lemmyvore

lemmyvore, miesiąc temu

Isn’t it fourth?

lemmyvore, 2 miesiące temu

I liked the puzzle battle style of games like Disgaea 2.

Not a big fan of the classic “let’s all stand face to face and take turns bashing each other” approach.

lemmyvore, 2 miesiące temu

Depends on who wins the election. Trump would come out with anti-union legislation so the large studios might decide to hold out for that.

lemmyvore, 2 miesiące temu

The fact they couldn’t even make it as good as Red vs Blue is amazing. And that’s not a high bar.

lemmyvore, 2 miesiące temu

I’m really surprised they made two seasons.

lemmyvore, 3 miesiące temu

I can’t give specifics because it will depend on the version you play and also it’s been a while and I don’t remember all mods by heart. So it’s just gonna be suggestions; in no particular order:

• First of all you’ll need the fundamental bug fixes. There’s (still) lots of bugs in vanilla Skyrim.
• You will need the new improved menus, most mods rely on them.
• Personally I can’t play without improving the aspect of PC and NPCs, so improvements to bodies, faces and hair are a must for me. If you get down the rabbit hole there’s things like mustaches, beards, tattoos, eyes etc.
• Armor and weapons is a close second for good looking stuff.
• You will want a mod that improves polygons as well as something that enhances vegetation, skyboxes, water and weather.
• There are mods that fill the cities and villages with a lot more… stuff. Things like decorative vegetation, benches etc. You will not be able to play without it once you’ve tried it.
• The skill trees and the professions all need specific mods that apply balances and fixes. You can also go one step further and apply mods that actually make them interesting.
• If you can find one for your version of Skyrim, I strongly recommend a mod that improves dragon AI and makes the fights actually challenging. It always seemed ridiculous to me how easy they are by default.
• Better horses is a good idea, lots of convenience there.
• Smithing improvements. Nuff said.
• Personally I can’t stand the default fighting in all aspects of it. I must have didn’t roll and some extra brains for the enemies. Some mods the spruce up the dungeons aren’t bad either.
• You can get lots of extra quests and NPCs with Interesting NPCs.
• I typically avoid shaders and ENBs in favor of simpler mods that let you adjust the game colors (contrast, saturation etc.) They have very low impact on performance and give you that color jolt that’s 90% of why people use ENBs anyway.

On an even more personal note, I like to play like a classic RPG. I get mods that allow multiple companions and interesting NPCs and when I met somebody interesting I take them into my party. There are also mods that let you order them better, you can adjust their flags to set what armor and weapons they prefer, how they level up, and whether they have “plot armor” so they can die for reals. I usually end the game with a party of 4-6 people and it’s a blast. But you may want to adjust the difficulty accordingly as you go out you will start rolling everything.

Another very interesting approach I’ve tried a couple of times is mods that remove all identification clues (no town names, no directions, maximum map fog of war) and start you in some random point of the map. Add some difficulty mods so you have to be really careful who you meet, perhaps some survival mods, and it’s a real blast. You can also use rogue rules and restart when you die (and not save scum).

lemmyvore, 3 miesiące temu

I wonder if it works with a joystick…

lemmyvore, 3 miesiące temu

Skyrim came with a built-in mod editor?

Are you perhaps thinking of the manager they added on Xbox?

lemmyvore, 3 miesiące temu

What do you do for 1k hours in Starfield?

lemmyvore, 3 miesiące temu

It’s fucked because there are people buying that shit, in numbers that turn a profit over the cost of developing it. And it’s a very low cost because the skin support is something they put in when they make the game, and then get an intern to shit out a gaudy skin.

If you don’t like it you’re obviously not the target demographic anymore. It’s mobile gaming tactics creeping their way on PC.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu

Thanks, I needed that laugh.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu

But I mean that was the whole point of opening the Doom code wasn’t it? So it would evolve and expand beyond the state of the art at the time.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu

They’re actually two different genres, team deathmatch and battle royale. This Deadlock would be the former.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu

They’re surprisingly fun and I wonder why more team deathmatch games don’t include them.

I used to play Tremulous and it was super addictive to live and die by your base elements. Gives the game a whole new dimension about strategy and teamwork.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Here is some gameplay (from the alien camp point of view). This is another good example of gameplay.

Apparently both Natural Selection and Tremulous were inspired by the Gloom mod for Quake 2, according to the Tremulous FAQ:

Development on Tremulous began long before NS was in the public domain. If Tremulous is inspired by anything, it is inspired by Gloom for Quake 2. NS has a similar ancestry (please see Game Developer Magazine February 2001 issue); this is probably where the confusion arises.

lemmyvore, 4 miesiące temu

character based FPS, like multiplayer Borderlands

That applies too, but it’s orthogonal to game structure. MOBAs also tend to be character based and you can add it to basically any game (eg. card based rogues like Slay the Spire).

