ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.

I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Are you sure you're thinking of the right game? This game lists LAN play on its features and allows you to host private servers. It's been on my radar for precisely those reasons.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Please give us Galaxy on Linux, GOG, so I can shop with you over Steam.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

They don't even need to invest in its development. They just need to integrate it as a launch option.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah, but I want things like auto updates and cloud saves as officially supported features rather than something they can revoke from Heroic at any time.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Yes, that's the selling point, but I also value automatic updates and cloud saves most of the time.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I want auto updates for my games so close to "always" that you can only tell it's not 100% if you squint a bit. I use Syncthing in other contexts, like syncing emulator saves to and from desktop and Steam Deck, and it's not quite as easy as Steam cloud saves.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Setup is annoying, and feedback on whether or not it's working is a bit rough. I've lost data by misconfiguring it before. You have to run a background daemon on a device where battery life matters, so I tend to shut it off when I'm done. Syncing saves with SyncThing requires knowing where those save files are, whereas being built into the launcher client means they already know where those saves are, and that step is already done.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Do you have a source on Heroic getting a cut? I can't find it in their FAQ.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Neat. I was aware of Heroic before, but I haven't heard of this. This does change the equation for me, because now there's a data point that GOG can use to see where my money's going and how they can get more of it. What can you tell me about their refund policy? Are the results on ProtonDB just as reliable for GOG versions as they are for Steam versions of games? Does Heroic pre-compile Vulkan shaders the way that Proton on Steam enforces it? Whatever answers you don't have, I can do some of my own homework, but I'm intrigued now.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Less incentive, but 1.7% of a huge number of customers may still be profitable.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Thanks a bunch. If I get the answers I'm looking for, maybe GOG will be my go-to.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Nah, it doesn't just linearly double like that. If it takes 10 people to build, test, and support the launcher for Windows, it doesn't take 20 people to support Linux, since most of it is going to be the same across platforms. A 1.8% increase in sales also isn't the best prediction. On Steam, the vast majority of their players and revenue are accounted for by just a couple of the most popular games, and a lot of that is dictated by what games are allowed or successful in China. If your game isn't selling in China, your addressable market is actually much closer to being 4.5% Linux. That's not to pick on China, but China is a massive market on its own, and it's the difference between the case where you're selling microtransactions in Counter-Strike 2 or if you're selling a metroidvania.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The question for me is how much less I'm willing to pay for a game that made me wait past GOTY/spoiler season to play it, because I'm not paying $70 for it anymore.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It felt more like a retroactive beta, like taking back a move in chess saying your hand was still on the piece when they realized it wasn't working out.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

They're called platform fighters. And I doubt this thing has an offline mode, so no thanks.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I'm back into Final Fantasy VII, which I've never finished before. I've been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It's very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I've got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I'm lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you're trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I'm hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.

I'm replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I'm not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I'd enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.

I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.

Now that I've finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I'm back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.

Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I think the last console game I bought was Metroid Dread, but I leaned physical for those as well, because their digital storefronts are a single point of failure. I've witnessed first hand a friend of mine getting frustrated with a now-sunset Xbox 360 store, a problem I could see coming a mile away even when I was in high school when the console launched. On PC, if Steam disappeared tomorrow, I could pirate my entire library. If GOG gives me a week of lead time on their store going away, I could legitimately back up those games.

Digital is more convenient. I have shelves of old games and consoles that I'm working on culling rather than expanding, especially as someone who tends to move to a new apartment every couple of years. Physical often tends to be a false sense of security in the modern age of day 1 patches and other kinds of server dependency. DRM-free is actually what you want, unless you really, really enjoy the tangible aspect of the game. Outside of nostalgia, I don't think it matters to me.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Maybe not. The disclaimers on the side of the store page appear to be different between these and some other EA games. I hate how hard it is these days to discern if a game has a stupid always-online requirement.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

their own official DnD game is the complete opposite of BG3 in terms of monetization, popularity and critical acclaim

I don't follow. You buy a book and you play. Critical Role brings in more viewers than most primetime network TV shows ever could. They had a controversy around changing their monetization that didn't come to pass, is my understanding, but the complete opposite of BG3?

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Ah, that would make more sense. I thought that was a licensed deal like anything else.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I think I'd have a problem with it if bad internet super sleuths came up with some nonsense reasons to try to destroy my reputation.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That’s no excuse to try to get a user’s account banned.

I'd say it is. They highlight the part of Steam's rules against harassment, and while that's always subject to interpretation, they feel that this counts, and I'm inclined to agree.

The steam group had like 1000 people now it has almost 200,000 after the whole debacle.

Before this group blew up, YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers were already making their bullshit conspiracy theories. People try to paint this as Streisand, but that's ridiculous. The Streisand effect is trying to hide something, which you still seem convinced they're trying to do despite highlighting their clients on their web page and getting listings in the credits of the games they work on. What it looks like to me instead is that:

1. sensationalist YouTubers paint this company as the devil
2. this curator is made in response
3. it gets a natural, human reaction from the people targeted by this group
4. the YouTubers from step 1 use that reaction to mean whatever they want it to mean

In no way did I foresee a way that this group didn't continue on the same trajectory with or without Sweet Baby responding to its existence.

SomeOrdinaryGamer made a good video highlighting stupidity from both sides.

