nekusoul

nekusoul, 4 dni temu

In a way, focussing on the countries was always ultimately pointless (aside from encouraging votes througj country rivalries). It’s almost impossible to not have required countries after the million votes milestone. You’d have to male something very specific like “make dutch the only language in the EU” in order to not make that cut.

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

On the other hand, I’ll be curios how far Steam Input integration will go. Assuming these don’t self-destruct every few weeks like the original Joy-cons, these might make a neat portable controller.

nekusoul, miesiąc temu

It’s great that these devices finally exist. For the longest time your only option for handheld gaming was Nintendo, or maybe Sony for a short period of time, so I always went with Nintendo as a companion device to my PC.

When the Switch launched, I started wishing for a PC with that form factor, unrealistic as that was at the time. At some point in time I even got hardware-banned from anything online because I dared to install some things on it in order to transfer my save files between PC and Switch. Even lost the ability to download a game I had already bought but not yet installed.

Thankfully, around that time the Steam Deck was announced, and the only time I booted the Switch afterwards was to dump all my games and saves.

nekusoul, 2 miesiące temu

Agree. Personally I like having something portable, so I’ve always complemented my PC with a Nintendo handheld. Thankfully, PCs can now be handhelds too, even including an open operating system.

The only time I even booted my Switch after getting the Steam Deck was to rip all my games and saves from there.

nekusoul, 2 miesiące temu

A bit tangential, but I also feel a lot of people make the same mistake with GamePass. I buy a lot of gameson release day (mostly indies, but also some AAA), so theoretically I should be the target audience for GamePass, but I did the math once for a three-month period and came out at a loss if I had bought GamePass.

Based on nothing but anecdotal evidence, the type of person to get GamePass also typically enjoys a lesser variety of games on average, making the cost/benefit ratio even worse.

nekusoul, 2 miesiące temu

Yeah, I don’t think I make that many that wrong purchases, although that doesn’t mean that a lot of games I enjoy end up unfinished due to limited time. When it comes to testing games, one thing that’s neat is that demos got a huge revival in the last few years, particularly due to Steam Next Fest.

Looking at the current line-up, I’ll say that right I’d probably come to a different conclusion, seeing as Blue Prince, South of Midnight and the new DOOM are all included. Then again, I use Linux, so I wouldn’t be able to use Game Pass even if I wanted to.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

Probably not the Steam Deck successor alone, but the PC handheld ecosystem as a whole might be able to get there at some point (preferably mostly running Linux).

Though it’s kind of insane how much progress was already made over one generation: It went from a Kickstarter grift (Smach-Z), to the Steam Deck, to multiple competitors already.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

Not sure what you’re seeing there. The Bedrock edition is also available on PC and the rest is a direct quote for the reasoning why that version gets it before the Java version.

It’s not like they’re forbidden from acknowledging the existence of other devices either. It’s just not their target audience.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Oof. I’m already put off when I see a compose file that has more than like 3 containers, but that one really takes the cake. Two message brokers, two proxys, three webservers, two daemons and another handful of other containers? That’s, indeed, truly insane.

Just because it’s now easy to deploy giant stacks of server software doesn’t mean you should.

nekusoul, 3 miesiące temu

Not necessarily. A good architecture could allow for crossplay between different kinds of accounts. They’re just taking the easy way out.

nekusoul, 6 miesięcy temu

I think the way to go about detecting cheats server-side would be primarily driven by statistics. For example, to counter wallhacks one might track how often a player is already targeting an enemy before they become visible. Or to counter aimbots one could check for humanly impossible amounts of changes in the direction of mouse movement, somewhat similar to how the community found out a bunch of cheaters using slowmo in Trackmania.

Add in a reputation system that actually requires a good amount of playtime to be put into the highest tier of trust for matchmaking and I think one could have a pretty solid system that wouldn’t have to rely on client-side anticheat at all.

nekusoul, 8 miesięcy temu

Yup. If it’s important enough that devs now have to add a disclaimer on the store page, surely devs shouldn’t be allowed to circumvent that by adding it later. Since SteamDeck customers are affected by this the most, it’s weird that this isn’t already a rule, particularly for games that are SteamDeck verified.

nekusoul, 9 miesięcy temu

Striking YT channels, expanding their Palworld lawsuit and now this? There’s no denying that they wasn’t always pretty litigious, but they’re picking up speed at an absurd pace. Did recently they hire some of Oracles lawyers or what?

Good thing there’s now enough competition in the handheld market, so I’m no longer reliant on their under-powered devices.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

As much as I’d like to see this game preserved, I don’t think the dev can be held responsible when they’re refunding everyone who purchased the game.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

“A single company does this and while the other 99 won’t, saying pretty please will certainly work. See? No intervention required!”

Bootlicker indeed.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

www.pcgamingwiki.com/…/Category:Unplayable_games

And that’s only PC games.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

Taking away a game you bought because the game was intentionally made to rely on a server is always scummy behavior. That’s the whole point.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

Hello, sole arbiter of a game’s worth.

Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

The other answer from @ampseandrew already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:

• Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
• I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

nobody paid

That’s just blatantly false. People bought the founders pack were never refunded for example. Those people being entitled to the server software or a refund is anything but greedy, even if that only applies to a single person.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

If they can play against bots, which already exist in the game, or band enough people together with access to the game to play on a server one player is able to host, then yes. That’s what I’d expect at a minimum.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

If they want to keep some form of DRM then that’s not my job to figure out. This wasn’t a problem back in the day when server software being distributed was the norm, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.

Though personally I’d be in favor of abolishing online DRM entirely, but that’s another story.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

At least try to make an effort to understand what I write.

