Idk, I feel that’s okay as long as the saves are incredibly frequent and reliable.
I’ve never lost progress in a From Software game for instance, and they have an only auto save system, but it saves literally everything you do as soon as you do it, so unless you deliberately alt-F4 instantly after doing something, you won’t lose any progress.
Can you reload old saves, or only the most recent? I think being able to reload an older save is important in the case of glitches (NPC walks through wall and is unreachable etc)
I also have never had any issues with game breaking bugs like that. I’ve encountered some glitches but nothing a save+reload couldn’t fix. Everything just resets to its normal spawn point.
There are game studios out there that don’t release broken garbage that needs the player to walk on eggshells, backup saves, and do arcane console commands to make the game playable.
There’s also a place in hell for devs who don’t include a “save and quit” in rogue like games because they’re worried people will save scum. As if honest people who can’t devote enough time for a full playthrough are less important than people lying about progress in a non competitive single player game.
I assume it’s more about the hassle of implementing a way of serializing the game state for storage in most cases but if people want to cheat in a single player game let them or better yet seed the rng so that the outcome is the same anyways.
Hngh. Balatro already had a bunch of hassle on Switch eShop due to the PEGI ratings change.
Earlier, Nintendo somehow got a PEGI 12 rating for 51 Worldwide Games, which includes poker and blackjack. I wonder what they argued to avoid the 18 rating. “Sure, this compilation has poker and blackjack, but it’s not like we made it fun.” (It’s adequate but compared to Balatro it’s very much a non-frills experience.)
“sure our game has gambling elements, but we’re Nintendo so shut the fuck up and give us a better rating because you’re a private company in the business of giving ratings”
It’s a decent game but a terrible one if you are comparing it to the original Overwatch.
I’m just genuinely curious why/how it’s still getting updates and people are playing it with the way it’s talked about, they make it sound like the worst game ever
That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.
According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.
In my opinion, anyone saying OW2 is worse than the original is saying this for personal reasons and not trying to be objective. OW2 is, in my experience, much more balanced than OW1. Many of the more frustrating aspects of the game have been fixed or removed, and most of the characters added since OW1 seem fun to play and not frustrating to play against.
There are very many valid criticisms one can make of Blizzard. The history of being a shitty workplace, the objectively awful decision to make OW2 a sequel, the treatment of Jeff Kaplan by execs, the monetization, and probably more. None of those criticisms (except monetization to a limited degree) have anything to do with whether or not OW2 is a bad game or not.
But I’m speculating since the person you responded to has not elaborated on any of their views.
I agree with you. Even though they’re still not the kind of game so would play regularly, Overwatch 1 was extremely annoying to play with all the stuns, freezes and more. Overwatch 2 toned down and removed most of these which made it actually somewhat enjoyable.
Ehh I disagree, I played consistently ow1 for years and ow2 just wasn’t as good.
I mainly missed tank synergies. Without it the game just wasn’t the same. The other tank changes were just insane too. And I preferred the full 6v6 experience.
Then they had to go an monetize the shit out of it, when I already paid for the game! The last straw was either paying for new characters or grinding like hell.
The tank and 6v6/5v5 has been heavily discussed, recently devs made a long devblog about it. I can kinda see where you’re coming from, I think, but between balance/queue times/the average player (of which there tends to be more of when you’re with 5 others instead of just 4) it seems to me like 1 tank works better in practice even though it struggles when compared to the ideal world+nostalgia goggles.
I was very pleasently surprised not disappointed by the monetization, like uncompleted weekly (battle pass -primary method of profression) challenges carry over, so in theory you can do all weekliesduring the last week if a battle pass. also aren’t the new heroes available if you play just a few matches?
I honestly though I would get used to it, like the forced 2-2-2 comps which I initially disliked, but I never did. It just made the game feel like too much more like a pure fps. And it not feeling like that was what made it unique.
In my experience all the que times were fine as 2-2-2 even when queued as duo dps
I don’t mean to be a dick but without giving actual reasons all you’re saying is “I preferred ow1”, which is kind of what my original comment was referring to. Tank synergies is definitely something that was lost with ow1, rein/zarya and dive comps were very fun and definitely something I miss. But it was also a major source of balance issues and player frustration.
Two tank team composition was a consistent balance issue and severely restricted the design of tank heroes. Sigma is a really fun and interesting hero, but when he was added overwatch entered a prolonged two shield meta which was incredibly boring. The devs added a cool hero, and he made the game worse. Not only did he make the game worse, but there was no obvious or easy solution, because sigma wasn’t the problem, two shields was the problem. In my opinion that exemplifies how bad of an issue the game was facing and justifies the changes made.
There’s nothing wrong with preferring ow1 but the person I responded to called it “a terrible game compared to the original” which is just blatantly incorrect in my opinion.
