With regards to Ciri’s age, she’s 21 during the main events in The Witcher 3.
At the end of the books she’s 17.
No idea if they’ll play down the salaciousness or not, but given when the game will likely take place that at least won’t be any issues with the main character being a minor.
If it means a return to random encounters, no absolutely not. There’s a reason I don’t go back and replay the older games even though I have fond memories of them. That reason is largely Zubat. Fuck you Zubat.
But also, aside from a handful of bugs and performance problems Scarlet/Violet and Legends: Arceus are the best the franchise has ever been. I’d rather they refine what they’re already doing and keep making things better rather then regress purely to appease someone’s misguided nostalgia.
I’ll believe HL:3 is real when it is for sale, purchased by me, and played in it’s entirety. And even then it might just be a particularly vivid delusion.
HL:3 is gaming’s dark matter. Until all other possibilities are definitively ruled out, it’s not HL:3.
This ‘edition’ (I feel a bit odd calling it an edition, like I’m selling you a newspaper or something) might focus more on some GOG news, so consider this more of a ‘lite’ news version I guess?...
Looks like it’s just the brand it’s sold under in that market.
I was more just pointing out that they are the same thing, since it wasn’t clear if you knew that or not and I think it’s important that people know what the drugs they’re taking actually are. Tends to be safer that way.
Hopefully, you’re either taking it as prescribed or having fun responsibly. Benzos can be fun, but they’re also some of the most addictive substances on the planet.
Also, these articles you’re posting are some quality writing.
At the time I’m writing this there are 78 comments in this comment section. I haven’t read all of them, so let’s just assume that every single one of those comments represents a unique individual who believes that the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck (and related) are direct competitors.
Given the nature of this platform and community that number is not even remotely surprising. It’s also an utterly insignificant number of people.
The overlap between people who would buy a Switch 2 and people who would buy a Steam Deck is a tiny sliver of a Venn diagram. Those are two largely separate categories of gamer.
I typed out the below as a response to you, then reread what you wrote. We might be making the same point just with different words. Hopefully I’m not coming across as overly adversarial.
I think most people on social media, including lemmy, exist in an echo chamber that amplifies specific views to the point that it becomes easy to think those views are much more broadly held then they actually are.
Changing the question around like you suggest might help some people realize that, but I also think that there are a lot of people who think that the views expressed in their slice of social media are actually indicative of broader trends.
I also don’t think I’m immune to this effect, but I do feel somewhat compelled to point out specific instances of it when I notice it.
Because graphics are the most important part of a game?
If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.
Based on the limited information we’ve gotten about ZA there’s no reason as of yet to doubt that it won’t be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.
Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin’s Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it’s a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.
I don’t disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it’s anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.
However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they’re willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.
I was more thinking of the N64 and GameCube games (Stadium 1&2, Colloseum, and XD Gale of Darkness) when referencing older games with poor graphics specifically. All four of those games were graphically inferior to other titles on the same consoles.
However, every single release has been plagued by bugs that can result in completely corrupted save data, softlocks, and a wide variety of other unexpected behaviors. Major examples being MissingNo and the other glitch pokemon, bad eggs, a wide variety of exploitable, but potentially save corrupting bugs like the infinite item glitches in gens 1-3, and a whole host of bugs that break how moves are supposed to work in battle.
Hell, shinies were originally a graphical bug in gen 2.
Technically, you’re allowed to make copies for personal use unless doing so requires bypassing DRM, encryption, or some other lockout mechanism.
Emulation is still not piracy and neither is making a personal backup, but if making that backup requires anything more than a standard disc drive or a cart reader then it is a DMCA violation.
The last three bioware games the last three mass effect games?
Of Bioware’s last three games, Andromeda sucked, Anthem was an atrocity, but Veilguard was decent, not great like classic Bioware games, but it wasn’t bad, it was at least fun to play and had a decent story and characters.
Of the last three Mass Effect games, Andromeda sucked, ME3 was great until the Horizon mission then it goes to absolute dog shit, and ME2 was great as a character driven RPG but feels a bit out of place in the franchise as a whole.
Only in the latter case do I really see a true downward trajectory. In the former there’s a tentative upward trend in the quality of Bioware’s games.
The game was solid from launch. When a game is an offline, single-player game, with no future content planned, and good QC from the get go, you don’t need a whole lot of updates. You just need to fix the bugs that pop up when the general public with their wide variety of hardware/software configs and gameplay styles that weren’t tested for get their hands on it.
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?
I have rewatched MGSV trailers multiple times, and I find this combination of 5+ minutes videos with scenes and music building the right atmosphere to be amazing. The other thing is, that for some, they created fake expectations of what story was going to be about....
