So… its $50 more than an LCD, 256 GB Steam Deck (the Switch 2 is also LCD).
A Deck has two touchpads that work as mice.
And you can buy a real mouse with those $50 bucks you saved.
Oh right and it has a bigger screen, can run almost every modern to ancient PC game, and basically every retro game if you can handle an EmuDeck or RetroDeck guided installer, oh and it also just is a computer that does everything a mid tier linux laptop can do.
It can even run Switch games, and probably will be able to run Switch 2 games in… what, 2 years? 3 years?
I’m really not trying to rain on the parade here, but uh… yeah I do not understand the cost benefit analysis on a Switch 2 vs a Deck unless:
You really, really want to play Switch 2 games soon
OR
The Switch 2 somehow has vastly superior performance to a Steam Deck
… I kinda doubt that last one being the case, but the specs aren’t out yet (afaik) so I guess it is possible.
Steam Decks are manufactured in Taiwan… so they’ll likely jump in price too… but that could possibly be delayed for at least a bit…
I think Valve has warehouses in the US full of them, and they are also a private company with absurdly deep pockets, and thus don’t have the ‘maximize shareholder profit in current/next quarter’ mandate… so they may be able to keep their costs to consumers from raising, by just internally subsidizing them…
1: I mean, I guess? I do not even have a mouse myself right now… but if I needed just a cheapo one for basic use… you can get something functional for $20 or under, a basic mouse you’d get for a work laptop type thing.
2: People have all kinds of ‘unusual’ Deck set ups.
The mouse dongle you just mentioned wouldn’t… really make that much sense, as … you can just hold it… and use the touch pads… or the touch sensitive screen itself…
But its actually not uncommon for people to dock their deck, sync it to a controller or M+K, and then stream it to a smart tv, or a dumb one via a dongle or direct connection to the dock. No, you’re not gonna get true 4k on any non retro game, but a good number of people do something like this.
3: … As compared to…? Your minimum 3x more expensive PC you can upgrade with even more money? Another console/handheld you… can’t upgrade?
Unless the Switch 2 can play Cyberpunk 2077 at better than 45 fps, with graphics basically medium/high, I don’t see how the Deck is ‘showing its age’ compared to other similarly priced handhelds.
Decky FrameGen is pretty neat. I think I managed to tweak mine up to an avg of almost 55 on the benchmark, and thats without mucking around in CET to squeeze out even more.
4: I absolutely understand buying a Switch 2 is your best option if you want a very straightforward, doubleplus legal, and expensive way to play Switch 2 games.
Like, if you’re super dedicated to current era Nintendo games, sure, fine, yep, get a Switch 2.
But if you just like games in general…
5: Pretty much yeah, I agree. Its possible to get it working with a Deck, but its gonna be a lot more hassle, and you’ll need peripherals, yep.
Yep, I already said the Switch 2 makes sense if all you care about is playing Switch 2 games.
I am not trying to aruge that the Deck is just hands down, inherently superior in all cases, for everyone.
I hope there’s a way for you to put parental controls on your 12 yo’s Fortnite account’s ability to buy microtransactions, and that you have enough time to teach them how to identify and disregard all the dark patterns in the game that encourage irresponsible spending habits, as well as resist all the social peer pressure that comes with an MTX heavy game.
The technicals are … very complex, but the upshot is: It basically injects FrameScaling/FrameGen modes into games that don’t officially support them on AMD hardware.
So… I’ve done this with CP2077, and if I understand this right, basically it injects FSR3, but under the DLSS settings under the game’s options menu… and it works better than the game’s current officially supported FSR 2 for the Deck.
… Civ 7 is the Civ series shitty attempt at copying Humankind, Humankind is currently $12.50 USD, $25 for all DLC + base game, and is a way better deal than Civ 7 at $70, if not just actually a better game than Civ 5 or Civ 6 + all their existing DLC/expansions.
Civ peaked at Civ 4 and all its expansions for me.
Yes, doomstacks were a problem, but hard pivoting all the way over to Civ 5’s only one unit per tile led to a whole bunch of other bullshit in the opposite direction.
