Unity: Disappointed to discover denying access to a document with legal standing to the affected parties could have legal implications, and now trying to make up a cover story.
Glad you understand. It’s great when people on the Internet understand that their backlash against a very popular thing doesn’t matter because the popular thing is still beloved by millions
If only they supported Linux better, or really like at all… I know you can grab the files and install without DRM. But, the whole lack of a client makes it a nuisance to use. I used to buy everything on GOG when possible. Since I got a Steam Deck that’s changed. I shouldn’t have to use Heroic Launcher IMO…
Yet, ease of access is what appeals to the average consumer which leads to preferring steam for Linux for the same reason people get hardware restricted consoles. If a company wants to appeal and expand their market making themselves more accessible is how they do it. Otherwise alternative is to be an overlooked option.
Yeah, had Valve tried to push Linux again without trying to make it accessible for the average user it would have flopped like the Steam machine. Or at the very least users would have tossed Linux for Windows. Accessibility is very important, and technical users should not be looked to as guides on what is acceptable for the masses.
Because they should be able to make a launcher that works. The Windows GOG launcher (GOG Galaxy) is a joke. They want to make one launcher to rule them all but it struggles with almost every one. I have a Windows computer for games that require it (Valorant mostly for me) and even on PC I use Heroic. I don’t want crazy features. I just want an officially supported GOG client that works well on Linux and Windows.
Galaxy works fine on windows. It’s far more stable than steam btw.
In the meantime heroic or lutris work very well. So why is there even a need for something else? I’d argue it’s better if a company don’t hold your game hostage for you to play them.
I’ll admit I’ve only used Linux for the past 5-6 years, but I think the last time steam crashed for me was almost a decade ago or something? Is it not stable on windows anymore?
It does crash regularly, or it stops working and you need to restart it, and it always did this kind of thing. The obnoxious “I need to update before you’re allowed to play” is hardly a selling feature. The videos and the adds are both obnoxious and intensive on resources.
Galaxy has its ups and downs, but overall I feel its lighter and much more responsive. The interface is much less cluttered, much more logical and clear. And it’s not a fucking drm.
I thank vavle for what did for Linux gaming. Proton is brilliant and incredibly useful and valuable. But I also despise them for steam being litteraly a DRM. So I will forgive cdpr if they need time to develop galaxy on Linux and I’ll use lutris and heroic game launcher in the meantime.
It is trivial to disable all the video content (and some more) on steam if you happen to be on low-end hardware that needs that (or just if you don’t like it, really)
It does crash regularly, or it stops working and you need to restart it, and it always did this kind of thing.
Then you use it wrong. No idea how that’s possible but I run Steam on Windows, macOS, and Linux and except very early in the life cycle of the Steam Deck, I can’t remember Steam ever crashing on me in the last 10 or so years.
It cannot possibly be the fault of a shitty software and it must be me…
If you were correct, there’d be widespread reports of crashes. While no software is always free of bugs, if a piece of software is crashing for you all the time and hardy for everybody else, it’s the logical conclusion that the underlying problem is on your side, probably by installing unstable drivers.
Hahaha like people will fill a bug report everytime a software crash… I wonder whether you’re delusional or blinded by your faith into this piece if shit of a software.
I have the exact opposite experience as you. I have never once seen steam crash. My steam account is now 9 years old. I was absolutely stoked when I saw GOG Galaxy was trying to handle not only GOG games but games from other platforms as well. But my experience with that has been so bad. It’s fine for GOG games, but I’d much rather just add all my games into steam at this point. So as for stability, I don’t see any way that GOG Galaxy could ever beat Steam.
For Linux support, Steam is a DRM which is a detractor. But with all they’ve done with proton, steam input, steam deck OS… I’d say that Steam is definitely doing more for the Linux ecosystem than GOG.
Steam has been working on the steam deck for how long now? 5? 10 years? Gog has that much time to catch up.
And as I said, I don’t deny the role steam played and is still playing for Linux gaming. But it’s still a drm. And that’s something I simply cannot ignore.
I do use steam mind you. But I’ll use and support gog everytime I can. If steam did the most for Linux, gog did and still do the most for players.
I do not understand this debacle at all. 100% of people against the inclusion of pronouns—USE A PREFERRED PRONOUN. I guarantee if I called one these man children a “her” they’d lose their little minds.
