yeah at the time you were forced into it. the won servers were shut down and most peoples computers werent good enough to play CS and have this clunky software running in the background at the same time. it worked but alt-tabbing back then was a gong show and you definitely had the performance hit.
i played CS daily then so the first day was a shit show and I dont think I got much time in that day. mostly just trying to get connected…the servers were overloaded.
I pirated almost any game that required it, only ended up signing up in 2018 I don’t remember why at the time but I don’t think it was to buy games since I didn’t buy any until almost a year after creating the account.
I thought it was great. I got a physical copy of the Orange Box for $20 and didn’t care that I had to install Steam to play it. After I had it set up and realized I didn’t have to physically go to the store to get games anymore, I like it even more.
Not me - the moment when buying a game outright is no longer an option is the moment when I stop paying for video games. I already have a large library on Steam (1,700+), GoG (400+), and I’m not planning on buying any Playstation or Xbox products. I’ve never paid for Xbox game pass, or PS plus, nor do I plan to. They can scheme all day long, hike the prices every week, I already buy games only if they’re on a really deep discount or in a bundle. Never paid more than 30 bucks for a game, and I could count on one of my hands how many I paid more than 20 bucks for.
I do, of course, realize that I’m in the minority, but hopefully more people will realize how big of a scam these subscription services are.
I don’t know, I don’t think the PS Plus one is a scam. I subscribed to the mid tier one when it was cheaper for a whole year than to buy a game I wanted to play that was included with it. I’ve played a good half dozen to dozen games in the year I’ve had it. I feel like I’ve definitely got my money’s worth out of it.
I was mostly referring to the last part of the article where the author explains the entire long-term plan behind the subscription services - first they offer a large variety of games for a low price, then they squeeze the customers for every single penny after they’ve cornered the market.
See how Netflix work out their hike etc? I don’t think it would continue to work in their favor to meet the profit/sub count projection to make their stocker holder happy.
the moment when buying a game outright is no longer an option is the moment when I stop paying for video games.
That moment will not come. That would mean that every single indie developer had come under the umbrella of such subscription services and not one bigger actor would want to try to differentiate from the competition.
Gamepass isn’t a scam right now in my view. I’m able to get 50 day passes for 7 bucks right now. Once gamepass starts being more expensive than buying the games I want I’ll just go back to doing that.
Once game pass starts being more expensive than buying the games I want, I'll just go back to doing that
You may not have that option. The business model here is to burn cash, get consumers used to gamepass, then get games onto gamepass exclusively (likely in exchange for higher payouts from the service). Once we are at that point, which may be years away, prices will rise and there won't be another avenue to play most games.
This is the model right now for shows, and some movies, they are produced for streaming services and are only available on those services.
Most games already don't get physical releases. All that needs to happen to eliminate choice is that gamepass makes publishers a better offer than Steam - then there isn't a digital release either.
I think that kind of action is what would get regulators on Microsoft’s back which is why they started selling games on third-party platforms like Steam. Could be wrong though.
They are playing with fire… most games don’t require computer level graphics/cpu power. If they aren’t careful they will lose their shirt to mobile gaming and console gaming will turn into an unpopular niche thing of the past.
Yeah, people online have been talking for a long time about how exploitive Roblox is. However, it’s still very popular and I know many parents who let their kids play it. I think most parents just think it’s like Minecraft, and don’t realize the effect micro transactions has.
I’m a bachelor in my 30’s, Roblox wouldn’t have been targeted at me, but my children…which I don’t have. So the first I heard of Roblox was a Youtube video essay titled something to the effect of “I made a video about how exploitative Roblox is, and then it got worse.”
Makes sense that he’s done with the work part of being so intimately linked to a character. He has done so much voice work over the years. But I must say I really love that he’s still going to be Mario but in a much more laid back role as Ambassador, he deserves his retirement and it was kinda expected after the Mario Movie cameo.
Pathing should be low hanging fruit here. Most NPCs don’t need accurate pathing, and can use a much faster algorithm to calculate. Hopefully the devs do a round of optimizations for late game content since that seems to be where most of the issues are.
We don’t know how their NPCs are built though. The pathing seems to be the same for every NPC that moves, so I bet its baked in somewhere up the inheritance tree. They already use ocular occlusion to take down some of the clutter out of view. The fact is the city probably pushes the limits of the engine in its current state.
