Love Tyranny and PoE. Think Deadfire would have been an exceptional game if there was about half as much of it, but even as an epic RPG it does go on. Ten bucks for ‘three big games’ of content is a steal, though.
It isn’t that ‘successful game has a better-funded sequel that loses the magic due to feature creep’ is exactly unheard of - it’s a tale as old as time. But Deadfire was a sales disappointment, which it probably wouldn’t have been if they’d only spent half as much making it, and so we won’t be getting a PoE3 :-(
Agreed. Amazing game, but it’s because most of it is excellent so the jank is easy to ignore, rather than the whole thing being polished.
I think they made the parry-heavy emphasis of the game even more difficult to ‘read’ by having all the early enemies be very twitchy robots with difficult-to-anticipate parry timings. It becomes much easier to get the timing right once the enemies become more ‘organic’ a bit later. That’s also the point where you have some better gear and some level ups, so it’s not quite so brutal.
Giving the early enemies slow, smooth attacks with big swings would make sense for robots, sort out the difficulty curve, and give you plenty of chance to get used to parries. They can reasonably require a lot of damage so ripostes would be the only way to effectively defeat them - health which you could reasonably remove from a lot of the late-game enemies who are stupidly robust.
Never felt like P actually has iframes on his dodge? It’s serviceable enough when the important thing is to move away from where an attack is going to land, but it’s certainly not a Dark Souls-style ‘dodge through the attack’. It’s not Sekiro’s ‘running away to tease out an attack you can punish’ either, he’s a very slow dude in comparison.
They might be former users of FARK, where submitting stories didn’t allow duplicate links? And so you would see the top article in the aggregator frequently being blog links and some right weird ‘news’ websites.
Lemmy has the opposite problem, where the same link can be posted again and again even on the same instance, of course.
I dunno how common a use case that would be. I’ve a laptop that makes a great job of Dwarf Fortress but gets a bit hot and choppy when doing 3D, and a gaming desktop for ‘everything else’. I certainly don’t want those settings synchronised. My friends with Steam Decks like the cloud saves but need to set lower settings than their ‘main computers’. Strikes me as unusual to have multiple machines with roughly equal capability, unless you’re an internet cafe from the 90’s and have multiplayer Doom set up.
No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
Not so much “remade” but the engine was open-sourced and it’s been kept up-to-date for modern computers. Exact same levels, graphics, sound effects as it ever was, but obviously the resolution now is much higher than it was in the early nineties. Think my graphics card can push it at 4K 144Hz while still being in power-saving mode; it does more work rendering desktop fonts nicely.
There’s also a port of Pathways Into Darkness onto the engine, if you want to play it? It’s a real bitch to emulate a classic Mac to get it running, but this is basically drag-and-drop. It was brutally unfair even at the time, and contains a lot of features which have not aged well and are distinctly un-fun - it is not a game that’s afraid to waste your time, put it like that. I do love the idea of it - the atmosphere of it is probably the best bit, and I’d love a modern remake of it.
Which is ironic, because Fallout 4 is the game that caused me to no longer be hyped for anything else that Bethesda had coming. Fallout 76 and Starfield didn’t disappoint, because I was expecting them to be shit from a company that had lost its way, and they delivered spectacularly.
Another fantastic project that makes gaming on Linux so much easier. It’s incredibly strong in configurability and ‘robustness’. Yes, you might have to set up all of your Wine bottles and things like that, which can be a faff, but once it’s working in Lutris, it just keeps on working on Lutris.
Great for long-running series, too. I’ve been a big fan of the XCOM series since the Amiga days; in Lutris, it’s easy to have UFO: Enemy Unknown / Terror from the Deep running in openxcom, Apocalypse in DosBox, and connected up to the Firaxis remakes in Steam. Similarly, love me a metroidvania, and have got most of the 40+ CastleVania games lined up and ready-to-go, just a double-click away.
I’ve always thought it was an otter, but never up till now have I questioned why it’s stolen an orange. They’re not the most citrus-loving of creatures.
The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you’re targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that’s appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A “poor man’s gsync”, if you will.
To quote an old RockPaperShotgun comment about Dark Souls, the best decisions are the ones that you don’t know you’re making. DS definitely has storyline changes depending on where you go first, what you do and who you speak to, which is far more natural than a two-way dialogue option for “blatant RPG decision making”.
The tragedy of Elden Ring is that it’s far too long for that. I’ve played through DS several times and would expect to get it finished in about five hours, so can play through the various plot line resolutions in a long evening of gaming. ER has a variety of ways that the DLC can play out, you say? Best book a fortnight off work so that I can get a hundred hours of gaming in.
For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.
Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it’s probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.
shadps4.net to be precise. Differs from other emulators by not emulating the hardware, but by reimplementing the API, from what I’ve read. More like Wine than eg. rpcs3.net
With the success of massive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that actually offer player choice again, Peterson is excited to release his game to an audience that does want more again. After a rough period of RPGs where player choice and ingenuity were watered down, there’s now a hunger for more branching paths and player freedom.
