As much as I dislike Nintendo, the Switch is an excellent console despite its hardware. It’s no surprise that it’s been as popular as it has been for so long. These days though, there are a lot of competitors in the handheld space that have much better hardware, so it really maintains its position due to a combination of branding and the game exclusivity.
I’m curious what their next console will be. I probably won’t buy it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also a huge success.
While some of their language has changed, the sentiment of this latest aggressive movement is just as distressing. It’s time for the games industry to stand up to it
I’m not sure which game this comment is in context of, but steam reviews showcase the issues pretty clearly. For example, I went on the steam reviews for MTGA at one point for fun and saw a comment complaining about there not being enough white male masculine looking avatars. I’m not sure how Gideon Jura (literally the definition, even in cards, of a masculine white guy) and Garruk are not masculine enough for this person lol.
Most likely, from how the comment read, they were complaining about the female portraits and portraits with non-white characters. I’m assuming they missed the NB character portrait (Niko Aris) since they didn’t specifically call them out.
I also remember back when Horizon: Zero Dawn came out there were a lot of people complaining about a female MC. Personally, that was one of my favorite parts of the game since it gave a non-traditional perspective of the story in my opinion. Maybe some people disagree, and that’s fine, but giving a game a poor review just because the MC is female is honestly just a dishonest review of the game.
You are not entitled to my money.
I don’t think the article claimed anyone was, at least from my read of it. It’s your loss if you refuse to enjoy games over such a petty reason though.
It’s also honestly just childish to give a game you haven’t played a bad review for having a more diverse cast. The main character is literally on the box art - if it bothers you, then the game is clearly not for you. It’s like me reviewing an otome game poorly because I don’t like otome games.
This sounds like a nightmare for production lines. Items on belts just randomly turning into spoilage? I hate thinking about how this will break so many common factory setups, and I like this change just as much for that same reason. Just filtering out spoilage at the end of a belt won’t be enough for some designs, especially when 3+ ingredients are involved in the recipe (so two input belts). It’ll be interesting to come up with new designs that can filter the inputs mid-belt to remove the spoilage, since it’s inevitable if your inputs come faster than you can process them.
The cat is out of the bag and despite many years of warning before this and similar technology became widely available, nobody was really prepared for it - and everyone is solely acting in their own best interests (or what they think their best interests to be). I think the biggest failure is that despite there being warnings...
From the quotes in the article, I have to agree with drawing that line. On the one hand, making a non-profit mod using AI-generated voices has no opportunity cost to the actors since they wouldn’t have been hired for that anyway. On the other hand, and this is why I am leaning against training AI voices off people at all without permission, it can cause actual harm to the actor to hear themselves saying things they would otherwise be offended by and wouldn’t ever say in reality. In other words, the AI voices can directly harm people (and already have, according to the article at least).
I couldn’t finish Starfield, but had fun up until the point they added the fantasy mechanic to it. For a game I got for free, it was worth every cent. I might have been upset if I got it full price though.
Removing filter variants of inserters sounds super nice. It always felt odd to me that filters were a part of a completely different type of inserter, and needing to carry both non-filter and filter variants of inserters took up a lot of inventory space it felt like.
Looking for those games that you may have heard about but never tried until you got a Deck. Or old games on systems you never had that you’re trying for the first time. Or new AAA games that just released in the last year or two that you picked up for the first time specifically to play on Steam Deck and have kept you glued to...
Some friends and I once went to visit one of their families for spring break back in college. We made the mistake of starting a server.
The spring break ended. We left the room maybe twice a day to eat food, around 7pm and 4am. The factory grew. I think there was a family there, I can’t remember though.
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
I essentially got Starfield for free (bought a laptop and it came with a code). For $0 it was worth every dollar spent, but I do feel bad for the people who pre-ordered.
I can’t imagine why someone would pre-order a game like this one though, these devs don’t exactly have a great track history. At least for the people who pre-ordered Starfield, we know Bethesda will at minimum deliver a game lol.
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Even if you take my spending (which was in the hundreds) on Warframe into account, it was still worth the thousands of hours I put into the game. It’s really just a matter of whether you enjoy the game enough to justify the spending.