I can tell you definitively that yes, this debate hurts people. Sending the statement that it’s a valid point of view to consider trans people mentally ill (or worse) harms people. If you look at how our existence is being debated and the consequences of that you would have to be very privileged to not see a problem.
This isn’t a court of law and I’m not arguing the statutes. I don’t like unilateral censorship in any form and I’d be equally butt hurt if they banned a mod to include pronouns.
Bear in mind we are both here because of the actions of a private corpo.
Imagine if they removed a mod that included pronouns.
A mod that makes other people feel included is NOT on the same level as a mod that deliberately excludes them. There’s a massive difference here.
The pronoun removing mod is a pretty blatant message of hate and deserves to be moderated as such. People can go on about freedom of speech blah blah blah, but no one is required to include you in their community if you’re being mean and hateful. That’s exactly what happened here.
If you don’t want to feel excluded then don’t install the mod.
I don’t understand why people argue for less options that don’t affect them.
No one is forcing the mod on you. Is it really that harmful that it exists?
I don’t give 2 shits if a mod exists that makes everyone in the game trans or gay or anything else. I’m just not going to install the mod unless it improves the game in some way or it sounds like it would make the game more interesting with alternative play styles or something.
I’m never going to argue that the mod I’m not interested in should be removed because it’s not reinforcing my beliefs.
Tolerance goes both ways. I tolerate your beliefs and you tolerate mine.
That tolerance doesn’t exist in this woke reality we are enduring at the moment. Anything that doesn’t repeat the correct narrative is subjected to cancel culture. It’s always my way or the highway.
No one is forcing the mod on you. Is it really that harmful that it exists?
Yes, in very much the same way that hate speech is moderated out of communities, and for good reason. Allowing this stuff to exist is basically saying that this is okay when it frankly isn’t. Imagine if there was a mod out there that removed your entire race and culture out of the game. How would that make you feel if you were just scrolling through the list of mods? It’s just a shitty statement to make.
We moderate things like the N-word and antisemitic Nazi bullshit out of forums all the time. This is the exact same thing and if you can’t see that, well frankly you’re probably in a position of privilege.
Tolerance goes both ways. I tolerate your beliefs and you tolerate mine.
This argument is frequently used by the intolerant to justify their actions. The one’s who identify as they aren’t the ones going around telling those who identify as he or she that they’re wrong. It’s the other way around. You’re completely misidentifying who’s being intolerant here.
I don’t know how to do the cool quote thing you did but I’ll answer in order.
I don’t care if you want to edit my race out of your game. It has zero effect on me. It’s your private game. Why would I care? If I don’t like the mod it I just won’t install it. I’m never going to intervene to stop you from enjoying your game the way you want just because I don’t agree or like it.
This argument is just trying to find reasons to be offended.
I’ll give you an example that will definitely trigger you. I play HOI4. That game is a historical WW2 game. The game does not have an accurate flag for Germany because it’s symbol is not allowed to be shown in Germany. I always use a mod to put the proper Nazi flag in the game because I want my historical game to be representitive of the period. Denying me the ability to use it doesn’t make the historical event suddenly not happen. It happened. Am I suddenly a Nazi supporter because I want my war game to reflect reality?
Im not out Heil Hitlering, or calling for the deaths of millions of Jews. I’m just playing was war game in the privacy of my own home.
I’m not American so the N word has very little meaning to me. I think it’s stupid that people can’t even write the word without being banned. How are you supposed to talk about it. It’s rediculous. If your skin colour is the right shade then you can go around saying the forbidden word at will?? Honestly I’m never going to say it because it’s not part of my cultural norm anyway.
In Australia the racist word people used for indigenous was ‘coon’. I’ve never used it and I never will. Ive not even heard anyone use it since maybe the 80s when a kid was trying to be an edgelord. Do I think the word should be banned internationally just because some wankers used it 30+ years ago? No. If you’re using it in a hateful way against someone or a people, then sure, that bastard should face some consequences.
I’m just never going to support blanket banning activities or words for everyone because of a few bad actors.
I think that’s a terrible idea.
Now we are onto the apparently oppressed rich western people that want to be called some idiotic pronouns like xi, or horse person or some other BS. I’m not doing it. It’s too stupid.
If someone wants to be called she instead of he, then whatever, I’ll call them it. It causes me no harm and I really don’t care. Live your best life.
