“gamers” would have a cow if there was ever a sequel seriously discussed. He already charged them once, how dare he charge them again.
I suspect 10-20% of the community would take that stance, even if it’s only a few%, it would absolutely be magnified by the echo chamber and there will be talk or how concerned ape left stardew valley “incomplete” and it’s "abandon-ware"and all future products should be pirated.
Not sure where you’re coming from. Stardew Valley was completed years ago and the guy has actually kept releasing free content updates nobody even asked for. People are actually getting annoyed at him for continuing to update it since he’s supposed to be working on his next game.
Plus the updates keep breaking mods. Part of why I’m holding off on another playthrough is that I’m worried he’s going to add one more update as soon as I finish a modlist and boot up
Maybe not; but my bigger worry is that while this is good for indies initially, by guaranteeing a minimum fixed income for a project - the long-term effect will be that Gamers^TM^ may just begin to expect indie titles to be “free” via GamePass and won’t buy them otherwise.
This would pretty much monopolise those sorts of titles to XBox and leave developers dependent on Microsoft for their continued existence.
I think that there’s big enough chunk of gamers that wasn’t own and support Indie games directly rather than rent them through gamepass that it hopefully won’t have much impact.
I am hoping there won’t be any exclusivity BS though, Epic has been bad enough with that already.
Unfortunately that’s already happening, I know a few people that are hard to convince to play something that isn’t on GamePass — I never insisted, but it’s still a bummer that I need M$'s blessing to play with people I know, considering I don’t have an Xbox and cross-play games that we all like are hard to find.
Yeah it’s straight up the big tech playbook. Undermine competition with low subscription prices and a lot of content. Lure in developers with deals that are too good to be true. And then once the customers are invested in using GamePass and stop buying games, increase subscription prices. And since MS is by then the gatekeeper to the market they don’t have to pay out so much to the developers anymore. It’s basically what Uber has done, once they killed the taxi market in a city they increased prices and lowered payouts to drivers. And since customers are used to those ride hailing apps the normal taxi market will never bounce back and drivers are basically forced to work with Uber or change jobs.
Also once Microsoft has a large chunk of the market in hand they basically decide before hand which games become a success or not instead of letting the market decide. So yeah games critical of their customers like the Israeli government will probably never get on GamePass and thus never reach a large audience. We’ll be seeing way more censorship than what we’ve seen with Steam recently if GamePass becomes the default way to consume games.
I hate Game Pass. It’s a poisoned well. If it’s a continued success it won’t just turn games into subscription service content (meaning we’ll own our games even less. Anyone thinking MS will continue selling games separately I guarantee if Game Pass sticks around for the next decade there will be “only on Game Pass” games) but it will become a locking mechanism for whatever MS new gaming OS will be. MS will make sure Game Pass won’t work on Linux so MS could continue having OS dominance in the gaming space. And of course the service will eventually enshittify because $$$.
The future of Game Pass is a future nobody wants. Paying for an overpriced service to play a curated list of games you can’t own on a machine that will track everything you do and feed you ads every chance it gets.
Whose employees then go and form a new company, marketing its first game as “by the makers of X” and MS is left holding IP of dubious worth and their dick in their hands.
Being paid is better. Less cheaters and griefers on new accounts ruining everyone’s game.
There are still plenty of griefers (mostly PlayStation players in my experience, which is why I have crossplay disabled and don’t join randoms anymore), but imagine how many more would be there if they could use bots to keep creating new accounts to claim the game for free.
This surprises me, as I've only really encountered one lobby that had griefing issues, and they were readily resolved by me running an autocannon and the laser pistol lol. I think the nature of the game itself does a lot to minimize the impact of players being jackasses.
I tried playing with PS players about 11 times, and every single mission ended with me being team killed and kicked right before extract, but after all the objectives were completed. I’m not giving them another chance.
As someone who played an unhealthy amount of Rocket League, the transition from paid to free to play ruined the game. The sheer amount of smurfing was disgusting.