Humankind … just has better inter game system synergy, and those individual systems seem better thought out, more engaging and less… cheesable, exploitable, to a great extent due to how everything meshes together.
The first few months after launch absolutely were rough, with some pretty significant bugs in specific, but often crucial scenarios… but they got ironed out, and the result is great.
Also a lot of the initial backlash was from the pollution / global warming mechanic… they quickly added an option to just turn most of its effects off, but to me the entire thing read as a bunch of people being used to massively colonizing, industrializing and war mongering and then being angry that … that has consequences.
Guess those people have trouble grasping the concept of an externality.
Oh well, they’ve all been filtered, recent steam reviews are ‘very positive.’
Err… well, without any mentions of specific gripes or difficulties you are having… entirely seriously, actually play through with the tutorial enabled.
There are 3 different tutorial settings:
No tutorial
Moderate tutorial (ie, you’ve played some Civ games and want to mainly focus on what is different in Humankind)
Full tutorial (baby step you through everything like you’ve never played any kind of turn based 4x before)
The middle of the road tutorial does a pretty good job of highlighting and explaining systems and actions that work differently from Civ, or are just entirely not present in Civ, but doesn’t hold your hand through every single basic concept that you would already be familiar with as an experienced Civ player.
EDIT: Beyond that, I guess uh… a lot of the game sub systems kind of work… similarly to a lot of Civ game mechanics, but not quite the same, in some cases, significantly differently.
For starters, your civ progresses as you unlock new ages, but your leader stays the same. NPC leaders have a set of traits that affect their demeanor in diplomacy, as well as give them varying kinds of buffs for their gameplay.
These NPCs and their traits are actually classed by the total score of their cumulative traits, basically just a few minor traits are ‘easy’, up to a whole lot of powerful traits as ‘hard’. You can pick to play against easier or harder NPCs as you like.
You can also unlock traits for your own leader by basically doing in game achievements.
But uh yeah, get used to the idea of swapping civs situationally as your progress through ages… or you can sort of ‘prestige’ a civ beyond its roughly historically accurate age, if you want a buff to … i think its your renown or fame score generation the purple one lol. In some situations, it might make more sense to continue with the unique units, buildings, and sometimes civ specific gameplay mechanics through an age.
Other stuff uh…
City planning is pretty important, Humankind uses a multi tile approach to cities, where you can plop down varying kinds of districts and unique buildings according to the terrain around the actual city center. You may have to balance between urban design/zoning that is super efficient in the short run, but actually inefficient in the medium or longer run, as well as defensive structures, which you’ll may want to place on a choke point tile, even if it would be highly productive with a non military structure on it.
Human kind uses a heigh layered terrain approach, with I think 7 different heights. A height 6 tile right adjacent to a height 1 tile will have an impassable cliff on that border. I like to play with more extreme height variations so as to both make the world feel larger in that land traversal takes longer, things like mountain passes and terrain chokepoints become as relevant as they often are in the real world, and it offers more interesting battles.
Rivers are in tiles, not borders between them. This makes crossing rivers more time consuming and annoying… but plays well into the rest of the games combat systems… also, if you embark on a river tile early game, this is basically the representation of building small makeshift boats… and now you can move much faster up or down a river, which is very much in line with how many real world civilizations used rivers as basically logistics highways.
There’s also a system of regions, basically. You can assign a few cities to be connected to the same major city, and then basically micromanage the entire region of cities to coordinate their production to subsidize each other, in various ways. If you do this well, you can benefit greatly, but if you either screw it up or don’t take advantage of it, you can be at a comparative disadvantage to other players.
… theres a whole lot of stuff that is different than Civ games, I could type for hours lol.
I never played the demo, started with the full game… maybe a couple weeks after launch.
As I said in another reply, yeah, it absolutely was rough on a technical level for the first few months, a good number of actually fairly common edge cases where the game’s systems would break, things wouldn’t actually work as intended, as described by the game itself.
But, after about 6 months, they fixed basically all of these… and didn’t really even have to do like major tweaks to the balancing of the game… the problems were technical implentations of the designed game, and once they got those ironed out, the game as envisioned was now actually the game as it performed.
