Yeah, though it’s honestly somewhat overwhelming to get into now. I played it a fair amount at release with friends in high school. I tried to try it again like a year ago and holy shit there’s a lot. It used to just be a really chill building game, because there wasn’t that much to fight. Now, building is just a mechanic you do while continuously increasing difficulty and unlocking more content.

Pirated copies get updates just like any other. They just don’t get automatic updates, like most storefronts provide. That’s a feature of the store though, not the game.

Yeah, I think even base Morrowind sometimes looks better. Skyrim is higher fidelity though, unless you replace every model and texture. I still assume there’s some stuff that can’t be fixed, but idk.

And, while the graphics aren’t as high fidelity, this is quite possibly the better way to play. Skyblivion won’t have Morrowind specific mods at launch (the Skyrim ones should work probably). I don’t know about the VR version, but all later Bethesda games are a significant downgrade in UI/UX for PC at minimum too. The UI is made for consoles first now, where Morrowind was PC first, and it was pretty amazing.

Their games never drop in price, and they are priced higher than anyone else. Don’t buy this shit ever. If you really want, emulate it. That’s the closest you should get to it. (Even then, is there anything worth it? There are too many amazing PC games already. I don’t need to play the fairly generic stuff Nintendo makes.)

Yes and no for the story events. There were a few community events that were time limited, though most of them didn’t add to the lore much, if at all. There have been some things where stations are threatened, and the first time it happened it was a big event. Now that’s a standard thing that happens occasionally in the game, and the community has to defeat the ship before it destroys a relay. (Honestly, it’s pretty boring, but the rewards are good.) So there are a few world state things, but not much, and they don’t really contribute to the lore, just the feel of the world.

Aww, I didn’t know the Starsector community was ruined. I don’t engage with it much though. The game is pretty obscure, so it needs any publicity it can get, but that’s sad to hear.

For getting powerful, it’s mostly about mods. One important part about modding is realizing there are diminishing returns for adding the same thing. +100% ability strength doubles it. Adding +100% more only increases it by 50% (it’s still adding the same amount, but the total, with the amount added, is increasing less). Different gear will want different stats increased, but you almost never want to go all in into one thing.

For the story stuff, it doesn’t matter. Your game only has your progress. For the most part, the world state that you see is the same as your progress, not the progress of the game. You can take your time and you won’t miss anything. It isn’t like other MMOs where the world progresses without you.

I don’t wish it were more combat focused, but it did more to be engaging. I don’t want to take the chill game away from people, but one example of this is I think flying is boring and tedious, and it doesn’t need to be. The fact you literally can’t hit the ground, or anything else, means you don’t even need to look at your screen. If you can close your eyes and be fine, it can’t be engaging.

That’s my biggest complaint. It’s a game about farming a bunch of things, but they seemingly do everything they can to make sure you don’t have to be engaged whole doing it. Ideally, it could do both of these things. Either it’d be a toggle for “turn your brain on” mode, or the more engaging activity would be more rewarding, so you’re encouraged to do that but can do mindless stuff as an alternative if you want.

It’s really weird. I played in those early days (there’s a handful of badges available for the game, so most people don’t have one, but I get to be special because there’s an alpha or beta badge), and I really enjoyed it. We had one tileset, and that was enough. Now, I’ll occasionally get the urge to play it again, and there’s so much more, but I’m so much less interested in it. Everything feels less impactful. It’s just too easy now, and there’s no reason to keep going. Back then you needed to progress to survive.

The community is still as nice as ever though. I’m glad that hasn’t changed. Not many games grow as much as they have and keep that. Studios should really try to examine what they did and try to replicate it. It’s something beyond game design. It must be partially how they communicate (weekly streams, and just very up front about their plans), and also how important that is to them. It’s so important that the community lead was made the game director. What other studio has done that?

I don’t think they’ve soured on it, but they use it a lot differently than OpenAI does. They still use it as one part of their anti-cheat solution for CS at least. Honestly, that’s a great use for it. You train it to watch for suspicious behavior, and then it can automatically be deployed to look at matches that have been reported. They don’t use it to replace people. They use it to augment what they do.

It’s impressive how long muscle memory lasts. I’ll forget how to play a game, but my fingers will naturally go to the right buttons to perform actions still, even without nearly this amount of time in a game.

I’m now thinking of an amazing feature the Steam Controller could have had that would have made it actually above other controllers. If the pads also had programmable screens, you could have throttle displays and stuff on them, that are set by touch. It still wouldn’t be a flight stick, but it’d be a lot closer. That ability would actually justify it above other controllers. Currently it seems good, but I’ve already got controllers and can’t justify $99 for another one.

