sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, this would’ve been much better solved with expansions. Just get the core loop solid, and then build on it.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I don’t really understand the decision here, wouldn’t it be better to just put out a notice saying that it won’t see any more updates, discount it, and then move on? A lot of people like it, so I doubt it would require any real work.

Then again, if the OP actually did steal assets, I can understand taking it down to limit liability.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Created by SCKR Games, Only Up was previously removed from Steam amid accusations of copyright violations connected to various in-game assets

It was already removed for that. I’m just wondering if the accusations weren’t satisfactorily resolved, or if this is something different entirely.

Either way, it’s up to them, but I just think it’s a little odd. It seems like a great game for getting some residual income from.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The Deck’s AMD Van Gogh APU can’t be had in any other device and is substantially different to any other chip AMD produces.

Is it really that different? I thought it was basically Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 GPU cores. It’s not an off-the-shelf SOC, but it’s also not that custom. So this seems a little hyperbolic to me. I’d say it’s pretty similar to the XBox Series S SOC (and Series X and PS5), which uses the same cores, just a different amount of each.

I also think it’s kind of interesting that they’re jumping to a VR Headset. If it’s a standalone, it’s probably not “low power.” If it’s not standalone, I think they’ll have issues transferring data fast enough to be practical. So my money is on some kind of accessory, like maybe a Steam Link 2 or a controller. Those are low power, wireless, and seem to fit the bill a bit better.

Then again, maybe it is a VR headset. But I really don’t see them competing at the low end on VR.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

And this is why I didn’t buy Starfield. I loved Morrowind and was disappointed with Skyrim, and I think it’s because I prefer a tighter, more linear story and don’t like “messing around” as much. I watched a gameplay video, and the things that player got excited about (all the side content) really didn’t grab my attention, and the story itself seemed a bit flat.

I probably would’ve loved it as a kid, but that’s not what I’m looking for these days.

So for me, BG3 is the better game. But younger me would’ve preferred Starfield. They’re both great games, just for very different audiences. And I could totally see someone having exactly the opposite opinion as me, which just shows how great both are.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s just marketing fluff.

The game seems (to me) to essentially be FPS, Sci-Fi Skyrim, with some space fight minigames. There’s a lot of stuff you can do, but the main storyline is pretty short, the AI sucks, and most of the appeal is side content and looks.

That’s what I expect from Bethesda, and that’s what they delivered. It’s only really “next gen” in the procedural generation department, so it’s basically a regular Bethesda game, with a little bit of experimentation thrown in. That’s what Bethesda delivers, and they deliver pretty consistently.

I’m guessing there will be a ton of cool mods in the next few years for a deeper story, interesting space combat, etc.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I think it would be interesting to be able to hire a merchant NPC to loot for you. You’d lose a bit of the value (say, half), but the merchant would reinvest those profits to carry better items, and they’d give you a discount.

You’d have an incentive to look through the loot to take what you want, as well as an incentive to ignore the stuff you don’t. That way you get the immersiveness of an encumbrance system, without most of the tedium.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Not really. Some have space-based inventory instead of encumbrance, some have no limit, and some don’t have many items to pick up.

Weight-based inventory is relatively rare in my experience, though it’s very common for Bethesda games.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

What about a working game instead? They could just delay the launch until they’ve finished what would’ve gone into a day 1 patch before going gold.

If they did that, they could:

  • start working on an expansion
  • give the dev team vacation time as a celebration for going gold
  • start work on the next game
  • do a bunch of play testing to reduce the need for patches a year after launch (i.e. catch more bugs)

In other words, a studio shouldn’t go gold until their TODO list for launch day is done. That should be the standard, and it seems to be what BG3 did.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And that’s why I generally prefer indie games. Many indie games are made with passion, with money being down the list of priorities. AAA games are made with money first, though there is certainly passion as well, it’s just not the top on the list. As studios and budgets get bigger, so will their expectation of profits.

