I mean, I could see if they tried to make this rent-to-own over 2-3 years. At half the price they’re offering.
But renting… where you’re paying over the entirety of the price in a single year, is fucking insane.
If renting, and updating it every 2 years, then for like 1/4th of the price then sure. I could see it being promoted how they are. Rent out older stock for 50% retail to at least get some value out of it while allowing people to pay ~$30 a month for a decent computer. (and then you could “upgrade” the lower tier with this to end up recouping 75% of retail over 4 years.)
But who the fuck is paying 10% of the cost a month to borrow an okay computer, even ignoring the full month cancelation fee, and ridiculous contract. (which is… ignoring a LOT.)
It is sad to see NZXT lowered to this as I used to have a decent view of them. They make some nice cases. CAM kinda lowered that view a bit, but I was in the beta for that and got a free water cooler out of it so I could overlook that (it’s improved a lot since beta, though it gathering data is still not great it’s less horrible than it was.). And pushing their own not as great products for the prebuilts still seemed okay for prebuilts for those scared to build on their own. But this is just… too much to overlook. Wild.
The only way this is marginally correct is if he is comparing to the money needed to create an AAA title. And in the end the company making the AAA title will have the cost operation to host/distribute and have all the others features Valve offers if they decide to do it in their own storefront.
Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).
The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.
And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.
There’s something I’d like to call “the Bethesda” bar. It’s basically an industrial bar lower than most. Let’s define what that means:
releasing the same game over and over
make games so buggy that a release with only a couple hundred of glitches is deemed "polished*
ignore progressive development for things like NPC AI
put all the money in marketing and hype
make the user think they’re getting something new, rather than just another boilerplate game
I’m sure the story writers did some characters justice, but I won’t be playing this game - especially since Bethesda claims it “can’t run on older hardware”, despite the fact that modders are proving them wrong.
The Betheada bar is a cancer upon the industry and I view it as consumer facing psy-ops, relying on brain-dead fanboys with nothing going on in their lives to squeal with glee as a new AAA-title is released to fill that void.
Ah yes the “everyone who likes something I don’t like is a brainless zombie” argument, coming from someone who doesn’t like Bethesda and hasn’t even played the game.
Early Bethesda games in general focused on giving you more freedom and the tools to do what you want. Where later games tried to give you more cool things to do. I think the quality decline is obvious from the change.
ESO is great, though? It just has a shitty combat system with attack weaving. Even 76 isn’t that bad anymore. Honestly just seems like you get your opinion out of gaming journalism.
I have literally never watched or read a review of ESO or Fallout 76.
I played both.
ESO fails at being a solid Elder Scrolls game because it’s tailored more toward an MMO experience. The writing is awful, and the quests are boring. The combat sucks, and the social features are abysmal given you can’t even share quests. Literally the only reason I could imagine anyone playing this game is because they want to grind out an MMO every day that’s set in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Fallout 76, I don’t even know where to start. Again, the MMO mechanics tear out everything good about Fallout games to deliver a bland, grindy MMO with bad combat.
I really dislike most of the games Bethesda makes . Skyrim I found glitchy and the sword play felt really bad . Fallout 3 the gameplay seemed like walk backwards and shoot. I did like death loop thou
I felt the same until I modded the shite out of Skyrim this year and now my mod list hit critical mass and I‘m having an absolute blast with it. Starfield runs worse and looks worse for me so that game needs some time in the patch and mod oven before I dive into it… I‘m patient.
I don't disagree that the mods for Bethesda games are cool, but problem is that the barrier to getting a massive mod list set up and working after years of mods have come out is considerable.
I feel like, given the sheer size of the mod library, mod managers need something like a list of base, curated set of mods to start with, kind of what Wabbajack does, but then have the ability to add mods to it. That way, to get you most of the way to a heavily-modded game, you just pick from among a few popular modlists.
Choosing that curated set to start with would let you avoid spending hours poring over reviews of different mods and culling obsolete information to determine what you think the current-best, say, lighting mod is.
And have the ability to update to the latest version of the modlist, or roll back to an earlier.
Once that's up and going, then if you want to go tweak it or add or remove a particular mod, you can.
This is the way to be. I won’t be buying Starfield for at least a year, likely longer. By that time GPUs will be able to run it easier and I’ll be due for a new one. The game will have also seen its most significant bugfixes in that time.I haven’t bought a new game hot off the press in almost a decade. #patientgamers
Don’t eat your burger hot off the grill, let it cool and allow it to congeal the fats a little bit. That way it doesn’t fall apart on the first bite. ;)
You should try Prey if you enjoyed Deathloop, it’s DLC “Moon crash” was made a few years prior to Deathloop and incorporates similar mechanics except the map is randomized on each playthrough so it’s always a little different.