It’s been years since I last played, but back then you could tell the devs genuinely loved their game and were passionate to build it up. I hope the same is true today, and considering the game is still actively developed, I’d imagine it is.
Honestly, I have no issue with exclusives as long as they get released on another platform after a while. Sony’s been good about releasing a lot of the hits on PC after a couple years, so aside from missing the initial hype, I haven’t really missed out being PC only.
Exclusives that stay exclusive indefinitely, I basically treat those games as if they don’t exist. I don’t have anywhere to put a PS5, nor a desire to get one really, and as far as I know they make most of their money from game sales anyway. I don’t see much value in them locking people out of their games completely.
Not sure about other companies, but at the one I work at, recommending a training doesn’t mean a whole lot except “this might be relevant to your work”. For example, in this case an employee expressed concerns of being discriminated against, so it makes sense to recommend training on how to identify and address those kinds of problems (even if no such situation is actually occurring) so that you’re better prepared to handle it.
This is how the software engineering industry works. It’s actually games that are the outlier here, with their big releases each time a sequel is made.
More visibility would definitely help here though, odd that they don’t put a banner on the store given how big of a release this is for many players.
What if the modular computing evangelists at Framework decided to make a handheld? YouTuber Pitstoptech has largely answered this question by building a “fully upgradeable gaming handheld” around one of Framework’s upgradable motherboards....
Framework is also releasing their GPU modules. Hopefully someone finds a way to make that work with a handheld as well, although the form factor of the module might not be handheld-friendly.
I had no expectations going in (wasn’t planning to play it) and came out having fun. I don’t know what expectations you or anyone else had, but maybe those expectations are what ruined the game. I don’t think anyone’s claiming the game is perfect (anyone who is probably is trolling), but it’s pretty dismissive of its strengths for people to say it’s unplayable (unless you legit can’t run it, which is fair). If all you focus on is what the game doesn’t do well, then you might as well only ever play perfect masterpieces because all other games will be a disappointment. If the price is a concern, it will probably go on sale eventually anyway, assuming you don’t find alternatives before then.
I do think there are a lot of flaws with the game, but those flaws have already been elaborated in great depth by others. Despite those flaws, game is still fun and has a lot of room for mods to come in and make it better.
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
For me it’s pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don’t dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.
Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.
Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that’s a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive’s measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn’t take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.
I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free “DLC” on Steam, for example.
USB 3.2 gen 2x2’s theoretical speeds cap out at 20Gb/s (or 2.5GB/sec). It’s certainly a performance improvement compared to USB 3.0, but still doesn’t quite meet the performance of an internal NVMe. If your PC supports Thunderbolt, you get double the bandwidth (so 5GB/sec) which does match what some slower PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can handle. This is of course assuming you’re comparing to a NVMe, a SATA drive won’t come close to these speeds but I believe most laptops these days use NVMe drives.
Regardless, if you’re loading games off a USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface, and assuming you’re using a single drive to a single controller (keep in mind that performance is split between connected devices per controller, and PCs often only have a couple controllers at most to manage all the ports), your read performance is probably more than enough.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren’t too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you’d expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner’s laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn’t surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won’t work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to reach their limits with today’s major releases.
You also have to be careful with what other USB devices you plug into your computer (both internal and external). The spec is 40 Gb/s for the controller, but ports often share the same controller and the bandwidth will be split between connected devices. For some computers, this could mean that 3 or more ports should be completely blocked off when plugging your gaming USB drive in, at least while playing the game. If your PC only has a single USB controller, I guess you’ll also need bluetooth peripherals.
Ah, most laptops these days ship with an internal NVMe, so that’s what I assumed you were comparing against. A USB 3.2 gen 2x2 enclosure will vastly outperform a SATA SSD I believe, again assuming it’s the only device connected to your controller.
Wife absolutely loves BG3 to the point she ordered some 5e books to better understand the systems. She went in knowing nothing about the lore, the systems, or anything and it quickly became her favorite game of all time.
I have yet to jump in though. Played about an hour, but I feel like I need a good block of time I can dedicate to getting acquainted with the game before I can really start to enjoy it.
