MentalEdge

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Opening the pause menu will cause the traveler to immediately sit down, according to my sister who played the game religiously for a while, this is the equivalent to “BRB” among people who play a lot.

Each secret you find will add embroidery to the clothing of the traveller, meaning players can tell which one should likely be showing the other around, as well whether someone is a first-timer.

Sticking together is also not that important. The game will match you with a new player if you get separated.

People who play it more than once typically do it to show new players around, that’s where the value of repeat playthroughs comes from.

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I am so fucking jealous you’ve heard the ost live.

An orchestral performance cannot be captured by any kind of recording in a way that does it justice.

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You’re right, I recalled the pattern being more complex and showing the progress towards the white robe, but I’m misremembering. The patter simply show how many times someone has completed the game, up to three times.

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That’s the version people actually play, and which has the furthest developed systems to do bigger stuff. Look up PaperMC, it enables some wild stuff for Minecraft multiplayer.

The server options available for multiplayer in Bedrock are truly pathetic in comparison.

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No shit.

It was way too early back when you did go on a studio buying spree, too, so maybe just stick to funding the studios you do have.

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Forbidden West’s PC release. They made some odd choices about how the mouse should work with the weapons select wheel, but it’s a damn good game which I can’t wait to get to the new DLC content of, which I’ve yet to play.

Still jumping into Helldivers 2 for an operation now and then.

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What did you use to get there? My longest range ship is still a Viper mkIV I engineered for small worlds 2 at 35ly.

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Activision is burning the rope that is the ancient goodwill of Blizzard-fans at both ends.

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It’s a long rope. Woven from decades of WoW, StarCraft and Diablo.

It’ll run out soon. Mostly it’s only been burning so slow cuz people have been in denial over the fact for so long.

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They are, Ghost Ship Games.

DRG was never an indie, it was published by Coffee Stain Publishing, which is a subsidiary of Coffee Stain, which in turn is a subsidiary of Embracer.

Ghost Ship got fully acquired by Embracer in 2021, though their publishing deal with Coffee Stain started in 2017, before Embracer had even touched either company.

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Ghost Ship did not self-publish DRG, they published with Coffee Stain. The publishing deal started in 2017, with Embracer/THQ buying Coffee Stain a year later in 2018. And even later buying Ghost Ship, as well.

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Katana Zero

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I’m taking a week off work to drown myself in Forbidden West when it comes out on PC. Again.

I already did it back when it launched on PS. No regrets. So I’m doing it again.

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They seemed to be acquiring and funding good things for a while there, and then out of the blue went “oops, spent a bit too much there lol, gotta melt some of these down for cash” and then threw some seriously good shit right into the crucible.

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Even if that deal had worked out, it would not have left a nice taste in the mouth.

They really shouldn’t have played as fast and loose as they did.

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After the initial trouble with the Zero Dawn port (which they actually put in the work to fix), the ports have been stellar.

The extensive accessibility settings and configurable graphics have been even more accommodating than some PC-only titles.

And sony has been releasing drivers for the PS controllers so that ported PS5 games could still access and use the unique features on the DS5 controller, even when not running on an PS5. And not just on windows, but on Linux too. Sony has been going out of their way to not just bring the games over, but to explicitly support unique features they could have locked down and made exclusive to PS consoles.

Getting to play with the half/full adaptive trigger pull for main/secondary fire in Rift Apart on PC, was really cool.

It almost feels too good to be true in comparison to companies like Apple and Nintendo.

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Stop reminding them we used to be able to do better.

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But how are we going to emulate proprietary online services for games relying on them?

Games preservation should be legally enshrined, and require client and server source code to be published if a provider decides to stop running the online services required to play.

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Preserving an accurate record of human cultural history, isn’t going to be very accurate if we only save the good parts.

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Personally I probably miss Battleborn the most. It got so utterly overlooked, it died fast.

And Gearbox in their infinite wisdom developed it so that even the story mode was online-only.

Though there’s some modding happening to maybe bring it back…

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Economist: exponential growth, infinitely!

Physicist: uuuuuhhh…

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I enjoyed the federation reborn as well. I have an opinion.

