Katana314

@Katana314@lemmy.world

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Katana314,

I gave Linux another shot this past month. It was a lot better than I remembered, but still not good enough, basically in the reliability areas. I wish the experience was “it all just works” like so many have said.

I may not mind giving it another try when Windows Recall goes live.

Katana314,

Priority one is having a working computer. Priority two is evading future spyware.

Priority three is using an OS where seeking support for issues doesn’t produce the reply “Sounds like you fucked something up, idiot, because it works perfectly for me!”

Katana314,

You’re saying this to someone who took the time to format a drive to install Linux, read up on recommended partition structure, and take the time tweaking desktop settings to my preference, in genuine hope it would become a daily driver so I could stop using Windows. All of that effort still wasn’t enough.

The quote wasn’t pointed to you, but it was a generalized view of how seeking help turns out. Your above comment, and this one, are showing the same thing: You, and Linux users in general, need only the tiniest justification to belittle someone for not being a 100% Linux devotee/apologist.

Katana314,

I used Linux Mint 21 first, which didn’t (correctly) support my ancient wi-fi card or graphics driver. I then tried 22, which was much better, but failed to run a number of games, exhibiting a variety of issues not listed on ProtonDB.

I then switched to Bazzite, which ran those same games correctly, but its OS-integrated file explorer was oversimplified far past what Windows does, it failed to install several Linux-native applications, alt-tab behavior was frequently glitchy around games, and often I would come back from sleep mode with bizarre graphical glitches forcing me to restart.

I’m not even highlighting the poor usability, or the stuff I might be able to reconfigure. I’m okay with taking time to tweak my OS how I want it, but not when that’s just a matter of having it work correctly.

Katana314,

Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.

Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.

Katana314,

It’s not just trust of the game developer. I honestly believe most of them just want to put out profitable games. It’s trust that a hacker won’t ever learn how to sign their code in a way that causes it to be respected as part of the game’s code instructions.

There was some old article about how a black hat found a vulnerability in a signed virtual driver used by Genshin Impact. So, they deployed their whole infection package together with that plain driver to computers that had never been used for video games at all; and because Microsoft chose to trust that driver, it worked.

I wish I could find an article on it, since a paraphrased summary isn’t a great source. This is coming from memory.

Katana314,

If server validation was still a common practice (as it should be) then cheats wouldn’t come in the form of speed hacks, teleportation hacks, or invincibility. The traditional thing in CS that was hard to prevent is aimhacks and wallhacks. I respect that those are hard to prevent, but they can be much less impactful in modern hero shooters.

Katana314,

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Katana314,

The funny thing is, I hear that Concord at least worked on a basic level. It was visually high fidelity, guns worked, and it wasn’t terribly buggy, which is more than a lot of popular releases can say. But, of course, it offered nothing new and the character design was terrible.

Stories and Mechanics around punishing over-aggression angielski

For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up “turtling”, dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible....

Katana314,

Some games that come to mind:

Dead by Daylight has an issue with killers that keep their focus on one of the four survivors, ignoring the core objectives and other players. Worse, it often works well. There are many videos out there of experienced teams that find karmic counters for this practice, helping the victim escape the killer to some completely unknown location on the map, and often leaving the killer late-game with little to work with.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a 4v3 horror game), on the other hand, developed some issues where the prevailing strategies for the victims involve stacking up abilities that let them ignore attacks so there’s no need to hide or move slowly. It ends up taking long enough for the family members to even strike them down that some will brute-force objectives right in the family’s face. Part of the game’s issues is, the maps are developed to be relatively tight, so there’s fewer places for family to check, but it also made stealth strategies relatively ineffective.

An old favorite of mine for countering “Rush Meta” is in Team Fortress 2. For single players hoping to run past players to objectives, the Engineer’s sentry locks on to them pretty quickly, and no matter how fast they’re moving, it spells death within a certain bubble. Being automated, it also means no one has to camp for this to stay around. The sentries still die to inexperienced players that are making a unified push.

TF2’s other “rush punisher” is the Heavy - a class with a low skill cap, but a high health pool. He deals ludicrous damage up close, but can’t move quickly. So, he’s most lethal to people that are running at/past him instead of attacking from a distance. He says it right in his intro - he can’t outsmart people. He’s just a strong presence in a push for anyone that doesn’t have a plan to slow themselves down in order to deal the ton of damage needed to kill him. For a long time, in matches where the enemy team stuck to having 3 pyros rushing the frontline, my sole strategy was to pile up on Heavy, forcing the enemy team to consider ranged attackers like Demoman and Sniper, slowing the game down as a result.

Katana314,

Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it’s not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.

