kadu

kadu, 15 days ago

That’ll be the death of epic

Don’t threaten me with a good time

kadu, 15 days ago

Nope.

Dead serious.

I’d love it if the company who decides to sign exclusivity agreements for PC games stopped existing. And I would doubly love if we could go an entire generation without all games relying on a bugged version of Unreal Engine.

kadu, 14 days ago

It’s so comical that you had to search so hard to “find Valve doing the same” that your link is a 2005 forum post, and you still failed, as it’s absolutely not the same thing.

kadu, 14 days ago

Oh no I’m so offended!

What made you so angry, my dude? Your shaders not compiling correctly? Overpaying for an exclusive release that lacks basic features present in the discounted Steam release that came after the agreement ended?

kadu, 17 days ago

My dude really just took one of gaming’s most famous quotes, made it shorter, and it became news.

I really like Gabe.

kadu, 24 days ago

What the hell, I bought it recently but thought it was pretty much done and abandoned, that’s super cool

kadu, 24 days ago

Nice!

You could actually already buy completely custom boards for a few GameBoy models, only transplanting the SoC from an original board.

But those are sold with an unjustifiably high profit margin, by the “loved by the community but actually quite shady” retro modding stores.

kadu, 24 days ago

The Switch is more than proof enough that pretty much any modern game engine can compile to an ARM target with zero issues (though Nvidia’s low level APIs help, not sure about Qualcomm).

But there’s zero chance older PC games would ever be updated, and by older I don’t mean ancient, some AAA studios stop issuing updates in about one year after release.

So it all comes down to being able to emulate X86 on ARM… The best example we have is Apple, and games run but with a massive performance hit. Microsoft’s implementation is borderline unusable. I’m not sure what to expect from Valve.

kadu, 25 days ago

I agree with most reviews. Not sure about which one you’re specifically mentioning as it apparently contained factually wrong information…

But most reviews complained about the mix of a very generic story, which is true, with an extremely repetitive gameplay loop that isn’t nearly as engaging as other contemporary games. It’s fun for two hours, then you start to realize those two hours just keep repeating for the next 30 until you finish the game. I played for 15 hours, not 30 minutes, and had to drop it out of boredom - the gameplay couldn’t carry it forward, and the story was so generic it wasn’t able to fill that gap. It’s a game that I might not even remember in 5 years.

kadu, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Honestly though, “boss used a healing potion” or “boss used Heal Me Daddy spell” is bad game design, and somewhat immersion breaking.

It shows you couldn’t balance out the skill and pacing, so to artificially lengthen a fight, you simply dump more health.

It’s in the class of mechanics that disrespect the player’s time: it wasn’t a long fight because you had to figure out some hidden pattern, it wasn’t long because it was hard, it wasn’t a mistake you did… You did everything right and almost killed the boss too fast, so the game artificially removed your progress.

You can have healing mechanics that aren’t lazy: elemental affinities, a healer companion that can be defeated, etc

kadu, 1 month ago

It’s a good game, but not an action RPG - the combat is heavily turn based. Thanks though!

kadu, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I can’t test it (not colorblind) but many recent developments have been made with Microsoft’s help, and for all their faults, Microsoft is usually quite good with accessibility so perhaps it’s the good version.

kadu, 1 month ago

And there are games with DRM on GOG.

If the platform actually enforced non-DRM, it would make more sense.

kadu, 1 month ago

Path tracing is not the future - it’s the present.

kadu, 1 month ago

That’s FSR 1.0, not FSR 2.0.

FSR is a regular upscaling shader that only looks at nearby pixels. FSR 2.0 uses motion vectors and temporal reconstruction, it can’t be forced by the compositor into all games like FSR 1.0 could.

kadu, 1 month ago

The game engine must be tuned to provide the data, Mesa can’t force it.

kadu, 1 month ago

This game is fun, but after about 15 hours you realize you’ve actually seen and explored all the gameplay elements - they’re just repeated for another 30 hours.

So it’s a good buy if you would enjoy a classic zombie apocalypse scenario, with a loooooot of biker dudes being all about bikes and cranking that hog. If you need a deep story, do not buy, because the gameplay can’t carry it along alone.

kadu, 1 month ago

Honestly, that’s not an issue if you can scale down.

I don’t understand why people assume their hardware should be able to max everything out. The game should obviously target current consumer hardware, otherwise they’ll have nobody to sell it to, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with allowing the engine to run with settings current hardware can’t handle - but newer hardware in the future will.

