Carighan

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Oh, don’t mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to “Valve worship”. They’re simply the least bad option, but of course they’re all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh… for now, I’m happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah, GOG is my preferred store if there’s feature parity, too. On that note, anyone here got AoW4 from GOG? Are all mods available through Paradox, or at least all you’d ever need? Or is most bound to Steam like back in the AoW3 days?

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Oh that’s another really good point: Epic trained the consumers to open Epic weekly to get free games, then close it again. It’s a weird thing to be known for.

Sure, had them cornering the sellers market worked out - unrealistic as it was in hindsight - then having the buyers already all have the store installed for the free games would have been a genius way of getting more and more people onto the store. But it did not, and now it has just cemented the Epic store as a place you do not spend money on!

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Also their near-infinite Fortnite money.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Same, I always check whether GOG has a game first, and whether it’s patched up to par. Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features (although personally I do not really care about achievements) or worse, the devs give up on releasing patches for the non-Steam versions.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

In what way? Genuine question? The dev cited there has a reason for his opinion, after all.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I just finished playing the System Shock Remaster yesterday night after ~22 hours. I could still do everything from memory pretty much, and it remains an amazing game to this day, especially with the slick fresh paintcoat from the remaster.

Now I’m exploring Shadow Gambit a bit. Always loved the Commandoes games, and this is the third - and sadly final - Mimimi game that copies the gameplay verbatim. And from the little I’ve played so far, it’s fantastic. Having actual supernatural characters fits the abilities really well, and the voicework is done tremendously well, too.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Nah, it’s a very faithful remake - after a lot of back-and-forth of them considering changing the game more they ended up making a near 1-to-1 graphics update.

So I would recommend it. There are some parts that are made more challenging. Inventory management is a big one. OTOH that makes sense, as the modern controls enable *far more accurate combat and hence saving ammo is somewhat easy and you can easily use the shotgun or the magnum as staples.

I basically saved teflon ammo whenever I found it (dumped it all near the cargo lift) then before entering level 8 retrieved my modded Scorpion from there with nearly 1500 ammo and just went to town with that + leftover shotgun shells. But the drops are also changed, so both teflon bullets and magnesium ones for the Assault Rifle still commonly drop in the final few areas.

And of course, taken from the main game, EMP grenade into berserk-stim Laser Rapier is always an option and kills even the toughest enemies in the game before they recover.

That being said, one specific thing is annoying: Beta grove now deals constant and quite significant damage even with the enviropack on. You have to rush rush rush it, luckily it is brief. Other than that, it’s neatly improved, modern graphics with a cool retro-effect from the nearest-neighbor filter, modern controls and combat and some better and more convenient HUD, redone audio including new recordings from Terri Brosius (SHODAN), they also completely redid cyberspace. While I like the original, I can see why most did not, so I really don’t mind this part.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

The freaking Deviator the Ordos had in Dune II.

It turns your units against you. Sure the ROF is low, but damn. Plus, given how the controls worked (or didn’t) back in the days, this caused utter havoc not only with the unit control but also other unit’s pathing.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

A golden parachute so big he could trivially buy into the next company. If he wanted to retire, he would have long done it.

Worse, what if he ends up as the boss fo GamePass or Xbox?

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Why? As in, why are they “the last hope”? What can they do that ActiBlizzKing cannot?

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

They would just contract Blizzard to make that, so if they were able to do it they would have done so already.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

And SS1 came out 29 years ago and just got a remaster. This isn’t a years-pissing context. Starcraft II was supported way long, and extensively. And like all good games, eventually the vast vast majority of players have moved on, and then the devs might move on, too.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s such a shame - and such a bizarre decision - that this is based on the vanilla Persona 3, not the Portable edition with the optional female MC and all the extras.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Really not my kind of game, but wow it looks spiff. I might be tempted to get it on a steep sale on the future just for looks.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

MS wanted to buy Nintendo. The company that has so much money on hand that they are a noticable thing to the japanese banking sector?

Of all possible companies they were looking at buying? Heck, Sony might be more realistic by comparison, at least their gaming/console parts!

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Interesting, and we also finally see the completely disc-less version we’ve been expecting for over a generation now.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I want to play a game of Dungeon Keeper now where the “good” side has gone wicked from repeatedly being beaten and goes wild building up their own horrific “utopia” and attacking everyone else.

Then again, they’d just build Florida I suppose. 🤔 and ban books in schools and shit.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Should localize them by using the Japanese title translation so it sound equally “foreign awesome” in English? ユニコーンオーバーロード is what Google Translate outputs and hey I will say, it immediately looks less silly to me, despite actually saying the exact same words. 😑 (I hate that this actually works)

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Quite excited. A bit tricky because given how amazing Hades turned out I want to hold back with this and only play it once it’s complete. But that might be a long time. Still, from the little they’ve shown this is looking to shape up really really well.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Oh that’s interesting, quite a few new characters. Didn’t expect that to be a focus of this.

Overall I’m extremely happy with the booster pack. So many new courses, and while I thought I’d hate most of them, it’s quite the opposite.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

You’re welcome to take on the rewrite of our auth-service too, since it seems so trivial in your world. Always fun to drag legacy services around for those 12 really loud and angry users.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I wonder, if the rumors about the Switch 2 are actually true - which so far I don’t think they are simply because it’s a Boy Who Cried Wolf thing by now - then at some point they ought to start firing up marketing for it. Remains to be seen whether anything official pops up in this, because by you’d think it would.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah exactly. Because to me it implies that less than 90% is shovelware crap, and I cannot quite believe this. It doesn’t feel that way, even with all the filtering Steam offers nowadays.