Go pull up the steam store page right now: Overall score is still ‘Mixed’ it did indeed have a rough launch… but Recent Reviews are ‘Very Positive’.
The people that bothered to stick with it… well they seem to very much like where the game is now.
So, I’d say yes, the general consensus of people still playing it is that it did indeed improve significantly.
Also, its pretty undeniable that 2K, Civ 7, very much did try to ape some, but not all, of the changes that Humankind put on what is basically the Civ formula, that just never occured to them.
The entire concept of you and other players basicslly just having the avatar of your civilization remain the same for all time, but the civilizations themselves change, with historical eras?
Thats one of the most obviously visible differences between Humankind and any Civ game that existed … prior to Civ 7.
It is also, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons those initial reviews of Humankind were ‘Mixed’: a whole lot of Civ fans just thought the whole idea was stupid, and were vocal about it.
… And then Civ 7 does the same idea, but more watered down, with only 3 eras, 3 different civs per playthrough, as opposed to Humankind’s … well basically 6 + 1, where that + 1 represents your pre-civilization nomadic tribe/culture, basically playing a fairly different kind of game, prior to building your first real city and thus advancing to your first choice of civilization.
Also, worth throwing in here I guess: Advancing through eras works with a similar mechanic as to racing to build wonders in Civ: You can only have one player as each civ at a time, so if you really want to have first dibs and the full range of civs to choose from, you have to be the first to era advance, otherwise another player may beat you to it and pick the one you were planning on.
But, it also works differently than wonders: Wonders are just built by a city in Civ. Eras in Humankind are advanced by earning points for completing basically era specific mini objectives… and you have a range of different options to choose from, maybe you go for numerous easier objectives, or focus on a few, more difficult ones.
Aw, been a while since someone’s complimented me, thank you!
Yes, I too fucked up the city planning stuff a good deal until eventually… it clicked.
It isn’t the same game as Civ, a lot of the sort of ingrained ideas you don’t even realize are baked into your subconcious from playing Civ a lot… will lead you to knee jerk, make the kind of ‘well obviously i do this in this situation’ decisions…
and yeah, then get slapped with ‘nope, no workey’.
But… if you stick with it… just like you probably did, many moons ago, with Civ, you can absolutely get much more skilled.
You must empty your mind of false notions you didn’t even realize you had, before you can begin to fill it with correct ones, haha.
Its funny you bring up stellaris… i spent like a month just utterly failing until that ‘click’ moment.
Then, a few months of ‘i am actually decent at this’ and then a few more months till ‘actually this is boring because i win by stupid margins every time on anything but the most absurd difficulties, and in those games its pretty much a completely random dice roll of surviving early game or not due to the absurd early game ai bonuses… and then by mid to late game, the AI is just literally too stupid to engage in 80% of the micromanagement strategies i am using to snowball’.
As you say, it goes back even further that SBMM, to the large scale abandonment of the dedi server paradigm in favor of auto match making.
Nearly no online games even have actual server browsers now.
Back in the late 90s through the 2000s to early to mid 2010s…
Nearly every online game was a dedicated server, or at least you throwing open a temporary server with your own custom control over maps and gamemodes.
Many dedicated servers were run by a person or community… and this enabled communities to form around them, enabled lasting relationships to be made, hell, probably most mods or clans for most of those kinds of games arose from that, and a lot of those went on to later become massively more expansive, start their own game studio and put out their own games.
Now thats almost all gone.
You… used to be able to get onto a Battlefield server and know the regulars, like a bar.
That promotes at least a baseline of basic manners and etiquette.
Now all you can do is look at a general conception of an entire game’s community, because the player has no agency to actually choose to associate or not associate with certain people or groups.
A lot of people seem to think that a monopoly has a much, much more direct and literal definition than it actually does.
The definition the FTC uses is:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Some courts have required much higher percentages.
(Well, at least untill Elon and Trump put the fucking Shark Tank guy in charge, or something like that.)
