• 0 Posts
  • 98 Comments
Joined 2Y ago
cake
Cake day: Jun 01, 2023

help-circle
rss

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:

  • Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
  • Release date is announced.
  • Game is delayed.
  • Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
  • Game is delayed again.
  • Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that’s 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
  • Game doesn’t work.
  • After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
  • Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they’ve fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
  • Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
  • Game is delayed.

Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.


I’m currently playing:

  • Star Citizen (I know I know. I paid like $40 into the Kickstarter years ago and I dip in about once a year or so.)
  • Last of Us 2 (again)
  • Schedule I on Steam Deck is pretty fun.

I’m also currently gearing up to get horrendously addicted to Rimworld again since there’s apparently a new DLC on the way.


Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.

And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.


I have a long-running conspiracy theory that Google deliberately makes the UI’s of their various services (Android, Google Docs, Youtube etc.) baffling and they hide important features away so that you have to use Google to search how to do things.


Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I’ve never played it since.


Yeah that’s honestly the main thing for me too. It’s $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like… $30, especially since by all accounts it’s not even finished.



Yeah same here, my Deck in its case easily fits into a backpack, I think it’s portable enough. At a certain point you can only make things smaller by cutting essential stuff I think.


I’ve seen one of those folding phones IRL, and it seemed to have a big visible crease running right down the middle of the screen, which I could also see in this video. It looked annoying enough for a phone, I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a gaming device. Plus as others have said, that button layout is horrendous.


I got Surviving Mars for free on Epic and really liked it, but I instead spent more money to buy the full game & all the DLC from Steam just on general principle lol.


Just as a heads up, the Hitman trilogy is absurdly complicated to purchase for some unknown reason. I own the first two and I literally cannot work out how to buy the third one.

So tread carefully I guess lol.


Yeah I have a Steam Deck with a dock and bluetooth mouse & keyboard, it’s basically just a desktop PC lol.

Although the Deck does struggle a bit with super high-end games, so a similar thing with beefier hardware could fill a niche there I guess?


When the first Steam Machines were announced years ago, I assumed they’d all be running the same hardware like consoles do, and I thought that was actually quite a good idea because it could give game devs a sort of “baseline” set of hardware to aim for, as opposed to the sort of “vaguely make it run on Windows” system we seem to have currently. So if the new ones are all more-or-less the same kit like the Steam Decks are, and they take off well enough, it could be handy in that way I guess.

Plus it’ll presumably run SteamOS so more Linux exposure which I always appreciate.


Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.

Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.

Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.


I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.

The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.


I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.

But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.


English, where the word ‘jam’ can mean traffic, a stuck door, to play music, to cram things into a tight space or a fruity preserve lol


From what I’ve read, the problem at Bioware seems to be with management. IIRC the last Dragon Age was started as a live service game, then scrapped and restarted, and I believe Anthem was also scrapped and restarted at least once, and Mass Effect Andromeda had a bunch of its creative team quit halfway through. So management getting rid of most of the staff for Mass Effect 5 (which was announced as being in development back in 2020) doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.


I find it’s great for doing all the piddly day-to-day crap that I don’t want to put much brain power into, like writing cover letters and emailing the bank or whatever.

I think as long as it’s used sparingly it can free you up to do stuff you’d rather be doing, but IMO where people go wrong is when they use it to do the stuff they want to be doing as well.


Yeah I own 1 and 2, all I need is a button that’s like “click this to get the rest of it” and I’ll do it. But I haven’t picked up 3 because I don’t want to spend an hour figuring out how to buy the fucking thing that will probably end up not getting me all the content anyway.


When I saw the title my brain immediately went “Hitman” before I even read the rest of it lol.

I own the first two, but I haven’t bought the third one because I literally don’t understand the process of how you’re supposed to buy it.

At this point, I can only assume they they don’t want people to purchase their game for some reason.


My main issue with the first game was that I felt like it didn’t respect my time. There were some missions where the game would send you miles away to get something or find a person, only for you to arrive there and have an NPC go “Nah it’s not here” and send you miles in the other direction and do the same thing, and sometimes arbitrarily dump like 6 bandits on you along the way that you had no hope of defeating, so you’d die and go all the way back to square one again. I had to bail on eventually because of that.


Untitled Goose Game, but the other way. Got to the end of what I assumed was the first world, but it turned out that was the entire game.

Still a good game, but if I’d known I would have waited for a sale or something.




Yeah I grabbed that too! Also Mad Max for like $3


Civ VII is $160 CAD for the full version though. 😬


I still have my original one from however long ago it was when they came out (10 years or so maybe?) and it’s still working perfectly well. It’s outlasted pretty much all my other controllers, except for the red PS4 controller which mysteriously refuses to die.


Yeah I’m similar, I’m in for about $45 or so from the Kickstarter. I wrote it off and stopped paying attention about 6-7 years ago (it was already pretty far behind then!) but I figure, I’ve wasted more money on dumber stuff before, and if an actual game ever does happen to materialise then I’ll give it a look.



I assume this is the same reason why they want to ban TikTok but not Facebook - it’s not so much that they object to the data harvesting, they just object to non-American data harvesting that they can’t readily influence.


When they announced Steam Machines the first time, I thought it was a great idea because it would give PC devs a sort of baseline system to aim for, and then I was surprised when they launched and they were all sorts of different system specs. I’m still convinced that’s at least partly why they failed - if you buy a console like a Playstation or XBOX, part of the appeal is that you know exactly what you’re getting and what will run on it. If it says ‘PS5’, it’ll run on your PS5.

So hopefully if they try again it’ll be something along those lines, kind of like the Steam Deck.



Yeah V and VI (even even IV I think) are still perfectly fine and playable, so I’m happy to wait pretty much indefinitely lol.


Yeah this is me with Civ VII too. Normally I’ll pick up a new Civ game on day one, but since the new one has Denuvo and it’s nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I guess I’ll just be picking it up in a Christmas sale in like 5 years or something.



I thought the new one, Romulus, did a pretty good job of keeping the retro look going. I actually didn’t like the movie itself very much, but props & costumes did a good job lol.


  • Might not play on Deck
  • Denuvo on launch day
  • $180-ish Canadian for the full version with all the add-ons.

This is gonna be the first Civ as far back as I can remember that I probably won’t bother picking up on launch day TBH, which is sad.


Especially for Star Citizen lol. Like what are they gonna show? Given their track record, at best it’ll be some half-baked new mechanic that doesn’t work properly and will eventually be tossed and replaced anyway.

The whole game right now is just a series of those duct-taped together, as far as I can tell.