But there are also lots of battle royales without characters (like PUBG or Fortnite) and team deathmatch without characters like CS.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

Do they not also block access to the Steam IPs?

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

Yeah but now people will get right back to spending money on the game. So at the end of the day it’s still Sony laughing all the way to the bank.

Shit like this should result in a boycott not in “at least it’s not as bad as it could’ve been”.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

You don’t owe Arrowhead anything. They’re not a dog, they’re a company who’s made bad choices and now has to deal with them.

What use is a good game if you get blocked out or exploited trying to play it? Do you really want to give your money away? Ok, but stop wondering why the industry is going to shit. It’s because of gamers with more money than sense.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

Again, why do you care? You paid for a product. That product is now different from what it was supposed to be. You’ve been screwed and switch-baited. Why do you care what unholy combination of companies led to this? If it were any other industry and any other type of product you’d be screaming murder. But because it’s games we find excuses.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

If they’re as incompetent as they sound they’d have to change it manually and assuming you could make them do that it would probably break something in the account. 😄 There’s no good way to do this if it was badly put together.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

From what source? To be a remaster you’d need access to the original tracks or even higher quality ones. If you used the in-game music it’s not a remaster, at best it’s a remix.

lemmyvore, 5 miesięcy temu

The library shrank over a long period due to the change in patronage, from rulers friendly to academia to some that had other priorities. The writings were taken to other places that were more interested in them. There was indeed a fire at some point but it only burned part of it and anyway by that time the collection was a fraction of what it used to be.

lemmyvore, 6 miesięcy temu

Why not a Prince of Persia 1989 rogue? It was literally a dungeon crawler…

lemmyvore, 7 miesięcy temu

And despite all that, just you watch if it’s not going to be a cool game once the modders really start going.

Exact same thing happened with Skyrim, full of promise and ideas, half-assed execution. And look at it now.

lemmyvore, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah Bethesda really needs to pay some attention to Japanese games before they get anywhere near making an NG+ mechanic.

The whole point of such a game is that they’re so rich in detail that it’s impossible to do everything and see everything in one playthrough. How do you miss that?

lemmyvore, 7 miesięcy temu

Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG

Not in a world that already had Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls in it.

You can labor the “open world” point but in any other metric DS & DeS stood above it: quest lines, action, feel, mechanics etc.

lemmyvore, 7 miesięcy temu

Just say it: Elden Ring is the ES6 we deserved.

lemmyvore, 7 miesięcy temu

But what there is of it is hand-crafted to perfection.

There are also fundamental differences in plot mechanics between Western and Eastern RPGs.

In a Japanese game the plot lines don’t wait indefinitely for the player to pick them up — you get brief windows of opportunity and then they move on.

It makes things a lot more realistic because you don’t have any of those silly circumstances where you’ve already done tremendous things in one plot line only to be treated like a newb in another.

lemmyvore, 8 miesięcy temu

Obviously fake. A real announcement would have called him -sama purely out of spite.

lemmyvore, 8 miesięcy temu

But does it have to be resources? What about unlocking a new character type, that can use different powers?

lemmyvore, 10 miesięcy temu

I imagine they have CGNAT already. But you can run servers that only assist users to establish a connection handshake from behind CGNAT, then all traffic happens peer to peer.

Now, whether the ISPs can get away with blocking that handshake is another story…

lemmyvore, 10 miesięcy temu

What makes you think that anything client-side will be allowed to work as it should?

lemmyvore, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Hear, hear.

Quick disclaimer, I’ve been involved with FOSS shooters for something like 20 years now. I mention that to establish where I come from: in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games. If there’s something you don’t want the client to know or do, you make it so on the server.

There is a lot of things that the server can do that can severely limit cheater shenanigans. If you don’t want them to see through walls then don’t tell them what’s behind walls. If you don’t want them to know what’s behind them then don’t tell them what’s outside their cone of view. If you don’t want them to teleport look where they were a moment ago and where they claim to be now and figure out if it should be possible. You get the idea.

Aimbots can be detected because at the core it’s a simple issue of the client’s aim snapping from one place to the target too fast. What’s “too fast” and the pattern of the movement can be up for debate but it can definitely be detected and analysed and reviewed in many ways – regular code, AI, and human replay.

If this kind of analysis is too much for your server to perform in real time (it was too much, 20 years ago) then you can store it and analyse it offline or replay it for human reviewers. You can fast-parse game data for telltale signs, analyse specific episodes in detail, and decide to ban players. Yes it happens after the game was ruined but at least it happens.

