MudMan

MudMan, rok temu

Look, gaming "scoops", such as they are, boil down to somebody having a friend somewhere that will break NDAs to you on the basis of being your buddy, being somewhat intoxicated, or both. The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.

But on the flipside, it does mean that you have to take them at their word, and like any long game of telephone that also means you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Things may be lies, the source may just be mistaken, opinions may get passed as facts, things can change later. Rumors are rumors until they aren't rumors.

But that being said, will the vaporware huge triple-A remake that was explicitly struggling during development come out in the middle of the great 2023 game developer purge?

Meeeh... I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, it's a bit weirder when Gamespot repackages Grubb's take as news, in that it becomes harder to tell whether it's them being coy about "we know a guy who knows a guy" info or if they're just trying to manufacture a click out of something that's unverified.

But then again, we're rating them against Youtube "influencers" and whatnot, so I'm actively shocked that any standards would remain at all these days.

MudMan, rok temu

Sorry, I had responded but also missed the "Steam Deck" qualifier. To be clear, the poster you're responding to is absolutely right in general terms, but performance will be an issue for 360 and probably PS3 on the Deck.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeeeeah. No padding in old games. None at all.

Somebody hasn't gone back to play mainstream games on the PS2 era recently, when large developers had a fraction of the money and any game below 30 hours was ruthlessly slammed online for being "too short" and "not good value".

I swear, people use the term "triple-A" just to refer to bits of gaming they don't like, regardless of who made them or for how much money. The term is meaningless by now.

MudMan, rok temu

Just this year we got Spider-Man 2, Pikmin 4, Cities Skylines II, Super Mario Wonder, Hi-Fi Rush... The guy even praises Baldur's Gate in this.

It's just people being weird and conservative and nostalgic. "Game that doesn't make me feel like a child" = "modern game".

MudMan, rok temu

So many of the responses to this (and the original video) boil down to "me like good games that I like, no like bad games I don't like".

I promise there were boring, repetitive, grindy games all through gaming history. This isn't a "modern gaming" thing.

MudMan, rok temu

The "new zeldas"? Where were you when they hid a bunch of quality of life upgrades behind an actual hundred skulltulas?

I think sometimes people mistake a game surfacing a list of content for practical reasons with forcing you to touch every little thing inside the game. In any case, Zelda games have always had a progress screen like that. They practicaly pioneered the concept.

MudMan, rok temu

It depends. There are some people here and there. But also, you don't need to be a hardcore gamer to do a LOT of the technical work in gaming. Mostly you just need to be really good at coding and somehow prefer decent snacks and a lax dress code to money and job stability.

MudMan, rok temu

Oh, like PC games in 2001 weren't just like that as well. This isn't a platform thing, this is a development cost vs budget vs technology interplay.

So yeah, PC games were just like that, too, except back then the console ports were much, much worse than they are now, so that part also sucked.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, no, we're not disagreeing here. Absolutely go spend a decade sorting out a single form in a banking software thing. It is objectively the better choice.

All I'm saying is the few people who get into it non-vocationally are mostly there for the vibes.

MudMan, rok temu

Then you either expressed it confusingly or you aren't understanding my reply. Because it sure sounded like you were saying modern PC game design tropes were console-specific back in the early 2000s and that's why you don't remember grindy games existing back then.

MudMan, rok temu

I mean... if somebody has a gaming storefront monopoly in Windows it certainly isn't Microsoft. Concern about monopolistic practices is a great catch-22 between the OS dominance of Windows or the platform dominance of Steam, and I'm about as concerned about both.

FWIW, I have both a Steam Deck and a GPD Windows handheld and, being entirely agnostic about that entire conversation I default to my GPD Win 4, because of ergonomics, usability and compatibility concerns, in that order.

MudMan, rok temu

I said this on Masto, but this tells me nothing as written. You can get the first game to run like that, too.

The thing is, if it runs that way on an empty map and degrades the same way the first one did, I can't see it not crashing on a full endgame map. So... how does it run on endgame? Or is this endgame and it runs fine at first? Guessing no, since the devs themselves said this was a problem. And, well, I've seen footage from streamers and it certainly chugs on small maps, too.

MudMan, rok temu

Hm. So it scales with VRAM and GPU, not CPU? Interesting.

That's less concerning than people had made it out to be, at least for a game of this genre. It still doesn't sound particularly pleasant to play, but hey, less of a dealbreaker.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, it seems weird because you'd think all the simulation load would be in the background and they could scale the visuals. Since it seems like there's a high base cost for them I assume it's possible to make that run at least a bit better at some point.

