It is both. Standalone device but also designed to communicate with a PC via a USB dongle. So lower resource games “just work” and you take advantage of your PC (or Steam Machine…) for the heftier stuff. Which is as close to the “norm” as it gets in VR these days (although the facebooks connect over WLAN)
I would also like a fanny pack form factor (great for spare batteries too) but it’s “just” a snapdragon. The actual chip is likely nothing compared to the displays and battery
It definitely doesn’t look glasses friendly but that is also a solved problem these days. Many of the online glasses companies directly sell them and they just push on rather than needing to buy the lenses and print a mount and then remove the old lenses and blah. My ex and I both wear glasses and we never had a problem swapping out on the facebook quest or whatever.
Unfortunately, we didn’t create enough art for Joseph Gordon Levett to sell so Volnutt is forever stuck on the moon and we will never get an aged up Tron Bonne outside of the internet.
In light of the recent criticism that Rockstar Games has been facing for its firing of over 30 employees, one employee from the studio has taken to the GTA Forums to talk about the company’s actions. Under request of anonymity, and having been verified as a real Rockstar Games employee by an admin, the person – using the...
Part of me thinks that this is going to be the one where no one fucking gives a shit because of all the BS that R* have been doing since GTA5,
Zero chance.
Sucker Punch fired one of their senior devs for a mario and luigi joke when kirk got got. EVERYONE was angry, the studio heads came out to say they stand by their decision, and plenty of people were keyed in to the hell that Erika Ishii has had to put up with on social media for daring to portray a female character in a video game.
Ghost of Yotei comes out. Metacritic of 86 and just about every outlet had to cover it and talk about how much they love it. A few of the more independent outlets stood true but… there are just so few video games that come out in a given year that you can’t possibly dare to deprive yourself of something over things like workers rights or politics. I mean, what else could you possibly play in September of 2025!!!
It was literally a joke about wondering if the killer would be named “mario”. It was far tamer than what many of the chuds have said.
It was sheer and utter cowardice and abandoning the people who actually make the games that got them there. And when even god damned paramount reversed course with kimmel, the head of Sucker Punch doubled down on standing by their actions.
As for Ishii: “Social media was being social media” sums up how much you care on that front.
And THIS is why GTA6 will sell like hotcakes no matter what happens.
No, you 100% did. All while also justifying chudlike behavior because the company that released the game about a Native American (who was Troy Baker in brownface but we try to ignore that) fighting against the cops in Seattle can’t afford to have any policality to their games. Also that ignores the actual Ghost games themselves.
Maybe you didn’t intend to. But your actions sure as hell did. So… either get pissy and insist you didn’t and the problem is everyone else or engage in some self-reflection.
“We are responsible for what we say and what we do, not the interpretation others do out of them.”
Yeah, fuck off with that Steven Universe bullshit. It is fun to tell kids to do what is true to them and to not care about what anyone else says. Until they are an adult who thinks dressing up like a school shooter and making “I identify as an attack helicopter” ‘jokes’ is fun.
Intent is excuses and apologies. Actions are… actions. And if someone’s take is that they totally get why sucker punch bent over backwards to protect chuds (at the expense of labor) and that they clearly don’t give a shit about the massive waves of abuse thrown at a voice actress? I’mma gonna assume they are a chud. And, because I believe in judging people by their actions, I 'mma gonna call them a chud.
Does that mean they are a chud? Of course not. There is a LOT of room to apologize and make it clear they are actually an ally. A half-assed “no, I didn’t do that” ain’t it.
And… if you aren’t an ally, you are an enemy. And a large part of allyship is doing what you can, no matter how small, to make people feel Seen and welcome. And when you have moderators siding with the people who don’t really give a shit what kinds of abuse a genderfluid actress received for daring to exist while making DAMNED sure we understand why the company that left them out to dry is gonna protect the chuds?
So, on that note: Decide where you stand. But, by all indications, you might as well ban me now because I’m going to continue to call out chuds. And I’d hate for that to get in the way of the hype train and posting daily blog posts.
I always preferred the chonky bois of AC1/2, but 4/4a did indeed feel REAL damned good.
My main issue is that everything about the mission structure encouraged just rushing the objective and DPSing it down. Which is fun sometimes but not when it is EVERY mission.
Its also a big reason I genuinely loved Daemon Ex Machina (the first one, at least). You had the blitzes and the arena missions but you also had some truly amazing slogs where you are just fighting nigh endless waves of MTs and are grabbing whatever gun you can off the ground to down a few more enemies.
