This is honestly pretty funny. Even another government agency recognized how bad the response was. That was literally like someone asking how old you are, and you respond by telling them the definition of age.
If Discord is going to be abandoned by people, I wish we’d go back to proper forums that’s much more accessible and searchable. Continuing down this road is just going to lead to the continued burying of useful information behind these services.
I think there’s room for both, as in the old days there was typically an IRC channel along side forums that was typically a secondary channel (but not always).
But yeah, forums would be ideal, preferably with federation support so there is no need to make an account with every single one.
Well, you see IRC and forums went together because they filled two different needs and we understood that back in the day.
IRC was for chatting, short, quick real time communication that would be lost to the ether as soon as you signed off, unless you had a bouncer or log bot.
Forums were for long information, be that long posts or posts that needed to endure for a long time. Sure you’d get some one liner responses to those posts, but forums were not at all instant like IRC. Though the information did stay much longer, and was much more searchable and organized.
Discord has spoiled us, being quick and chatty while also allowing for longer posts and being searchable. At least within the Discord client. Shoot they even added those “forum” channels to replicate the old forum feel. But real time.
Forums are just not great for real-time interaction like discord chat is, not to mention the integration of voice chat, video streaming, etc is just too convenient to give up without replacing it with something similar. I too wish discord/whatever replacement gets attention was more searchable and kept stuff long-term, but… if you want to post info that lasts, post it on lemme and link it on discord or whatever.
True, but I can’t help having nostalgia for ye olde forum days.
Edit: Not sure why I keep being downvoted. I never said forums would replace anything. I was merely acknowledging my nostalgia for old forum boards from a now bygone era. Didn’t realize having fond memories of a time period on the Internet was a bad thing. Jesus.
I kinda don’t though. I quite enjoy real-time chat and voice and video with friends. It’s not like forums don’t exist at all anymore tho - you’re on one right now. I get my forum experience from places like reddit or lemmy, and I use them for very different things, so I’m glad both exist.
discord is not a forum (even if they want it to be with the forum channels), its never been a good location to store information. That being said, its amazing for real time communication unlike forums. I hate that devs use it for FAQ and bug forms and stuff. I stopped reporting bugs if it requires me to join a discord.
Discord did there best to be an all in one solution and we just need a return to real time chat and voice along with asynchronous communication like forums
We need both for different purposes. Discord is amazing for voice, video, and IM chatting. All things that happen in real-time. But forums are intended for a vastly different use case. Forums are play-by-post. They’re asynchronous. They’re meant for responding at your earliest convenience, not for talking to someone right now. The fact that so many people began using Discord as a forum replacement is a travesty, because Discord is a fucking atrocious medium for forums… Not due to any fault of Discord’s, but because they’re completely different use cases.
You’re on a forum right now, no? I think a lot of Discords have accompanying Reddits and vice versa, hopefully they start using Lemmy. But forums are still popular. Just not Ye Olde BBS
I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn’t all that appealing these days.
They don’t actually let admins shut down their wikis or remove content from them. They can leave and start a new wiki, but they have to leave the old one in place (for which Fandom could potentially just find new admins), and they can only link to the new wiki from the Fandom wiki for a period of two weeks. With Fandom’s SEO, there’s a good chance the Fandom wiki will still be ahead of search results of a new wiki even after migration. Source
I wonder if this could be mitigated (or even nullified) by a cooperative game developer, through DMCA takedown notices sent to Fandom. There is a lot of art on these wikis, after all, and I imagine the copyright holder has some say in who is allowed to distribute it.
Thank you. I’ve been dabbling with the idea of establishing a non-profit for my lemmy instance. I’m not a user of game/movie/etc wikis, but I do love looking after my servers. I wonder if a non-profit owned wiki site bear any weight over time.
Man this was an issue already some 10 years ago when touhou wiki went self-hosted. It took a whole year for google to get memo and link the new one above the old.
Nowadays I assume it’s pretty much impossible to reverse the flow unless if your game is huge and highly sought after.
Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).
I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.
Buying a steam deck significantly increased by gaming time. The ability to immediately suspend and resume my gameplay, and not have to go over to my desktop helped a lot. I’ve played more this past year than I have in the last 3 years combined.
Sure the game’s setting predates the Nazis and there are none to kill in the game. However, there is an entire inexhaustible faction of Confederates to murder. But even better than that, the game gives you several opportunities to stumble on a Klan meeting.
