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All it had going for it was the over-short-sold theory, which was sound but not enough to prevent the billionaires from just adjusting the way they play the game. The idea to become a focal point for gaming (instead of just a place to buy games and other shit) might have worked but I never saw any changes at all in that direction in any gamestops I visited. Just shelves full of products I only kinda want. And a lot of space dedicated to funkopops, which I don’t understand why anyone wants. Does anyone even still want them at this point? I don’t think I’ve every seen someone buying one.
From my POV, there isn’t a difference, other than a CCG gives you physical objects so wotc can’t just up and decide that they don’t want to run magic anymore and make all of that loot disappear.
But from the gambling perspective, it’s exactly the same. Oh, actually one other difference, electronic gambling can fuck with the odds in real time while physical cards need to be determined when the pack is assembled. But it’s still based on false scarcity.
Yeah, I think this would be a useful feature for games out of early access, too. It’s not as important (because not all games need updates) but it would be a nice plus to show how long it’s been since the last minor and major updates.
Maybe also add a standardized spot for possible features with various levels of confidence and ETAs (along with history so it’s easy to see when a feature has been “promised soon” for years). Devs could address common complaints in reviews this way, rather than replying to a few and hoping those are the ones people see, plus the nightmare of updating those replies if things like timeline change.
Any time some weird thing results in the refresh rate being set incorrectly, it is pretty noticable to me. Though it might be more about the pixel response time being tuned for the max refresh rate and thus the screen looking a bit darker at lower refresh rates (because the pixels get closer to returning to black before the next frame comes in).
Just speculating on the reason but I definitely notice it when it’s wrong.
I had planned on getting a 4k monitor as part of my upgrade path. But then when it came time to get it, I stopped and looked closely at my 1440p monitor and realized that I never thought games didn’t have enough pixels to look good.
I ended up just getting an ultra wide 1440p instead and don’t regret it.
A good portion of my failures in boss fights are due to getting the boss low and thinking, “I can just spam attack until he’s dead now” and then getting caught by attacks I was avoiding prior to that.
And a decent portion of the ones left after eliminating those ones are due to not being used to the attacks enough to avoid them consistently.
Assuming soulslike boss fights.
Oh yeah, 90s and 00s Blizzard was great. I had fallen in love with RTS after playing a demo for Dune 2000 (I think it was) and after mentioning it to a friend, he loaned me his copy of Warcraft II. From there, my top games were Blizzard games for over a decade. WC2, SC, found out that cool Diablo game another friend had shown me was also Blizzard as they were marketing D2, then WC3, then WoW was my peak Blizzard obsession. But they still had some more good ones: SC2, Hearthstone, HotS, then the first Overwatch.
I think all that WoW money ruined them. Line must go up, even if they were on a massive mountain that would naturally eventually wane as people grew bored of the game and the niche it fit in grew more crowded. They started chasing dollars instead of chasing great games and making dollars in the process.
That Diablo phone app game being announced as if their audience gave a fuck about mobile games showed how out of touch they were with what used to make them great. And the follow up “don’t you all have phones?” just cemented how blind they were, not even considering that the people making mobile games so much money didn’t have much overlap with their current fan base, most of whom built a relatively expensive gaming PC to game on despite how much cheaper phones already were.
And there were other questionable things, like that WC3 remaster that no one asked for replacing the more capable original.
The D3 auction house, though to be fair to that one, I liked the idea going in and it was only after experiencing it that I understood it was a bad idea that would make most runs boring because most drops couldn’t compare to items I could get cheap on the AH.
Then the China thing and trying to defraud a tournament winner out of their prize because he said something in support of Hong Kong. Then finding out that it was a workplace dripping with toxic masculinity (which was the case even when they were doing great).
And then they did a WC3 remaster on Overwatch, replacing the game that was originally purchased at AAA price with a free to play one that also wasn’t finished, with features promised to make the replacement easier to swallow just dropped.
By the time Microsoft came to buy them, I didn’t care what happened to them anymore. Activision had already been business major enough, with their only credit being that they didn’t immediately enshitify Blizzard when they acquired them.
For game streaming itself, there’s always going to be the latency issue that will keep a bunch of gamers away from ever using it. I never bothered even looking at the streaming options when I had game pass because of that.
GPU drivers have low latency modes for when the timing of a frame update means your current input will come a frame or two later, and a difference of 10ms in frame delivery time can be enough to call something a stuttery mess.
Now add network latency that is an order of magnitude higher. Streaming video and/or audio is fine because it can buffer enough to absorb typical latency jumps, but games can’t buffer more than the upper bound of input latency, so that brief 1 second network hiccup is a horrible stutter where you can’t even move.
Though at least game pass works more like Netflix in that you can just pick a game available and try it out if you have a sub. I don’t get the appeal of the ones where you not only subscribe to the service but also need to buy the games you play at full price.
WoW probably holds the most cases of this for me.
World PvP was one front. Early on, just winning fights felt good. Then, as I got better, it felt more normal when it was an advantageous matchup for me. But the peak for me was during TBC, I was leveling my rogue and a hunter jumped me as I was mining. This was pretty much a worse case scenario, especially because the hunter was lvl 70 (max at the time) and I was still something like lvl 65. But even at the same level, a) a hunter is a natural counter for a rogue, and b) I was mining so I didn’t even get the stealth advantage.
So there was a lot of dopamine when I ended up getting to finish mining that node and the hunter had to walk back to his corpse after I beat him anyways.
Also a lot of dopamine from finally beating raid bosses that my guild had been stuck on for a long time. Vael in BWL was the peak for that one IIRC.
A better way to handle that would be for “taking screenshots when other apps have focus” to be a special permission that needs to be explicitly granted. Could even make it app specific (ie, “I allow app x to take screenshots or record the display/audio of apps y and z”).
