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ampersandrew

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Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

ampersandrew,
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That game is very good at introducing concepts gradually though, and plenty of other things you'll discover by accident, as intended.

ampersandrew,
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Nah, I don't think so. It actually explains everything you need to know, but it's buried in stat and item descriptions that, especially in 2011, we weren't trained to read through to understand the game. So if it's all that missable but still in the game, I think it's fair to say that it just sucks at teaching you.

ampersandrew,
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Skullgirls, which is now my favorite game, scares people away with its tutorial, so I ended up making my own for it instead. It was through resources for a bunch of other fighting games that I ended up realizing what I wasn't understanding about Skullgirls.

Honestly, you could probably just put fighting games here in general. Understanding what it means for a move to be plus on block is super important, but most new players will have no idea what that means. I can only name one game, Fantasy Strike, that teaches you to jump to escape command grabs.

ampersandrew,
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At least in the enhanced edition of the first game, there is a tutorial.

ampersandrew,
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It's not Baldur's Gate 3, because it's Baldur's Gate 2. I think I'm past the halfway point, and I'm hoping to have it beaten before this thread comes up next week.

I also started a co-op playthrough of Quake with a friend of mine, and I play a few runs of 30XX here and there.

Other than that, it's Street Fighter 6, and there's a patch coming for Guilty Gear Strive soon that I'm excited about.

ampersandrew,
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It's not Baldur's Gate 3, because it's Baldur's Gate 2. I think I'm past the halfway point, and I'm hoping to have it beaten before this thread comes up next week.

I also started a co-op playthrough of Quake with a friend of mine, and I play a few runs of 30XX here and there.

Other than that, it's Street Fighter 6, and there's a patch coming for Guilty Gear Strive soon that I'm excited about.

ampersandrew,
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There is a bit of a continuing story in Splinter Cell, but for the most part, each one is its own story. I'd say I was fairly unimpressed with Pandora Tomorrow and Double Agent, but neither is bad. Conviction is very different from the games before it but still plenty of fun, and Blacklist somehow manages to marry Conviction's gameplay with the classic gameplay of the series in a modern way, but Michael Ironside was battling cancer at the time, so Fisher was unfortunately recast. If you're asking the average person which one is best, most will say Chaos Theory, and then you'll get a contingent of people such as myself who prefer Blacklist, but CT is still great.

As for the old Baldur's Gate games, no better time than now to go through them. I'm inching closer to finishing 2 after beating 1 earlier this month. They're great.

ampersandrew,
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If you're interested in a roguelike metroidvania, I'd highly recommend A Robot Named Fight. There's also the Batman Arkham collection that just came out on Switch, and the first game, Asylum, is a 3D metroidvania.

ampersandrew,
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If they're still playing the game anyway, I might call that a review bomb.

ampersandrew,
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That's the exact recipe for ensuring that they don't change it back.

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  • ampersandrew,
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    Some great games make use of that increased power. Many more do not.

    maybe we will start seeing 50 watt gaming GPUs being viable and capable of running games at medium/high settings, going for cheap

    The Steam Deck runs lots of games at those settings at about 15W, more or less, depending on how you count, and at lower resolutions too. Strides are being made toward this end of better performance per watt, especially in ARM architectures, which is a step that Apple arguably took too soon, as it relates to gaming.

    ampersandrew,
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    Steam muddies this a bit though, since you have two weeks or two hours of playtime to try it out and get your full money back, so it removes a lot of the risk in the first place; in some cases, it removes all of it.

    ampersandrew,
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    No other game takes that long to compile shaders, so that could have been a red flag for a refund on its own. And you can pay attention to forums and games press in the meantime to find out when it's in a playable state before you repurchase it. But on launch day, you could have it preloaded and smoke test it with no risk.

    ampersandrew,
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    There are also Steam reviews, reddit forums, etc. One person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying it isn't. I've got Mortal Kombat 1 pre-ordered, and that series has a history of shaky PC ports, with enough cause for me to believe it could happen again. If all's well, I'll know before I finish work for the day from reviews, forums, etc., and I'll get Shang Tsung for no additional cost. If not, I get my money back, and they can earn my money from me some other time.

    ampersandrew,
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    But that's why I said one person saying it's still a problem is more valuable than two saying that it isn't. There are more resources beyond those. Quick looks, Digital Foundry, SkillUp, Let's Plays...and as you said, games can still have these issues beyond day 1, so at that point not pre-ordering wouldn't have saved you from it either. But two hours is certainly usually enough to find the obvious deal-breakers if the other resources fail you. Cyberpunk 2077 worked pretty damn well for me even right at launch; I didn't pre-order it, but even if I did, I probably would have been able to tell in two hours if it was horrifically broken like all of the video evidence from other players showed it was, in general. I also really enjoyed it, so that's just a difference in taste between you and I.