These encounters are special because they’re a sandbox for creative butchery and guiltless massacre. Even the game’s honor system looks the other way while you toss a gallon of liquor onto the burning cross, dousing the Grand Dragon and all his Cyclopses, sending them in a screeching panic, fully engulfed, off a nearby cliff just like that dude in Lord of the Rings.
Evey time I run into the RDR2 version of the KKK (Lemoyne Raiders?) I get so giddy and happy that I get the opportunity to find a new, creative, fun way to kill them all.
Probably favorite is to hogtie the ones I can keep alive, toss all the live and dead ones into a single pile, then light it on fire
Lemoyne Raiders aren’t the Klan. There’s actual klansmen too. You have to find them at night in the woods near Lemoyne, but they’re never associated with the raiders.
I could have sworn I got some note off one of the hooded corpses that identified them as Raiders, and nothing actually using the actual KKK name, though it’s so obvious from the hoods and the cross that that’s exactly who they’re intended to be
SpoilerI love the part when you come across that old man who’s house etc has been repossessed and he wants you to go and retrieve some belongings. I initially I felt sorry for him so of course I went and did it, and then you find out he was a slave trader. I completed the quest anyway and liked the cut scene where Arthur just burns everything. Then before I rode away I shot him in the head and laughed when I saw it made my honour go up
I can’t speak for other people, I don’t even play solitaire. Realistically, I imagine most people get new PCs with newer Windows versions and play whatever solitaire is on there.
This isn’t really new. Solitaire has had ads for over a decade now since Windows 8, and there is a monthly premium subscription to remove them. As I understand it they also don’t show during offline play, but might be wrong about that.
If it makes you feel better/worse, the subscription is shared across multiple games. I was playing a bunch of Microsoft Jigsaw at one point (don’t ask), and while you could play as much as you’d like for free, the fact that they squeezed ads into it to extort you (or more likely, clueless older people) really cheapened the whole thing.
They had a lot of pretty photos which were probably not free, but come on, this is Microsoft, they have the money. I think this should’ve been bundled with Windows for free. I truly think a lot of people might even look back on it fondly the way they do with a lot of the older bundled-in games. We will take for granted how much the default option with any sort of technology around us has an impact on us as kids. Maybe not everyone, but not everyone loved pinball or inkball.
Actual textbook enshittification: what was once a space for a nice default thing to fall back on if you were bored and had their operating system has now become an “opportunity” to “generate more business.” Very sad. Computers are impossibly wonderful machines, everyone who has access to one should be able to enjoy a few basic things, packed in, for free - with no strings attached (looking at you candy crush).
I’m sure there’s a nice free or paid jigsaw game made with love out there that could satisfy that itch I felt that one week in 2020. Hm.
Edit: I have now redownloaded Microsoft Jigsaw and might just expand this comment into a full post/rant about the state of modern consumer software through the lens of Microsoft’s current casual games suite
There are daily challenges and things like that which is what I would refer to as online play. Not that crazy imho of you’ve put thousands of hours into vanilla solitaire that you may welcome something to spice it up.
I can’t see any news that you can ‘pay to remove ads’ but lots of “how do i remove ads in solitaire” with settings instructions or registry edits so i think op is only half right
I did. I’m not going to go buy it for this though. They literally use poker terms, poker imagery, and real poker hands. Saying it’s just because there’s cards involved is disingenuous.
You could use the same for majong or pachinko like games like Peggle. The issue is the actual gambling, not just the game elements or risk, reward, and points going up. Loot boxes are 10× worse.
That guy legitimately made his hobby into his job.
There’s 0 reasons for him to still keep updating the game with as much content as he’s doing except for his own satisfaction. Truly the best developer a game can have
Man the negativity. I’m so sick of gamers negativity. It’s not even a new game, it’s a remaster. you knew what the product was going to be. It’s oblivion. We all knew it was oblivion. If you don’t like oblivion, why did you buy it?!
I swear to God if they changed it too much I’d be commenting here on a post about how they had no respect for the original. Then we wonder why “they never listen to gamers”. Because we bitch and moan about everything.
Just musing on the fact that Bethesda doesn’t care about making games and instead just cashes in on nostalgia. I also think their finance bros realized their upcoming big IP drop is going to be an objective POS and wanted to prime people’s expectations by re-releasing a 20 year old game with some lipstick on it.