If you buy your hardware to masturbate over the thought of setting the slides to “ultra” you might be disappointed. If you buy your hardware to game, turn the settings down and go be happy.

kadu, 1 month ago

Well, Valorant has significantly less cheaters and they get banned much more often… But then people go nuts over “iNvASiVe AntIcHeAt”.

You can’t have both. Either complain about anticheat and live with cheaters, or run anticheat and enjoy multiplayer.

kadu, 1 month ago

I simply do not buy games on release.

I won’t even buy Silksong on release - wait at least a couple of weeks for the impatient to beta test it for you.

kadu, 1 month ago

Yes, the publisher is to blame.

But it will keep happening regardless - so you can either keep falling for it and screaming it’s not your fault, or wise up and start having a bit more patience and buying games later.

kadu, 1 month ago

There are lots of benefits to this approach.

You wait for a sale and not only do you pay less, you get a patched version of the game, with mods available, often with DRM removed or toned down, walkthroughs and wikis already matured, and depending on how long you wait, your hardware might have evolved allowing you to experience the game better than you could at release.

kadu, 1 month ago

There’s also the big issue that Microsoft isn’t just a giant games publisher, it also owns one of the only 3 consoles with a viable market, and they absolutely dominate the PC operating system market, including their graphics API, store and dependencies.

kadu, 1 month ago

This device was sent by the manufacturer to the reviewer, but they haven’t disclosed this relationship.

kadu, 1 month ago

I’m so happy they’re moving away from the “New Super Mario” formula.

Too bad they’re still going nuts on “everything is made out of plastic” look for the 2D games, but everything else is looking to be a major return to the World formula and that’s great

kadu, 2 months ago

I bought Diablo 3 in a physical DVD in a local computer store. This is Brazil, so the mere idea of managing to line up and buy a game at the same day as everyone else in the world was huge at the time.

I get the game, I install it, and despite not having the best PC it did run well - I also don’t remember suffering with the server issues most people did at launch. However, I need to take a break to study for some tests, and after that, I moved cities so this meant I took a break from the game for a few months.

When I come back, my account is locked. Why? Well, I was playing everyday, but then I was not, and they interpreted this a “suspicious sudden change of playing habits”. They wanted a picture of my ID to unlock my account. Guess what though, their support wasn’t equipped to deal with a Brazilian ID. Of course, being brazilian, my only ID is this one.

So that was how Blizzard locked me out of a game I owned, a game I could physically hold in my hands.

And that’s the story of why I’m never buying a Blizzard product, regardless of medium or store, regardless of quality or hype, regardless of promises or support pages. The game could literally make my computer start ejecting gold nuggets out of the USB 2.0 port, and I would not play a Blizzard game.

kadu, 2 months ago

The official system requirements page actually lists 85 GB, or at least it did yesterday, not sure if this was changed.

But even at 85 GB, it wouldn’t be particularly weird for a modern FPS title.

kadu, 2 months ago

There’s no way Sony is giving up on PC ports now.

They invest into developing a game and get all the sales within their own game store, plus the exclusivity boosts the sales of the console itself and next titles in the franchise. Then, after all this effort and cost is long gone, they get to invest minimal effort to sell and hype the same game all over again to another audience and, again, try to hook these players into the franchise perhaps even selling a console to them. There are no downsides, only extra money.

kadu, 2 months ago

Of course it is.

Being an Epic exclusive is the same as not existing on PC, unless you’re Fortnite.

In fact, people were packaging the Yuzu emulator + Tony Hawk’s ROM in a binary as a “pirate PC copy” to avoid Epic.

kadu, 2 months ago

It runs on a Switch, so it’s going to be significantly better on the Deck.

kadu, 2 months ago

I wouldn’t call CrossCode a “classic JRPG” at all, it’s nowhere near one.

It’s an action RPG, almost emulating a western MMORPG.

kadu, 2 months ago

I hope so, a duopoly isn’t exactly good but it’s better than a single viable player.

And it’s not like AMD is perfect: their APUs had several issues that Valve and open source contributors had to fix on their own.

kadu, 2 months ago

If these platforms supported Linux, they’d be able to compete with Steam… 15 years ago.

Nowadays Steam offers so many solutions to PC gaming that other clients simply would take ages to copy. Steam Input, cloud saves that actually work, Steam Link, Remote Play Together, etc

kadu, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I wish GIMP had a full UI redesign like Blender, it could work as a Photoshop replacement for many use cases but… Jesus it’s non intuitive, flawed and it mixes opposing design principles all the time.