I said it’s their job to figure out how to do DRM -if- they want DRM. If they can’t figure out how to do that then the answer shouldn’t need to be spelled out explicitly: No DRM. Simple as that.

If you’d rather see games you spent money on being taken away from you based on the whims of corporations, just to make sure others who might not have payed for it also can’t play it, then I don’t know what to tell you.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

Yes, you’re just explaining regular piracy here. I do not care. It’s a thing that’s already been possible for almost every single-player game in existence, and yet, there’s a constant stream of new single-player games releasing every day. Weird, right?

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu (edited 10 miesięcy temu)

At this point I’d that say getting enough individual countries is almost inevitable in the process of getting 1M signatures. If the distribution between countries remains as it is, every country with more than 25% right now would reach the threshold by the end.

Seems to me like the individual country threshold is only added to prevent initiatives getting single-handedly pushed by a single big country and never be the blocker for regular initiatives.

So yeah, the best strategy would most likely be to keep pushing the big countries: Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Speaking of Italy, what’s up with them? Only 18%? Those are rookie numbers.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

That’s one thing I checked first, but compared to Germany for example, the average age and percentage of people playing video-games is apparently just a few percentage points of difference. Though “people playing video-games” could of course mean anything and I’d wager that the average person playing casual games on their phone might not care as much.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

Agree. I don’t know this person, but at best he didn’t understand the campaign and also overdosed on defeatism. At worst he’s intentionally misrepresenting the campaign and lobbying against better consumer rights.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

Looking at this map there seems to be at least some correlation. There really needs to be popular advocates for each language and country, particularly for the smaller ones and those with a low english speaking population.

nekusoul, 10 miesięcy temu

At the very least, a save game editor wouldn’t be too hard to create when running your own server.

Though that got me thinking if there’s some kind of GDPR shenanigans one could already utilize to get all your account data. I kind of doubt it, but it would be hilarious.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

It was similar for me, except that Nintendo made the decision for me by prevening me from purchasing (or downloading) any game from the eShop. Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected to get banned since I also hacked mine in order to dump my games and transfer saves for games I owned on PC and Switch.

Still, since Nintendo apparently didn’t want to have a customer and the SteamDeck was announced shortly after I jumped ship day one and only turned the Switch on once again to transfer my saves back.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah, I pretty much hopped on it as soon as it was hacked so there wasn’t much knowledge of what could lead to bans. Granted, at that point I was already a bit dissatisfied with the Switch, so I went in fully aware of the risks and not really being afraid of the risk. I even had a preorder running that I got locked out of, though luckily enough, that got a PC port not soon after.

nekusoul, 11 miesięcy temu

It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.

But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.

nekusoul, rok temu

I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.

Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.

nekusoul, rok temu

Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.

nekusoul, rok temu

That’s true. Personally though, it not being optional for any amount of time just shows that there’s no good argument to have it be mandatory in the first place.

nekusoul, rok temu

Yup. I’ve always loved having a handheld device as a companion to my PC. The first few months with the Switch were great, but as time went on I just wanted a better designed Switch that’s also just a PC, particularly after getting hardware-banned for trying to fix some of the issues myself with homebrew apps.

I never would’ve thought that we’d actually get to see a device that’s real so quickly (anyone remember the Smach Z?), is actually pretty good and how quickly it’s now becoming its own market segment.

nekusoul, rok temu

They’ve basically perfected keeping the community mostly happy by toeing the line between putting out solid base games and putting out greedy DLC.

What we’re now seeing is what happens when you don’t immediately change course after you skimp on making a good base game.

nekusoul, rok temu

I just got the (first) completionist achievement after 60 hours plus however many I spent on the demo. I might try a few of the challenges and try to win with the final stake at least once, but after that I think I’m done.

It’s an absolutely amazing game and has secured its place in my deck building hall of fame beside Slay the Spire and Wildfrost.

nekusoul, rok temu

I’ve been really looking forward to this one since watching the first short clips. Also helps that Pseudoregalia really got me into the mood for some more Metroidvanias recently.

nekusoul, rok temu

Most games are great because they provide something unique or are polished to perfection, so it’s wild that they’ve made something that manages to be both their first attempt. Really looking forward to whatever they decide to do next.

nekusoul, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Played it a bit so far and the controls are really unique. Definitely needs a lot of learning to get somewhat competent, but also very powerful when mastered. I’d be surprised if this isn’t going to become my favorite platformer of the year.

That said, the tutorial level (1-0) feels rushed. Very confusing pacing and camera transitions as well as bad audio mixing. Thankfully I haven’t seen any of those issues again in any of the proper stages.

nekusoul, rok temu

A bad voice probably also just feels much better and complete than having no voice at all. At least based on the observations I’ve made when adding sound effects to my games as a hobbyist. A silent game just feels bad.

nekusoul, rok temu

I’m currently playing one of the games in Last Call BBS: 20th Century Food Court.

For anyone familiar with the Zachtronics catalog of games it’s like someone bolted one of the programming games onto one of their factory games, but the programming part is done using cables. Unsurprisingly, programming with cables gets quite messy, so even after a short break I usually have to restart a puzzle because I don’t recognize what part was supposed to do what anymore.

So yeah, great game, would recommend.

nekusoul, rok temu

It’s a great game but that’s indeed one big issue of the game. Most of the game is pretty lenient when it comes to difficulty, but there are a few bosses that come with pretty enormous difficulty spikes. I’d recommend looking up how to power-level when you reach those sections.

nekusoul, rok temu

Seems like they won’t release it before it’s in a state where it’ll “just work” on about machine, which makes sense, since that’s the thing that helped the Steam Deck to success.

To that end it’ll probably be a while before they can get there, particularly for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, assuming stuff like multi-monitor VRR and bug-free Wayland support is on the list of requirements.