Me in 2004: Yeah I’ll never play Half-Life 2 because I hate that it comes with a mandatory useless piece of software. « Steam », what the hell is that? Full of DRMs, ugly, bugged to the core, eating up my precious RAM.
There are valid concerns but there are benefits to using one game manager. There’s nothing good about having to install a bunch of them because every other game is in a different store.
It still would be best if games came DRM-free and all of them were compatible with whatever game manager someone chooses, but a lot of them aren’t, especially from big publishers.
I’m pretty pragmatic. While I appreciate what Valve has done for PC gaming, I like the idea of them having some legit competition in the space. So when the Epic store started, I bought a bunch of games there to give it a shot. Outer Worlds, Control… And of course I grabbed up a bunch of free games, too!
…and then, over time, I’ve repurchased all of the games I liked on steam anyway.
Edit: for the downvoters - as OP, I officially congratulate Kecessa on their sick burn. It made me lol. So… If you were feeling conflicted here, go with the upvote.
Epic is not a competition to Valve. They are long ways from that position. If Steam ever was afraid of competitor it was from Windows Marker Place or whatever the name of built-in windows crap is.
Personally my main gripe is their aggressive strategies to force people into their garbage-tier launcher. Compared to Steam it’s just miles behind, and it’s yet another app to run on your PC. All my friends are also on Steam, and Steam had Linux support. However, if all you want to do is launch singleplayer games, you don’t mind the Epic launcher, and you get a good deal, then do whatever you want to.
I have never used a launcher before (for obvious reasons as mentioned in my post), so I found the idea of a separate launcher dumb in the first place. I have used it in recent times thanks to Epic’s free games. Finished two of the Tomb Raider trilogy.
Like, I’m fine with a store, but I gotta open the launcher to launch the game? On Windows, with the Tile based Start Menu, I kind of thought it was a terrible idea NGL. I gotta open, wait for it to load, open the library, then click to run, THEN it’ll open…
Plus, if I want to track progress, it’s a hassle because I can’t track without the damn launcher…
I fundamentally have no issue with the Epic Games launcher. Steam needs competition to keep it in check. Without alternatives, Steam can and will strangle Dev profits, which is a problem. But Epic is a mediocre service, another app to be running, and actively going out of their way to prevent games from being on the platform of the consumers choice, which I am not a fan of.
Related note: does Epic have any DRM free games? Even Steam has a fair portion of games that are DRM free and work perfectly well from a flash drive on a computer that doesn’t have Steam installed. As far as I am aware, Epic does not.
There’s just a series of minor ways in which epic is worse, and I don’t like having front-end clients for my games as is, so a second, competing alternative going out of its way to push me into using it rubs me the wrong way.
You don’t need all store fronts running at once on your pc though. Just boot up what you need for the game you want and it’s just six and two threes, whether it’s steam or epic, or any other launcher.
The issue is that I miss features when using Epic. Additionally, games from Epic are not visible in my steam library which leads to me forgetting that they even exist. And also nobody uses it, so there’s no community feeling like I have with all my Steam friends.
I don’t mind it for free games though. If they give me a game for free, they deserve me using their launcher for that game haha.
Honestly, most “professional” game reviews are made by average joe gamers who happen to have a platform to broadcast their thoughts. Most of these writers are not expert players nor are they always well versed in the genre of the game they’re reviewing.
I never understand why people put so much stock into them when their opinions are no more valid than any random person on the internet.
Proton VPN is probably one of the best VPNs out there. Has open source clients, is based in Switzerland so under their strong jurisdiction for privacy and data protection, doesn’t keep logs or sell data, has good speeds, includes useful features, etc. I’d definitely recommend it, as well as Proton’s other products.
Ahhh ok. I’m using a controller at the moment for accessibility reasons, but I’ll definitely look into doing that when I can again! Maybe it’ll show if I just idle a couple seconds over the selection
Right on 🤙🏻 I figured there had to be with how accessible the controller options truly are - I haven’t been able to check since my initial response. I should get to relatively soon though! Option on the controller is: select --> enable help tools
Refunded, was expecting an Obsidian interactive world got served a dead open world with static NPCs, static everything. The only saving grace is combat but it’s not nearly deep enough to carry the game. I’ll get it again when it’s at 10-15€ which is the price I’m comfortable playing for this level of competence. Was back to Kingdom come in a flash.
kinda sounds like The Outer Worlds, in a way. Which is kinda the feel I got from some youtube videos I watched about the game. Got to wonder how on earth the current 70€ pricetag is in any way justified.