    ampersandrew,
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    Isn't this usually just LOD stuff where the high-quality stuff is when you're up close and the low quality stuff is for when you're far away? So you're just about always seeing the high-quality stuff, and it's the stuff that's actually processed in real time like shadows and stuff, that take up practically no space, that are getting toggled when you turn down settings. That's how I understand it anyway.

    ampersandrew,
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    Even if that tech worked, you wouldn't want the games you buy to rely on it.

    ampersandrew,
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    So if those people aren't seeing the information they need, they should not pre-order. I'm confident that if you know these other avenues to find out this information, it's easy to avoid getting burned.

    ampersandrew,
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    It's not laziness. Why sell you the games when they can exclusively rent them to you instead?

    ampersandrew,
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    Is the ROG Ally dead in the water? It seems to be gaining some traction. I don't think it's going to overtake the Steam Deck or anything, but it satisfies that customer who wants a little extra power, resolution, and compatibility.

    ampersandrew,
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    Adobe would be huge, but what would be even bigger is if it came pre-installed on a computer you buy at Walmart or Best Buy. Otherwise, no one's going to want to switch from what they're using unless the thing they're using bothers them. As annoying as I find Windows Updates to be, most people don't seem to notice.

    ampersandrew,
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    There will be different amounts of friction depending on the customer and what they expect. If all they need is Chrome and like one or two other Electron apps, as long as they're walked through the software center on first boot, quickly. But there will be friction when one odd customer here or there expects program X and it's not available, even if there's a very viable alternative. They'd have to educate their customers through marketing like Apple does to ease that transition, and Apple still only has a single digit percentage of the PC market.

    ampersandrew,
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    No idea; I've got a Steam Deck. But those slight improvements at the expense of battery life are speaking to a large enough subset of people.

    ampersandrew,
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    I had a GPD Win 2 and had the same experience, but the truth is that you're going to spend more time in game than dealing with Windows, so if you need that compatibility, you'll put up with it.

    ampersandrew,
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    In the past two decades they delivered some of the most successful, beloved games of all time.

    ampersandrew,
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    No, you can measure it in things like sales and review scores. Sure, they also put out games like Fallout 76 and Wolfenstein: Young Blood, but two decades is enough to capture Skyrim and Fallout 3.

    ampersandrew,
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    But there are also tons of people who've been plenty pleased with those games, as you can see on the long tails of their sales and how many concurrent players they retain to this day. You're the odd one out on those heavy hitters. Not so much on 76, and to a lesser extent, 4.

    ampersandrew,
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    So...that's your personal taste. Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have been successful if no one liked it, and we can quantify some form of quality via review scores. Some of Bethesda's games have reviewed phenomenally well, especially in as large of a bucket as the past 20 years of their history. If I was the sole dictator of what was good, no one would be playing the latest Assassin's Creed game or Hades, but plenty of people love those games; the majority would say they're great, and we can measure that to some degree.

    ampersandrew,
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    I just think you would have made your point better if you had said maybe one decade, because two decades catches some certified bangers in the public consciousness.

    Microsoft Teams is now part of the Xbox Game Bar so you can stream gameplay to friends - The Verge (www.theverge.com)

    Microsoft has integrated Microsoft Teams with the Xbox Game Bar, allowing users to stream their gameplay in real-time to friends over Teams video calls. Up to 20 people can join a call to watch and chat together while gaming. The viewer can see both the game and overlaid video of friends. However, streaming performance is...

    ampersandrew,
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    Teams is for work when your employer got a good deal on Microsoft software and didn't give you Slack or literally any other alternative for voice.

    ampersandrew,
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    They've totally ruined any brand power that Skype once had by now, so in this case, I get it.

    ampersandrew,
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    I don't need Slack to do voice calls. I could use something else for it. It's just that the things that Slack is good at, Teams is horrible at, and Teams sucks for calls too. If someone calls me, the pop up that allows me to accept or decline the call should actually be responsive and not crash. When I'm browsing old messages, it should be able to render a simple text history without thinking about it for 30 seconds. When I get a message, the notification should occur every time instead of just when it feels like it. When I lose and regain my VPN connection, it should be able to dynamically reconnect without crashing or hanging on a disconnect message. If you're going to put document integration into Teams, why is there not a tab system for open documents I need to keep open rather than forcing me to use the history on the back button or otherwise reload the document by clicking through to teams->team name->files?

    ampersandrew,
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    I mostly play fighting games, which can be alienating with a large group of friends who don't grind them as much as you do, because then you reach a point where you win every match against them, and they're not having fun. If you go to locals, and I do, you make fighting game friends, which is some kind of solution, though not ideal. Perhaps the 2v2 mode of Project L will help that problem, but I don't trust Riot to make that game work without an internet connection, and online-only games are a deal-breaker for me at this point.