So if you want better games, buy from smaller studios. Show them that you value passion over high budget.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Agreed. But I’d much rather sacrifice AAA features like mocap, voice acting, and RTX if it means a higher chance of playing a game with a lot of passion put in. Those are nice to have, but not the reason I pick a game.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

Having a day one patch doesn’t make a game broken, but it is a symptom of a bad internal process. Here are the patch notes for BG3 Day 1 (not sure if 100% accurate, but this is the best source I could find). To me, that doesn’t sound like anything game breaking.

I’m not saying BG3 is the gold standard for AAA game releases, I’m merely saying it’s what we should expect for an average AAA release with some being a little better and some being a little worse.

I’m not saying every bug needs to be fixed. Even older games before SW patches were a thing had a ton of bugs. I’m just saying, the game should play well even if users never patch the game. This is really important for game preservation, so you should always be able to take the game disk and install it offline and play through the whole game and have a great experience. That’s not the standard many AAA studios hold themselves to.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I’m not saying the game needs to be perfect, but it should be a great experience beginning to end without applying any patches. As in, I should be able to take the game disk and install it without any Internet connection and play through the game with only minor bugs here and there.

This is really important for game preservation (the patch servers will eventually go offline), yet many AAA games are almost unplayable without day one patches.

I’m a huge fan of software updates for games, but those updates should merely improve an already great experience, not be the method to fix a broken game. A broken game should never leave QA.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup. And I wish more AAA titles took more risks in gameplay and storytelling, but those seem to be few and far between.

Starfield is a fantastic example. If you asked me to describe a Bethesda game set in space, it would look a lot like Starfield (but I probably would’ve missed the procedural generation). Usually AAA games are pretty much as expected, with one or two surprises on the side, and that’s it.

BG3 basically delivers on Cyberpunk’s promises (branching storylines, mocap, great visuals, etc), and it did so on launch, which is really rare.

Cypher 007 Is A New James Bond Game That Hits Apple Arcade Later This Month (www.gameinformer.com) angielski

Publisher Tilting Point has revealed Cypher 007, a new top-down action game starring James Bond, coming to Apple Arcade on iOS devices later this month. It launches on September 29 and takes players into "The Mind Trap."...

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, I don’t use Amazon Prime and still get free shipping, it just takes a couple days longer.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Cool, maybe I’ll play it now.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I’m pretty sure they just don’t care. This was easy and made money.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, how about… no DRM and instead focus on making games people want to buy. It seems to work well for CD Projekt Red, and surely it would work for others as well.

Piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I use Linux, and Steam just works better for me than GOG. I also switch between my Steam Deck and Linux desktop, and Steam just makes that seamless.

I like the idea of GOG, but Steam just works better in the service department.

sugar_in_your_tea,

What happens if you buy that and then cancel GamePass? Do you keep the game? Just the upgrade? Or do you lose everything? Do you get it back if you resubscribe?

sugar_in_your_tea,

From the article:

Berbach remarks on his time with Riot, where he worked on the launch of its CSGO and Overwatch 2 rival, Valorant, as well as time with the League of Legends team before and during his position as game director for LoL Wild Rift.

So Wild Rift, a 5v5 MOBA on mobile.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The only one I really value is Digital Foundry. I like how they break down games technically and give insight on how to get the most out of them through settings and whatnot.

But outside of that, I generally trust user reviews more.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Hopefully that sends the right message to the rest.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The character models seemed pretty simple for such a demanding game. I was hoping at least major characters would be a little more detailed. Then again, this was from watching a stream on my phone, so maybe it looks better in person.

Aside from looks, the voice acting I saw seemed a little odd. It could also just be a poor script, but it just didn’t seem all that great.

