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
Can you find this person whom wandered off into the ashlands? They went east-ish.
I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit in the Construction Kit to find out where in Vivec’s name I had to go this time. Usually it turned out I just barely missed the person or location I had to go before starting an hourlong search.
That’s what I like about the game. The NPCs tell you where to go to the best of their ability, and you follow to the best of yours. I like it a hell of a lot more than quest markers.
There is at least one occasion where NPCs just straight up lie to you in quest directions though. I can’t think of it off the top of my head but I remember it existing because I complained about it on a forum.
On one hand - great worldbuilding! “Local dumbass gives you bad directions” is a funny and memorable point on top of what might otherwise be a forgettable side quest. On the other hand, I spent the better part of four hours looking for whatever egg mine or ancestral tomb or whatever it was he asked me to find before getting fed up and having UESP tell me “lol no actually it’s off in this complete other direction”, and I’m pretty sure I assassinated that NPC after I turned in his quest.
Yeah I remember some fuckin guy said you can find the herb east of balmora. Que an hour long search and epic journey for the ages only to finally read a guide that says the guy lied
Jesus, the finding people thing was tough, but finding the quest item that I had already looted from a grave and either dropped or sold to a random merchant? Game ending, man.
This was me lmao. On my first playthrough of Morrowind as a teenager I dicked around and did everything except the main quest for ages. Around level 18 I decided to actually progress the main quest. Hasphat, check. Arkngthand, no sweat. Talk to Sharn Gra-Muzgob, she says to fetch the Skull of Llevule Andrano. Cool, go to Andrano’s tomb, looks kind of familiar. Where is the Skull of Llevule Andrano? Cause it sure ain’t here in his tomb. Whoopsie.
Never found the skull, never progressed the quest, had to start a new character to actually experience the main story. I wonder how many potential Nerevarines failed to ascend due to missing minor quest items. Wish I could ask em that inside the Cavern of the Incarnate.
I got the same survey. The ones that they definitely do not want to do, if they value their reputation, are things like “increased cloud save storage (that’s still probably less than what Steam offers)” and things that they took away, like 1.0 installers. But some of the other options look to be more squarely aimed at the enthusiasts of the preservation program that this subscription is designed to financially support, as well as one or two actually good features like legal account sharing. Hopefully they go down that route instead.
It's on par with Steam, I think. You get like 200 megs per product. I know because my Witcher 3 install is above that and it's annoying. That wouldn't be a dealbreaker as a subscription benefit, I don't think.
With the rest I do agree.
I can tell they're struggling and have been for a while. It isn't easy to compete with Steam, and the thing that would have done it (having DRM'd new games in the service) was voted down in a similar survey some time ago.
I would not be against some Patreon-like crowdsourced solution for behind the scenes stuff and prioritization rights. GOG, or something like it MUST exist. Steam is bad enough with their current dominant position, it can't be the sole remaining option in this market.
I would much prefer to be able to give them more money in exchange for more games, though. I am constantly frustrated by how often some indie game is only available on Steam, and I've started buying things full price on GOG but waiting for sales on Steam as a matter of policy.
Is that where it is now? I haven't looked at the documentation in an age. I think most stay lower because ultimately cloud storage is a cross-platform concern and different first parties have different requirements. Plus you want to keep it under control anyway. At any rate it's not a huge concern and other services like PSN or Nintendo Online already charge for it, so... not a dealbreaker as long as the base implementation stays free.
What makes BG3 so great is that it doesn‘t just have voice acting, it has full acting. The actor of Astarion worked for 4 years on it and claimed it was the equivalent to shooting 4 seasons of a TV show. It‘s a huge scope that almost nobody can or want to afford. I mean those studios who can just don‘t take that part very seriously and are eyeing with simply opting to use AI instead. I doubt it will ever be recreated, maybe not even by Larian themselves.
You might be interested in the videos made by Champutee, a one-armed gamer who has done several experiments with both genres and controllers to continue enjoying gaming.
Nope. I’m gaming to have fun, not to work off some backlog. And if I buy a game, barely touch it and never play it again, that’s fine. Keep the fun in games and don’t treat it as an obligation.
To be fair, FoMO can be justified. That multiplayer game isn't going to be worth playing in five years time. That game that has cool new tech isn't going to dazzle once things move on, etc..
Yes, but it is more about the cost. Games are pricey enough as they are. Why keep the games perpetually unplayed but then buy new ones and put them aside as well?
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.
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