Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.
Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
Playstack: Balatro
Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.
Supergiant Games took a payout to make Hades a times exclusive for EGS. They still have some anti-consumer practices, even if you personally don’t think it’s as bad.
@CodenameDarlen and plus, most of the time, when you're buying indie games from steam, they're drm-free, so you can play them offline, run them without steam running in the background.
honestly, I have no more hope in the AAA games, since it will be the same game over and over again with different skins or slight UI tweaks. there's nothing much Steam can do at this point, because it's the business model of these companies in the end. It's time to give back all the money wasted on these AAA games to indie titles now, it's well deserved...:bilibili_dianzan:
The hell does "piracy against big companies" even mean?
Man, pirate what you can't afford if you must, just... you know, be honest about it. I'm always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That's not how that works.
For the record, while I think there's plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, "DLC", "game has a launcher" and "game is ported from other platforms" are not that. "A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it" is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you're taking.
For the record, I also didn't buy it because I also didn't think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.
And again, I'm not saying don't pirate it. Do what you want. Just don't be weird about it.
It's a "me" problem in that "I" think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. "I" also find the concept of "pirating against" to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.
RDR is €50 full price and includes all dlcs, €30 atm in autumn sale. AAA games are priced between 60-90 these days. What do you mean it’s full AAA priced
In my head anything above ~40 eur is basically AAA pricing. Personally, I’m not going to acclimate to their new prices being double that. If it’s above 40 it basically doesn’t exist to me.
I’ve a dual boot with Linux + Windows, my games are isolated on Windows where I’m not logged in anything important. I can just encrypt my Linux partition for a possible vulnerability. But I really think that it’s hard to happen, at least it never happened to me, I’ve pirated before a few times.
Also it’s allowed to pirate on my country, it’s just not allowed to redistribute it, so I don’t need a VPN.
Just download from trusted sources and it’s fine. At this point I’d rather to trust the community providing pirated games than big companies harvesting my data.
I didn’t have a good experience with Linux, I tried twice, I’ve a laptop wit hybrid GPU AMD + NVIDIA, and NVIDIA is painful on Linux. I loose a lot of performance playing on Linux, tried Fedora last time, OpenSUSE before that.
Thats why you usually use a VM / dedicated computer to download / check pirated software. Its annoying… But less annoying than the shit that ubisoft / EA does…
Using a VM to check pirated software, but then running it on your main pc if you don’t notice any malware (I think that’s what you are saying?) is not safe.
Running untrusted software only on a vm or machine that you don’t care about with zero personal info is safest.
At least from Lutris you can run your games (pirated our otherwise) genuinelly sandboxed with something like Bubblewrap or Firejail, which as far as I can tell you can’t do in Steam (unless you sandbox Steam itself, which is problematic if for example you want to deny networking to some games but not others).
IMHO, if you sandbox them it’s actually safer to run pirated versions of games in Linux than running the official versions from Steam with no sandboxing, at least for AAA games since pretty much all those companies have done or do abusive shit.
Gaming in a vm is possible, high end multi-player game in a vm is more complicated because of the performance penalty and the anti cheat (again the same problem) honestly I don’t know how good this solution could be
As long as it’s communicated amongst the participants. Yes! If anyone could just pause it because they wanna go see a movie now or make a baby? NO!
Solution: everyone in a sessions needs to enable this. So a friends-group can actually take a break for a tinkle. Or that everyone has to enter the menu or such and then the game pauses.
I’m hooked on Nightreign right now. It would be pretty nice if there was a special pause ping you could do that paused the game if the other two players agreed with reply pings.
Pausing in StarCraft allowed any player to pause, and any player to unpause. Additionally, each player could only pause a finite number of times (like 5 per game). I think this could work in nightreign.
The hard part is that there’s no chat in nightreign, so someone will pause and you have no idea if it’s legit or they’re just griefing.
Have you ever tried playing a multiplayer game where other players can pause the game? Stellaris has this feature and it is an immense annoyance. In fact, it is considered BM to pause the game when playing with anyone other than your real life friends that you inform in a voice call.
I grew up playing NES, where it was super common for either player to be able to pause the game. Pausing and unpausing right as someone is making a jump will never get old.
Like any other game mechanic, there are times it makes sense to have it as an option, and times it doesn’t. If it’s a 100% PvE cooperative game you’re playing with a close friend you know well, sure; why not? Let either player pause the game for everyone. At least some of Hazelight Studios’ games feature this (A Way Out, It Takes Two, Split Fiction).
But for competitive fighting games or ones with many players, it could be abused, or just be too annoying to enable. Maybe in the latter type an in-game voting system where everyone has to agree to pause the action?
Dying Light: The Beast has this, it's very refreshing. When all players go into the menu (including the inventory) the game pauses. Should be a standard feature.
There are levels to coop. Of course in something like Chained together you have to wait because your character is literally chained to the other character. But I think most people would agree that Valheim is designed with coop in mind. If someone goes to the toilet others can still collect wood, expand the base etc. The more open-ended the game is the less it becomes a requirement to stop the game for everyone else.