Blocking a person from modifying their game because you don’t like the idea? That’s Nazi book burning philosophy right there. If you can’t see it irony then I don’t know what to say to you. You think your in the right, but your actually to oppressor, even if you think it’s with good intentions.
If you’re using it in a hateful way against someone or a people, then sure, that bastard should face some consequences.
That’s exactly what the creator of this mod intended and its hilarious that you don’t see that.
In Australia the racist word people used for indigenous was ‘coon’. I’ve never used it and I never will.
Think about it this way. There’s a reason why you don’t use it, right? There’s a reason why your friends don’t use it. If one of your friends uses it all the time to hate on others, would you be okay with that? If its as offensive as you say it is and I have no reason to doubt otherwise, would you want to be associated with that? Probably not. You’re making conscious decisions every day about who you want to hang out with, who you want to be associated with. You’ve cultivated your own community of people who you like and want to hang out with.
That’s exactly what Nexus Mods is doing. They want to cultivate a community that’s gender inclusive. They don’t want to deal with people who aren’t, nor give them a platform to do so. They’re within their right to do so.
Just because Nexus Mods is an online community doesn’t mean it’s different from real life. That’s what people fail to understand.
The reason some things get downvoted, is that they’re factually incorrect, morally intolerable, or just plain incoherent. Reasons matter. The fact it’s “your opinion” means nothing. Some opinions are bad, actually.
What you’re doing is a finger-curling argument. ‘Oh what, is curling your finger a crime?! I’m in trouble cuz I went like this?!’ Sir - you shot your wife.
How about names. Do you call Muhammad Ali still Cassius Clay? Just because that’s the name he was given at birth. Should people not have the right to change their name? Like it is here in Germany. And what exactly do you consider stupid about the pronouns them or they? I think they (!) are just normal pronouns, aren’t they? And for quite some time they are regularly used to replace single persons, if the gender of that person isn‘t known. I know that because when that started I was totally confused because I had learned different at school in the 70s.
My only take on the pronoun thing is please don’t get mad at me and go into lecture mode if I forget your preferred pronouns for a second. It’s essentially muscle memory, and I will already feel bad about it just by your facial expression from the mistake.
People generally shouldn’t get mad as long as you’re behaving in good faith. It’s like accidentally calling someone by the wrong name, you just apologise and correct your mistake.
Trans and non-binary people often get portrayed as if they’re monsters, but most are reasonable people who can understand mistakes and are capable of accepting apologies.
The more I think about all of this, the more rude I find even using pronouns instead of their name in general… are there certain sayings in English that generally require defaulting to pronouns? I am having a hard time coming up with many.
(Yes I am aware of the fact I used a pronoun to type this, but it’s not directed to a specific audience)
Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.
Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:
“Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.
Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.
I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.
Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.
A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.
Personally, it’s nbd when people slip up - especially people who’ve known me for a very long time pre-transition. Oftentimes they correct themselves, and I usually feel worse that they feel bad about it. It’s pretty easy to tell when it’s intentional or not, and I reserve my ire for people who clearly mean disrespect.
Though, I should say, that’s now - early on in transition, it was certainly a bit harder to take. It reminded me of very fresh family abandonment and abuse over my identity. That’s not on the people who accidentally called me by the wrong pronoun, but it certainly could put me in a pretty bad place and I’m sure I wasn’t the friendliest in those moments. The more that trans folks are supported by their friends and family, the more secure they feel and the less likely they are to react strongly to being accidentally misgendered, imo.
But what the anti-trans people tend to miss when making the “offended every mis-gender” is the wide gulf of difference between being hurt and being offended. I’ve known people in Emergency Services who had PTSD triggered by off-color comments that reminded them of something they lived through (things like “he’ll have your head for this”… you can imagine why).
They weren’t offended by those off-color comments. They were hurt. And those of us who care about them are careful not to say things that hurt those we love. But if we do slip up, we know and they know that it wasn’t out of malice, and nobody is offended.
…except the people who want to call you by your deadname because hurting you makes them feel good. They are offended, and they want to hurt you. And nobody should be making excuses for them. Dozens of people here are, and that’s a shame.
NexusMods is a private company with their own conditions for using their services.
You are not entitled to anything on others’ properties, including your ability to speak.
There is no freedom of speech here on lemmy.world either for you, they can restrict and block your posts from being seen by others, still their rights to do so.
People say Lemmy isn’t a hivemind but the reaction to your comment proves that this is not the case.