The console release target is a bit of a question mark, though. You'd think they have just weaker GPUs and they'll need to optimize to fit, but they can also target lower resolutions and do other stuff there. Plus if there's an I/O issue in there, there's a reliable spec for SSDs on those, so who knows.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah. In fairness, it IS disappointing to have to target 1080p or 1440p at 30 fps these days on PC... but it's definitely not a dealbreaker for a sim game like this. Seeing early benchmarks and performance I'd say it went from wait and see to "temper expectations and be ready to target 30".

MudMan, rok temu

Alright, so I got the game and it a) actually has a fantastic options menu with a ton of granularity, and b) it has some really dumb, wasteful settings flagged as "high" with no "ultra" preset.

I went from launching into a default in the 30s for the default map to toning down their nuts global illumination, volumetric clouds and transparent reflections for a neat 100+ fps. And then I cranked it back up a bit to be hovering around 90. I'm sure I'll have to tweak more when I get deeper into the game, but yeah, no, this is gonna be playable.

For the record, I think setting up decent defaults and settings should be a thing in PC games. Tuning the game shouldn't be the first thing you have to do. But whether it's thanks to last minute patches or people overreacting to the announcements I think this was a bit overblown. I'll report back if that proves not to be the case as I get deeper in.

MudMan, rok temu

Hah. It did lose some fps as the city grew. By the time I expanded to a bunch of tiles I was hovering at 50-60 instead of 70-90, but I'm on a VRR display, so I never felt the need to crank it down further. It may get there eventually, but I'm done for the day

The defaults for high are absolutely messed up, and it's entirely possible that some of the settings are straight up bugged. The game doesn't look that much better than CS1 on reasonable settings... but it also doesn't run that much worse, either.

Honestly, I have bigger gripes with some of the interface and with how much micromanagement there is in here. I think the tech issues are both overblown and could have been mitigated with better defaults.

EDIT: In case someone has use for it, what I did was mostly turn off volumetric clouds, turn off Vsync, turn off transparent reflections and drop the settings for Global Illumination and other screen-space effects to not be full res.

Oh, and also, they seem to think SMAA looks better than TAA here. It doesn't. You definitely want to manually change that to TAA and disable DRS, which defaults to extremely gross FSR 1.0. The way this is technically put together by default is super weird.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, I saw that they acknowledged the broken settings and provided a slightly confusing explanation about the technical reasons for it.

I genuinely think they should have locked those settings to a lower default until they can patch them. I get what they're trying to do by being transparent, but... yeah, I don't think it worked out for them or the people interested in the game.

I've been playing a bunch, I now have a large city going on and it's still very playable, at the cost of worse lighting and slow-loading textures in close-ups. Honestly, at this point I'm more annoyed by some UI and sim quirks than the performance, but here's hoping they keep improving all of the above.

MudMan, rok temu

Straight up SimCity-likes, I suppose not, but there certainly are lots of games aiming to scratch some of that itch.

Honestly, CS2 is mostly competing with CS1. Or with my endless instinct to go back and play more SimCity 4 again.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, so... being in the gaming industry really sucks right now.

Go give a hug to your local gamedev. They probably need it.

MudMan, rok temu

And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.

It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.

I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.

The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.

In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.

MudMan, rok temu

Yikes. You're gonna need a bigger hug.

MudMan, rok temu

Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.

So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.

That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.

MudMan, rok temu

Besides all the roguelikes people mentioned, Omikron: The Nomad Soul from Quantic Dream has you possess a different body each time you die, which comes with different conditions. The idea was then reworked much more extensively for Watch Dogs: Legion, where you play as a whole resistance movement you can expand via recruitment and jump to a different member upon death.

MudMan, rok temu

It is absolutely amazing that nobody seems to have clicked through to the actual article.

So for all the "just use hall effect sticks" people, the patent is apparently not just for a solution to drift but also a way to add variable pressure to sticks, kinda like what Sony does to triggers.

It took me like fifteen seconds to read deep enough to find that.

For what it's worth, I think it could be interesting, especially if applied in a Nintendo-like way, bur proprietary stuff like that tends to go underutilized. You know, like the triggers on the PS5 controller.

MudMan, rok temu

I've had far more stick issues on PS5 than Switch, but that's probably just luck of the draw.

For the record, the patent isn't about removing drift at all, from what I can discern, it's about adjustable resistance sticks.

MudMan, rok temu

No, I read the whole thing, including that line, but that's entirely editorializing from the reporter. The quotes from the actual patent are pretty clear, machine translation word soup aside.

You being nitpicky made me go dig up the full patent, which makes it even clearer: "(...) The intensity of the magnetic field can be designated from the application. Thus, it is possible to perform flexible control in accordance with the application".