I forget a lot of 3. But 1 and 2 didn’t really do mission rankings along those lines and were generally built around having to push through multiple rooms and hallways. Whereas 4(a) heavily emphasized wide open spaces and rushing to get those objectives.
6 was a MUCH better balance where the S rank actually often required a certain number of kills and many missions had ways to justify the ammo expenditure so that it wasn’t just “get a karasawa and then human plus”.
Eh, fuck it. I have no need for more “douche and a turd sandwich” “both sides suck” humor in the 2020s and I have zero desire to give rockstar any money after their blatant union busting.
Exactly, as I don’t expect QA done by something that can’t think or feel to know what actually needs to be fixed
That is a very small part of QA’s responsibility. Mostly it is about testing and identifying bugs that get triaged by management. The person running the tests is NOT responsible for deciding what can and can’t ship.
And, in that regard… this is actually a REALLY good use of “AI” (not so much generative). Imagine something like the old “A star algorithm plays mario” where it is about finding different paths to accomplish the same goal (e.g. a quest) and immediately having a lot of exactly what steps led to the anomaly for the purposes of building a reproducer.
Which actually DOES feel like a really good use case… at the cost of massive computational costs (so… “AI”).
That said: it also has all of the usual labor implications. But from a purely technical “make the best games” standpoint? Managers overseeing a rack that is running through the games 24/7 for bugs that they can then review and prioritize seems like a REALLY good move.
Sleeping Dogs (aka “Sleepy Dogs”) is basically GTA in Hong Kong but inspired by HK crime dramas rather than tarantino stealing his ideas from them. And it was REALLY good and shockingly holds up (did another run late last year). Arkham Batman style combat on foot but you also have guns and cars (with Total Overdose style shenanigans to leap from car to car). Technically a sequel to True Crime LA but nobody cares about that.
Also… Emma Stone is in it for reasons nobody understands. And it is still unclear if she actually knows she was in it either.
But it also highlights the issue. Taking GTA and moving it to another country would, by and large, lose the purpose of the game. Modern day Rockstar is very much an American company and all of their points of reference are American cinema (or what few foreign films take off here). That was very noticeable any time Nico began referring to “the old country”. To transplant that to Russia or Thailand would just be an American movie set in Russia or Thailand.
Whereas… if you enjoy HK crime dramas than you will LOVE Sleepy Dogs because it 100% understood the assignment. United Front clearly worshipped the movies and it very much showed… while also making sure Wei Shen had spent most of his life in the US to account for any weirdness there.
And if you’ve ever spent time in Hong Kong? Okay, it isn’t quite as good as RGG and Kabukicho or Yokohama. But you very much get all the right vibes in a way that the GTAs often fail at with LA and NYC. You aren’t going to be able to navigate Wan Chai just because you beat up some fools there (unlike how you can 100% navigate Kabukicho after any modern Yakuza…) but you are going to feel “at home” on the streets in either form.
More or less all companies (that are legally allowed to (and some that aren’t)) send anti-union propaganda. Whether it is outright villification or just “We are your friends. Talk to us. If you form a union it is you saying we failed”. That is kind of just the nature of the game.
What matters is what happens when the workforce decides to unionize anyway. You can either respect it or do everything you can to slaughter your workforce.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.
Yeah. I never fucked with EU but I am a huge CK sicko and… I have a LOT of problems with Paradox as a publisher but they’ve really been pushing their internal/flagship studios to focus on onboarding and approachability for these games.
Was really surprised to see that the new East Asia DLC for CK3 actually added a new tutorial sequence/character. Haven’t sat down yet to see if it is focused on the Mandate of Heaven or if it is just for people who want to get back in and are sick and freaking tired of Petty King Murchad.
There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km^2^, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what...
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.
A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.
That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.
As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to “levels” than anything else.
Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and… I’ll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.
A bunch of free content with a coupon in LoTRO. Very worth downloading the game and redeeming if you ever had or ever think you might even want to try the game....
If you actually look at the MMO/MMO-adjacent landscape… most of the ones that are still alive are over a decade old with some legally allowed to drink.
