You are correct, it’s been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed
A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.
I don’t know, the first one was cobbled up together from early access by programmers at a marketing firm and while janky (part of the charm some would say), it was quite an achievement.
The approach which should have delivered better results was wrecked with takeovers and company drama then dumped to the public in a bad state.
It’s not much of a delay. It was supposed to come out in 2 months, but delayed another 2 months. Doesn’t seem like much time to get any real work done.
They also cancelled their premier at the Tokyo game show days before schedule. I have to wonder if they’re worried about the backlash that a lot of games are getting lately (Dustborn, Concord, etc) and just trying to push the game a little bit further out to avoid controversy?
I’m the kind of person who has no issues with moving on from a game with only 20% of the achievements/trophies unlocked after beating the final boss. If it’s not fun, it’s not fun.
I think the only two games I set out to 100% were probably Super Mario World, or Donkey Kong Country 2.
Ah dk3, the one I’ve NEVER beat. I always set out to do it and grow bored first. I think by the time I started playing that really good games existed like halo and the like.
Superliminal was cool, but I just didn’t enjoy it. It was fun for a bit, but I feel like the mechanic overstayed it’s welcome for how simple it is. There’s not very many unique ways to use it. That’s probably why Valve abandoned the idea too.
Still, it’s interesting and worth a shot. Plenty of people love it.
I feel portal could be replayed if you focused too hard on the puzzles the first time through, there were quite a few secrets worth exploring in that world, though none too deep unfortunately
I feel like portal 2 can get by on a playthrough every so many years based on the writing/VA making it enjoyable even if you half remember the puzzles.
I was going to write anti chamber, because I never want to play it again, but %'s 30-90 of the way through the game I was itching to start over. It had me so hooked, but then the ending just took the wind out of the sails so hard. Heck maybe 10-98% of the game had me itching to replay it.
Awesome game. I was high on cannabis when I played it, and managed to beat it in one sitting about 10 years ago. I want to play it while high on shrooms, that would be even crazier.
Soul like everything, but that's just me being too clumsy for any challenge. I do hope some people could stop complaining other games being too easy tho. Not every game needs to be Soul likes.
Also this, but because it’s got the quality of an Indie game. Before people jump down my throat, compare the animations, sound effects, graphical fidelity, and voice acting to any other AAA game. Even the combat, which people usually extoll as the best thing about them, is just dodge->attack over and over again. Don’t even get me started on the pathetic “storytelling” in those games.
You can be sure that even the Epic version will still require the Ubisoft launcher. That is how all of my Steam purchased Ubisoft games are with the exception of the first Assassin's Creed which predated the Ubisoft launcher. All of the others require it regardless of how I bought it.
I'm going to wait for at least two or more years after release for the new Prince of Persia. My days of paying full price for Ubisoft's games are over and recent statements from the CEO make me reluctant to ever buy their games again.
For anyone left behind, Minetest is a community-developed alternative.
It’s more of a game engine/launcher + highly moddable, so the base game is rather minimalistic, but you can simply install more extensive games. For example, for a very Minecraft-like experience, MineClone2 is your best bet.
Minecraft. Back when I started playing, it wouldn’t even tell you what recipes existed, yet gave you a 2x2/3x3 grid with hundreds of types of items/blocks to figure it out yourself.
Without external resources I would probably never have figured out what the 2x2 empty grid in my inventory was meant to be! I watched so many videos and read numerous wiki articles it could have been a college class.
The early builds had few enough things you could make that it wasn’t really that hard to intuitively figure out but in it’s current state it would be near impossible to figure out how to make some things without recipes to guide you.
like early alpha builds I think the only thing that would have tripped you up hard would be trying to make dynamite firestarter, or shears even then you could experiment for a while and figure it out.
I think the issue was it wasn’t clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn’t very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn’t much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.
Then there’s redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.
Also, being pedantic, but shears weren’t added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn’t much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.
Oh yeah, I forgot, it’s been a decade you used to literally just punch sheep and I vaguely recall when that update dropped. I recall eventually just looking stuff up, but a lot of it I figured out on my own first. Redstone is absolutely something that really needs an in game guide that the game completely lacks, nothing about it is intuitive at all, even if you know how digital logic works it behaves a little strangely.
I always played the game to build cool forts and castles so wool was definitely useful to me to make them look good.
zombies dropped feathers because the game didn’t have chickens until sometime after 2012 (0.3?) and you needed them for arrows alphas are just like that. The Rust alpha was similarly nonsensical.
I always thought part of the appeal was just discovering the world and how it works, but it’s so established at this point it’s better to just have a guide in game.
I assure you fellow survival fan, you not being able to carry materials through portals will absolutely improve the game and not just pad it out significantly!
And on top of that, not make sailing a skill, the map reveal range hilariously short even in wide open oceans, not having much to do other than sometimes stopping to fish or collect chitin, and really only one threat in the ocean for 95% of the game who stops being a real threat once you’re beyond wood/flint arrows (the actual threat being your fellow players shooting the boat’s wonky collision)
I fully expect them to go back and rework sailing but right now its not a great time.
I agree, but I’m also torn there. The first boat trip back with a full cargo of previous new resources definitely felt more awesome than just stepping through a portal. By the fifth time the novelty has worn off though and I would like to teleport it please. Maybe something like the first 50 ingots need to be produced at the home base for your character to get “magically attuned” to the metal ?
They introduce a tier 2 portal in the Ashlands that let’s you teleport metal.
IMO, a little too late (in terms of the game’s biome progression), but still useful because sailing to and from the Ashlands in a bloated barge is a real bad time.
I worded that poorly, I meant too late in progression of the game’s biomes*.
