Tried out the demo in late 2024. I really like the concept. It didn’t feel like all those "[retail store type] simulator] UE5 asset flips that are all over Steam. It has it’s own visual style and IMO has more refined core gameplay mechanics. Sure, some of the gamplay is similar (and can be very addicting), but you can see that thought was put into the gameplay mechanics.

If the 1st person store simulator concept seems intriguing, but you are looking for something beyond a quick UE5 asset flip, I would recommend to check this out.

I am surprised that it was released for free. I briefly interacted with the dev in late 2024 and I was under the impression that there would be a commercial release in 1H 2025.

I would assume a publication like “Nintendo Life” will promote Nintendo irrespective of what the issue is.

And to my limited understanding, the people who buy/use Nintendo are either children (you are not going to tell them they have shit taste) or hardcore fanboys who on some level will defend any action by Nintendo no matter what.

Fascinating business model.

rental sales of CDs

CDs? What would you rent CDs for? The only thing I can think of is music and win 9x games.

The weird discount application and the sales taxes.

The sales tax always drove me nuts (and in total I loved in North America for a decade), I could never get it over it.

Where I live we just get an item list (with true cost per item) and a subtotal.

That’s a fucking wild bill if you are not from the US. One would almost think you are being scammed (I am talking about the deceptive structure of the bill, not the values).

I have yet to try the demo, but I believe with Entitled, it’s actually not the story. You have the standard “save the world/princess” narrative (their page describes this in an ironic way) which you can complete, but you also have a management/tycoon x lifesim hybrid:

The world of Entitled is a quirky mix of fantasy and real life. Modern economic themes blend with a medieval fantasy setting. One moment you’re delivering swords for the blacksmith, hoping someday you will own a sword of your own and become a proper hero. Shortly after, you pay taxes and attend lectures on supply and demand on the job market. All that to figure out what to actually do with your mediocre life.

I tried the demo (this was over a year ago, so much could have changed). Seemed solid, but a little bit average. The world was compelling and I was curious to learn more. Some unique mechanics were included.

In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.

I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.

I think the bigger deal is Lemmy/Threadiverse getting 100K MAU and seeing steady growth beyond that. We are currently at around ~50-55K MAU.

Subs are a deceptive metric, MAUs are far more important.

Those castle and pond shots are beautiful.

With the price of GPUs what they are, who risks messing around with new GPUs like that?

First few hours of both FO1 and FO2 are pretty rough. Lots of almost comical kiting and a bunch of tiring save scumming seem mandatory.

Combat in the mid to late game is fun though. You have hard encounters, but you also have the opportunity to be prepared.

Thanks for the write up.

I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.

I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.

I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).

What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.

Did you get the HD patch?

I thought this was unique enough to share in [email protected]. 😆

They are on my “to play” list. :)

That’s a fair point. We did have Arcanum in 2001 and while it’s arguably legendary in CRPG circles, I don’t think it did all that well commercially.

The Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (Van Buren).

Bethesda’s version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.

Cheer!

My last playthrough was about a year ago, so I have time. :)

Dredge is really cool if you are looking for something a bit more casual, but with decent narrative and very strong world-building.

Jesus Christ, the DLC prices. They’re selling each additional ship for ~$50? Like, the game with all ships is ~$700? I mean, I know that DCS World and Il-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad use that model, but I can’t imagine that the ships function as differently from ship-to-ship as the combat aircraft in those games, bring as much additional gameplay.

It’s the Star Citizen model. Players should be happy they are not paying $400 for a concept art piece of a ship.

Might have to check this out when I do my next replay of Hl1/HL2 (I do them every 2-3 years).

Did not know about Dave the Diver releasing FOMO DLC, it’s been on my medium term wishlist, but I might just skip it. I have more then enough games to play.

It just doesn’t seem like that kind of game to do FOMO DLC.

Thanks for the update. Lots of interesting highlights.

It’s almost certainly not going to have much connection to the Marathon series beyond the name and general thematic direction.

