Minecraft seems like the obvious choice for kids who liked Roblox. Terraria is another. If they can only play on a server that one of them hosts, then no need to worry about outside users.
Good on you and the other parents for getting that shit out of there, kids don’t need addiction machines trying to pressure them into spending money.
According to r/VPNTorrents, Proton and AirVPN are the only recommended VPNs since they are the only well-established privacy-respecting ones left that still have port-forwarding. New ones are popping up with promise, like Azire and a couple others, but time will tell. As for Proton, I decided against it because of its limited port forwarding and lack of IPv6 compatibility and settled on AirVPN But Proton has genuinely great products if you're interested in the full suite. AirVPN, in my opinion, is just the last great VPN. Open-source & fully featured client, run by activists, anonymous accounts, crypto purchasing, IPv6 compatibility, full port forwarding, great support, Tor integration, the list goes on.
They're super transparent with whatever they have going on with them. They had one probe within the last couple years but they don't keep logs so I'm not sure anything bad for the users is possible, and what VPN hasn't been asked for it's information lol
The issue is that authorities were able to retrieve the private key off the server. Yes, Windscribe adjusted afterwards but, it puts their security practices into major question. If you read their response to the situation it was a ton of side stepping the issue, trying to put blame on other VPNs, or trying to act like a government getting access to one of their private keys was not a big deal.
Windscribe is fine, back when they were shit-tier I grabbed a lifetime pro subscription for $30. For the common user, who just wants to download their very legal Linux ISOs on qbit its a good VPN. I just think Windscribe gets a pass on its history more so then a lot of other VPNs.
You might want to add the proper context that the servers were siezed by authorities (so not stolen) and they were very transparent about the fact that it was a legacy system. They also followed with a plan to rectify, including third part audits. Every organization makes mistakes, it’s how they respond that matters.
If you’re looking for a VPN provider that hasn’t had issues ever in their history, good luck. You’ll just end up with the ones who lie and cover up incidents.
“If you’re looking for a VPN provider that hasn’t had issues ever in their history, good luck. You’ll just end up with the ones who lie and cover up incidents.”
This is the type of ignorant statement makes it hard to take you seriously. First of all its not true, and if you really believed it, why waste time stanning for Windscribe? What’s your pitch? “They all suck so go with this one”
Sure, trustworthy VPNs are few and far between but they do exist. On the no port-forwarding side you have Mullvad, and IVPN and other newer ones that seem promising for now. On the port-forwarding side you have Proton and AirVPN with other newer ones that have some promise.
Even OVPN, who now has dubious ownership, has a far better track-record then Windscribe.
Second, you’re absolutely right. Steam did a great job with the whole Steam Deck Verified thing. It ensures that the game “just works”, which is someone that can’t always be said of PC games. It makes sense, given the near uniform hardware of the Deck, of course, but it’s still important for reaching the console and/or casual gamer markets.
And let’s face it, the Deck is just convenient as hell. It’s the mobile gaming solution I’ve wanted for decades.
…but I totally get what he means. Some people just aren’t excited about fiddling with settings, hardware, software or otherwise. It’s just a pain. Even myself, I’ve noticed I’ve lost most of my appetite for twiddling with drivers and such so I get it. When I play a game, I want to play the game, not set up the game, tweak the game, etc.
This has always been one of the key advantages of consoles over PC gaming. You can go to Gamestop, buy the game, plug it into your console, and then play. Or at least you used to.
Consoles have gotten more fiddly over the years, and the Steam Deck meets them halfway. If you are okay with online game stores, managing storage space for your games, you are already good to go with your Steam Deck. If you want to, you can tweak your settings for more battery life or performance, or venture outside the Steam Deck Verified games.
Eh, it’s not always great, Baldurs Gate 3 is “Varifed”, but it took some fiddling with the settings to get it toba stable 30 with decent lod on my deck.
I had an idea of a game where you played as a photojournalist documenting the brutality of a near-future totalitarian regime. There would be elements of stealth because you’d have to evade the police to take your photos and you have pretty much no combat ability. You’d use your earnings from selling the photos to gradually upgrade your equipment, maybe starting off with a shitty cell phone camera and working your way up to professional quality full frame SLRs. I’d want it to simulate the workings of a real camera… f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, etc., so you’re challenged with getting good, usable photos in difficult conditions.
You know, that sounds sick actually. Especially if it was more sandboxy than linear, and also had some kind of survival system (pay for food/rent) to add tension and encourage risk taking when snooping around.
This is more or less what I wish Beyond Good And Evil had been. The combat in that game wasn’t good but I liked the idea of having to photograph evidence and getting photos of wildlife on the side to earn some money. It wasn’t nearly as fleshed out as your idea though.
I played 76 a few years after it came out and I thought it was super fun. Idk if it was way worse when it came out or if my standards are just shit but me and my wife loved it
Honestly, I tried it with mates well after release, and it was really grindy and boring. The few quests we did had too much padding and lifeless NPCs, even if the environments were neat. And we were all big BGS fans since Oblivion, yet not overly nostalgic over the old games or anything.
