It’s not that I trust Valve. It’s that I distrust them the least when compared to the other giant companies out there. And I already have 90% of my games on Steam.
I trust GOG the most, but Steam is solidly second-most. Guaranteed that if Epic had their way, the PC gaming landscape would be just as trash as the console one, if not moreso.
Valve could definitely go off the deep end after Gabe is gone, and that’s why good third-party competition is still healthy. But for right now, they’re one of the few large companies I’ve seen that aren’t on the enshittification warpath.
I too prefer GOG, but the fact that they still haven’t made a native linux port of GOG Galaxy causes me to mostly use Steam. I usually use GOG for indie stuff and thingsI want without it being tied to a launcher or DRM.
Oh, and I recently bought Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 there, as I felt it was about time I gave Chris Sawyer some money for all the fun the pirated version I downloaded 25 years ago have provided.
Have you tried the Heroic Games Launcher? It’s currently the most advanced launcher for GOG games on Linux, even implementing support for some of GOG Galaxy’s online services. Additionally it’s officially affiliated with GOG, so you can “donate” to the project by purchasing games through the client.
I have not. In fact, I’d never even heard of it until you mentioned it.
But I sure as hell will give it a go now that I am aware of its existence. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, I feel like I trust Steam as long as Gabe is calling the shots at Valve. I’m sure it helps that they’re a private company. Hopefully whoever takes over after him will have learned the lesson that you can make a nearly unimaginable amount of money in this industry without putting the screws to the consumer. If they were public or let the business “experts” in I’m sure there would be all sorts of moves to extract more money from customers that would end my trust, but I feel like overall I have a couple of decades of experience at this point that Valve isn’t actively trying to hurt me.
Oh crap… you bring up a good point. How long do we think Gave has left? There is absolutely no way Steam won’t get worse after that happens. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.
It’s also that they put out a product I actually find value from like Linux support, Steam Input, forums, workshop, etc. I enjoy using Steam because I find it to be a good experience.
It’s like reasons people prefer Android or Apple even if they share the same apps. Really can’t discount the experience simple things like navigation and social features do to add value. Those who dismiss it as unimportant probably share the same views as some MBA who only looks at the numbers and think they can just enter and corner a market through brute force spending.
I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And…
Lenny indeed lacks some casual fucks, almost every thread has some extreme opinions. I had someone unironically try to explain to me why it would be beneficial to the human race to go extinct.
Ok so, I didn’t enjoy Skyrim as much as I enjoyed Morrowind, in fact I never finished it; I skipped Oblivion 'cause at the time it came out I… had other things to deal with.
I liked FO3 (weirdly, I liked it better than FONV), but in my opinion the new ones don’t hold a candle to the first two.
I agree almost 100% with you on this. I did play Oblivion, but Skyrim has the more interesting world IMO which makes it a slightly better game. The strength of Bethesda games that makes them good, in my opinion, is the same every time: explore a large interesting world with your own created character. This explains (in part) why people like Morrowind so much: the world is just so weird and interesting.
The problem is they don’t know how to improve on that concept. Instead they are mostly adding features that either don’t add anything to it or actively detract from it. For example, Fallout 4 received settlement building and weapon crafting. But, the time I’m spending on my town, I’m not actually out exploring. If I can craft weapons, I care less about the cool weapons I find in dungeons. Now, Starfield got rid of most of the crafted world altogether in exchange for procedural planets that aren’t interesting to explore at all.
Aan an aside, I don’t think it even makes sense to compare the first two fallout games with the Bethesda ones. Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.
Fallout 3 and beyond are not really sequels, they’re a completely different series set in the same universe.
I would argue they’re not even the same universe. While F1 had its share of of people living in post-war rubble, by F2 the world was mostly newly-build cities or primitive societies but there was a sense of progress, like having actual money (and by Tactics paper money was in everyday use). Then F3 comes and everyone is living in a pile of rubbish, with unreadable burnt pre-war books on their shelves like they want to pretend the world is how it used to be, nevermind that generations have passed, and everyone is back to trading in caps.
Yeah, that’s weird of the new Fallout games, there’s people sleeping on 200-years old mattresses (what are they made of, asbestos?). I get the destruction, and I understand how they may not be able to rebuild civilization to the old standards for a long while, but ffs, at least patch your walls!
There’s an industry to make new guns but people just step over the skeleton in the lobby of the half-collapsed hotel the three dozen residents call “Halftower” without a drop of irony.
Sports games suck (almost always) so no thanks. I’m sorry that you’re this sensitive to people who don’t take every opportunity to talk shit about Bethesda. It is a fact that they’ve released some incredible games and also that they actually don’t owe anyone anything at all
I love Bethesda, what are you on about? See, that’s why making assumptions is bad lol.