Bethesda is already prepping to screw them over. Like with the Fallout London guys. Fuck Bethesda. Leaning heavily on the community to fix their issues but ready to fuck them over when they come with a large project by quickly releasing their own shitty remake or updating the game, breaking the mod. Better pirate their games or don’t play them at all, they do not deserve our money.
This is a weird take. Bethesda isn’t getting in the way of mods and actively supports them, it’s not like they pushed an update to screw over Fallout London, they’re not going to get permission from mod creators to work on their own franchise.
If Bethesda does make their own remake, I fail to see how that hurts the people working on Skyblivion.
Combining oblivion, morrowind and Skyrim into one game mod: Bethesda broke it. Fallout London: Bethesda broke it. Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod. Yeah, they do actively break mods to screw too enthusiastic modders who will create more and better content using their platforms, which will show their failure, laziness and not-caring-at-all-about-their-customers-at-all, because they only think of money and how to get as much as much as possible by screwing their customers over again and again. Todd is an asshole and Bethesda is a rotten company which still profits and milks their old successes from the time they weren’t rotten.
Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.
I’m now curious about this from a technical perspective - how did the update specifically break their mod in particular? Were they doing a bunch of custom DLL hooks or something?
I know with Skyrim SE modding it’s usually that any update breaks SKSE and a tiny handful of other mods that directly hook DLLs or the executable (these mods are usually scripting engine extensions and are a dependency for a variety of other mods), and depending on the update sometimes it takes longer than average to get a new version of those running (the AE update was one of those because they switched compiler version and that broke the method SKSE was using to find hooks). But in general that only breaks 1) mods using those (think SkyUI) until a new version comes out, after which most of those mods start working again without the individual mods needing an update and 2) mods that include their own plugin DLL, (think SkyClimb) which have to wait on an update and then compile a new version of the DLL for the new version of both the game and the other mod, because addresses and functions they are hooking may have changed. Mods not using SKSE or similar generally run just fine between versions of SSE (including AE).
So basically what happened with the AE release for Skyrim SE where Bethesda switched to a new compiler version and the tool the script extender team was using to find the correct offsets couldn’t handle it so they had to track down the offsets manually like before they’d written the tool, leading to a longer than usual time for the script extender to update than usual?
Which if it’s anything like SSE means that mods that didn’t use F4SE were basically unaffected, mods that use F4SE had to wait for it to update which took longer than usual after which they would mostly work unmodified, and mods that involved a plugin DLL for F4SE had to at the very least be recompiled against the new versions of the game and F4SE. Nothing about that specifically targets Fallout: London though from what it sounds like.
I mean, it would suck for any mod using F4SE. The answer for what to do is the same as every other update - recommend people not update until F4SE is updated.
Did they have their own plugin DLL or were they just using F4SE as is? If the former that would make it suck for them even worse since they’d potentially need to find some new hook addresses of their own and wait for the new F4SE and then reconcile their DLL.against that and then test it all again to make sure nothing broke.
Yeah, that’s what Fallout Londond creators advised - delay the update. A lot of folk got already hit with it by this time tho, so a lot of people were pissed.
And they DID insert their own IIRC, may be wrong on that one.
WTF are you smoking? It was not “specifically designed to break the mod”. It was specifically designed to coincide with the Fallout TV series on Amazon prime.
Exactly! I hate when people keep saying Bethesda “screwed over” mod devs, as if making a free mod takes precedence over someone who actually works for the game studio being told by their boss to make this update happen.
There’s too much going on at the company for someone to try to track down mod authors to “get their permission”
It would be like you offering me a place to stay and asking if I’m okay with you doing housework. Like I have no say, it’s your house, you need to do regular maintenance.
Personal beliefs and the laws to which you are upheld are two different things. I didn’t say I agree with the law. Why are you assuming my personal beliefs?
