in it.
Right. Some games are so good you like them. But it’s “uphill” to start them again… so it’s either don’t or just push through.
That’s why I’m such cases I’ll watch a let’s play. Something I can have in the background to get the lore or story. Or a video that explains the story for Death Stranding.
But for others, such as tears of the kingdom, that I had to stop halfway through because of a crazy work project and a lot of overtime I just went back and did side quests until the gist of what I was doing kind of came back to me.
In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
And to add on to #3, you might not even remember how the game works. Like obviously movement is easy but you might forget some other important mechanics.
Though sometimes this can be a good thing because you might learn the game better the second time. Like I got stuck on one encounter in Doom Eternal and dropped the game for a while. I came back and loaded my old save but had no idea what I was doing because the gameplay loop is more complicated than “shoot everything and pick up drops”. So I started a new save to relearn it and didn’t even notice when I passed the point I was stuck on because it wasn’t hard at all the second time through.
I might end up doing this with persona 5 royal, too, though I put a lot more hours in to get where I’m stuck at.
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