Honestly, I’d rather see another studio take a crack at the franchise. I don’t know whether Gamefreak have lost a lot of important talent over the years or if they just got lazy because their games are guaranteed to sell no matter how poorly they’re produced, but they do not know how to make games in the current era. Full stop. The last handful of mainline Pokemon titles have been unacceptably poor quality, and Nintendo won’t light a fire under their ass because… why would they, when they’re already printing money?

I think it would be wildly beneficial to the health of the franchise if a completely new studio took the wheel for a minute. They don’t have to reinvent the game mechanics or take the story in some dark and gritty direction or anything like that, but if they just made it functional that’d already be a huge step up over Gamefreak’s last few releases.

Personally, I’d love to see Retro Studios take a crack at a mainline Pokemon title. They’ve already got a very close relationship with Nintendo, and have released nothing but bangers.

The electric costs aren’t nearly as high as people think. For huge datacenters, yes, but that’s because they’re processing requests for hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously. For a studio using it to translate lines for a single game, they could easily get away with doing it locally, and effectively for free. You can train your own local model on a consumer-grade PC without any issue, and it’ll still run just as fast as the big server farm-powered models.

My roommate has been playing with a bunch of different local AI models on his own PC for a couple years now. There’s been no discernable change to our electric bill. His PC draws more power playing an anime waifu gacha game than it does training/generating AI.

What was Wurm Online?

I really don’t think it was that secret. Every modern Ubisoft game I’ve played has had multiple unskippable TOS checkboxes that you had to agree to before you can even pass the title screen, which state in no uncertain terms that they’re going to datamine the shit out of your entire play session.

It is still nice to see this stuff being challenged, though, even though I’m doubtful that it’ll bring about any meaningful change.

Yeah man we get it, piracy good, laws bad, yar har and all that shit. This guy’s still an idiot, and so is anybody defending him.

It’s so lifelike!

If I had to guess, it’s probably to keep pricing parity across regions and avoid a clusterfuck of import loopholes.

Realistically, the gameplay loop doesn’t look too different from something like Helldivers 2; go into a mission, fight enemies on the way to an objective, complete the objective, return back to your escape point. Really, the only difference is inventory persistence, but Arrowhead manages to stuff a lot of story into that.

I don’t think it’s the most conducive medium for storytelling, but it’s far from impossible, if you ask me.

I really like the aesthetic, but the gameplay looks pretty much identical to every other extraction shooter I’ve seen. I feel like that’s such a niche genre that already has a lot of big contenders, so it just seems like a weird move for Bungie to invest so heavily into this genre without offering anything substantially different.

What makes you think this will be lacking in the lore department? Lore is what Bungie does.

I think $800m may be enough to place it as the biggest scam in gaming industry history.

The problem is that a live service game has to be a “complete” game, even at launch; ie. playing any one “season” on its own should be a satisfactory experience for a player. Star Citizen is nowhere near being a completed product.

There was fine print at one point during the stream that specified that 4K will be limited to 60 FPS.

You gotta press the C button first, to ask them.

I was in a CAL-O team back in my CS days. Not saying this to brag (clearly, as CAL-O was definitely not top tier), just to credential my own opinion as I’m no stranger to competitive FPS play, myself.

It does not matter what you do. If there is anything altering the players inputs whatsoever those players need to be playing against only other people with those same assists and controls.

I don’t necessarily agree that the two are incompatible, even for comp/ranked play. Even if you segregate controller and M/K players, the players in the controller pool aren’t necessarily all playing with the same controller (third-party or Pro/Elite controllers are fairly common), and the players in the M/K pool are definitely not all playing with the same peripherals.

Some controller players will have extra buttons, paddles, or gyro aiming that other players won’t; and it’s probably rare to find two players in any M/K lobby using the same mouse. Even in a PC-only lobby, the player with the $400 RGB HyperTactical GX Mountain Dew & Knuckles mouse is going to have an intrinsic advantage over the player using the 2-button mouse that came with the Dell Optiplex he bought at a yard sale. So either way, neither matchmaking pool has players on a truly even playing field to begin with, and somebody’s choice in their input method is likely to give them some sort of advantage over others in their lobby.