Just like arbitrary apps shouldn’t have access to look at the clipboard or full file system whenever they want.
They meant they wanted a game set during the conjunction of the spheres but didn’t know if witchers were a thing yet at that timeframe in the lore. The wording made it seem like they were talking about your first witcher idea but they were talking about a different alternate timeframe setting they’d like to see.
Exactly. Oh and I also just remembered another angle: their anti-linux stance. They used to make games with native Linux support, but as I understand it, they’ve even removed Linux support from some games that already had it, trying to keep the Microsoft monopoly going. I wonder how much money ms is giving epic for that.
Same reason why a lot of the non-steam handhelds are non-starters for me. And yeah, I can live without games that depend on Windows kernel-level anti-cheat.
My backlog is so full I could keep entertained even if I ignore every single game I don’t currently have in my steam library. Hell, I even ignore some that are there when I realized they have denuvo or something like that after buying and the refund window has already passed when I do notice.
Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!
Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.
I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.
It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.
Doesn’t really apply in this case.
TSMC charges per wafer. If yield improves, that means each wafer will have higher quality chips, on average. Which could mean less junk chips and/or more chips that will make it to a higher bin (which could mean more speed or less that needs to be fused off due to a flaw).
Also, you’re not the customer they are talking about. They mean their customers, like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, etc.
Though you might see some savings because higher yields means inventory levels increase, which could mean a lower optimal price on the supply/demand curve. Even if the MSRP is lower than the optimal price, it would still mean less opportunity to scalp the chips for profit.
Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?
I hate those because:
- Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
- I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
- If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
- It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
- And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.
Yeah, the line between AAA and Indy games is kinda blurred at this point. Especially because quality has split into production quality and gameplay quality and higher production quality seems to be getting more accessible to smaller dev teams.
Like I’ve been playing Enshrouded and have been enjoying it. It’s a large game (like I think the map is comparable to a WoW continent with fewer total regions but each region is larger… I think it’s a bit bigger than breath of the wild) but I have no idea if it would fall into the AAA box or not. Nothing about the game screams “Indy” or “small development team” other than the game being (IMO) really well done and not feeling like a product of a ??? step between “start making game” and “profit” like so many AAA games have felt like with all their season passes and MTX.
Ultimately, “good game” vs “bad game” is more important than “AAA” vs “Indy” (or whatever other categories), which is why I first asked about it. My bias has gotten to the point where I’ll ignore a lot of the games that look like they are AAA games tuned for engagement and profit rather than necessarily being fun, but I could be missing out.
Any AWD Lambo in Gran Turismo. Especially after getting used to powerful RWD supercars.
With FWD cars you start out with, you can pretty much go from full throttle to threshold braking back to full throttle as aggressively as you want while taking turns. As long as your speed is low enough to go around a corner, you’ll make it and if you make a mistake, you have a chance at recovery.
With RWD, you’ve gotta be super careful with the throttle on turns. If you try the instantly apply full throttle approach, you’ll end up spinning out when the rear tires (that provide stability) lose traction. A lot of the videos of people fucking up their supercar are instances of being too aggressive on the throttle when they weren’t going perfectly straight. I’m not sure how accurate Gran Turismo is for this, but you can give it full throttle while cornering, but you have to ease into it slowly. You don’t have much opportunity for correction, though with careful throttle control you can sometimes turn it into a drift, though that usually doesn’t work out unless you plan on drifting going in to the turn.
With AWD, just point the tires in the direction you want to go in and give it full throttle. Start losing traction? Try more throttle. It was a fun moment discovering this, after being used to the RWD approach. Might need to max out your tires and tune your suspension for stability to get these results, though. Just angle the tires outwards a bit for camber, go as low as you can without seeing sparks, and add some downforce on the front and back and it feels a bit like an F1 car.
Though the actual F1 cars they have are pretty awesome, too. A step closer to the arcade style racing where you didn’t need to learn the brake button.
IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.
It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.
Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.
It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.
And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.
Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.
Deathloop came out in 21. Though as mentioned to the other reply, steam says denuvo anti-tamper rather than DRM (and they claim to have pirated it a year ago), so this could be a different use case.
Just wondering if the anti tamper involves anything in the kernel now, since that was the use case that was originally targeted with kernel level code.
Yeah, and based on my search it looks like it had it right from launch, too. Though the steam page says denuvo anti-tamper, so maybe that’s not the same as the denuvo drm that (I think) uses encryption on certain parts of the code.
Fwiw, I didn’t notice any annoying performance issues. Apparently there is/was a stutter that was fps dependent, but the devs said they didn’t think it was related to denuvo.
I skipped buying Death Loop despite a decent sale on steam just yesterday because of denuvo.
It also made me more glad I just dropped Xbox game pass because that client didn’t show it used it at all (or if it did, I didn’t notice it), and it was on my wishlist because I had been playing it via game pass.
I wonder how many sales publishers leave on the table because of denuvo (both from people boycotting denuvo and from the lack of free advertising piracy gives) vs how many sales it generates because someone couldn’t pirate a game instead of buying it.
Like my own experience with this is when I was playing pirated games, I picked games based on availability of a pirated version. If there was a specific game I wanted to play, I might have looked for it, but failing to find it wouldn’t have meant I was headed to the store for it.
I later bought some of my favorite games after playing the pirated version. Great games made me want to give the devs money. Plus, people tend to talk about games they love, and others who hear about it might not go looking for a free version.
So all that makes me wonder if those who use denuvo are just paying extra for something that just hurts their sales instead of helping.
I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.
First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.
The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.
And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?
Depends on whether their ambitions concerning Taiwan are more about Taiwan itself or interrupting western chip dominance/production. I think without the second part, invading and occupying Taiwan would be more of a negative than a positive for China.