tal

tal, rok temu

Text-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There's a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.

tal, rok temu

Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

Wait, outside Europe?

Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can't geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

I remember that the EU didn't want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn't heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it's not like the US says "if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him".

EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary -- and I am not sure that it is -- that seems like the EU is saying "you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe". Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that'd kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

thinks

If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it'd be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it'd basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don't know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company ("Valve Germany") or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

I'm a little suspicious that this isn't a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it'd create too many issues.

EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that's exactly what the situation is.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don't believe that that's what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

EDIT2: Okay, here's an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

Yeah, so it's just that these "mezha.media" guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

tal, rok temu

I think that that's a sheep.

EDIT: The top comment on YouTube says "goat mommy is Crimson Acid from Paradise Killer".

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Valve’s “fake Windows Linux device that just runs Windows games without paying Microsoft money – how is this not a violation of Windows TOS”

Valve uses a build of WINE called Proton, not Windows. Microsoft's TOS terms apply to Windows. They don't have anything to do with software that's simply able to run the same binaries.

EDIT: Ah, I looked at your comment history, and it appears to just be trolling, so I assume that this wasn't a serious question.

tal, rok temu

It is possible to get a USB power station. The Deck can charge at up to 45W.

I wish that power stations acted more like "external batteries" (would automtically be flipped on by devices when their internal batteries get low, will be charged after their internal batteries are charged), but even as things are, they do let one extend battery life on portable devices dramatically.

tal, rok temu

It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.

The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.

tal, rok temu

The Steam Deck is more expensive.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Microsoft-SVP-00001-Xbox-Series-S-Game-Console-512-GB-SSD-AMD-Zen-2-3-6-GHz-10-GDDR6-SDRAM-RDNA-HDMI-1440p-Controller-HDR-Capable-DTS-Dolby-Atmos-Sea/1861650659?from=/search

Series S: $274.95

https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck

Steam Deck: $359.10

And that's for the low-end Steam Deck. The nicest one is $519.20, almost twice what the Series S runs.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we're getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that's definitely not a constant; some people aren't going to care much about openness.

That said, if I were trying to compare Valve's offering and Microsoft's offering, I'd probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they're more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn't have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.

I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I'd bet that it'd be more-limited than a Series S.

That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have-always-been-sold-at-a-loss

As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there's ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.

The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it's still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.

We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately -- that's why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that's to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.

If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.

Now, all that being said, I don't have a Series S or a Series X, and I'm not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I'd rather have, you're preaching to the choir. I'm just saying that I don't think that I'd agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.

tal, rok temu

I'm a little fuzzy as to why the first-sale doctrine exists for physical goods but not for digital goods. It seems to me that any reasonable economic rationale should affect either both or neither.

tal, rok temu

modular thumbsticks

Hmm.

So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?

Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

What is Microsoft even making money on these days?

googles

https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/

Azure, Office, and (still) Windows, apparently.

Only 8% of revenue is gaming. They sure do went to grow that.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The Fallout 3 remaster (fiscal year 2024)

If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands -- where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset -- was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I'd forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I'd forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Tale_of_Two_Wastelands

Tale of Two Wastelands

Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]

Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Heh. Porting Skywind to an Oblivion remaster might make sense.

It'd be interesting to see Tamriel Rebuilt ported to Skywind ported to this Oblivion remaster.

Need some kind of automated migration tools to help.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It's not as critical for Bethesda's series, because the stories don't intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.

tal, rok temu

Leopards actually have spots:

https://jimsgunsupply.com/DuraCoat/dc/DuraCoathotpinkleapord_22_081410.jpg

Tigers have stripes:

https://www.cerakote.com/project-gallery/68747/pink-tiger-stripe-ar-cerakoted-using-sig-pink-and-graphite-black

tal, rok temu

It’s a major historically cross platform franchise, for one thing.

Also, there aren't a whole lot of game developers that do Bethesda-style games.

I haven't played any Mario games in a long time, and I don't know what they look like after consoles went 3d. But go back some decades, and they were side-scrolling platform games. There were lots of other side-scrolling platformers. The Mario series was a particularly good series, but it had lots of competition.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Maybe Valve should take another crack at the console market.