If we want to game in a truly fair, competitive environment, then we should do it like sports leagues do and ensure all players are using standard-issued equipment so that the only variable is the individual skill of the players. But there’s a million reasons why that can’t happen though, so we have to accept some amount of compromise to fairness in order to make games playable.

Ultimately, if the concern is “aim assist is too strong on controller”, then I think that’s a quality control issue on the developers’ part, and something that can be remedied. I don’t think the right solution is “split the player base into sequestered factions”, even though it’s an easy solution. Because you also need to consider that the input method isn’t the only factor deciding any encounter between players. If it were, then you could give the top M/K players a controller and they’d skyrocket through the leaderboards. And vise-versa, the top controller players should start landing all their flick shots once they switch to M/K. But they don’t, because just like in traditional sports, familiarity with the equipment is just as important as one’s ability and game knowledge.

Another often-overlooked issue, which nobody wants to hear, is that there 100% exists an attitude among many M/K players of “he’s on controller, so there’s no way he can be better at the game than me”. A lot of times, the balance between controller and M/K is just fine, and players are just finding themselves on the uncomfortable end of the Dunning-Kruger curve. And I’m not saying this as some sort of Holy Paladin of Gamepads or anything; I actually prefer M/K. But quite often I see PC players dismiss the skill of console players, because they equate their skill to their platform selection. I’m not accusing you of this, by the way, just mentioning that this is an attitude I see a lot in competitive circles, but never see anybody actually talk about it.

I’m multitasking and dangerously decaffeinated as I write this, so I’m sorry if I’m rambling and not making any sense lol.

It depends on the game, really. Some games balance controller and M/K inputs very well, and I appreciate cross-play in those games. In my experience, Apex is particularly bad about their input balancing and gives way too much advantage to controller users, which is why XIM/Cronus cheating is so prevalent.

But, you can definitely still have a competitive and fair balance between inputs. Destiny 2 was actually really good about this, and their weapons team did a LOT of work to make sure that matches between console and PC players felt good even at high levels of play, and they nailed it, imo. I think part of the way Bungie made it work was by making every weapon have intrinsic aim assist, even on M/K. This allowed them to tweak that value for each input mode, so that guns felt right regardless of what you played with.

And the tradeoff wasn’t just “extra bullet magnetism in exchange for slower aim speed”, they also increased the visual recoil and screen shake effects for controller users, so that the aim assist wasn’t completely free, all on a per-weapon basis. Despite Bungie’s flaws and numerous missteps with Destiny, this is something that I don’t think they get nearly enough credit for.

There are some devices that do this, but as you’ve already noted, they’re crazy expensive. There’s cheap(er) ways to accomplish the same thing, though.

Assuming you don’t need to do any heavy-duty computing on either screen, you could probably get away with a very cheap laptop for the primary display, and something like a Wacom display tablet for the touchscreen element. I’m not sure how compatible such touchscreen displays are with Chromebooks, but most Chromebooks easily have Linux installed on them, which I’d imagine has much better support. Or pretty much any low-spec Windows laptop would also work just fine.

You could probably get away with a decent setup like this for the $500-600 range. The tablet could rest over the keyboard of the laptop, or if you’re clever with drafting and have access to a 3D printer, you could probably easily print yourself a mount of some sort to secure the touch display over the laptop keyboard to avoid pressing keys and give it a more intentional design. I don’t know how well using an on-screen keyboard would feel, so something modular like this, where you could easily expose the real keyboard without too much fuss, may be a good route to take.

For file management, especially if you plan on interacting with a file on both screens at any point, that would get very cumbersome very quickly.

Australia’s usually really strict when it comes to violence in video games, but the Silent Hill series isn’t really known for intense gore. Though, the trailer looked a bit like it was going to be a bit body horror-focused (I got lots of Junji Ito vibes from it), so maybe SH:F will actually be a bit bloodier than other SH games.

