KoboldCoterie

KoboldCoterie, 2 dni temu

The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)

KoboldCoterie, 6 dni temu

Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.

KoboldCoterie, 9 dni temu (edited 9 dni temu)

One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.

That’s going to be the limiting factor.

Are you specifically looking for something to play against each other? There’s some pretty good options for co-op games with crossplay, and that might make for a more friendly experience, but if you’re in the mood for something competitive, options are a little more limited.

Some potential options:

• Destiny 2
• Monster Hunter Rise
• The Ascent
• Borderlands 3
• Warframe
• Remnant 2

If you all had a PC, you’d have a lot more options. Maybe two of you should consider going in on a Steam Deck for Brother #3 for Christmas!

KoboldCoterie, 14 dni temu

Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.

It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.

Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.

I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.

Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.

KoboldCoterie, 24 dni temu

Vampire Survivors’ genre has been coined ‘Bullet Heaven’, literally the opposite of bullet hell. The fact that it has the tag on Steam is kind of meaningless. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ Steam Page has the Dating Sim tag, but I’m willing to bet I won’t get to romance a Rathalos.

KoboldCoterie, miesiąc temu

“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”

And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.

KoboldCoterie, miesiąc temu

GTA4 is 16 years old at this point. Why would you expect it to support DirectX12, which is 7 years newer than the game?

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

Ooh, I’ll play.

Final Profit: A Shop RPG is an RPG about a deposed elf queen who opens a humble shop and slowly advances through the ranks of the Bureau of Business with the eventual goal of defeating Capitalism from within. It’s unique. It has some incremental game like mechanics, and can get a little repetitive in the mid-game, but it has a surprisingly compelling story and a lot of unfolding mechanics that keep it interesting all the way through.

Roughly a 30 hour playthrough with many endings, NG+ and some optional challenge modes that remove or change some of the most obvious strategies for advancement, so if you finish it and still want more, you can play through again with a somewhat different experience.

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can’t speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.

You’ll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that’s just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.

Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.

The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

The dev is also very responsive! I left a (positive) review with some critical feedback and they commented on it very quickly and had a bit of a dialog with me about the comments I’d made; they ended up revising the Steam page based on review feedback (mine and others), too, which made me want to support them even more!

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

It’s unfortunate that RPGMaker games have such a consistent and distinct aesthetic, it’s really obvious when a game was made with the engine, and a lot of the reviews mention it, too.

That said, this is definitely one of the best RPGMaker games I’ve played. They really stretch what’s possible with it. Can’t get away from that look, though.

KoboldCoterie, 2 miesiące temu

Definitely another great one!

KoboldCoterie, 3 miesiące temu

I want a FO or TES game that’s just a modder playground.

• Build the world, don’t populate it with anything.
• Divide the world into a grid, let modders submit mods to a central database and register them with the grid squares they alter.
• Let the game download an assortment of mods (maybe using user-defined tags to preference certain content) that fills out the world, using their grid square registration system to ensure no overlapping / conflicting content.)
• Let players rate content they play.
• Reward the modders who made popular content in some way.

Obviously there’s a lot of glaring problems with this, but in my head, it’d be awesome.

KoboldCoterie, 5 miesięcy temu

This is the first I’ve seen of this game, but… this is definitely not what I expected from a game titled ‘Perfect Dark’. Maybe I just don’t remember the N64 game well enough, but this seems pretty far-removed, from a plot perspective.

KoboldCoterie, 5 miesięcy temu

Wasn’t the original Perfect Dark hard sci-fi with aliens and spaceships and things? It’s possible I just don’t remember it well. Either way, this doesn’t look like a bad game at all. Just not what I’d have expected.

KoboldCoterie, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s either that or they eventually plan on charging PC players a monthly fee to play all their Sony games.

That would be hilarious, I’d love to see the backlash if they tried that.

KoboldCoterie, 6 miesięcy temu

“It’s as fun as Marvel Rivals!” could become the new face of apathy and sarcasm.

KoboldCoterie, 6 miesięcy temu

I have been watching the Prince of Persia game, but I would absolutely have glazed right over its release while entranced by Hades II, so yes, I agree with you, it’s a very smart decision on their part.

(Also, can I just say, holy shit is Hades II some good value. It’s basically two games worth of content in one. More than twice the size of Hades I. Utter insanity.)

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.

I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

It’d honestly be hilarious if all the creators just started rebranding their fan projects with Palworld Pals (or any other similar IP). Start shifting the discourse away from Pokemon. I’d love that.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

For better or for worse capcom is doing this shit in nearly every one of their games so i kinda expected this shit And if we stop shitting on them for doing it, we let it become normalized.

Denuvo is a cancer This pretty much sums up the topic.

Optimisation. It is poor apparently. Nothing new really as far as pc games go. It’s actually a lot worse than that. It’s been a while since I played something that had this level of problems. The fact that it’s CPU-based performance is actually the bigger issue because it doesn’t matter how beefy your graphics card is, you’re still dropping a ton of frames in that city specifically. I can run the game at 144 FPS until I go to that city, then it drops to 40, which is just outrageous. Gaming PC build logic has for a long time been to prioritize a great graphics card over a great processor (assuming you’re building with a budget and not a ‘money is no object’ type build), because that’s what matters for games, but suddenly with this one specific game, the processor is the bottleneck.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

To add to that, the DLC thing really pisses me off particularly because I bought the game last night, and there was no DLC. The DLC didn’t show up until a few hours later, and by that point it was too late to refund it. Kind of felt like a bait and switch, because normally I wouldn’t buy a game at launch if they did that shit.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.

Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

They could have made it an AU only feature, though, and didn’t, to their credit.

KoboldCoterie, 7 miesięcy temu

This isn’t Steam specific; this applies to almost every digital marketplace. Yeah, it sucks, but there’s some things you just have to accept. When’s the last time you bought a physical copy of a PC game?

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I haven’t bought anything at $70, and don’t intend to start.)

If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and don’t include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their ‘Video games haven’t changed price since the 90s! The price isn’t keeping up with inflation!’ argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. There’d maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games I’ve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really don’t want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, I’ll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, I’ll probably just ignore it, as much as I’ll hate doing so.

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

Hours per dollar isn’t a great metric for all sorts of reasons

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much I’ll spend on a game. If I’m only going to spend 20 hours on it, I’ll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (‘Finished’ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), I’d feel pretty bad about that purchase.

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically play… if I’m buying a AAA action game, it’s something something like Sekiro, and I’ll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)

And to be clear, I’m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesn’t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - I’ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. I’m also not against short games… I often prefer short games, but I also won’t pay $60 for them; I’ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. I’m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.

There’ve definitely been games that I didn’t get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have played… Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and it’s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. That’s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); it’s a “waste” from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes that’s okay, and I’m willing to splurge. I’ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesn’t have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldn’t expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldn’t buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesn’t really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games I’ve bought lately have been $10-$15 “boomer shooters”.

KoboldCoterie, 8 miesięcy temu

Anything upcoming that you’re particularly excited about?

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

For what it’s worth, if you customize the difficulty of your game (which you can do at any point, including after reaching the 40s), you can change most things, including resource drop rates and how much effort it takes to mine them, xp rates, Pal encounter rates, capture rates, etc.

I had a similar experience as you; by the time I hit 42 or so, I had the capture power maxed out, and most eggs were not giving me anything interesting, and I had the whole map revealed, so exploring had lost its luster and I was not enjoying the thought of grinding out another 6-8 levels to start being able to tackle some of the harder challenges in the game; I set the XP rate to x4, and doubled the resource rates, and it pretty much solved the problem for me.

Obviously if you’re playing on a server this isn’t an option, but if it’s just your own single player game, consider trying it; you might find some settings that smooth it out for you.

KoboldCoterie, 9 miesięcy temu

There is a fairly nice base location near the center of the map that has ~6 coal and ~6 ore nodes, and is on a plateau making it functionally immune to NPC raids. I found it completely accidentally; there’s the 3 wildlife sanctuaries around the outside of the map and they all face inward at different angles, so I was trying to triangulate where they were “pointing” to see if it was leading somewhere. Turns out it was leading to a sweet base location.

This is noteworthy because there’s 4 resources (ore, coal, sulfur and quartz), so you need a base with access to 2 of them if you want to have all 4 generating passively.

KoboldCoterie, 10 miesięcy temu

In my opinion, the fact that so many of these competing devices run windows just ruins them out of the gate. The fact that you can cleanly suspend and resume games on the Deck is its best feature by a mile, and I’ve yet to see any windows-based device manage to even come close to doing that reliably.

KoboldCoterie, 10 miesięcy temu

I prefer playing characters as little like me as possible. If there’s a non-human option, I will always take it. The further from human available. Weird alien race? That’s my jam.

If I have to be a human, I’ll often play a female character because it’s the furthest from ‘me’ I can get within those constraints. I’ll also usually play a character of a race I am not, for this same reason.

KoboldCoterie, 11 miesięcy temu

To see a marching band.

KoboldCoterie, rok temu

Still takes like 20 headshots to down someone.

I think this is largely dependent on build and weapon. I’ve been playing a stealth / throwing character and throwing knives kill almost anyone with a single headshot, as do revolvers. If I try to use an assault rifle, though, I can empty a clip into someone’s face and they’re still standing.

KoboldCoterie, rok temu

They’re out of their fucking minds.

KoboldCoterie, rok temu

Just to echo what Marc said, we are so sorry for our earlier actions.

We are so sorry you took our earlier actions so poorly.

Genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet.

Genuinely disappointed that our removal of the TOS was noticed and publicized across the internet.

This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. And Marc’s response is true, you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity you are using as long as you keep using that version.

This new Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity, whereafter we will do everything we can to invalidate prior versions of Unity, and force upgrades on users.

We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer some Q’s live

We do have a fireside chat ongoing with Marc where he will answer whichever Qs live we find convenient to our narrative, and ignore any that are not.

Please forget about our attempted greed, so we can try again in a stealthier manner in the near future, at our earliest convenience.

KoboldCoterie, rok temu

The worst isn’t even people currently developing things - it’s developers who already have released products. Imagine if you released something like, over the summer, for example. You’ve been paying the current revenue share, and will continue to do so until Jan. 1, then you’ll start paying the per-install fee. So you’re paying twice for the same customers’ purchases.

KoboldCoterie, rok temu

Exactly - as others have pointed out, if they can do this, what’s stopping them from raising it to $1 per install, or $100?

KoboldCoterie, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)

The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.