There are a couple of types of cheating that you can’t detect server side:

• Modifications to the client HUD that help the player grok information faster and better. This is a large category that can include things like colorblindness overlays, font changes, UI changes, movement tracking on display etc. As far as I’m concerned that falls under HUD modding and should be welcome in any healthy game. Again, if you don’t want clients to have a piece of information don’t give it to them, and design your game in a way that such mods are mostly irrelevant.
• Automating input. Again a large category that includes macros that speed up complex chains of operations. Can be slowed down by imposing server-side delays but you can hurt legit fast players this way too. Same as above, if this is what makes or breaks your shooter then perhaps you should rethink it.

Some of the most fun games I’ve seen did not care about HUD mods and macros and on the contrary embraced them. You want to write a macro that will auto-purchase the best gear based on your available coin after respawn? Knock yourself out, because what constitutes “best” gear changes depending of the circumstances, and a veteran with a pistol can smoke your ass anyway if you don’t know how to properly use that fancy plasma gun.

I’ve mentioned human review above which brings up an interesting feature that I don’t see implemented in enough games: saving and replaying game metadata. It’s stupidly simple to store everything that happened during a match on the server side and it doesn’t take much space. You can offer that recording to seasoned players to replay on their PC which allows them to see the match from any player’s point of view. An experienced veteran can notice all kinds of shenanigans this way – and it’s also an excellent e-sport and machinima feature that enables commentary, editing, tutorials and so on.

Edit: Oh, forgot one thing. You may be wondering, then why don’t the big game companies do all this? Simple, cost. Why should they pay for server juice and staff to review games properly when they can slap a rootkit on your computer and use your resources?

lemmyvore, 10 miesięcy temu

Why doesn’t Elite let you travel offline? Like, set the destination, close the game, and reopen it 3h later.

lemmyvore, 10 miesięcy temu

The problem with HL is that it had very little to offer beyond “you’re a witch at Hogwarts”. They put together a great setting… then did nothing with it. It’s a huge pity and a great waste of something that could’ve been amazing.

lemmyvore, 11 miesięcy temu

No game should save gigabytes. Even megabytes can be too much. If the game is very linear a save could mean a single number. Even if it has character cosmetic customization and a convoluted plot with lots of choices it’s still usually in the kilobyte range. The larger saves (overall) would be sports games like rally racing where the game needs to be able to provide a thorough replay of every race.

lemmyvore, rok temu

Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂

I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.

lemmyvore, rok temu

For my curiosity, what on Earth could you possibly do for those 40 hours? Cause for me that’s about 5 times more than it’s worth spending with the game in its current state.

lemmyvore, rok temu

The original vanilla Skyrim was pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong it was playable but it was a very forgettable and unimpressive game. The low quality assets, the bugs, the half-assed talent trees, the uninspired and unfinished quest lines, the dumb AI, the barren ugly towns and landscapes etc. Just think about all the things you have to fix nowadays with mods to play it properly, nevermind adding new stuff.

lemmyvore, rok temu

But it is facts In talking about. Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made, or that the AI was good etc.

All you’re saying is that you liked the game in spite of all that — either that or you can’t even remember how bad it was before the mods.

Skyrim’s greatest virtue will always be how moddable it is. But that still doesn’t mean that Bethesda put out a great game in 2011.

lemmyvore, rok temu

That may be the answer. I mean if Skyrim were not moddable it would have also been a very forgettable game.

lemmyvore, rok temu

They went downhill since Morrowind… it was their last game that managed to capture players on its own merits, with zero mods.

People forget that Bethesda used to be a sports and arcade game developer back in the day and that Elder Scrolls was very much uncharacteristic for them. They tried and made some interesting things for a while but once they hit mainstream they never went back to the interesting stuff. It also means I don’t think we’ll see an ES6 game worth talking about.

lemmyvore, rok temu

Oblivion is where they started cutting corners and exploring how much they can get away with not doing.

lemmyvore, rok temu

Only like 3 seconds worth of actual gameplay footage, the rest is cinematics.

lemmyvore, rok temu

Is this your first Bethesda game by any chance?

Things like bugs, performance fixes, improvements etc. are for modders to do not Bethesda.

I’m surprised they didn’t leave DLSS to modders.

lemmyvore, rok temu

That wasn’t a review, it was a bunch of statements stringed together. At most it could be the conclusion of a review.

A review needs to offer some explanations about what’s good (or bad) and why.

lemmyvore, rok temu

Probably not, I doubt cracked copies play online.