I’m pro choice either way. If people want to identify as they, them, it. It’s up to them. If people want the option to remove that from their game it’s also up to them. Who cares either way.
This is the wrong take tbh. It isn’t about censorship. The mod itself is a message of hate and deserves to be moderated as such, just like on any other platform.
Imagine if you were scrolling through NexusMods and you saw a mod that removed characters of your ethnicity or race from the game, or maybe a mod that added say Nazi symbols or something. How would that make you feel? Mods get removed over inappropriate content all the time, this is no different.
or maybe a mod that added say Nazi symbols or something.
You know there are WW2 games that have mods that do exactly this, right? Specifically because they don’t use Nazi imagery to refer to Nazi Germany because that imagery is illegal in Germany so they use substitute imagery that’s Germany-safe to represent Nazi Germany, because that’s cheaper than managing two editions where one is historically accurate and the other is Germany-friendly. For an example of this, see Hearts of Iron.
Then you get mods that restore the historically correct imagery.
Lol I feel like you’re just proving my point. The question isn’t whether these mods exist. Of course they do. But an entire country has made such symbolism illegal specifically because its a bad part of their past and they find it offensive. They’re within their right to do so and so is Nexus Mods. Nexus Mods are allowed to remove whatever content they find offensive to cultivate the community that they want.
It’s not censorship when private groups are doing it. Moreso, I think the entire world has figured out the right answer to the Paradox of Tolerance is intolerance (yes, even censorship).
There are two reasons said censorship is okay.
Those who hold to these extreme beliefs are happy to censor the opposing viewpoint whether we censor them or not. They see the idea of trans human rights as unworthy of protection.
So long as you allow a false belief to spread, there will always be adherents. When it is a harmful belief, that makes even innocent-seeming propagation of that belief genuinely harmful… which by every moral tradition (and most legal ones) is sufficient to override freedom of speech.
Remember, there is no free speech absolutism where all speech is protected. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or ignorant. What we’re arguing about is whether to draw the line at malicious behavior that is already more harmful than speech many of us are already against.
And from your “don’t want stupid pronouns in my game”, you show you’ve fallen for bullet point #2.
Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.
This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.
So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.
Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.
Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.
Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.
Unfortunately, increasing cache seems to be the direction things are going, what with AMD’s 3D cache initiative and Apple moving RAM closer to the CPU.
So Denuvo could actually get away with it by just pushing the problem onto platforms. Ideally, this would discourage this type of DRM, but it’ll probably just encourage more PC upgrades.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with ram-less systems soon. A lot of programs don’t need much more memory than the cache sizes already available. Things like electron bloat memory use through the roof, but even then it’s likely just a gigabyte or two. Cpus will have that much cache eventually. The few applications that really need tons of memory could be offloaded to a really fast SSD, which are already becoming the standard. I imagine we’ll see it in phones or tablets first, where multitasking isn’t as much of a thing and physical space is at a premium.
That’s just not true, here are a few off the top of my head:
video games
docker containers
web browsers
productivity software
RAM is actually the one resource I run out of in my day to day work as a software developer, and I get close on my gaming PC. I have a really fast SSD in my work computer (MacBook Pro) and my Linux gaming PC (some fast NVME drive), and both grind to a halt when I start swapping (Linux seems to handle it better imo). So no, I don’t think SSDs are enough by any stretch of the imagination.
If anything, our need for high performance RAM is higher today than ever! My SIL just started a graphics program (graphic design or UI/UX or something), so I advised her to prioritize a high amount of RAM over a high number of CPU/GPU cores because that’s how important RAM is to the user experience when deadlines approach.
Large CPU caches are great, but I don’t think you can really compensate for low system memory by having large caches and a fast SSD. What is obvious, though, is that memory latency and bandwidth is an issue, so I could see more Apple-style soldered NAND next to the CPU in the coming board revisions, which isn’t great for DIY systems. NAND modules are just so much cheaper to manufacturer than CPU cache, and they’re also sensitive to heat, so I don’t think embedding them on the CPU die is a great long term solution. I would prefer to see GPU-style memory modules either around or behind the CPU, soldered into the board, before we see on-die caches with multiple GB capacity.
Well you’re right that it’s not practical now. By “soon” I was thinking of like 10+ years from now. And as I said, it would likely start in systems that aren’t used for those applications anyway (aside from web browsers, which use way more ram than necessary anyway). By the time it takes over the applications you listed, we’ll have caches as big as our current ram anyway. And I’m using a loose definition of cache, I really just mean on-package memory of some kind. And we probably will see that GPU style memory before it’s fully integrated.