Not a dumb take at all, it’d be awesome if they did. Unfortunately there are likely contracts or business reasons preventing them from doing so, or code shared between the 360 and current gens that they want to keep proprietary. Still, with MS open sourcing more and more projects over time, I’d love to see it.
You really thing not referencing them or making any content related to any of their IPs will prevent them from sending a C&D? They’d probably send one out to everyone if it didn’t cost them any money to do so. God forbid you hire some plumbers, wear a red shirt, or draw something in the shape of a star.
Minecraft. Back when I started playing, it wouldn’t even tell you what recipes existed, yet gave you a 2x2/3x3 grid with hundreds of types of items/blocks to figure it out yourself.
I think the issue was it wasn’t clear what items were available to craft. If I had known that axes, pickaxes, shovels, etc. were all in the game then it might have been easier, but even making the crafting table (2x2 wood planks) wasn’t very intuitive. Honestly, there wasn’t much of a clear path forward with most of the recipes. Advancements and the recipe book later helped a lot, but it was pretty hard to play during beta and alpha without the wiki or a mod like TMI.
Then there’s redstone. I feel like even today, redstone is completely unexplained in the game, and while you can kind of figure it out on your own, many of the intricacies are left unexplained (repeater locking, timings, comparators, how redstone is passed/not passed through different kinds of blocks, gates, etc). Without taking some time to learn about digital logic and basic computer engineering concepts on your own, redstone is basically magic dust that does a thing when put in a specific configuration.
Also, being pedantic, but shears weren’t added until beta 1.7. Wool dropped from sheep before that. That being said, alpha had a lot of really weird mob drops (why did zombies drop feathers?) and there wasn’t much use for wool anyway beyond decorative purposes and hiding doorways with paintings until beds were added in beta 1.3.
There are some games that split high-res assets into separate free DLC. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve definitely seen it on Steam. For example, Shadow of War does this with high-res textures and 4k cinematics.
PCIe gen 5 speeds are double PCIe gen 4 speeds, for the same number of lanes of course. Whether a hard drive is capable of those speeds is another story (although my current drive pushes the limits of gen 4). I’m not sure what the fastest PCIe gen 5 hard drive on the market is right now, but eventually we will start to approach the limits of gen 5 and start looking at gen 6 drives, at least at this rate.
Somehow I ended up with a pre-order by buying a laptop. It feels like they’ve been practically giving them out, at least with their AMD partnership, and assuming you’re already in the market looking at hardware. I wasn’t even planning to buy the game originally, maybe I’ll play it.
I can’t say my experience playing PC games comes even close to that.
My PC is already on - it’s a multipurpose machine, so I was already using it for something else.
Steam opens on startup, no need to open it.
Steam auto-updates the game in the background. No need to wait.
I don’t think I’ve ever needed to update a driver to play a game. Also, regularly updating most drivers is actually not recommended, and you should only really be updating them if something’s broken. Graphics card drivers you might want to update now and then, but even then it’s rare that a graphics card driver makes a game suddenly playable. This seems comparable to firmware updates for consoles, although the last two consoles I used were a Switch and I think a PS3 so my memory’s a bit hazy there.
Yes, third party launchers are obnoxious. It still only takes maybe 10 seconds at most to get most games opened though, from my experience. Not all games use third party launchers either, but sadly a lot of the bigger games do.
Being able to continue easily where you left off does seem like a benefit consoles have. It’d be interesting to see that on PC, although I have yet to find a need for it since you can save practically anywhere in most games anyway, with the exception of cutscenes and tutorials I guess.
It takes me maybe 10-20 seconds to get most games that I play open on my machine, excluding the obnoxious splash screens games have when you open them which is the reason I think #6 might be a compelling argument. With the splash screens, it’s easily 2-3 minutes because more than half of that is sitting there staring at some stupid brand logos.
Of course, I already have a PC for other reasons, and the PC’s hardware is more than capable of playing games (moreso than most consumer gaming consoles at least, if not all), so I’ve never really felt like there was much reason to get a console, with the exception of a Switch since it’s a handheld. There’s already an enormous catalogue of games to play on PC, so it’s not like I’m missing out on much. Also, I might be a bit unique in that I’m using my PC all the time anyway. For someone who doesn’t use a PC very much, I could see a console being more appealing due to it being a dedicated gaming device.