It’s a lot easier to make a small slice good than the full product. I’m also not surprised by this, even if something they showed was great.

If there isn’t a reference to Space Janitors I’m going to be upset.

Steam Input works fine. I’m specifically talking about their custom software for the controller, which is also used to update firmware.

Notably, Linux support sucks with those. I have one, and you can’t do any of this on Linux through their software. There are ways to do it still though, as you can do with any controller really.

Dude, no one is asking for realism. Why are you strawmaning?

Play a modern shooter, and compare that to Starfield or FO4. They just don’t feel good. Weapons don’t have weight to them, and there’s no impact to them being fired. Your character barely reacts. You just run around spraying bullets, and it doesn’t feel like anything.

What it needs are good animations, recoil systems, camera punch, VFX, and things like that. Starfield and FO4 have almost none of that. It’s the bare minimum to not be absolute trash. If you’re comparing it to FO3, they’re fairly good. If you’re comparing it to something like Battlefield, Escape from Tarkov, or anything modern, not so much.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy. I think FO4 was reasonably good, and FO3 and NV were good too. I just didn’t enjoy them for the gunplay. It’s everything around that that makes them good.

Personally though, I think Starfield sucks. The story is bland as hell if you know much sci-fi (if you’re failing to appeal to the audience that follows the genre, you failed). Exoring sucks. Clearing dungeons is pretty boring after you’ve done the five dungeons a few times. The loading screens, even on an NVMe SSD, constantly take you out of the experience. I just don’t understand what there is to like. I’d rather play FO4 with a bunch of cool mods if I’m playing something like it, or Morrowind if I want a good Bethesda RPG.

Id helped with FO4 too. Sure, it’s a lot better than 3, but, compared to any other shooter, it’s pretty horrible.

Portal 2 already had Hammer, and even a more limited Portal 2 specific editor, for making levels. That Portal 2 specific editor is more like Mario Maker. It gives you the ability to place all the stuff that’s in the game, but it’s very limited in how, and I think you can only do boxy shapes.

Sure, it’s poorly researched, but we’ve seen it enough times we can make assumptions. Denuvo has a performance impact. Bypassing it removes that. It’s a relatively safe assumption that this performs better than they standard release of the game.

I’m willing to bet it’s at least in part to anchor a higher price for the PS6. It’ll “only” be a little more expensive than this, so why not buy it?

Another good example for Unity is Escape from Tarkov. Yes, EfT is a Unity game. It’s hard to believe.

I don’t remember, but I think KJP is independent. They just signed a contract with Sony for money for DS/DS2. I don’t know, but I somewhat doubt they’d agree to total PS exclusivity. I think their games do pretty well on PC.

From my memory of the original PSP, the stick wasn’t used as often as the d-pad. Obviously the right didn’t even have a stick. This layout is good for this use case. They could swap the sticks and the d-pad/face buttons, but then they’d be really annoying to use. Since they’re more used they should be the priority.

Is your comment written by AI? It seems weird, and we already went over most of what it says.

Also, DQ runs on Nintendo systems. That makes me certain it’s cloud based.

Damn, your system is insane. Yeah, an RPG maker game is next to nothing compared to that. Still, Dragon Quest I think is 3D. It takes a lot more VRAM than RPG maker.

I have 16GB VRAM, which is a lot for most systems. That’s easily consumed by an LLM. Any model that doesn’t use at least that much tends to perform pretty poorly, in my experience. That’s not mentioning how much heat it generates while running, which has to be removed from the system or it’ll slow down. Even if your system can handle it, it heats up fast. It’s great when I need a heater running, but when I need AC my room gets warm quick.

I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that economies of scale actually mean data centers are more efficient. This isn’t to say their use is justified, just that they’re able to take advantage of things a home computer can’t.

However, having to run it locally means it needs to be much more limited. This is doubly true if you want to run the game and the LLM at the same time. The LLM is easily able to consume all resources your system has available if you allow it to, which means the game won’t run well (if it runs at all). This limits the use so it can’t just be shoved everywhere and constantly running, like it could if it’s sent to a data center. It’s not more efficient, just less consumption.

It depends on how it’s done, and what’s important to the game, if you can do this. If you can see outside the elevator, it obviously has to be really moving a fixed distance. Also, if you’re supposed to know the height you moved it needs to be fixed, so the experience conveys that. The key is to just make it as long as, or longer, than your longest expected load time, or make the door stay closed until it’s done.

