ono

ono, 4 miesiące temu

The art style reminds me of Scavengers Reign.

ono, 4 miesiące temu

he’s gone off the rails in the last 6-12 months - complaining about needing more linux devs

It’s also ironic in light of his history of loudly bashing linux and linux game development.

I can’t think of anything good to say about Tim Sweeney.

ono, 4 miesiące temu

I might give Backpack Battles a try. It doesn’t look like my usual style, but I heard there’s some good strategy under the surface, and I like that it’s made with Godot.

ono, 4 miesiące temu (edited 4 miesiące temu)

Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a wonderful mix of exploration, sea battles, romance, swordplay, trade, and subterfuge.

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove is one that I’ve only played briefly, but I remember it having a fun style that made me want to try it in depth some time.

ono, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m curious how long the current gen OLED consoles will be in use before they develop screen burn-in.

ono, 5 miesięcy temu

*r34 ;)

ono, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t know whether I would be comfortable murdering pokemon, but if the gameplay turns out to be great, I would give it a try. I think I’ll wait on this one until it develops a bit and there are enough reviews to balance out early adopter (dev friends & family) bias.

Direct link: store.steampowered.com/app/1623730/Palworld/

ono, 5 miesięcy temu

I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.

Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu

*Yuzu or Ryujinx. Not Cemu. Not Dolphin.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Epic cons:

Also:

• Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
• Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.

Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)

To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.

Steam pros:

Also:

• Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.

Steam cons:
Drm

Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.

If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.

Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games

Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)

ono, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu

somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all “evil” MTX and DRM in the process

Having worked with DRM systems since long before Valve existed, I’m reasonably certain this is just plain false.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Valve was scanning your DNS cache

The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.

Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)

ono, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

I don’t think getting freebies from them counts as supporting them

I do. Some examples off the top of my head:

• giving them access to your stored data, by letting their code execute on your computer
• giving them access to your behavioral data (a form of biometrics), through the same
• giving them access to your system fingerprints, through both code execution and account creation
• giving them legal influence over you, by agreeing to their terms
• giving some of their legal arguments greater weight, by increasing their market share
• giving them greater sway with publishers, such as when seeking exclusivity deals, by bolstering their user count
• giving them greater value to investors, by the same

There are probably other ways in which it supports them. Those are just the first ones to come to mind.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu

Good riddance.

ono, 6 miesięcy temu

Civ 4: Baba Yetu

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

It seems like a great game by all accounts.

Unpopular opinion: I liked the characters and lore a lot, but I found that the sloppy controls and sluggish movement made the world frustrating to interact with, and most of the encounters were so repetitive that I was bored before long. I ended up switching to easy mode so I could finish the story without having to spend much time on the tedious gameplay.

IMHO, if you were to rush through W3 in story mode and skip the side quests, just to get the background before playing W4, I don’t think you’d be missing much.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

I actually found the side quests’ writing pretty good, and indeed, sometimes even memorable. Unfortunately, most of those quests share a handful of nearly identical tasks, so the good writing started to feel like little more than window dressing before long.

The map encounters were worse, though: Lots of question marks telling me exactly where to go meant there was nearly no real exploration to be had in this open world, and arriving at them led to the same copypasta events over and over again. If you happen to enjoy those events enough that you can’t get enough of them, then that’s great, but I was bored after the first dozen or so. (Skyrim was far better in this department.)

I remember liking a lot of the main quests, and the characters, and the story, and the world building. It’s just that the bulk of the gameplay felt like filler content, with forgettable combat and awkward controls. (I swear, Geralt, if you plod forward one more time when I pull back on the stick, or let one more candle get in the way when I try to interact with something useful, I’m gonna smack you.)

I hope Witcher 4 maintains (or even improves upon) the writing quality of its predecessor, and adds responsive controls and interesting gameplay beyond the main plot points.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Great evil + great evil + smaller evil = ?

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Lately?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

But really destiny and overwatch complicated??? Those games are for children

Overwatch might seem that way because of the cartoon style and the low skill floor, but the skill ceiling is somewhat higher. I haven’t met many children who would be good at predicting behavior of high-level opponents and coordinating to counter it, for example.

I don’t know that I would call it complicated, either, except in the sense that there’s often a lot to keep track of all at once. I think I’d place it somewhere in the middle.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

IMHO, some of the beauty of Baldur’s Gate 3 lies in the ability to start playing immediately, and discover the mechanics little by little as you go. Instead of an impenetrable wall of complexity, it gives you a world to explore while learning something new every time you play.

However, if you want to study the mechanics, you can also consult the D&D 5th edition rules. BG3 follows most of them. media.wizards.com/2018/…/DnD_BasicRules_2018.pdf

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Please be good. I loved the first one (despite the bugs).