No they don’t owe anyone anything. Unless you consider the fact that a company owes fans a good product or else they lose those fans. Like I said, I love Bethesda, but I’m not a blind fan boy. I can see them slipping with each new release. Do you think Fallout 76, with its issues and lies they told about it never having P2W is good? So you think a huge number of barren planets adds and entertainment value? They need to start doing better because they can’t rely on their past success forever.
I don’t think they ever said that. It’s their “first new IP” in 25 years, and was “in production” since 2013, likely just planning stages. In reality, production only really started after FO76, when more people were available to do actual work.
For me, the visuals are a huge part of gaming, i simply don’t like the style of most indie games go for. The “artsy” stylistic graphics, the 80’s inspired pixel graphics, the simple polygon graphic is all indie games seem to choose between these days, and in personally hate looking at it.
I agree, I’m looking for immersion and story. That said, I’m also willing to wait a few months for devs to fix all the bugs they should have removed before the rushed release dates.
"Choose" isn't really an accurate term to use in your comment though, is it? Obviously high-realism AAA game graphics are going to come with a high budget outside the realm of possibility for the average indie dev, unless they have some super talented people with a passion for the project working for cheap.
A lot of us are willing to make this concession or adjust expectations for an experience that has great gameplay, soundtrack, story, etc. as easily as reading subtitles to enjoy a foreign film. The imagination can do plenty of the heavy lifting.
There’s a few indie titles that are developed by one person and maybe a handful of part timers or freelance people. Turbo Overkill and HROT(Single dev working is Pascal). Most of the time, the retro art style works to the design of the game. Ion Fury uses a opensource fork of the Build Engine(Duke Nuken 3d) and leans heavily into the 90’s idea of Cyberpunk and 90’s pop culture in general. Dusk is a Quake-like, but I had more immersion in the smooth gameplay then I would in a HD game where the hardware can’t keep up with the optimized graphics engine.
Meh. Today’s realistic graphics is tomorrow’s retro graphics. If a game was fun ten years ago, it’s fun today. If it was only playable ten years ago because of the graphics, but isn’t it playable today, it wasn’t fun in the first place.
This I do not understand. I am sure a ton of people pre-ordered Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty even though we know how it launched. (And I love the game, I followed all the news, but even I could wait for a fckin day to wait for the reviews)
The strategy to this is to buy so much crap on Steam and Humble Bundle that you don’t have time to pre-order AAA games.
For example, I love Borderlands series, and I have so many games to play that I could easily wait for TTW to be on sale - lo and behold, 10 bucks in a Humble Monthly with all the DLCs, and extra 7 games with it aswell. Banger.
It baffles me how anyone can stand to preorder any game with the market being so oversaturated. There are SO MANY great games on a constant $20 or less sale rotation you'll probably never have a chance to play if you're a full-time working adult. I'm worried about grabbing a highly acclaimed title that's been out for 5 years before it fades into obscurity, and I have to stumble upon a shout-out 3 years later to be reminded of its existence. Not about some stupid launch skin bonus, or OST mp3s you'll never click open.
Larian is an unusual case. It's indie but it's huge. They aren't funded by or marketing through a bigger publishing company so IMO that's still indie. But they're hundreds of people so not really small, and BG3 can by all means be considered a AAA game because the difference in quality and scale is indistinguishable from AAA published games.
I still play AAA games occasionally, but I’ve enjoyed gaming so much more since I got more selective with them.
ToTK was worthwhile, but even for the newest entry in my favorite series since childhood, (from a developer with a pretty good track record for their games) I still waited a week to see if any launch bugs needed to be ironed out.
I can’t even remember the last AAA game I bought before that.
Sorry, but the other methods are demonstrably better at it. We didn't arrive at them by accident. There are outliers like Civilization keeping people hooked for years; the people still playing Skullgirls all these years later sure aren't doing it for any type of reward system. But the fast track to keeping people playing your game is to use all the scummy bullshit.
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Even just text adventure style games, wireframe arcade style games, bullethells, shooters like Vampire Survivor & etc, visual novels, syuff like Undertale, whatever? I think it’s clear that a low budget or small team doesn’t equate to unpopularity these days, if the game is made with care and attention to detail.
We do have series now but they’re high budget and long and kind of also trying to be the 1 mega game at the same time.
There’s also a lot of options for reaching new/underserved audience. Like. Make a high quality horse game for once, please? And profit off a bazillion horse girls who’ve been waiting for just that for decades.
Or make games for other countries that don’t have a big video games market yet, maybe. Like sell a console real cheap, at a loss, and then sell games in an area where there’s less competition? Maybe.
I wonder why they haven’t tried the model airport books and comics use, though. We could do it with games at this point. Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
I think that's exactly what Fortnite and Destiny 2 do, even though I object to the way they do it for so many reasons.
Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Urban Games currently does this with Transport Fever. They flat out said while hyping the release of Transport Fever 2 (which was their third transport tycoon style game) that their goal as a development studio is to make the best transportation tycoon game they can. So they intend to continuously iterate.
N3V Games, who developes the Trainz simulator game was literally formed to buy up the property and talent from its original developer Auran and continue the franchise
There’s a third example I was going to give but got distracted while writing this comment and forgot
One example might be Fnaf (before security breach or help wanted), since they are relatively simple, short games made by one guy, not on high budget. Most of them launched like 3-6 months after each other, keeping up interest in the series.
Something big aaa games also miss is the creativity, since a cool gimick can be implemented as a main mechanic in a 1-2 hour game, since it doesnt over stay its welcome.
So yeah, most games are getting too long for their own good (like ubi sandbox games), not to mention the ‘games as a service’ games.
a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games
As much as I prefer this model that actually isn’t what creates engagement and retains players over several games and years. They don’t do it because it’s fun to make predatory things. They do it because it makes them heaps of money. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it. That’s the sad truth here.
Re: hats and paint jobs…hats dominated TF2 for how long? There was a black market and widespread scamming for cosmetics, that’s how nuts it got.
Imagine you’re a gamer, one who is interested in game Design. Your view history has games, gaming, game design, but it’s also full of algotrash talking heads, scam baiters, shit slingers. You open the YouTube app on your phone, and it immediately opens to shorts, you don’t remember settings that as the default but it’s fine, you recognize the creator and the 45 second clip was neat. Swipe up. Next video, it Nile Blue dropping a beaker of chloroauric acid. Next video, its Chris Boden yelling about some kind of electrical infrastructure you don’t understand (and that’s pretty cool). Next video, Thor, speaking softly, explaining an aspect of game design that you never thought of. This one catches your attention, its in your wheelhouse, its something you’re genuinely interested in. You click the profile, swipe through a few more shorts. Your algorithm is permanently damaged. Your a pirate software fan now, whether you like it or not.
Or you can use freetube and never see algotrash talking heads in your feed and never enter into this cycle.
Downvoting requires you: A. Click into the video
B. Select the downvote button, thereby engaging with the video
The algorithm is not designed to feed you content you like, only content that will generate clicks and interaction. The only way to eliminate that content from your feed is to forcibly remove it, as they have designed the feed such that it is impossible not to interact with it.
Again, I suggest trying freetube as a frontend, as it allows you to retitle and rethumbnail clickbait videos, and remove shorts from your feeds, thereby eliminating the skinner box that is youtube from your life.
They hide it, but they do have RSS Feeds for each channel. I follow all the channels that interest me via my feed reader and only interact with the site to watch the videos. I never click any links to anywhere and am not logged in.
With videos, yes, but not with shorts. It’s like TikTok where you swipe, but you have like and dislike buttons as well. I dislike all AI slob, Nile, nearly all of that shitty promoted stuff, but still get these.
Same with Spotify, my weekly mix rarely contains more than 1 song I actually listen to (metal, punk, hardstyle, hardcore) yet it gives me hardbass and this kind of genre where all you hear is distorted over-amplified bass every third of a second and that’s it… I dislike like a tinderella
I really fucking hate that, too. The algorithm is so fucking vile and evil.
I cant even watch the content i want to watch on youtube, like fishing and guns (with the exception of forgotten weapons and InRange, which the algorithm doesnt seem to view as gateways to right wing indoctrination (cause they arent) and seem to be safe… at least for now.), because if I so much as hover my mouse over one of the thumbnails of that kind of content, I immediately get blasted with 3 months of right wing extremist pseudo-intellectual diarrhea that I cant escape without completely resetting my browser.
but if I spend an evening watching retrogaming stuff? Oh fuck, Youtube just completely ignores that and pretends it never saw me show interest in that.
Never talked shit about about Chris, love the guy, but its absolutely true that he partakes in the same clickbaity tendencies that lead us to this problem in the first place.
i don’t watch him but i hope this isn’t about what he did in wow because the sheer fact that anyone even gives a shit seems wild to me. but hey i hate MMOs so maybe that’s why.
is there other reasons people don’t/shouldn’t like him or is it just vibes
It’s not because he did anything wrong in wow that people are upset/memeing about, it’s because he’s unable to say “I’m sorry, I could have done better” without including any buts or “the others also messed up”. It has just exposed him as an incredibly self obsessed person.
on that part sorry i still don’t care. it’s a child’s game; there’s nothing to apologize for. but his comments on stop killing games and accused farms are bad.
I’ve seen him described elsewhere as “a poor man’s idea of a rich man” and I think it’s accurate.