I will say coop always makes games more fun, and AAA tends to skip this.
But there’s also a lot of really awesome 2P coop these days.
Consistent crashing, tons of lag, and lots of additions from BGS that were two steps back for every step forward. Think about what it would be like if half the players at the SBQ disconnected in the fight and make them 4-5 times stronger than when they were last I played (when expeditions were released).
Then you would have quests that gave atoms, the currency you give IRL money to get, that were literally unachievable. The camera ones were the best as they ran for weeks with no camera being available in the game.
There was a raid. Almost no one could do it. The game either crashed or people rage quit.
I wont even talk about Nuclear Winter.
The game is a miracle for what it is but it took a while to be acceptable. Loved the game at one point but now it is too much a reminder of COVID shutdowns.
1 - The first season was already in the south west US, as with… every Fallout game not made by Bethesda.
2 - They are almost certainly going to retcon large elements of New Vegas’ plot and world elements out of existence or into nonsense, as the first season already did with a whole bunch of shit.
They couldn’t even put Shady Sands on the right spot on a map.
They already broke Mr. House’s character and backstory by including him in that rountable corpo discussion.
His… and New Vegas’ backstory in the game are based on House more or less hating all other corpo leaders, determing via statistical modelling that nuclear was was inevitable… and then doing everything he could to build a goddamned ICBM defense shield for Vegas.
He had to act solo precisely because he was kept out of the inner circle of corpos and gov high ups who were much more in the knoe, by the older canon.
But more fundamentally… House has spent almost 200 years looking for the platinum chip, because he was just a few days late in having it delivered, pre-apocalypse.
Why and or how could that possibly happen if he was in the meeting that decided to end the world?
New Vegas as a storyline is literally irreconcilable with the TV show already, its like shitty fan fiction.
The Deus Ex series often have pacificist playthroughs (3rd one definitely does, you can play a pacificist playthrough of the OG game with a few exceptions).
The Age of Decadence has a mostly skill check and conversation playthrough. I forget if it’s fully pacifict though.
Both are past 100k now! I want to issue a special “fuck you” to all the idiot streamers that tried to kill SKG. And of course a special “go fuck yourself” to PirateSoftware and Asmongold for being fuckwit right wing tools for corporations. You have a special place in my heart as illiterate lapdogs to shitty corporations and right wing shills.
Yep they actively campaigned against the petition and fundamentally misrepresented it.
10 months ago PirateSoftware started a campaign against it starting here-ish: youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y
Also 10 months Asmongold did a react video that supported PirateSoftware: youtu.be/AhVsyhjcndw
PirateSoftware refused to acknowledge that he got several things wrong, and even refused to acknowledge it when confronted. He actively bans people with dissenting opinions in his stream so it wasn’t surprising that he refused to acknowledge that he was wrong. About a week ago Charlie (aka Penguinz0) confronted him about it and he still refused respond to basic factual inaccuracies: youtu.be/6sJpTCitKqw
Ross did a video talking about the whole thing last week as well: youtu.be/HIfRLujXtUo
There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the broad strokes. I hope PirateSoftware’s stream keeps declining until he is relegated to complete obscurity. Also, PirateSoftware can eat my entire ass.
Asmonpoop is a moronic bum and people went from “this weirdo is strangely entertaining” to " let me hear what my moronic hobo-idol has to say about this".
It is a little bit like how people supported Drumpf as a joke first.
PirateSoftware is what dumb people thinks a smart person acts like. His audience can’t even pay attention unless he draws boxes in paint. I do understand how he can seem initially likeable, but if you watch him for more than a couple of hours you’ll see his knowledge is shallower than a spilled glass of water.
Still in disbelief people think SKG is going to work. The premise fucking genocides the MMORPG genre. You kill games by implementing this horrible understanding of how games work.
I have never seen more people support games who have no fucking idea how games work and it’s the most frustrating shit ever. Pirate Software is right. It’s not even a debate.
And if a company refuses? They’re dead anyway. This is not well thought out and PS called it out. You have no actionable solution but are calling for one to just appear.
I can literally play WOW private servers right now. I can host my own private server and play it single-player.
What is being required is not complicated or difficult.
If a developer wants to destroy their own project instead of taking the extra week of work it takes to let people locally host then that sounds like a really dumb decision.
No, it’s much more reasonable to make devs put the hosting oprions they use in the code of the game for others to use instead of a community having to reverse engineer the net code and build their own tool.
Your contradictions are destroying your argument dude. This is why nobody takes you seriously.
Lol you not understanding why that can’t happen is what’s sending me. There are so many issues with just the PREMISE of this that you don’t even address.
At what point is a game considered dead? When is a company obligated to provide access? Will the company be legally obligated to release character profiles? If yes, how does one stop third parties from modifying it/cheating prior to hosting? If no, it’s everyone expected to restart ion company death? How will this access be granted or hosted? How long will this need to be available for? Who pays to keep this information hosted for that duration?
There are so many fucking questions unanswered because you seem to think you can just throw fucking LAN ports on a game and it just work. Your brain is stuck in 2004 where all you needed was an IP address and port number. Games aren’t that simple anymore and the ones that are, already fucking have it.
