This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games....
To be fair, an indie dev just tossing stuff together on the weekends and evenings has everything needed in these accessible game engines to build a AAA title of 15+ years ago.
That’s what I was trying to say is they have everything they need mechanics-wise built into these game development environments. The difference between AAA and indie is more on the scope of how much artwork, sound design, writing, voice acting, Foley work, etc. goes into the game
A solo independent developer can pretty easily recreate the mechanics of GTA V in Unreal for example, but they can’t realistically recreate a selectively compressed representation of the entire LA and San Bernardino counties plus a 14 hour (or however long it is) single player campaign
I think the saddest part was observing a clear wind down of Sims 4 then last second “lol JK we’re not releasing another sims game” and the entire player base seemed to release a collective sigh that some of the structural problems that have plugged TS4 are here to stay
I’ve been biking so much lately that my legs are getting hella toned, the rest of my body is starting to tone too and I’m feeling much more alive and healthy than I have at any other point in my life!
This is my second season. I’m biking about 5 hours a week right now, averaging about 40-50 miles per week. I don’t know how obvious the toning would be to others but I can certainly see it, since y’know I’m the one who sees myself the most
Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
The big problems is outlook like every mail client from the early 2000s collected tons of features during the mail client wars where every client needed to do a billion different things, so now there’s dozens of random little features baked in that very few people use but those who do have built entire business processes around.
For example I observed while working at a bank that the backend finance people would use the voting feature to vote on whether to bundle certain loans together. I’ve never before or since seen anyone in any business actively use that feature. There’s lots of other little features and tunables buried deep in Outlook and it’s a royal pain as an IT person to quickly learn about whatever obscure feature a user is complaining stopped working and of course figure out what the intended workflow for the feature is to begin with before I can even start troubleshooting how to fix it
I can’t blame Microsoft for wanting to greenfield Outlook development to a new standard base that’s shared between webmail and the application, but holy crap the amount of technical debt Outlook accumulated is going to take ages to escape from.
Personally, I don’t mind Outlook (new). It sends and receives emails, it shows my Teams meetings on the calendar, and it lets me easily schedule calendar events and Teams meetings, which is all I really need. Most importantly it bypasses a ton of annoying quirks of Outlook (classic)'s license verification and M365 authentication so I generally encourage my users to use it if they don’t otherwise have a strong preference, because it saves me tickets (especially the dreaded “outlook lost teams integration” complaints where Outlook (classic) misplaced its own extension for communicating with Teams (new) and usually involves uninstalling all versions of Teams then installing Teams (Classic) and upgrading it in-place 3x to resolve)
So I recently devoured the book series and can clarify, she was first trained as a Witcher, then as a sourceress by Yennefer, but after she was teleported into the middle of the desert and tried to use fire as a source of power out of desperation, she gave up all magical abilities as the fire was trying to consumer her. So shes a brilliant swordswoman, has partial Witcher mutation (some of the mutations come from the secret Witcher diet which she was fed at Ker Moren while being trained) and depending on when in the timeline the game takes place she would have incredible reflexes and some interdimensional travel capabilities.
There’s also some really interesting opportunities for storytelling given how Ciri’s background is just soaked in trauma. On that note, I am also curious if they intend to play down the salaciousness for this entry or not. In the books Ciri was definitely curious (and heavily implied to be bi) but remained a virgin, and by the end of the series she was still a minor by modern standards. I want to say she was 16 or so at the end of the last book.
I’m super excited to see where this game goes, because if its worthy of being released after the masterpiece that was The Witcher 3, it’s going to be brilliant
Passing the torch off to Ciri fucking entirely makes sense within the world and lore of the Witcher serie
It’s also literally what happens in the books. Ciri grows as a person and becomes a badass swordswoman while Geralt eventually swears off taking monster contracts and later actually stops killing monsters. He even goes to donate his sword before getting pulled into one last battle to protect his friends and chosen family
Honestly TES6 has one thing going for it and that’s that Skyrim is over a decade old now so matching the scale and scope of Skyrim is much more achievable.
