Fantastic game, glad it’s finally getting updated and getting the cliffhanger ending resolved.
That said, the original XBX still looks extremely good (at least when emulated at modern resolutions). For an HD remaster I haven’t actually noticed any real visual improvements other than the character models being better.
So this problem started back in 2023 as in still occurring. Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and Silent Hill 2 are some of the offenders. All these games were highly rated on gameplay and graphics...
In my experience it’s largely been unreal engine 5 games.
The issues with both Doom DA and Indiana Jones is that they have mandatory ray tracing that can’t be disabled. I generally think that ray tracing is a often a waste, it’s far too resource demanding, other lighting techniques can offer very similar visuals for a fraction of the cost.
Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.
It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.
All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.
People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.
*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.
Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.
That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.
I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.
That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.
There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.
Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.
Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.
“A man chooses! A slave obeys.” - Andrew Ryan, BioShock
In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.
Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.
Pocketpair goes on to say that Palworld has been claimed to infringe on three patents held by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company and that part of the damage is required as compensation....
Probably just not big enough. Pokemon-like games are very common, palworld was just hugely successful and a lot of the media coverage for it was comparing it to Pokemon.
Yeah, it’s unfortunately common to have games running better through proton than the native port. We’ve seen a lot of devs drop their linux port recently because the proton version ran better with fewer issues.
Obviously a well executed native linux port is preferable, but a lot of smaller devs have trouble justifying spending a lot of time working out kinks for a linux port if the game already runs great through proton.
Quit World of Warcraft recently Because I couldn’t justify the subscription anymore. It’s been really hard to find a game to put time into and keep my attention. I tried OverWatch 2 but that game is hot fecal matter. Stardew Valley is fun for a little while, all my friends quit though And that’s who I played with. Team...
I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.
It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.
Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.
Huh, google play is refusing to sell it to me. Getting a [OR- FGEMF-20] error code regardless of payment method.
Edit: searching I came across a reddit thread, the post is older but all the comments are people complaining about this issue with trying to buy Balatro today.
Edit2: working now for me, about 4 hours after the game went live
$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC....
8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.
The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.
I bought Rocket League because it had a Linux version, and Linux games were scarce before proton. Epic bought the developers of rocket League, and made it Epic exclusive. People who bought the steam version got to keep it, except for Linux users because Epic cancelled Linux support.
Epic loves to act like they’re anti monopoly, but they only care about that when they’re competing for market share. They’re extremely pro Microsoft and anti Linux.
Also one of the biggest concerns about Valve having a monopoly in the PC gaming space is that they could use their marketshare and money to block rival stores from getting popular games, making it hard to compete and removing user choice. In reality, Valve hasn’t done this, but Epic is leveraging their big pile of fortnite money to do this. It makes people think that if Epic ever gets into a dominate market position, that they’ll absolutely be an abusive monopoly that makes the market space worse for everyone else.
I’ve played maybe 10 hours total of Overwatch 2 and it is incredibly boring (to me). But it seems to get lots of updates often, heavy monetization which sucks. The steam reviews are scalding. It really makes me wonder… is it that bad? Like really? It’s hard to gauge if the game is thriving or on deaath’s door…
That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.
According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.
For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.
So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.
Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.
Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.
Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.
With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.
I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.
The original designer of Dead Cells, Sébastien Benard, formed a new studio and has a new roguelike game on the way called Tenjutsu in which players take the role of a renegade yakuza.
Earlier this year, Benard called the decision to end Dead Cells development “the worst imaginable asshole move”.
I’m curious about how others feel about this. I think Dead Cells is an incredible game, but the amount of continued DLC releases has actually turned me off of the game somewhat. I’m actually glad development has ended in a way, so that I can rebuy the “complete” game and have everything.
The game already had tons of content, I don’t think it needs perpetual new content additions.
Stardew doesn’t bother me because the updates are free. As soon as there’s more content for the game, I have it. If I feel like playing Stardew again, the new content is a reason to jump back in to playing it again.
However with Dead Cells, whenever I think about going back and playing it I think about all the new content that I haven’t bought for it. It feels like my options are spend money for the current complete game, play an incomplete version, or just don’t play it right now. I’ve been deciding on “don’t play it right now” for years now.
Favorite: Steam Deck, it’s my favorite piece of gaming hardware I’ve ever owned. The controls are fantastic, it’s now frustrating to use other controllers that don’t have back paddles, gyro, or track pads.
Least favorite: cheap off-brand controllers, with bad tactile buttons, sticking buttons, analog sticks that drift, analog sticks that only register 8 directions, etc.
Also, Wii U. I have some mixed feelings on it because I have some good memories with the system, but the hardware never paid off. Their were almost no games that made use of the gamepad screen in a way that wasn’t just a gimmick, generally the only real advantages of it were being able to play on a handheld screen while the TV was being used (a feat that the switch and steam deck so far better) and being able to have split screen multiplayer where the players can’t see each other’s screen (limited because you only have 1 game pad, and the deck struggles to do two different rendered screens for many games, with games like Hyrule warriors having to cut the enemies in half when doing split screen).
I’m currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles and I also played Final Fantasy remake and Golden Sun recently and all of them have wildly different combats. Which got me thinking what JRPG out there had the best combat? This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily your favorite JRPG as well....
