It wasn’t terrible for what it was. I just remember being let down after years of listening to my best friend’s other friend telling me all of these promises he had fully subscribed to. It all sounded too good to be true, but both us and the industry itself were too young to have experienced overpromises like that. I thought maybe I just didn’t know how far technology had come, and we were about to see it fully manifest in all its glory…
But what we got was a fuck load of bloom and a few branching choices. And a marriage system that let you be gay. I definitely made my guy gay. Well, not at first. At first I married the barber because I thought I’d get free haircuts. That didn’t work. So I made my guy gay.
Fable 1 was a game I had lots of fun with. Being Brazilian, I was more or less immune to the hype buildup around the game, so I had no clue what was promised vs. what was delivered until years later
I have this clever idea for a starship game where you can explore the universe. What I’m going to do to fund development, and it’s totally not a scam, is to sell starships for real money. At first of course you won’t be able to do anything with the ships because I haven’t actually developed the game yet, but in just 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 years there might actually be a game, possibly.
Yup I recall a friend telling me of all these awesome things, not what the things were anymore but articles he read of Fable, and them not being there. He has a habit of over promising features while still making a decent (sometimes awesome) and fun game but it doesn’t help when he talks up about things that aren’t in the released version.
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
Nintendo’s patent lawyers should be reported to the bar association over this. These most recent patents are atrociously bad and could probably get the lawyers sanctioned
The time for “collaborate and listen” has passed. Now, the time for Nintendo to bring down hammer go hammer mc hammer yo hammer and the rest can go and play has arrived.
I really disliked bioshock 3. So I have little hope.
The story was over the top but without saying anything interesting or iconic.
Gunplay is a weird mix between call of duty and bioshock and it doesn’t work.
Upgrade system along with only two weapons felt weird. Topics are less useful and less common than in previous games.
“Choices” in story are not choices, completely useless.
Companion AI is bland, they promised a revolution with Elisabeth but it’s just a fly tied on a cord, there’s zero AI in it. It can’t die so there’s nothing to interact. It just moves around you, pretend to seek supplies and to hide from bullets but it’s all fake, it cannot be hurt and she just tosses you supplies on scripted events.
The bird is hyped and have zero impact in the gameplay.
And I could go on…
Bioshock 1 is a thousand times better game in every single aspect.
“Choices” in story are not choices, completely useless.
That, at least, is a staple for the series. Otherwise I mostly agree. I was enjoying the story and worldbuilding until about the time when the portals to other dimensions started appearing and the plot went sideways. From then on it was mostly bullshit they tried to explian by repeating “quantum mechanics” over and over.
Making Elizabeth invincible is the only way that game is playable for me. There’s no chance in hell I’d play an entire game that’s one long escort quest where I’m constantly worried about the useless sidekick that I’d rather be without. She may not have added much, but a superficial narrative device is a thousand times better than a crippling gameplay decision.
Makes sense. Individuals regularly get patents in America and individuals regularly get cancer in America. It’s just an asset albeit one that may have emotional value. But cancer will cost you your heirlooms here too
I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.
And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.
Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10...
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.
The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.
The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.
I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?
Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!
That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.
It’s Valve’s responsibility that Microsoft stripped DOS support from their OS in Windows 10?
Starting with Windows 10, the ability to create a MS-DOS startup disk has been removed, and so either a virtual machine running MS-DOS or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source.
Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak.
I think it’s more about if you don’t upgrade your PC.
Say you bought a game on Steam, while Windows XP was current, then just kept that PC, didn’t upgrade for whatever reason. Why would you, your game is running fine. But now Steam doesn’t support Windows XP anymore or Windows 7 for that matter, even if the game itself would run on it, making Windows 10, eventually 11, then whatever in the future, effectively the minimum requirement to play your game. The dev isn’t really at fault, because the game could technically still run on that OS, you just can’t download it anymore.
I agree with him in that regard, that it these things suck, however few people are actually affected by this. I think there should be some sort of “Legacy Client”, but then you have to deal with security. Just saying, connect your Windows 98 machine to the net for an occasional DRM check isn’t really viable. Installers would be the obvious answer, but that’s not what Steam does. Maybe Linux could be the answer, but I don’t know if it could be basically the same at one point with kernel version requirements or something like that.
Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible,
I think they mean modifying the minimum requirements, because their electron based abomination of a client does not support older systems
so unless you know to use the goldberg emu, it will possibly make those games different, or at worst unplayable. I know of games that glitch with modern hardware, in one instance because it is so old the dev never thought about graphics hardware with 2 GB VRAM or more, and it was never patched either.
its suprising that such a high profile person does not know about goldberg emu (or various other solutions), so they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.
Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?
That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.
Healthcare is just a way to coerce the working class to produce value for the wealthy. That is the real reason why there is no universal healthcare in America.
I’d be interested to know how I can pay my electricity bill with my free healthcare. Also I need to go to the supermarket today; how do I convert free healthcare into a trolleyful of food?
Civilised countries like the UK and other European countries. Technically it’s not free because it’s paid for by taxation, but it’s free at the point of use: if I go and see a doctor, I don’t get billed, but I do pay 9% National Insurance tax.
WTF did I just read? Fuckin weirdos. That is uncomfortable on so many levels. Poor kid. I remain traumatised from the time I had to remove all the malware from my dad’s computer. That was twenty years ago, he’s dead now, but I still carry the abominable image of him in his wheelchair, pulling his decrepit knob to Thai ladyboys, with the dogs lined up on the sofa watching. Ignorance is bliss. Ho hum, conservatives eh?
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