In my opinion when a sequel falls flat or is outshined by an earlier entry in the series, it’s usually because the studio messed with the formula for the gameplay, not because of a change in characters
It’s a game series (and later media series) literally based on a series of books. The short stories tell Garalt’s story, but the longform books are far more about Ciri than they are Geralt. Go read them they’re brilliant books but more important to the point you’ll understand why Ciri is so important to the story that’s being told
Ending with Ciri following the Witcher path, is Canon now
It’s canon in the books too. She was trained at Ker Moren, then trained by Yennefer but ultimately she gives up her magic entirely after pulling from fire as a source out of desperation. She remains an extremely skilled swordswoman with partial mutation
Honestly the longform books take a similar approach, telling several very important people’s stories from the perspective of how their stories intertwined with Geralt’s and later Ciri’s
Cranky brooding swordsman is kinda a one trick pony. It’s brilliant and hilarious to respond to everything no matter how threatening with just a grunt or dismissive comment, but after 3 major games, it’s time for something else
I feel like the repetitive combat is more a result of combat that actually encourages dodging and using signs rather than just standing still and slicing while the enemy either hits or not based on RNG, and the fact that in combat you truly are jumping around, dodging, parrying, etc. makes it more true to the source material.
The style of combat in The Witcher 3 also makes it so that if you do find yourself in a much higher level fight than you should be you can with enough tries manage to beat it. I had one playthrough where I took on the werewolf quest while too low level for it, didn’t preserve any saves before the no turning back point for the battle. In order to save my save file I had to keep trying and failing to defeat the werewolf until I finally got the hits and dodges just perfectly enough to defeat the werewolf. It sucked but ultimately it was possible to complete and not just by an attempt with golden RNG rolls results
can you fuck a horse? that was one of the more… questionable scenes in the book.
Uhhh which book is that? If it’s the section I’m thinking of with Kelpie the horse, she’s entranced by its beauty and it’s rider/owner tries to use that to get into her pants (and ultimately died before he was successful) but I don’t believe she ever expressed sexual attraction at all to it by my memory from reading the books a couple of months ago.
the party basically needs the woman to proceed. she does not want the child. i believe it was the product of rape. yet for some reason geralt and a literal fucking vampire convince her that abortion is wrong and she should keep it instead of drinking a potion about it
The party is trying to find Ciri after her disappearance. Geralt and Cahir are having visions indicating that she’s presently in great danger and suffering (and at that she was!). Finding out while practically at the front lines of the great war that their incredible archer, Milva is pregnant completely derails their entire journey because she can’t ride, shouldn’t travel, and will need to rest in a safe area for a while (which they are at this point constantly far from anywhere safe), plus they can’t exactly bring a baby onto the battlefield they’re actively crossing. It’s one moral quandry wrapped in another. Ultimately Geralt and Cahir leave it to Milva’s decision, as does Regis the barber-surgeon/vampire who created the abortion potion.
Also it wasn’t rape. While guiding a group of elves to safety, they hid in a thicket for a night with Nilfgaurdians surrounding them and searching for them. The elves decided that since they were likely to die a horrible death at any moment that they should take the time they have to find what enjoyment they can, and Milva decided to join in. It just so happened they did not die that night and now Milva is carring a halfling for whom she does not know the fathers name (for safety no names were shared with the elves she guided)
i think they generally said that ciri lost her elder blood powers after the king of the hunt was killed right? otherwise I’m gonna be really curious how handle that as well. she should be sort of the world’s greatest sorceress otherwise.
She gave up her magic after trying to use fire as a source of power out of desperation while navigating out of the “Frying Pan” desert. She wanted to save Little Horse the unicorn after an unfortunate battle with a monster she hadn’t yet learned of, but no other sources were available. My understanding is fire as a magical source is all consuming so it is forbidden to pull from for safety reasons, but that was largely left up to interpretation.
Upon pulling from fire, she saw the imense power that presented her, the ability to rule the entire world, but also how that would hurt those she cared so deeply about, so she instead gave up her sourceress’ powers.
If you want anything to complain about in the books it should be Milva’s winging about being an illiterate farm girl that honestly was out of character and just seemed written in so she wouldn’t outshine the others
Edit: Cahir’s attraction to Ciri is also creepy as hell the way it’s written, but that might be intentional, since that’s at a point where she’s coming to realize that everyone wants something from her, everyone will tell her why she should want to give them what they want from her but nobody ever seems to care or ask what she actually wants.
