I haven’t heard of the game but see that it’s going for $27. For me at least, buying a $27 game, I’d expect 10 hours minimum of enjoyable gameplay, which throws the free refund out the window if it would deliver.
It could be possible that they wanted to increase their game length to justify the price and stretched things if the first 80 minutes were tedious and slow. I’m sure there’s some consideration to front load the enjoyment into the first few hours, with or without the refund, but I would assume lesser priced games would focus on that and not one going for this price.
gotta avoid sunk cost, I used to buy 30$ games and say if I got 10 hours its worth it when I didnt enjoy the game and wouldve been better off spending my time (which is always more valuable than the amountt of money lost on a game 20-70$) elsewhere
OMG it’s wild that you would say that because I’m actually reading (listening to really) Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson as I’m making this! If you’ve never read it a pretty big plot point is a Brown Note image that looks like noise but that will scramble people’s brains if they have enough of an affinity for computer languages.
I feel like it was in the first 3rd or so? To me that counts more as setup than anything else. The rest of it has been more of the implications, how it works, and what to do about it, which I would consider more to be spoilers.
Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
We have basicly everything you play games on, so also both of these. But the Steam Deck is absolutely the gigachad, even moreso than my actual gaming pc if you just look at hours used.
If you forced me to get rid of all my devices but one, it’d probably be the Steam Deck that’ll be left. And yes this consideration included my gaming pc and smartphone.
The only regret I have about buying the Steam Deck is being so late to the party. (i got it like 6 months ago)
The brown is bad, but to be fair to the right side, it’s the left one that has bad reflections and is blurry - it was released when bloom effects were new and it used them way too much.
I will check out utube videos on the game before buying, if the game is over a certain price and a complex game. This will spoil some things, but it is usually not too bad.
C&C Generals 2, they got canceled and then made in to a mobile game. I considerd staying 10 hours in line to try it out at gamescom in köln 10-12 years ago, decided to get drunk instead.
Yeah that was a letdown for sure. Still better than releasing it as a mobile game I think.
If you haven’t heard they recently released the source code of C&C generals and zero hour and there’s multiple efforts working on a community patch.
I’ve been watching the competitive scene of zero hour for a few years now. It’s really exciting and now that the source code’s out, sky’s the limit on what we can achieve.
Switch to Linux. As a big-time gamer, I did it last year and it’s been fantastic. Only issue is if you main games with root kit anticheat…but with enough momentum in Linux direction, game studios will be forced to abandon those dubious detection methods anyway.
I’ve been hard at trying to get games i like to work in mint. It takes a lit of time but it’s going ok. Like you said though kind of sucks for multi-player. I can’t even get diabolical multi-player to work (after I looked up how to fix the instant crashing audio driver issue) . It’s also a lot of qork getting any racing game to work with my DFGT…even though linux does see the axis and buttons, the force feedback is all messed up. Wish I knew how to code so I could fix these issues! But I don’t have 12 hours a day to ever learn that
Use Bazzite. It is a distro dedicated to gaming and user friendly for beginners. It still has some limitations but it is better compared to others when it comes to gaming. You don’t really require more tweaking unlike other distros to make games work.
This is the advice I came here looking for. I’m intimidated by the switch and have no time, but if there’s a distro that’s easy to get going, I’m there for it. I’ll check it out!
I just wasn’t sure fedora based (bazzite) would be as easy to troubleshoot as mint (Debian based) since arguably debian/Ubuntu are the most popular distro.
Another distro that’s easy to get going for gaming is Garuda.
Also, the easiest way to switch to any distro is to get a USB drive and install a program called Ventoy. Then you throw your install iso onto the Ventoy drive, boot from USB, and you’re good to go.
As a tip, pick up an external drive large enough for your Steam library. Then in Steam, you right click on each game and select Manage/Back up game files.
Doing it this way will save you days of downloading.
Sadly I use way too many programs that only work on windows or Mac that Linux would handicap me. The free open source versions of yhe apps I use are no where near as capable.
My only option I can think of would be running a virtual machine of Win10 on a Linux install so I can still use those apps.
I’m not the OP but I have a similar situation. I work in multimedia design and use a wide array of software from the full Adobe suite, to in-house command line apps, to the Articulate suite and everything in between.
I’d love to be on Linux but that just isn’t a possibility for me.
I mean, sure you can do this, but you have to also sympathize with the folks that have years if not decades of experience in a program/suite, and that experience is what they use to market themselves. Like, in a perfect world, everyone could make the switch to FOSS alternatives, but it’s not so cut and dry for those who can’t spend up to years of their personal time to just get back to being as efficient as they were with the other, just to not support a scummy company. I’ve been moving pretty much entirely over to FOSS for everything I do, but it’s been years in the making, and substantial effort on my part. And I have it easy, since I work in software development. We in the FOSS community can’t expect all others to do the same.