Oh well, wishlistforgotten, maybe some sale notification at some point comes a long
I thought it was okay, though not without it’s issues. The itemization (everything being “standard -> better -> betterer -> best”) and the size of the playable areas were kinda weak.
IIRC Finished the main game twice, couldn’t be arsed with the dlc though.
Well, it’s a gametype/genre I tend to enjoy greatly - so I can probably overlook quite a bit of jank/issues/whatevs and still get some enjoyment out of it. First round was the “blind go”, second round I wanted to see what can be done differently and what kinds of different outcomes there are. IIRC not much changes when doing stuff differently. Admittedly the second round around was bit of a slog - I think I played it through, but not 100% of it.
To me the “okay” means more of a “more fun than not”. The game isn’t great by any means, but it’s not also off-putting to play, but I don’t feel like I need to re-install the game ever again. Also, the game isn’t terribly long either.
The price tag exists solely to drive people to subscribe for Game Pass. With the kind of content the game offering, it’s a perfectly good 40 dollar game, not a 70 dollar one. A good spin-off to the PoE franchise while still moving the world forward.
I think using LLMs to provide the dialog for NPCs in a RPG is a use case that’s just begging to happen. Ie townsfolk that don’t just give the same few replies every time, and who react to things you’ve done in the past beyond just whatever prewritten options the developer thought of.
That is…actually far better than I thought it would be. It’s clearly not ready yet, but I could see the potential.
The AI model is too happy to serve the whims of the player, but if there was a better model that could actually be hooked in to me hanics like personality scores or reputation, I could see that as an interesting gameplay system. It also needs more checks on what they are and aren’t supposed to know (e.g. why would a Skyrim NPC associate the name Batman with heroism, or why would they know who Gandalf is?).
A (digital) setup like Westworld is probably in the cards someday. Hopefully with more checks in place to keep the AI from rising up though!
Thanks for sharing, this set me off down the rabbit hole, and it seems this is now a popular and viable skyrim mod for organic dialogue with NPCs: www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/…/98631
If the feature actually worked as intended I could see myself ignoring the rest of the game and just chatting with the townsfolk.
In reality, I imagine the NPC would totally forget what we were talking about after a certain amount of messages pass. Limited context windows and all that jazz.
A challenge game developers have talked about with integrating LLMs is keeping the dialogue matched to the game world, e.g. you don’t want a Skyrim NPC mentioning a cell phone.
This is what he sees while tripping on acid. In reality he was naked and is now wrapped in newspaper and has a rusty colander on his head. He is actually collecting mushrooms with a plastic knife, though.
Did not expect that a game that’s basically about going from A to B through walking could be that lengthy, having great scenery and a weird, vague but good story.
I’m really excited for its sequel, just hoping it will also be available for PC on release.
Is that correct? Kojima bought full rights to the IP couple of months ago and released Death Stranding on everything immediately. Seems like it’ll be timed exclusive at most.
They’ve only announced it to be getting released on PS5 in 2025. That’s almost all the information there is about the game rn. I would take it to mean timed-exclusive, but that’s still not releasing on all platforms at once.
I wasn’t surprised by the length of the base game, or even by the presence of the post game, but by how much time the game spent ending. You beat the villain, that should be it, right? Lol no, you have to traverse the whole game world without vehicles and no network support. That’s it, right? Lol no, here’s a giant boss monster. That’s it, right? Lol no, here’s a shitload of cutscenes. Then the credits, then cut to black. That’s it, right? Lol no, more cutscenes, then one last delivery… and one last burst of cutscenes, some of which should have come earlier. That’s it, right? Lol almost, you have to watch the credits again, and then one blessedly short cutscene before the postgame, and then you can finally go to the main menu and quit.
Thanks for contributing in unneccessary witch hunting. You’ve shown that Lemmy can be just as petulant and inhospitable as reddit. Nothing I have ever written is AI generated, such a weird criticism and hilarious to lob that at someone considering that even million dollar tech companies who have made “ai detectors” have failed spectacularly with false positives. But you dislike what I say so you’re 100% correct, right? yea that makes sense dude sure.
It’s amusing to me how you felt the need to write this incredibly long “shame on you” rant, like you were really that bothered by some words you saw that you had to write up a long witch hunt and try to harass me.
If you feel like an user may be a bot, please report it to a mod so we can put said user under observation in order to access its behavior.
Your comment seem well documented, but that’s something that should be sent to the mods via PM, not posted on the open.
If you were wrong, and he was legit, you’d have triggered an harassment campaign against him by encouraging others to just conclude he must be a bot because someone said so with a lengthy comment they don’t have the time to fully check.
Edit: clarifying why this shouldn’t be done that way, as my previous take was kinda harsh (I was a bit tired)
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