The writers were so busy patting each other on their backs with how “deep” they were being with symbolism about the importance of communication, that they went and made the whole cause of the burn a child being lonely on some planet somewhere so they could twist the burn into a big symbolic point about how “if only we had been a little better” something like it would never have happened.

It was so fucking telegraphed that I saw it coming episodes away and was rolling eyes every time the show referenced this symbolic circle jerk.

No. Shit happens. The universe doesn’t care, and it WILL fuck your shit up, I would have been far more impressed with the crew rebuilding the federation after an inevitable natural disaster, making a point of life finding a way despite the random crap reality throws at us, and how communication and understanding is one of the things that help us do that.

Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic, not delusional, and as such the core message of that season rings hollow. It’s too hopeful. Instead of “we might not be perfect, and we might not know what’s coming, we know we are enough” it was “we’re nearly there, we just need one more step to be perfect, and nothing bad will ever happen because of this ever again”.

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The Expanse was fantastic. I’d love to see the rest of the books adapted some day…

As for other sci-fi, my god there’s so much good shit in literature that will never be seen on a screen.

The Three Body Problem is getting several adaptations, one of which might or might not fix my issues with that series, but it does have conceptual potential.

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Apparently any further sales of the game will have a cut going to even the staff that was laid off.

That’s commendable, but overall this is still an unfortunate development. I wonder if microtransactions in big games like apex and genshin are down this year? Is this an overall trend, or are people choosing to spend on one game, foregoing titles like Jumplight Odyssey for bigger spending on one (arguably less deserving) game.

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Cheats will only grow more advanced, at some point you’ll be able to train an AI to play exactly like a human, but while performing perfectly far more reliably than a human.

The line between what skill looks like versus cheating will only get blurrier.

The real long term solution is to enable the vetting of players (not by the game company or god forbid the government, looking at you china), by returning to community based servers/private matches. And to have reports dealt with faster and by people who care about the game personally.

As a member of the Northstar community, cheating is basically a solved problem for us atm.

There is no anti-cheat, instead a global ban tracking system was put in place and server admins are now able to share the identities of players who have been caught cheating, banning them on every server, regardless of who is running them, by the hosts simply opting into the global ban system.

People used to form “gaming-clans” in order to find people to play games with to begin with, and that structure for a community around a game is likely to become relevant again simply to be able to fill matches with people who you can be sure are honest players.

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EA account ID. Northstar is the community modded version of Titanfall 2.

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While that’s all true, the day you can just fire up an undetectable AI to play for you, and all the matchmaking queues are flooded with people doing the same… Players are going to beg for the ability to not just team up with people they know, but play against people they know.

Maybe that wont be privately hosted servers, or even fully custom matches, but when cheaters become indistinguishable from the highly skilled, forming even the most basic community bonds in order to find people to play with will be preferable to matching with randos.

For similar reasons people already prefer to team up with someone they know, as opposed to a stranger they might have to carry. People will want to be able to pick who they go up against, as well.

Once the cheaters win, (and they will) the first game to figure out a system to let players do this, WILL be a better experience than current matchmaking algos.

Edit: An example of a game that kinda already does this is Elite: Dangerous. There are two main modes, open and solo, in open you can run into all other players also playing in open, that means you might have to defend yourself against other players.

But, if you want to avoid PvP, but still want to run into other players, you’re in luck! Because there is a third option, private groups. When in a private group, the game works as if you’re in open, but you can only see other players who are in the same group. Meaning other players who also do not want to engage in PvP.

Mobius is likely the largest such group, essential it’s a giant clan of non-PvPers who play the game together. Something similar could absolutely be done for other games, where smaller communities can then vet their members and get rid of players who break the rules.

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It’s open source.

No choice? I can still apply my own bans on top no matter what the mod does. Spyglass isn’t what enables bans, it just makes them networked and tracked. And I could modify the mod to work however I like, or even fork the whole thing and make my own database.

That’s not been necessary as Erlite has been maintaining the spyglass mod and database with integrity.

There’s no chokehold here, no problems have arisen, and if they do, only then are additional solutions warranted. I’m not suggesting this is the final solution for all games, but that this kind of community driven counter-cheater work, is.

