I am hopeful for this. Playing it on day one, I reported a garbage management bug on the official forum: only to be told it was “by design”, and yet still game-breaking.
The performance woes got all the press, but the game was fundamentally broken. It was nearly impossible to lose. Too many services for a small city? Here’s free “government subsidies” that you also can’t shut off when your city is successful. Don’t have garbage service? No problem, a neighboring city you have no control over is gonna handle your trash – for free.
I hope this is finally a step in the right direction, but I’ll never understand why it took a year to listen to day 1 issues. If the game had been released Early Access the response would have been better all around. Performance issues need to take second place: if the game isn’t fun, I don’t care how it performs.
I decided to test it even though I’m done with the game. On my 110k pop city I ran it for 2 hours and simulation speed pre patch was 1.2 and is now .06 - 0.8
The performance is back to where it was pre optimization patches.
I was just watching CityPlannerPlays stream where he was trying the new patch out, and oh boy has the game changed totally. It actually looked like a fun challenge instead of the money printing simulator that it was before.
Ok it doesn’t have bikes but walking and public transport are so over tuned its impossible to actually have traffic issues. If you don’t want to make a car centric city you can easily not make one.
It absolutely is on Windows, on Linux all the kernel level anti-cheats that work at all (EAC, BattlEye) operate purely in user space with no kernel level permissions.
I dearly hope that it stays that way forever. Can you imagine having to input your sudo password before launching a game so it can compile and load some sketchy external kernel module? Fuck that!
I’m pretty sure games that use kernel level anti-cheat on Windows do need administrator permissions to launch (I’m not certain though, I haven’t used Windows since before this whole kernel anti-cheat thing started to become common). It’s just that on Windows it’s a simple OK box majority of people click through without a thought because of how used they are to doing it without really knowing what it does.
This is more or less what I was getting at. Windows UAC triggers so often with no context that’s its really just an annoying popup to most users. You need to pass the same UAC prompts to installing Excel as to install a root kit or a compromised software package.
Now if only the start up loading screen didn’t take forever. Takes like 20-25 minutes on SSD. One of my friends has it complete instantly and the rest of my group is baffled with how.
Does your BIOS have “Enable Resizable Bar” and “Above 4G Decoding” options? Both of those were off on mine, and I had the same problem until I flipped those on.
Used to play this but stopped about 2-3 years ago as I vowed to quit playing until they added Zenos, which they never did. Added every other random from side games, but not him. I do have NT, so good riddance I suppose.
𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭: It was excellent to hear Koyasu as Seifer’s voice actor though. Best decision made in that game.
I think it will depend on what Microsoft promises to the team. Eventually the funding needs to como from someone, and seems that Game Pass is great for games that can’t drive by selling copies alone or are not Baldur’s Gate III level of quality.
Yeah that’s fair. But with how they’ve managed other “first party” titles I do not trust their policies.
I’m most curious to see how Senua’s Saga comes how since it should be a single player-only game that won’t fit into the monetization scheme Microsoft seems to like most
Which monetization scheme is that? It's not like Starfield, Hi-Fi Rush, or Psychonauts 2 had microtransactions, and those are just some of the games that actually had time to cook after Microsoft bought them. For how they've managed Halo and Gears, I don't believe microtransactions made their way into the campaigns, unlike an Assassin's Creed. I'm not sure I see the association here.
Both yes and no. Epic hasn’t gotten anything out of their attempt. Xbox is another matter, they are still trying. It was more or less the point of buying all those developer studios. They are just not rushing it. But yeah, the plan is to get the Game Pass concept to a certain point of normalization. Which they’re quite close to achieving.
By every metric we know of, they're very far from achieving it. Even with some of the largest companies by market cap now in their ownership, they're still nowhere close to owning the breadth of games that get made. Palworld still sold more copies on Steam than there were Game Pass subscribers who tried the game out as part of their subscription. Growth for Game Pass has slowed dramatically to something in the ballpark of a plateau, and subscription services for games only accounted for 10% of spending. This was two weeks ago that Matt Piscatella of Circana said that the idea that subscription services would take over gaming is unsupported by the data.
Palworld isn’t a MS Exclusive and the studios they bought haven’t churned out anything of note, yet. So it makes sense there hasn’t been any inclination of sudden growth in subscriptions.
But as I said, it’s a long con. The plan remains the same, get Game Pass into as many homes as possible. Let subscription become the new standard. It’s Microsoft after all, their track record speaks for itself.
You don’t have to agree with me, time will tell if it works out for them or not. But as for my part, I’m still actively against it and will stick to my guns about “Subscription Services and Storefront Exclusivity” being a no go.
I don't have a subscription to it either. Their games aren't exclusive to Game Pass, and you can still buy them a la carte. In fact, my point with Palworld is that many more people still opt to even though the intuitive answer is that it's cheaper to rent the game for one month than it is to buy it outright, but I think people have a pretty firm grasp at the value you're giving up to not own it outright. It was a long con to get people to buy games from the Windows Store too, and people rejected it. They can't squeeze blood from a stone if the market doesn't want something. The online subscription service that is doing the nasty stuff that you're afraid of is Nintendo's; there are games there only available via subscription. Not to say you're wrong for where you draw the line in the sand on what you will or will not buy, but nothing indicates we're anywhere close to that doomsday scenario.
“Doomsday Scenario” might be a bit much as a descriptor. XD
And yes, be it Nintendo, Sony, EGS or whatever, it’s the same deal. The biggest difference is simply that MS is so big that it not even close to a risk for them. As long as Xbox’s income evens out to zero and they aren’t actively losing money, it’s “a win” and they can easily make up for it and add to it until it starts making money. But it already does, so…
A juggernaut that size is hard to contend with and usually gets it’s way.
It will be interesting to see how many of InXile, Obsidian, Bethesda and ActivisionBlizzards future games will be Windows Store and Xbox exclusives. (timed or otherwise.) They are the new bargaining chips after all.
Bad rng ruins games. When it’s done correctly, it’s fun. You have to seperate what’s fun from what’s not. It’s fun to hit a 20 and instantly delete something form existence. It is not fun to “do everything right” and still be punished for it.
Most of the time I’ve raged about RNG is from WoW, not other games. In WoW, I’m not raging about misses or crits. I’m mad because I’ve done the fight as well as I can and succeeded, only to have the same damn leather boots drop every damn time that neither I nor anyone else needs. Or having to kill bugs to get a specific quest item that could drop on your first try or your thousandth.
RNG in this game can also be infuriating, but in a different way. It’s not game breaking, just fight delaying. Or I might not be able to deceive the guard to let me in, so I just have to fight my way in.
My first playthrough I slept with the Emperor and then Wyll, and ended up with Wyll. I killed Karlach for Wyll.
Second one I was with Lae’zel but was a durge. I wanted to be with Karlach since I didn’t have her on my first playthrough but then I killed Isobel. That dooms Karlach.
So this time I’m aiming for Karlach. She’s so fun!
I don’t use Steam, GOG, or Larian launchers to play the game. I also play off-line. I wonder how many people have completed the game but weren’t counted.
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