Runescape: 2001
WoW: 2004
LOTRO: 2007
Star Wars TOR: 2011
Guild Wars 2: 2012
Final Fantasy MMO (that people actually liked): 2013
Old School Runescape: 2013
Elder Scrolls Online (about that…): 2014
And a lot of that has to do with people increasingly using MMOs as “comfort games” which… work best for the oldies. And most of the money going into game dev focused more on annual games and then live service games where you still spend about the same amount of money per year but feel better because it isn’t a monthly subscription. Instead of spending 10-15 bucks a month you spend 30-50 bucks every other month for the battle pass or the new expansion or the Officer D.Va skin and so forth. TOTALLY different.
So most of the newer MMO-ass MMOs are either doomed from the start for being overly niche or take a more Korean or Gacha oriented balance and monetization scheme where… they are competing against the juggernauts that are also closer to a decade old than not.
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line
Strong disagree on “most”
For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.
In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.
I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.
For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth
And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding iperf3 to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.
Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type sudo before every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.
Up until the big UI/UX update a few years back, the vast majority of people had never heard about Dwarf Fortress outside of the sickos and the people who remember when LPs were forum/blog posts.
Unreal World has been in that same category where the people who play it love it and the rest vaguely recall their favorite youtubers maybe trying it out once.
Describing Bilibili as “a social media company” is like describing Google as “a search engine” or Microsoft as “the people what make the calculator app”.
Duckov seems solid from what I have seen. It also has the full might of Chinese Youtube behind it and has been doing sponsorships with basically any influencer who will take the money. Its as simple as that.
I can’t speak to Mexico. But, at least in the US, video games very much have been a pipeline for both rehabilitation of the military’s image and direct recruitment. It is what leads to generations that believe tier ninety special force operators are the greatest people ever which both provides “They know what they are doing and have their reasons” and “I want to be one of those”
I am not aware of any cartel friendly games (unless you REALLY disliked Fifty Cent, I guess?) but I wouldn’t immediately rule this out IF it is part of a wider media push.
Violent video games do not make you violent. But “cool guys doing cool shit” makes people want to “do cool shit”. There is a reason (para)militaries around the world tend to cooperate with, and outright fund, so much media that glazes them. Hell, military/spy porn is sometimes so good that it makes you ALMOST stop making jokes about how Sullivan Stapleton should play Hank Hill in a live action KOTH (that man wishes he had Hank Hill’s ass).
As long as you run the proprietary nvidia drivers, performance is more or less noise for a given driver version. There IS some annoyance with slower releases for drivers to Linux but… nvidia has had much bigger problems with new driver releases over the past year.
The big issue is if you run the open source community drivers. And… if you are spending leather jacket money and then using low performance drivers… you are an idiot. Because Mistah J already has the metrics and money he wants and doesn’t care if you actually use your card after buying it.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of dwnsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.
Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked… which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.
These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn’t really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.
But also… have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn’t considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.
it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window
Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed /wiki jennah’s feet and then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.
It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN
Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.
My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.
If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.
As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.
To be clear. Fuck ASUS. Their ROG Armory Crate shit is god damned malware.
But for a “new xbox” that is the “PC with gaming mode” that MS have been alluding to over the past few months? That is effectively what Valve are doing with SteamOS (and same with the Bazzite devs).
I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.
Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.
But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.
And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.
All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.
And it is probably in Valve’s best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since “1024 at 40 FPS” doesn’t scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.
And I’ll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle “steam deck games” on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.
Aside from the windows and armory crate bullshit (both of which go away if you install bazzite…), the ROG allies are actually pretty good hardware for their price.
Because… you aren’t driving 4k@60 for under a thousand bucks. And the ROG Ally X whatever is very comparable to laptops with similar hardware. And while I do not at all think you need that power in a handheld, people are going to notice it when it gets compared to a PS5 pro or a PS6. Which it will.
Let Sony launch the PS6 at 1k or higher. Let Microsoft somehow get the xbox series 2 out at 2k because they are pulling a The Producers or whatever. And if there is demand? Premium ass Steam Box. If there is not? MAYBE do a more premium 500-800 USD NUC. And if people REALLY love the ASUS Bumfuck ROG Seventy Seven Y Y Z or whatever? Give ASUS 20 bucks to sell a shit ton with SteamOS installed by default.
The key difference is that Valve were trying to build a market with the Steam Boxes. SteamOS is already demonstrably viable for “console” gaming and the consoles are going to be selling bigass PCs in 2027 already. Let them take the risk and then let Valve swoop in.