I’m not Tyler Bourbon, but it’s Fusion 360 for me. I sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s the only piece of software that keeps a windows install in my house
Not OP, but for another data point: recently I did quite a bit of Linux-related research on the three Adobe apps I use (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, in this order of prominence), and they are all reported as some level of broken via Wine and their Linux alternatives are missing important features and/or a pain in the arse to use :/
Unfortunately, any app that needs a GPU would be difficult to work with in a VM. You have to manually set up GPU-passthru, which requires figuring out the PCI addresses and whatnot of your card, along with using a terminal. As I understand it, this process also prevents you from using that GPU outside of the VM, which is cruddy.
I was hoping to have a Linux Mint + Windows 11 VM back in January, but that didn’t work out. I am hoping that the upcoming SteamOS Desktop would make Linux friendly enough for games that aren’t native to Steam, such as my GOG collection, Window 3.1 stuff like Stars!, modding, and assorted Japanese locale games.
SteamOS isn’t going to be the “Windows killer” people think it’ll be. I’m a massive Valve and Steam fan but SteamOS isn’t any better than any of the other major distros when it comes to gaming.
I think it’ll feel like pop os. Pretty much set up for gaming right out of the box, but anything deeper and you’re forced to touch the terminal. What I do think it has going for it however is the publicity of Steam, plus a promise on Steam’s part to continue to dump a bunch of resources in to making it a better experience. I’m not expecting mass migrations, but it will likely be what gets all the folks on the fence to switch over, at least among gamers
Terminal usage is inevitable with Linux. It’s not as scary as it seems and can actually create a sense of accomplishment when you use it. Pop is a solid distro for sure but you don’t need a “gaming distro” to game on Linux these days (not that Pop is a gaming distro specifically). There’s actually a Linux Experiment video where he proves this with a thorough test. All major distros work fine for gaming.
I encourage people to not go for SteamOS unless you’re setting up a PC you want to use solely as a home console, or if you’re flashing it to a different handheld.
That, all coming from a big Valve fan. I simply don’t think it’s a good idea for people to get their hopes up over SteamOS somehow being a no-terminal, peak gaming Linux experience. I also don’t think it’s a good idea to hold off until SteamOS gets its full PC release, because most major distros today will work just as well. It’d literally only benefit people to start learning Linux now so that by the full SteamOS launch, they’ll be more informed as to whether it’ll be something they’ll find useful enough to use as a daily driver.
I understand where you’re coming from. I myself prefer using a terminal for most things, and use arch (btw) for the PC I game on. I understand that learning Linux is the best move for folks, but I don’t see that being an option, at least initially, for people on the fence.
I know that, from a Linux user’s perspective, it is the wrong move, but I have plenty of friends that want a “no terminal, gaming ready” distro before they make the move. I see it more as a first step, removing the barrier for making the switch to Linux. Once they are already there, it’s much easier to convince themselves to learn Linux a bit deeper if needed over time.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just naive and hopeful, but there are a good number of my friends that I think will make the switch to Linux that wouldn’t have without SteamOS.
The way I see the root kit anticheat situation is that because Valve has their own Linux based OS, these companies making anticheat are probably going to end up tailoring it to whatever kernel Valve (or whatever the biggest/most widely used distro made by a large game corporation) uses to ensure people aren’t cheating.
With a kernel that can be swapped out for another with varying degrees of difficulty, why wouldn’t they just tailor their work to whatever the biggest corporate game company supporter of Linux is using? If SteamOS (or any other distro made by maybe someone like EA, heaven forbid) ends up becoming what these anticheat devs see as the defacto Linux distro for gaming, I guarantee they’ll probably just focus all their efforts on making sure SteamOS (or whatever it ends up being) works as best they can and hanging out everyone else to dry.
A real “Wanna run the latest CoD (or something similar) on your device? Make sure you use the kernel we say you have to use!” kinda situation is what I foresee happening.
There’s also an OpenBSD song with a few lines of lyrics that I think could sum up what could (and sadly most likely will) happen, in metaphorical Odyssey kind of way:
Corporate monsters, many closing passages\ Tempting harpies\ 13 years of treachery
Though it’s definitely going to be more than 13 years.
Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. xkcd.com/323/
It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
I’m here, so I’m more likely to know who that is or what he looks like. But I don’t. I do now because you mentioned him and I looked up how he looks like. Your average Joe is gonna be even less likely to know who that is or what he looks like. So I’m guessing that’s why. Some CEOs just avoid the spotlight. Or maybe I’ve just been avoiding MS news, dunno
Because he set the general, evil directions for MS. Like keeping users uninformed and locked in, smearing the competition, sabotaging open standards, taking your control over your hardware and data away from users, etc. All happened during evil Bill’s reign.
Not to mention the many deals with hardware manufacturers in order to avoid competing OSs to have any chance. They managed to kill BeOS and dominate the Japanese market in the 90s
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