She does also extremely briefly travel to Edwardian or Victorian London (I forget exactly what year it was). It’s mostly depicted through a newspaper clipping from The Sun and a rebuttle from another newspaper calling out their quoted witness for trespassing and strongly implying he was inebriated at the time and being an unreliable source. It’s quite comically written really
By thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world’s description I know what scene they’re talking about. It’s not great but it’s not as bad as they make out. Basically she ends up traveling for a bit with this really smarmy dude. Think incel used car salesman. He’s described as having greasy hair, he’s clearly not trustworthy and acts only in his own best interest, and is constantly trying to get into Ciri’s pants. But, he’s riding this incredible horse the likes of which Ciri has never seen before (and it turns out to in fact be a magical horse) and Ciri is just entranced by this incredible and majestic horse, and smarmy dude can tell, so he makes sure to use the horse to get Ciri to interact with him even though they both know she wants nothing to do with him and only gives him the light of day to see his horse.
Anyways smarmy dude and Ciri end up running from some bandits, smarmy dude is injured but plays down how badly, and basically uses this plus gifting her the horse she’s so entranced by to manipulate and guilt her into agreeing to sleep with him (from her perspective it’s been made clear how curious but nervous she is about sex, so she’s not entirely opposed, but it’s also implied up to this point that she’s far more into women than men) and then just as she’s starting to potentially enjoy the pity sex with the asshole but before either of them can actually get their pants off, he fucking dies!
The death cutscenes were absolutely gratitudous in the first entry, but honestly, if you can get past that the whole series is quite good and it’s really great storytelling and acting watching Laura arc from terrified recent college graduate put into unthinkable situations that she must find a way to survive all the way to cocky know-it-all who must literally nearly end the entire world and accidentally kill many countless innocent people to finally find hubris and actually start being a decent human being
The second one might benefit from a remaster by the time 4 comes out, as some of the models are a bit too XBox360 era, with the strangely wide shoulders and oversized arm muscles of the time
lead dev dude who wanted players to feel ‘protective’ over Laura (dude was a weirdo).
Oh yuck!
The good news is past the first game the death cutscenes are far less gratuitous, and honestly as long as you’ve got decent enough reactions you don’t see very many of them. The third game in particular puts a ton of effort into being respectful, including for example, actually having NPCs speak in local languages with English subtitles rather than a crowd in Mexico City all speaking English for example
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!
The big benefit is that much horsepower allows the phone to very very rapidly “race to sleep” in that the faster it can crunch the numbers then return to a much slower clock the less power it’ll consume overall
The “support” most importantly includes security updates. You better bet every hacking group has been working at finding fresh zero days for Windows 10 and is stockpiling them to start hammering any PCs that can’t be upgraded this October
There have been a few i was genuinely excited for but I’ve also been collecting them regularly so there’s a lot I’ve never played and probably won’t ever play plus fun ones I enjoyed
Yeah whatever happened to that? That was such a good idea and could have been absolutely game changing if it was actually marketed to the people who would benefit the most from it
It’s super easy to forget but Ubuntu tried to do it back in the day with Convergence as well, and amusingly this article also compares it to Microsoft’s solution on Windows Phone. It’s a brilliant idea but apparently no corporation with the ecosystem to make it actually happen has the will to risk actually changing the world despite every company talking about wanting an “iPhone moment”
Apple would be in a prime position, they’re entire ecosystem is now ARM based and they have the chips with enough power. But it’s not their style to do something cool to threaten their bottom line. Why sell one phone when you can sell phone, laptop, tablet, desktop separately?
Let’s be real, Apple’s biggest risk would be losing the entire student and young professional market by actually demonstrating that they don’t need a Mac Book Pro to use the same 5 webapps that would work just as well on a decent Chromebook (if such a thing existed)
As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!...
I’ve been sinking further and further into the RetroDECK time-sink of setting up my emulators just so, and having the most fun doing so. The PS2 is a largely unknown system to me, I neither had one nor spent much time before now playing through some titles....
Just throwing out a fun game from my childhood, Lego Racers 2. I’ll have to read through later for ideas because I’m in a similar boat in having never really been in console circles and never owned a PS2
For me, anything 25 FPS or higher is 100% fine and I’ll be enjoying my time. I never play competitive online shooter games ever, though. All single player ones like GOW and the likes. I game on a 60 Hz 4k monitor. GPU is AMD RX 6600 alongside Ryzen 7 5700G and 32GB RAM. My games are set to meduim most of the time at 4k....
