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I liked Starfield (I even 100%ed the achievements on Steam). I also loved No Man’s Sky long before the shift in pubic sentiment towards it, so maybe I’m just weird. But if you’re reading this and thinking “this guy wouldn’t know a good game if it shat a voxel-based turd onto his chest”, you’re WRONG. I also loved MindsEye. So there.
I don’t think it’s necessary, even from a story perspective (the game does a great job of filling in the blanks for you). It’s definitely worth playing Portal 1 though, it’s a fantastic game with perfect design even nearly 20 years later. I mean apart from engine and graphics tech, I don’t think the game could be improved upon much. Same is true for Portal 2.
Another thing about Portal 1’s story is that it’s barely there at all. Almost all of it is incidental to the puzzles, and the story that is there is either passive exposition from the antagonist, or some very minimal environmental stuff. With that in mind, you could easily get yourself up to speed on the story going into Portal 2 just by glancing at a one or two paragraph summary, maybe with a couple of screenshots (you could probably convey everything in the story in one sentence if you’re creative with the punctuation). Portal 2’s story is much more fleshed out and interesting, though.
Portal 1 is so old and undemanding that you could probably run it smoothly inside a VM even on a meagre PC. I don’t know what OS you’re running, but I presume it’s not Windows?
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Won’t it be kinda strange for gamers who buy a game and find that none of the characters look like the ones on the Steam storefront? 👀 Many of these characters are legendary and have been in long-running serieseses, imagine booting up the latest Uncharted game only to find that Burt Reynolds is the main character now, all because you turned on DLSS.
Downright disrespectful of the artistic toil that goes into perfecting characters, lighting, colour grading, etc. Like maybe there was an artistic choice made to not have the character look like an AI ad for an AI-generated OnlyFans model?
It used to be a tool to gain FPS while retaining graphical fidelity. Now it’s aiming to be a full-on infidel; replacing art to the extent that it’s barely recognisable. What will DLSS 8 be like?
‘Steam Store Front’ should be shortened to ‘Stormfront’. At least then no one would be shocked when they discover it’s teeming with illiterate bigots.
All I can suggest is that you report and block as much as you can. If there’s a game, like Relooted, that’s a bug light for scumbags, go to its forums when you have 10 minutes free and just report the shitstains you come across. Steam does take action sometimes.
My parents paid about that much for a SNES copy of Earthworm Jim back in the mid-90s. It was disgusting then and it’s disgusting now, despite the fact that, adjusted for inflation, that would be £140 today. I mean I don’t feel like we’re getting a 50% discount when a game costs 70 fuckin’ quid nowadays.
There’s really no reason to spend that anyway, not on PC at least. IsThereAnyDeal.com and the slightly questionable loaded.com (formerly cdkeys.com) give decent discounts even on day one (and Steam itself will eventually have it on sale, of course). Loaded isn’t like G2A, which is a credit card thief’s wonderland. It’s more like when your uncle Jim crosses the border with 40 cartons of cigarettes secreted in the wheel wells of his truck because they cost 400% less over there. I can live with that level of mischief when it comes to AAA games that take the absolute piss with their prices and their hostage DLCs. EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar have not caused me a millisecond of lost sleep when I get their games for £3 six months after release from a code that was originally bundled with a new GPU. With how extremely easy it is to pirate games (something I haven’t done in nearly 20 years), I don’t feel like those larger AAA companies are meeting us half way, to say the fucking least.
In any other business, having 6 simultaneous failed projects would be cause for dismissal of the CEO and probably the majority of the management staff. If I owned or had a large amount of shares in a company where this happened, I would not be a happy chappy. But I’m assuming the Ubisoft upper echelons are patting themselves on the back for their business acumen and financial savviness, already penning their bonuses into their calendars.
Meanwhile, regular workers are dropped like pubic lice the minute it’s convenient to do so.
Parasites.
