canis_majoris

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

You can refund games for being buggy, you cannot however, play them for dozens of hours and then refund them. Steam’s limit is two hours and two weeks.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

Cool, can WoW be part of my Gamepass sub now? Thanks.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

No, I think they’re going to continue adding massive value to the Gamepass system to keep it afloat and competitive. Maybe a WoW sub is a bit of a stretch, but basically all other games will thrive on the platform. StarCraft 2 is still the benchmark RTS for competitive play. Overwatch and Diablo are not my cups of tea but they would also make great offerings on the platform. Most of Blizzard’s core franchises outside of WoW itself are heavily MTX’d out the ass, battle passes, cosmetics, whatever - even if it’s included in the gamepass sub, the theoretical higher volume of players will likely compensate for unit sales through the aforementioned MTX.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s funny that I lead with this because I had a minute to think about it and honestly I kind of just don’t care. Dragonflight did not renew my hopes for retail, although it had some neat mechanic changes. Classic will be over for me probably by the end of January, unless they announce basically Classic+ based around the WOTLK talents. I am going to get my Shadowmourne, kill Arthas on heroic, and then go play FFXIV.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

I don’t think Sony is going to give up that easily, nor is Nintendo or Valve.

Microsoft has tried, with sheer force of capital to buy out these players and couldn’t understand when they were denied. In tech you can do big mergers and acquisitions with sheer capital but Nintendo is a pride and joy crown jewel of Japanese industry, and no amount of money would allow MS to buy them.

MS’ big push for accessibility and cloud gaming makes them ultimately platform agnostic over time, because they are leveraging the cloud technology to deploy their catalogue on any machine with an internet connection and a screen.

“Classic” Microsoft, the EEE (envelop, extend, extinguish) strategy that made them assholes through the 90s and early aughts hasn’t been nearly as prevalent in the current Nadella era. More often than not MS has been forking open source projects or simply contributing to them in their own ways rather than building proprietary systems.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

Terra Nil is like 80% of this.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

Terra Nil is a great game. It’s really chill and relaxing.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

This is the second article today where I saw Todd Howard talking about severely nerfing aspects of the game. Earlier this morning I read an article saying similar things about the space suit system - initially they were going to be a lot more punitive on what you can and can’t wear based on environmental conditions, so you’d need a suit for cold, a suit for toxicity, a suit for radiation, etc.

canis_majoris, 8 miesięcy temu

Yeah the hazard warnings are pretty useless now, because they’re not actually that dangerous or meaningful. I didn’t even know that it caused damage, I guess I haven’t been on a severe enough planet.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn’t even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I know, right? Service has been down almost an entire year.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I stuck with Gamepass because I am a PC gamer. I toyed with PSN but the PS5 controller was not natively recognized by the client at the time I was testing it, which is dumb as fuck. Steam will pick up the controller and use their drivers for most games, but the PSN service just didn’t work with the PS5 controller natively.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

The menus are pretty fucking awful. The map is really really bad. For a game that’s like 90% based around fast travel you would think they would have a map that makes sense.

Skyrim never improved on any of these aspects even though it got re-released like 15 times. I still have to use UI addons a dozen years later. I love that Bethesda has a great, strong modding community, but it’s really really shitty that they’re constantly relied on for regular, baseline things that shouldn’t be bad.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

Skyrim needed UI mods, and to wit, still needs UI mods, despite being re-released like 15 times with limitless opportunities to improve basically anything - instead they focused on high resolution textures, which is something that the fanbase basically already makes on launch week.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it’s been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I’ve ever played. It’s funny because they were getting worse.

Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played on launch.

It does get better with time, but it’s inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I’m still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

The indoors Fallout map is the worst thing ever. I don’t think it’s ever once helped me out of a jam or cleared up confusion. If there are multiple levels (and there always are) it’s all just slapped together in a single plane on the map so it makes less than zero sense.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

That’s fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It’s not an excuse.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I’d say that was probably the general attitude for SR1 and 2 overall - they were largely GTA clones, but when GTA took a turn into gritty and realistic, SR3 took a left on silly and surreal which allowed it to separate itself from the stigma of being a “GTA clone” and into its own category.

Even SR2 has a lot of really silly stuff that they don’t really do in GTA games, like the property value minigame where you spray literal shit over everything. Stuff like that eventually became too absurd for Rockstar to want to do but it was perfect for SR.

3 is one of the only games I managed to 100% because I enjoyed it greatly. 4 was funny at first but then it became boring after a while when you had all your superpowers and it got boring to keep fighting the same alien SWAT cops over and over again.

For Gat out of Hell, I never bought into the “Johnny Gat is the GOAT” attitude that SR tries to get everybody to acknowledge. It was literally just a filler game comprised of mini-games, and I would often opt to play Kinzie instead of Johnny because I just like her character more.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect progress from a sequel. I think it’s even more reasonable to expect progress from a reboot.

The whole point of rebooting something is to be able to bring fresh ideas into the system, which can include stories or mechanics. At the very least a sequel should have some kind of feature parity with the first game, otherwise you’ve essentially just made a shitty DLC as the next iteration by dropping features.

Saint’s Row 2 had a great amount of content, and even when we were playing over LAN with Hamachi, the game was somehow smart enough to figure out what stupid shit we were getting up to, and it prompted us to play “death tag”. We didn’t even know it was a built in feature in the game, we had just been running around killing each other in various funny ways until the game said “hey, we have a structured way you can do this” and we had a blast.

Saint’s Row 3 expanded on everything SR2 had set up. It drove the story forward, the engine was much better than the original PS2 iteration and there were just as many minigames if not more.

Saint’s Row 4 took everything to the extreme though, which is unfortunate because that’s really where the death starts happening. When they literally blew up the planet as a plot point and turned it into a Matrix parody it lost a ton of focus and grounding that made it enjoyable long-term.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.

Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.

I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

I play a lot of games on Gamepass so I am basically just renting it.

canis_majoris, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s fun and finished. Too bad you don’t like it but it’s a really enjoyable game for most players including myself.

canis_majoris, 10 miesięcy temu

It’s a perfect digitization of D&D 5th edition - it’s like having an automatic dungeon master using the rules and regulations we’ve been playing with on paper for ages.

It has a massive plot that can vary wildly on playthroughs depending on how rolls go, just like the real version.

It’s four-player co-op with PVE in an age where cooperation is increasingly rare outside of competitive team games.

It’s a well designed, properly built, finished product that can be expanded on with DLC, rather than using them to address core gameplay issues. (looking at you Paradox)

canis_majoris, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah because Twitter is not a real place. The actual D&D community spoke with their wallets and they said “we like a good, finished product without stupid terms of use” and all bought BG3. People who don’t even play D&D bought BS3 to play with folks who do play D&D.