Right. So whoever did the update at Bethesda found it important to do that update. The developers of FO:London found it important to release their mod. If you ask the Bethesda employee they’d think their work was more important. If you ask the FO:L team they would say their work was more important. How do you determine whose importance was more important?
I think Fallout London adds more to the game and was wanted by more people. Democracy and utility seem to be agreed on this case, and those are the two measures I use to determine importance.
And I’m going to say more people wanted official ultrawide support. Now what? Are we supposed to poll every time someone wants to do something? If I feel like important for me to jaywalk and I step in front of a car and the driver feels it’s more important for them to not stop what then? Are we supposed to block traffic to until we figure out whose action is more important so they’d have right of way?
This is why we have laws, because everything does not need to be looked at case by case and sometimes we can collectively agree that one way is always better than the other way.
I don’t see Bethesda has doing anything about this project.
Like TESNexus did take down my Morroblivion main quest implementation back in 2010 (although someone else had already uploaded a half done version which was allowed to stay up? maybe they had sucked Arthmoor off or something.) I just moved to the Morroblivion forums after, nbd.
But you’ve been able to complete basically all of Morrowind in Oblivion for more than ten years, and I don’t think Bethesda has done anything. I think they threatened/scared the French guy who made the executable that converted everything, but backed off and never really bothered again.
Tbh, I could see them giving Morrowind away for free at some point - just like Daggerfall and Arena.
The way they might fuck people over is the endless Skyrim and Fallout updates I guess that break fucking everything. But not legally I don’t think. This gets people to buy more copies of Skyrim (and we know the modern gamer isn’t patient enough for Morrowind proper)
I honestly don’t know - I have no evidence one way or the other.
However, FO:London was in development for a long time (years?), and Bethesda decided to release a (edit:) mod-breaking patch right before its release, b/c the TV show got popular and they wanted to say the game was still in development?
Maybe it wasn’t specifically to “screw over some mod devs,” but it didn’t help the community one bit.
With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.
I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I’ve never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn’t have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).
Sorry if this comes across pedantic, but in case anybody isn’t aware there are some games that offer Achievements (Alan Wake 2 is one I know).
I do agree though, Epic just doesn’t have the features Steam does. I don’t think their barrage of free games idea is a bad one, but it feels like an afterthought when it’s just not as fun to play them there. (Better Linux support would be nice too, at least there’s Heroic.)
They have achievements on all games, it’s been the case for two years
Edit: to be more specific, on all games on-boarded after March 9th 2023 (need to have the same achievements as on other platforms) and available at the dev’s discretion since May 2022
I just checked this again, first for game I had there for free but bought later on Steam - City of Brass - and couldn’t find achievements anywhere. I then looked into Fortnite and League of Legends - also no achievements. I then found there is “my achievements” link somewhere in my profile, from where I could click “browse games with achievements” and turns out, from few dozens games I own there not a single one has achievements.
I admit that I should have been more specific, the change wasn’t retroactive, so I should have said that achievements have been available since early 2022 and since early 2023 games can’t release without the same achievements as other platforms
They’ve had achievements for over two years… I swear all the anti epic crowd knows nothing about what their launcher is like at this point and just keep repeating what they read back when it launched… Just like the Steam boycotters back in the early 2000s
I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.
I’m willing to bet all I own that most Steam users don’t care about their profile or people seeing the achievements they got but they still care about achievements as a form of optional challenges they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.
Pretty sure you underestimate what the average gamers spend, you’re in a bubble if you use the social features and it makes it seem like most people do, Steam has 132m monthly active users.
Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.
I wasn’t even going to pay $449, let alone $600. I figured it would have been somewhere between $300-400, with 400 being on the high end of reasonable.
$449 I would have waited a bit. But $600??? I get it’s because of tarrifs, but that’s really going to hurt the systems long term sales numbers the same way covid hurt PS5’s lifetime sales numbers.
Yeah I’m not in it at either price point. I’ll for once be a patient gamer and wait until it’s reasonable or I’ll skip this one. I’m betting there’s lots like us.
