ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’ve been looking forward to this one. So much of this genre is going live service and online-only, and these people are some of the few making just a video game. I’m pretty new to this genre, but I liked that last Titan Quest quite a bit, and I’m looking forward to a lot of the modern sensibilities the genre acquired in the past 20 years, like dodge rolls and perhaps WASD/left-stick movement.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

There are a lot of types of games that are inherently not broken in their designs, and there are advantages to portraying the aesthetic in the same style, like quickly conveying to your audience where your inspirations came from so that they know what type of game it is. In a similar way, lots of games have moved on to a PS1 aesthetic these days.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

or making a real case why it’s beneficial

To which I said:

quickly conveying to your audience where your inspirations came from so that they know what type of game it is

In a lot of ways, “they don’t make 'em like they used to”, so in addition to that art style helping to convey what kind of game they made, it also comes along with cost reductions for their art pipeline in a lot of cases. It doesn’t really make them “stuck in the past” when there were real advantages to how things used to get done.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

And the YouTube link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hr6Q2hln_M

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s a convention too, but it’s way smaller.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

How do terms of service give them root level access?

EDIT: For the record, I’ve been playing through this whole series in the middle of when they rolled out these EULA changes, and I wish them the best of luck in getting root access to my machine, but I promise you they didn’t get it via Proton.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t mean to be disrespectful when I say this, but I can agree that gravity pulls things up instead of down and it won’t make it so. I just skimmed through the EULA and didn’t find anywhere that it said it needed root level access (though maybe I missed it), nor did the executable take any action to try to do so.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Then I suppose the loophole is to play on Linux.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s Borderlands. They already had that claim. I don’t feel good about it, but they made this change after I’d already started this trek. It’s one more data point that gets me closer to only buying games on GOG, but I’m not all the way there yet. It’s definitely nefarious that it’s all good and legal to change the terms of the thing you bought after it’s already been sold to you. However, I also don’t see any evidence yet that it’s actually getting root level access to your Windows machine other than someone’s summary in a review, which is not exactly direct from the source.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Yes, support for Borderlands 2 continued long after it was clear that Steam Machines weren’t taking off, which means it’s on a newer version than the Linux native one that Aspyr ported. You can still run the Linux native version, but if you want to play with your Windows friends or just get access to all the DLC, you need to run it through Proton.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

But it doesn’t have the mandatory kernel level disclaimer either.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Sure, but it also seems like it’s data that you offer up via a 2K account, which I don’t have. I have a user name tied to my Steam ID, and that’s about it.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

He’s also in the crop of people who rage baited his audience with nonsense about Sweet Baby Inc.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Good: ArcSys making a Marvel fighter like Guilty Gear Strive. Bad: Published by PlayStation, which means even the PC version will require PSN.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

For me as well, unless Valve and Sony work out PSN compatibility with Proton in the next year or so.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

If you get any kind of consistency, you should reach out to the mods and get it added to the sidebar. I like having a thread like this in a gaming community.

I’ve been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance in anticipation of the sequel, which I already bought. I feel like I never know when the next opportunity to do side quests will be, so I found a good break in the story around main story quest 8-ish, and I’m just doing those for a while. The first couple of missions set some false expectations for what this game is and what you’ll have to put up with, but it becomes much more straight forward after that.

I’ve also been going through the Borderlands games ahead of that series’ sequel, and I just got to Borderlands 3. Man, that game feels great to play. It’s been interesting to play through these games so rapid fire, because whatever my criticism was of the previous game, the developers also knew about it and addressed it in the next game. I hear the writing takes a turn for the worst in this game, but the first few hours are more than tolerable so far.

And for quicker sessions, I’ve also been playing through Devil May Cry 4. I started playing through these games back when Hi-Fi Rush completely floored me, and then some other games came out, and I put DMC4 down for a while. Now that I picked it up again, it’s still great, but I’m not really sure what to do with Nero’s revving mechanic.

Why are you trying to wean your girlfriend off of Strive? I love me some +R too, but both of those games are great!

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

How far are you? I found chapter 2 to be a slog, in particular, but then it picks up right after that.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Yeah, the rough part is that they send you back and forth between the two furthest corners of that map over and over again. But if you like the political intrigue of the show or Game of Thrones or that sort of thing, plus the twist the series puts on classic fables, it will get there, haha.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Strive is so good. Any top 8 of that game is just full of people using the RC system in really clever ways.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Now that it’s launched, might you be interested in a GOG version? I’ve got this game on my radar, but I won’t be able to get around to it at least until I finish a few other long games I’m working through.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

This would be the last exit that makes sense to either delay Marathon or cut their losses and let it die a quick death.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

The word was they cancelled their marketing, which doesn’t mean a delay is definite. When Concord wasn’t going well, they just put it out and hoped for the best despite a beta with terrible metrics, and…that’s an option again, where they’re not throwing good money after bad.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Those “What’s New” updates are so easily abused. If you played multiple games in a series, every single one of them will post an update about the latest game, so you’ll see the same update like 5 times. Or, if you’re Street Fighter, you’ll pretend that it matters which one of your fictional characters currently has a birthday, and that will litter the feed until you click on “show less”.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I’m questioning if there’s ever been a good D&D video game adaptation that wasn’t trying its best to just replicate the tabletop experience, and then I’d ask if it’s worth trying when you could just continue to make good replications of the tabletop experience.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

And hopefully they do away with those unlocks being tied to a server of theirs.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Close! That was Agent Under Fire, not Nightfire. It’s one of my favorite multiplayer shooters, specifically with nonsense like the Q Claw, Q Jet, and moon gravity turned on. Nightfire really pared back on the stuff that made Agent Under Fire ridiculous, and it was good for different reasons.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

From the press releases at the time, it appears the new owners only have the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, not their other IPs like Ghostwire or Evil Within. If they had to be choosy, Hi-Fi Rush was the one worth getting.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren’t open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There’s something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

How did you feel about Baldur’s Gate 3? Because the structure of the maps in the first two Witcher games are what most of the genre is like.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Always has been.

There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).

As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

GaaS means you have ongoing expenses after launch in a way that normal games do not. The costs are higher, but they keep chasing the much larger reward that only a super small percentage will ever achieve.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Rivals of Aether II is a more realistic contender to Smash. It had a really good turnout at Combo Breaker this year.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.

To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

The cast is playing high schoolers, right? If they’re re-recording audio at all, wouldn’t it be better to get people in their 20s, at the most, rather than in their 40s?