Basically, fighting games don’t have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There’s fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don’t require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don’t involve much decision-making.

I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don’t know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it’s basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.

Are any games using neural networks for better hard AI that doesn't cheat? angielski

Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision...

Katana314,

The most advanced AI I’ve seen is in Hitman WoA, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Both games don’t have “learning” AI. They just have tons of rules that the player can reasonably expect and interact with, that make them seem lifelike. If a guard sees you throw a coin twice in Hitman, he doesn’t get suspicious and investigate - he goes and picks it up just like the first one. Same for reactions to finding guns, briefcases, or your exploding rubber duck.

World of Warcraft adds $90 mount to in game store (lemmy.world) angielski

I thought this was a joke but it seems like it’s actually legit. WoW, which has a subscription and paid expansions, just added a $90 item to their store. This is Korean MMO levels of absurdity. What do you think of this?...

Katana314,

I’ve known about the gold tokens system, it has made sense as a way to invalidate black market gold sellers, equalizing WoW gold against the US Dollar. Still don’t quite understand why the token would now sell for 170k though…? Unless you didn’t mean to use the dollar symbol.

Marvel's Midnight Suns is criminally underrated angielski

I’ve been playing it for a good couple months and I’m still nowhere near tired of it, I’ll actually replay the whole game once I beat it because it’s so much fun. Love the story and voice acting too. This game goes on sale a lot so I’d highly suggest getting jt for cheap and trying it out

Katana314,

I got the impression the writers had read a bunch of niche Marvel comics and wanted to impress with that knowledge. Maybe some fans of those characters actually enjoy that, but it didn’t flow well. I barely had any context for who this Hunter is, who Lilith is, and why they matter.

Katana314,

There’s still some truth to his statement.

If someone says one thing and does another…people tend to trust the action, not the words. If sales numbers indicate one thing, it doesn’t matter what people say on social media.

Katana314,

I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.

Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.

Katana314,

I feel like when developers have a good pedigree, they can apply their concepts elsewhere.

Blizzard hadn’t made a shooter before Overwatch, but definitely got it right in so many respects. Bloober team had some mediocre horror games, but was steadily getting better before they made the Silent Hill 2 remake. Valve made just shooters before Portal and then DOTA 2. Heck, easy to forget The Talos Principle, an existential puzzle game is made by the people who made “Uber DUMB MACHO SHOOTER Serious Sam”.

Oh yeah, and survival horror team Tango Gameworks making cartoon rhythm combat game Hi-Fi Rush.

Katana314,

I’d say even PC, in terms of hardware, has plateaued. Many PC gamers are staying on Nvidia 1080 and 1070 cards, because gaming just hasn’t moved up past that graphical level - and it really shouldn’t, because quite a few human eyes just can’t see much detail beyond then - and developer budgets quite often don’t catch up to make use of all that excess hardware.

This might mean we effectively stay with the PS5, or even the PS4 generation, for quite a long time, while still generating ideas with what we do in that level. Probably the biggest thing we have to do now is control gaming budgets better. Try watching the credits of any Ubisoft game, and think “Someone approved all of these hires.” Meanwhile, rewind to Half-Life 2 and they played through the entire credits of the game during the opening sections without it taking a half hour.

Katana314,

I’ve found that Steam reviews are especially useless for visual novels and games with anime girls. I am open to the concept of a visual novel, and really enjoy the Ace Attorney games, but maintain 99.9% of them are trash, with none of their excess dialog trimmed down. They all have reviews saying Overwhelmingly Positive though, because anyone who would take the chance to try that genre - a small segment of people - will enjoy it.

I also really wish Steam would implement a Helpfulness system for Guides, since most games have Guide pages that are just filled with meme posts, eg; “How 2 win: Pick OP character, enjoy victory”.

Katana314,

There’s no exact point in time at which “the aggregated reviews” are one finished article of news. One bootlicking review site will have its review of a game out in the first 3 hours to be the first place people read. Then, another detailed reviewer will spend a week investigating the game’s systems before providing a more nuanced review.

‘Unknown 9: Awakening’ Arrives To 200 Steam Players, Poor Reviews (www.forbes.com) angielski

You can’t really gauge its Steam reviews because there are only 13(!) total so far, reflective of a game that has launched with just a few hundred players. 224, as I’m writing this article. Sub-Concord levels. Yes. Concord is a unit of measurement now....

Katana314,

No…TRUE Scotsman uses Sweet Baby Inc!

Katana314,

Sorry, folks. We’re still working on the browser plugin that automatically hides/downvotes all social media content that raises the topic of Sweet Baby Inc. You’ll just have to do it manually for now.

Katana314,

Thing is, it is the same requirement as EA, Ubisoft, and to some extent, Valve.