MTG Arena - there’s a regular play queue and a ranked queue, and people definitely play to mess around and try new decks for fun. This of course doesn’t cease to induce salt from sweaty gamers in the play queue.
Even ignoring games that you consider “in the gray area,” who are you to say someone can’t find a way to have fun in a game that doesn’t align with your way of having fun? Not everyone is playing the game hoping to land on an esports team.
Edit: I’m mostly referring to casual queues - ranked queues being hyper competitive does make sense. I’ve just seen the same argument made that casual queues should be the same level of competitive.
"My maternity leave was supposed to start next Monday and I got laid off today," former Bungie employee says (www.videogamer.com) angielski
It’s official: No Nintendo console has lasted as long as Switch without being replaced (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
The disturbing online misogyny of Gamergate has returned – if it ever went away (www.theguardian.com) angielski
While some of their language has changed, the sentiment of this latest aggressive movement is just as distressing. It’s time for the games industry to stand up to it
Factorio Friday Facts #414 - Spoils of Agriculture (factorio.com)
Looks like things are going to get really interesting
Baldur's Gate 3 actors reveal the darker side of success fuelled by AI voice cloning (www.eurogamer.net)
The cat is out of the bag and despite many years of warning before this and similar technology became widely available, nobody was really prepared for it - and everyone is solely acting in their own best interests (or what they think their best interests to be). I think the biggest failure is that despite there being warnings...
Bethesda Celebrates 30th Anniversary of The Elder Scrolls, Provides Small Development Update on The Elder Scrolls VI (www.thefpsreview.com) angielski
Factorio Friday Facts #393 - Putting things on top of other things (factorio.com)
And the Factorio devs just continue to add more quality of life and interest to the game mechanics....
All of Insomniac's upcoming titles have leaked (www.resetera.com) angielski
I believe Insomniac were hacked / ransomwared last week or something. Apparently here’s the leak of all their upcoming titles....
Steam Deck Owners: What’s been your favorite game that you first discovered on Steam Deck and now you can’t seem to put down?
Looking for those games that you may have heard about but never tried until you got a Deck. Or old games on systems you never had that you’re trying for the first time. Or new AAA games that just released in the last year or two that you picked up for the first time specifically to play on Steam Deck and have kept you glued to...
Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Squadron 42 is the single player campaign of Star Citizen, that is supposed to launch as a separate game. It's basically a small portion of Star Citizen, but with a story and ending. I'm still not confident; waited too long for that.
When was a game's price worth it to you?
Say a simple (hours enjoyed playing)/(price of game) equation. How many hours (you enjoyed) per $ do you think is reasonable/expected? Or is there other criteria for you?...
Warframe | Abyss of Dagath - Official Gameplay Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
PS5 Slim’s Lack Of Fanfare Speaks Volumes About This Generation (www.thegamer.com)
Former Bungie HR Manager Is Suing for Wrongful Termination After She Reported Potential Racial Bias (www.ign.com) angielski
Counter-Strike 2 is officially released (www.counter-strike.net)
Modder Turns Framework Laptop PCB Into a Handheld Gaming PC (www.tomshardware.com)
What if the modular computing evangelists at Framework decided to make a handheld? YouTuber Pitstoptech has largely answered this question by building a “fully upgradeable gaming handheld” around one of Framework’s upgradable motherboards....
Is It Just Impossible to Have an Honest Conversation About Starfield? (www.themarysue.com) angielski
It sure feels impossible to have an honest conversation about Starfield online right now.
Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe) angielski
Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Starfield has been cracked (i.redd.it) angielski
I Simply Do Not Have Room On My PC For Starfield (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Baldur's Gate 3 is currently taking up all the storage space I would give to Bethesda's sci-fi RPG.
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 27th
New thread! Whatch’a all playing!...
Xbox boss would ‘love to find solutions’ so games aren’t lost when the 360 store closes | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
What's a good game you played with an awful tutorial? angielski
Either it didn’t teach you anything at all, or it taught you the most irrelevant parts of the game.
Starfield install size reveal; it is now preload (www.gamescensor.com)
The Last Of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West... (feddit.nl)
I was seriously considering getting a PS5 until I saw the costs of the games + hardware.
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