It would be neat if they hired some people who actually had innovative ideas about gameplay, visuals and stories to maybe make a neat new game within an existing or new IP, but they haven’t done that in literal decades so I think its pretty reasonable to not be incredibly excited about anything they are putting out or planning to put out in the future.
As someone with no kids and a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy video games, I wonder how much of this vitriol comes from bitter millennials who are mad at the world because they don’t have time to play games anymore.
As a long time Bethesda game fan I agree with you on almost everything you’ve said about Bethesda… But the remaster is a terrible example of your points.
The remaster does exactly what it says on the tin and they’ve been very upfront about how it was made and why it was made in the launch video.
It’s hard to criticise them for cashing in on nostalgia when they’ve shown time and time again with Skyrim re-releases that do a fraction of what the Oblivion remaster does still sell like hot cakes.
Nostalgia is at the core of their business model. That’s why they march Skyrim’s corpse out every two years like clockwork; that’s why they picked Fallout for a new franchise after ES; that’s, frankly, likely why Starfield sucks so much.
It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.
The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.
It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.
More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.
With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.
Emm, no. If you build something from the ground up it’s called remake.(Demon Souls, the Resident Evil series) Remastered is taking the old game and put on a fresh paint of coat and give it some modern QOL so it’s much more accessible today.
Skyblivion is closer to remake than remaster.
Also i feels like you misunderstand why people like this game.
If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.
A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.
A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.
I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.
Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.
They literally had a hour long stream explaining what they did, and then you could have watched any of the thousands of twitch streams showing it. There was zero reason that you should have bought this if you thought this. I knew exactly what I was buying, seems like pretty much everyone did.
You are describing a remake. A remaster is a fresh coat of paint. Todd Howard said verbatim “This is not a remake” and then talked about his reasons why. You’re going on like they lied to you when they literally said everything you just complained about, and then you still bought it.
And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison
Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.
It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
I can buy a new toaster from the shop, why can’t I buy a woman too? Does this mean Gamers are pro sex-work? Or pro indentured servitude for women more likely…
my inner engineer wants to challenge this: I know there’s a dildo company that does tours, and at least copies penises and vulvae of customers as a souveneir, im sure there are things that copy at least he surface of the vaginal canal if you want to be completionist. maybe with the right kind of 3d printer it could be done? not sure, haven’t really worked with nylon materials.
Nylon? I would think this would be a ‘print the moulds we use to pour in silicone’ situation, if we’re going for usability. formlabs.com/blog/casting-silicone-guide/ On an engineering note I’m also sure I’ve seen this exact thing before, but I wonder what would improve it. Self-heating? DIY solution could be a hidden pocket for reusable handwarmers lol
Gamers tend to think of things as quests. A box to check off. A completionist. Getting married and having kids is part of life’s quests for many people. It’s not seen as collaboration in many ways.
How does romance work in most video games? Select the correct dialogue options, memorize the correct answer to questions, give them the same gift every day?
The other main way a lot of young men “interact” with women is through porn, which is always made with a mind to what a woman would enjoy during sex…/s
because you think of “I never get laid” as a normal human need to connect with another person, which is what it is but they’re too deep in misogyny to realize it. instead to them getting laid is a quest to complete and it involves a quest item known as a woman, not a character. so I never get laid has less of an undertone of “why can’t I connect with a woman” and more of “when will we get our government mandated sex slaves”
I'm in my 40s and I've been playing counterstrike since I was in my 20s. I play other games briefly but anytime i'm bored I still hop on CS. It's a habit like checking your locks 3 times or taking your clothes off to poop
They’re just referring to normal habits we all do like checking your oven for the family of mice you let live there before leaving for work or brushing your teeth one tooth at a time while watching the Flintstones in a language you don’t understand. We all do it.
Yea like moving all the food on the top shelf of your fridge to the bottom and moving everything up shelf by shelf every morning or making sure you vacuum your walls properly. Standard stuff.
I don’t know about every time, but I’ve had an intestinal blockage. Everything came off. I was sweating and crying for what felt like hours. Pooping was the best feeling I’ve ever had at that moment.
While I don’t fully disrobe, the freedom of pulling one leg out of my pants is amazing. You can get a nice spread going for those times you need to bear down a bit.
The older I get, the less I want to learn new competitive games because I just don’t have time anymore. It’s just nice to go back to something familiar every now and then.
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