Absolutely what everyone else says. Keep signing. There’s a good chance this petition could reach the most signatures ever for a EU Citizens Initiative. I believe the current record is 1.7mil.
As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.
There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.
It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.
Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.
Generally, yes. But Epic is not competitive in any way.
Their idea of being competitive is not to deliver an amazing product, it is to buy exclusivity for games so they can’t be sold on other platforms, which benefits no one except themselves.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.
Unless it’s infrastructure or something with a natural monopoly.
The main competition with steam is buying physical copies of things. If we want to support retailers selling physical copies of games and bricks and mortar shops, that’s a good thing.
Alas, I think the games industry is chosing to abandon them. And Steam has the ability to add games purchased outside of Steam to it for convenience. Unlike Epic it puts the user close to the top of priorities.
When I saw the post’s title I was hoping for a good, perhaps even balanced, critique of the remake’s choices, or the underlying engine’s shortcomings, or perhaps even the original designs.
Calcium Contract is a boomer shooter with a pretty unique rewind feature. Humorous with old school feels, but for a modern time. It’s a one man project.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
There may be more people watching Deadlock than there are watching and playing Concord today based on available data and reasonable extrapolation. Valve continues to market in a unique way that works.
Concord is dead on arrival. Kind of a shame, the game looked a bit interesting but being $40 and having very generic art this was bound to happen. Deadlock is in a whole other league.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
Honestly, paying for a (primarily) multiplayer game isn’t a problem for me. I actually might prefer it when you look at Overwatch vs Overwatch 2. But I wasn’t about to sign up for a playstation account to play my Steam game.
I think that’s what makes it such a good point of comparison though. It’s titled differently and we were promised it would be different, but all that really happened was they changed their monetization tactics. And maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I remember liking Overwatch when it came out, but now I have almost zero interest in playing Overwatch 2, even though I’ve gone back to it a few times just to give it a try.
Yep. Gog is probably where we should all be getting our games tbf. Being mad that a game is available on one drm store instead of another drm store is kind of silly. In either case we’re only buying the license and not actually owning anything.
The director should have reasons for the difficulty of the game. Celeste is a Perfect example. It’s hard but it lets you learn and allows you to try again easily even if what you are doing is hard. Hard games that punish you and make you walk for 20-30 mins just so you can learn a few new moves the boss does can be incredibly frustrating. Many people who play these games eventually look at videos online to help after multiple tries because just “getting there” is extremely time consuming. A lot of games have normalized looking things up and that is disappointing as someone who would rather figure it out on my own. But wasting 30 mins to be killed in 2-3 hits from multiple stage bosses is not enjoyable IMHO.
One can think of it just like about a fastfood joint. Two lines of coordinates: food and service, or user experience and mechanics. We do play clunky old games for their plot or shallow timekillers for their gameplay. Striking the right balance that is fitting your core audience is the goal. There, Kodjima thinks about better service, toning down mechanics so that everyone can eat their burger, while Miyadzaki serves artisan sets knowing their inaccessibility is a part of the deal for their niche audience.
I love ULTRAKILL for many reasons, but this is one of them. I would never have completed the Prime Sanctums if I had to wait longer than 1 frame to reset to the checkpoint.
This is the entire problem with modern gaming meta though. There basically is an assumption that people will look up the walkthrough, so you need to scale difficulty with that in mind.
I am like you, and this is a big part of why I’ve almost entirely stopped gaming. Either the game is too hard, or it has like 20 minutes of cir scenes per hour, or it requires an hour of supply grinding any time you pick it back up.
Like cyberpunk? The borderland series? Elder scrolls series? Expedition 33? Assassin’s Creed series? Tons more hyper popular games I’m not aware of because I play mostly arpgs too.
There’s plenty games that try to offer easier playthroughs, unless you wish for a game without easy mode but an easier baseline experience, in which case… Pokémon? The TLoZ games from Wii onwards? Idk, there’s plenty and plenty more I don’t know of.
I found expedition 33 to be difficult even in the story telling mode. It suggests a focus on the story, but you absolutely have to scale your characters correctly, learn boss fights patterns etc. I don’t like the fight gameplay (not my cup of tea), so I tried to avoid them, but I couldn’t progress past a certain point. Love the story and universe, but wish they’d made an even easier mode because I don’t want to spend time learning all the mechanics and combos etc.
Weird, I beat everything but the last optional superboss (Simon) in hard (the difficulty before max) and it’s not like I learnt character combos much. Yeah I did learn enemy movesets, sorta, but I always dodged, fuck the parry. Enemies did hit my characters a lot and almost half the turns were spent reviving them, but the revives recover post fight so it’s whatever.
I did reach a point where Maelle and Verso were so strong that enemies hardly got a turn though.
I put exactly 0 thought to the characters builds, so I know it’s my fault and I suspect it’s not that hard. But I literally have no interest in the combat system, so of course the game is not entirely made for me. However, this story mode shows that some devs don’t consider difficulty as a pre-requisite to enjoy their art.
Maybe there’s a mod that autowins the battles for you if that’s something you would enjoy? If all you want from the game is the story and the art but go along at your own pace, so not game play videos, god mode cheats might give you what you want. I’m being 100% serious.