By the time you’re in the Ashlands, you’ve likely moved hundreds or thousands of tin/copper/iron/silver/black metal. It feels like tier 2 portals should have been unlocked around the time you get an artisan table since the game makes you double back for more iron to make the padded set and then once again for mistland weapons - Which just feels tedious since roaming the swamps with plains tier gear makes the enemies laughable.
(I know you can mine the ancient giants armor for scrap iron too but I seem to get like 95% copper 5% iron scrap.)
There are a few different mods that allow you to gate material teleporting in various ways. Closest to what you’re suggesting would probably be AdvancedPortals which adds tiered portals created with higher-tier materials. I just use TeleportEverything because I don’t think the restriction is fun or presents an interesting challenge.
Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.
It's possible I'm just interpreting the quote wrong. I figured they were making the distinction between "console" and "entry level PC" as a way to say "The price isn't set yet, but don't expect this to be $400-500"
Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.
It’s not particularly great hardware. It’s fine, but not great. The most obvious thing is 8GB VRAM, which is bare minimum for modern gaming really. Add in that they’re buying in bulk, that price seems reasonable.
I know they don’t have the same supply chain at all but Apple sells an entry Mac Mini for $600. That makes me feel like a similarly priced Steam Machine is possible.
Apple mini is a hard comparison to make because the cheapest mini is a loss leader. Add a bit of extra ram or extra storage, which you have to do since the base model is very limited and the only way to get it is through Apple because everything is soldered together, then it is suddenly more than a $1k PC. They make the profits up with those upgrades which are practically mandatory and grossly overpriced.
The base M4 model is 16GB ram and 256 GB of storare and it costs $600, “cheapest minipc ever with such performance”.
The 512GB storage model costs $800.
May I point out that 256GB of ssd storage does not cost $200.
The 24 GB model costs exactly $1000.
No matter how much ram prices are ramping up right now, 8GB of sodimm ram does not cost $200…yet.
Anything else above those specs throws the Mac mini into $1k+ territory. It can go all the way up to $2600.
Now, Apple rarely publishes manufacturing numbers to the public. But historically this has always been their strategy. A base product that seems too good to be true (because it is) that leaves buyers wanting a bit more. For which they get skinned alive, price wise. Of course, I can’t be 100% certain that the base Mac mini is sold at a loss. But evidence suggests the $600 mark is priced exactly to act as a loss leader.
You didn’t present one piece of evidence that $600 is a losing price point for the base model (and you even stated that explicitly). All you’ve done is shown that Apple is known for their outrageous markups; something we all can see with our own eyes.
Given they’re greedy enough to markup storage and ram so much; I’m willing to bet they won’t bother with techniques like “loss leaders”. I bet the margins are just extremely tight but that profit is above zero.
That’s just pointing out upgrades carry a large price, not that the base model is at a loss.
Which is a super common strategy in pre built, especially in systems that can’t in theory take third party upgrades. Commonly a mobile platform will charge a hundred dollar premium for like 20 dollars worth of UFS storage. At least at some points PC vendors have done DIMM SPD lockouts to force customers to first party so they can charge a significant multiple of market rate for their parts.
I doubt anything in Apple’s lineup is sold at a loss. They might tolerate slimmer margins on entry, but I just don’t think they go negative.
I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.
Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.
Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.
It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.
I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”
You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.
The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.
Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.
High end would be the high end of the market components, right? So RTX 5090 ($2k+) or RX 9070 ($700+). High end CPU would be Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $400. Add a motherboard and copious RAM and you’re looking at $2k+ for all AMD, $3-5k for Nvidia.
Mid tier would be somewhere in the middle, so cut those numbers in half ($1-1.5k). Low end is what you can get away with, so cut the mod tier in half again, though going below $700 would be hard for anything but the most casual of games.
Personally I don’t think I would say that most people would consider a $1,000 PC to be entry level. To me entry level means something that a kid could save up their pocket money for in a reasonable amount of time maybe with a paper route to supplement. I’d say entry level ends at about $700 just to throw a number out there. For $1,000 you could get a PS5 and a PSVR2
But it’s also a handheld console so that doesn’t really track.
An entry level gaming PC doesn’t have to have a battery and it doesn’t have to have a screen which are big expenses. You can’t just take the price of the steam deck and multiply it because so much time has passed between the releases of the two products and they’re not equivalent anyway. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
I like GoG but… GoG very much has a history of “performative” bullshit.
Some of us still remember The French Monk Incident where they pretended the site was shutting down and let everyone hammer the download servers so they would panic and “learn” why “DRM Free” games were better. The backlash was so bad that it actually led to the addition of a new quest (that totally wasn’t ready to go…) in The Witcher 2 that, if you won a game of dice poker (Gwent before we had Gwent) you would get a Witcher 1 code at GoG.
Also… their definition of “DRM Free” is what us olds would have called “that Stardock GOO shit”
They’ve also had a LOT of “we are going to lose the rights to sell this game so buy it now” FOMO sales. I want to say the Atari games have been through at least four?
And so forth throughout the years. It was more or less guaranteed GoG would do a smut games sale once Steam delisted games. The freebies is a surprise but stuff like House Party is a massive DLC sink and the Postals get given away five with every soda.
So e’rybody saying “Now is the time to let GoG know they were being inconsistent and they will fix everything”: Hey, I got a really great deal on this bridge. And I’ll give you a discount if you pay in whatever “untraceable” crypto kids like this week. Err, but through this site that just gives me fiat currency. No reason.
There is only one magazine video game advertisement I really remember from seeing in the wild in an actual magazine, and that was the Quake 3 Arena one of a computer in a crusty-as-fuck basement bathroom in front of a toilet with just a super dirty setup.
Wow this is incredible, thanks for sharing. I find it funny that Nintendo fostered their famiy friendly appeal seemingly right after the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Those particular ads are saucy.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
bin.pol.social
Ważne