Which… is kinda what they did with the Steam Deck. GDP and Aya Neo put in the work to make handheld form factor laptops at semi-reasonable prices. Valve rolled up and wrecked their shit with the Steam Deck.
It is just deeply stupid. These were GenX and Millennial games.
I care less for “boomer CRPG” (mostly I just laugh because it isn’t like the genre has evolved significantly since Baldurs Gate. Mostly just polish and folding in more TTRPG mechanics) than I do for “boomer shooters”. Mostly because boomers were the ones trying to get all violent video games, and especially games like DOOM, banned.
Millennials increasingly feel like a forgotten generation that increasingly catches all the hell that boomers and genx have unleashed upon the world (and, in fairness, people don’t often realize that genx aren’t millennials), but whatever. Mostly it is just really stupid and… we can do so much better.
Like… Demon Souls is 16 years old. Let’s start calling Soulsborne games “boomer bonfires”. I mean, it is old, right?
Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.
And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.
I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?
But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.
I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.
Not saying krafton deserves the benefit of the doubt but:
Understand that “agentic AI” is almost entirely a buzzword that means “Microservices with an LLM somewhere in the mix”. Which… is what people are already doing.
Yes, there are some (idiots) who think that means EVERY single node in the graph needs to be an LLM and fuck the planet, Jensen needs a new zipper. But, by and large, what that means is they are using the exact same infrastructure they were last week but MAYBE added an LLM for preprocessing or postprocessing. It makes management happy because “We are using AI” and it makes everyone else happy because they can keep using the tools that actually work.
Yeah. Its one of those things that increasingly annoy me.
People (rightfully) shit on Bethesda for never fixing known bugs. They ALSO shit on Bethesda because any patch potentially breaks mods that use unofficial tools.
I understand that the majority of people online aren’t developers (or are hobbyist/student at best) but… that is development. I actively dread when a major MR is pulled in because that means my merge conflicts are going to be hell. MOST of them are just eyeballing the changed file and saying “that looks right” but there will inevitably be a changed interface that involves very extensive tweaking before I can even think about running my test suite again to find the rest.
But for major forks? There is a reason that so many of them end up using a somewhat dangerously outdated base. Okay, part of that is the nature of a fork and WHY it forked. But it is also because pulling upsteram changes is a REALLY big undertaking.
I don’t have a particularly large stake in this as I am increasingly on the “wouldn’t it be crazy if I replayed Morrowind again” train but going by (obligatory: Fuck fandom)
Looks like a somewhat decent amount of scripting and placement changes that would definitely cause merge conflict level issues with mods. Like, I assume tools have gotten a LOT better but I still remember the days of “please for the love of christ stop putting things in Balmora” because of the endless conflicts. And enough code changes that it would break the script extender.
You can make the argument that you actively don’t want those fixes but… considering the shitshow that the “unofficial patches” have become, being able to play more “vanilla” holds a lot of appeal to people.
Don’t get me wrong. I do think Bethesda should reach out to modders more (although, considering the aforementioned Unofficial Patch debacles, maybe not…). But it just seemed insane that people were losing their minds and angry that Bethesda would DARE to patch their game when Fallout London was going to release or whatever. Like… what?
Having played the original (and most Obsidian games), I can only partially comment (also: Support BDS, fuck Microsoft, Obsidian are probably dead either way regardless of sales…):
I strongly disagree with that. I think a much better statement is that Obsidian… generally doesn’t super care about the overall plot outside of a few major beats (Pillars of Eternity 1 being their really big exception and it arguably being their greatest work as a result).
They instead care about the moment to moment narrative. They want you to CARE about what is happening in the now. Because the main quest? That is mostly a quick journey. What matters is the people and scenarios you meet along the way. And a huge part of that is writing those chains of quests in a way that it feels like your actions Matter.
And when it works? It fucking WORKS. You really feel like you are part of a living and breathing world in a way that few studios can even hope to manage. Like, yes, the world is ending, but life still moves on and you become deeply invested in this family that refuses to give up and die… even though they probably will. It is very reminiscent of how RGG does the Yakuza/LAD games.
And… like the LADs… it also can mean that you just don’t actually care about what the giant bad vibes tree is actually going to do. But, once you have finished up all the side quests you kind of just don’t care? RGG tends to avert that by making the last hour or two just constant cutscenes, epic fights, and shirts getting ripped off. Obsidian prefer to go much more introspective and… if you vibe with that then it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
Contrast that with (classic) Bioware (and modern day Larian) where you have that same fork/join model of story telling but they make it a point to constantly shoehorn in references to the main plot into every interaction to the point it is a bigger surprise if the woman who stole that cake wasn’t secretly the adjutant of the big bad’s top general.
