The site can be fun sometimes. ;p

Hopefully it will be a banger like the first!

Does Microsoft make Halo? Halo’s developer is owned by Microsoft, just as Xenoblade’s developer is owned by Nintendo.

Xenoblade

The Xenoblade series is made by a developer that is owned by Nintendo. If Nintendo doesn’t want people to rag on their products, they should make them better.

I remember back when Halo 3 and 4 were out for one Microsoft gaming platform (Xbox), but not the other (Windows); and Halo 2 for Windows was a disaster area (Games for Windows Live, ugh). Went on like that for years and years. I just couldn’t figure out why even first party Microsoft games were not available on both Microsoft platforms.

I would have bought the Halos in a heartbeat from a Windows-locked store back then. Though, I’m glad that by the time they launched an official MS store (and much, much later released Halo 3+ for the PC, and Halo 2 in a way that didn’t suck), I was already souring on Microsoft as a company and didn’t want to lock myself into a platform-specific store.

Exactly, every time I say ‘I’m thinking of putting up a Factorio server, you want in?’, they are significantly less likely to be playing (or paying for) the newest game that has kernel-level access. Why, because we are playing Factorio for the next few weeks together and Factorio is fun.

Factorio isn’t the only game we play, but the point is to reinforce yours. If you are playing fun game x, your friends are more likely to play x instead of something else. Even if they have no care about Kernel-Level access, the fact you do affects their buying (and playing) patterns.

First of all, plenty of people would be happy to self-host a game for their friends, if they were still allowed the option.

Exactly! Me and my friends often play on modded Factorio servers that one of us hosts. This is only possible because the developer doesn’t lock things down to only the first-party (official) servers.

We don’t play with cheaters either (you aren’t getting invited to our server if you are). We play with our friends because it is fun, in a way no official server could hope to work.

Why would they listen to your personal complaint if you, singular, are going to buy it anyway? Your voice only matters to a company if it means you won’t buy their product otherwise. Don’t buy the game, then tell them why you didn’t.

Maybe they should spend less money. Something like Hollow Knight was made at a fraction of the cost of a AAA game, but is excellent.

If you spent a tenth as much on each game, you only need one or two games to do well for the whole set of ten to be a success.

The company also has a vested interest in keeping PC players on their OS, while simultaneously treating the platform like a second class citizen for years. Anybody remember the abortion that was Games for Windows Live? And it isn’t like Windows Mixed Reality or ‘this is now a tablet OS’ are doing them any favors either.

God am I happy I didn’t buy any software on the Microsoft store.

Agreed, seems OP is getting tired of the live service grind. Subnautica (start with the first) and Hollow Knight are both excellent single player games to try out.

It’s Not Hard For A Billion-Dollar Company To Credit An Artist From Time To Time

The companies who own these games never bother to credit the artist

I guess I’m a bit confused here. Every film I have seen in my entire life credits the artists, and many games do as well.

Some games that make for some fun coop and don’t require a ton of screen time. All of these are at least gold rated on ProtonDB so should be fine on the SteamDeck, though I’m not sure about crossplay with consoles on any:

• Sanctum - An interesting combo of first person shooter and tower defense (Sanctum 2 was also real good)
• Borderlands 1 - Looter shooter with some solid humor (Borderlands 2 was also real good, but goes downhill in later games)
• MechWarrior 5 - Who doesn’t want to be a giant mech riddled with guns?
• Left 4 Dead 2 - Fight together to escape zombies, or in multiplayer servers work together as the zombies to take out other humans

Now, less of a focus on shooters:

• Golf It and Golf With Your Friends - Put Put golf taken to extreme levels
• Magica 2 - Murder enemies together in a top-down wizard game
• BattleBlock Theater - Jump over obstacles and solve puzzles together

People also are increasingly realizing that Ubisoft games are all very bland and…the same. People enjoyed it the first time, but why buy a new AC game when you already have essentially the same thing in you library already?

Ah, the good 'ol: you have three options, choose two!

Though, not paying annually for multiplayer access certainly helps with the financial ruin problem. ;p

Highly, highly recommend using GOG. Buying is owning. There is no DRM and they even provide offline installers for the games you buy.

But they updated the terms of use and apparently now, stating that buying is not owning

This has always been the case for Steam and every other service that isn’t GOG.

Jump over to PC and choose both 140fps and quality. ;p

I’m at least happy we are past the era of ‘the human eye can only see 30fps’.

It certainly felt very tacked on. I never enjoyed having to interact with it, nor did it add anything to the story.