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.
Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so “bad” chances to hit aren’t such a problem.
Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it’s promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn’t a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.
Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.
Not that I disagree with your point about walled gardens, but “better” hardware for a handheld gaming machine needs to have a decent balance between performance and battery life. Longest plane or train journey that I’m likely to take is about five hours, and I’d need to rate any gaming hardware on the ability to run for that length of time. On that basis, the Switch is pretty much optimal. My phone has a higher resolution and can probably push more frames, but it would run hot for about forty-five minutes maximum. Plus, I’d then not be able to make calls or listen to tunes at my destination.
Steam deck would probably be a better choice, though. Fuck Nintendo.
Identity is a many-layered thing, and I’d never describe myself as British unless very specifically prompted to do so, but I can at least sign that. 5,071 let’s go!
So far we’ve had “amazing Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when (Black Isle / Obsidian) developed it, and “bland Fallout RPG on a janky engine” when Bethesda have developed it. Having both great writers and a decent engine would be amazing for Fallout, although just Obsidian and their Pillars of Eternity engine would be perfect with me.
Larian have said that they’d like to get away from DnD 5e after working on BG3 for so long, so I’m assuming they won’t have licensed Pathfinder either. If we take the set of all possible IPs and strike out those two, then that must make Fallout more likely. (Albeit not very likely.)
A shame that all the really early 3D games use their own software rendering engines, and aren’t so amenable to being “cranked up” like later games when accelerators became common.
Get some of the early freescape games like Total Eclipse or Castle Master, early cyberpunk games like Interphase, or even Frontier: Elite II running in big resolutions with silky framerates and insane draw distances, I’d be so pleased.
Quite a good list, although without any real surprises, except for the cheeky inclusion of a recent fan-made PC port. I’m glad Kerbal Space Program is on it, but a few other personal favorites (and candidates for best game of all time) are absent, like The Talos Principle, BeamNG.drive, NEO Scavenger, World of Goo, Mafia,...
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),...
Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.
It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.
Genesis is a different style of game tho, isn’t it? Diablo-like rather than third-person hack and slash?
Love the series. Personally prefer 3 due to its more limited scope; the other two are great, but to on for a very long time, and I really can’t be bothered playing through the Portal-like bits again. Happy if 4 is the same length as 3.
Yeah. Unless they’ve some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you’ve paid out overheads as well.
If they’re planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it “your phone in game”, so you can receive texts from the president’s daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you’re doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.
Which makes perfect sense - none of the previous producers have. Mostly, they’ve just used their stock characters and locations, and made a game that they thought would be fun out of them. There’s a couple of games that qualify as ‘direct sequels’ (Ocarina -> Majora’s, Wind Waker -> Hourglass) but even then, it doesn’t benefit you much to have played the preceding one. Would be weird to try and twist the games into a chronology that strikes me mostly as ‘fanon’ anyway.
Happy 30th birthday, DOOM. I’m grateful to have been a part of this incredible team. Thank you for playing our games, and thank you for keeping DOOM alive, all these many years....
Since all the games of that era now have laughably out-of-date tech, the fact that Daikatana did at the time doesn’t stand out so much. Played through it again a couple of years ago; it’s more janky-but-interesting than the disaster that you’d believe from its reputation - has some good bits in amongst the mostly-okay.
The Gameboy Color version of Daikatana, which is a top-down JRPG instead? That is genuinely a good fun game. Think JR has it for free download on his home page? Easy to get, anyway.
Seems likely. It only stutters on Windows - run it through Proton on Linux, where it’s translating it all to Vulkan, and it’s silky smooth. Maybe off by a frame or two as well of course, but it’s pretty much locked to 60 fps in either case on my machine and can’t really check. DirectX seems quite bad for hitching when a new shader is loaded - they’d all be pre-compiled on a console since the devs know exactly what the target hardware is, so if you don’t rewrite your engine on Windows to accommodate it, then you’ll have problems.
Act 1 and at the first half of Act 2 ran pretty well for me, generally 80ish fps on max settings everywhere (6700xt @ 1440p). It’s after that when it started running like a three legged mare; frequent random slowdowns to about 15fps. I suspect that they got the game mostly finished and then started their optimization pass at the beginning, and just hadn’t got to the end of the game by the release date, which was moved forward last-minute to avoid Starfield.
The end of the game doesn’t look any more complicated than the beginning; suspect they just ran out of polishing time.
It would still be a fun little puzzler, but it’s very much a single-note satire, and a lot of it would come off as “lol random” rather than taking the piss out of The Witness. Which is also brilliant, love them both.
Annoying - the demo was really good, and ran great on Linux using Proton. Guess I’m going to be holding off on buying till it’s removed and on sale, then - there’s no point in buying a game early and it running like shit.