And, just for funsies, Owlcat tend to be a lot more like Obsidian in their approach but also are generally much better at tying in enough of those side beats to the main quest (or at least a party member) that it still holds together.
But yeah. That is a huge chunk of why so many people never finished Outer Worlds 1. They did the three or four planets to get access to the imperial capital world and… were done by then because they had effectively experienced two or three REALLY solid mini stories/arcs and didn’t see much point in moving on.
Nintendo have ALWAYS been supervillains (at least, since they got into video games).
Like, everyone loves the story about how Nintendo “saved video games” after The Crash by tricking stores into carrying Robby the Robot. And… like most stories that came out of 90s/00s games media, it ignores the existence of PC gaming. But whatever. We got REALLY lucky that people liked the NES because if they didn’t? NOBODY would ever have been able to try that again.
Aside from that? Nintendo is just Disney. They are ridiculously protective of their IP and everyone insists on dragging their kids in because they remember loving it growing up. And they are INCREDIBLY protective of their back catalog (less so in the Switch era where third parties were an active detriment for performance reasons) a la The Disney Vault.
And… all the Nintendo Adults have made it clear over the decades that “Corporations aren’t your friends. Except for the one with Mario. #StandUpForNintendo”
To be clear: I am one of the five people who bought every single Battlecruiser game. That shit was GOOD. That doesn’t mean Derek Smart wasn’t always an evil mother fucker (back in the day, he joined an Unreal message board JUST to curse me out and call me like seven slurs. And I was actually defending his games in that thread).
Enjoy what you enjoy. Just don’t associate “make good game” with virtue.
Curious. Hadn’t heard of them at all and they seem to have made solid progress.
So I went to their “github” link which goes to their own self hosted (codeberg?) which is a big ol’ orange flag because it implies that either they don’t understand what git actually is or they assume their audience doesn’t… I can see that it is a yuzu fork. Not inherently bad but it does explain the progress for something nobody ever heard of until… today. And that has implications for the project getting a pretty strong C&D because of the shenanigans Yuzu was allegedly doing to get such strong compatibility on release day for so many games. Yellow flag, we’ll say.
Just skimming the last few MRs? Seeing a LOT of “waiting reviews” on the merged side of things which is another orange flag. Best case scenario it means they don’t understand how to map their SDLC to their tools, worst case scenario it means they aren’t actually doing thorough code reviews which is playing with fire when it comes to a console with as many leaks as the Switch.
Also no Releases. Which further suggests they have no idea how to use their tools. So did some digging on the readme and it looks like the project itself probably began 6 months ago with git.eden-emu.dev/…/d29d7b931c6ae8c035992d7a15d96a…
So yeah. Not sure how much they have contributed to the fork but everything I am seeing is just making me want to remind people that a LOT of people are going to make yuzu forks and you should think about what is going into the code you are going to blindly run. And… it kinda makes me think less of whatever blog site ran this interview.
To elaborate. There is nothing wrong with forking a project (assuming all licenses are upheld which, at a glance, this does). But the beautiful thing about git is that it is fundamentally decentralized so ANYONE can make a fork. And EVERYONE does. So the important things to check are if they actually have any idea how to run a project or are fly by night “hackers”. The former is how you make something stronger. The latter is how you get a whole shit ton of unacknowledged CVEs. And a great indicator is how they use their tools and implement an SDLC. And a huge indicator into that is how merge requests are handled.
One more edit. What allegedly sealed the fate of Yuzu (and Ryujinix) was very strong evidence that the devs had been looking at the various Switch leaks/hacks and were using pirated pre-release copies of games to improve 0-day compatibility.
Now, I am obviously not a lawyer so I can’t say whether they WERE doing things nefariously. But if you spend enough time dabbling in reverse engineering, you rapidly spot the telltale “intuitions” that come from somebody “cheating”. Because they aren’t testing code against behaviors or even using tools to speculate what C code created that assembly. They are looking at code and then writing an interface/re-implementation of it. And that is a MASSIVE no no because it gets you well past the bleem lawsuit and starts making you liable for a lot of penalties that we DO have precedent for.