To be honest with you, my reply was supposed to be to the comment saying that humble has gotten worse overall since IGN bought them. Didn’t realize my mistake until now.
I feel like any other major company with Steam’s marketshare would be far less consumer friendly than steam.
Steam funnels a lot of money into Linux, and Linux is very popular on Lemmy. If you use Linux, you are benefiting from Steam’s success.
Steam is just nice to use, and has good deals. It’s nice to have my games in one place, and I don’t know if any other storefront with as many nice user benefiting features as steam.
Stadia was pretty cool honestly, it just never caught on, and it’s game library couldn’t compete with other platforms.
It was magical feeling though, just being able to play any game from my library in anything with a screen. Any Chromecast, Chromebook, old PC, phone, tablet, etc. They could all run any game, and you could switch between them at any time if someone else needed the TV or something like that.
It made it easy to imagine a future where you don’t worry about how to play a game, or ever spend money on a new console or upgrades, or ever have to delete games so you can wait to download another game. You just think “I want to play this game on this screen” and it works.
To be fair, that’s the low power Ally with a pretty significant 20% off sale.
I’m not well educated on the power difference, but a quick google search shows the cheaper Ally gets about 60% the benchmarked performance of the more expensive Ally when plugged in. There’s also a significant drop when not plugged in, but less severe (only about a 20% drop in fps). Source
I suppose the real question is how does it compare to a Steam Deck at that price, and if the drop in power is worth the price difference.
I think Sony just delisted Ghost of Tsushima from all countries where PSN isn’t available, even though it’s primarily a single player game that won’t require PSN.
So Sony is still on their bullshit, even though they conceded over Helldivers.
The year is 2051. The Witcher 9 live service game is coming out this year, and it’s supposed to be the industry’s first A x 10^14 game, but Ubisoft has shattered expectations by announcing that their next Assassins Creed will be A x 10^16, skipping an entire generation of A’s.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition | Review Thread
Game Information...
Steam Deck Gaming News #2
To start with:...
Reviewers giving high scores to poorly optimised games really grinds my gears
So this problem started back in 2023 as in still occurring. Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and Silent Hill 2 are some of the offenders. All these games were highly rated on gameplay and graphics...
PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery
Clown emojis all around
Caves of Qud 1.0 OUT NOW! (store.steampowered.com)
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world)
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Palworld announces Terraria crossover
source: x.com/Palworld_EN/status/1861560568756462079#m
What games have you put the most hours into?
What are some video game quotes that is stuck in your head?
“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”
deleted_by_author
Pocketpair Confirms Which Patents Nintendo And The Pokemon Company Are Suing It Over (www.thegamer.com)
Pocketpair goes on to say that Palworld has been claimed to infringe on three patents held by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company and that part of the damage is required as compensation....
Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] (youtu.be)
YouTube video: youtu.be/uScsmjvdwyo...
Deadlocked is one of the funnest games I've played in a while
Quit World of Warcraft recently Because I couldn’t justify the subscription anymore. It’s been really hard to find a game to put time into and keep my attention. I tried OverWatch 2 but that game is hot fecal matter. Stardew Valley is fun for a little while, all my friends quit though And that’s who I played with. Team...
Shadows of Doubt Review Thread [~70 avg, ~70% recommend] (opencritic.com)
Game Information...
Steam does the opposite of forcing Arbitration on its users (lemdro.id)
Balatro is now available on mobile! (apps.apple.com)
Finally, the ultimate weapon against boredom while waiting
Sony’s Concord reportedly cost $400M to develop | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
$200M before the Sony acquisition and $200M after. It’s a little hard to believe. The story seems to only be coming from Colin Moriarty right now, but I trust Jordan Middler to consider it at least reasonably plausible if he wrote it up for VGC....
Majima-Focused Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Announced at RGG Summit as Next Yakuza Game (www.ign.com)
Is overwatch 2 really that bad?
I’ve played maybe 10 hours total of Overwatch 2 and it is incredibly boring (to me). But it seems to get lots of updates often, heavy monetization which sucks. The steam reviews are scalding. It really makes me wonder… is it that bad? Like really? It’s hard to gauge if the game is thriving or on deaath’s door…
'Cities: Skylines II' Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords (www.wired.com)
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com)
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
Dead Cells receives its final major update today, seven years after release (www.eurogamer.net)
What's your favourite and/or least favourite gaming hardware?
So, I’ll start. I have 3 devices that I’d say are tied for best...
What JRPG combat is your favorite?
I’m currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles and I also played Final Fantasy remake and Golden Sun recently and all of them have wildly different combats. Which got me thinking what JRPG out there had the best combat? This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily your favorite JRPG as well....
The Humble Games Situation Gets Messier With Claims Of Lies And Damage Control (insider-gaming.com)
$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players (www.gamesradar.com)
Netris is an open-source cloud gaming platform with Stadia-like features using Proton (www.gamingonlinux.com)
ASUS breaks your ROG Ally if you don't pay $200 for warranty repairs: SCAMMING COMPANY! (youtu.be)
President of Xbox at Microsoft asked about the closure of Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, spends close to a minute saying almost nothing (www.pcgamer.com)
Noita - Noita Epilogue 2 Update (store.steampowered.com)
Forget Ubisoft's AAAA Games, CD Projekt Is Making 'AAAAA' Games (insider-gaming.com)