But overall, the game seemed pretty good, but not something I’m dying to run out and buy. I’ll have some more time this fall, so I’ll probably wait for a few patches to land.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Why? They do that pretty much with every major release, especially for demanding titles. People tend to build PCs specifically for a specific game, so the major GPU vendors want to fill that high end need.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, a mix of both would be ideal. The fact that we’re surprised that Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 were solid on release is a problem, all AAA releases should have that level of quality at a minimum on release.

If games are consistently solid at release, I’d probably preorder like I used to. Now I wait and see because, more often than not, it’s a buggy mess the first few weeks.

Baldur's Gate 3 - Patch #2 Now Live! - Steam News (store.steampowered.com) angielski

Patch #2 for Baldur’s Gate 3 is now live, bringing bug fixes, substantial performance improvements and much more! If you missed our latest Community Update, we highly recommend you give it a read here for a glimpse at the future of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the role your feedback is playing in that....

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

No, for releasing a solid game and following it up with a solid performance patch. If the game sucked at launch, I would understand criticism, but it didn’t.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Ok, so make good games and sell them for what they’re worth. I don’t see why they need subscriptions to stay in business.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Which is really dumb. I wish they would just wait to release until the game is done instead of sending a bunch of patches over the first few months after release. It’s that kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games at release or even for the first few months because I know if I wait, I’ll get a better product.

Before digital was a thing, game companies had to fully test their games before releasing because there was no way to patch it later. I wish we would’ve kept the same mindset today, but with the ability to patch in case they missed something.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.

These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).

However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:

  • Dark Forces
  • Lords of the Realm 2
  • Command and Conquer - most titles
  • Warcraft - 1&2
  • Age of Empires
  • Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear

I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).

Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.

sugar_in_your_tea,

According to ProtonDB, it seems to work fine. AOE 2 seems to work after tweaks. AOE 3 seems to work fine if you disable Steam overlay.AOE 4 seems okay for single player, though it seems YMMV with a multiplayer fix.

If in doubt, check proton DB for tweaks.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The most recent comment that claims it works is from 3 days ago, and it seems you need a startup command. So it seems to have been completely broken as of a week or two ago, but potentially there’s a workaround on the latest Proton experimental.

So your experience from a couple months ago may no longer apply.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, XBox GamePass is not available for Steam deck or Linux generally, so I have never used it. I would probably sign up if it was available though.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, it’s a promotion, so it’s available when they want to increase user counts.

sugar_in_your_tea,

If you only ever play games or watch movies/shows once regardless, it’s just a cheaper way to get content. The only reason I don’t use Gamepass is because it doesn’t work on Linux. That’s it.

I have Netflix and Disney+ because it’s way cheaper than buying the movies and shows I watch on it, movies and shows that I’ll only ever watch once.

sugar_in_your_tea, (edited )

I’m talking about GamePass, not Starfield. Gamepass only works on Microsoft OSes AFAIK, so you won’t be able to use it on anything it doesn’t control (i.e. macOS or Linux).

sugar_in_your_tea,

Ikr? That’s one reason why I like Netflix. I don’t like the DRM, but they at least do a good job ensuring it works pretty much everywhere.

In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info) angielski

After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I need to really want to play a game to make an account outside of whatever launcher I’m using, and that’s just not true here.

sugar_in_your_tea,

IDK, Denuvo + EA account makes this a hard sell for me. If those are removed, I may consider it at $20, but definitely not $60.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Or they could, you know, wait for it to be ready to release. How about they wait to announce it until the game is done, and then spend the last few months polishing it?

sugar_in_your_tea,

GTA V? Really? I absolutely hated the story in that, and I hated the characters. Here are some of my issues with it:

Trevor:

  • interesting epilogue, but otherwise pretty much no character arc
  • really wanted to see him try to take on the Los Santos gangs (DLC!)

Franklin:

  • largely just does whatever Michael says
  • wanted to start a dealership, but he kinda gives up once he makes it big (DLC!)