The games don’t drop in price, but the consoles do. There’s even a chance the price could go down for the holiday season, even if it’s something miniscule. This launch price is the early adopter tax.
Tariffs are not just for new products (new models). As soon as the current ps5 stock of a retailer is gone, they have to order new ones and pay a tariff. Then they make it more expensive for the consumer.
lets say Walmart now sells a ps5 for $400, but in a month they have to order new ones, from China. The order is more expensive than the one last month because of the tariffs, so they pay like 40% more. Walmart will now sell the ps5 for about $550 to you.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t jacked up the prices already! Partly because Capitalism^TM^ — but also because I fully expect for big retailers like Walmart to have 30-90 day payment terms with vendors, and some of those invoices potentially being subject to these tariffs.
…stop being right! I got angry reading that, but when I clicked reply to yell at you, I realized it was all emotional backlash on my end. I couldn’t formulate a thought process to show why you’re wrong. Because you’re not wrong. I just hate that you’re right!
I’m fucking done with Rockstar after GTA5. Took a great franchise and fucking ruined it with online mode. One of my first sessions ended up with a hacker teleporting everyone to a single location on the map and dropping millions on everyone.
Also, I can’t play Vice City (still my favorite) on PC without the Social Club bullshit or downloading a cracked version (I gave up on pirated software), despite it being a single player game. Just another company I’m happy to boycott forever.
You should try playing Vice City on a PS2 emulator. Connect your emulator with retroachievements.org and try to get all the achievements. If you can find a legit PS2 copy, it won’t be piracy.
That’s a good wisdom! I still have my original PS2 disc packed away, but I’d have to get a DVD drive for my PC (I haven’t had one for years). They’re cheap enough, and I’ve got a few other games as well. Thanks!
I only ever bought RDR2 from them, which is still bringing me a lot of enjoyment, and after seeing how they squandered RDR online for the heinous crime of not printing money fast enough, I don’t think I’ll be buying anything from them for the foreseeable future.
That’s my big problem with the online mode as well. They could have actually made it fun but it’s totally unplayable because they don’t do anything about hackers while at the same time even by legitimate means giving players access to fucking sci-fi death machines.
I’m so sick of spawning in and instantly getting blown up by a flying motorcycle with infinite rockets. That’s not even fun gameplay for the person the flying motorcycle.
A remaster for the first two wouldn’t be enough, I figure. I played daggerfall unity and it just does not hold up. A full on remake would be interesting, but they’d have to go hard, and reconceptualize a lot.
I think Avowed is the smoothest (strictly comparative) game on UE5 I've played in a long time. I get 120fps locked on epic and no shader compilation stutters (1440p, 7900XTX and 7800X3D, FSR quality) outside of cities. As soon as I enter a city and move my camera/character, it dips to 50fps with my GPU barely being used and CPU spiking, which really doesn't make much sense to me considering the aren't a lot of NPCs in town and they don't move/have routines
The issue there is 4K, even with upscalers it's a massive rendering job for GPUs. Realistically, only the 4090 and 5090 could run in high settings at 4K (with or without upscaling). I had a 4K monitor with my 7900 XTX and decided to dial back to 1440p (and got a n OLED screen too) so I could run my games at max on 120 or 144 FPS, because at 4K I would get anything between 50 and 100 fps with a mix of high and medium settings
Even if they do, I feel like both projects will have different enough approach to things to avoid making the other obsolete. Maybe… possibly.
I’ll certainly take the unofficial remake over the Bethesda one due to lower requirements and lack of Creation Club. That, and I’m just more interested in the fan interpretation of Cyrodiil to be honest.
I really hope so! It seems like such a no brainer, get a studio to remake the bulk of it and keep creative control. I came into TES world in Skyrim and would love to go back through them but I’m a snob for a modern looking game now.
I am always suprised that people expected anything differently.
Epic was from the start doing things the wrong way, and I will not support any store that has exclusives.