Google Now and Google Inbox were legitimately some of the most useful products any tech company has released. They were such game-changers, and I’ll never stop being angry about their cancellation.

I wouldn’t mind it, if it could do the basic things I need an assistant to do. When they first started pushing Gemini, I couldn’t even get it to do simple things like send a text or a set a reminder. I’m sure it’s gotten better since then, but just immediately failing at what I would consider the bare minimum really soured Gemini for me. Still haven’t reinstalled it, counting down the days until Google forces it on me.

Good! Hopefully more devs follow suit and pull traffic away from Fandom.

Also hopeful that they manage to fix the SEO on the site, as Fandom is still the top result for “Vampire Survivors wiki”.

Anything to avoid discussing TES6.

I believe it’s supposed to be more of a spiritual successor to The Sims.

I used to play RF2 multiplayer on GameCube with my brother when we were kids. We’d go onto that space map and try to snipe each other from across the map with the railgun.

The early RF games are really underrated.

The SH1900 from The Finals is one of the most satisfying guns I’ve used in a game before. Kicks like a horse but chunks away enemy health bars. High risk, high reward, high octane. And the audio just thumps you right in the chest with every shot, almost as much as the folks on the business end of the barrel.

I’d remove those from your backups. There was a situation a while back where a guy has his Google account shut down because he sent pictures of his child’s skin rash to his doctor, and the photos were flagged as CSAM when he uploaded them.

Edit: A bit late, but here’s an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-csam-account-blocked

I feel like this will work out about as well as “GMO-free” labels on food.

I believe the later Pixel models have longer support periods. But I’m in a similar boat with my old Pixels; my P1 still works just fine, and I’d love to use it as a makeshift security cam, but it’s so far out of date that it’s probably not wise to have it on the network at all.

For me, it’d be Prime. The game just oozes atmosphere from start to finish, and has one of my favorite game soundtracks of all time. I still sometimes listen to the Phendrana Drifts tracks because they’re just so damn chill.

when will they tackle loot boxes?

Once loot boxes stop buying yachts.

Looks like it’s finally coming back up.

Edit: nevermind, not fully back up. Looks like some PSN services are working, but game logins are still down.

Check out The Finals! It has a lot of similar movement abilities. The maps are designed with verticality and fast traversal in mind, so it may scratch that itch for you.

It’s hard not to when the man who just did two nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration is also trying to insert himself into our gaming spaces. We don’t want nazis in our communities.

My apologies if I’m getting this wrong, as I don’t play Gacha games, but isn’t that worse?

It depends. I’m not sure how current loot box games handle it, but with most gacha games, there are determined odds for the prizes, so they have a “pity” system. So after a certain amount of pulls, you’re always guaranteed to get the top reward. RNG will make it so that you’ll typically pull all the way to nearly the end of that pity timer before you get the top reward, but you’ll eventually get it.

I’m not sure if traditional loot “boxes” have such a protection in place. I dunno if it’s any better or worse since they’re both pretty manipulative tactics, but it’s different.

I feel like the difference is the loot “box”, itself. Granted, I’ve not played any loot box games since Team Fortress 2, but in that game the box was an actual inventory item you could store and open whenever you wanted, and those items would always be from the same pool.

With Genshin, you’re basically just pulling from a singular, infinite loot box that rotates its reward pool. So you can’t, as a player, decide to open a Year 1 item when it’s not in the current rotation.

It’s a small difference, but I feel like that’s why we have separate terminology for “gacha” and “loot box” games.

I’m confused. I’ve played Genshin, and I don’t remember any sort of loot box system in the game. There’s a gacha system which seems to be what the article keeps referring to, but that’s very different from what I think the average user considers a “loot box”.

Was kinda hoping for specs. I like the design upgrade, though.

Sure, but Xenoblade isn’t about Japanese historical events. It’s a little too on-the-nose with Assassin’s Creed.

It took a year and a half to develop an “undo” feature? WTF is happening at Google?