I haven’t kept the closest eye on this - rumor is they’re planning to port more of their games to competing platforms, maybe allow 3rd party Xbox hardware, and phase out most physical Xbox games, right? Or am I way off the mark?
Basically. The main rumor is that Starfield, the new Indiana Jones game, and all of their other first-party exclusives are going to be coming to PS5 and Microsoft is giving up on the idea of console exclusivity. Not sure what that means for Xbox in the long-term, but it is going to be an interesting week.
Yes, because console wars. A lot of people that bought into the Xbox brand are angry Microsoft is "giving up" and "disgracing" developers by putting their games on PlayStation. It doesn't help that without a clear statement from Microsoft people are free to speculate that Microsoft is going to be the next Sega and Phil Spencer is going to personally come to their house and destroy their Xbox.
More seriously, there is some genuine concern about what will happen to the digital libraries of people who bought into the Xbox eco-system if Xbox stops being a thing. Or what will happen if the AAA game market comes down to Sony and Nintendo. But there are a lot of people angry their favorite mega-corporation "lost" even though we have no idea what Microsoft's actual plans are.
I can partly understand the frustration. If you bought a Series X/S instead of a PS5, you must have put some amount of faith in Xbox exclusives to make it worth missing out on Sony exclusives. Now, after an abysmal half-generation, it seems like Xbox is giving up on exclusives altogether. So what was the point in buying an Xbox? If PS5 gets all Xbox exclusives, then an Xbox retroactively becomes a really dumb purchase.
Haven't there been multiple MMOs from former WoW devs that have all gone under by now? I remember Firefall used to have the biggest presence at PAX, and Firefall is no longer a game that exists anymore.
What’s this business about Epic changing from a game developer into a ‘platform’ and him no longer being a good fit? Anyone able to explain that a bit?
I have to imagine it is related to the claims that they are gonna retool "Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators" and the acquisitions they have made of platforms related to user created content.
Nintendo did the same thing. I don’t remember the exact details, but they took a pirated copy of NES Super Mario Bros and were reselling it on another platform. As much as a dislike Nintendo and Take-Two/Rockstar for their business practices I can understand that it’s probably easier to just take back “stolen” and modified code and use it for themselves instead of repeating the process of getting around old copyright BS in order to resell the game.
Tldr: Nintendo outsourced the work for dumping NES ROMs and developing a NES emulator for GameCube and that contractor added the standard headers to dumps they made from original cartridges provided by Nintendo. Someone saw the headers and drew conclusions.
Rockstar used securom for the original disc release
Razor (an infamous piracy group) cracked the game shortly after release but only for Windows XP (Vista didn't exist yet)
Rockstar released the game on Steam "without securom" but in reality is just using Razor's crack
Fans eventually (like a decade later) realize there's Razor signatures in the executable on Steam
Rockstar pushes an update with a new executable, however this wasn't properly tested and is broken due to how the anti-piracy acts.
Gooood. I honestly had to stop playing for a bit, everything started breaking once I got past Act 1. I feel like many of the decisions I made, which seemed normal at the time, broke the story’s continuity and interactions. I reached NPCs before I was supposed to, explored side quest locations before I knew there were quests there (fuck you and your parents, Oliver…), fast traveled when I shouldn’t have, etc. etc.
Yeah, I’m seeing stuff like that. I fast traveled at some point, and my journal immediately updated to tell me that Halsin had left for good and would no longer help me. But he was still chillin at camp…and that wasn’t the first or only problem I had with him.
I might just start a fresh save after this patch drops.
Yup, failed a quest twice because we couldn’t help up a KO’d NPC. Healing, splashing water, pushing, long rest, nothing would get them up. In fact, they DIED after doing a long rest, when the condition says it’s cured by it.
Fuck Hi-Rez for making a really good Tribes game and then abandoning it for Smite. I sure hope they merely licensed the name and don’t hold rights to the entire IP, cuz I want a good, modern Tribes game so bad.
This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite's been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it's not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it's clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.
There are some games that aren't DRM free on Steam that do go on GOG and remove the DRM. In some cases (unfortunately) the GOG version doesn't get consistently updated like the Steam version.
It's kind of a habit for people telling you about GOG deals or promos to mention that it's DRM free whether the Steam version has DRM or not, because DRM free is the primary selling point of the store. (They also sometimes include hacks/patches to deal with compatibility with modern systems that aren't always on the Steam version.) It isn't necessarily meant to imply that any other versions have DRM (though in a lot of cases they do).
At some level, even a "DRM Free" game like The Witcher could still be argued as having DRM since you need to authenticate your purchase with steam to download it.
Pretty close to the same at least. The main distinction would be that the Steam version still requires a copy of Steam to be running and logged in on the computer you copy it to, which at least means Steam has to have been online once ever to get the account logged in before using offline mode. GOG has offline installers that can be backed up and used without any client.
For the vast majority of use cases, it’s a pretty minor difference, but one way in which it might be significant is that the GOG installers will never stop working, but if one day years down the road Steam were to shut down, the Steam version could only run on computers that could be running offline-mode Steam. There’d probably be ways to break that simple bit of DRM, but a legal offline installer is a very nice bonus for things like archival sites or research applications.
It’s the kind of thing that even if you’re not choosing to use it, it’s nice that it exists, and hopefully it can continue to.
I don’t think you do need Steam running. If it’s truly DRM-free, just copy the game directory to a new machine and the game will run. Don’t launch through Steam, launch it directly from the game directory.
I’ve run games directly without Steam running on a handful of occasions, such as when someone else is using my Steam account (e.g. my kids on my other computer) and I want to play a game. I could probably play in offline mode I guess, but running it directly isn’t that hard.
It’s not an installer, but I don’t need an installer when I already have all the game files in one directory.
twitter.com
Ważne