arc

arc, 9 miesięcy temu

I thought it was a great game that captured the spirit of the books & movies so well. Thankfully all the mock outrage and virtue signaling didn’t affect its sales and probably boosted them.

arc, 9 miesięcy temu

Yes. Some game “reviews” were such absurd, performative straw man attacks at JK Rowling that they bordered on parody. I’m thinking of the Wired one in particular but others were equally bad. The irony is these diatribes clearly helped the game, or rather, this really good game sold well in spite of that crap. Ultimately these websites just undermined their own reputations.

arc, 10 miesięcy temu

The same Hasbro that tried to make a land grab for all D&D derivative content by changing their Open Game License to grant them irrevocable, perpetual rights to it. This is not a nice company as they demonstrate time and again.

So maybe it’s time the RPG community stopped thinking Hasbro are ever going to change, mourn for what D&D has become, but move onto something else.

arc, rok temu

Probably too late for Unity. A commercial game engine only makes money if there is a constant influx of new games to sustain it. I bet a lot of developers, large and small, have already decided to dump the platform either immediately or for their next project. So revenues are going to go into free fall.

Devs will move to Unreal (powerful) or Godot (free) and Unity will die. And it’s all thanks to John here and the other members of the board who thought squeezing people for $$$ who have choices was a good idea.

arc, rok temu

Who on earth would rely on a game engine in bankruptcy? Would you get support? Would you get product keys? Would backend services get turned off? Who would collect revenues and would the terms change again? I think Unity has already done itself irreparable damage and if it ends in bankruptcy then blame the outgoing CEO. Engines need a constant conveyor belt of new games to sustain their revenues and I don’t see this happening. If the company is bought it will just be to pick the bones of a dead platform, collecting revenues from games out in the wild.

And yes there is pain and a learning curve to moving to other engines though I think most programmers would be able to cope with change and if they’re that incurious and inflexible that they can’t then maybe it’s time to find new programmers. I expect most teams will jump to another engine at a natural break in the development process, e.g. after completing a game and moving onto the next and they might start on a smaller project and work up to familiarise themselves with their new tools.

As for Godot, I am sure it is not a 100% feature for feature replacement for Unity. But it sure as hell is capable of powering 95% of indie games out there no trouble whatsoever and I daresay some more challenging titles. Another compelling reason for devs to reevaluate their relationship with Unity.

arc, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Serves people right for crowdfunding a game let alone one built around some libertarian wet dream where you have to buy your way to success, dropping thousands on content like spaceships.

arc, rok temu

The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.

I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn’t. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they’ll never have to actually deliver on their promises.

arc, rok temu

Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.

arc, rok temu

I wonder from a cost benefit analysis if even its even worth the effort. If someone is playing a game under emulation then most likely they never had the intention of buying the game. So what’s the point of using anti-emulation checks? It’s just an additional cost (and drag on development / testing) that doesn’t translate into extra sales.

arc, rok temu

Hogwarts Legacy also sold a shit tonne, in part because you got the whole game, not half a game with a “season pass” or pay to win DLC.

arc, rok temu

I think Hogwarts sold well because it was a genuinely good game which captured the spirit of the franchise, a decent story line, an explorable world and had some decent combat mechanics.

I think the JKR boycott did help in an underhanded way because most of the protesting was shrill straw man character assassination. People tuned it out and bought the game anyway based on word of mouth. The real losers in this nonsense were gaming websites who undermined their own credibility by boycotting the game or scoring it badly just and turning the review into a diatribe about gender politics.

arc, rok temu

I wouldn’t trust anything from a P2P site that purports to be:

1. A cracked game / application for desktop and mobile platforms. Maybe it’s legit but assume it is malware.
2. A serial number generator. If you absolutely must run one of these do it from a throwaway VM, or via WINE emulation to mitigate what it might do.
3. An encrypted archive with a README. It’s a scam designed to make people sign up to other scams to release a non-existent password.
4. A movie / audio with an extension such as .scr, .wma, .com, .exe etc. It’s malware.

Movies, audio & books are generally safe providing they use a recognized extension - mp3, mp4, pdf, mkv, aac, flac, epub etc. Stuff that runs under emulation like console games is generally safe. I say “generally” because an exploit could still be crafted to escape a popular media player or emulator and cause actual harm to your computer.

All the ads and 3rd party scripts should be considered malicious too and should be erased with an adblocker, or even better use Tor.

So basically use some common sense and if you really want some game or app, just buy the damned thing or wait for it to go on sale.

arc, rok temu

Read their own FAQ. It’s not an emulator in the classic sense of emulating the OS. It is however emulating the API of Windows. I quoted the pertinent line of the FAQ elsewhere and made my point clearer

arc, rok temu

Not sure what the thumbs down is about. It’s right there in their own FAQ.

In fact it ends by saying - “Wine is not just an emulator” is more accurate.

arc, rok temu

I’ll give the game a go but I’ve played so many MMOs to know the warning signs of a game using grind (travel, upkeep, etc.). If that happens I’ll be gone as fast as I signed up.

And I say that as a veteran of Asherons Call, Everquest, EQ 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert, Company of Heroes, Company of Villains, Guild Wars and many more. I think I played EQ for 18 months on subscription but the amount of grind convinced me I’m not going to put up with that any more. When those other games resorted to the same BS I was gone.