ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

How do you figure? That’s not what I got out of this article.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Matt Piscatella pointed out on Bluesky that a launch like this is only a function of how much inventory they made available. The Xbox One had the third most successful US launch of a console.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Often times you do, but plenty of other times there’s nothing left, and I think that’s where the frustration sets in.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launching on Game Pass and, like its progenitor, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk.

It’s this thinking that led to Starfield and Redfall being priced at $70 and Hi-Fi Rush priced at $30.

I could bitterly rationalise it if this were the release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80

Why? Playground hasn’t even made a game in this genre before. Why do you expect that to be more worth $80 than the company that’s been making acclaimed RPGs since its inception?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The Outer Worlds 1 was a fantastic palate cleanser after Starfield.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Nah, I loved The Outer Worlds. It gave me exactly what I wanted from the setting, it made me laugh, and it wasn’t bogged down in bloat by trying to be any bigger than it ought to have been.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That’s a bummer. There was a lot that looked great to me, though most of it was for 2026. Given how much good stuff there is in 2025 that I still have to get through, that’s a-okay by me.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

We very much do need GOG to be competitive with the market leader but with the primary selling point of DRM-free, yes. And is it a coincidence that the beginning of your username is the same as that awful YouTuber?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

This machine will be the same desktop-mode-not-required-but-allows-for-more-functionality thing that the Steam Deck is, but it will chew through battery faster in exchange for more compatibility.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I sincerely doubt that this device will satisfy criteria #1 or #2, unless you’ve got a generous definition for #2.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They have given up on their own handheld. And why wouldn’t you prefer the PC library when it’s so much larger? The appeal to this device at this point is that the new UI is better for the handheld use case than desktop Windows.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

At least at first, it will be the only handheld running this version of Windows. So maybe after a year or two, it won’t be all that unique, true, but a year or two is a long time at the rate these handhelds are advancing.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

i just wish Xbox came out swinging with a compatibility layer for the Xbox game library

Though not officially announced, signs of that are appearing already, including a hint or two in the speech of the conference.

And for plenty of people, being able to play live service games that don’t work on SteamOS, with a UI that’s almost as good finally, will be enough.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I hate live service games and Windows, so no, this device is not for me, but those are also the most popular games on the market by a wide margin. Despite how awful the Windows experience is today, there’s still one Windows handheld sold for every two Steam Decks. That situation can only improve with a version of Windows designed for handhelds.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The audience has very much expanded since covid. Around that same time is when fighting games (at large) finally got the good netcode, because they finally realized they could no longer get away with the easier, cheaper, bad netcode. You might not know what the word “rollback” means, and probably most players don’t either, but I think everyone intuitively understands that it feels better to play these games online and that they’re getting better matches. This also came along with a few new ways to shed motion inputs, or at least make them optional, in many big releases, and a renewed focus on trying to invent good new single player offerings. Fighting game majors are breaking attendance records every year, and in a world where the e-sports bubble has burst, the fighting game scene is the only one growing organically from grass roots without spending money it doesn’t actually make (Fatal Fury might be the exception here, due to ties to the Saudi family).

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

For the fighting game nerds out there: an interview on IGN confirmed that there are KI breakers during active tags, and combos will be limited in similar ways to Killer Instinct, meaning a combo meter rather than hitstun decay. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; this comment wasn’t for you. These were the answers I was looking for, and now this is my most anticipated fighting game despite having no familiarity with the source material.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I’m sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

And the YouTube link:

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

Then I suppose the loophole is to play on Linux.

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc 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, miesiąc temu

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

ampersandrew, miesiąc 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.