To expand a bit on the user base issue: Even on Reddit with its giant user base a game needs to have a decently sized audience in order to sustain a healthy and active subreddit.
Now, hypothetically speaking, even if this place had a tenth of the user base, it would mean that a game would still need to be 10x bigger in comparison in order to maintain an active community.
For now, only a very, very small handful of games are above that threshold.
Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.
Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
Like, there is an in-universe explanation for why you are solving puzzles.
That observation actually made me go through my library looking for more examples and, yeah, it’s surprisingly few. There’s ‘The Entropy Centre’, which also falls into the “You’re a test subject” category. Other than that there’s the Zachtronics games, where the reason for puzzle-solving is because it’s your work.
Simply going one step down from buying every “halo” product would already do wonders for a significant price/performance increase.
That said, when building a new PC I usually start with the recommendations listed at Logical Increments, which has a neat table sorted by budget. Anything at or above the “Suberb” should give you what you want at 1440p.
I’d also very much recommend a high refresh rate monitor, preferably 1440p, which has either GSYNC or FreeSync with a good variable refresh rate range. It really helps with maintaining a smooth presentation as you aren’t forced to keep your game running at a fixed framerate anymore.
This is just a hunch, but could there be a loophole possible with those promotions where you get a discount, but only if you own another related game? Maybe devs can just add discount for owning a free game and fake a permanent discount that way?
But as OP already said, we’d need a dev who’s already published a game to confirm these kind of theories.
Edit: This comment is probably right and it’s just an automatically applied bundle discount, but there’s a bug in the Wishlist where it shows the combined price of the bundled games. If that’s the case then Valve should really fix this ASAP, since it probably falls under false advertising in some countries, even if it’s a bug.
Something I completely missed, due to the insanity that is the runtime fee, is that they’re also getting rid of their Plus subscription.
While Plus never had a bunch of benefits, it was basically the edition for individuals and very small teams who just wanted to get rid of the splash screen. These users would have to use Pro now, which is 5x more expensive at 2040$/year/seat.
The roadmaps over last few years already showed that they don’t really care about indie devs anymore, but now it feels like they’ve become actively hostile.
When it comes to “classic” comedy, then Hi-Fi Rush is one of the highlights in recent times. Not only are there a lot of jokes in the dialogue that landed for me, all the cutscenes are also loaded with perfectly timed visual gags. Lots of humour hidden in the environment as well.
Other than that, any “serious” game that has a wonky physics engine can accidentally be pretty funny on accident. Slinging around corpses in Dark Souls 1 for example.
Runs great on my 5000 series AMD CPU and 3000 series Nvidia GPU
Just specifying the series doesn’t really say much. Based on that and the release year you could be running a 5600X and RTX3060 or you could be running a 5950X and RTX3090. There’s something like a ~2.5x performance gap between those.
I was initially also a bit surprised by the amount of it, but after thinking about it for a bit, Blizzard seems to have engineered the perfect conditions for this to happen:
Create a massively successful game for PC, which also creates a giant group of people who care about the game.
Make a bunch of bad decisions, which are particularly bad for the existing user base.
Only then release the game on Steam, meaning there are no positive reviews from the launch period and a bunch of disgruntled former players, all of which are allowed to review the game because the game has become F2P.
There aren’t a lot of genuinely great mobile games, but Threes! is certainly one of them. What I like most about it is that it actually understands what it means to be a mobile game: Short rounds, no constant focus required and it can be put down at any time since continuing a round is pretty so easy as the complete state of the game is always visible to you.
And for everyone who likes Threes!, I’ll also recommend Twinfold. It’s a game clearly inspired by Threes but with some dungeon crawling and rogue-like elements added on top. Maybe not as tightly designed as Threes!, but with just as much love and detail put into it and its presentation.
Yup. Although it seems like Nintendo is believing it as well, considering they didn’t already shut the project down years ago. Either that or Nintendo just doesn’t want to risk a second Bleem ruling, legalizing emulation even further.
A big problem with an unlocked framerate is the physics system, which you can generally solve in two ways:
You tie the physics to the framerate. Problem is that this introduces all sorts of weird behavior, caused by rounding errors and frequency of collision checks. For example, objects could start glitching through thin walls if their framerate is low because collisions are checked less often.
You run the physics at a fixed internal interval. This solves a lot of problem with the first approach, but also means that you have to put in effort to mask the fixed framerate through interpolation/extrapolation if you still want to keep the actual framerate unlocked.
So Wolfenstein New Order probably went with the first approach, made sure their physics system stays stable within a certain FPS range (30-60), and then locked the FPS beyond that.