The casting choices are really questionable here. Looks like the casting was done to bring in a generic movie going audience that watches movies based on the cast, but this was only going to succeed by appealing to the actual fan base. Jack Black and Kevin Hart don’t need to be in every movie. I’m surprised Chris Pratt isn’t in this honestly.
I have no doubt that Eddings wouldn’t want to have anything to do with anything remotely close to Pitchford after that kind of treatment. If he did, that’s a toxic as fuck environment to create.
I really do like the idea of switch and might be a potential buyer, but… as a long time PC user woth zero console experience I’ll pass. I don’t want to (re)buy games that seems to be quite overpriced on Nintendo. So if anything, I’d be buying Steam Deck.
when i have my non-tech savvy friends over, i don’t want to make them sit there for 5 minutes while i try to connect all the controllers, and then make sure the game in question recognizes them all and isn’t trying to map all controllers to one input or something. Maybe it’s gotten better in the time since I last tried, but my experience has not been “2 minutes to run the mapper”. On the Switch, you just press a button on each controller and you’re rolling.
On Steamdeck, I haven’t tried multiple controllers, but with one, it has been rather seamless for both the PS5 and the Stadia controller. They are both Bluetooth, and when I turn them on they just work. That said, the original SteamDeck(which is what I have) doesn’t support CEC or Bluetooth waking, so the Switch wins out on automatically turning on and switching my TV’s input. The OLED SteamDeck is supposed to fix that, but I’m not paying for a replacement until this one dies or a SteamDeck 2 comes along.
For what it’s worth, this actually isn’t too bad on the Steam Deck. Controllers are all seen as individual, so you can set players 1-4, rearrange them, pretty much whatever.
It used to be much worse on PC. On Steam Deck now at least, it’s pretty manageable. I imagine this is the same situation for PC now if you’re using Steam
I’m a PC gamer but my wife got me a Switch for Christmas because she knew I wanted to play some Mario Kart. The 1st party stuff is pretty expensive and doesn’t go on offer much (as long as you only use digital stores like me). Other stuff can be pretty cheap though, I’ve got Limbo, Inside, Civilization VI, Torchlight II, and more that I can’t remember, for like £2 each on offer. There’s lots more that regularly comes up as less than £10.
Well, technically yes, but why pay even a couple quids when I already have purchased the game on PC? Of course there’s this “To support the dev!” but honestly… How much he’s going to make from such a purchase after all?
This is why I find Steam Deck the most tempting handheld console, because it can play (almost) all the games I’ve purchased over last decade on both Steam and GOG. I’m no Nintendo fanboy so I can happily live without Mario or Zelda.
I sold my switch as soon as the original SD was announced. Just got my OLED in the mail and couldn’t be happier; easily the best console experience I’ve ever had.
I’ve always been a PC+Nintendo person. I get mostly just Nintendo’s games (Mario Kart, Smash, Zelda, Metroid, Splatoon, etc.) and some party games on console, and everything else on PC.
There’s not been a time in my life when I haven’t had the first-party Nintendo lineup since the NES came out when I was like 8. Since most non-Nintendo games seem to eventually make their way to PC these days, they complement each other nicely.
for a while there, it was actually better to play Switch games on PC with an emulator than it was to play it on the actual Switch. BOTW and TOTK were gorgeous in 1440p 60fps, wish all gamers got to experience that.
It’s not just “it was”, but “it is”. I am right now playing TOTK on Yuzu (yes the one that is no longer available) at 1440p 60 fps, with around 60 hours and near the end. I played this year BOTW the same, but 130 hours! And I enjoy them with my favorite controller at the moment, the Xbox Series S controller. The experience is not perfect, but I think much better than on original hardware.
I got a Switch. It’s been mostly untouched for years. Most games that aren’t created by Nintendo themselves are available on Steam. I even played Totk on PC using Yuzu.
Until the Steam Deck I was also a PC+Nintendo person.
The great thing about Nintendo consoles was that their library of games covers 80% of games available on other consoles if you want them. Otherwise, you could easily never surpass more than 25 games, all of which could easily only be Nintendo games.
For a fairly long time there was just no need for anything else, as something about the Nintendo exclusives felt more reasonable than the PSN/MS exclusives. Probably something to do with them generally being cheaper and more unique games, or maybe just that the price of the console isn’t as high so it doesn’t feel as “exclusive”, even though they are.
For example, looking at how PSN uses their games to really sell buying into their console; Spider-Man, Horizon Zero Dawn are examples of games that did so well Sony was almost forced to let them come to PC, somewhat thanks to Microsoft. Or how these companies are trying to sell games for versions of their consoles - Sorry, you bought the PS3 and 4 version, you’ll have to upgrade for the PS5 one! No no, this company is good because they gave the game you paid for already to you again for free!
I haven’t bought a Switch game since I got my Steam Deck and hacked my Switch so I could dump the games I own.