    Baldur's Gate 3 is a game a lot of my friends and even my brothers are interested in playing co-op, but I know from experience with Divinity: Original Sin and attempts to co-op long games like Factorio and Starbound that eventually adults' schedules will not align to be able to finish the game you started. For BG3 in particular, I think I'm going to play it solo for the first time, and then I'll try co-op with one of my brothers and maybe a separate game with another friend of mine where I play a character in their worlds; that way I can try different builds and strategies, and if our schedules diverge, they can keep going in their game with the character I was playing.

    Unfortunately, most other co-op games are online-only these days, and I think we're going to start seeing a swing back to allowing LAN and split-screen again, not the least of which is Baldur's Gate 3, but it's going to be slow going for a while. FPS games in particular have dried up immensely, at least for the style of game I'm looking for. Competitive FPS games have become live service, second job, battle royale or extraction shooters; and the campaigns, when they happen at all, have become open world checklists. So in the meantime, my favorite co-op games have been session-based games like roguelikes. Things like Vagante, 30XX, Streets of Rogue, and such. The one exception for FPS games is that cross play, split screen, controller support, all that good stuff added to the Quake remasters has myself and a friend of mine eyeing finally playing those games co-op, because we're not going to get anything like it for a long time.

    ampersandrew,
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    I'm on Linux, so if I buy from GOG, I don't get cloud saves or automatic updates. If we had Galaxy on Linux, it would be my default store. But it's not on Linux, so I shop on Steam.

    ampersandrew,
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    Neither are guaranteed by the seller though. They could change their API tomorrow and break compatibility. Unlikely though that is, if they want my sale, they can do the work themselves rather than relying on an unofficial project with hooks into their store.

    ampersandrew,
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    What if you only bought the expansions that speak to you though? I don't need the content creator pack or the K pop radio station, but I did want Green Cities and Mass Transit, for instance.

    ampersandrew,
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    So then what if you waited until it had all of the features that you consider necessary and then buy those on a sale? You're a far cry from $2k spent in either case.

    ampersandrew,
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    Who determines what's a basic and what's expanded content then? You know what's in it when it comes out, and you can buy it at that price or not. If they do extra work, it makes sense to sell it as an add-on. If you were happy with it before they added night clubs or weather features, were they really that essential to be included in the base package? If you weren't happy with it before they added those things, wait until they add those things. They sell a good product at a fair price, and they're forthcoming about what's in it. They don't try to keep you hooked with weird psychological tricks or gambling mechanics. Nothing about this is fucked.

    ampersandrew,
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    They've got that this time, and it is modeled, at least a little bit, off of real world things like people deciding to go somewhere based on parking availability and such.

    ampersandrew,
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    Strikes not withstanding, I don't see how that business is unsustainable. Film and television companies integrated and consolidated until there's at least 4 or 5 major players in that space for healthy competition, and the back of the napkin math makes plenty of sense.

    ampersandrew, (edited )
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    That's not unsustainable...that's a healthy, competitive market, and a great deal better for the consumer than the television model it replaced. You also don't need to stay subscribed to a streaming service after you've watched the show you wanted to watch, and even if you stay subscribed to only the ones with shows you like, it's far cheaper than cable.

    ampersandrew,
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    Which part was wrong?

    ampersandrew,
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    It's been a long time since that was the case though. Now you have to update the console, update the controller firmware, install the game, and update the game.

    ampersandrew,
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    Sure, but they're approaching a convergence. PCs have gotten easier and consoles have become less streamlined. With something like the Steam Deck, it's even more blurred.

    ampersandrew,
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    Eh, I don't know about that. It's free to play and huge in popular culture because tons of people played it.

    ampersandrew,
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    If it wasn't on their minds before Diablo IV, I'll bet "defending our patch notes on a live stream" is going to be a difficult position to staff in the future for a company that's already had issues retaining talent.

    ampersandrew,
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    That's an absurd take.

    ampersandrew,
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    Sure, but if you want to see what happens when you have a lot of employee turnover from people not agreeing with the direction of a game, look no further than Redfall. Often times that top talent you're talking about will form their own studios and bring colleagues with them.

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