Granted, I think those others have spread their legal agreements to more countries, which has been the main complaint. But they all get to track player data; I’m sure Sony only got into PC wanting that too.

Katana314,

To me, $70 is a reasonable price based on what bread costs now, but the minimum wage needs to like, triple.

The focus on freemium games and whales may even be driven by America’s wealth gap.

abovearth, do Gaming angielski
@abovearth@hostux.social avatar

What game has the best thunderstorm?
@games

Katana314,

How about the one at the end of Zelda: Ocarina of Time?

Having effects that shatter the framerate is, of course, a very undesirable thing for gamers. But something about it in the context of a sudden final boss fight against Ganon, placing his large figure against the thundering background, made him much more imposing in a way that might not really even be represented when playing the game in 4K on an emulator.

Katana314,

I’m reminded of a required minigame near the end of Star Fox Adventures based purely around button mashing. The requirement needed some dozen attempts when I was a kid and lead to strats involving rubbing a spoon on the controller.

Katana314,

I’d argue that part of the problem is, gamer culture has approached everything in the industry from a vein of negativity. “Don’t buy this”, “Pirate this”, “XPublisher is damn evil”. Certainly many of those accusations and rejections are valid, but there is now far, far more attention on what sucks than what’s good. A developer puts out an awesome singleplayer game they spent 7 years making, and we’ll give them $60 but…not much more than that. We’ll probably even complain if, due to high budgets, it comes out at $70. Meanwhile, the rest of the world that’s curious about entertainment doesn’t care much about 30 “Don’t” rules and just buys whatever seems interesting when they’re bored - because they got their paycheck and want something.

It’s reasonable a developer is always finding new ways they can pay their staff. I’d even say many singleplayer games we love were NOT the money-makers we wish they were. Granted, quite often now those $60 are going into paying into shareholders and executive bonuses, and I think that’s another valid thing to be negative towards, but once again: If this was an important point to gamers, we could champion studios that grant paid time off and lower their CEO bonuses.

And I’ll even go one further: If a common thread is “Studios ask too much of our money for the full game”…we could even turn our attention to minimum wage laws. We certainly should be.

Are there any recent-ish single player, complete games that are similar to Rise of Nations and would work on Mac or at least on WINE? angielski

I love that game and it’s the best RTS I’ve played. It seemed to basically rip off the CIV games heavily but simplify them and put them in an RTS context. Everything I loved about Age of Empires as a kid but much better and also spanning the ancient age to the information age....

Katana314,

While I am not an RTS buff, depending on your internet connection from this Mac’s location, Geforce Now could greatly expand your options (basically most Windows games). You would be playing the games on a cloud server (and could switch to local saves if you ever get a Windows PC)

Katana314,

I’ve been pretty vocal about my annoyance with the roguelike genre. I even have the tag blocked on Steam so they’re never recommended to me - my hope is that Steam shares metrics on tag-blocking statistics.

But, I would guess there are enough fans of them to keep being made.

Katana314,

I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.

That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.

Katana314,

First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc technology to be invented (–Wikipedia)

Sorta doubting whatever study found proof that a CD can last 200 years…

Katana314,

What exactly would that entail? I “own” Hades, thus I can depict Zagreus in my own works, as his likeness is my property? I’m allowed to copy the game to a dozen thumb drives and sell them on the street?

My mental health has improved after deleting games that have microtransactions in them angielski

After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but...

Katana314,

I’m able to keep these games around because I’m pretty good at ignoring FOMO and microtransactions. I don’t need everything. One fun skin that I like when I’ve already enjoyed the game more than I’ve paid? I’ll consider it. But I don’t need everything from events - sometimes they’re just a good reason to play it together with friends at that time, like when the carnival is in town.

Still, there’s enough games out there that no one really needs to consider those types of baited experiences, especially if you know you’re susceptible.

Currently downloading The Witcher 3 for the first time. Got any advice for me? (lemmy.world) angielski

So I just read this book on history of games called “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” and was fascinated by the chapter on The Witcher 3 and mostly how the team put in so much thought and care in every single side quest. And seems that there are a lot of moral decision to be made on each adventure. So I finally decided to give it a...

Katana314,

Always buy new shoes in the afternoon - after your feet have expanded.

…Oh, you mean about the game?

Katana314,

Whenever people say this, I imagine they have adblockers on YouTube?

I can’t say I have strong reasoning for it, but I’ve never set that up, and I’ve gotten a bunch of ad spam around the release…

Rusted Moss is pretty good (Metroidvania) angielski

I’ve been playing a bunch of Rusted Moss lately. It’s a Twin Stick Shooter Metroidvania, which is appreciably different from the Hack and Slash type I normally play. Getting used to mouse-and-keyboarding a platform heavy game took a bit. And boy are there platforms....