Generally speaking, a monopolist is a single entity that has captured a huge chunk of an otherwise varying and well differentiated market, if your market is closer to the theoretical (ie, not real) idea of perfect competition, or if you’re talking about a consolidated market with only a few major players, the monopolist has at least 50% of the market, though, depending on other factors, that line may be drawn at up to 75% ish.
Different specific situations, regions, laws, etc. establish differing specific criteria… but the idea is not that a monopolist is defined by being literally 100% of the market.
That situation would specifically be referred to as a ‘perfect monopoly’, and like ‘perfect competition’, is basically theoretical only, or a situation where you’re looking at something like a local public utility or some kind of government/state entity.
In actual mainstream academic and legal usage though, a monopoly is a single entity in the market has a very outsized market share when compared to any other market participant, such that its actions alone can very significantly affect all other market participants.
…
Now… when it comes to Steam… a whole lot of the arguement is ‘what is and is not the market, what constitutes its boundaries?’
If you define it as just ‘PC video games’, then sure Steam likely is an effective monopoly.
But if you define it as ‘all digital games’, then no, not even close, the Google Play Store and Apple Store are responsible for far more digital game downloads than Steam, way waaay more games are mobile games than PC games, if you go by yearly or monthly downloads, or market share.
It gets even more complicated with cross platform games.
Ultimately, it would be up to a lawsuit, lawyers, judges, industry experts, to argue all of the specifics of exactly whether or not its legally valid to formally classify Steam as a monopoly that would need to be broken up or penalized or regulated in some way, and a huge part of that legal battle would be based around differing definitions of what exactly Steam is a monopoly if, and whether those precise definitions are valid.
…
‘Other options exist for consumers’ or ‘they don’t have a perfect monopoly’ is not a valid arguement against Steam being a monopoly if Steam facilitates 85% of PC game sales, and the other 15% is split up between 10 or so other digital store fronts.
If that is your rubric for ‘what is the market’, then yeah, Steam is a monopoly.
But, if your rubric is ‘all digital games’, then no, Steam is just a large player in a market with other larger players, other slightly smaller players, and many other very small players.
…
Beyond that, a huge part of legally being determined to be a monopoly is unethical/illegal behavior of the ‘monopolist’ being used to obtain or maintain their monopoly.
In Steam’s case… I think that would be pretty hard to substantiate, its more so just that Steam had the idea first, expanded upon it quite a lot, and no one really bothered to try to compete with them on the same level untill basically the Epic store, fairly recently.
The word for a market dominated by only a few very large players is oligopoly, not… polyopoly.
Not saying you’re saying that, just saying.
…
As to the etymology…
Its derives from Greek.
A monopoly has one (mono) influential seller for many (poly) consumers.
An oligopoly has a few, wealthy (oligo, as in oligarch, oligarchy) sellers for many (poly) consumers.
Importantly, in Greek, poly is closely related to polis, meaning basically ‘all of the people/citizens’.
This is also where English gets ‘Politics’ from.
…
Also, I wrote a whole other comment, but the mere existence of any competitors, no matter how small… doesn’t mean you aren’t a monopoly.
Its just means you aren’t a perfect monopoly, which basically never exists in real life, outside of public utilities.
If the rubric for ‘is it a monopoly?’ was ‘do any competitors exist?’, then basically no company that’s ever been broken up or regulated for being a monopoly was actually a monopoly.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here.
I agree with the sentiment of this… MTX/lootbox shenanigans are a bad, harmful practice that should be much more heavily restrained…
But that has nothing to do with being a monopoly.
At this point, its a widespread industry problem.
You’d address that with regulation, but not on the basis of Steam being a de facto monopoly, instead based on some kind of consumer protection regulation.
… But Trump and Elon are blowing all of that up, so, probably not gonna happen anytime soon.
Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard.
10 - 30 % really isn’t that unreasonable compared to a lot of existing comptetitors… though I guess we’ll see how their ongoing lawsuit around that ends up.
Either way, this also doesn’t make or not make them a monopoly, unless you or the ongoing lawsuit can prove that a 30% is functionally an outsized monopoly rent, wildly out of step with the rest of the industry.