I play a ton of simulation and strategy games (and some that I would hazard to classify as virtual railfanning/model railroading, like Railroads Online and Transport Fever 2) so I crank up the prettiness, download as much custom content as will load and enjoy the scenery at 20-40 FPS
They were decent to the Anno series, but honestly that’s probably just because they didn’t see the value in messing with the formula that Anno solidified around the time of the acquisition and it reliably boosts their numbers with strategy gamers who otherwise might not be customers of Ubisoft’s at all
If you want a stupid fun “kill infinite number of baddies working for an insane BBEG” style game, Just Cause is a blast. 2 and 3 were both fantastic (3 smartly gave you infinite explosives) and the amount of silly chaos you can cause (and are rewarded for causing too!) is brilliant.
For an example, in JC2 there’s a mission where you have to destroy a rocket which is launching using a fighter jet and blow up the rocket before it reaches orbit. The ongoing challenge was simply that I’d shoot it until I got too close, not start maneuvering for a second pass until it was too late and instead crash into the rocket dying in a fiery explosion, followed by the rebel leader telling me over the radio that I’d failed and to try again. Then one of the time, I shot the rocket until I got too close, started maneuvering too late, exploded as the plane crashed into the rocket and the rebel leader started saying something over the radio, except it was a congratulatory statement, and I realized I’d instinctively ejected from the plane at impact, and was now falling down to the ground with only my parachute and lots of enemy aircraft trying to kill me. So I grappled to a helicopter, persuaded the crew to let me in (aka beat them up and threw them out) then got shot to hell by another helicopter, which I conveniently would grapple to, persuade its crew to let me in, and keep repeating the process until I finally was close enough to the ground to grapple down to the ground and steal a fast car to evade the enemy army.
JC3 one-ups this by instead of having you blow up a rocket (an ICBM in this case) but instead catch up to and ride the ICBM so you can redirect it to save a major city.
My understanding was that KSP2 was originally going to be just a slightly cleaned up re-release of KSP1. A remaster if you will. Buy up some existing mods, bundle them in, clean up the UI a bit and enjoy the fruits of this new definitive edition of the game. But the team was able to convince Take2 to try to replace the game engine as part of that remaster and truly make it worth while (hence the 4 year delay from the original release date)
I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers
Bought a retro handheld, got any indie games recommendations? angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/33146291...
Vintage gaming advertising pictures: a gallery angielski
This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games....
EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects (www.notebookcheck.net) angielski
Less than 20% of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4’s soundtrack is made up of songs from the original games [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Stardew Valley dethrones Valve classic Portal 2 as Steam’s top-rated game (www.dexerto.com) angielski
The Illuminator Advert - Game Boy Accessory angielski
One more time! angielski
Here’s the article...
Microsoft Office gonna wreck your shit angielski
"You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store? angielski
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
Youtuber Geekerwan has find the motherboard of Switch 2 and after reverse-engineer he have simulate the performance on a similar PC angielski
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pr_V8rtzrE...
6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? angielski
It's so frustrating every time I remember to check the freebies angielski
Small, incremental improvements don't make shockwaves like the old massive tech leaps used to. (lemmy.world) angielski
Steam Deck Gaming News (lemmy.world) angielski
As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!...
Emulating PS2 for my Steam Deck, would love any recommendations! (lemmy.world) angielski
I’ve been sinking further and further into the RetroDECK time-sink of setting up my emulators just so, and having the most fun doing so. The PS2 is a largely unknown system to me, I neither had one nor spent much time before now playing through some titles....
What's your "this is totally fine and I'm going to have a great time" FPS (refresh rate). ?
For me, anything 25 FPS or higher is 100% fine and I’ll be enjoying my time. I never play competitive online shooter games ever, though. All single player ones like GOW and the likes. I game on a 60 Hz 4k monitor. GPU is AMD RX 6600 alongside Ryzen 7 5700G and 32GB RAM. My games are set to meduim most of the time at 4k....
Everyone's favorite AAA company might be facing bankruptcy (lemmy.world) angielski
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good (www.nytimes.com) angielski