Yep. The type of people buying the horse armor are not the people who are complaining about what it means for a full priced game to have such and and the direction that pointed the company in. Given this is what he is talking about now, and not how they have lost their way and are working on delivering solid experience for players, unlike their last games, is telling.

But, I lost all hope for TES6 to be good when Starfield came out. Maybe I’ll be wrong, hopefully I’ll be wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.

Just remember to not play League of Legends. I’m pretty sure that game is designed to trick you into thinking you are having fun, but what is actually happening is everyone in team chat is yelling at you and you are probably yelling (at least privately) too.

• Source, every LoL player I have ever been on voice chat with

Yep! He is pretty popular and does some nice reviews. He generally likes pointing out negative aspects a bit more. But he is one of the more honest and amusing reviewers out there.

He is the same guy that used to do the Zero Punctuation reviews.

And it was something people were hoping would save the game. But, it’s unfortunately more confirmation that Bethesda can no longer produce quality games.

Unfortunately you need to forget about it for another number of years. As only two of the three parts are out. Part two took them four years after part one, so safe to guess the same for part three.

Also, the names are exceedingly confusing:

• FF7 Part 1 is named: Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020)

• FF7 Part 1 Enhanced is named: Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (2021)

• FF7 Part 2 is named: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024)

If their goal is to get people to completely check out due to long, long release schedules and confusing naming, they are succeeding.

They are suing over a patent though (ie, a technology). What you are talking about is a copyright suit.

Unfortunately we don’t know what patents Nintendo is suing over. And I struggle to think of a patent issue that would generate a good faith claim.

Yeah, I was decently interested in it until I found out the whole game won’t actually exist for years. Maybe I’ll get the bundle at a deep discount 8 years from now, assuming I even remember it exists.

Lol, capsule distributor apparently running a little high on stock!

Yeah, kinda sounds like he should put the whole game down. That monthly sub isn’t cheap either. Shit adds up.

Yeah, with the Intel 13th and 14th gen issues, it really shouldn’t be recommending them as much. I think part of the issue is they only have one CPU vendor per tier. If they improved that, it would probably fix the issue. That said, if we are going purely off price/power, I’m not convinced their choices are bad.

For a beginner though, I really don’t like just shoving them at PC Part Picker. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed with choices.

While this is certainly in self-build territory, Logical Increments does a real good job giving balanced builds for various price points. People new to building often don’t know how much to spend on a CPU vs GPU to get the best value out of a given build cost.

We have those IRL as well, condos and townhouses. Many people choose to go for those.

Best we got is a new Skyrim version. What do you mean you don’t want to buy the game you already own again? We made 20 different versions, all just for you to buy!

Not specifically SW: Outlaws, but they were given something that previously only EA made meh games with, and they decided to also make a meh game. Ubisoft really likes their meh games. See also: Assassin’s Creed #25, coming out this year!

Damn, it’s down 45% over the last year as well. They seem to have released a few flops recently; and their notable IPs kinda just aren’t exciting anymore.

Bank transfers are slow. It is generally taken out of the account the next business day, sits in escrow for a few days, then appears in the destination account where it takes another day to clear. About a week total.

Though, if it gets held for suspected fraud or needs to cross international boundaries, it can sit in that escrow account for much longer.

Doubtful. The story in GTA 5 was much weaker than in RDR 2, and Rockstar’s direction with GTA has been shifting increasingly heavily on multiplayer and micro-transactions. GTA 6 will almost assuredly continue leaning increasingly heavily on multiplayer and micro-transactions.

hiring way too many developers to work on a project

Most development companies also destroy their own built up experience after every game. Instead of using the experts (the people who have been making games for you for years) to create your next game, instead they lay those people off and hire new people.

Even better was with Kerbal Space Program 2. They didn’t even allow the KSP2 devs to talk to the KSP1 devs, despite them all still being employed at the same company. The people perfectly positioned to make the next game were not allowed to touch it or even talk to the people touching it. This culminated with a disaster of a release and the community roundly rejecting KSP2 as it is significantly worse than the first. It didn’t have to be this way.

Seems it is better known than I thought!

I see you are doing some downvote farmin’ today!

Is a good game, especially with mods.

Avorion - In which you command and build a spaceship designed by yourself (or others on the internet). Soon you have AIs you command and space stations you own. The game allows you to lean as much or as little as you want into the fleet command and economy aspects. If you want, you can just pilot one big-ass ship and do it all alone.

Yep! I would be much more interested in a Braid 2 rather than a remake of a game I already own and enjoy. I actually didn’t realize until writing this comment that Braid Anniversary Edition even had more puzzles than the original.