Why? I played OW from beta, stopped playing after all the shitty workplace accusations came out, then played again for 10 or so hours last month.
I didn’t play much competitive (in my recent sessions) but the game seemed like it was in a pretty solid place. The only “major” issue I can think of is that the tank role is incredibly important, which creates a bit of a toxic environment where people are scared to play tank because they get flamed if the team gets rolled. But I think the downsides are worth the benefits, with tank being so important it’s become the core that the rest of the game balances around. Healers have more agency and dealing damage/contributing to elims is a vital part of the role. A lot of the frustrating/cheesy aspects of the game have been removed, scattershot, damage-doomfist, mercy 5-man-res, goats, double shield.
Again, I took a long break from the game, but before that I clocked a lot of hours in competitive. Personally the game feels about as balanced and enjoyable as it’s ever been.
Obviously the monetization is gross and that entire side of the game sucks now but that’s an entirely different conversation.
So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.
It’s a word-puzzle game that incrementally teaches you how to use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find & replace text. Some of the puzzles add silly restraints for you to work around, and the game has charming NPC coworkers that introduce each challenge.
Never heard of it, and sounds awesome, regexes are the sort of things that need lots of practice to be good at, a game seems like a great way to keep the skill alive
Yeesh, I’ve never used the website but that NightCrawler person seems like they have some serious control problems. The fact that the whole community was willing to chip in/pay for it and take it over and the admin still refused to cooperate is pretty shitty. At least it looks like someone managed to convince the admin to let them host and takeover the site’s wiki.
This is oddly common in ROM hacking/mod scenes. There’s been no shortage of drama in the Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics communities, too.
At the very least I wish people would consider the bus test once a site/project gets to a certain critical mass. Insane to me that a site with this kind of profile never had coverage for that scenario this entire time.
I really hope that tcrf doesn’t take over. I STILL can’t contribute to that website because it requires you to sign up for Discord and agree to Discord’s ToS just to paste some stupid code into their bot.
after some further research, it became apparent that Discord staff could save a significant amount of money by changing S3 providers. The new bucket was set up, but when the time came to make the change NC refused to do it, even though he was not the one footing the bill.
There’s a conspicuous absence of explaining why they wouldn’t do it. What were their actual concerns? Did they not voice them or are they just being withheld?
NC refused to join the Discord to talk about solutions in real-time.
Why was this a requirement?
Did we vent in private? Sure.
And what did you say?
Did we dox or threaten? Fucking hell, no! And frankly I’m LIVID at even the suggestion that we did.
Well something clearly happened if his family was brought into it, so if you’re going to skimp on the details, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to believe that.
The whole thing just comes back to the larger issue with discord: the record vanishes.
I have roleplayed a different flavour of racist in the last three games, and I am hardly unique in that sense. Every race is defined by their racism or the racism they face.
C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.
KSP2 was a management fuck up. Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
You see this a lot in project management. People go to school to learn to manage projects, and they think that all projects are pretty much the same. You define the deliverables, set the schedule, track the progress, and everything should work out fine. When the project is a success, they pat themselves on the back for getting everyone to the finish line, and when the project fails they examine where in the process unexpected things happened.
Video games are an art form. Creativity can’t be iterated into existence, and the spark of fun is more than the component parts of a good time. Capitalists believe that they can invest in the creative process and buy the value of the talent of extraordinary people. They have commoditized creation, dissecting each step and then squeezing it into a format that fits into a procedure.
Here’s a Kanban board of game features, pick one and move it to the next phase. Develop, test, evaluate, repeat. What are your blockers? Is this in scope? Do we need to push the deadline?
That can help you make something, but it won’t be art.
As an art appreciator, and someone whose professional duties include project management, I love this comment, especially “[project management] can help you make something, but it won’t be art.”
As a project manager (well sort of, but did IT projects for a while, have multiple friends in the gaming manager): Yes and no.
From my point of view: The problem isn’t the fact that games are art. While games have their creative side they also require good “brick and mortar work” in the back - as many games as went horribly wrong due to a lack of space for creativity went wrong due to a lack of “less than glamorous” brick and mortar work and overcreativity. (Most drastic example would be the reddit dragon MMO story)
This is actually a reason why people who are very invested in the subject matter of the project they manage often are horrible project managers - and vice versa people who have no clue can’t be good PMs either.
Project management has one core component: Knowing when to ask whom. A good PM knows that the dev(or dev team lead) will always know better how long “feature X” will take. Of course I can try to learn how to do things… but that wouldn’t help much as the exact dev or team will still have their individual speeds. But a good PM also will know when to ask someone else who is nore knowledgeable for advice or to confirm things. (I literally had an Dev trying to tell me a small feature would take two weeks. Fair enough. But interestingly enough two other Devs were fairly sure it takes 30min including documentation. Which sounded way more reasonable. Turned out said Dev always tried to pull these stunts with new PMs and his lead being on vacation)
A good PM will also know when to give people space for creativity - and defend this room towards the budget.
