I’m not following closely and haven’t gamed on PC in a while but:
Denovo is a technology that is supposed to prevent copying games (DRM). Not sure what it’s current state is or might be mixing it up with other DRM, but DRM is known for causing headaches for paying customers. Using excessive system resources, refusal to launch for legitimate paying customers, spyware/excessive data collected and sent to a corporation, etc. In some games, volunteers will patch bugs out of a game, and this will cause the game to think it’s cracked and refuse to launch.
Some DRM is “phone home” and can’t be played offline, so people in remote areas can’t play. And sometimes the company doesn’t want to keep servers online when the game has been out for 10 years, so people that purchased the game can no longer play.
In this case, the company let reviewers rate the game and got the initial scores and sales, then pushed the unpopular DRM update. It’s scummy. If you’re using it, then use it. Don’t bait and switch.
While I also dislike Epic, I feel that their going under would be a bad thing for the industry as a whole. There are only a few game distribution platforms of this size; Steam, Epic, Prime, GOG, and EA/Origin (not including Consoles). So there will be less competition and less innovation. They give out a ton of free games, and people may lose access to those licenses. They also employ(ed) a large number of people who are going to be jobless. I’d prefer they get their act together and be held accountable.
Epic has never been about innovation in the retail space. Sweeney talks a good game but it’s always been consistently out of his ass. He launched the Epic game store framing it as some sort of crusade on behalf of consumers, “Apple bad”, “Steam bad” but the reality is he just didn’t want to split money with others in the stack. I don’t blame him for that but his marketing was disingenuous and it’s quite obvious, now, that his business plan was inherently flawed.
His performative crusade against Apple has now led to 20% of the company looking for new jobs. We all stood by cheering, selling our souls for a bucket load of cheap games that, for the most part, we wouldn’t actually have paid for and will never get around to playing.
I don’t really care about EGS, I’m more concerned about Unreal Engine. If they keep dumping money into EGS exclusives and whatnot, it could impact UE investment, which would be bad for the industry.
I dumped a ton of hours into Battlefield 3, and the Bad Company games. Now in terms of BF, I mostly play Battlefield 1943. I tried 2042 but immediately hated it. They gutted the game of everything that made the series so good.
Totally going to snatch this one, thanks!
I used to play Urban Terror a ton back in the day. Not a massive game like BF and BattleBit but it’s a super fun shooter (and it’s free!).
As much as i can enjoy battlebit, you arent giving battlefield enough credit
The populations of the games at the current moment arent even that far off, Battlebit is at 8k, 2042 is at 5k+whatever the number plays on origin.
Battlefield has a LONG history of always releasing in a shit start and getting better overtime. This trend has happened for the past several games (since after 3 I believe)
No, I’m giving battlefield all the credit it’s current incarnation deserves:
It is not as good as a game made by 3 guys on Unreal. I tried it again last week out of curiosity and it’s flat out not worth getting when BattleBit exists, in my opinion
And a long history of releasing trash and getting to decent only proves the point, BattleBit actually started as an enjoyable and decently content filled product whereas battlefield you KNOW won’t next time it comes around
The point is it’s playerbases are in a similar tier in size. Of course its your opinion that battlebit is better (and is mine too), but that doesnt stop the idea that there are plenty of people playing 2042 now (especially vs launch). I have a friend who has both games, but when hes playing alone, he more often boots up battlefield more often then battlebit, and he spends a LOT of time playing those games more tham the rest of his library.
I’m not suprised. On one hand, there wasn’t exactly a lot of marketing around it. I didn’t even know it was announced until last week, and I follow gaming news and some VR news. On top of this, its an expensive, casual device - the sort of thing a kid will ask for after seeing someone else using it, not something people are lining up day-one to buy. At least something like the Valve Index, for all its disadvantages, very clearly targets enthusiasts who will go out of their way to seek out newer or better products. If Valve decided to release a Valve Index 2 (or for a more direct comparison, a Valve Index Pro) I’d be willing to bet their day-one numbers would look better, even if their overall market is much smaller.
I’m sure they’re waiting for the price tag of a device with the features you describe to be more in line with current steam deck prices before doing that. They probably don’t want to annoy early adopters either.
Thats the main goal imo. Theyre not teying to compete with the high end devices, all of them will likely download steam and give Valve money anyways. Valve always targets on expanding the market, with vr and such. The Steam Deck exists to expand the market to budget pc console like gaming, and it would not make sense to replace it now.