The Hottest of Takes:
If we’re talking artistic credibility (as opposed to job security, plagiarism, and environmental impact), I want anti-AI people to uninstall their desktop graphics applications like Photoshop and GIMP. If you depend on buttons, value inputs and algorithms to get the art you want out of the machine, as opposed to using an easel and scanning your work into the PC without minimal touch-ups after the fact, then you’re no better than the person typing book-length prompts to get what they want. If you animate with key frames instead of hand-drawing every frame, you’re likewise just as credible (or not) as the prompt jockey. Hell, if you at any point use CTRL+Z, CTRL+C, CTRL+X or CTRL+V, you’re as artistically incredible as Paulie Promptnuts.
Just to be clear, I don’t think any of those things. But if you’re dismissing art on the basis that AI was used at some stage in its development, you should be thinking those things.
Did the Chinese state preapprove these titles?
No Devotion = No Sale
The Steam forums are the most repugnant and racist-filled psychotic right-wing shitholes I’ve ever encountered (and I once went to the Stormfront forums). Genuinely, Steam forums exhibit the most pure and concentrated anti-woke, “every single thought in my head was placed there by Ben Shapiro”, “blacks are the real racists”, x-phobic bigoted brain cancer on earth. I block them where I find them, report the ones that seem actionable, but it’s like trying to hold off a tidal wave with a tennis racket.
Wait, if devs are worried about it, and players are worried about it, who the fuck is doing it?? If it’s a widespread fear, they should band together and set up an AI-weary union, and gamers would support the shit outta them for it. Make it like a privacy policy, a binding agreement that AI will be used sparingly if at all.
One of the only times I’ve ever been grateful that Rockstar Games - a litigious and thoroughly despicable crew of money-grubbing cunts - are being pressed in their most sensitive and tender area: their bank account.
Now John Indiegame doesn’t need to worry about the Collective Shout campaign. The scumbags with the army of lawyers and endless rivers of money will take care of things.
/cope
I haven’t spent a dime on GOG since this happened. Fuck them. Not only is their professed anti-censorship stance fucking laughable in light of the Devotion débâcle, their game preservation efforts are even more laughable when they literally excluded a game from possible preservation because of a hoard of thin-skinned CCP hostages.
Even without that episode I would have stopped using GOG eventually, because they also went against their one selling point - no DRM - more than once. They sold Witcher 3 hard copies with online verification (you had to link it to your account with a serial number, you couldn’t just install it and play it from the disc offline). They included a little card in the box with an apology for this requirement, citing their need to protect their sales. Which is fair enough, but don’t pretend that this isn’t DRM. The fact that it was one of their own games shows how much hypocrisy they have when they complain about other developers doing the same thing. Being able to share the downloaded files freely makes me wonder why they bothered with any DRM, but bother they did.
Then they sold Hitman (2016) which has literally the most egregious and hateful DRM in the history of gaming. If you don’t submit to it, your game is essentially a very expensive demo. Most content and even basic game features like saving and progress tracking is disabled unless you’re connected to the DRM server. GOG users complained and the game was delisted, but the fact remains that they fucking tried. If GOG doesn’t even believe in being anti-DRM anymore, then I see no reason to use their [apparently] CCP-curated games library.
GOG may have started out as a plucky band of disruptors and idealists, but that dream died about 10 years ago. They’re EA cosplaying as Che Guevara. I wouldn’t even mind if they behaved like every other storefront, but it’s the pretence and the morality-washing that makes them especially despicable. I mean EA and Ubisoft aren’t feigning to be motivated by some grand political or societal good; they’re malignant capitalists who would sell their own children, and would tell you as much. GOG dons the robes of a grassroots pinko activist while dancing to the exact same corporate tune.
Nice gesture, but keep in mind that this is the same GOG that was poised to release Devotion by RedCandleGames, only to renege on it because CCP imbeciles told them to. They are brave against censorship except when it involves actual conflict with censors. As soon as that happens, it’s bootlick city.