Compare the Nintendo eShop, which doesn’t filter and where Nintendo doesn’t care, and the endless pages and pages and pages of shovelware you need to scroll through (and 15 iterations of AAA Clock for 2€, 80% off! 😅) to find each single proper game.

I would have thought 2%-3% make money, honestly.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard the name. Neither of the company, nor of any of their products. Still sucks for the employees of course, the current downturn is huge and as it accelerates and more and more investors pull out, the money the C-suites care about disappears and they panic even more about their bonuses so they fire and shutter even harder.

The made-up money that is the stock market can sadly have very real effects on employees’ livelihoods. :( But of course not on the CEOs who happily cash their 6-/7-digit base salary and then just fuck off to the next company they can drive into the ground.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Ah, I enjoyed the tour maps in the packs. Berlin is my favorite, but Shanghai is also really pretty.

Excited for the last pack to come out, and then honestly MK8 has more than enough tracks for anybody.

…

Oh this is about the actual mobile game? Damn. Wild that it’s still around, considering what a sad fart it was both in gameplay and reception. Reading up a bit on it, it apparently even ran quite well, interesting to hear that. It went completely off the radar after just a handful of months.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Feels like they got like 1% tops then. >.> It’s weird what a cheating problem this game has, especially with the tag-along thing where only one person cheats but others who do not cheat intentionally group with them to farm wins.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Very much so, because to me it openly announces that the game is centered in its design about something between:

• Microtransactions
• Extrinsic motivation
• FOMO

None of those are a good story, great characters, good world building or good intrinsic gameplay design. And they don’t need to be for a live service game, but it also means it’s inherently worse as a game than the same underlying idea not developed as a money squeeze service.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

To me it’s less about the user reviews, and more about how as now some time is passing, listening to professional reviewers in podcasts etc, more and more the mood turns… tepid?

It’s not that anyone is underwhelmed. More just… whelmed.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I expected it to be way more next gen after all these years

It is “next generation”:

• It’s the next generation of huge.
• It’s also the next generation of empty.
• It’s the next generation of pretty.
• It’s also the next generation of soulless.

I mean, it basically heightens all previous design parameters for open world games, does it not?

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Interesting, it seems to not be available at all in Germany, nevermind as a giveaway.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Uh huh.

I mean sure, two outlets reporting it, but I’ll believe it when I see it. With the Switch Pro/2/U/360/Series N in particular, the leaks were always so outlandish and in the end turned out false, while we can clearly assume the overall news about a Switch successor being in development to be real, any specific piece of news I’d immediately discard and put into the “made up stuff”-folder for the time being.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

RockPaperShotgun’s review is out now, and I could not agree more. The game is so meaningless.

It’s crazy impressive. Especially on a technical level. But it feels like a tech demo more than a game almost. It’s still fun to idle time away in, but it’s not engaging. At all. It’s brain idle time. In a positive way, but also no more than that.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

But Elden Ring is a japanese ARPG. That was what the jab was about I’d imagine.

Or do you mean you want an ARPG instead of a JRPG/CRPG, as in, manual combat instead of menu-based party combat?

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Would branching out into spectacle brawlers work for you?

In that case, check out Bayonetta 3 on the Switch and Armored Core VI on PC/whatever!

For something closer in combat feel to Elden Ring, Atlas Fallen maybe? But I haven’t personally played it and reviews are mixed, so can’t really say how enjoyable that would be.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

At this point it feels like Tim Sweeney is a generative AI which has been exclusively trained on taking a data set from Steam’s and Gabe’s decisions and inverting them. And that’s it.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

The problem is more that generative AI is trained on the actual work done by other, actual people. And we have no legal framework so far how those people should get paid in turn.

Plus, let’s not for a moment imagine that Sweeney is saying this out of a firmly held personal belief. He’s entirely based on his reactionary stance to Steam. Steam goes against generative AI -> Sweeney is in favor of it. If Steam would say they’re against eating live babies, you can sure as hell bet he’d sing praises for that, too.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.

It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.

The problem is in the details. They failed to:

• Create other games worth mention.
• Have memorable characters.
• Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
• Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
• Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
• Have a story worth mentioning.

In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.

But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?

But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.

Bold of you to assume anything wil ever change with their total lack of QA.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

they would have done well if they did not stray so far after SR2

And yet their successful games were SR3 and SR4, when the games could stand on their own instead of needing to tag along with GTA for publicity.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

Let’s try recreating Saints Row 4 but with Johnny Gat as the protagonist … and also he’s now in hell.

And IMO even that would have been okay (plus playing as Kinzie was far better) if it had been actual DLC. It was alright as a “I played SR4, and wish I had ~12-15 more hours to go in it”. It was essentially the same game, some new areas, swapped main char but it matters little, done. It was clearly once much smaller and meant as DLC, tbh.

Carighan, 9 miesięcy temu

I mean just looking at Elden Ring here:

• The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
• Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
• Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
• Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
• The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
• The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.

All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.