There are a lot of bugs that crash the game. It’s barely functional for most. Just look at the Steam reviews.
These games were free before, and with a community patch were still playable. This rerelease somehow got a worse patch than the community patch and costs 40 bucks.
Well you could make it work, for example some random pattern in chat backgrounds that trace back to whoever is the user. That would still show up in a screenshot.
I suggested we play Sniper Elite 4 to my girlfriend recently. She’s not usually one for shooter games (she’s more of a Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing/Cozy Grove/Coral Island type of gamer), and I wasn’t sure she’d like it. She thought she wouldn’t, but she’s happy to try out a suggestion of mine every once in a while even if she thinks we won’t play it much.
We loaded into San Cellini island and she initially struggled with the controls and how to aim and shoot. The gravity and wind effects weren’t super easy to grasp either (she’s on the Steam Deck as well, making it slightly harder to aim too). She accidentally shot a couple times as I was giving her a quick tutorial, which attracted a Nazi soldier to investigate and try and shoot her (which scared her a bit as she got hit). Off to a rocky start, and I could tell she wasn’t enjoying it at all.
We got to the first tower, where the game gives you a pretty good view of the area and lets you fairly securely shoot a bunch of Nazi soldiers. Time to shoot! Here we learned she gets a bit jumpscared if the game suddenly shows you a slow-motion killcam, especially if I was the one triggering it. Again, not a great start for her.
She struggled, but did hit a couple of them. Then on the 3rd or 4th kill, the game showed her the magic words after the kill: “TESTICLE SHOT”. This caught her completely off guard, immediately exclaiming “WAIT DOES THAT MEAN I SHOT HIS BALLS OFF?!”. I have never witnessed her doing a complete 180 degrees turn on her opinion of a game. Suddenly the game became extremely enjoyable for her. The first time she had a killcam where she could see the Nazi balls pop one after the other was like giving her crack cocaine or something. Total bloodlust.
We’ve played through the entire campaign in a span of two weeks, then the DLC, the overwatch missions (twice to play both roles) and now the survival maps. Every evening after dinner she asks if we can “shoot more Nazi balls”. Her spirit animal is Hugo Stiglitz at this point.
This sounds a lot like what Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance has been doing for ages, and that expansion came out in 2007. The only difference is the unit limit but that’s mostly for performance reasons (and is rarely hit in competitive matches anyway).
How are these mechanics next-gen if they’re more than 15 years old?
You can download them manually if you want. Updated drivers is rarely that important for performance. Maybe for newer games, but not for 98% of what’s already out there.
And they also mess things up occasionally. Like all those Minecraft performance mods that had to change how the game looked to the driver, because if it looked like Minecraft it’d tune itself and get worse performance instead of better.
82% positive just means that out of everyone who decided to buy it in the first place, 82% feel like they got what they expected. If you don’t expect greatness, then perhaps this game is exactly what you thought it’d be.
Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.
Sure, but even Epic exclusives aren’t any cheaper than the games on Steam. These savings directly go to the game developer/publisher, not the consumer. This means there’s no incentive for the consumer to switch to Epic other than exclusive games, which is a pretty poor reason to switch away from a well-established platform.
It’s slightly cheaper for developers to put their games on there. But that sucks as a business model, because game prices aren’t any lower so for the end user it doesn’t matter. And on features, Epic just loses every matchup against Steam.