And that trend will continue, which is why console sales are well behind where they were last generation, and it’s why the next Xbox will just run Windows.
They ought to patch out the need for Ubisoft’s launcher. Same goes for EA’s back catalog, for that matter. At least EA’s newest releases don’t come with the launcher.
Even when you buy their games on Steam, there’s an EA launcher there in addition to Steam. This is the case for It Takes Two, for instance, but not for Split Fiction. Split Fiction only uses Steam if you bought it on Steam.
I’ve been playing through the Borderlands games for the first time lately and really enjoying them. I should be through the Pre-Sequel and 3 by then. Also, there’s probably something we can infer about the GTA 6 release date from this, given the leak that Mafia: The Old Country comes out August 8th.
It’s my thought as well, but Ghost of Yotei was scheduled for October already, and Sony would surely know when GTA comes out, so maybe it’s a November game? Borderlands will likely be enough of a time sink that you might want a few months after it before releasing a GTA.
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
I play Fantasy Critic with some friends. We allow remakes in our league but not remasters. This one counts as a remake for purposes of this site, with a flag on it to note that it was contentious. This game definitely blurs some lines on some definitions.
The story was the most interesting thing about Starfield, since like me, the writers of Starfield also really loved the movie Interstellar. Unfortunately, nearly every plot line sort of wrapped up in an unfulfilling way for one reason or another.
I think the gist of Bethesda games is that what they did was truly impressive 20 years ago, but each individual piece of them is kind of bad. The combat is bad, the story is bad, the RPG systems are way worse than their pen and paper roots, the NPC schedules tend to do little more than make quest givers just appear in slightly different locations, and what should be dynamic uses of physics and NPC line of sight never manifests in anything more interesting than putting a bucket on a shop keeper’s head to steal things.
There’s nothing quite like a Bethesda game, because I think when another developer sits down to make a new game, they try to make one or more of those pieces way better than a Bethesda game rather than implementing everything that Bethesda implements, because plenty of it is bad and will be bad without being able to focus on it.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s only searchable for the current calendar year, and we can view games we had on our roster in the same league in previous years. No one had any of those games on their roster. The site differentiates between remasters, remakes, and reimaginings, with a reimagining being something like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII Remake. We used to not allow remakes, but we changed the rules for our league starting last year (personally, I voted against it, but I was outvoted). The league commissioner can always override a decision that the site makes when categorizing a game.
Yes, it is fantasy sports but with video games. You draft games, and your points are determined by their score on Open Critic. Over 70 gains points, under 70 loses points. Every point over 90 is worth double. The way my friends and I structure our league, we have one counter pick during the draft, and the counter picker gets the inverse of the points of that game; so if I have a friend who drafts Kirby Air Riders, and I counter pick it, and it scores 67, my friend loses 3 points and I gain 3 points. If I counter pick a game that scores positive points, I lose those points instead.
The only game on my roster that has released so far is Knights in Tight Spaces, which only got me 6 points (I aim for about 13 points per game), because it scored a 76 on Open Critic, and I was perhaps a bit too risky when I drafted Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, because I got counter picked on it, and it doesn’t have a release date, so I might be stuck with a game that scores 0 points due to not releasing this year.
Correct, you don’t know that. You can speculate on releases, like I did with Pony Island 2, and get counter picked as a punishment for the risk. As long as it’s in the site’s database, it’s fair game. I drafted “Unannounced 3D Mario Game” this year, but then I picked up “Unannounced 3D Donkey Kong Game” after the draft for 1 in-game dollar (no one else put in a bid for it), as a hedge, since the rumor was that either a Mario or a Donkey Kong game would be made by the Mario Odyssey team for the Switch 2 launch. No one counter-picked Mario, so I’m allowed to drop it, and the Donkey Kong entry automatically updated to Bananza. The “season” is a calendar year. We do our draft early in January, and typically the first release of the year will be like halfway through the month, and the score that each game earns is whatever score it has at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.
Because we don’t know every release a year in advance, A) this game got a lot harder starting back in 2022, because that’s when game marketing cycles got way shorter, and B) some of the best reviewing games of 2025 probably won’t even be announced until this coming June.
They have their own database. If there’s a release or a rumor they don’t know about, you can suggest one, but they ask you to cite your sources. If it’s got a Steam page and you provide that link, they’ll basically add it right away, which is what happened when I got Total Chaos added. Fantasy Critic also gives league commissioners a lot of power to house rule just about anything.
