ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 5 godzin temu

They’re just games that favor those categories. Even if Peak pops off, it’s not going to win a category like art direction or narrative, ever. It was far from a slow year.

ampersandrew, 13 godzin temu

Echoes of Paradox moving Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 to The Chinese Room for some reason none of us on the outside understand.

ampersandrew, 12 godzin temu

The only explanation I can come up with is that they’re a studio that reliably ships finished projects, and maybe that was all Paradox was looking for.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

that will cost more than a console

Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.

ampersandrew, 2 dni temu

Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.

ampersandrew, 3 dni temu

The correct lesson to take away from it, that they won’t ever do, is to release multiplayer games in a way where they can live on without constant updates or a central server.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

What do you believe the cost to Sony is for community-run servers?

ampersandrew, wczoraj

In this case, the ask is to release the server binary and allow users to point their game to a different server when the official one is gone.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

If it costs them nothing, then what does the cost of servers have to do with anything? If someone else wants to run servers at their own expense, that’s their prerogative. Why would you have an issue with a bad game remaining playable? That’s valuable history that everyone can learn from.

ampersandrew, wczoraj

I don’t believe I said anything like “all games deserve ongoing maintenance”.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Why would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a PC that used a brand-new operating system and had a gaming library a fraction of the size of that of Windows machines?

I had one of the old Alienware Steam Machines. I know it wasn’t a popular answer, but my answer to this was that Windows was atrocious for the living room just like it’s atrocious for handhelds today, and I had easily and cheaply amassed a large library of Linux-compatible games even back then by way of Steam sales. But this wasn’t even the only problem. We only had OpenGL ports rather than lower level and more performant APIs like Vulkan. Running a marquis Linux title like Shadow of Mordor would come with a sizable performance hit compared to the Windows version, even when run on exactly the same hardware, and that would also require a machine that cost $200 more than a PS4 that could run the same game just as well.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

So, funny story, I bought it as the Windows variant, because it was $50 cheaper for some reason. Bloatware subsidies, maybe? My roommate and I tried it for a little while, but using Windows from the couch sucked so much that I put SteamOS on it. My roommate only booted back to Windows to play Hearthstone. I just rocked whatever SteamOS would let me play local, since streaming games from my desktop in the other room wasn’t cutting it for me. I played through KOTOR2 on that machine, on SteamOS, and had a great time.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don’t focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don’t think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Console gamers who don’t know what Steam is

How common do you believe this is in 2025? It’s on every big game’s launch trailer, and Steam dwarfs any console player base. Network effects alone should make just about every console player (who’s old enough to read) aware of what Steam is.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu (edited 4 dni temu)

To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscious, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box

There could never be a better test for the hypothesis than this critical moment where people are fucking pissed at Microsoft.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

The part where they have to install the OS itself is going to be a major deal breaker for mass market.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

Digital Foundry’s analysis of it is that it could retail for somewhere between $400 and $500, but it will be slightly less powerful than a PS5, and therefore, it wouldn’t be as attractive at $500 retail. Valve probably knows that, too.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

Digital Foundry’s guess is somewhere between $400 and $500, and they think it will be a harder sell at $500 for the power it’s offering.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

I’m sure there are vast swaths of older games that will hit 4k60 though. Me, personally, my TV is still 1080p, so I’m confident I’ll hit my full resolution without breaking a sweat, haha.

ampersandrew, 5 dni temu

friends/chat was offline for literally months

Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

Thank you. Didn’t notice I screwed that up.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

I’ve got a bit of a VR library, but the new ease of setup with this one does have me considering how I’d use the virtual display features. Even with trackpads, a lot of mouse-driven games aren’t great on Steam Deck, but I’m replaying Baldur’s Gate 2 right now and wondering how the mouse controls might work out in VR.

ampersandrew, 4 dni temu

That was a conscious decision they made at the time so that you could browse the web and such with no driver downloads. The full functionality of it is kind of locked behind Steam itself (without community made software), which is its worst quality, for sure.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu (edited 6 dni temu)

Yeah, Xbox controllers are pretty much standard. Comfortable, not overpriced, great compatibility with everything, no fuss. Newer ones, from the past several years now, will have Nintendo-style d pads, now that the patent has expired, and connect via bluetooth for wireless play or with a USB C cable to save on batteries. Speaking of batteries, it uses AAs, which means that you can actually swap them when they get low, as opposed to PlayStation controllers where batteries don’t last long and they aren’t really exposed for you to access them. I’m not going to tell you Xbox controllers are the be-all, end-all, but there’s a high chance it’s all you need.

EDIT: Even though I use Xbox controllers all the time, I forgot that the newest Xbox pads actually have d pads that are even better than Nintendo’s design. They look funky, but for my money, it’s the best d pad out there.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu (edited 6 dni temu)

Not me, sorry. On desktop Linux, I’m always wired, and the bluetooth always just worked when I needed it on Bazzite or Steam Deck, connecting via the controller setup in the Steam menu, but maybe someone else here will know.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

No one wants to scope their games back down either, especially when they’re met with complaints like The Outer Worlds.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

There is, because we expect more fidelity now than we did in 2011, and Skyrim was built on some existing bones. When you’re trying to make a game like that in Unreal that you haven’t done in that engine before, it’s going to be smaller (if you’re smart). Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t get to be that big without building on Original Sin 2, and the same can be said for Elden Ring; perhaps without a pandemic in the middle, those games might have even been made in more reasonable time frames than 5 or 6 years.

ampersandrew, 6 dni temu

Right, there is little difference between them because they had the prior game in the series to build off of, but don’t just gloss over “and graphics”. The fidelity that we expect today is why you can’t just make the next Morrowind with 50 people, because people expect it to be better than Morrowind now that we’re 20 years removed from it. A smaller team than that made Dread Delusion; a larger one made Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. From those, if they’re fortunate enough to have financial success, they can build on it just like Bethesda built on Morrowind’s bones. What Obsidian made with a similar team was The Outer Worlds, which kept the fidelity up but the scope small, and I think it was the right decision, because otherwise, you end up taking 7 years per game like Kingdom Come. Those are great games, but it took 15 years to get two of them, and the first one was rough.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

GameFAQs was definitely responsible for anyone knowing the fatalities in Mortal Kombat games for a while. I was using it plenty in the mid 90s.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.

I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.

Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.

ampersandrew, 7 dni temu

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.

I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.

But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.

It didn’t happen overnight, much like GameStop.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.

But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

Yeah, I liked that one more than its reputation as well. In some ways, I liked it better than the 2 remake.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.

ampersandrew, 8 dni temu

I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.

ampersandrew, 11 dni temu

Well, it keeps getting pushed back, not forward, so that helps.

ampersandrew, 9 dni temu

The campaign, yes.