With that said, I don’t think it’s his fault the petition failed, people just don’t care usually.
edit: To give more context, Pirategames literally does not know what the Stop Killing Games movement is about, he thinks it’s only about single-player games being always-online (yes that’s a component of it but not the whole thing) and converting multiplayer games to be offline-playable single-player games but it does NOT mention that anywhere because it is NOT about that. However, I guarantee you that Pirategames will not admit that he was mistaken about his understanding of the Stop Killing Games movement, he will instead double and triple down and insist that he had the correct understanding of it. lol
So they should omit the tech demo because people can’t read? Nah. And what was wrong with the Witcher 3‘s launch? Is this about the color grading again?
They’ve come out and said specifically this is a tech demo in the world of the Witcher 4 but its not actually witcher 4 the game. As in, they’re showing off the new tech, like foliage nanite.
The Eldenring and Silksong communities’ collective mental health deteriorating bottomlessly up to the release date announcements will forever be one of my favourite parts of internet history.
I’ve played Lunacid! It was good, but the limited equipment slots (just your weapon and two rings) meant it didn’t have the same feeling of gradual progression that Kings Field had. Haven’t played Tears of the Moon yet.
I would definitely have preferred armor but I found the weapon and spell progression to be really good up until it kinda just stops maybe 80% through ending A. Although I think making the “use it until it upgrades” explicit was a mistake since it encourages you to stick with one. Rather than learning, 10 hours in, that the starting sword was actually OP.
And entering the catacombs from the wrong (right?) direction is the kind of bullshit From aspires to. Pitch black, invisible enemies that feel like they are respawning, all just constantly rushing you from every direction as they walk through walls. And you are just struggling to find the torches while feeling like you are getting smacked with a greatsword every step you take.
I’ve heard REALLY good things about that short game where you play as a bug in a bug kingdom but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I was in both communities at the time… Only the OGs will remember when the only thing we had to go off of Elden Ring was a random rumor that called it Great Rune.
I don’t think it will suck. It will just be “more Hollow Knight” - which is perfectly fine and what people should have been expecting. Don’t think it will live up to the irrational hype though unless it’s literally the best game ever made.
I haven’t played Outer Wilds yet, but I loved The Outer Worlds, so I’m all on board for this. I have my doubts that Microsoft will want Obsidian to launch Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 in the same year though.
I’ve been deterred for so long because Majora’s Mask was perhaps the most violent reaction I had to playing a video game, and Outer Wilds does the Majora’s Mask thing.
The one mechanic is similar, yes. But the gameplay and exploration are drastically different.
I can’t praise the game enough… it’s just so good.
For example. You’re in a dungeon and then it happens and you go back.
In some ways something happens when you’re pulling on some thread. There’s no dungeons, no goal (explicitly). You are exploring and as you learn more you realize there’s areas to check out because they’ll answer some question you have about what happened or why something is the way it is.
In this case perhaps the mechanic occurs and you find yourself briefly annoyed. But then you go back to the spot, this time things are in a different place and state and you realize something happens that allows you to go further which leads to another thread/mystery.
And then you’re off. As time goes on you learn to accept and then even invite it. More and more you unravel deeper mysteries, learning what and why and then seeing earlier conclusions in a new light.
Why it’s happening, how it’s happening, what can be done and can’t, etc. it’s really a one of a kind experience.
I went and edited more into the answer. Trying to capture the feeling about it so that they aren’t afraid of being annoyed. Hopefully I handled it gingerly enough.
I love the idea of the game, and started playing it. But realistically it needs you to commit to some continuous time otherwise you forget what you’ve learned, and I haven’t had the time yet. I played it for a few days, explored lots of places but didn’t learned anything, possibly I was looking on the wrong planets and trying to figure out how to do it right on that planet got frustrated because I didn’t have something that was needed, or something… But I do love the idea of the game, and I want to go in blind. But some of those puzzles can be really frustrating when you only have a few minutes per day and forgot all about them by the next time you try to solve them.
Just keep pecking at it! Unravel each thread until you’re stuck then grab a hint from somewhere and keep going, I had to come back to Outer Wilds after starting it once initially and giving up, and I’m glad I finished it. Especially the DLC.
Use your ship log, it’ll remind you of all the clues you’ve found so far and how they connect together. But I agree it’s better to play continuously without large time gaps to keep everything you’ve learned fresh.
It’s so funny to be reminded of that period in the 90s where any first person game was described as a “DOOM clone”, because DOOM itself was the first FPS that hugely took off.
If it means that it’s talking about society, every story ever written is political in some way. But we all know in this context it means “stuff I don’t like”.
TBH that goes both ways too. How many people would be upvoting and praising this video if it was coming at the topic from the other direction politically? I would bet it would be a LOT of people here. I get frustrated at hearing everything called “woke” too, but if people are going to ask one “side” to check their biases, they should be able to do the same for themselves.
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