I don't blame the commenters for not going that extra step, though, that's just me being fastidious. I do blame the reporters focusing on stick drift because mah clicks for not reading the patent properly, though.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I find the idea of a stick being full of ferrofluid or whatever else they're using for this to be... likely finicky and potentially messy and fragile, depending on how much you need in there to make it work properly. This sounds intriguing and weirdly high-tech, but if you made me bet I wouldn't feel comfortable putting money on this showing up on a Switch 2 just yet. Could be wrong, though.

MudMan, rok temu

I mean, that's fair enough, I suppose. Like I said elsewhere I've had more problems with the PS5 controllers than the Switch ones, but my guess is this is luck of the draw. Some people just don't like the Joycon form factor, and that's also fair. I have some wrist issues and split controllers are amazing for my specific issues, so I'm very on board with the design for very specific reasons.

FWIW, I suspect a lot of the issues people report with those things are down to connectivity, not build quality. The BT antenna in those is terrible and it's being power starved to run on their tiny batteries. I've used literally hundreds of Joycon at one point or another and rarely seen legit stick drift, but I've had controllers where in a noisy environment just your hand grip could make the connection get all flaky. What the Switch does in that scenario seems to be to just hold your stick position and call it a day, which isn't great.

MudMan, rok temu

For the haptic feedback? No, it's a mechanical screw with a physical stop to keep it from turning at the right time. You can see it disassembled here. The sensor may be a hall effect sensor, I don't actually know, but once again, the patent isn't about drift.

Watching that video gave me flashbacks about how much of a pain in the ass these are to disassemble, too, which is why I have several of these with stick drift issues just gathering dust instead of actually repairing them.

MudMan, rok temu

I'm just here to remind people that those guys are active shills that sold out immediately back when all of us principled ones were raging about them forcing always online DRM onto Half Life 2 and actively boycotting it (and still playing a cracked copy anyway, because hey).

And you know what? We were right. Turns out it DID make everything a nightmarish hellscape of big brother-esque remote digital rights control where you never own anything you buy. Those 20 year old veterans ruined it all.

So yeah, they get a badge and I get to go "you maniacs, you blew it up!" and so on.

MudMan, rok temu

I do buy from GOG. It's my primary online store. I only go to the others when something isn't available there. Which is most of the time, because we live in the lamest dystopia.

For what it's worth, fanboys are gonna fanboy, but I have no need to deny Steam's conveniences to call them out on the anti-property DRM crap. Absolutely piecemeal DRM is worse. Not that Steam made it disappear, I had a game install Denuvo on me over Steam just this week.

Absolutely digitally purchasing games is better than digging up optical media for DRM checks. Absolutely it's better to have worldwide digital launches where you just... get the game the second it launches instead of running around after it like a crazy person.

But we do live in a DRM dystopia where we own nothing and are supposed to like it, the tens of thousands of dollars dumped into my Steam account will go away the moment a Steam moderator decides they don't like me and they will certainly evaporate after I'm gone, and many, many games are now lost media like we just started making TV but haven't invented video tapes yet.

All those things get to be true at the same time. I was kinda joking with my original post just to remind people that Steam was far from controversial and beloved at launch, but since we're talking about it... yeah, hell yeah, we gave up on basic ownership for the sake of convenience and Steam was absolutely part of that process.

"God damn you all to hell" indeed.

MudMan, rok temu

Right. See, you think that list of bannable reasons at the end is making this sound less dystopian and DRM-abusive and stuff?

It's kinda doing the opposite.

Don't get me wrong, most of those are scummy (not sure about the account sharing one, though), but in real life you at best get fined or banned from a store or something. Nobody comes into your house and sets your 20 year old game collection on fire for being a bit of a dick.

Which, hey, whatever, I don't expect my Steam account to get banned any time soon. But the EULA is very clear that none of those games are a thing that I own and I don't get to give them away and people don't get to inherit them eventually and if they DO decide I'm a scumbag those games are gone.

And that sounded quaint and hypothetical in the early 2000s, but dude, that account is a significant share of my assets by now. If I had bought all those games physically I could live on reselling them for months.

MudMan, rok temu (edited rok temu)

No, wait, it literally WAS Steam. I mean, it wasn't just Steam, but those guys were there at ground level. Valve is ultimately an offshoot of Microsoft, it's not like becoming the main app store on home PCs by introducing structured DRM, sales and download management software wasn't part of their plan.

So let's be clear about what we're talking about here. Denuvo? Yep, that sort of DRM predates Steam. License limits and online activation? That's contemporary to Steam and it's the problem Steam is trying to solve. Online app stores built around DRM? Steam is as early on that race as it gets, and it's absolutely built for that purpose.