It’s already sort of a thing in embedded processors, such as ARM SOCs where RAM is glued to the top of the CPU package (I think the OG Raspberry Pi did that). But current iterations run the CPU way too hot for that to work, so the RAM is separate.
I could maybe see it be a thing in kiosks and other limited purpose devices (smart devices, smart watches, etc), but not for PCs, servers, or even smart phones, where we expect a lot higher memory load/multitasking.
This again is why modern gamers are just fucking impossible to please. Bethesda gives you BOTH options. If you need to get to a planet from one solar system to another, you CAN just press a button and be on that other planet, or in its orbit if you haven’t been on it yet.
But that’s just it, you CAN instead pull up your starmap once that mission is active, see the star you’re at, and all the little dots youll follow to get where you’re going. You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission. Doing this, you’ll often get sidetracked with another mission, the choice is yours. They dumbed down interstellar travel as hard as they could without it no longer resembling what interstellar travel would be like.
I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do, and the fast travel is just for people who want to level/“beat” the game quickly as its own end instead of taking it all in, possibly and understandably due to player time constraints.
Fast travel is a convenience feature. People would be bitching if it wasn’t in there. Sometimes you just want to zip back to Whiterun Diamond City New Atlantis to sell some crap.
I think (for me atleast) the larger issue is the fact that I have to engage a cut-scene to land on a planet. I don’t have an issue with a loading screen in order to get into the system, or even just outside of the planets atmosphere, but it’s kinda weak that I also have a loading screen when landing.
It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
The issue would be believing anything not explicitly said or shown in a pre release showcase. You don't expect anything not extremely, extremely obvious or you just let yourself down and then blame the studio for underdelivering.
A bunch of that is of course the fault of marketing itself, but this goes for almost anything marketed ever, beyond video games.
I got a slightly better (though slightly harder to run on steam deck) version of what I expected after watching the direct. It's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's just silly how people turn unsubstantiated wild speculation into some kind of unmet feature set.
I mean, there are parts of the game's major criticisms that are understandable and do impact the game experience in a way. The worst one for me is the lack of a local map. I've gotten lost in cities or complexly laid out buildings a number of times already, which is, suffice to say, not enjoyable and nigh on unforgivably clumsy to experience repeatedly.
I'll forgive, or even enjoy, say, Dark Souls for the same thing because it's not as complicatedly laid out and the world is smaller and much more visually distinct in its areas to make it up on the back end, along with the entire design ethos being very hands off in terms of delivering info to the player, which sets a standard compared to Starfield's polished to a sheen experience, which suddenly becomes less so in other spots, creating a negative contrast.
Others, like the lack of seamless planet to space transitions were never advertised, and though having them certainly increases immersion, visual spectacle, and thus perceived enjoyment and value of a game, is not really important in the grand scheme unless you wrongly expected it. I don't have enough time to worry about a planet transition, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do there and what I'm gonna do next within the gameplay itself. With this sort of criticism, the game would be undoubtedly better with such a feature if it wouldn't have delayed development too significantly to implement, which no one can really say for sure.
Then there are criticisms like the fact that planets are limited in scale and you can't fly your ship close to the ground on the surface, which is just wildly beyond the scope of what Bethesda would be able to deliver and still say it's the same game. That would've been so complex it would've sacrificed other features undoubtedly, and shows more about a given player's desire for "Starfield 2: We Added all That Space Sim Stuff People Wanted that we couldn't before because we'd end up like Star Citizen" than it really does about Starfield's successes or failures in the features it explicitly attempted to deliver.
Back to the reviewers primary issue that in a traditional Bethesda game you experience the journey of going from one place to another, at least for the first time. Starfield has none of that. You never experience the journey of traveling to a new location, you just teleport. So effectively you are constantly disoriented, with no Tru sense of scale or journey.
It’s not a space sim and was never intended to be one. They made it clear almost a year ago that it didn’t have stuff like surface flying or atmo to space transitions. If you were still thinking it had this stuff at launch your weren’t paying attention.
The actual act of doing it gets old, but I do like the fact that you can't fast travel out of a situation in ED, it means if you go on a deep space expedition to make discovery money you are gonna be in DEEP SPACE, and you better be fucking prepared with a ship spec'd specifically for it because you do not want to turn around and give up because you couldn't fuel scoop or make a jump.