If this is instead roughly in line with the rest of the industry, you’d again need to address this with some other legislation that spans the whole industry, not specifically targeting Steam as a monopoly.
every game is actually a puzzle gameok, not literally, all of them, but most game mechanics do ultimately breakdown to solving puzzles, with varying degrees of required reaction times. strategy = complex puzzle.
You’re right that SS13 basically doesn’t have an actual… game, that everyone is playing, so the goofing off an being morons doesn’t ruin the game… becauase there isn’t one.
Various individuals will sometimes get specific objectives… but they don’t even have to do them.
Its basically a chaos simulator.
You can define ‘winning’ as surviving…
…or you can define it as ‘I transmuted a monkey into a clone of the janitor, killed the janitor and gave the monkeyman the janitor’s id, and even though monkeyman collapsed my cranium, no one realized the janitor was an actual monkey’.
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
You can set it up fairly easily the Steam version of DX and the Revision Mod, which at this point is basically all the most popular DX mods, reconfigured to play nice with each other and be as mutually compatible as possible.
Someone already mentioned Caves of Qud, that one is amazing, Noita is really good, also StarSector is functionally a roguelike but in space.
Also No Mans Sky is basically a rogue like if you turn on permadeath, kick the difficulty up.
Here’s the quote, for people allergic to reading the update in the article.
Update: Nvidia sent us a statement: “We are aware of a reported performance issue related to Game Filters and are actively looking into it. You can turn off Game Filters from the NVIDIA App Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode, and then relaunch your game.”
We have tested this and confirmed that disabling the Game Filters and Photo Mode does indeed work. The problem appears to stem from the filters causing a performance loss, even when they’re not being actively used. (With GeForce Experience, if you didn’t have any game filters enabled, it didn’t affect performance.) So, if you’re only after the video capture features or game optimizations offered by the Nvidia App, you can get ‘normal’ performance by disabling the filters and photo modes.
So, TomsHW (is at least claiming that they) did indeed test this, and found that its the filters and photo mode causing the performance hit.
Still a pretty stupid problem to have, considering the old filters did not cause this problem, but at least there’s a workaround.
… I’m curious if this new settings app even exists, or has been tested on linux.
Here at NZXT, we strive to deliver the best products and services to customers, but sometimes, we don’t fulfill that desire.
Sure, we spent thousands upon thousands of man hours intentionally designing a pc rental service to rent out falsely advertised, subpar pcs, at stupendously high cost to you, our loyal customers…
And sure, we’re only issuing this statement because we got caught, and even while apologizing, we are heavily qualifying our actions and emphasizing things we think we so well…
But what is most important is that we want you to know:
Used to spend most of my days playing live service games that required a huge amount of time, or big AAA titles that are critically acclaimed. For example, Fallout 4/76, Battlefield 2042, rainbow six, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Skyrim, Destiny 2, OverWatch… Basically any really big game that you would find on the top 20 of...
If you want a Battlefield game that actually revolves around teamwork and communication, I suggest Squad.
The team largely started off modifying BF2 into Project Reality… eventually became their own studio and made their realism / teamwork version of BF2 in UE.
Its not as milsim as the Arma series, but its not as casual as Battlefield.
This is like saying “Think again! The car mechanic said the car’s engine suffered a failure,” as a retort to someone asking if a faulty spark plug is the cause of the car not working.
Yes, so the update could still be to a part of the kernel that those games’ Denuvo implementations need to not change.
Its not a ‘tangent’.
Its pointing out that the person I was replying to made a category error, resuting in the total nullification of their retort to who they were replying to.
Yeah, it has always had a cartoonish, exaggerated art style, almost every character has limbs, hands and feet that are far more voluminous than a more realistic character, color schemes are usually quite bold and highly contrasting, and all weapons and armor also have comically accentuated proportions and excess to them.
Its a shame Blizzard seems to have just decided that all its IPs now basically follow the WoW style conventions, abandoning the earlier, distinct styles of their other IPs.
It is especially weird because their concept art for much of their stuff… often doesn’t have the weird cartoony proportions … but by the time it ends as an ingame asset, it does.