For an example, Dark Souls 1 has to have fixed length elevators. The length is totally tied to the physical world. If it changed length to suit loading times, it’d throw off your sense of where you are. Dark Souls 2, many of the elevators are just trying to convey a sense of traveling, not a specific amount of it. The world is abstract, and the transitions are more about a feeling than the actual physical scale. (These two use the exact same system though obviously, but it’s a good example of different goals.)

I’m pretty sure the price increase is for OSRS also, but they just don’t get anything.

Anyway, I somewhat agree with your argument. You get what you pay for, and if you want the game to not have MTX then you’re going to pay more (possibly, increased players could counteract this). I wouldn’t use an “hours played” metric to defend this though. I think it’s a bad metric even for regular games, but especially RS where it’s a “second monitor game” much of the time. Enjoyment/$ is the metric that matters. It’s harder to measure (as it should be, as it’s subjective), but it’s actually the reason we play games.

Eh, I’ll wait for reviews at least. It wouldn’t be the first sequel to drop the ball. I don’t have any loyalty to a company. Even though I think every game they’ve made, from Natural Selection 2 on, including Moonbreakers (even if it didn’t do well it was the best model painting simulator I’ve seen), has been worth playing, that doesn’t mean it always will.

Hanlon’s razor applies here. It could be, but I doubt it. It’s just yet another stupid CEO who thinks he, and his AI chatbot, are smarter than everyone else.

However, internet users are also stupid. They think buying the game will hurt them. In what world does that make sense? They company made the purchase with this deal, assuming they’d pay it. They expect it to make them money. The CEO just thought he could just squeeze extra profit out of it by getting out of the deal. It doesn’t mean they’ll lose money by paying it. It just means the game is making them a ton of money, but they’ll have to give some of it back to the studio.

But it also helps the game sell better. I’d bet, if the game does well, Kraft on will make far more than that back. They didn’t purchase the company to lose money. They just thought they could get out of paying that money and make more profit. It’s not that they’d not make a profit by avoiding this, just less.

More of a reason to do it then. That’s scummy. I guess I’ll be avoiding them like the plague.

I understand why they couldn’t sell it at a loss. It’s a general purpose computing device, and it would be too easy for a call centre somewhere to buy 100 of them, which would lead to 0 game sales for Valve…

I’m not saying they will, but I hear people repeat this as if it’s fact, and it’s pretty nieve. They’ve had other products people wanted to scalp, or whatever, before. They have a system for it. You have to have a Steam account older than a set date before you can purchase, and your number of purchases is limited.

That’s even assuming it makes sense. Yeah, the price could be low for the hardware compared to average consumer products, but does that mean it’s lower than the, comperatively, cheap hardware used by offices? Almost certainly not. They probably don’t even have a GPU. They have to compete with gaming hardware prices, not office computers. A low gaming hardware price is still going to be expensive for an office. It’s also going to be expensive for the product for a data center. They have specialty hardware they use that’s purpose-built for the task. Sure, once upon a time the PS was used for a supercomputer. That was a much different time for hardware.

It’s big, but it’s not really impressive. It’s just for restitution, because the tariffs were already ruled illegal. This is just suing to see how much will be returned. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t effect much. It’d be nice if the money went to the consumers that paid the increase in prices, but we know that isn’t going to happen.

Isn’t the whole point, since the Xbox One, that they didn’t want it to just play games? We don’t consider it dead just because it does more stuff. I guess you can have whatever definition you want for your personal view, but I don’t really think anyone else would agree with it. It’s still going to be a Microsoft controlled platform that’s typically in the living room on a TV. Most people would say it’s dead when they stop having a device in the living room, not when that device gets extra features.

Saying this is the death of the platform is stupid. Worst case, it’s at least better than current Xbox, which doesn’t have the option to play PC games. Yeah, it’s going to have all of M$'s spywhere and AI slop, but so would any MS device. I’m not buying this crap, but if you already wanted an Xbox then this is an improvement. Yeah, you’re better off with a PC, especially one running Linux. This has been the case for decades, yet the consoles still sell.

If Microsoft doesn’t produce Xbox’s anymore, where are they going to go?

Hopefully Valve gives them a home with the Steam Machine. We’re still waiting to hear the price for that though…

(It is just a computer running Linux, but it’s sold as a console.)

Returnal came to PC. Honestly, I think it looks cool but I didn’t care for it. Everything it did, except for graphics, has been done better by indies. It felt pretty bland in my opinion, but probably pretty unique if you only play AAA.