You definitely get a feeling of being a very small person in the galaxy with lots of things going on far away that you'll never see, and having limited fuel and constant frameshift jumps allows for more mechanics and complexity like fuel scooping or being interdicted.
Starfield lets you go wherever at a moment's notice which makes the galaxy feel very small comparatively and lacks stakes for exploration and jump range (along with the infinite fuel), reducing the need to have specialized ships. It also allows you to miss out on some random events that only happen when a ship in orbit with you hails you on comms. You miss those experiences if you fast travel past them all, which is echoed in other Bethesda titles with their own random encounters during travel that can be missed due to fast travel.
That being said, it's a Bethesda fantasy version of space, you want to do fun space opera things and having hardcore travel might clash with that, I can understand why it wasn't implemented that way. For example, no one mentions this, but I fucking LOVE bethesda's save system of saving the exact state of everything in the universe in that exact moment. Im a filthy save scummer and I love it. I like being able to save scum difficult space battles, and I don't think you can do that in most other hardcore space games, but I'm so grateful that I can here.
Maybe it’s because I’ve only just made it to Mars, but I didn’t know there was any other way to travel except for clicking and fast traveling. Click load click load click load planet. The tutorial tells you to do just that… is there something later on that says differently?
Hard disagree. For no other reason that it’s impossibly difficult to find/sort missions by proximity. You got one blue blip on the map or hud, maybe a white blip if it’s not active, but no options to make it active or to even find the mission in your mission list.
Not to mention, all travel is menu based. In space when you target a planet as your next destination, all it does is bring up the menu to fast travel to a location on that planet instead of… giving you the option to fly there yourself at warp speed.
Sure, you could do it one planet at a time instead of skipping systems… but it’s all the same experience You never truly experience the part of exploration involved in experiencing the space between origin and destination. So it might as well all just be exploration by menu, even if you pretend you aren’t.
I can agree that you absolutely can navigate without fast travel, but the whole design seems to be guiding you towards just fast traveling. From the menus always offering a “show on map” option, which then pulls up the prominent “land” prompt, to the fact that even fast traveling you’re apt to hit 4 loading screens completely killing any sense of continuity, and that only gets worse if you try to actually navigate.
It feels like a big series of set pieces broken up by a ton of liminal either loading screens or menus, depending on your preference of poison. I’ve never felt like I was discovering cool things, just going to the next set piece.
I don’t think fast travel is the problem. The problem is that there is an actual “exploration” part of the game, where you wander around planets scanning things and looking for points of interest, but it is by far the most boring part and I have not had much fun when interacting with it. There is nothing exciting to find, and it primarily rewards materials that I mostly haven’t had a lot of use for, because when I need something specific for research or crafting I can buy it at the store, because materials are nearly worthless in terms of credits.
The mini-dungeons and other points of interest you can find need to be way cooler for the wandering-around-on-planets to be worthwhile, and the actual exploration gameplay needs something more than walking across plains and hills in order to be interesting.
The best parts of the game are when you pretend it’s Fallout In Space and hang out in cities doing quests for randoms.
I mostly agree and have been defending it from haters recently myself. But there is one thing in the way of “You can then jump to each dot on the way, look around, scan planets, get hailed by ships, visit places your scans found, etc on your way to your mission… I’m of the opinion thats what Bethesda wants you to do.”
Starfield is a “looter shooter RPG” like other Bethesda games. And like other Bethesda games, your time off-leash is limited by your inventory size, with valuable items dropping that take up to 10% of that or more a piece. Awkwardly, ship storage is just not that incredible, until/unless you either go all-in on outposts or all-in on megaships. Which means you do end up having to stop and go to a city often, probably the one with your next mission goal.
It’s not a huge gripe, but I think Bethesda has always used inventory to drive people back to populated centers to pick up quests.
Basically your choices with travel are “how many load screens do I want to see between here and my destination.” And that’s not really what anyone wants. It is not the same as being able to walk from Solitude to Dawnguard. Not even remotely close. You can’t even walk from settlement to settlement on a planet because they only ever have the one settlement.
I remember fondly playing overwatch 1 with my friends and sinking in hundreds of hours. If they wanted to break into the steam market they should have done it with the first one. Not with their lackluster, phoned in sequel. This was just stupid of them.