Cheating is being treated as a tech problem with a technological solution, when really it’s a social problem which should be solved with inter-social solutions.

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I’m not denying any part of what you’re saying, I’m saying that this specific case is currently working fine, and that it is merely an example of the kinds of solutions I want to see enabled.

Obviously the bigger the community, the more complex the solution needs to be, and the more bases have to be covered. You’re nitpicking a specific example I gave (and doing so from a position of ignorance concerning northstar and its community), rather than my ideological thesis. Which is that communities should be empowered with social structure so that cheaters can be properly ostracized. Spyglass is just one way for a community to implement that.

Northstar isn’t big enough to even begin to compare with discord or minecraft. The concurrent playercount on all servers put together seldom matches ONE big minecraft server.

If the factors you bring up become a concern, I’m ready to pick up the tools to deal with it myself, as I’ve already done before. But so far, there has been no need.

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Psygnosis, later known as Studio Liverpool.

Sony shut them down a few years ago. Man seeing that old owl logo hits me hard in the nostalgia bone.

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They seem to consider only massive franchises like GoW and TLoU and Horizon worth their time… But most gamers need variety outside the mainstream game genres, so I don’t see why they are shutting down anything with a smaller fanbase.

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It’s software. I’m pretty sure my linux desktop can do this… It’s not a special feature, exactly, the system state gets saved to RAM, and then the CPU goes to sleep.

On resume the kernel reads the state from RAM and puts everything back where it was and things continue from the exact same point from which they were suspended. Theoretically.

It’s a complex sequence, and windows sleep is famous for getting it wrong on lots of hardware configs. I’ve had trouble with it on linux, as well, almost always relating to the GPU.

Valve very likely put in some work to have it work as well as it does on SteamDeck, but theres no reason it couldn’t work on any given device.

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Sleep has almost never worked with games, though. I’m not aware of any games that can survive wakeup without crashing on windows.

One of the ways Valve was able to expand the OS in a manner they could never have if the steamdeck ran windows.

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Really liking Endeavour! Finally hopped over from the unstable mess that is Manjaro.

Still not as noob friendly as VanillaOS or some other options. HoloISO or Bazzite are both supposed to be good in that regard, as well.

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That’s because it’s not a product. It’s an experiment for figuring out what they as a studio might be able to do with something new and untested. This is a trial run of a new engine, and they simply decided to publish the result for others to see.

This is more like publishing research findings than trying to market and sell something for a profit. Whether the result is good or bad, it’s informative either way.

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Except they just got CoD. Playstation is about lose one the mega-franchise cross-platforms games that “everyone” buys.

IIRC they did sign the deal that let’s the continue to get releases for a couple more years, but no way MS just keeps releasing their games on PS forever.

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More likely, they’ll just buy Ubisoft or EA.

We want lots of smaller corps competing, not just a couple giants. Every merger is one fewer of the former, regardless whether it forces one of the existing big corps to step up their game.

Not that ABK was small, and for once I’m split because holy hell did it need new management.

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Lots of horror! Nice.

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Standard tactic when making unpopular changes, and a company would really like to keep them. Sacrificial CEO gets replaced, to make it look like things changed.

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Except it needed to be literally perfect for me to give Blizzard Activision another cent.

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!huntshowdown

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No he’s suggesting the game would be so shit that buzzwords were the only way it could get any runway.

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This game in particular, yes, but Molyneux certainly could make non-blockchain games.

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TLDR: They can’t afford the greater costs of the new license, so they are sticking with the version of unity their current license is for.

This will block them from releasing a switch port as nintendo version gates unity games to a recent version of the engine.

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the company believed they undervalued the games.

Almost definitely true. The type of games that devolver publishes are often fantastic, but they are smaller experiences that a subscription pay model would nigh certainly never pay for fairly.

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We remember it with fondness, and yet, it was the lootbox that started it all.

Good riddance.

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True enough. But Overwatch was the first big game where they basically got completely ignored as an exploitative mechanic on PC.

Micro-transactions were for a long time mobile only, then it was free-to-play only.

Remember, OW was a full-price title. Yet, it still worked like a free-to-play.