Making a good gaming platform that could rival Steam would take A LOT of time and money and dare I say - no company is willing to lose that for a chance of one day perhaps being only slightly worse competitor that still can’t convince people to migrate.
There are only a few companies that could even hope to take on Valve, at this stage. The likes of EA and others. But by definition, their company culture means they’ll never be able to take on Valve.
Someone else made a comment about what will happen when Gabe steps down and I suddenly realize what a short-term golden age we’re likely living in, even with all the bullshit.
Making a platform that was simply a copy of all of Steam’s features would certainly take a lot of time. That’s why to break into the space a new platform would need to actually innovate a killer feature that brings early adopters to it even without having all the bells and whistles Steam has. Then the user base can and will grow as you fill in the gaps so the ‘sacrifice’ of using your platform is lessened.
All exclusive games do is build resentment in your customers at being forced to use an inferior product.
How many games are y’all installing at once? 825GB is plenty. You can have three 200GB games installed, plus 3 or 4 AAA games with more reasonable disk usage.
That’s the way I play. Like 2-4 games max on my storage. Each one is a different genre, I play it until I finish then uninstall and move on to next game.
Hell yeah. We should be boycotting them for taking our physical media, because it breeds complacency and that’s how they steal from us. You will own nothing and eat bugs.
I mean… you can still use physical media for games, just prepare for it to be awfully slow unless it’s like a tiny indie game or something low-fi. As for the console makers, they still offer non-digital models. Idk who’s “they” in this instance.
edit: even better, it was pointed out to me it doesn’t have to be slow if you copy the contents of a disc to internal space
I agree, but being that you can buy a 256gb SSD from Walmart for $17.99, I’d like to see a new complete game purchase at $67.99 that you just plug the SSD into the top of the console and press a button to turn it on. SSD loads and has the entire contents of a completed game without need for internet access. If it doesn’t work, they didn’t ship a complete game and should be liable for refunding/replacing the product you bought from them.
Sure they are sata drives, but you really shouldn’t need something faster to play a game, as everything can go to the consoles RAM/GPU’s memory and then store back to the drives, meaning they could cut internal storage if needed as well. Stick the drives in cases, put on your games rack. Id like it. Maybe I’m not the main demographic though.
No longer play a game, sell it… Or format the drive and recycle it for another use.
So, back to cartridges. Honestly I’d be totally fine with that- but the issue isn’t quite with my end. Some game is made, and is sold for $70. A disc costs under a dollar to produce. A cart is significantly more, and digital is just paying upkeep on a server. Digital has the highest profit margin, and carts the lowest. Discs are great for physical distribution.
That said, I would totally love collector editions in the form of a figurine with storage media built in.
You can still get modern games on a bluray, but people started valuing convenience in the moment over everything else. That’s why digital-only consoles got so huge, on top of being cheaper.
I think that’s a bit too big to be just the OS, they have like 50GB of built-in stuff (share factory+astro but you can uninstall both). It’s probably something sensible like 60GB but they’re playing it safe by doubling the reserved space. It’s Sony after all
You lose some because 825GB refers to 825.000.000.000 bytes, divide by 1024 (bytes in KB) and you get 768GB usable space. In the early days of ps5 there was 667GB left over after OS and stuff
You can fit maybe 5 games at 100 GBs a piece (which is pretty standard for PS5) on an 825 GB drive, not to mention that you have to leave up to 100 GB overhead just to update certain games plus room for the OS. If you have a family then you literally have a situation like mine where I have 1 game installed to the PS5 and Warzone, Fortnite, Roblox, Rocket League, Fall Guys, and Marvel Rivals take up the rest of the console storage space
You referring to the expansion drives that slot in the back and are hotswappable? Most expensive storage medium I’ve ever bought. Problem was, there was no alternative… Internal storage ignored, ofc
Current gen games can’t be played from standard external storage. You could put the game there, but it would have to be moved to internal memory to play it.
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