That is of course if you’re not some kind of a coop purist. If you are then there’s no room for nuance here and this discussion is irrelevant.
If I recall correctly, Starcraft 2 has a pause in online match. Other players get pause screen and can unpause the game. It all comes down to both(all) players agree on pause, and can be useful if correctly implemented.
Payday 3, if all players enter the pause menu, the game actually pauses. Anyone can exit the menu at any time, and re-enter it - which again pauses the game, if all other players remain in the pause menu.
It’s nice because it lets players loot and plan while others are away, but if they too need to afk, the team isn’t screwed by a guard coming around a corner with nobody to react.
I installed one that gives me 1000 rosaries when I press f3. I came to the conclusion that being able to buy things was more about grinding than anything else, and I didn’t enjoy it.
Technically cheating I guess but I don’t think it really makes the game any easier.
I might not be as far (just past act 1), but I haven’t felt the need to grind rosaries (yet). A bunch of times I’d be exploring for an hour and notice I have like 500+ rosaries, and then I get them made into strands till I have to spend them. I don’t think I’ve seen anything on sale for more than 800 rosaries, Maybe it’s different later in the game but at least in the beginning of the game, it doesn’t feel like a chore.
I suppose my experience may be different than others, I’m at the tail end of Act 3 and I have yet to grind for rosaries or shards. I remember people saying I’d need to do that, and I never have.
I do the shard grind but that’s because I love messing around with the tools. Luckily I can farm 500-1000 rosaries relatively quickly and that lets me buy a full stock of shards and a backup of consumables if I do 1k
There’s about 3 different “no double-damage” mods that I’ve tried, for a boss I just couldn’t be assed to try legit, anymore. They all seemed to work, fine.
There was a “respawn outside the boss room, instead of at a bench” mod that I installed for a particular boss (you can probably guess), but I can’t really speak about whether it works, cause I happened to beat it on the next try after installing.
There was an “infinite shards” mod I tried, but it didn’t work at all, and I didn’t see any others, so be wary of that one.
Last Judge runback didn’t really bother me. Just sprint straight out, with a few properly-timed jumps, and you skip every enemy and reach the boss in about 30 seconds.
Bilewater was nonsense, even after learning how to run it perfectly. And I LIKE Bilewater, as an area.
I’d like to have a mod where I could play through the game as the knight and use the bad system from the first game. Just as a way to play it again for fun.
Is it really that bad? I don’t really play metroidvanias, but thought I’d give it a try and have really being enjoying it. You have to go in with the expectation that a lot of fights might take 5-10 tries to learn all the mechanics and build muscle memory. It’s a hard game, but also very rewarding when you progress precisely because it doesn’t spoon-feed you victories.
Also, IIRC, they’ve already released a few patches to tone down the difficulty in some of the tougher spots.
I’m definitely overstating for effect, but yeah, to me, the game very much feels like they wanted to cater to the inhuman speedrunning and challenge running crowd from Hollow Knight, and made things unreasonable for causal/average gamers.
Maybe my bias is in having played and loved Hollow Knight first, but I NEVER felt like I was being given an unreasonable challenge in Hollow Knight. And Hollow Knight, by the late and post game, is HARD. They just managed to balance the difficulty curve so masterfully, that every escalation felt natural, even exciting.
Silksong, overall, did NOT do this for me. The early game felt obnoxiously punishing, the mid-game completely fell off a cliff into easy, once you get a handful of key upgrades, and the late game just varied all across the spectrum.
Come on now, it’s fine to be opinionated on the matter but inciting an unnecessary argument doesn’t do any good. Mods are a great feature and allow many people to get even more enjoyment out of an incredible game.
Many people, myself included, think that Silksong is not balanced as well as it could be.
Anyway, yes there are quite a few mods that I’ve found so far. Balancing out some of the more egregious design choices, and adding some general quality of life changes and time savers makes this game so much more enjoyable in my opinion. The challenge is still there, the game just feels much less like it’s trying to force you to be a masochist.
Also, there are purely cosmetic mods as well for people who just enjoy a different look.
I’m not far enough in Silksong to give an opinion, but: Had this happen with Stellar Blade. I was playing through, actually started to enjoy the story, and it has a series of about 3 bosses at the end, interspersed with cutscenes (not fought in a row, just progressively harder). And they were awesome - challenging, but awesome. I felt rewarded for recognizing the full combo strings and parrying, as well as recognizing opportunities to get attacks in.
I get to the final boss (the “Take hand” one), and it’s a brick wall. Epic and all, but feels like a leap in difficulty for an already-tough game. I keep at it, trying my best, but it gets no easier. It’s also an unsatisfying runback after often barely getting far into the fight. Finally, having not needed it all game, I switch to the game’s built-in easy mode. Even then, it’s a challenge, and I lose if I’m not paying attention to the attacks! But, I can at least recover from those failures, and try to learn more in one go. From then, I’m eventually able to get through and see the conclusion to the story. I recognize I do not hold bragging rights to that final boss, and I’m fine with that. I liked getting to see the ending cutscene, I exhibited as much patience as I could give with the bosses…but any more than that, and I would’ve started to hate the game.
bin.pol.social
Gorące