Michael:

  • arc was okay, but he didn’t seem like a good fit for main character, especially when Franklin gets the ending

All in all, I felt like the three character perspective was largely a distraction from the lack of actual storytelling. SA and IV didn’t have that, so they actually had a meandering plot with some character development to round it all out.

I haven’t finished RDR2 (it’s so long!), but I really loved RDR and heard that story for RDR2 is even better.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m not expecting RDR-levels of storytelling or anything, and the original RDR is way better than any of the GTAs in terms of storytelling and characters. However, GTA V felt like such a downgrade from previous entries.

GTA V starts out strong, with a fun heist sequence, which gets the player excited for more. And then the next thing we see is Michael at marriage counseling, and then we meet Franklin, who seems ready to take up Michael’s mantle. Then we see Trevor, who is now running drugs in the rural area, which is also pretty exciting. At the start, I was excited to see all three develop their individual storylines, with Franklin just getting into the underground, Trevor establishing himself as a drug kingpin, and Michael getting his last heist in.

But instead of that, Trevor and Franklin kind of give up on their arcs and they just focus on helping Michael with the heist. Why? Why doesn’t Trevor try to take over the drug trade in Los Santos? Why doesn’t Franklin try to start his own dealership? Or at least steal cars as side content? If they’re really interested in heists, why is there only about five of them? Why can’t I go do more after finishing the main storyline? What about Las Venturas, doing heists there would be a ton of fun!

To me, the storytelling really dragged once Trevor came to Los Santos, which was more than half of the game. In fact, I dropped it and came back about three times (restarting twice) because it was so uninteresting, until I finally forced myself to speed through the story just so I could cross it off my list so I wouldn’t feel the need to come back. I didn’t have the same problem with either GTA SA or GTA IV, and I even finished GTA IV after GTA V (played off and on on console before GTA V, then bought and played through on PC).

And the world felt small to me. I know it was physically bigger than every other GTA game, but it felt so much smaller than GTA SA, which was able to fit three cities and a rural area and still make them feel far apart (GTA V just had one city and a rural area), and it felt similar to GTA IV. I didn’t feel any desire to explore like I did with SA. The backstory was interesting, but I think it just highlighted how disappointing the rest of the story was.

In fact, I even like GTA III more than GTA V. It’s pretty janky to play today, but it still has that OG charm to it.

So I honestly don’t understand why it’s so loved. Nothing about it really stood out to me aside from the graphics and performance of the engine. I didn’t like the driving as much as IV (controversial take), the humor felt bland to me, and I didn’t find any of the side characters particularly interesting, except maybe Lamar, and he also largely gave up on his arc.

So GTA V is by far my least favorite of the series, so much so that I’m not looking forward to GTA VI.

sugar_in_your_tea,

CUDA is only better because the industry has moved to it, and NVIDIA pumps money into its development. OpenCL could be just as good if the industry adopted it and card manufacturers invested in it. AMD and Intel aren’t going to invest as much in it as NVIDIA invests in CUDA because the marketshare just isn’t there.

Look at Vulkan, it has a ton of potential for greater performance, yet many games (at least Baldur’s Gate) work better with DirectX 12, and that’s because they’ve invested resources into making it work better. If those same resources were out into Vulkan development, Vulkan would outperform DirectX on those games.

The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, most of the problems with FreeSync were poor implementations by monitors, or poor support from NVIDIA. More people had NVIDIA cards, so GSync monitors tended to work better. If NVIDIA and AMD had worked together at the start, variable refresh would’ve worked better from day one.

Look at web standards, when organizations worked well together (e.g. to overtake IE 6), the web progressed really well and you could largely say “use a modern browser” and things would tend to work well. Now that Chrome has a near monopoly, there’s a ton of little things that don’t work as nicely between Chrome and Firefox. Things were pretty good until Chrome became dominant, and now it’s getting worse.

It absolutely is “pro technology”

Kind of. It’s more of an excuse to be anti-consumer by locking out competition with a somewhat legitimate “pro technology” stance.

