I don’t know about Xbox, but drift issue is pretty common in PS5 controller too, and I recall reading that all companies uses sticks from same manufacturer.
Everyone online sings praises of ‘Hall-effect’ sticks, but no one (Sony / MS / Nintendo) is currently using them, probably because of higher cost.
If this works, this will probably solve the issue for Nintendo at least.
It definitely happens with Xbox Series controllers too. Bought a brand new Series controller and a rechargeable pack only for it to get unbearable drift within 5 months
Using the larger, potentially more durable, joysticks would mean a larger potentially less portable Switch. Given that portability is the core feature of the Switch I can understand Nintendo’s reluctance to implement them. Especially when other companies are experiencing similar issues with their sticks. In my opinion a novel approach is the way to go here. Hall effect is nice, but it is costly and could potentially present some legal challenges at the moment.
the problem with the current switch is that the joycona are unusablely small
Increasing the size neard the size of the steam deck really won’t decrease the portivility as your gonna carry a power adapter and a case with it anyways
I find that the JoyCons work fine for most games, granted I have small hands. As for power adapters and carrying cases, I don’t carry an adapter and the case I use is very slim. Just enough to protect from drops really.
I use both frequently, and the size of the switch is a big feature for me. I carry a low profile case and no power adapter. Increasing the size would be a big mistake in my opinion- it would just be a worse steam deck without some really killer new features. In my opinion they should just offer larger joycons for people who want them!
A company already makes hall effect joysticks that are JoyCon sized and they claim to hold a patent for them. I haven’t taken the time to verify, but even if they don’t have a leg to stand on they could still take Nintendo to court.
@JonDorfman, right, but Hall effect analogue sticks themselves have existed for a long time, so that technology in general (except any novel addition) is (most likely) not patented anymore.
I am interested to see what they do, as they’ve said before the BG3 engine sorta breaks down after level 12 so they might not go any higher. Presumably that means it’s another ‘start at level 1’ type campaign.
Was it the engine or the ruleset? It’s widely accepted that D&D 5E is sorta hot garbage at higher levels so I was assuming that’s what Larian was referring to.
The traditional answer to this is to just not let players cast spells that would be costly to implement, in the same way that we can’t currently cast Reincarnate or Magic Jar. There are still high level combat spells to look forward to, like Meteor Swarm.
I’ve heard that high level D&D sucks ever since I got into D&D back in 2e, so I don’t know if 5e truly sucks, or it’s just continued player sentiment toward something that’s always been, IMO, misunderstood.
Personally, I fucking love epic level shit. Starting at 20 and using the epic level book to go further is awesome. The problem I see, though, is DMs quite often don’t think epic enough. They think too small scale and it sucks for everyone because
There’s a lot to keep track of on a single character. So many spells and abilities at that point, and if you’ve never really played a lot of high level stuff, you can get choice paralysis or just not know how some of your stuff really works.
Strength. What’s a challenge? Quite often when I see what others are using in their high level campaigns, they are just poorly balanced large scale battles or a single big monster and not really thought out. If your party has close to God like powers, they should be fighting actual gods.
Usually it is the vast variance in magic items from one DM to the next that makes it very hard the rules set. Then of course the DM must work out what to do about the magic items they gave out. And of course the variance in skill and style of the players...
Min/Max players are crap at higher level. Role Players are great at any level. DMing at low level is fairly easy. DMing at high level is a bitch at best.
5e at high level sucks because WOTC didn't bother to actually test any of it. They admitted they didn't test past level 10 and their inclusion of magic items is so bad that the recommendations for how many to include show the devs are terrified of them; you get so very few by official recommendations.
Save or Suck spells make higher level 5e (and 5e in general) a huge PITA to plan encounters for when players can just get lucky and end things outright. Magic items don't have a power level listing, just a rarity doing double duty that is wildly inaccurate. Class balance is shit: martials are boring. All they do is swing the weapon most of the time and very few class abilities really alleviate that. Spellcasters are so vastly more powerful and fun that multiclassing is way more popular than it should be.
Monsters in 5e are boring. Most of them are just bags of hit points that swing. Very few have bonus actions or reactions and the ones that do are often just "parry: increase AC once". They came out with gem dragons 2yr ago and they gave them all the SAME bonus actions: shapeshift and misty step. It's like they don't even bother to try, which is evident in recent releases.
/rant. But seriously, I love high level D&D. You can really raise the stakes. I'm DMing a level 12 5e campaign now and my primary way to make encounters interesting is two-fold: firstly is 3rd party content to get monsters that are actually interesting. Secondly I create objectives that aren't just "murder monster". I just had a bunch of literal street children hit my party with a net trap and arrow that makes them drop their items that said children tried to steal and run away with. 2 got away but they were able to find the hideout and defeat the boss. Actual stakes besides just getting killed.
Epic narratives have their place, but if you follow the 5E rules they don’t work well mechanically.