I don’t really care? Is that allowed? 🤷
I’m old enough to remember when computers started to be used for art, and how traditional artists were complaining about how soulless the end product would be, and how unskilled people could ‘fake’ being good artists because the computer does most of the work for them. I mean the undo function of a computer on its own is putting incredible creative power into the hands of even the most useless digital artist, power that da Vinci himself would have creamed his little loincloth over. And the copy & paste function - and all of the other everyday functions all PC users depend on - cut down the production time by orders of magnitude compared to traditional painting/drawing. This isn’t even getting into the incredible transformation tools on offer in Photoshop (or even MS Paint 1.0).
Remember matte painters who painted incredible photorealistic chunks of the screen in films? Do Photoshop users of today feel any qualms about having extincted the fuck outta those people? Would they have even entertained the woes of those artists if they were around at the time? Would they have been calling for government intervention to prevent non-traditional matte painters from taking those jobs?
What about sculptors and stop-motion pros? Movies have been riddled with worse-looking CGI replacements for those things for half a century. Any shits given about those artists who spent their lives perfecting their craft only to be supplanted overnight by a cunt with a Pentium who produces objectively worse results?
AI is just the latest sabot-magnet disruption, and it won’t be the last, despite the apocalyptic language around it. Either find a way to live with it and exploit it, or lay down in the Artists of Christmas Past mass grave and pull the clay in over yourselves. Or, you know, go ahead and try to uninvent it or whatever it is you’re proposing 👍 And if you really wanna go hardcore, uninstall all of your digital art tools, get yourself an easel and see what you can do in the “real world” with your “real talents” without recourse to time-saving, labour-deleting, instantaneous bespoke-brush-manifesting technology.
Why are they so excruciatingly slow to release patches? This patch doesn’t even cover game-breaking issues, such as the bow’s paralysis perk crashing the game if you trigger the perk twice in a row. There’s a workaround where you edit .ini files to set the chance of paralysis to 0%, but most people aren’t gonna do that.
I got 100% of the cheevos and logged 110 hours in doing so. The game crashed for me literally hundreds of times (maybe close to 1,000), and I submitted the bug reports for every one of them. I had to quicksave every minute, to avoid losing too much progress. It’s the most unstable piece of software I’ve ever used, game or otherwise.
The game itself is great, but fuck me… almost 2 months later and they patched maybe 0.2% of the crashes and bugs every player is encountering 😒
SOMA still lives in my brain 10 years later.
$800 million doesn’t even seem that high at this stage (I had assumed they broke a billion by now).
Whatever this ends up being when it’s all said and done is never going to justify the production costs. If you developed a helmet that could trigger the hardest orgasm your body can muster at the push of a button, it would not justify $800 million.
This will be my first experience of Morrowind, the original is just way too old for me to try getting into now. I’m a Philistine, I know, but I need a modern UI and interface and UX and all that jazz. Skyrim is pretty old at this point too, but it still holds up in all the important ways. So, I shall wait for the release of Skywind! (Could probably have phrased that in a slightly less flatulent way…)
The game was acclaimed and beloved by virtually everyone who played it, and it’s only becoming profitable now? Is it too simplistic to say that a normal release across multiple storefronts, namely Steam, would have made it profitable in a matter of months?
I genuinely keep forgetting the game exists. An article like this one will pop up from time to time, and only then will I remember about it. Epic is a black hole.
It will be riddled with monetisation, with the attendant mission/quest structure to support that goal. Like, it’s an impossibility that it won’t be. Starfield was on the verge of getting some good will back from the player base, but squandered it on that bullshit pay-per-quest DLC they released recently. Bethesda is beyond help at this point.
- No Man’s Sky - 1,631 hours
- The Long Dark - 1,337 hours
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 651 hours (I combined the original and Special Edition playtimes)
- Nova Drift - 434 hours
- Fallout 4 - 378 hours
- Starfield - 178 hours (I enjoyed it!)
If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.
It’s quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn’t bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.
I wonder if there’s a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.
I haven’t bothered to read the article yet, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume they want our PCs to be so overpowered in order to better run their AI bullshit. Gonna turn us into a distributed datacentre or something.