Oh it’s certainly pushing it to the limits, which is why they need to change things. If it’s pathing, they have a ton of options to make it smoother, since most NPCs don’t need fancy pathing logic.
That’s optimal if you want to find the best path to a destination, but NPCs milling about a town don’t need the best path, they just need to move toward their goal more or less. And most go on a mostly fixed route, so you can just store the ideal path in memory and let the NPC evade up to some distance from that path.
This makes it a lot more friendly to do a multi-threaded implementation since you don’t need to figure out collision avoidance until it’s about to happen, just look a few steps ahead and course correct as needed.
Enemies should use proper pathing, but NPCs don’t need to be anywhere near that sophisticated.
But I have no idea what they’re actually doing under the hood, it’s just concerning that it gets slow when the player moves without interacting with any NPCs.
Yeah but with how optimal the game is are they really not using waypoints for jobber npcs already? This game runs extremely well. That seems like a hell of an oversight. Thats why i figured the pathfinding was baked in somewhere higher up or something.
Edit: I really don’t think it is pathing. These models have insane LoD. I’m thinking they tuned it since D:OS2 but its the same engine. I bet its just compounding factors of high polygons, environmental effects (the earthquakes) and NPCs just existing in high number on top of that. There is more than double the amount of NPCs inside the city than anywhere else in the game.
In the Digital Foundry review, they saw huge performance dips when just running in small circles, when standing still had no impact. As in, on a high end system, performance dropped from ~90FPS to mid-60s, just by moving in a tight circle (i.e. not enough to actually move the camera).
That sounds a lot like pathing to me, though other things could certainly be causing it.
It just seems like something there is poorly optimized and it shows when there are a lot of NPCs around.
And the game essentially uses last gen tech (DX11, no RTX, performance drop on Vulkan, etc), so it’s not pushing the boundaries all that much, so it’s probably not fully optimized. It should be feasible to optimize it to at least not get FPS dips when moving vs standing still in towns, if not get a bit better performance on older CPUs (e.g. Zen 2 CPUs like 3600 and whatever is in the Steam Deck). It runs pretty well, it they could probably get a bit more.
Pushing the boundaries of the engine is different than pushing the boundaries of the industry. Maybe it could be the pathfinding. But movement doesn’t necessarily mean its pathfinding. I’m sure transforming all those polygons costs more computationally than pathfinding.
But why only when the player is moving? Surely the NPCs are also moving all the time, so just moving the player and maybe nudging the party members (so like 4 new characters moving?) shouldn’t drop frames by ~30%. Something seems off there.
I hope they figure it out and patch it, because it would really impact the experience on lower end hardware, like the Steam Deck (i.e. stable 30 FPS vs stutters in the late game).
This article leaves a lot to be desired imo. Some of the stuff in here you can see is incorrect just from launching into the main menu of the game.
Here is my personal take on Star Citizen as someone who’s been following the project from the beginning:
If it’s something that interests you, you should wait for a free fly weekend and try it out. The game is far from done but it’s fleshed out enough now that you can have fun if it’s your thing. If you think it’s not worth buying, don’t buy it. Then you can come back on the next free weekend to check it out again and see the progress.
Everything else is just noise. Yes the game has raised a lot of money, yes there has probably been mismanagement and development has been slow. Yes there’s still a ways to go before feature completeness.
TLDR: Who cares. Go play it if it’s your thing and have fun, or don’t and just forget about it until they hit 1.0 sometime who knows when.
People who paid money expecting the promised timelines instead of useless feature creep, care very much. In fact people cared so much that CIG changed the user agreement to no longer allow refunds.
They took a stupid amount of money from people all while promising timelines that were never kept, and a game that I doubt will ever see completion before bankruptcy.
They need to stop throwing money and precious development time on minuscule features when their alpha can barely run on modern hardware without taking 10min to load and crashing shortly thereafter.
I hope that I am wrong about SC and the game does come out some day, because I will absolutely love the game in stable form; but the last few years have been painting a very grim picture of SC’s future
Fun fact, the user agreement doesn’t mean anything in Australia. Australian’s can get a refund any time they want because legally we cannot sign away our rights.