I like it as a piece of software, too, it's well made, but why whitewash it?

Plus, I have to point out that you seem to be arguing two opposite things at once. Is DRM inevitable? Well, since you seem to be correctly arguing that DRM-free alternatives do exist and seem to be financially viable... I'm gonna say no?

MudMan, rok temu

"Service" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. As is the narrow band of time and games you're referring to that required online activations at all. For a long chunk of PC gaming even games with a CD key only performed an offline algorithmic check on the key.

So yeah, if you breach the EULA in a service you get banned. If you own a thing you don't get it destroyed for a separate infraction, though. Which is my point.

And honestly, I seriously doubt that they wouldn't get away with an account ban in the EU. There are many ways in which the EU does good stuff to curb abuses of so-called "services", including dragging Steam kicking and screaming into having a semi-functional return policy, but EULA-based infractions driving account bans hasn't historically been one of their pet peeves, and there are absolutely examples of people losing access to large libraries out there.

MudMan, rok temu

But they did it. They made it work. Somebody else might have, I suppose, but it was literally them. EA was trying hard to push online activations and failing miserably. Download managers paired with DRM were a dime a dozen and were not making a dent. It was Steam.

They took the most anticipated game in the PC landscape and acquired the most played mod, bundled them together with their trojan horse of a DRM-cum-online store and forced the entire PC community to buy into it or be unable to play the big stuff.

That´s what they actually did in the real world. I remember, I was there.

So given that Steam absolutely counts as "shitty DRM" in my book, I'm not sure your representation fits reality. Like I said above, I buy DRM-free games whenever possible and my Steam account is still growing way faster than my GOG account despite prioritizing GOG.

MudMan, rok temu

Cool. I don't disagree with any of that, for the record.

It's the defensiveness and outright denialism of the tradeoffs that I'm calling out, if anything.

MudMan, rok temu

I'd argue the "illegal things" fit my definition because, again, you do not lose access to legitimately purchased things for doing those things in the physical world.

Likewise for banned bought-and-sold accounts, of which there are some examples online. Selling things or telling someone your credentials is not illegal, the only basis to remove access to the account on that would be the EULA.

MudMan, rok temu

It matters because it's there. If it was meant to not be DRM it... wouldn't be DRM. That copy is very much designed to justify the fact that Steam allows games to publish with double or even triple DRM solutions under the Steam platform.

In practice, the DRM matters because it discourages keeping a backup of fully owned game files. On GOG it's trivial to backup offline installers, which are provided explicitly (and I do keep a backup of games I only own on GOG, by the way). Steam explicitly limits your access to your games and how you use them, presumably to support a secure microtransaction environment within the Steam platform. That'd be the "ensures the Steamworks features work" bit in that text.

That's extremely nontrivial for Steam, for the record. Disputing the ability to drive separate MTX under Steam is why several major publishers ended up withdrawing for a bit until they realized it's not commercially viable and Steam is effectively a quasi-monopoly on the PC platform.

MudMan, rok temu

Look, Valve people speak a very specific way. It takes a while to wrap your head around what they mean.

The quote you're giving me is Valve-speak for "we were cool with your double-dipping DRM back when it was free for us but we now would prefer you don't add it to your game because it makes it harder for us to sell your games on Steam Deck where we control the whole platform".

And yes, those things do apply to Steam. You absolutely don't own your Steam games. Those go away with your account, unless you're actively extracting and repackaging those files for backup. This is itself a breach of Steam's EULA and not a service they provide. It is absolutely a piracy mitigation tool and, while there is a "Offline Mode" you are not allowed or able to install or play your games without online verification as a general rule.

The notion that multiple people here are questioning the fact that Steam's DRM is, in fact, DRM because it's crackable is kind of shocking. It's a testament to their PR, for sure, but also to their ability to do long term moves due to being a private company. It didn't take a genius to understand that the real piracy dampener for PC gaming was availability, price and convenience rather than technically profiicent DRM, but it did take a competent CEO with no shareholders in his way to deploy that strategy.

But that doesn't mean it's not DRM or games-as-a-service. It absolutely is. Valve invented or perfected DRM, online distribution, battlepasses, monetized UGC and, technically NFTs. The branding exercise required to do that and still be perceived as a fan-favorite, user-first company should get a TON more credit than it does in marketing schools worldwide.

MudMan, rok temu

I mean... would it? Indie devs not only existed before Steam, but typically have a hugely contentions relationship with them. I haven't forgotten all the growing pains about races to the bottom through sales, arguments about curation and the entire Greenlight fiasco.

