Yeah, it’s kinda like asking your mail deliverer when something you pre-ordered will arrive.

My favorite so far has been Enshrouded. Voxel world that doesn’t look like it’s made of cubes, plus souls like combat (though not nearly the same difficulty).

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.

Who knows the connection between badgers, mushrooms, and snakes?

Rot is an essential part of our digestive process, assuming rot just means biological processes converting food from one state to a generally less appetizing state.

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.

Lol I stayed away because the anticompetitiveness was immediately obvious (they should have opened with the free games but showed their hand early by starting with exclusivity deals), but I’m not surprised it gets even worse.

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.

A moment? I had a few during my first playthrough. PD, RL, W, T, DL. And many moments of forgetting to keep an eye on that oxygen meter lol.

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:

1. Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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”.
5. 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.

I’m more curious if there were any AAA games that didn’t disappoint this year.

“Ur, ur, ur!”

How do you sell an indie game studio? Doesn’t sound very independent even before the sale to me.

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.

That might bias the results towards gaming cafes and people building test machines. Cases where an account is used but a single snapshot doesn’t necessarily reflect what they normally use or that would capture the same machine multiple times.

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.

Ah yes, the Flight Simulator and Hitman crossover expansion.

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?

DMCA takedowns on any videos with one in the background unless they pay their Nintendo licensing fees.

Don’t forget invasive anti-cheat components that can reduce performance, introduce security risks into your kernel, might be spying on everything else for all we know, and still fail to prevent people from cheating.

Oh yeah, not just for others who want it but also to cause max pain to scalpers when others can get what they want to sell for cheaper than the scalpers paid for it in the first place. If the price stays the same, there’s a good chance the scalpers will be able to at least cut their losses by selling at a slight discount (or even at par if they find the right location for a “you could have this in your hands right now instead of having to go to the store” kinda deal).

This is why I like seeing new tech with a high launch price. Even if I want one, I’m patient, and it would be worth seeing a bunch of scalpers get fucked from just assuming that initial demand will set the price even higher.

I hope they thought they had to wait in an uncomfortable line to grab the ones they got and that the store only offers exchanges and no refunds.

I used my money to put one of their games in my library and when I noticed (after the refund window) that it was an Ubisoft game, I decided to play something else.

I don’t subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy.

Is it a collection of games or more of a mashup? Ie, do you get a menu where you pick one of many games that are independent of each other, or is there an overall narrative (or something) that ties them all together like the NES remix packs?

I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.

This isn’t really about safety, it’s about gun manufacturer profits.

Imo work hours should result in equity and a say in how the company is run. Maybe a split like half the votes come from shareholders and half comes from the workers. And if the company does share buybacks, the worker share increases.

Or unionize and make it known that if the company is purchased, the union will walk out or start their own.

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”

Could add a reference to the coup against Xi, too. Dunno if it’s true, but it’s probably something whoever is in control of the CCP would want to censor either way, at least until they are ready to openly replace Xi if it is true (though even then, they probably won’t be calling it a coup).

For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):

Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding

Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.

Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.

Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.

Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world

CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes

UT: AI bots

Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons

Deus ex: rpg fps

Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.

Battlefield: large scale multiplayer

Socom: fps game that isn’t first person, online console multiplayer

Call of duty: using gun sights to aim

Far cry: open world fps

Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.

Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn’t really get into it)

Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)

HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level

TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn’t remembered for this)

Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg

Metro 2033: fps survival

Halo reach: custom maps

Destiny: MMORPG FPS

Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)

Pub bg: battle Royale

Even as far back as the first xbox, I remember some people installing Linux on it. It’s also why Halo later came out for the PC, because porting it wasn’t that difficult. Iirc, the first xbox didn’t run any Windows kernel but it did use direct x.

I think they fucked up with the series s/x. The Balder’s Gate 3 release made me realize that their policy that games needed to have the same features enabled for both the s and x essentially meant that even if you spend the extra money on the x, it will be held back by the s merely existing.

I was disappointed to find out that my PS5 doesn’t support Bluetooth headsets. You’ve gotta get one of the Sony ones I guess. The controller looks like it has an RCA port for analogue headphones and a built in mic, so it might fit your use case but I was pissed when it wouldn’t let me use my wireless bone conduction headset instead of the earbuds on the PSVR2. I usually just use my TV speakers because earbuds never stay in my ears properly, but it would be nice to be able to play without worrying about the volume being too loud for others, like late at night.