Pocketpair goes on to say that Palworld has been claimed to infringe on three patents held by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company and that part of the damage is required as compensation....
Yeah, there was a great video on YouTube I saw a few days ago that went over why Sony is backing Pocket Pair, why Nintendo is making this case about patents, why that’s a massive risk for Nintendo, and why Nintendo is willing to take that risk.
It largely seemed to come down to the Nintndo-Sony rivalry that started when Nintendo backed out of the SNES era deal to create the PlayStation. Nintendo is trying to crush Sony’s potentially viable competitor to their largest franchise and are making the case a patent case because that’s the only route they can pursue. If they lose, Nintendo stands to lose those patents.
RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I’d play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with...
I don’t know about nowadays, but back in 2007 when I got bored with Runescape I switched to Guild Wars. Great MMO. Kind of dead playerwise now, but the servers are still up and it is soloable.
Currently, that is the case. Update 7 was supposed to have mod support for consoles as well, but that got delayed to a future patch. It’s coming though.
That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
A Blu-ray can hold up to 128GB. Most games aren’t bigger than that, though some are. And including multiple discs to fit the entire game used to be standard practice, and could still easily be done.
This is for DRM, online install for a physical game has always been solely for DRM.
Bit late to respond, but as someone else pointed out, physical PC games are virtually nonexistent. Even the collector’s edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 I recently bought came as a steam key and a disk with the steam client installer and a few files for the game to make Steam think the game is installed and force an update. I was pretty disappointed by that.
And no, most people don’t have a blu-ray drive or any kind of optical media reader in their PCs these days.
As for whether or not disks that large are printed on by publishers, most physical PS5 games are printed in disks of that capacity as are 4K blu-ray releases of movies.
I wouldn’t say I’m new to Ubisoft, more that they haven’t released a game I’ve been interested in playing since Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
As for day one patches being a necessity for games, I would argue that if a game has major game breaking bugs on final release (AKA launch day) then the game isn’t worth playing, much less spending money on.
If a game can’t even install on a system that meets its minimum requirements without needing a patch, then I’d say that’s a feature not a bug. Since it tells me that I should strongly reconsider purchasing anything from that publisher in the future.
"You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Would you like to see a mainline Pokemon game created in the old style? angielski
I’m talking about a new game but made with old graphics and mechanics similar to Megaman 9 & 10....
Half Life 3 (wccftech.com) angielski
Could it be true? We’ve all been waiting so long I’m very skeptical anytime I see articles like this but this actually looks good?
Steam Deck / Gaming News #12 angielski
This ‘edition’ (I feel a bit odd calling it an edition, like I’m selling you a newspaper or something) might focus more on some GOG news, so consider this more of a ‘lite’ news version I guess?...
Are PC handhelds like Steam Deck really competitors for Switch 2? (www.polygon.com) angielski
Pokemon Legends Z-A's visuals aren't "great" say former Nintendo marketing leads, but hope Switch 2 could allow Game Freak to "go back to the drawing board" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Nintendo has sent a DMCA notice to Ryujinx forks (lemmy.world) angielski
GitHub link to Nintendo’s claim - all the details you need are here...
Dragon Age: The Veilguard appears to receive its final update (smarfdurden.com) angielski
Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat? angielski
Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels...
What are your favourite trailers? angielski
I have rewatched MGSV trailers multiple times, and I find this combination of 5+ minutes videos with scenes and music building the right atmosphere to be amazing. The other thing is, that for some, they created fake expectations of what story was going to be about....
Larian revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has sold 2 copies in the Vatican (gamerant.com) angielski
Pocketpair Confirms Which Patents Nintendo And The Pokemon Company Are Suing It Over (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Pocketpair goes on to say that Palworld has been claimed to infringe on three patents held by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company and that part of the damage is required as compensation....
Corporate greed is killing RuneScape. What do people play instead? angielski
RuneScape was my favorite game of all time when I was a kid. I’d play it for at least 8 hours a day every day, and never get bored. Now, RuneScape is RuneScape 3, terribly infested gambling microtransaction mess that looks like a really bad early access game, or Oldschool RuneScape, which is really fun, but is infested with...
Baldur's Gate 3 level editor is cracked open by modders, bringing homebrew campaigns one step closer (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers (www.bbc.com) angielski
Valve Corporation is being accused of using its market dominance to overcharge 14 million people in the UK....
Star Wars Outlaws Requires The Internet To Install It (kotaku.com) angielski
Halo Infinite Update to Bring Networking Overhaul, Easy Anti-Cheat, and More Next Week (techraptor.net) angielski