Hold on there buddy! There’s no reason to be derogatory towards hobos like that. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so offended on the internet as to have someone associate my good (user)name with the likes of Asmongold. If you don’t bring that down a notch I’m gonna send the ghost of Woody Guthrie to haunt you until your dying days.
Asmongold does that. Like the dude doesn’t have any real opinions other than what gets views. If he sees the winds changing he’ll pull a 180 in order to take the heat off himself. He also has hoards of followers and youtube minions to make him seem far more centerist than he is. He’s like the personification of the alt-right playbook for dummies.
Asmongold is a megaphone for shitty opinions. Like I posted elsewhere he’ll change his opinion if he gets called out, but the damage was done when he put it on the megaphone in the first place. His take on the “never play defense” is to not have any actual opinions when confronted then just go right back to saying other right wing bullshit.
Hard disagree in my case. But that might be because it’s a new IP. When I play Fallout 4 I can’t stop myself of thinking what was and could have been. I obviously don’t have that with Starfield and found it much more enjoyable
I found Fallout 4 had good gameplay, but the main questline didn’t connect with me at all. I’m currently playing through Starfield at the moment, have like 220 hours playtime, I honestly wish I wasn’t finding it so boring but it’s easily the most bland Bethesda game I’ve ever played.
The story writing seems kinda half-arsed, but my main issue with Starfield is in the environments. Every location feels the same, and the planets are all just barren deserts with a random base and two caves plopped on it. At least Fallout 4’s environment felt hand-crafted, and not just like they rolled three dice.
I thought the main story was pretty enjoyable tbh. I can still remember some side quests really vividly as well, which is a good sign. The batman nod for example, or the 0 g casino. There was a lot of copy and paste, agreed, but the gunplay was fun so I didn’t mind that much. Also I spent hours on ship creation, thatwas cool
every time I got lost in the ship builder, I’d spend an hour on some crazy design, be a piece away from saving it, and the game would just lock up and stop responding to input. Only ever happened in ship builder. I lost like 4 hours to that flippin’ bug!
I like them both, to me starfield just feels like a newer fallout 4, but I also like space and the guns, but at the same time after playing oblivion a ton in highschool all bethesda games just feel like the same thing with a bit less. at least with fallout and starfield you could build up bases and stuff, ive actually been replaying oblivion remastered a ton since I havent really gamed in a long time just because its so familiar but new at the same time after all these years
My dislike of epic is that they seem to be buying their way into competing, instead of actually competing on features.
Free games sounds good now, but what happens when the fortnite gravy train runs out, and epic needs to start making a profit? They’ll likely have to enshittify fast.
Steam at least has a solid history of being generally good. But who knows what will happen if Gaben ever ascends.
No, EGS is plenty shitty now; what they’re saying is that EGS’s one singular saving grace - the free games they give away - likely won’t last for the reason they outlined.
While I'd like to see more advanced features in other launchers (or, ideally, at the OS level in both Windows and Linux), I don't think it's realistic to expect new competitors to get to that level of support with 80% of the market fossilized around Steam.
They have a twenty year head start and a ridiculously dominant position. You're not going to get a proprietary controller translation layer or a full on video capture software right off the bat. It makes sense to focus investment on getting content first, since Steam gets all content by default by having an iron grip on the marketplace, and for business reasons other launchers prioritize multiplayer features first.
To be clear, I'd agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.
Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.
Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it's a leap of faith.
Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I'd have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I'd have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn't have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it's their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren't elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.
But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.
Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.
You’re unironically defending EGS and calling me a troll. If you think that’s how a store with 7 years and a billion dollars invested (Sweeney’s words, not mine) should look like, that’s fine, that’s your opinion and you’re free to use it. Personally I’m not a fan.
I'm not "defending" anybody. I'm not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.
I don't know what percentage of the Epic Store's funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that's because it'd be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don't know how much funding that leaves for client development.
Like I said, I'd probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I'll also acknowledge they probably wouldn't see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don't give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they've actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.
Hell, if you look at it objectively they'd probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn't. Maybe there's a path forward there. I don't have enough of an inside view to know.
How come gog doesn’t get the same hate if it’s all steam fanboys and it’s all so unwarranted? How come it’s all focused at EGS? Are you sure it’s not because you’re mistaken? Maybe you’ve got a rage boner for Steam and you can’t see past it.
Well, for one thing the "GoG doesn't support Linux" narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.
For another, GoG doesn't get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn't get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.
Ubisoft's platform does get the hate, though. And EA's. And Acti/Blizzard's. And Microsoft's. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.
So after some soul searching I'm going to say I absolutely don't have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that'd be a very confused boner anyway).
Your not wrong, but I just dont get the feeling that epic is going to transition towards actually being a competitive store. This is entirely my own myopic gut feel, not based on any facts.
Honestly, I agree, unless steam aggressively enshittifies themselves, I dont see any rivals catching up either. They are so far ahead, and so far, haven’t started screwing their customers.
And gog selling out to climb doesn’t really solve anything.
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