Now I have a PC console that has my entire gaming library consolidated. Bonus: a majority of the games play better emulated. Cons: missing internet on games (and including it would only be hacked servers). And before this point, the only games I ever repurchased were ones I wanted to support the devs of, Doom 2016, Monster Hunter: Rise, Crypt of the Necrodancer.
It was similar for me, except that Nintendo made the decision for me by prevening me from purchasing (or downloading) any game from the eShop. Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected to get banned since I also hacked mine in order to dump my games and transfer saves for games I owned on PC and Switch.
Still, since Nintendo apparently didn’t want to have a customer and the SteamDeck was announced shortly after I jumped ship day one and only turned the Switch on once again to transfer my saves back.
Yeah, I pretty much hopped on it as soon as it was hacked so there wasn’t much knowledge of what could lead to bans. Granted, at that point I was already a bit dissatisfied with the Switch, so I went in fully aware of the risks and not really being afraid of the risk. I even had a preorder running that I got locked out of, though luckily enough, that got a PC port not soon after.
How did you get banned? Or why do you think, I mean. I was worried about that too but I took all the precautions and I’m still able to use it today if I want to. I do have a 1.0 switch though so it’s just the rcm jig.
The only issue I had in the whole process was animal crossing. Every other save seemed to transfer over fine which was cool.
Also to be more honest - only like 85% of my switch emulated games were perfect, but over time these games are just getting better and better. My go to example was at launch of all of this, Marvels Ultimate Alliance 3 was pretty broken, it worked but the textures were all wonky. Just a few months later it was way better, and by now it’s basically perfect. I’ve almost completed my playthrough of that game (how many years later…)
It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.
But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.
Ah yeah I see, I only finally hacked my Switch once I got my Steam Deck, long after it had all been pretty refined. It was fun reliving the days of hacking my Wii when I did it, even felt basically the same lol.
I agree mostly and did the same. At some point when the Steam Deck was new, I really thought about getting a Switch instead alongside my PC. Because the Steam Deck is more like an extension to the eco system I already have with my PC (especially as a Linux user). On the other side, the Switch would widen the the number of games to play. You can’t buy specific games on PC, such as some of the most beloved franchises and games in history.
I went with the Steam Deck, as a fan of Steam, Linux and PC in general. The Switch system is what, 7 years old? 8? Even games from its launch time are still sold very expensive. Plus Nintendo does really bad things to the fan games and such, that I won’t support this company any longer.
Exactly. Not only the games are still (even after many years) very expensive with not that much “steam sale” level of discounts or various humble/fanatical bundles, it’s Nintendo’s behavior that is the most off putting part in the equation.
As soon as I got a Steam Deck I completely stopped buying Switch games (or playing on Switch in general). Most games are playable on both systems and the prices seem more or less the same (at lest for the ones I’m interested in), but the main advantage for me is being able to move save files between the deck and my PCs.
I had a Switch for a few years before the Steamdeck came out. If all the games you want to play are available to play on Steamdeck, stick with Steamdeck. It’s more powerful, has way more games, you probably already have plenty of games to play on it, the games are way cheaper, and the degree which you can modify the software and hardware is pretty unique for a “console.”
The Switch has an edge in form factor and is more convenient for me to use. Although Switch emulation on the Steamdeck is pretty decent, I still prefer the original hardware to play Animal Crossing or Zelda.
The form factor advantage of the Switch comes from its trash controller. When I replaced with the the Hori split pad, the form factor was almost similar.
Theyre trying to argue that JKR being a massive TERF is fine because theres one trans character in the game. The “I cant be racist, I have a black friend” defense.
I don’t care for JK. But JK didn’t make the game. Hundreds of designers, artists and programmers did. And you think those people should be boycotted because one person is a TERF.
Those people were already paid, and you can make a game about wizards and magic without licensing the Harry Potter IP and further enriching JK Rowling.
She collected royalties from it. It doesnt matter if she had any input or not. Buying that game results in some of that money going into her pocket and I dont want to give her a dime. If she didnt get a dime for it that might be different but as it is she does and she revels in the shit stirring that shes done that resulted in blow back. I cant justify giving that troll the satisfaction of buying products that benefit her financially.
Maybe in your fantasy world, but in real life when a game bombs the studio gets cut down, downsized, etc. Volition was recently closed because of the bombing of the Saints Row reboot. Avalanche is great studio and I wish them to continue existing.
When the series creator is vocally advocating to marginalize transgender people and financially supporting other members of the hate movement, it takes more than a token NPC to make up for it.
Most likely that character is an insincere PR move from Warner Bros, but some trans people also pointed out that naming her Miss Ryan was probably done in bad faith. If anything, sounds exactly like the kind of tasteless thoughtless naming that JKR is infamous for.
Tangential but was at the hospital for an Endo appointment with my son and chuckled in our waiting room “I bet there’s an old white guy in a suit right now going ‘but what if we made these waiting rooms smaller?’”
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.
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