I mean, you can just plug a PC into your television. Flip on Steam's Big Picture Mode. It's pretty similar, just that you don't have to buy your hardware from Valve.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Well, there's that The Outer Worlds game that was billed as being kind of like Fallout. I was kind of disappointed with it, because some of what I'd call its weak points were really part of what make Bethesda's games for me. Bethesda has interesting perks that really alter gameplay, and The Outer Worlds has pretty bland perks that slightly bump stats. The Outer Worlds is, strictly-speaking, open-world, but there's no reason to really retrace steps, so it functionally feels a lot more linear. Bethesda focuses on you wandering around the world and just stumbling across interesting things, and The Outer Worlds has little to stumble across other than in cities. Bethesda has interesting weapons that operate significantly-differently, and The Outer Worlds has a few weapon classes that all operate in about the same way, including uniques, aside from several "science weapons".

However, it did get a good Metacritic score, so I expect that there were people who liked it. It was also pretty bug-free. And it is kind of in the same vein, but just didn't have what made me really enjoy Fallout titles.

More-broadly-speaking, I guess that you could call any open-world games a little like Bethesda's stuff. The Grand Theft Auto series, Saboteur, probably the Assassin's Creed series (though I've barely ever played those), the Mafia series.

EDIT: Hmm. Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds were both done by Obsidian, and Microsoft apparently acquired them as well five years back and rolled them into Xbox Game Studios, so from a standpoint of people on other platforms (well, I'm on Linux, but can run the Windows releases via compatibility software), I can imagine that The Outer Worlds doesn't make things less frustrating, even if one does really like it.

tal, rok temu

Honestly, there are very few games I have seen that don't work on Proton today. You might need to update to the latest experimental or use the GloriousEggroll build of Proton, but I don't even bother checking ProtonDB any more.

I will say that one of the games I really would like to run on Linux, Command: Modern Operations (and its predecessor, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations) does not run on Proton. But aside from that...

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Hmm. I'd think that a desktop would probably be most-comparable to a console (well, okay, other than portable consoles).

And the price difference isn't that high these days. It used to be enormous:

Go back to the NES, which came out in 1983:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System

Introductory price: ¥14,800 (Japan) US$179 (equivalent to $530 in 2022)

Compare to the IBM PC (which, frankly, lacked a lot of game-friendly hardware) and came out in 1981:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

Introductory price: Starting at US$1,565 (equivalent to $5,040 in 2022)

The Mac came out in 1984:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

Introductory price: US$2,495 (equivalent to US$7,000 in 2022)

The Apple II in 1977:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

Introductory price: US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,270 in 2022)

So the NES -- in inflation-adjusted dollars -- cost about what an Xbox Series X or PS5 cost.

But nobody is spending $5k-$7k on a typical desktop today. And certainly not on one with comparable hardware to the existing consoles.

tal, rok temu

The new world has to be pretty similar to the old, given that the article says that one can flip between the modern and original graphics.

Talking of nostalgia, all three games are being released with an option to switch between the original blocky polygon graphics, and lovely patched-over modern designs. If it’s anything like the Monkey Island remakes, this means I will spend the entire time obsessively switching back and forth, unable to cope without knowing how every scene looks in each incarnation.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Can we just… not get remasters and remakes anymore?

I'd like to have HD versions of a number of older 2D games that I enjoy re-released.

Honestly, I'd like to have HD versions of some newer games that were originally done with low-resolution graphics, like Binding of Isaac and Caves of Qud. Nothing wrong with low-resolution graphics -- I think that it enables shifting resources to developing gameplay, and that that's often a good tradeoff -- but those games did well, and I'd be willing to pay for flashier graphics.

If you look at Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, it's gone from ASCII to graphics to significantly-prettier tilesets. Dwarf Fortress did something similar. I think that that shows that there's demand for it.

I appreciate that not everyone wants that, but I would.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Honestly, this was something that Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 could have benefited from. There were people who used Nuka-Cola for healing instead of stimpaks, especially with Fallout 76's Cola Nut perk, but one significant benefit of using stimpaks instead was that you had a binding for them when using a controller instead of a keyboard.

https://old.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/x5la14/diluted_stimpak_should_not_have_the_highest/

Console players don’t have hot keys so I’d like to be able to choose what’s on the right d-pad button Since it’s the only instant use button I have available. I’d actually prefer if you could bing any item to that button. It would make using the cola nut perk way easier.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It looks like that's what they're doing. The bugfixes are out now, and they're saying that they're providing post-release updates for the FoV slider, HDR calibration menu, and DLSS.

tal, rok temu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Pistols

The Pink Pistols are an LGBTQ gun rights organization in the United States and Canada. Their motto is "Pick on someone your own caliber".[1]

Pink Pistols enrollment up.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I loved my Dualsense too, and then the left stick started drifting so badly, it’s completely unusable now. It’s only about a year old, too

I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don't recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I've seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.

Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.

tal, rok temu

A bunch of controllers have extremely obnoxious security bits required. I had to get two separate bit sets to open a bunch of controllers.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I would guess that any platform-exclusive game is going to have some level of that, just because you've got fans of Platform A and fans of Platform B. And Starfield was purchased by Microsoft specifically to have an X-Box (well, and PC) exclusive, so...

Go back to the 1980s, and it was "Mario sucks" or "Sonic sucks".

I play games almost entirely on the PC, so the Starfield acquisition (as well as the other recent acquisitions by Microsoft or Sony or whoever that have been driving the antitrust concerns) haven't really been on my radar, but if I had a popular game coming out on my platform and then someone paid to ensure that I didn't get it, I'd be kind of irked.

I did use a Mac, many years back, and I remember being annoyed when Bungie -- then a major game developer for the Macintosh, in an era when the Mac wasn't getting a lot of games -- was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. Halo did come out for the Mac, but Halo 2 didn't, and I imagine that a lot of people who were on the Mac then were probably pretty unhappy about that.

tal, rok temu

I would rank Fallout: New Vegas more-highly than Fallout 3 too, but it wasn't developed by Bethesda. They just published it. Obsidian developed it.

tal, rok temu

I don't disagree that the mods for Bethesda games are cool, but problem is that the barrier to getting a massive mod list set up and working after years of mods have come out is considerable.

I feel like, given the sheer size of the mod library, mod managers need something like a list of base, curated set of mods to start with, kind of what Wabbajack does, but then have the ability to add mods to it. That way, to get you most of the way to a heavily-modded game, you just pick from among a few popular modlists.

Choosing that curated set to start with would let you avoid spending hours poring over reviews of different mods and culling obsolete information to determine what you think the current-best, say, lighting mod is.

And have the ability to update to the latest version of the modlist, or roll back to an earlier.

Once that's up and going, then if you want to go tweak it or add or remove a particular mod, you can.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Huh. I was just watching a review for No Man's Sky that made virtually the same point about that game, down to the 50 hours. The review said that the first couple hours were very boring, but once the intro and early game was out of the way, it got way more interesting. His pinned comment reads "I have now sunk in 50+ hours into this game. It keeps showing new stuff. Please help me. My family hasn't seen me in days. "

Maybe open-world game developers need to see if they can streamline the intros somehow. Even if the intro isn't a large percentage of the time you play the game, it does make the first impression.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It's apparently coming out shortly (like, this month or next). But, more to the point, the delay apparently wasn't because a platform vendor purchased it to be an exclusive, but because the dev team hit some kind of technical problems with the port. That is, it's not in the group of "Mario and Sonic" exclusives used to sell a platform, and Microsoft's acquisition was to make Starfield one of these.

https://www.techradar.com/gaming/xbox-series-x-s/baldurs-gate-3-will-release-on-xbox-between-september-and-november-according-to-swen-vincke

EDIT: Split-screen on the XBox Series S is apparently where the problem is:

Larian has been struggling to get Baldur's Gate 3's split-screen co-op feature running smoothly on the Xbox Series S. Despite the feature working as intended on Xbox Series X, Microsoft policy demands that Xbox Series X versions of their games cannot have any features that Xbox Series S editions lack. This means that canning the feature on Series S simply isn't an option for Larian.

tal, rok temu

In Fallout 4 and Skyrim, modders did ultimately put out high-poly-count heads, high-detail eyes, etc. I imagine that if tradition holds, there will be modders doing the same in Skyrim.

tal, rok temu

Oops, thanks, yes.

tal, rok temu

Playstation tends to cater to people who like turn based games, aka interactive slideshows.

Huh.

I'm a few generations out of date on consoles, but I was kind of disappointed with console turn-based games.

I normally think of the PC as the place to go, because the mouse and high resolution are often good partners for that.

Turn-based strategy games, stuff like Paradox titles especially seemed to be a PC thing.