This ‘edition’ (I feel a bit odd calling it an edition, like I’m selling you a newspaper or something) might focus more on some GOG news, so consider this more of a ‘lite’ news version I guess?...
Judging by how these posts are taken here, I think once you’re done vacationing, you could look into doing this professionally.
It’s cool that Breath of Fire IV has that tag saying that the game was picked up due to the dream list, but I’ve got some concerns about what GOG will or won’t touch. Someone here on Lemmy pointed out correctly that these are always the PC versions of games in the Good Old Games program. Several of the games they’ve picked up recently are games that I only ever thought of as console games and didn’t know that they had PC versions. The problem with that is that up until approximately a few years into the life of the Xbox 360, it was quite common to have a PC version that didn’t resemble the console versions of the same title at all. For instance, the Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter games on PC have the same stories and voice lines, but the levels and gameplay mechanics are totally different. Spider-Man 2, based on the movie, is immensely important in video game history, but only the console version; the PC version is widely considered to be garbage. 007: Nightfire is on the dream list, but everyone there is sure to mention that the one people want is the console version. Anyway, I hope they can figure this out and start getting some classic console games saved just as well as the PC versions, and I hope that the PC versions they’re choosing aren’t compromised compared to the ones that are so fondly remembered.
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
Indies are making now what would have been AAA back then. And as many great games as there were back then, we get more now. Back then, it was possible to keep up with just about every major release as it came out. Now I’ve got a backlog of 9 games that piqued my interest and came out this year that I haven’t had time to get around to yet, and it’s only April.
One man is not responsible for all of your criticisms of writing in their games for decades. The writing and development processes of games are too opaque for you to be able to attribute anything to one person on teams as large as Bethesda’s.
Nah, don’t try to pass this off as, “I was only joking, bro”. People get real death threats when this kind of shit happens in forums. I remember the Jennifer Hepler stuff, and there was just as much expert analysis that went into her witch hunt back then.
I have a small gaming group of 3-4 ppl where we love proper progression based multiplayer games. We’ve been playing Barotrauma for ages, a fair share of voidcrew, multiplayer modded RimWorld, and we rode the Lethal Company Wave of crew based mission collecting games, but we’re looking for more games in the same vein with a...
That first part is exactly what I’m saying. Many multiplayer games involve starting from zero every time, so that didn’t seem to be what OP is looking for. I wouldn’t recommend Vagante, for instance. It has a small handful of unlocks, but the lack of other progression is a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, a loot game like Borderlands will have you continually upgrading your character and gear over many sessions, and that’s likely what OP is asking for.
Often times they’re the same thing. The money comes from the owner of the IP, who contracted out the project; owner of the IP decides they don’t want to do it anymore; no more money coming in to fund the people working on it.
This is a date you pick when you want to be nominated for the Game Awards, and also when you’re confident that Grand Theft Auto won’t interfere with your sales.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
I have fond memories of being the only one I knew with a Virtual Boy. My mom got it on clearance along with games like Teleroboxing and Galactic Pinball.
I’m currently in the last few hours of the DLC of Borderlands 2, trying to wrap it up before moving on to the Pre-Sequel.
My wife and I finished up Split Fiction and have moved on to Blue Prince, which we’re 3 in-game days into. We love a good puzzle game, and we’re told this one will fit the bill.
And besides those, I’ve still been replaying Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the first time. I made it to the titular city in the former and I’m still probably in early hours in the latter, probably about to get an introduction to a major character in the story (“The Prey” is the name of the quest that I’m on right now, if you’re curious).
Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
I’m pro-paid-mods, but at least the way it was rolled out the first time was pretty shit. The modders were left with a very small cut after Valve and Bethesda each got theirs, and Bethesda did basically no vetting of the content to make sure it wasn’t stolen or malware or what have you.
Yeah, but the headline cuts out that part where they’re not growing. I think more customers can do math than console manufacturers are willing to admit, or at least more than Sony and Nintendo are willing to admit. The word’s out about how much that online subscription is going to cost you for multiplayer over the years, and if they were interested in running a console the way that consoles have always been run, the lowest hanging fruit to keep that going and to be competitive would be to remove that cost; they’re making it up in digital sales anyway. My guess is that once the new Xbox is just a disguised Windows PC, that will be when they drop the requirement of Live/Game Pass for online multiplayer.