I got a refund a while back after I discussed this point, and my grievances with their broken promises, delivery failures and increasingly hostile sales tactics with RSIs (at the time) Director of Player Retention, Will Leverett.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. I think they should definitely give refunds to folks but that’s also the risk you take with backing a project. I’ve had plenty of disappointment with backing games, I don’t consider SC in that category but I can definitely understand people who do.
If they give me a refund I will stop caring, until then you don't really get to say 'who cares, forget about it for another decade'. I paid money for a product that still doesn't exist and is more than 8 years overdue, and that's even without getting into the discussion about whether the PU is worth it or not - where is sq42?
People paid money because they were promised a finished game by 2014. It’s still nowhere near finished. It hasn’t had an estimated release date for years.
Sure, if you enjoy the game at its current state, fine. No one should take that joy away from you.
This article was the same paragraph over and over. “Lot money, lot time, no game, please say date.” I didn’t really learn anything about the situation or controversies.
Whaaaaaaat!?!? I thought this was a small update? Seasonal changes to characters, new festivals (I think these are both firsts) plus new quests? Can someone please check on CA and make sure he hasn’t literally burnt out from all the work he is doing to get people quality content?
Stardew had 100% ruined my expectations of games. I didn’t even want to play the Story of Seasons game that got released on GamePass and that was the game that got me into farming sims (the original Harvest Moon version).
I absolutely love their client and prefer GOG over Steam. I remember how their client GOG Galaxy is highly praised in the developer community, because it is so well designed and runs so performant. It also allows you to play any previous versions of games you own.
What has GOG done for Linux? I care about OSS and companies supporting my preferred OSS operating system. To that end, Valve continues to be a steward without peer.
Yes, i’m sure it’s a lot of work to move game engines but time and time again it’s the same story. Closed source anything is free until the easy money has been sucked up so why even bother with anything closed source?
Sooner society stops feeding the greed, hopefully the sooner we get back to a sustainable society!
Part of the problem are the stockholders who expect the shares to go up in price every time. If it starts dipping down enough a huge portion of them will pull their shares and bankrupt the company. This causes companies to mostly think in the short term cause it’s better to make a bit more money than be bankrupt.
Still trying to shoehorn in a "runtime fee". That's not going to work and with this model it's pointless anyway. Just make it a 4% revenue for sales after $1 million. Same end results (actually potentially more in fees) without all the runtime issues. Make it apply only to a specific version and later and after a certain date and then you also don't have the retroactive problem and the massive blowback.
It works for that market too even without install fees, you just make it a percentage of revenue generated from microtransactions. It's still tied to the game.
Quick math shows that's irrelevant with a 4% revenue cap, as I pointed out in my original comment, and at best they will be paid the same as just doing a 4% revenue fee. More likely they will get some amount less than 4% from most devs.
The only reason I see for them going this route instead is to claim they are still royalty free, install fees aren't royalties. Which is BS anyway.
Calling DA2 serviceable is probably some of the highest praise it’s received. The game is steaming dookie. It took out every single thing that made Origins a masterpiece and gave us a dialogue wheel and an entire game made of 5 copy+pasted rooms. Also a nonsensical main plot with no real player agency and the most forgettable ending of all.
DAI is mid af but it looks like a God damn masterpiece next to DA2.
If they hadn’t reused the maps it’d been remembered as one of the greats.
I also thought the balance on Nightmare or whatever was an atrocious mix of ubertank enemies and getting one-shot by rogues but the actual story and companions were fantastic.
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, he could have indeed been a well meaning mage just trying to live under templar thumbs? Instead of also being exactly the smoking gun?
The Orsino fight doesn’t make much sense if you side with the mages - there was no reason for him to go Akira monster when he did. Even BioWare acknowledged how little sense it made, in a conversation you can have with Varric in Inquisition.
Listen, it might’ve looked cheap as fuck, but I found a certain charm in the “every dungeon interior is just one of three dungeons with different parts blocked off”. Plus the combat flowed really well. I played that whole game through like… 5 times. One right after the other.
If you play it after coming off Mass Effect 1, the “every colony bunker or mine is one of three options” regardless of the planet just becomes part of that Old BioWare’s aesthetic.
Great ideas, cool combat system, great art style and graphics, ruined by writing that was somehow chaotic and utterly predictable at the same time and stupid ass kill ten rats/fetch 10 letters filler quests.
games
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.