Don’t let the word cheat be a distraction, games are for enjoyment and if the default experience is not enjoyable for you tweaking is 100% fair in offline games tbh. My point was that I like there to be an actual default unified experience, but everyone is free to enjoy how they like. I’m one of the cheesiest players of offline games of all time lol.
Yeah no worries I dont have any issue with cheating in single player games.
I used loads of trainers in the past to expend the fun in a game after beating it. It’s just rarer the times I need to pull out one to finish it
Because the game is prettier/smoother running on my computer native res at 100fps, than watching compressed videos on YouTube.
Otherwise yeah I would have watched a play through instead.
Also going at your own pace and being free to explore the environment is more pleasant than watching someone do it for you
Something a lot of people forget is that looking stuff up is not something normalised recently, older games tended to have a freaking manual that explained most bosses and areas, it even gave hints!
I get that you would prefer that, lucky there’s plenty games for both of us.
Fair point. I always associated those with the fact video games were relatively newer media at the time but you are correct. Some times they would give you maps and instructions.
Respectfully disagree with your stance (which is fine, as fushuan said, there’s games enough for all of us.) When I was younger and played more games, I would frequently look up how to get through them on GameFAQ. The joy wasn’t in figuring out puzzles, it was in getting to see the story unfolding.
You can download an stl for the battery cover. I modified it to allow the backpack controller to attach to/detach from the main controller. The original is in a box somewhere safe and well.
It’s an extra 12 button Bluetooth controller using an esp32 dev board. So your games need to allow you to use multiple controllers. You could also program it to send keyboard keys but I haven’t tried it.
I actually made it because I got banned because I couldn’t use my lights in euro truck simulator 2 multiplayer mod. I’m not sure I’d want to use it in any competitive games as it’d likely break off if I got mad.
I think it was only like 24 hours. It’s all automated though. So you get a thirty second countdown mashing buttons to try and work out how to get your headlights on if you spawn at night.
I think they were worried about their branding being associated with violence. In the 90s, there was a ton of anti-video game propaganda branding it as violent garbage that was corrupting our children.
Ironically, video games are very good at conditioning human responses to iconography. So despite the Red Cross’ hostility, video games still succeeded in conditioning a lot of people to instantly associate plus signs (any color) with health.
The red cross, red crescent and red crystal emblems provide protection for military medical services and relief workers in armed conflicts.
Under no circumstance is it acceptable to create a situation where something could be mistakenly identified as being associated with the Red Cross. If it appears in the game it might appear on a publicly visible computer screen, poster, TV, etc and thats not acceptable.
It is, genuinely, in the Geneva Conventions that nobody should use the red cross except for to designate medical staff and establishments that are protected under the conventions. The idea is to make sure that there is absolutely never any doubt that that symbol means anything else in order to minimise the risk to those people
Yeah they have a legitimate case for defending the use of the symbol so aggressively and the best way to avoid is to use the green and white variant that is used on pretty much every first-aid kit sold.
My biggest gripe with this is games that present a historical setting, such as World War 2 games. The Red Cross was all over the place during WW2. Saying game developers cannot ever use it under any context means that a game that wants to present historical accuracy would not be able to.
The way it could work is that they could just put a message before starting the game that the red cross is only there to present a historical setting, but otherwise is a symbol of Red Cross movement. And there could be a setting to switch to green crosses, if you want to stream, etc.
To add, the first time I heard about it was through the video game stuff. So if anything, I think we should view them going after game devs as a form of spreading awareness. When it hits headlines it makes it clear just how important it is to not use it in other contexts.
i look at this and nod. then i look at sponsored fortnite skins with the red cross and realize they dont give a fuck about that actually, theyre just greedy.
I haven't played Fortnite so I might be missing something, but glancing at screenshots and promotional stuff it looks like they're consistently using white on red instead of red on white
Not sure about everyone else but to me using an insanely popular game to fund global non-profit organisation is kinda a good way to raise money. It’s really a weird hill to die on.
The red cross sign has a very specific meaning and protection under international law. They don't want the symbol to be used outside of the agreed uses because they don't want that meaning, and consequently the protection it affords, to get muddled.
They also don't like when a red cross is used on a random first aid kit in the real world.
Everyone is betting Tonga will not get itself into a war.
But if it hypothetically happened, I assume they would be pressured to use an alternative war flag by the international community.
On a more serious note, applying international laws against sovereign states is always more complicated than to enforce them against individuals and organizations operating inside of signatory states.
BG3 is great and all but there are other games with at least equal voice acting quality. For all its qualities I never felt like “wow, I’ve never seen voice acting like this in a game!” when I played BG3. It’s really good and really consistent but nothing earth shattering.
I know I bring up Disco Elysium a lot, but that is one game where I got repeatedly shocked at the quality and diversity of the voice acting. With the exception of one single character I think it’s acted to absolute perfection.
I also didn’t really feel the same about Alan Wake 2 like, at all. I thought it had superb acting (both voice and full video segments) and probably hold the quality of its acting above BG3 personally. Alan Wake 1 less so.
mass effect and the first few dragon age games had great acting, Kingdom come has great acting, most of the Sony exclusives have great acting, it’s out there. It’s just rare.
I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.
The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.
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