If they really were so “pro technology,” why not release DLSS, GSync, and CUDA as open standards? That way other companies could provide that technology in new ways to more segments of the market. But instead of that, they go the proprietary route, and the rest try to make open standards to oppose their monopoly on that tech.

I’m not proposing any solutions here, just pointing out that NVIDIA does this because it works to secure their dominant market share. If AMD and Intel drop out, they’d likely stop the pace of innovation. If AMD and Intel catch up, NVIDIA will likely adopt open standards. But as long as they have a dominant position, there’s no reason for them to play nicely.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Opening the standard… compromise the product massively

Citation needed.

All NVIDIA needs to do is:

  1. release the spec with a license AMD and Intel can use
  2. form a standards group, or submit it to an existing one
  3. ensure any changes to the spec go through the standards group; they can be first to market, provided they agree on the spec change

That’s it. They don’t need to make changes to suit AMD and Intel’s hardware, that’s on those individual companies to make work correctly.

This works really well in many other areas of computing, such as compression algorithms, web standards, USB specs, etc. Once you have a standard, other products can target it and the consumer has a richer selection of compatible products.

Right now, if you want GPGPU, you need to choose between OpenCL and CUDA, and each choice will essentially lock you out of certain product categories. Just a few years ago, the same as true for FreeSync, though FreeSync seems to have won.

But NVIDIA seems to be allergic to open standards, even going so far as to make their own power cable when they could have worked with the existing relevant standards bodies.

sugar_in_your_tea,

How do you explain PCIe, DDR, and M.2 standards? Maybe we could’ve had similar performance sooner if motherboard vendors did their own thing, but with standardization, we get more variety and broader adoption.

If a company wants or needs a major change, they go through the standards body and all competitors benefit from that work. The time to market for an individual feature may be a little longer, but the overall pace is likely pretty similar, they just need to front load the I/O design work.

sugar_in_your_tea,

communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers

  • like a GPU and a monitor? (FreeSync/GSync)
  • like a GPU and a PSU? (the 12v cable)

DLSS and RTX are the same way, but instead of communicating between two hardware products, it’s communicating between two software components, and then translating those messages onto commands for specialized hardware.

Both DLSS and RTX are a simpler, more specific casez of GPGPU, so they likely could’ve opened and extended CUDA, extended OpenCL, or extended Vulkan/DirectX instead, with the hardware reporting whether it can handle DLSS or RTX extensions efficiently. CPUs do exactly that for things like SIMD instructions, and compilers change the code depending on the features that CPU exposes.

But instead in all of those cases, they went with proprietary and minimal documentation. That means it was intentional that they don’t want competitors to compete directly using those technologies, and instead expect them to make their own competing APIs.

Here’s how the standards track should work:

  1. company proposes new API A for the standards track
  2. company builds a product based on proposal A
  3. standards body considers and debates proposal A
  4. company releases product based on A, ideally after the standards body agrees on A
  5. if there is a change needed to A, company releases a patch to support the new, agreed-upon standard, and competitors start building their own implementations of A

That’s it. Step 1 shouldn’t take much effort, and if they did a good job designing the standard, step 5 should be pretty small.

But instead, NVIDIA ignores the whole process and just does their own thing until either they get their way or they’re essentially forced to adopt the standard. They basically lost the GSync fight (after years of winning), and they seem to have lost the Wayland EGLStream proposal and have adopted the GBM standard. But they win more than they lose, so they keep doing it.

That’s why we need competition, not because NVIDIA isn’t innovating, but because NVIDIA is innovating in a way to lock out competition. If AMD and Intel can eat away at NVIDIA’s dominant market share, NVIDIA will be forced to pay nice more often.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The process I detailed does not require consensus before a product can be released, it just allows for that consensus to happen eventually. So by definition, it won’t impede progress. It does encourage direct competition, and that’s something NVIDIA would rather avoid.

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