I would love to be priced wrong.

Haven’t played the 2nd one, the first one is solid though. I did find the political simulation to be a bit inflexible, I think I disabled political impact on my runs.

“It has been over a quarter of a century since SimCity 3000 was released in 1999.”

First off, rude.

😜

I am glad I am not the only one who is still playing it somewhat regularly. :)

Honestly, just try Simcity 3000 or Simcity 4 (some community mods are mandatory). Simcity 3000 is easier to start imo.

Just remember to watch spending and make sure to always have new zones (primarily industrial and residential) until you hit 1950 or so.

Start at the edge of the map with an industrial district that goes parallel to the edge of the map.

Plan ahead with your transport structures (leave a compact corridor for a railway line) and zone locations.

Initially focus on surplus budget and growth (i.e. surplus budget mostly spent on expansion), but try and invest into education so that by 1950 you have a more educated populace.

Have fun!

I played a lot of Simcity 2000 (it was the first game I played), so for me the visual, size and quality of life upgrades in Simcity 3000 were always impressive.

Simcity 3000 doesn’t have NAM or anything similar. 😀NAM is a must install for Simcity 4. It’s one of the reason I think Simcity 3000 is a bit more approachable.

So this is what REPO looks like. I heard it was super popular, but never had a chance to encounter it.

Cheers!

Never heard of The Escapist before, sounds like a fun game.

Cheers!

Surprised it’s your GPU fans that are the loudest, I barely hear my 3080 and I regularly heard the CPU cooling fans, but then again I most play strategy games that heavily bottlenecked by CPU.

GPU fan noise is not something that’s easily fixable, unlike CPU cooling.

This is a good addition to Lemmy.

I stand by what I say. It is clear that CIG are being dishonest in terms of what they have achieved.

Server meshing is mostly a marketing project to maintain confidence in cash shop spend. Not saying people haven’t worked on it, but the main aim is to keep selling JPEGs.

Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.

So a single dual core Pentium Pro CPU handles a shard of 4K players, with a comparable server CPU being limited exclusively to trading/transactions and another high end Pentium Pro being limited to (as per your description) a high traffic IRC server?

Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious. I am happy to learn more about Dark Age of Camelot’s architecture (even if I am wrong), but I also won’t take CIG marketing/propaganda at face value.

This is from an article on Dark Age of Camelot from 2003:

The heart of Camelot, it turns out, isn’t in the English countryside but in Fairfax, Virginia. There Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running linux. Each group of six servers runs what mythic calls a gamespace—a virtual world inhabited by thousands of players. The idea is to create different gamespaces for different types of players.

Design decisions also reflect the need to keep players happy. While each gamespace could conceivably handle 20,000 simultaneous players, Mythic limits them to about 4,000 players each, adding new gamespaces when necessary instead of increasing the load on the ones already up. “If you have too many people, the worlds get too crowded,” says Denton. “The last thing you want is to be bumping into thousands of people.”

We also have multiple example of CIG trying to market common tech (serialized variable!) as some of milestone.

I knew he was an American-style libertarian (understable considering his lack of experience and sheltered life in the US), but I don’t know he was into partaking in ShitCons run by local chauvinists.

One thing to keep in mind about the “$40-$45 is all you need” statements that litter almost every Star Citizen thread is that the math doesn’t really work out.

As per CIG, you have around 2.5 million paying accounts (with many of them being alts). 2.5 M. * $45 gives us $112.5 M, so just 14% of their revenue.

It’s clear that they will put the overwhelming majority of their resources into something that gives them 86% of their revenues; milking whales, selling JPEGs and power creep cash items (with the vast majority of the older cash shop items being either outright non-functional or abandoned).

All you need to do is follow the money.

Server meshing being “unmatched” is mostly marketing BS.

You have examples of MMO games leveraging server meshing (with Pentium CPUs) from 20+ years ago.

Dunky video

What if you don’t know who Dunky is and you didn’t find the video funny (seems pretty low effort).