Valve I dont believe sees it like a cellphone where theyre trying to make more money by doing yearly releases. They arent a hardware company fundamentally. They only develop hardware as a means to expand market, not to make profit directly off of.
Its why virtually none of their hardware projects are bog standard, be it steam machine/deck(Linux market), index/vive (VR), Controller (touchpad, HD Rumble), Link(local streaming) as each project was designed to introduce pc gaming to a new market, or expand pc gaming by adding new features
Valve is also a privately owned company, meaning that every decision they make will always affect Gabe, and not someone different every week like most other companies. Valve needs to think long term while their competitors need immediate effects.
None of my friends have a Meta Quest (or any VR headsets for that matter). On the extremely few occasions the headsets are brought up, all the conversations are the same; “it’s kind of cool but it’s made by Facebook”.
I wonder how many people would be in the market for a relatively cheaper headset like the Meta Quest if it wasn’t a Mark Zuckerberg project
Its a mixed bag. The Pico headsets are around the same price point but at that price point, you are typically paying with your user data as well. Its just a question of who you are giving it to facebook or some random ass Chinese company. While Facebook trying to own "VR" for itself is bad I will at least thank them for making headsets that make it more likely people are willing to dip their feet into VR. While facebook sucks, only having to pay 300 to 400 to get into something you may absolutely hate. They make for great "starter" headsets that you can probably easily find on the 2nd hand market for sub 200. Try out VR on a quest and if you like the concept and feelings of it probably invest more on a better headset. Hopefully we will hear more about Valve's Deckard soon.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention PSVR 2 which is pretty damn good but for 550, I don't think it will have a massive appeal to console games seeing as they are gaming on something funnily worth less than that headset. It being locked to only the PS5 is also a massive penalty against it and there is no news of a fan made driver for it on pc.
They’re not just entry level headsets. You can link them to a powerful gaming computer through Steam Link and then they’re the equivalent of a $1200 headset from Valve or HTC.
100% not equivalent. I said entry since it gets the job done but it has a ton of limitations. The biggest one is it having to compress the video via the link cable and it having to decode on its own cpu. So this can lead to a some artificating and some stuttering issues. This is a problem that can be solved if Meta chooses to use DP over usb via the displayport protocol but that makes engineering a bit harder and it runs counter to their whole point of the device being a standalone unit, this isn't even an unrealistic ask since this is how the PSVR2 works.
2nd one and this is only a partial issue but its still worth mentioning battery life. For many people having a link cable will extend the life of your quest 2 but it won't keep the same charge level so a session will probably stop after 2 or 3 hours. Which is fine for a single person but if you are doing this for a party or something, may not be enough time to let everyone have a go with the thing. So a standard headset will just have a dedicated power cable and can go for as long as you want it to. Like said I'm hesitant to put too much faith on meta since they can easily drop support for these headsets. To my knowledge the quest 1 still works with a link cable but how long do we expect that to be the case, maybe one day a software update with their oculus platform basically makes it impossible to use it.
If your computer has USB-C 3.2 v2 then you can play for infinite time over the charge cable. I have a couple on my MOBO and as soon as I switched to those ports I never had charging issues. I think that resolves the video compression issue too. I’m not certain about the video issue but the bandwidth of 3.2 v2 is double what the display port is. I’ve never had any issues anyway. I’m sure there are other benefits to the pricier headsets too, like not having to deal with Facebook, and possibly better interfaces and stuff, but for the money the Quest v2 is pretty awesome.
I own baldurs gate 3. But if im honest games with that much choice tend to make me feel overwhelmed since I don’t want to miss anything or ruin anything down the road.
Try to see it like a choose your own adventure instead of "gotta catch 'em all". I find it helps to have a soft rule against savescumming for myself - if I make a mistake, my character made that. The only times I let myself reload is if the outcome of what I did was unclear, and went entirely against what I thought it would do.
That sounds like a good idea. Over the years I got so used to playing games where you try to find and unlock everything and where there’s an endgame you have to prepare for. It’s very hard to break that mindset.
I usually have the same problem as you when I play rpgs (or rpg-like games), but BG3 has been different for me. Part of that is that I went into it wanting to just let the game play out. The other part is that the game does an excellent job of making results ambiguous (in a very good way, imo).
You can choose to save/kill/sneak through something and “complete” it, but it often is not obvious whether you made the optimal choice. Most approaches seem valid and you may not find out the real consequences until later in the game. Embrace it. Accept your consequences. And keep going. It really is an amazing experience.