Katana314,

Funny thing is, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Metroidvanias, but…never enjoyed Symphony of the Night. There’s so much forceful encounter repetition, so many dead end items that don’t actually help you “unlock any doors”, and it’s so easy to get into a rut of wandering the castle unsure where you can go next.

Katana314,

That’s the thing. I even remember trying to use a guide, but it’s difficult to work past all the “Here are 18 secrets that don’t do anything you can get from the beginning” as well as all the bits you can do out of order. Locating the part of the guide that gives you just enough to keep playing on your own is really difficult.

Many other Metroidvanias are sort of more clearly delineated between story beats, or major powerups you’re meant to get in order, all of which allow you to go places you couldn’t before.

I'm tired of every game being live service angielski

I’m really frustrated with how almost every new game these days is being forced into this “live service” model. It seems like no matter what type of game you want to play—whether it’s an RPG, shooter, or even something traditionally single-player—you’re stuck with always-online requirements. And for what? It adds...

Katana314,

I genuinely fault gamers for some of this too, though.

There’s a very small indie game out called “Liar’s Bar”. It’s simple and fun. But, there were still people in forums savagely complaining that the game’s pointless XP system didn’t save correctly after a match - and that it didn’t have skins/emotes to earn for investing time into it.

There’s also MP games I play that I find fun, where I see popular, level-headed streamers complain that there’s been “nothing new” in its past two months. For most players, this wouldn’t even matter because they’re not able to play it nearly as often.

Then there’s games like Back 4 Blood, the late-grown attempt to reinvigorate Left 4 Dead’s magic. For those who don’t know; the game is still fully playable right now. It’s still fun. The developers just don’t add more to it anymore. Yet, as soon as they made this announcement that they were moving on to other games, there were conclusive, prophetic statements out about “Why Back 4 Blood DIED” as though the game is completely gone.

It’s wrong to claim that publishers moved to the constant-update, live-service model forcefully in their own decision-making vacuum. People (maybe not even the people in this thread) asked for this.

Katana314,

Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.

Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.

Katana314,

I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.

Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.

It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.

Why does the PC gaming industry still use such deceptive pricing? angielski

Battlefield 2042 is $60 right now. One of my friends on Steam plays Battlefield 2042 and I thought hey, that would be pretty cool to play with him. I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much because that game came out a long time ago and was extremely poorly received and like, I’m sure it would be really easy to buy that game or...

Katana314,

As well as OP’s problems getting dud keys, I would warn that key resellers often contribute to the pickpocketing industry.

Tourist gets lost in Indonesia, kid grabs his wallet. In the time between then and when the tourist calls their bank, the kid buys as many legitimate keys of Game XYZ as he can using the tourist’s credit card, and sells them to G2A.

The bank refunds the fraudulent transactions, but even if the key retailer (eg, Greenmangaming) reports the transactions to the game dev, the dev is often pressured to not revoke the keys since it just leads to poor press off later customers that believe themselves “legitimate” for spending money on the game.

Sites like isthereanydeal.com give more legitimate tracking info and avoid key-sharing sites; the copies sold were obtained directly from publishers. They can also give price history to give you an idea of whether the game will go on sale again soon.

Katana314,

There’s still a bit of market force, but it comes in the form of other game developers.

Imagine you went to the grocery store, and saw Hardin McCombsky’s Super-Premium Dry Seasoned Cheese was $1000 a wedge. How ridiculous! How do they expect us to pay that much for that cheese?

Only…Shaw’s Bargain Dry Cheese is $4. And it’s not the same thing - but it’s still pretty good.

Basically, this kind of thing works out in many other industries. Sometimes on rare occasion, one producer makes things MUCH better than competitors and can demand a much higher price because no one else comes close.

To give a more game-relevant example, BattleBit is $15 and compared favorably to Battlefield. In other cases where there’s no competitor and the developer hasn’t lowered their price for sales, it may be because they’re confident they did good work and made a good game. Factorio is famous for this.

Starfield's first DLC is one of the worst Bethesda DLCs of all time angielski

Starfield steam page for the DLC currently shows eight user review score of 41%, making this one of the worst Bethesda DLC’s released of all time. This is so horribly, shockingly bad for Bethesda, because it shows as a gaming company, they are no longer capable of delivering a really good gaming experience as they had in the...

Katana314,

Remember, folks: Microsoft kept these people, and fired the ones who made Hi-Fi Rush.

That, alone, was my signal the entire console was going to slowly burn down.

Katana314,

From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.

Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.

Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.

To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.

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