I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
RockPaperShotgun did a performance analysis on this - long story short, a 30xx card will be good for about medium settings, a 40xx for high, and really a 4090 for ultra. According to the Steam hardware survey, that’s about one-in-five PC gamers that could start this up if they wanted to; a few percent can run it with all the flashy graphics. Combine the hardware exclusivity and the distinctly ‘meh’ reviews, get some seriously low player numbers.
Witcher 2, before they patched in the tutorial mission. (Which is still not very good as a tutorial.) Enjoy getting a shitkicking in the very first fight, since you’ve no idea of the controls.
Well, has the fully Youtube Poop-compliant animations, I suppose. The actual ‘game’ part of the games, if they weren’t so absurdly sluggish to respond to inputs and take such a very long time to load each new screen, would have been indistinguishable from any other completely uninspired, middle of the road platformer of the early 90s. From the gameplay segments of that video, that looks like all they’re aspiring to here, as well.
Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! (store.steampowered.com) angielski
What're you buying?
Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Fan-made Mario Kart 64 PC port released, with track editor and ultrawide support (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Fuckin nuisance angielski
Marathon is delayed (www.bungie.net) angielski
No new release date yet. The next update from Bungie will be in the Fall. Quite frankly, I thought the game would just come out and die to cut their losses.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Clair Obscur's Composer Talks Going From Unknown To Scoring 2025's Most Celebrated RPG (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
Developer interview: my Q&A with the creator of Lutris angielski
A while ago I had the good fortune of organizing a fair-sized interview with one member of the team behind Lutris....
Developer interview: my Q&A with the Heroic Games Launcher team angielski
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d9bb8420-1a21-4423-9bd4-1f09a49d8eaf.png...
Nintendo Switch 2 Launches on June 5th Worldwide; 1080p Screen With 120 FPS and HDR Support, Docked Mode 4K Resolution Support Confirmed (wccftech.com) angielski
Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I don't think these hills are silent after all angielski
Creator of Bloodborne 60fps Patch Says Sony Has Sent Him a DMCA Takedown — but Why Now? (www.ign.com) angielski
Oh thank god, there had to keep the bloodborne remastered rumors going before january ends.
Elder Scrolls creator Ted Peterson is “glad that people are wanting to break away from” watered-down RPGs as he works on an epic Daggerfall successor (www.videogamer.com)
With the success of massive RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that actually offer player choice again, Peterson is excited to release his game to an audience that does want more again. After a rough period of RPGs where player choice and ingenuity were watered down, there’s now a hunger for more branching paths and player freedom.
Trajectory (lemmy.world) angielski
After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal (www.androidauthority.com) angielski
Stop Killing Games Petition to UK Relaunched (petition.parliament.uk) angielski
The original petition failed due to two issues:...
Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Larian Says Its 'Full Attention' Is on Its Next Game, 'Media Blackout' for the Foreseeable (www.ign.com) angielski
Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992 (hackaday.com) angielski
PC Gamer: The top 100 PC games (www.pcgamer.com)
Quite a good list, although without any real surprises, except for the cheeky inclusion of a recent fan-made PC port. I’m glad Kerbal Space Program is on it, but a few other personal favorites (and candidates for best game of all time) are absent, like The Talos Principle, BeamNG.drive, NEO Scavenger, World of Goo, Mafia,...
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
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),...
Gearbox's first Risk of Rain 2 expansion gets hammered on Steam as developer admits the PC version 'is in a really bad place' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
New Darksiders game teased by THQ Nordic (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Report: Resident Evil 7 on iOS has earned Capcom $28,140 since launch (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Whatever Apple paid must’ve been worth it to go through with this.
GOG will delete cloud saves more than 200MB per game after August 31st (support.gog.com) angielski
Zelda Producer Eiji Aonuma Doesn't Really Care About the Series' Chronology (www.ign.com) angielski
John Romero: Happy 30th birthday, DOOM. [...] Thank you for playing our games, and thank you for keeping DOOM alive, all these many years. (nitter.net) angielski
Happy 30th birthday, DOOM. I’m grateful to have been a part of this incredible team. Thank you for playing our games, and thank you for keeping DOOM alive, all these many years....
Elden Ring May Be Getting New Content Soon, Judging From Recent Behind-the-Scenes Updates (wccftech.com) angielski
Baldur's Gate 3 dev shows off the level of optimization achieved for the Xbox Series S port, which bodes well for future PC updates (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Lords of the Fallen’s Steam reviews improve as performance patch lands, devs advise players not to use graphics settings “their rigs cannot handle” (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
15 More Free to Play Overwhelmingly Positive Steam Games (youtu.be) angielski
first video...
Lies of P quietly adds Denuvo DRM to PC version (nichegamer.com)
The Chinese Room is developing Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down (www.theverge.com) angielski
In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info) angielski
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
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.
Limited Run Games announce "Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore" - A spiritual successor to the Zelda CD-i games (twitter.com) angielski