CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I'm still not sure it functions fully now.
They butchered community servers and don't seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there's no "fun" until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it's never going to change and it's probably why Valve jumped on CS again.
Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.
I got through phases of games, and right now I’m in the one I like to think of everything-modern-is-making-me-angry-so-I’ll-turn-back-to-vintage-games - and that’s in the form of PCSX2 on my Steam Deck....
Not played by many because it’s one of the last releases on PS2, but if you like horror games then check out Rule of Rose. Up there for some of the best graphics on the console too.
Others are suggesting Resident Evil Outbreak File 1 and 2. It’s much better played online with other people than AI. There’s fan server support: https://obsrv.org (you have to make an account to see the forum, sorry) and they have guides to set it up on PCSX2. I’d recommend learning how to install it to the virtual hard drive because the loading times are pretty awful otherwise and server hosts generally only make hard drive install only servers.
Their Discord community is a good way to find a group to play with, unless you have a few willing friends :)
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
you mean too many shit games. its insanely hard to put anything into whishlist, cause every game is one of these:
phone game fps on rails, ported to pc, runs even worse than on mobile
anime girl doing something generic, the gameplay is pretty much abismal at this point.
pixelated sidescroller with the classic brown-green mario lookin map, but the leveldesign was random generated
action roguelike that pops up an upgrade every .1 seconds
ue5 horror game, where the first scene is an idiot going to a dark shed with the same flashlight model everyone used for 20 years now. runs at a cinematic fps on the lowest setting with dlss.
visual novel but the aspect ratio doesnt fit any known screen resolution from the past 29 years
good lookin game that is sitting in early acces for 7 years now. gets a balancing update every year, but we all know the campaign is never gonna get finished.
ragegame where its hard to control your own character cause "hahaxdfunny"
hardcore game that doesnt show you a tutorial, expects you to learn it from ingame, but since its hardcore it only has empty servers. devs tells you to engage with the toxic 200 ppl community in his little discord server.
super popular multiplayer where noone communicates, but you are suppose to work together
a game that was clearly made within a week, plays well, but its short and has no control settings. you never see the dev again on the internet.
there are so many games, cause it is just too easy to make something. the end is a neverending sea of slop. the worst part is, real gems are just almost impossible to find anymore.
Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.
But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.
In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.
rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand…making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)
That’s all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.
IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn’t have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn’t be hosting any of blizzard’s binaries or assets, and they shouldn’t be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.
It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.
it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.
if they did any of the coding themselves
At Turtle WoW they definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no?
I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow as it is for programmers now. Also I consider AI generations derivative work.
Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI
Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.
And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow
Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?
A few weeks back I reached out to RetroStyle Games, the Ukraine-based indie studio behind their first full release, Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival. I had first stumbled across the game (back when it was still called Codename: Ocean Keeper) during a Steam sale, and as someone obsessed with anything ocean-themed—books (The Deep),...
Yeah I don’t hate Valve fans at all. I have a Steam account myself with a decent library that I play on my laptop.
I had no clue whatsoever about the hacked 3DS ecosystem until my friend basically dragged me into it by buying the consoles (refurbished actually)! Once I started learning about the scene I really got impressed with what the small homebrew community accomplished. In addition to emulators and some homebrew games, there are also a number of utilities in the scene. You can run an FTP server on the hacked N3DS and just bulk copy over files via wifi rather than having to pull the microSD card and sneakernet it to your PC. There’s also a program called universal updater which is a package manager of sorts that makes it easy to download and install emulators and other apps quite easily.
Of course none of this is as smooth and convenient of an experience as installing Steam games would be on a Steam deck, though I’m sure if you’re into emulators you’ll have to use other tools to get those installed anyway.
My friend and I are currently playing through some classic NES RPGs which we’d previously overlooked. The N3DS has pretty good battery life, lasting about 10-12 hours on a full charge; far more battery life than I have time to spend gaming in a day anyway (due to my job). The standby time is good but not great, knocking off maybe about 10% battery per day while sleeping. Lastly, a big plus for me is that replacement batteries are available through iFixit. I bought 2 of them and the install process is very easy (just a couple of screws and you’re in).