I loved Assassin's Creed 2, so I didn't bat an eye buying Brotherhood and Revelations as they had the same basic background. They were full price games and I played for about 15 to 20 hours on each. That's not much for full price. They were basically just new story lines for the main game.
Personally, I sometimes like when a game feels like just a new storyline (and map) for the same game. Sometimes I just want more of a good thing and don’t want to have to learn new mechanics or risk the game making things worse.
And since dev time is limited, I think in theory, this could mean more time could be spent on making the story missions perfect. But in practice, I don’t think that usually happens. Publishers would rather cheap out.
Lol when I first updated it the game didn’t replace my desktop icon so it was still saying overwatch 1 so yes just stupid patch that ruined a perfectly good game haven’t returned since
An update implies they changed something to the game. This was just an update to the monetization. A blatant pure cash grab sold as a sequel game. Its a travesty, and if they had any decency they’d scrap it, apologize, and release “Overwatch 2 A Realm Reborn” that is an actual legitimate sequel to the original game.
A lot of games do mocap on the face but what strikes me most about BG3 is how much body language the characters use. They aren’t an emotive head on a stiff body switching between obvious static poses. Dame Aylin isn’t just shouting at me she’s leaning into it, arms up, fists clenched and shaking. It really adds a lot to the character performances.
Astarion's mocap in particular is just excellent. He's so deeply weird and it's completely appropriate. I love how during most normal gameplay, his whole body is constantly on the edge between breaking into raucous laughter or total exasperation. Kudos to the actor(s) and techs that put the whole package together.
I knew having a Lucifer type character would be one of the more entertaining features of having a vampire as a party member before I even knew he was a vampire
Similarly, I feel like they did a great job in Horizon: Forbidden West. A lot of the animations are rote, sure, but then there’s facial expressions, like Kotallo thinking about Zo’s abilities, that are just amazingly human.
Gaming has stepped up the production in recent years, and the standouts are obvious.
Saying “gaming has stepped up” while praising the most over-hyped, bland-ass open-world action series in recent history doesn’t lend much credibility to your comment.
Horizon hit a niche that hasn’t been beaten into the ground? An Ubisoft style open world game with far too many collectables and garbage to waste time?
It’s not treading new ground from a genre standpoint.
But the combat is a style that isn’t really very common in open world games, and the commenter you are replying to specifically was talking about the story, characters, and world building…all three of which set Horizon apart from other games, IMO.
Calling DnD bland always strikes me as funny. It's bland compared to most modern fantasy for the same reason Seinfeld is bland compared to most modern sitcoms: it's one of the the foundations upon which most of the rest of what we've consumed since its inception is built. We've seen all the innovations upon its formula, so going back to the original can feel lacking if you don't bother to think critically about why it feels that way.
The important thing is that even without all those innovations, they nailed the source material and created the richest experience they could within its boundaries. If it's not for you, it's not for you, and that's fine - no game is for everyone. But it's a pity you dismiss it so flippantly, and I hope one day you can grow to see what's executed well in a project even when its end goal isn't to your tastes. Or just grow out of trolling, whichever applies. I'm not going to pick that apart.
Oh, you might be right. That's even odder to me then; I haven't played any of the Horizon games myself, but I find their setting premise fascinating. Is it so poorly executed?
If I misunderstood, my bad, but I'll leave it since there are people who rant about BG3 in a similar direction.
I have to say that I played Horizon: Zero Dawn, and after the first couple hours it felt very samey. Basically a Ubisoft open-world game with slightly better movement and combat. Haven’t tried the new one, but I don’t think any open-world will ever really catch me again like Elden Ring did.
That's a pity. Still, the setting (time period/tech levels/world population composition etc) is worth taking away as something good that people can learn from, I hope, even if they messed it up so badly.
It took me several hours to get into HZD, but once it hit its stride it really hooked me. The opening few hours are quite weak, IMO. It takes that time for the story to start to reveal, and for the more deliberate pace of combat to make itself apparent.
I personally haven’t played Horizon myself; but from what I saw if it, it doesn’t look poorly made; it just looks by the numbers. Over the shoulder “cinematic” open world game with that Sony trope of the protagonist telling you the solution to a puzzle upon seeing it.
If my impression is accurate I would compare it to Quake II or Blue Beetle, if you are already a fan of Sony’s style of games you’ll most likely love Horizon, if you don’t like that kind of game then there isn’t much Horizon can offer you.