As for the pre-release copies? It is, again, hard to not think they had copies of Tears and what not pre-release. And while it is possible that for every major release all the devs went to stores that broke embargoes… yeah.
And the implications of this for a fork that was very publicly taken down is… they know they are potentially working with poison fruit.
I guess I wonder how much of that is just that… yuzu was REAL fucking good and this is Yuzu (if you check the source since their website doesn’t seem to acknowledge that?).
From a skimming of the code (if they aren’t going to do proper code review, why would I?), the main deltas seem to be related to CI/CD, branding, package updates, and MAYBE improved controls/interfaces more geared towards the android client.
And, to be clear, I think there is a lot of value in maintenance. But when you have to dig relatively deep to even see this is a fork and they already have donation links plastered everywhere?
Yeah… I would be a bit more concerned over making sure this is “above board” as it were.
Which… is honestly really shit to the actual yuzu devs who put the work in. And it isn’t like Nintendo is going to say “Wow, that really good emulator might not be the one we had taken down. Let’s actively not look and instead cry into our money”. If they want it down, they’ll look for a reason. And then REALLY quickly see it is the same codebase they had removed already.
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...
While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors with day jobs and that you can also see Janet at Remap or her twitch channel and Charles at Game Informer and Jacob talking about death in a video essay on Nebula and…
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.
Valve Reveals New Hardware Lineup: A Controller, Compact Gaming PC, and VR-Ready Headset (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Real talk, which would you rather have: Megaman 12, or Megaman X9? angielski
Don’t be shy ;)
Rockstar Games Employee Calls Out Studio For Spreading “Disinformation and Lies”, Union Busting (gamingbolt.com) angielski
In light of the recent criticism that Rockstar Games has been facing for its firing of over 30 employees, one employee from the studio has taken to the GTA Forums to talk about the company’s actions. Under request of anonymity, and having been verified as a real Rockstar Games employee by an admin, the person – using the...
Welcome To Armored Core - A Chronological Breakdown Of FromSoftware's Legendary Mecha Series (www.timeextension.com) angielski
‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Is Postponed Again — to November 2026 (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
At this rate, the PS6 will be out by the time this game is ready.
Square Enix says it wants generative AI to be doing 70% of its QA and debugging by the end of 2027 (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Protests erupt at Rockstar Games offices accusing GTA 6 developers of “Union Busting” (www.dexerto.com) angielski
GTA 6 dev Rockstar says recent firings were due to leaks of "confidential information" and were "in no way related to people's right to join a union" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Europa Universalis V | Review Thread angielski
Game Information...
For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big? angielski
There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km^2^, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what...
Free content for LoTRO with a coupon for 3rd of November (redeemable in-game with code EXPLOREOURWORLD) (www.lotro.com) angielski
A bunch of free content with a coupon in LoTRO. Very worth downloading the game and redeeming if you ever had or ever think you might even want to try the game....
Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up...
[UnReal World] has been in continual development for 33 years, and its creator doesn't think he'll ever stop updating it: 'When I accomplish one feature, I always have two more waiting' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Behind Escape from Duckov's unlikely rise to the top of the Steam charts (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Mexican Government To Tax Violent Video Games It Says Make Kids Violent (www.techdirt.com) angielski
Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.nz/post/29912814
Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games] (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
Oh, and turns out New World, Amazon’s one reasonably-sized success in gaming, is shutting down in 2026, and development is ending imminently.
Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
It’s confirmed: the next xbox will be a Windows PC box. It sounds very interesting that this will also be backwards compatible with Xbox games, including 360/One/Series games. I wonder if it’s just emulation, and how well that will work
'Mask of the Betrayer: the last of the boomer cRPG classics' - Warlockracy (www.youtube.com) angielski
Finally Decided I Explored Enough and Beat the Game (Elden Ring) angielski
ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
Krafton is now an 'AI-first company,' will spend $70 million on a GPU cluster to 'serve as the foundation for accelerating the implementation of agentic AI' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition - Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Seems like bethesda is taking a break from re-releasing skyrim every few years. hope this doesn’t break mods this time
The Outer Worlds 2 | Review Thread angielski
Game Information...
[Mujin] It's Time to Accept That Nintendo is a Supervillain (youtu.be) angielski
Preserving Play: How Eden Grew Into the Switch Emulator Everyone’s Talking About (my interview with the devs) angielski
I just wanted to share this!...
More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...