Do you mean relative to the other console platforms, or relative to all other platforms in general? If so, what titles?

Maybe turn-based RPGs or something, stuff in the vein of Final Fantasy? Is that what you mean?

tal, rok temu

I'm kind of surprised that The Sims doesn't have more competition.

It's been many years that the series has been kind of the only entry in the genre.

Yeah, a lot of the other classic Sim games don't have analogs either (though Sim City does), but The Sims is pretty commercially successful.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It’s ya’lls fucking fault for expecting No Mans Sky to be the greatest fucking game of all time at release

Yeah, having read over a bunch of comments here, a lot of the comments that are unhappy about Starfield are basically people expecting it to be like No Man's Sky, or some people who just don't like Bethesda games in general. The ones that are happy tend to be people comparing it to earlier Bethesda games that they liked.

I really like Bethesda games, so for me, that's great. But I do also get that there are people who don't like Bethesda games, and for those people, being told that they're wrong and that they should like it drives them nuts.

I think a good rule of thumb is to probably expect Starfield to be similar to earlier Bethesda games, like Skyrim and Fallout 4. If you like those games, you'll probably like Starfield. If you dislike them, you're probably going to dislike Starfield.

But trying to convince people who really like Bethesda games that they suck or to convince people who really dislike Bethesda games that they're great is kind of not likely to work well.

tal, rok temu

I was fine with the music in Fallout 4, and Bethesda did that.

tal, rok temu

Kind of wish that there was an icon in the Steam store for it, like with VR headset support.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I dunno.

Real life naval warfare is generally slow and boring, but by using a variety of tricks, like time compression and only having the player involved in actual combat, many games have made that palatable.

I think it could be done.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Yeah I meant fly as in between locations without a loading screen, kinda like in X3/X4/NMS or even Freelancer/Rebel Galaxy and older spaceship games.

Ehhhh.

I dunno about No Man's Sky.

But in X3 (and X2, for that matter), you don't really seamlessly enter stations. In X4, you do, but it felt like a gimmick to me -- there's not much interesting gameplay on a station.

And there are loading screens between sectors in those games. Short ones, but they're there. Freelancer too.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

What specific functionality is it that you want?

I listed one feature that I'd like to have (dynamic generation of polygons in curved surfaces), which I do not consider to be a very important limitation in another comment.

But if you strongly feel that the engine imposes constraints, then I'm curious what particular functionality it is that you're after.

EDIT: Another: I don't think that the game can generate billboards for player-built structures (so you can see the structures you've built in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 many cells away). I don't think that that's actually a fundamental engine limitation -- you could probably do it with the existing engine, just that the game doesn't do it today. Instead, stuff like that is generated via offline map-generation tools. But again, it's not really a huge deal in either of the above Fallout games.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I'm also not convinced that ladder-climbing, whether one wants it or not, is a fundamental engine limitation. It might not be in the game, but that doesn't imply that it's an engine limitation.

googles

This guy modded climbable ladders into Fallout 4, which seems like a pretty good argument that it's not an engine limitation.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/62738

And not that I object per se to ladders, but when was the last time you climbed a ladder in real life? I haven't in quite some years. I mean, sure, it's one more interaction, and IIRC there are some fire escapes that had ladders somewhere in Fallout 4 in Boston. But you could make the same argument about interacting with all kinds of things, and it just seems odd for so many people here to mention specifically climbing ladders. I mean, you could fall and catch yourself, drive vehicles, rappel on a rope, skateboard, ice skate, grapple with enemies, zipline, sail a sailing boat, or God knows, any number of other player-object interaction functionality things that might be added. I suppose that any of them could theoretically add gameplay, but I don't see why the criticality of ladders.

tal, rok temu

Probably were in the wrong camp, had a Sega Master System or Genesis or something at the time.

tal, rok temu

If you read through this thread, there are people doing so.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I saw some comment in this thread that on the Deck, someone had to set their Proton version for Starfield to Proton Experimental -- newer than the current stable release version -- and then it worked. Might try that on other Linux distros too.

IIRC it's in the Properties->Compatibility dialog for a given game.

checks ProtonDB

https://www.protondb.com/app/1716740

Many entries on ProtonDB saying "switch to Experimental". Looks like the current GloriousEggroll Proton build also works, but if you've never set that up, easier to just do Proton Experimental.