Mirodir

Mirodir, 3 dni temu

after leaving can’t join another for a year

Can you fix this? There was enough misinformation floating around about this already when this feature went into beta.

Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.

it should say something like: “After joining, can’t join another for a year”

Mirodir, 2 dni temu

From experience with the beta and memory, your wife (and you) will be able to choose which version to play. Either yours with a ton of DLC or hers with none. You should both be able to use the version with all DLC, but not at the same time.

It’s been a while since we tested this though so things might have changed, including my memory…

Mirodir, 7 dni temu

Despite all that, there was the Warlock who Ninja’d the Sword dropping in Naxx on the final day. Fun times. Now that we’re slowly approaching Classic MoP we’ll finally see if the masterplan worked out too.

Mirodir, miesiąc temu

With Larian’s previous game having great DM tools and them saying they would’ve loved to do DM tools for BG3, I think WotC telling them not to is a fair assumption to make.

Mirodir, 2 miesiące temu

I can only speak for myself. For me it felt really great being able to explore the world having absolutely zero idea of what is what, how much game is left, etc. It is reminiscent of a time when I was a kid and playing a game was exactly like that.

I even got quite sad when my friend “accidentally” told me

spoilerThat a certain action I did locked me into a specific ending unless I did something I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out. Rationally I understand that this is as inconsequential as it gets, but I didn’t even know for sure if there were multiple endings until that point.

Mirodir, 2 miesiące temu

People mention Spore because the official FAQ mentions Spore.

Thrive is never gonna be “from puddle to space adventures”-type of game.

People also mention spore because this is exactly what the devs are envisioning. To quote the FAQ:

Gameplay is split into seven stages – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space.

Mirodir, 2 miesiące temu

I totally agree with you. I was just clearing up why people bring up Spore beyond just the first stage being similar.

Mirodir, 4 miesiące temu

I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?

Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?

Mirodir, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.

What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.

Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.

Mirodir, 5 miesięcy temu

I experimented around with it in the beta out of curiosity.

Failed to accept the family invite. Your account must be in the same country as all current family members.

I’m assuming this is based on account region (i.e. purchase region) and not IP.

Mirodir, 5 miesięcy temu

Assuming it is store country that is checked: Simply VPN-ing doesn’t change that. Instead you have to make a purchase in the new place with “a payment method from the region you have moved to”. From experience this locks your account to the new region for 3 months. What would be interesting to know is if you can be in a family and then change regions afterwards without getting auto-kicked.

Needless to say, my experiments ended at trying to see if they have any kinds of restrictions in place (unlike for the original family share) and I don’t wanna buy a throwaway game and lock an account into a different region for 3 months just for shits and giggles.

Mirodir, 5 miesięcy temu

Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.

There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.

We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.

Mirodir, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.

It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.

Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.

Mirodir, 5 miesięcy temu

I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.

Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.

You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas.

Mirodir, 6 miesięcy temu

What really rubbed me the wrong way with ffxiv’s monetization past the regular subscription was the additional retainer service.

I know it’s not a large benefit to have, even if one’s main focus is on crafting/AH gameplay, but it still annoys me to no end that I could be more efficient by forking over an extra 2USD up to 6 times (iirc) PER MONTH. This means to max out one’s efficiency, one has to nearly double their monthly sub. Ultimately this was one of the many small frustrations with that game that lead to me dropping it, despite overall liking it.

Mirodir, 7 miesięcy temu

I sunk a lot of hours into Port Royale 2 many years ago. I’m not sure how well it holds up today or on its sequels. I think 3 was well received and 4 poorly.

Mirodir, 7 miesięcy temu

In decreasing popularity (estimated by me):