That seems like a much more enjoyable and relaxed way to go about it. I am trying to get back to the core of gaming i.e. just enjoying the ride. So maybe this really is the game I need to just sit down and play.
to add to this great suggestion, I usually tell myself it’s okay that my first game is a blind run and I can always adjust/ change course the more I go into the lore.
Some games are worth a second run and it will show.
I follow the same philosophy. Avoiding spoilers, there was a part of Act 2 that I thought was just the next conversation in a series of conversations, but it triggered a significant event that blocked me out of several things I had on the to-do list. I had no idea it’d trigger that, and imo I don’t think it’s reasonable that it would happen, so I did scum that.
I rarely replay games, but this is one I fully intend to replay with a different/bigger party (currently playing with one friend, but I’m gonna get two more to buy the game for the next run), a different class (currently playing cleric, thinking about barbarian or bard) and on the highest difficulty.
I think you technically miss quite a lot of content as some choices make other things impossible to pursue. I also take it as it comes, by that I mean I don’t reload save states because I failed a dice throw or made mistakes.
I am trying to get back to just enjoying games more. I dont know when I went from enjoying the ride to being so competitive in wanting to unlock and complete everything I can for everything. It used to be there to a certain extent when I was younger but I think my playing WoW with raiding and everything got me locked into this completions, min/max mindset. Which is fine for some things but tiring when it ends up being the mindset for everything I play.
It’s not about unlocking everything for me. Even with a second playthrough you’re probably far from seeing everything. Sure, the main storyline somewhat repeats itself, but there are multiple companion side stories and all kinds of other stuff you can stumble upon by accident that you then incorporate into your playthrough.
This is probably one of the best games for you to just enjoy, because you can still continue when failing something (unless your party is completely wiped, but fights aren’t really that hard in easy and normal difficulties). It’s a pretty personalized experience.
I’m the same and I studied every nook and cranny during my first playthrough because FOMO was real. Guess what, I still missed enough things to make a second run no less entertaining―especially if you play a polar opposite of your original character. This game accommodates to pretty much every stupid decision you can throw at it and it’s amazing.
Yeah multiple runs is def the kind of game it is. My first was a Durge and I thought I really explored most of the nooks and crannies. My friends are behind me still on their first one and regularly ask me about stuff I had no idea I missed once or twice! Started run 2 as a good character and it's like a whole new game.
I feel like that in most games but not in BG3. I do still reload sometimes if I fail a check, but BG3 makes failures fun! It’s rather rare that you’re actually locked out of something, and often times a failure leads to interesting outcomes.
I’m sure there is also a lot that I’m missing and don’t know about, so there’s no sense of FOMO. I really do appreciate that the game doesn’t many things. There’s no tracking that you’re attained 45 of 53 powers, or 237 of 245 hidden biscuits, or that you’re missing that last upgrade point to unlock something cool. I also haven’t come across any annoying skill quests where you have to take down 14 enemies in 12 seconds while hopping on one leg.
Larian has done a great job of writing interesting content for pretty much every outcome, and it’s one of the few games that I feel I will want to replay to see a different side of things. There’s a whole quest line in act 1 that you can only get if you fail a random check. I found that pretty novel.
I'm usually the same way with open world games like The Witcher, GTA, RDR, etc, but BG3 puts the story enough on the rails to keep me focused while still letting me make critical choices and enough freedom to explore so it feels amazing when I find little secrets or Easter eggs.
My buddy has played through it twice with 40 hour runs each.
I'm still on my first playthrough at about 70 hours and close to wrapping up act 3.
People are clamoring around you in a huge chorus of it's fine just roll with it but frankly, I think your point of view is totally valid. While Larian did a great job making every path a valid way to the ending, you can really only ever lock yourself out of content with your choices.
Go too far down one of two branching paths? Hope you can pass a big fat skill check or two, or that one companion will bail. Hope you didn't like that character or want to see more of that content. (Oh, and if you do pass the skill checks, 10 minutes later the companion is like "ugh no it's fine you were right, forget I ever wanted to go that way even though I've been obsessed with it for the last 20 hours" in the name of railroading the character back in line.)
Get interested in the wrong quest too early? Hope you didn't want to finish the main side objective in that one area. No no, even though all the characters are still present, you don't get to finish it. Because we said so. Shoo along to the next place. Go. Get.