Fighting actual Gods in D&D should be fairly comfortable for a party of level 20 characters, which is part of the problem. The way the scaling of character power compared to enemy power works, fighting a group of goblins on the dirt road as a level 1 party is magnitudes more challenging than fighting an actual God as a level 20 party.
Is that not the point? To go from struggling against the lowest foes to being equal to the toughest? Sometimes I wonder if the disconnect is between the game and the narrative. I’m in the, seemingly, minority camp of favoring the game side. The narrative is merely the vessel allows the game to flow and not the other way around. I construct sandboxes rather than linear stories. The stories come from the players and how they want to interact with the world, the consequences of their actions, and so on. As a DM, I provide the world at large, what’s currently happening in that world, and the moderation of the rules to facilitate the players telling their own stories, instead of having one I am merely telling them. I personally think this brings more life to the game. Players can become immersed more easily when they are thinking about what they are trying to do, and the dynamics of multiple players pulling the story this way and that just makes for a more compelling narrative.
It sounds like 5e is also just not balanced on the game side. Which was my problem with 4e, too and why I haven’t really tried 5.
I still haven’t played 5e on paper. Just BG3. I am a 3.5/Pathfinder lover. I know those rules and lore way more since I’ve played it for years. Feels weird to stop now.
If you're a 3.5/pf1e player, I'm sure you can imagine how high level spells can get really complicated to program in a game engine. And more importantly, how impossible to balance for them it can be. BG3 does a decent job of adapting spells to not be annoying or broken to use in a video game, but some high level 5e spells are way more ridiculous and open ended.
Don’t even need to be a specific rule player to know that. The actual PnP games are limitless. You literally can do anything you can imagine. You can easily make a new rule to handle stuff the books don’t cover. Video games can’t. Not with the same fluidity, anyway. I would expect the simple mathematics to be handled, along with spells and abilities that work in a CRPG. It’s amazing they even have Speak to Animals. I mean, it’s a simple concept, but you have to then also write dialogue for every animal you place in the game. Otherwise, the spell becomes worthless. That’s a lot of work I don’t usually expect from video games, despite it being something I love to see.
As you get further from spells and abilities which have a limited and defined effect on the world (I hit him with a sword, this spell sets that on fire) and towards reality-bending superpowers (wish spells, divine intervention) the 5e ruleset becomes increasingly difficult to deliver within a CRPG framework.
In that respect I get it. I wouldn’t even expect Wish it many other spells to be in a CRPG or if it was, it would be way more limited (as they would obviously only program so many actions you could even make). The rules always break down in a CRPG when the PnP game has next to no limits with imagination. A computer game has to be thought about in advance, with limited ability to flex on things that might make sense in the moment that can be ruled on the fly. Not to mention different interpretations of vaguer/not well written rules.
That is just the point where the exponential effects of leveling and introduction of 5e spells that require more DM adjudication are introduced. Together they make coding encounters extremely difficult in tabletop and a complete nightmare to code.
I have no interest in going over level 10 on tabletop as a DM, and can't imagine even trying to write code logic for it.
I'd be perfectly happy to see content at the same levels as BG3 campaign. Ideally a new campaign entirely, but if it's just DLC then an extra Act or a side campaign with new characters as a prequel or sequel or something would be neat.
It’s almost impossible to implement high level magic. Just the interactions between spells is insane. Basic interactions like Force Cage+any AoE (Sickening Radiance) to build the microwave of death… would be so hard to implement. They’d honestly have to veer off 5e and implement their own spells instead, tailored to the video game medium.
I do think the framework of the game would be a great place to start for additional campaigns. They could take this game and put a Candlekeep Mysteries style sequential dungeon crawl add-on and people would love it just to play multiplayer short campaigns.
It’s not impossible cause any thing that has specific rules laid out can be implemented. And table top rule are turn based(no time sensitive action, ie, physics simulation), fixed permutations/outcomes(dice rolls for everything), programming is just “rules” for moving numbers, even for deep learning networks.
The harder to implement are the conversations, cause there are pretty much infinite way depending on who initiate the conversation(background/race/stats/class/proficiency/+whatever player thinks that’s possible and DM assign a check value), with potential plots lines, the writer has to limit what can be chosen and remove other options even though it’s legit on table top.
I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).
Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).
Also bear in mind that it's not "just" rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can't just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of "anything is possible" you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.
With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won't stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn't be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there's a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).
But until that, we're going to be pretty limited. It's going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it's basically a completely different spell.
Even low level magic is sometimes too flexible for a computer based game. BG3 basically ignores Magic Mouth as implemented in 5e because arbitrary “trigger conditions” is just something that cannot be handled in a truly open ended way. Nevermind trying to implement Contingency properly – a spell that forms the core of high level magical shenanigans.
it used to be the case that when you weren’t able to enforce DRM on a piece of software anymore, you would offer it as a free download so people who bought it wouldn’t lose it
they don’t have to keep supporting, just not make it unavailable the best case would be if they made it open source, in that case other people could keep maintaining it, but would be against their profit incentives
Reworded: Think of all the resources spent on making sure people don’t steal the software you paid to make.