My hope is that iFixit will continue to make replacement batteries available long term. That could potentially allow my N3DS to last decades into the future, barring premature capacitor failure or some unfortunate accident.
I think the N3DS really shines as a dedicated older emulator (NES/SNES/SEGA/GBC/GBA) machine and it may be very hard to beat if you’re like me and prefer those older games. For newer games, especially PC games of the last decades or PS2/GameCube/Wii/Switch emulators, the N3DS is just not an option. I am looking forward to playing the Majora’s Mask remaster (written specifically for the 3DS) however!
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
It would be nice if we had both options. Let people matchmake for the default experience and let those that prefer custom servers to use those instead. There are problems with using only community hosted servers, such as game rules and less ideal admins.
That being said, the longevity that community servers offer is likely the reason they have been scrapped by EA. They want everyone to move to the next title that comes out like what people do with CoD.
That’s exactly what they did. You have official matchmaking, then you have community servers people host. If you use official rules, you can still earn xp in the community servers.
They have a server browser, official matchmaking servers just don’t show up but they only last one game anyways.
That limitation, and the inability to sidestep DICE by renting a server that never shuts down, made it difficult for communities to take shape in Portal.
The ideas are bound together. Same with anti cheat. Same with preservation. Removing private servers caused all of these problems at the same time. The author of the article speaks for the group who want the community that I admitted never mattered to me, that Portal doesn’t provide, but other knock-on effects of the death of the server browser do matter to me.
The big problem with matchmaking is that in the long run, it kills game. When people start to move on to a new thing, the population that stays because they're attached to the game gets fucked over by matchmaking.
The less people they are, the worse it works. That's when a server browser and the ability to run community server becomes crucial. It will keep a game alive for a decade after its last update.
Having long played some old CS, there was so much sense of community from connecting to a personal server instance, regularly seeing the same people, familiarize with specific rules to that server, getting to know the admin etc. I’m sure you feel a sense of community from match making, but it can definitely exist outside of matchmaking IMO.
And I’m not advertising for one over the other. But I’d be very happy to see the persistence of accessing personal servers for a game.
Yep. This is the correct answer but that’s not what this thread is about; it’s a nostalgic circle jerk mixed with a sprinkling of “back in my day”.
Don’t get me wrong here, I like the suggestions in this thread but literally one of the suggestions being upvoted is how the game is planned to handle servers (quick join is random and then there will be a list of community servers).
I’m fine with the official servers being random join, as long as I can pick and choose a community server. Which to state again, is apparently planned.
I’m still waiting for reviews on release to make sure they hold true to their marketing though. Can’t trust shit from large studios.
The community “servers” aren’t persistent though. They’ll only stay online as long as someone is online and using that instance. If that last person leaves the server shuts down - as far as we know, it still seems a like murky, but without being able to rent servers I can’t imagine them just leaving all of them online for free
Counter Strike 2 update wipes nearly $2 billion off skin market value by making fancy knives and gloves easier to get [Eurogamer] (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! angielski
I got through phases of games, and right now I’m in the one I like to think of everything-modern-is-making-me-angry-so-I’ll-turn-back-to-vintage-games - and that’s in the form of PCSX2 on my Steam Deck....
The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
Dev Retires “Dual Snake” Online Service, Migrating Features Into Offline (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Over the years, our server has been racking up costs, and the now-unsupported software it was running on finally gave out....
World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit (screenrant.com) angielski
Developer Interview: my chat with the creators of Ocean Keeper (an indie game on Steam) angielski
A few weeks back I reached out to RetroStyle Games, the Ukraine-based indie studio behind their first full release, Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival. I had first stumbled across the game (back when it was still called Codename: Ocean Keeper) during a Steam sale, and as someone obsessed with anything ocean-themed—books (The Deep),...
Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...