If they use the blockchain as designed, there will be no central server to switch off - it’s just running in a bunch of basements. They rarely do, though.
The person who stated this a while ago deleted their comment so the reply may not have made sense:
The blockchain does not contain the digital assets. it is just a ledger saying who owns the assets.
If the place the blockchain ledger points to no longer exists, the ledger is useless.
Same with NFT's, they are digital receipts that point to a web address, If the web address closes down, the NFT is useless.
For a real world analogy.
A deed (blockchain ledger) proves you own a house (digital asset stored on the game server). If the house burns down (game server is switched off), the deed still exists but it is useless as the asset it describes no longer does.
An NFT doesn’t need to point to a web address - the ape picture can be stored on the blockchain too.
So on the case of a game, everyone can be running their own server, using a blockchain to keep the shared world in sync. There’s no physical product to begin with.
Well it must have worked. All I heard for months when it came out was how bad everything about it was, then I finally got it myself and it quickly became one of the top favorite games of my life. Sorry for everyone who had a bad experience because I loved it so much.
I thought it was okay. It fizzled out pretty quickly for me as it felt half-baked and overly "gamey", which kept breaking the immersion illusion for me. I never did finish it. But I started over when Phantom Liberty dropped last week and it feels soooo much better. The immersion doesn't feel like it's being killed by a thousand cuts... everything feels more natural and believable now. It still has it's gamey moments, but they are a lot less obvious now.
I’m playing for the first time, amd my only real gripe is I wish the gorgeous cyberpunk world were more like Yakuza, with a million random minigames. Other than that, it’s been a blast.
The main story was pretty good, especially the Panam ending, which should have been the successor to Fallout: NV imo. Easily could have been it’s own game, excellent, 8/10.
I picked it back up in the post game after the skill tree rebalance and tried to get the highest heat level possible with the cars with guns on them, but the police kept getting lost, which decreased my heat level. Max tac couldn’t find me in a big intersection. I dejectedly uninstalled the game and decided to play something else. The red engine just can’t handle hazard level 5 interactions that well :/
I also played a quest, but it was just a “find a dead body” radiant quest for which I got about $2,500. I want more main storyline and less paper mache missions. The art direction and main storyline(s) are strong, but everything else feels really mushy to me. Witcher 3 was pretty solid all the way through.
When the game first came out you could walk around the corner to hide from the police. And none of the NPCs knew where any of the roads were, so they were just scrape along the side of building for no reason at all.
Yes and no. The AI is significantly better… but it’s still not great. Case in point: cops will chase you now, but it doesn’t take long to get a feel for how to fudge their pathing and lose them.
I played it on PC at launch and thoroughly enjoyed it. They’ve completely redone the skill tree system and reworked a ton of the weapons/clothing/cyber gear. It’s different now, but the story and core gameplay are still very much the same. I’m replaying it for the DLC and having a great time.
It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
The day Gabe dies and pathetic bastards with business degrees take over and ruin everything that’s made Steam great for all these years, is the day I begin pirating everything.
Exactly. Steam is a load-bearing member. After seeing what happened to Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Wikia, etc. it’s reasonable to think ahead. If Valve gets enshittified that’s basically the end of PC gaming.
I don’t even play games that have Denuvo. But I’m happy to see many of them remove it after a few years because they can’t afford to keep paying for their game to literally be worse and several had been cracked (although it’s my understanding that only one person was cracking those games).
…but… Literally, benevolent, sectionalized dictatorship is the only response to the Tragedy of the Commons.
…that is to say, individual responsibility and exercise of power. Work primarily on responsibility until you’ve got one area covered - then expand your power. Know your limits, and don’t try to expand your power beyond what you’re capable of handling responsibly. Encourage others to do likewise. Steam is good because they haven’t sold out, but are managed by people who have genuine interest in the industry, and who are willing to exercise power responsibly.
“…and a mouse and keyboard and an android phone to access cloud services, along with an entourage of fellow hackers that are mostly still at large all over the world” doesn’t have the same ring to it, I guess.
While change can be challenging, it also paves the way for new horizons. As EA retires these online services, they are undoubtedly working on exciting new games and experiences that will captivate players for years to come. As the gaming world continues to evolve, it’s our shared passion for virtual adventures that keeps us moving forward. So, let’s celebrate the memories and look forward to the next chapter in gaming.
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