Same company, but it feels like Moon crash was a more interesting version of what DL did. Plus Prey occasionally just goes on like 90% off sales (one time I snagged it and the DLC free on Epic Games.)
I can see why the reviews are between ‘Best game ever’ and ‘worst game Bethesda made’ and it’s so strange. I personally love Starfield and it’s universe while my friend hates it because it’s boring for him.
Tbh, me and at least 2 other people I know bounced off it hard, even after giving it multiple chances in 10+ hours of playing. Some people just aren’t jelling with it even with playtime.
It really is. I often find myself avoiding long games with intermittent text or dialog (RPGs!) because I get bored when there’s none and want to listen to a podcast but can’t because then I’ll miss the next dialog.
There’s also the “I’ve got something to do so I can’t deal with starting up a game” and then spending an hour on youtube
I’ve got a problem with having to watch YouTube or listen to a podcast while playing. And that includes RPGs… Though Expedition 33 has had me engrossed enough to shut the laptop while I’m playing
The good ones aren’t “blur”, they’re “subpixel rearrange”.
It takes about 4x4 square pixels to emulate the subpixels of a single round one… just like it takes about 4x4 round pixels to emulate the subpixels of a square one.
All pixels are a “blur” of R, G, and B subpixels. Their arrangement is what makes a picture look either as designed, or messed up.
For rendering text, on modern OSs you can still pick whichever subpixel arrangement the screen uses to make them look crisper. Can’t do the same with old games that use baked-in sprites for everything.
It gets even worse when the game uses high brightness pixels surrounded by low brightness ones because it expects the bright ones to spill over in some very specific way.
That’s still some Vsauce level reaching that “we don’t actually even see anything”. The tech doesn’t matter when playing and if it looks blurry, then it is blurry.
I said that it doesn’t matter. Only the end result does. There is no game I would play on a CRT simply because it looks worse. It’s not an objective fact but my preference. I don’t care how you are trying achieve the “CRT look” since it looks like shit and I don’t want to see it.
Have you checked the examples…? I feel like we’re going in circles. There are cases where the CRT looks objectively better, supporting examples have been provided, technical explanation has been provided… it’s up to you to look at them or not.
If you wish to discusd some of the examples, or the tech, I’m open to that. Otherwise I’ll leave it here. ✌️
The objective part is in whether it matches what the creator intended.
Sometimes they intended crisp contours, like in ClearType; sometimes they intended to add extra colors; sometimes they designed pixel perfect and it looked blurry on CRT; very rarely they used vector graphics or 3D that can be rendered at better quality by just throwing some extra resolution.
Many artists of the time pushed this tech to these limits, “objectively better” is to emulate that.
That looks bad sure but I wouldn’t look at that closely anyway and the filtered one looks even worse. I have played that game without any filters and I didn’t get any urges to use any. I have also played it on CRT but there wasn’t any choice back then.
Interesting back story incoming. My brother and I worked at one of the best restaurants (at the time) in Greensboro NC USA. My brother’s roommate (Mike), for several years (1989 - 1992 I believe), had only a high school education. After working a shift at the restaurant, he’d return home and shut himself in his room for hours (this was almost every day). My brother inquired out of curiosity and Mike showed my brother his computer set-up and the types of digital graphics he had been working on. Mike sent a 3 dimensional application to a digital graphics arts school (I believe in Raleigh NC) and was immediately accepted. After easily completing this program of study (Mike was highly gifted and driven), he was snatched up by the company that developed Myst. He went from barely scraping by to making a substantial amount of money in the field he dreamed to work in.
Fuck yeah, good for Mike. That sort of thing still works sometimes, but you have to be really, really good at what you do. But getting a good portfolio in the right hands at the right time is really all it takes.
I have little doubt that it will be a fantastic game, and even less doubt that modders will take it to another level. The biggest travesty so far still seems to be the lack of space archery. Especially with the modular weapons I feel a high tech compound bow would've been such a cool addition.
Gotta make sure the arrows still exist at distance though, unlike skyrim where you can put an arrow through someone and do 0 damage because you were slightly too far away.
That happens in Skyrim? But I remember videos of people suing fast travel after shooting from really far a way, like crazy away and then the arrow arriving where they fast traveled. Which fascinated me as I didn’t expect the game to track it.
If I understand it correctly from the reddit post, this was a popular mod, that you could get directly in-game, so probably available through the Steam Workshop or something. In that case you assume everything is fine and don’t really check out, if there’s something wrong.
This mod had some clever tricks to avoid detection from Antivir scanner. Not sure how deep and complex the Steam Workshop antivir scanner goes (if any). Hard to say if they would have found and prevented it. However, all antivir and other scanner software learned from this and now every malware using this technique could be detected instantly. At least in theory.
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