Also worth noting that sometime in the past week or so, maybe, they’ve changed their messaging on Game Pass. They put so much of their weight behind that thing trying to become the Netflix of video games, as a way of pivoting in a world where they can’t compete with PlayStation by doing what PlayStation does, only to end up with a fraction of the subscriber base that they expected to have. It’s a lucrative base nonetheless, but now that they’re decidedly not the Netflix of video games, they’re just leaning into being the industry’s largest publisher.
But not to the point that you could load up your Steam account or a random Windows game disc from your shelf. That’s the thing that’s likely to change, which has a profound impact on the library you can play on that machine, not to mention your ability to play online without a subscription fee.
I’m not giving them or Valve any shit. I have a living room PC running Bazzite, and I had a Steam Machine back in the day. That’s a product I want. And Microsoft is reacting to market realities before their competition is, because none of them wanted the gravy train to end, but it is ending.
For what it’s worth, I’ve got a number of friends, all in their 30s, who swear by Game Pass, as at least most of them are the type to bounce around to as many games in a given year as they possibly can without sweating if they finish them or not. Many they don’t even like, but they like to have formed their own opinion on them. It doesn’t make sense for me, as I do value getting to keep the game when I’m done, so that I can revisit it whenever I want.
All of my traditional consoles are collecting dust, and just moments ago before reading your comment, I was evaluating whether or not it makes sense to get rid of my PS4.
I found out a few days ago that my PS4 is no longer accepting Blu Rays, and my basic troubleshooting steps were unsuccessful, which severely diminishes the value I get from that machine, hence my deliberations minutes ago, lol. I have to ask myself how happy I’d be with the PC version of Until Dawn the next time I want to revisit that game, because that’s about the only game on that system I’d want to play that I couldn’t run better on PC. I couldn’t even be bothered to finish Bloodborne at the frame rate it’s got on a legitimate PS4.
I’m seeing reports in the forums that the GOG version of the game still has its LAN multiplayer. I only played a bit of Crysis multiplayer, but I can see why it would have been great. I was mostly on college networks at the time, so online multiplayer was rough for me unless it was peer to peer with someone else at my school, and hardly anyone had a computer that could run the game at the time; mine only got it running on low/medium settings.
However, there could be a fairly simple explanation there: Morpheus dies in the MMO game The Matrix Online. That specific event in the game is considered canon because the writer-directors, the Wachowskis, gave their approval to the game.
The fourth movie was written by one of the Wachowskis as a metaphor for their own transition, as a creative outlet during a grieving period after the death of their parents.
As I recall them saying, they felt that way maybe in retrospect? They hadn’t transitioned in real life by then, so that’s getting pretty subconscious at that point. At the time, the metaphors that were clear were about dreams, the savior allegory, a sense of not mattering as a cog in the machine, and so forth.
I did. Its cynicism about making another Matrix movie is well-noted and some of the most fascinating things about that movie, but it’s also a protagonist swap between Neo and Trinity, which makes a ton of sense for the trans metaphor. It can be cynical about the realities of making the movie and still not be sabotage. And also it was only written by one of the two Wachowskis.
and I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed that the new owners will be able to keep it running long into its twilight years—even if they’ve got little planned in the way of fresh content
The Borderlands games made billions of dollars, and no one needs to keep them running.
What the petition is strictly asking for is to leave the game playable. If that means the game requires multiplayer, then there should be some way to play multiplayer without the server on the other end. I’d certainly prefer that they just make the server executable available. I personally don’t care what the architecture is. People have gotten pirate MMO servers running. Even if it’s something the layman won’t know how to do, we need to have the option to run the server ourselves.
In a game like an MMO or most free to play games, multiplayer is all that exists. The game as it exists on your computer doesn’t even have everything that it needs to function. It’s asking for the game to continue functioning. As for CoD, the petition is not allowed to be prescriptive, so it would be to the government to determine specifically what must happen. In most cases, the shortest path to honoring what this petition asks for is to provide the server code, but I agree that plenty of games make that distinction very blurry.