Sadly - and this is a problem existing on all sides around PM- in the end it all boils down to a simple thing: Everyone thinks they know better. The PM thinks they know the job of being a Dev(or engineer,etc. etc.) better than the actual people doing the job. And vice versa the Devs think they could do without PMs (they can’t for larger projects it’s impossible, for mid size projects often really inefficient) or know their job better.
I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.
For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:
were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
this game was their first sizeable project
For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.
This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.
Not just making the same mistakes, they were told to scrap years of development and reuse the exact same codebase of KSP1. They had to start over the project with a decade plus of technical debt from a team they weren’t allowed to talk to.
Because remaking the same features from scratch was taking too long. They had already delayed the project due to covid at that point. They ended up with three games: the one they started before intercept was created (and that never saw the light of day), the one based on KSP with the upgrades and new features added (also never seen publicly), a neutered version without the incomplete new features (like multeplayer and improved heat simulation) that was launched as early access. Poor fellows were set up for failure.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
The rights were aquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2017, and they wanted a sequel to be released in 2020.
The dev studio shut down in 2023 and current status is unkown.
I never played cs1 on release, only played after it was nearly 10 years old, but my understanding is it vastly improved over updates and dlc (which unfortunately did cost more but did at least add meaningful changes for the most part).
Im curious to see where CS2 stands in 3-5 years when mods have really taken off and the devs had made most of their major tweaks.
I had it from release and honestly, even day 1 it smoked the competition in the city sim genre, releasing with features and scale than Sim City ever had.
The DLC often introduced more systems, but they did feel ‘extra’, the game was perfectly functional before parks or tourism or natural disasters etc.
The reason CS:2 felt so necessary is because the first was bloated and had underlying issues in it’s simulation logic, like unrealistically inefficient driving, or a large expansion to residential areas causing all the new residents to die of old age at the same time, crippling the city. Every part of the GUI and logic just felt clunky compared to modern, polished games.
I’d argue the DLCs did more than you imply. The extra modes of transit gave more options to move people, painting a custom park area made cities feel more realistic than premade square parks, universities could be a great centerpiece for a neighborhood. Its not like vanilla was unplayable, but the DLC defintely added more creativity for me.
Oh, the fucks up are massive. They hired a new studio, but also, they pulled the funding then the project without warning. Then they poached the devs, forcing the studio to close and sending them to a newly funded studio. But then, they forced the devs to scrap years of work from scratch, and start over the project with the old codebase and only a year as a deadline. Finally, when it became obvious it wasn’t a massive success, they cut their funding too without warning, and sold the IP without telling the studio about it.
KSP was mishandled so wildly that it should be a case study of how profit oriented management kills creativity and destroys IPs. They killed two studios and a massive IP with their shenanigans. This is why you never let the MBAs run anything.
I mean for ksp2 saying it failed cause they had “no experience with this kind of work” is kind of weird, since neither did the ksp1 devs when they started that. And they didn’t fuck it up either, let alone this badly. Remember that it was a passion project of harvester, working at a PR firm that just happened to let him do it under their roof and employment. The company did not even have any basic experience in game development, arguably even software development in general.
Institutional knowledge is a real thing and also like you said, the first KSP started as a passion project. There’s a huge difference in terms of pressure and expectation between developing your own passion project compared to developing a sequel of a highly regarded game.
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.
I tried, but I just can’t go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I’m waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.
I’d say TES as well, but with Oblivion > Morrowind. I had trouble getting used to it being more toward the RPG side than Action. But it’s rewarding if you see it through.
I couldn’t ever get into oblivion since skyrim was my first Bethesda game and a lot of oblivion felt like (to me) slightly janky skyrim. I was able to get into morroeind though because it was just so diffrent.
And I’m from the other end where I came from Morrowind and couldn’t get into Oblivion because it was so generic compared to the earlier game. Monsters leveling to the character made it so safe.
I remember when the monster that was spawning everywhere changed type I knew I had leveled up.
I actually did. After waiting 10 years for a new TES game after Skyrim, I got bored and installed Morrowblivion. Played that all the way through. Then I played Oblivion with some visual mods. It was still quite fun, though I didn’t do a full play through. If I hadn’t already done a full play through, then Oblivion would still be an awesome game after playing Skyrim.
I assume that when they die they’ll wake up from their wizard coma and it will coincide with some sort of cool plot point. Maybe his wizard body gets kissed by a frog or something.
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