However, it’s only being forced for kernel-level anti-cheat. If it’s only client-side or server-side, it’s optional, but Valve say “we generally think that any game that makes use of anti-cheat technology would benefit from letting players know”.
I will always love Valve for their ability to use corpospeak against corpos.
Your game has anti-cheat?
Wonderful!
I’m sure that always only results in an improved experience for all gamers, lets let them all know!
Or, even better, when you let a whole bunch of devs have acces to the kernel…
… sometimes they just accidentally fuck up and push a bad update, unintentionally.
This is how CrowdStrike managed to Y2K an absurd number of enterprise computers fairly recently.
Its also why its … you know, generally bad practice to have your kernel just open to fucking whoever instead of having it be locked down and rigorously tested.
Funnily enough, MSFT now appears to be shifting toward offering much less direct access to its kernel to 3rd party software devs.
I would love to see any kind of documentation that can somehow prove OW2’s AC is better than VAC, something that isn’t based on vibes or immediacy bias.
Oh it was initially classed as insanely intrusive malware when kernel level AC was introduced about a decade ago, by anyone with a modicum of actual technical knowledge about computers.
Unfortunately, a whole lot of corpo shills ran propaganda explaining how actually its fine, don’t worry, its actually the best way to stop cheaters!
Then the vast, vast majority of idiot gamers believed that, or threw their hands up and went oh well its the new norm, trying to fight it is futile and actually if you are against this that means you are some kind of paranoid privacy freak who hates other people having fun.
Which means that you still have to end up relying on reviewing a player’s performance and actions as recorded by the game servers statistically via complex statistical algorithms or machine learning to detect impossibly abnormal activity.
… Which is what VAC has been doing, without kernel level, for over a decade.
All that is gained from pushing AC to the kernel level is you ruin the privacy and system stability of everyone using it.
You don’t actually stop cheating.
It is not possible to have a 100% full proof anti cheat system.
There will always be new, cleverer exploitation methods, just as there are with literally all other kinds of computer software, which all have new exploits that are detected and triaged basically every day.
But you do have a choice between using an anti cheat method that is insanely invasive and potentially dangerous to all your users, and one that is not.
So … your previous assertion that OW2’s AC is superior to VAC was in fact just based on vibes.
Anti Cheat developers typically do not like to explain how exactly they work, how effective they actually are.
Their data is proprietary, trade secrets.
There will almost certainly never be a way to actually conduct the empirical study you wish for, save for (ironically) someone hacking into the corporate servers of a bunch of different anti cheat developers to grab their own internal metrics.
But that should be obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of how Anti Cheats work, both technically and as a business.
… None of that matters to you though, you have completely vibes based anecdotes that you confidently state as fact.
Please stop doing that.
When someone has no clue what they’re talking about, but confidently makes a claim about a situation because it feels right, this is typically called misinformation.
I mean, anybody could verify it by spending a few hours each on the respective games… But yes, any empirical data would be nice.
No, thats an anecdotal experience, and all it would tell you is the players’ perception of how prevalent cheating is… not how prevalent it actually is, not how effective an anti cheat system is at blocking cheaters.
But yes, any empirical data would be nice. For example, a study on the amount of blatant hackers found on lobbies joined in comparable ranks
“It would be great if there was any valid data/research to back up or disprove that thing I said earlier, but there isn’t, therefore I am completely justified in saying whatever as I want and acting as if its indisputable!”
Anyway, this isn’t exactly misinformation to anybody who has played both games at any decent rank. It’s unproved but immediately discernible information.
Again, no.
You made a claim that a particular anti cheat system is better than another.
You keep saying that ‘oh anyone can just tell’.
No.
What you are describing is again, at best, player perceptions of cheating prevalence.
The logic you are using is exactly the same logic that people who believe in astrology or woo woo nonsense medical treatments use to justify their efficacy.
… You have nothing but vibes and anecdotes, which you admit are unproved and have no basis in fact, beyond ‘i think this is obvious’.
You’re just bullshitting.
It is indeed pointless to attempt to get a bullshitter to admit they are bullshitting, when they’ve already backpedalled by moving goal posts, dismissing the importance of the discussion after being called out for making a specific claim which they can’t back up.