I’m all for open source software. But if a company spends money paying employees, they need to not go out of business.
Now, do I think they overcharge? Yes. Do I think their subscription model is offensive? Yes. Are there other alternatives: Affinity Photo, you pay once for the version. Yours forever.
Rumors are that they want to charge $100 and they’re sitting back to see the financial climate with the price increases to see if consumers will bend over and take it without any pushback
Or…switch 2 version taking longer than Expected…
OR. they’re seeing the writing on the wall for the console industry and they’re going to release VI for all platforms (PC included) next year
My guess would be they’ll do some kind of tiered release strucructure, and/or have already finished or mostly finished 2 years+ worth of major updates, including new ‘chapters’ of the main single player story… and basically, you’ll have to subscribe.
Like … $160 for whole game, major expansion 1, 2 and 3, $120 for game + 1st expansion… Or your baseline $100, and then a subscription battlepass mmo monthly charge, or you can pay more for expansions in chunks, seperately.
Speaking out of my ass, I think the majority will take it without pushback.
I’m sure there’s a swath of people with a console just play the yearly COD/FIFA, eagerly waiting for GTA 6 to drop. They’ll buy it without blinking.
I’ll just wait for the Witcher 4 patch 2.0, which will release after 3 years from the original release date and will actually contain the advertised game.
That’s the confusing part for me because statements from the design team said they had the very optimistic goal of running most games at 4k 60fps, which is more like $1000 entry level imo.
It’s not a 4K capable graphics card though it’s a 1080p capable graphics card that they’re saying is 4K because of the existence of AI upscaling which I think is a cheat. So you’re already overestimating the cards capability.
I think the problem is Valve lost control of the messaging, which led to bad expectations.
At least in the US, a computer hooked up to a TV to play games means it’s a “console” and not a computer. Maybe we can blame Nintendo back in the 80s for going out of their way to avoid calling the NES a computer (despite it’s name in Japan being Famicom, Family Computer), but the distinction exists today despite technologically no real difference. You know this, I know this, Valve knows this. So Valve wants to make a computer you hook up to your TV so they can get you to use their money printing machine Steam in the living room too.
If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once. It’s always either by name or the terms PC, computer, or system. They likely don’t mention the word “console” because to date, video game consoles follow a different business model, one where the model subsidizes the shit out of the hardware and then make money on the back end with game sales/licensing.
Current “console” hardware starts in the <$500 price bracket, and with so much third party media marketing calling the Steam Machine a console, that got people’s mind set on pricing expectations of that market.
My theory and point was that by thinking about that computer as a console, in the average consumer mindset it should be priced like a console. From a pure hardware product perspective there is no difference
Valve is thinking about it as a computer, and has stated they intend to price it like one and not like a traditional console
As someone who has hooked up computers to TVs all his life, I can tell you. Just turning on with a controller directly into game mode is a massive game changer as it is a pain to get it working today. Look for guides about it and see the batshit hacks people have come up with.
That and the overabundance of Bluetooth antennas. Oh, and it also comes with super fast WiFi 7 special connection for the frame inside the box. Also, heat and sound management. Gaming PCs are little space heaters, very efficient during cold weather and a pain in the ass in hot climates. Keeping them cool takes an assortment of turbines and makes the living room sound like an airport. If this thing is as power efficient, quiet and cool as advertised, it will be the gaming enthusiast’s dream.
A console is typically locked down; they can sell them at cost or a loss and make up the money selling games. A computer is typically not locked down, you can install games from wherever on it, so they can’t assume you’ll buy your games from them (even though you will)
I think both of you are right but also wrong. It’s called “whatever you want” and there is no universal name for the practice. If you’re not using your PC for media, it certainly isn’t an HTPC.
If you read Valve’s marketing material on the Steam Machine, they don’t use the word “console” once.
Doesn’t matter at all. Its clearly meant to operate in the position of one. They could have very well avoided that term to avoid implying the lock down that consoles come with.
They can set the asking price to whatever they like but a lot of us cannot justify those amounts for what amounts to a toy. By this stage in a console generation I would expect a lot more games and a lot cheaper hardware. The reasons that haven’t happened aren’t of interest to me as a consumer (they’re of interest to me as a nerd!).
Because hardware, software, culture, incomes, demand, supply, and many, many other factors have all changed since the 1980s. It’s not a straight comparison. Inflation is a factor but it is not the only factor.
When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I’d been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
They the. Said nothing for half a decade. Now starfield is coming out and is shipped from their perspective so he’s on to his next sale. Simple as that. See you in another 5+ years
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