There was a project that renamed it to a less controversial name and updated the UI to more closely resemble modern photo manipulation tools, but they’ve stopped working on it before a major release.

EDIT: There’s PhotoGIMP by Diolinux, a Brazilian Linux YouTube channel with a really nice host. This is a set of plugins and configuration files that try to ease the transition from Photoshop to GIMP for newcomers. It’s certainly good, but as an add-on, it can’t actually fix all issues with GIMP.

kadu, 2 months ago

Are there other open source projects near feature parity with GIMP, though?

There are certainly other commercial software, like Affinity, and certainly some shady Photoshop clones like Photopea (and it does work really well) but nothing like GIMP, as far as I’m aware.

kadu, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

So that’s it, I’ve lived to see carpetless as a viable non-TAS strategy. That’s crazy.

kadu, 2 months ago

I’m going to be fair, the Switch community will eat up anything you throw at them. And I say that as a Switch owner too.

The Doom 2016 port is not good, it’s to this day the only time a videogame straight up gave me nausea when playing. Guess what? The Switch community loves it passionately. The Switch subreddit will non ironically praise releases that are borderline non-functional.

So this game can look terrible, just the fact that it exists is enough.

kadu, 2 months ago

Very excited for this.

I really enjoyed the base game, I just waited a little after launch (like always) to play with some bug fixes updates.

I was just coming back from a gigantic period in my life where I didn’t game much, and never on PC - Cyberpunk was the first AAA I played right after coming back. This meant I wasn’t following the game for years and building a lot of expectations, and it didn’t disappoint me because “mechanic X was missing!” because I never knew I could expect X anyways.

I also wanted something a bit more linear, but still an open world, which is something this game balances pretty well.

The end result is that I really liked it. In fact, I prefer it to GTA V, which is a game that, in my opinion, struggles with balancing it’s mission structure with the actual game world.

kadu, 2 months ago

They claimed the Xbox One (the original last gen model) would be decades ahead of any other competitors because games would be, wait for it, cloud hybrid. Some things would render locally, but Microsoft servers would calculate complex collisions, volumetrics, crowd AI, and so on.

Guess what never happened.

kadu, 2 months ago

Because people complained

As they should - for several different reasons.

kadu, 2 months ago

I’m super interested in the new controller.

I got the 8bitdo ultimate and deeply regret buying it, so now I’m back to my Series S controller.

kadu, 2 months ago

Though from the knowledge we do have on the very likely SoC being used here, it does support DLSS.

DLSS not only helps a lot with games that are in the edge of running, but also does significantly help with image clarity in this age of TAA everywhere.

I’m expecting it to be essentially a Steam Deck, but replacing blurry FSR with proper DLSS and with first party games making smarter usage of the hardware. There will be less overhead from layers such as Proton. I don’t think it will go beyond the Deck in terms of what games and graphical quality we see, but we can expect specific ports that are entirely designed around the device and so run better than the equivalent PC version on the Deck, or Nintendo’s internal teams making games that look beautiful regardless.

kadu, 2 months ago

what they could do with actual up to date hardware?

It’s honestly hard to tell, given their history. When they first got 3D hardware, their first attempts resulted in a literal revolution in game design, with Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time changing how 3D games would look and control from that point onwards.

Their first time getting access to HD hardware? They didn’t have the experience and tools to design HD assets, which delayed pretty much all internal projects and resulted in several drought periods that helped kill the Wii U.

So if the Switch 2 suddenly had much better hardware… Would Nintendo make the most beautiful game you’ve ever seen, or would they stumble around and ship yet another booster pack to Mario Kart 8 with barely improved graphics? Would they struggle with balancing realistic ray tracing with their cartoony look? Hard to tell.

kadu, 2 months ago

The issue with comparisons with these mid-gen refreshes is that those improved GPU performance, but were held back by ancient CPU designs.

A new Switch could end up with technically weaker hardware, but with a modern architecture that handles modern games much better. There are many permutations on how they could balance CPU and GPU performance too.

kadu, 2 months ago

Perhaps to avoid buying them?

I personally have a weird habit of uninstalling and reinstalling games a surprising number of times. If I know there’s a fee associated with it, be it for the dev or Valve, and the money goes to vultures at Unity, I won’t be buying.

kadu, 2 months ago

Not forced to buy a game, my man.

If it’s Unity, or uses a weird launcher, or uses invasive DRM… Not getting my money.