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Friendly reminder that Klei is now owned by Tencent, in case that’s important to anyone here.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

There’s a reliable way to combat scalping in general. Start selling the item at a high price or in larger quantity and then cut the price whenever sales drop off.

That alone might be effective at reducing scalping, but would also put the item beyond the reach of entire income classes.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Dear CEO,

Games that don’t respect my time are not worth more to me.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

From the download page:

Currently only Windows is supported, but Linux and Mac users can use Wine .

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Full patch notes with spoiler tags

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Agreed on all points.

Out of curiosity, why did you capitalize random nouns in your comment, and leave the proper noun in lower case?

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s because of a German commenter in this case, since only some some of the nouns are capitalized.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Thanks for explaining. I’m convinced that autocorrect and touch screen keyboards are behind a great deal of the bad grammar and weird sentences that we see online.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

To be fair, one doesn’t have to be an automotive engineer to deduce something is wrong with a new car that struggles to reach 30km/h while most of the others exceed 100km/h with ease.

(This is the first I’ve heard of anyone blaming teeth, though. That’s a bit strange.)

ono, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

That’s not a fair comparison.

I think it is. Note that I wrote 30km/h, not 200km/h. (In case you’re American, 30km/h is about 18mph.)

The Last of Us Part 1 is another example. We know it should run better on our hardware (at least with low-graphics settings) because we have already seen the original game run far better on less capable hardware. Yet this one fails to do so even at the lowest possible settings.

Even Baldur’s Gate 3, despite being otherwise wonderful, has some glaring hit-and-miss performance issues (think 8 fps at 1080p) that show up on hardware that can handle similar games easily. You don’t need to be a software engineer to compare it to Divinity: Original Sin 2, adjust for a few years of hardware inflation, and have a rough idea of how it should perform at moderate-to-low settings.

I see people upset because the car isn’t a masarati,

I don’t doubt that those people exist, but I believe they are outliers. Most of the complaints I see about underperforming games in the past year or so are from people with very reasonable expectations. If most of the gripes you’ve seen are from teeth-blaming Masarati-entitled loudmouths, I suspect it has more to do with the forums you frequent than anything else.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

Given that they’ve developed a faithful and fairly wide-ranging representation of D&D 5e, I’m willing to bet that ended up being a lot more involved than their own proprietary system.

That game was just one example, but since you seem interested in singling it out:

Turn-based game rules cannot explain the awful graphics performance that game has, even at idle, on some systems. (Not even D&D 5e, which I happen to know in detail.)

Graphics engine enhancements might explain it, but in that case, the developers should have included options to disable those enhancements.

I haven’t reverse engineered the code, but some of the behaviors I’ve seen in that game smell strongly of decisions/mistakes that I would expect from a game that was rushed, such as lack of occlusion culling. Others smell like mistakes that are common among programmers who haven’t yet learned how to use the graphics APIs efficiently, such as rapid-fire operations that should instead be batched. Still others could be explained by poor texture and/or model scaling techniques. As a software engineer, the bad performance in this particular game looks like it could come from a combination of several different factors. None of them are new in this field. All of them can usually be avoided or mitigated.

In any case, the point is that none of that analysis matters for the sake of this discussion, because a community with experience using products doesn’t have to be experienced in building them in order to notice when something is wrong. It’s not fair to categorically dismiss their criticism.

(Thankfully, the Baldur’s Gate 3 developers haven’t dismissed it. Instead, they are working on improving it. Better late than never.)

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Sigh… You conveniently deleted important parts of my comment, such as “at least with low-graphics settings” and “adjust for a few years of hardware inflation”, and completely ignored the fact that I am talking about cases of abnormally bad performance compared to entire categories of games. The straw man you’re arguing against is not what I wrote.

ono, 7 miesięcy temu

Ha… That is hilarious, and very much like Bethesda. (See also: the bee problem in Skyrim.)

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

Baldur’s Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It’s nice.

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

Cut scenes should have the standard playback controls: Pause, stop, next/previous part, subtitles. They should also be available for later replay.

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

If you can store player decisions long enough to assemble a cut scene once, you can store them long enough do it again. The decision tree is already there. It’s not difficult or expensive.

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

Yes, exactly. Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important. Or if the voice actor mumbles. Or any number of other things that happen in real life.

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

!buildapc

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

so far, fluid frames is only available on DX11 and DX12 titles

Given how similar Vulkan is to Direct3D 12, it seems likely to be supported before long.

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

AKB

What’s that K for?

ono, 8 miesięcy temu

I thought King was a subsidiary, rather than part of the parent company’s name. Has that changed?

ono, 4 miesiące temu

I have good news for you:

polygon.com/…/gigantic-game-relaunch-rampage-edit…