I'd give them credit for pushing indie devs enough to get Nintendo to stop being annoying to work with, but that was Microsoft pushing Sony which in turn pushed Nintendo. Steam is background noise in that process.

Valve solved the issue of PC piracy in the way Netflix solved the issue of TV and movie piracy: by creating a convenient service people liked to use that is significantly more hassle free than digging through shady websites. If they hadn't figured it out, the next-in-line big store that happened was GOG, which is coincidentally a DRM-free storefront that grew as a reaction to Steam. I don't know what the CD Projekt Deck would have looked like, but we at least would have gotten a third sequel of a game series, so there's that.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, I'm not getting into an online quotefest and all of those points I've already addressed, so this is an agree to disagree for me.

MudMan, rok temu

But those things can be true at the same time. Yes, PC gaming was in a rough spot before Steam solved DRM and digital distribution. Absolutely physical PC games were struggling with no alternative and Microsoft sure wasn't figuring that out.

But Steam's success was to transition PC gaming to an all-DRM-all-the-time quasi monopoly built around removing PC game ownership from the table altogether.

I'm just as fine with both of those statements. In the real world things rarely are complete positives or negatives, despite our cultural need to take sides on stuff. This entire thread started with a tongue-in-cheek joke about how controversial Steam was at launch, which is an undeniable fact. People get weirdly defensive about it, though.

The biggest difference between Steam and others is that people tend to recognize Apple's weirdness about the App Store or the downsides of Spotify or Netflix, all of which pulled off similar moves. Steam, though, still manages to present itself as a bit of a plucky upstart that is with you on this thing against the big bad publishers, which is kind of nuts.

MudMan, rok temu

But your timeline is wrong there. DRM already existed, it was all over the place on PC games. Digital distribution was barely there.

Steam's innovation was to wrap the DRM into a full-on digital distribution platform. This is a good couple of years before Microsoft put one of those on the Xbox 360, and many years before they made full price games available on it. It's before the Apple App Store. Before World of Warcraft (although in fairness after EverQuest). Before Netflix. Before Spotify. It's before anybody was tying your digital "purchases" to a persistent account.

There's no reflection of PC value on other publishers not having their own take on Steam, Valve simply came first, before anybody else on any market or any platform. They were not the first to point out that curbing rampant piracy was as much about making the commercial alternative more convenient as well as more secure, but they were the first ones to implement it (poorly) and to improve fast enough to actually realize that idea.

They invented games as a service. Ground up. Day one. They are the prototype for digital distribution worldwide.

MudMan, rok temu

Aaaw, but I liked getting jumped by everybody immediately. Made those charisma points feel earned.

MudMan, rok temu

Hah, yeah, I guess they technically weren't. Could have fooled me, because if you didn't play those by pausing, queuing up every action and then only unpausing until you can queue up the next I don't know how your brain works. BG3 is basically a Divinity sequel, though, and it goes for that same improvised feel where you're supposed to go through the game chucking bags full of rotten fish at enemies instead of engaging with the actual combat rules. I agree that it's a very different feel in both, though.

CCG is "Collectible card games". I look at Midnight Suns as a card game with some positioning mechanics, more than a tactics game. It makes a lot more sense like that, in terms of the small puzzle-like encounters and the turn optimization and so on.

MudMan, rok temu

Yeah, in Midnight Suns specifically I don't think the grid would have worked, because that game is built on grinding extra turns and extra damage from interactions, so you need to be able to line up things with each other. Like, you don't just want to hit, you want to hit so that the guy goes flying into an explosive that topples a thing that then falls on another guy. It's more of a puzzle game than anythign else sometimes. They even have a challenge mode in there with those sorts of setups.

I think it's perfectly fair to be mostly into grid tactics, it's almost a different genre. I don't think you can legitimately look at BG3 or Midnight Suns and suggest it's the same type of thing as Final Fantasy Tactics or even XCOM. There's connective tissue there, but it's like comparing, say, Devil May Cry and Tekken.

MudMan, rok temu

We're getting into the weeds of DnD now and I'm not into the tabletop side of things enough to be that guy for you, so I suggest you google these things from better sources.

But basically, as I understand it there is an open license that allows people to make RPGs based on the DnD ruleset and actually sell them. Been there for ages, it's at the core of several other popular systems, including Pathfinder's "just keep playing 3rd edition forever" take. Hasbro tried to shut that down and monetize those derivatives as part of a wider push to milk the recent mainstream popularity of DnD (on the plus side that's also how we got BG3 and the new movie, so... take the good with the bad, I guess?).

Fan pushback was swift, strong and mainstream, so I believe they pulled back on those plans for now.