• Creeper World: A mix of tower defense and rts (with pause function) against a ever expanding goo called creep. The fourth installment is 3D and the next one will be a side-view spinoff.
• Tales of Maj’Eyal: Quite popular among the people who are into traditional roguelikes, but I very very rarely see it mentioned outside that community. It’s definitely the (nearly) traditional roguelike I put the most time into thanks to its class/ability system that bridges the gap between roguelike and turn based rpg really well.
• The Captain: Technically not indie as it was published by Tomorrow Corp (of World of Goo/Little Inferno/etc. fame) instead of the devs themselves. A mix between old school point and click game, but as a highly episodic space adventure. You travel from planet to planet on an overarching mission and each planet has its own interactive short story. Some are longer, some are very short and you never quite know what you’ll find before you land. All of the short stories have multiple endings depending on how you tackle the moral dilemmas it throws at you.
• Infinity Wars actually released before the rise of Hearthstone and also before the popular Avengers movie of the same name. It is to this day one of my favorite digital TCGs, and I played so many of them. Before I get into the main thing that I love about it, I wanna mention that every single card’s base version (colorless) is free, anyone can build any deck for free the moment they pick up the game and be 100% competitive with everyone else. The only thing they monetize is bling. Unlike in most mainstream TCGs both players do their turns at the same time in secret, once they both lock in, their moves play out. This gives way for some insane mindgames and outplays that eclipse those in any other TCG I’ve played. It is a bit rough around the edges, so it might be more of a “hidden diamond in the rough” than a hidden gem.
• Bombernauts is a really fun party game. To sum it up in one sentence: “Imagine if Bomberman was a platform fighter.” If you have friends to play with it, buy it on a sale, crank powerup drops up to the max (they stack, which took us hours to figure out), maybe download a mappack and I’m sure you’ll have a blast if the trailer looked any fun to you. There’s virtually no chance to play it with strangers through as it is super dead.
• Lastly I wanna give a shoutout to Clonk. Clonk is (or was) a 2D sidescrolling game-series that is visually reminiscent of Lemmings. The gameplay is a sort of mix between Minecraft or Terraria (predating it by many many years) and very very very low-pop RTS. It’s a mission based game where you control around 1-3 Clonks (the lemmings) and has full online multiplayer support. The missions can range from “build a base in this active volcano”, “take out the enemy team’s castle”, “win this wizarding duel” to “build a bridge across this canyon”. What made it truly unique was the community and community creations though. It was created with the explicit purpose to be customizable and users made many, many different maps and modes. It was to me what Minecraft was to the kids in the generation after me (without all the content creators, of course). Some people made an entire RPG in it. Others made what was essentially Among Us, just to give you an idea. Sadly the spiritual open source successor Open Clonk could never recapture the magic for me, and I guess I’m not alone in that because it pretty much died around 5 years ago. If I could make one game popular overnight, it would be Clonk. It did warm my heart to see that some of the celebrated custom map/mode creators from back then ended up getting into gamedev. One of the games developed by someone I remember from back then is Vintage Story.

Holy fuck I rambled a lot about Clonk and I still feel like I’d have so much more to say but this isn’t the most fitting thread for that.

Mirodir, 9 miesięcy temu

Looking at the reviews on Steam, I don’t think the setting was anywhere close to the largest problem.

Mirodir, 9 miesięcy temu

In Roguelikes and Roguelike-adjenct games there are also a few games that get close. (I’d even argue some totally eclipse SV/Terraria in that regard, but that depends on your definition.) Some, but not all, of them are even completely free and open source.

Off the top of my head, a few examples would include Dwarf Fortress, UnReal World and Nethack. Maybe some Space Station 13 servers if you count that too.

Mirodir, 10 miesięcy temu

I remember reading a lot of comments reading the opposite in the months leading up to RoR2 releasing. People were extremely skeptical about the game moving into 3d.

Going back to 2d might not be as big of a hit as RoR2 was but I’m sure it’ll do fine and the increased name recognition should help get some sales too.

Mirodir, 10 miesięcy temu

That I spent ca a third of a dollar per hour of gameplay (in paid games only).

I expected my rate to be much worse with my huge backlog…

Mirodir, 11 miesięcy temu

The (current) top comment on Youtube answers your question. Might have slight game spoilers so I’m gonna tag it just in case someone wants to go in fully blind.

spoiler“Ok, this class. Is DLC only atm unless you beat the game with a specific ending and then can pick after that. It’s a pretty strong class. Good armor, stats and weapon. Ranged is kind of borked and slow, but gets the job done. Here’s you easy mode class to start the game if you want it. If you guys want to see other classes let me know. I’ll try to get them up as I play through the game. Enjoy!”

I haven’t super kept up with this game though, so I’m also quite curious what the point even is. From what I understood “classes” in this game are the same as in Dark Souls/Elden Ring. They define your starting stats and equipment but don’t give you any special bonuses beyond that, so making a class-gameplay-trailer feels weird to me. Maybe I misunderstood something though.

Mirodir, 11 miesięcy temu

…and if they keep the emails they send out archived (which would be reasonable), they also have it stored in plaintext there.