You could just admit that ah well shit yeah, I guess I don’t have any actual valid reasoning or data to back up my claim, but nope you keep trucking on, doing everything you can to talk around that point instead of addressing it.
Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!
… Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?
I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.
They consistently make promises for things that will exist in the future, which then takes them years beyond their expected timeframe to achieve, or just never do them because some other past promise or promise they will make later makes an original promise either totally unworkable or wildly different.
So, so many missed deadlines, which uh, actually were just aspirational.
And… this is a game that sells you ships, gear, for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of real world dollars.
Some crazy promise will be made and oh, turns out that means we have to rework something like half the game’s systems to support that, but also they’re adding new content constantly that is always in some limbo state between following the old system’s paradigms and attempting to follow the new system’s paradigm.
What you end up with is a constant state of everything being a bit broken, and a lot of stuff being completely broken.
Its less like a released game getting DLCs and more like an alpha test that just never ends.
Which, again, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.
I need some suggestions on what to play. Single Player games only. Most of the games make me feel lonely and alone. In most of the games, the protagonist has to deal with the problems on their own, like Control, Crysis, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War (I liked the original 6 more than the new ones, even though the new ones had...
But no seriously if you can get past the extremely weird … basically early 00’s style mmo control scheme… for what nowadays you’d expect to be third person ARPG controls… Kenshi is an absolutely incredible game, and it’s got a lively modding scene as well.
I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…
I still doubt it.
I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.
But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.
The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.
When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.
From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.
That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.
But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?
You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.
But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.
Switch 2 mouse mode (such potential) (www.techradar.com) angielski
With the official reveal of the mouse mode for the Switch 2’s controllers there is the potential for so many classic games to flood the console....
Civilization 7 Outlines Crucial 1.1.1 Update as It Struggles to Compete on Steam Against Civ 6 and Even the 15-Year-Old Civ 5 (www.ign.com) angielski
Tetris angielski
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is as dark as that infamous Game of Thrones episode (www.polygon.com) angielski
Half-Life 2 RTX Demo Available Now For Download (store.steampowered.com) angielski
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Why Steam can be considered a monopolistic platform? angielski
^^^
Not pictured: A brief time during teen years when you might have both (lemmy.ml) angielski
Looks like Dragon Age: The Veilguard just received its final major update (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Sure sounds like it’s time to stick a fork in this game already....
How it goes (lemmy.world) angielski
Any Roguelike/Roguelite suggestions? angielski
I’ve sunk probably a thousand hours into Slay the Spire, have beaten Hades, and just finished Cult of the Lamb. Looking for something else to scratch that itch- preferably on switch. Any suggestions?...
Razer has released a backseat gaming AI bot called Ava, and I'm not sure whether using it should be considered cheating or not (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good (www.nytimes.com) angielski
We tested the Nvidia App performance problems — games can run up to 15 percent slower with the app (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
'I want to acknowledge that we messed up': NZXT addresses concerns about its controversial Flex gaming PC rental program and commits to taking action (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
This response is not nearly enough in my book.
Anyone else bounce around from game to game with no clue what to play? angielski
Used to spend most of my days playing live service games that required a huge amount of time, or big AAA titles that are critically acclaimed. For example, Fallout 4/76, Battlefield 2042, rainbow six, World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Skyrim, Destiny 2, OverWatch… Basically any really big game that you would find on the top 20 of...
Prime/GOG games that I do not wish to claim for myself angielski
cross-posted from: discuss.tchncs.de/post/25932362...
Windows 11 24H2 update blocked on PCs with Assassin's Creed, Star Wars Outlaws (www.bleepingcomputer.com) angielski
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Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Now if only they could more clearly communicate when games are playable offline.
Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done' (wccftech.com) angielski
Suggestions? Games that won't make me feel alone? angielski
I need some suggestions on what to play. Single Player games only. Most of the games make me feel lonely and alone. In most of the games, the protagonist has to deal with the problems on their own, like Control, Crysis, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War (I liked the original 6 more than the new ones, even though the new ones had...
Concord is going offline beginning September 6th (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429