Once they discontinue it, they dust their hands clean and their work here is done. That’s all that means. Releasing whatever they have to do to allow it to continue to operate is up to and including the moment that it’s supported. Discontinuing support and leaving people with something they can’t play is what the petition is asking to fix. If they did the work to make The Crew playable after the server was shut down, then they are still not providing any additional resources once they discontinue it; that work would have been done in advance. Once again, the petition can’t ask for how they’d like the problem to be legally solved or how the government should define the rules. In the video that typically comes attached to this with a more verbose problem statement and what we should expect as consumers, you can buy a digital horse, but turning the game off removes your ability to access the horse you paid for, so it’s asking to retain the ability to use everything you bought. That’s more than just a phone home if your game client doesn’t contain the multiplayer mode where you would use the horse (or CoD mulitplayer skin).
Pardon me. That’s an assumption on my part that the people in this community are the types that are so ingrained in this stuff that you’ve seen that video, and a link to this petition, a dozen times at this point. This is a campaign organized by Ross Scott at Accursed Farms. The main video pitch is here, and the super short version is here. And here’s the video that came along with the launch of the EU petition.
I don’t really follow Ross Scott outside of this campaign, but I believe he’s a US citizen married to a Polish woman, living in Poland. It sounds like it would take an act of Congress to change things here in the US. My e-mails to my representatives have gone functionally unanswered, which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
Next gen PS and Xbox consoles scheduled for 2027, tipped by cancelled Blade Runner game (www.notebookcheck.net) angielski
Ubisoft patch Splinter Cell Blacklist after 12 years to add achievements (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Wario64: Borderlands 4 is moving its release date up to September 12th (bsky.app) angielski
I’ve been playing through the Borderlands games for the first time lately and really enjoying them. I should be through the Pre-Sequel and 3 by then. Also, there’s probably something we can infer about the GTA 6 release date from this, given the leak that Mafia: The Old Country comes out August 8th.
Blizzard reportedly taps Nexon to publish Overwatch mobile and a new StarCraft game (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
It’s unclear which genre the StarCraft game will be in. Overwatch Mobile has reportedly been referred to internally as “Overwatch 3,”...
Oblivion remake is... really making it apparent how outdated Bethesda is in its approach to making games angielski
I know there’s great love for Oblivion (I never played it when it was new), and of course Skyrim is the gold standard for new fans (I played the shit out of that and it was my first entry into the elder scrolls back when it came out 14 years ago…) but I really feel like this shadow drop of a half assed remake is just priming...
Steam Deck / Gaming News #12 angielski
This ‘edition’ (I feel a bit odd calling it an edition, like I’m selling you a newspaper or something) might focus more on some GOG news, so consider this more of a ‘lite’ news version I guess?...
Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators) angielski
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
Ahoy: 2000. (www.youtube.com) angielski
00:00 Introduction...
Larian Studios Talks About Its Future (www.youtube.com) angielski
Larian is working on two games right now and restructuring the company around making both of those projects flow....
Oblivion Remastered Impressions (and Discussion Thread) angielski
I’ve been playing a lot of Oblivion Remastered and was hoping on starting a discussion thread about it....
Please suggest good progression based multiplayer games angielski
I have a small gaming group of 3-4 ppl where we love proper progression based multiplayer games. We’ve been playing Barotrauma for ages, a fair share of voidcrew, multiplayer modded RimWorld, and we rode the Lethal Company Wave of crew based mission collecting games, but we’re looking for more games in the same vein with a...
Unannounced Blade Runner Game Canceled At Supermassive (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Ghost of Yōtei comes to PlayStation 5 on October 2 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
Steam Deck / Gaming News #11 angielski
This week’s interesting bits and pieces in Steam Deck / Linux and general gaming that I have found, all compiled by me :)...
Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) (www.youtube.com) angielski
Xbox CEO: Consoles are a 'good, established business' and a 'really healthy part' of Game Pass (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
Thoughts about Crysis Remastered and multiplayer angielski
I feel like Crysis Remastered would have been interesting if it had multiplayer support....
Morpheus Actor Laurence Fishburne Reveals He Was Turned Down for The Matrix Resurrections — So He Might Not Be Back for Matrix 5 Either - IGN [Morpheus' character dies in The Matrix Online] (www.ign.com) angielski
However, there could be a fairly simple explanation there: Morpheus dies in the MMO game The Matrix Online. That specific event in the game is considered canon because the writer-directors, the Wachowskis, gave their approval to the game.
TV tie-in MMO looter shooter Defiance returns for a free-to-play third shot at life and gigantic messy boss battles (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
STOP destroying videogames angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/28425976...