ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Honestly, I think the Steam Deck has worse ergonomics than that last Steam Controller, but at least it has a d-pad and a second analog stick so that there’s always a way to play a game with no configuration.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Track pads and gyros are major features of the first Steam Controller that were brought forward to the Deck, and they can be game-changing for certain genres that have typically never controlled well on traditional controllers.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Personally I’ve never felt compelled to use the left touchpad, and I’ve never found a problem worth solving that the left pad would solve.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Black Myth: Wukong would surprise me, but the other 5 all have a real shot.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The state of AAA gaming is that releases slowed way down, resulting in way less output, which means you’re going to have fewer winners, by the numbers. Not every year can be like last year.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Quality or sales, I meant it the same way.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It’s bigger than lots of full games and has a proper beginning/middle/end. In the old days, it would have just been a sequel.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Asset reuse happens all the time even between sequels.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah, it’s no Baldur’s Gate 3, and I do hope they learn more lessons from contemporary CRPGs, but I’d say it has other strengths. I liked the combat, and I liked the story, characters, and world-building. Open worlds in most open world games are pretty shallow, and I’d say both this and The Witcher 3 follow that same template to the same ends, but at the very least, it allows you to approach an objective how you’d like after scouting it out, which feels satisfying. It’s RPG-lite, which manifests as a pretty good action game with some story branching, and I’m not upset about that, as much as I’d prefer they lean into the RPG stuff harder.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It got noticeably worse in the summer of last year. I have no idea what actually changed around then, but that was the first time the Steam forums were so toxic that it may not have been worth asking your question.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I’ve only got a few. Several of them don’t really track hours, but I know I’ve put over 1000 into them. Games like Super Smash Bros. (Melee, Brawl, and 4) and Rock Band 2.

Other than those, the only one I’ve measurably put 1000 hours into is Skullgirls, but Guilty Gear Strive will likely get there in a few years. Skullgirls is a game with so much depth that I can’t imagine ever getting bored of it. If anything, I’d just lose motivation because I can’t see the path to improving, but I’ll definitely never see every permutation of strategies you can employ by combining characters together. Guilty Gear Strive has so many creative ways to use its expanded Roman Cancel system that any Evo highlight reel is full of creative ways out of situations that you’ve never seen before.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

At this point, I’m aching desperately for that linear shooter. They have other strengths. Halo Infinite offered a ton more freedom than the old games, but it was worse off for it.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I’d be happy with DRM-free video purchases, but they don’t exist like they do for video games, and even video games aren’t available DRM-free across the board.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I’d very much prefer to not even have them take up shelf space, but it’s the only way that exists to actually own a copy of a movie or TV show. I have ripped a number of them, but if someone made the GOG for movies, I’d move all of my purchases over there.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

That few years is going toward making Windows less of a hindrance on handhelds and likely not so much into the hardware itself.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

In all likelihood, this would be a handheld PC that solves the problems that Windows has in that space.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

That’s Nintendo’s MO, not Microsoft’s.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

They haven’t really had a history of making you purchase them again. If you’ve got them now, you’ll still be playing the copies you already bought.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Those are supported platforms, yes. Many of them are redundant because the same license gives to access to the game on multiple platforms. I’m not defending them; your joke didn’t land because they don’t typically make you buy the same games over again. I’m a Linux fanboy and don’t own a Series X; I have no reason to defend Microsoft. Just make better jokes next time.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

There seem to be a lot of people here who haven’t gotten the memo that future Xboxes are likely to just be disguised Windows PCs, because they’re mostly interested in Game Pass and know they can’t compete otherwise. On an open platform, they couldn’t stop you from continuing to play your old games. They really don’t care about you re-purchasing their old games because they want you to rent a library. That’s why your joke was bad.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I don’t think I ever pitched a subscription as being better than ownership, just that your joke is divorced from the reality of the situation and the way Microsoft has operated for over a decade, and that’s why the joke didn’t land. Microsoft won’t get a stranglehold on the market, despite their best efforts.