And here's hoping you don't get curious about the "evil" path - you lose multiple companions and a whole-ass cast of side characters that are meant to follow you through the game and gain one (1) bit of interesting new content to replace them. Is it still interesting? Absolutely, but it's a consolation prize compared to how much you lose.
It took me 3 playthroughs or so before I finally felt like I was on a save where I was having a good 80%+ of the intended experience. And yeah, you can replay it for what you missed, but not everyone has time for that, especially in a game this immense. I know I've started it up to make my fourth character about half a dozen times and Alt-F4ed during character creation as soon as I think about going through the parts I've thoroughly combed already.
BG3 is my GOTY by a long shot, but people should have more sympathy for this outlook. There are definitely right paths and wrong paths, and while they all lead to the end, the wrong paths have a lot less to look at and a healthy amount of rubbing your face in the fact that you did stuff in the wrong order ("Perhaps you could have...." ok thanks, narrator).
I feel this. I’m still in the first act and taking my time, but I’ve already lost Gale because I accidentally selected the option to not give him a magical item to consume after he asked a second time - I said I would, and then when I went into the selection menu I realized I couldn’t give him the item I intended, so I backed out and he said fuck you and left. So that’s great for me. Maybe he’ll come back later but then again maybe not. So that’s a whole character I don’t have any more because of an accident.
Oh, and I also never got Lazel because I never went to the area where she was captured until much later and she wasn’t there any more. I did find her (before that, funnily enough) as part of the cut scene with the Githyanki near the bridge but I didn’t know she was a playable character, plus she acted like an enemy and I was really low level and got destroyed so I had to reload. So that’s another character I don’t have and may never get, although I’ll have to go back now that I’m a higher level and see what happens.
My point is that it’s really easy to miss out on large parts of the game due to random or accidental decisions, so I do understand people who find the experience off-putting. Still, I’ve been lucky to have enough free time to be able to play through with my wife so I’ve been able to avoid a lot of the stuff I fucked up in my solo game, and I personally love the game despite the experiences I outlined above.
I’m pretty sure I missed out on the bear cock experience because of this. He’s down for the three way but it’s getting dangerously close to the end of the game and there’s no way to beg for it, haha. The thought of a whole nother playthrough just to see it has me dreading the goblin area.
I’m concerned with the state of consolidation in the gaming space (and just about every other market, I might add) but I also find it hard to argue they’re a monopoly. They’re number three in the console space and thanks to Proton Microsoft’s de facto stranglehold on PC gaming OS’s is weaker than ever. I could see cloud gaming being a problem in the future but it’s such a nascent market who knows what will happen there.
surely Edgerunners isn’t fair to count toward that? That was already in the works before launch, it’s not as though they had a bad launch and thought “wow we should do an animated series to repair reputation”
Pre release I was so hyped for cyberpunk, was patient and waited for reviews, so voted with my wallet and didn’t buy it, and just forgot it even existed
Watched Edgerunners animated series off the cuff and it had no business being as good as it was (same as Arcane - gj netflix)
The next time it went on sale I snapped it up and havent regretted it one bit. One playthrough on my old hardware, obligitory playthrough to test after I got an Rtx, and another now 2.0 is out - definitely got my moneys worth
A lot of the hate was undeserved, IMO. Besides one absolutely hilarious bug where I called my ride in an odd place, and another where part of a mission didn’t trigger so I had to reload the last Autosave which was about 30 seconds back, the game ran well for me and a lot of friends at launch. And CDPR responded quickly and had patches out within a week fixing most of the gameplay affecting bugs.
I typically judge games pretty harshly, and my only experience with CDPR prior was Witcher 3, which dropped with some bugs but was patched within a week, and really didn’t understand the level of shade CDPR received.
I had a midrange PC at the time, and only encountered a handful of bugs my first play through.
Performance could be rough in downtown sections, but it’s was far from unplayable on day one.
I am firmly convinced that most of the people experiencing horrible performance or mystifying bugs were attempting to play the game on their smart fridge or something. If you had a decent gaming machine from the last 7 years or so, the game ran fine.
That being said, it should have never released on Xbox one or PS4. Those consoles were just too old and the performance wasn’t their.
A lot of the problems and stupid glitches people had were from playing off of a hard drive. The game really needs flash storage, even if it’s SATA. That should’ve been a recommendation from the start, if not an outright requirement like it is now with 2.0.
I think the console releases were largely to blame for the bad rep. Esp the older gen ones. I played from launch on PC and I had a lot of bugs but nothing game breaking and it didn’t stop me from thoroughly enjoying myself.
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