I've seen one video from SomeOrdinaryGamers, and it was too many, but he's cited in this article as perpetuating the bullshit conspiracy theories, so I'm good.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It has a "do not recommend" next to each game on the list, and it's used for people to review bomb games and cry about this company on the Steam forums.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Well, not Suicide Squad, but they've got plenty of bangers on their resume.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I beat the base game of The Outer Worlds and started the DLC. This game ought to have more eyes on it in the wake of Starfield. It's just a better version of that game. Each settlement you come across might have about 10 NPCs in it, and each one of them is connected to the other ones via quests that help you form a picture of just what happened here before you landed. It's excellent.

I also finished Penny's Big Breakaway. When you hit a flow state in this game, it's so, so good, but a bit of jank in the physics and controls for the game hold it back. Like last week, my recommendation is still to wait a few months to play it, in hopes that patches can square away some of these issues.

And then there's my usual fighting game shenanigans in Street Fighter 6 and Skullgirls, trying to be the FGC equivalent of "swol". The Capcom Cup finals for SF6 were a lot of fun to watch despite there being too many Lukes.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

If your game relies on matchmaking, more players makes that problem way harder to solve. The best way to reduce queue times is to reduce players.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

You know how most people never heard of this company or care that it exists? My understanding is that they consult on games to make them more inclusive. So you have a gay character written into a game, perhaps the result of this company's contributions or perhaps not, and then a bunch of people complain that Sweet Baby made the game woke or some nonsense. How did I hear of this? Steam forums became a cesspool for people crying about this company. If Suicide Squad bombs, it's because they consulted with Sweet Baby and went woke. Indiana Jones maybe features a woman in the trailer who looks like more than a damsel in distress? Sweet Baby's doing.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Boy, what a dishonest title for what happened here.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Correct, this is not a call to action for anyone except Valve to moderate conspiracy theorists.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

No, I just live in reality.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Do they sell a good product at a fair price? Do I know what's in it and get what I'm paying for? Is it future-proofed such that what I bought won't disappear if the seller turns off their servers? Does it refrain from using shady tactics to manipulate me into buying something I don't want?

If the answers to all of those questions are "yes", then it doesn't bother me. For instance, Paradox games. Lots of people seem to feel like they need all of the content for a given game, but I don't understand it. They released what they had for a full game at launch, and then while a large portion of that team can move on to prototyping their next game, a smaller team remains behind to come up with some goodies that you can modify that base game with to keep it fresh, if you're interested. It's low cost for them to improve the game at a systemic level, and if what they put out isn't good enough, you can just not buy it and still play the game you already enjoyed. It isn't any less complete just because they decided to attach more game to it, and this is far better for both parties than selling a sequel every year that's the same as last year's but with a tiny bit extra.

When it comes to cosmetics like Mortal Kombat's, it doesn't bother me that they exist. They're horrendously overpriced, so I never even consider buying them, because they're terrible value. There's also the shop timers that would fall under "shady tactics to [attempt to] manipulate me", so that's not cool. Far worse though is how much of that game is arbitrarily tied to server checks, including a couple of unlocks in the base game. Also not cool is that they replaced Krypt with Invasions. The Krypt was a metroidvania-esque dungeon crawl, and while it too was designed to get you to grind a bunch or spend a bunch of extra money, it was actually fun to solve. Invasions is just bot matches but worse, and it's tied behind server checks, because people like me used Cheat Engine to bypass the Krypt grind in MKX rather than spend $20 on Kombat Koins. I really enjoy MK, but they're stepping right up to, and sometimes dancing over, the line.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I can tell you from experience that you'll have a better time with plenty of old Assassin's Creed games by not having the DLC in the picture to affect your opinion of the total package.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I know my resistance probably doesn’t accomplish much

It does. Besides not giving that game your time and money, you're instead putting it in some other game that's making what you want, and they probably need your time and money more to keep doing that.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There are a lot of benefits to the sequel model in some circumstances. You get to have every permutation of a game and its versions rather than overwriting previous versions of a game that arguably might be better for their own reasons.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I just started typing in common video game title words in Steam's search, and I found several games just called "Void". We can extrapolate that scenario out and say maybe a new game is the first one on Steam to be called Void, but maybe there was an old DOS game called Void that came to Steam later after rights issues have been resolved. There's also the very common situation of a remake and its original version both being available on Steam, and maybe different companies own the rights to each one, like Star Wars: Battlefront. Perhaps these and other reasons are why those checks don't exist, but maybe they will now if these sorts of scams become more common.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I concur. At least the logos for the bad ones have "EA" in the middle of them so that you know which ones to avoid.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it's very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They'll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

No, as per the article, this is a person pulling strings.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It sure sounds like the money spent on those deals makes less and less sense, so I'll bet we see less of them going forward. Already the exclusivity period for this game is down to only about 3 months.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Maybe if emulating the game wasn't often better than playing it on the only hardware the game is made for...

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Assassin's Creed has just been doing numbers basically since forever, which is why Ubisoft turned into a machine that puts out one of those games every year. Valhalla was no exception. Mirage, however, is the exception. Ubisoft showed their lack of confidence in the title by pricing it lower. It was no secret to those who followed its development that it was spun out of a DLC for Valhalla, and reviews reflected the amount of effort Ubisoft put into it.