What do you think consoles are? They are just a pc with proprietary software and hardware.

You are missing the distinction by several miles. A short list includes the lack of cert, the availability of competitors on the same platform, and backward compatibility whether they like it or not. If the value proposition is as poor as you expect it to be, then the launch of a portable Xbox will hardly be noticed next to the Steam Deck, but the more likely scenario is that it’s basically a Steam Deck that plays nicer with Game Pass and anti cheat technologies because it’s actually Windows under the hood. You’ve demonstrated a large lack of understanding about what’s changed between 6th gen consoles and today, but the short explanation is that I don’t see a reason to expect Microsoft to charge you for Halo again on this new platform, because it would be marketing suicide among plenty of other reasons.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Hopefully they got the memo that PC games need shader compilation steps, and then it ought to be fine.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

From the reader’s experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I’ll still reviews if they didn’t annoy me too much on my way there. I’ll still read Schreier when it isn’t paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

You can tune out and do something passive while the ad plays, and eventually the information you wanted will appear, as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read. Perhaps this is all just a matter of perspective though.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

There are a lot of reasons to not want to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11, so it’s likely those people who defiantly choose not to move on. In the case of Windows 11, it also requires newer hardware just for TPM support.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I believe in you! Personally, when I find someone charging me subscription prices for something that should have a one-time fee, I flip the bird and run to the nearest competitor, but I can’t speak for your line of work. For my amateur needs, open source alternatives have gotten the job done, and I wish you the best.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I think it’s just because it was the dominant monetization scheme when they were introduced, people got used to spending nothing up front on their mobile games. Then there are other barriers. Like why would I pay $15 for Stardew Valley when it probably won’t work with a controller or output comfortably to a TV. You can do some of that stuff sometimes in mobile, but there’s no enforcement of it, so that means you’re getting a lesser version of the game, which drives the price down. I wanted to revisit Planescape: Torment on mobile, but they ported it to Android too long ago, and now it just doesn’t work with modern Android OSes. They’re really teaching me to not treat mobile as a place where people like me should expect to find stuff to play.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

It gets to be way harder to argue in court when it isn’t a “clean kill”, using Ross Scott’s words, so The Crew is going to be one of the best examples we’ll ever get for courts to rule on. I expect Ubisoft would rather settle than let this one go that far though.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Pirates have managed to run servers for tons of MMOs. The only thing stopping people from running servers themselves is that they’re not made available.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

For my tastes, this is too deep a dive for a game whose entertainment value is going to come significantly from solving puzzles. I’m already sold on the game at this point.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

They’re not too scared to make Elder Scrolls VI. It’s their next project. It’s just not coming until probably 2028 at the rate they’ve been working lately, and it’ll feel 15 years out of date this time instead of only 10.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Given the technical problems with Cyberpunk at launch, I don’t know that it’s a great idea to champion them. Both studios have had a similar release cadence in the same time periods.

When Microsoft bought Bethesda, they bought Zenimax, which includes far more than just the likes of Elder Scrolls.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Not so much the size it takes up on your drive, he’s referring to the breadth and scope of the game itself.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I haven’t played Still Wakes the Deep, but Indika was that smaller game for me this year, and I’d highly recommend it.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

You have no idea. The opening moments of that game are surprising, even with that blurb and my recommendation, lol.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

More than the actual demand for them, as they’re reselling at a loss.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The Quake games (1 and 2) got updated with co-op support and cross play.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

Indicators are showing that Dragon Age is selling just fine. And it’s not like they get to their planning meeting and ask, “Can we spend some more time on the game design? It’s got real problems,” only to be met with, “No, we’ve got to really focus on diversity this quarter.” They’re not related. While I hardly trust Ubisoft to wow audiences with a cool story, it’s not hard to imagine the related struggles that a foreigner and a woman might have to bond over in that setting.

ampersandrew, 7 miesięcy temu

The opening moments of the story are about intense racism over the most minute differences.