Valve understands that they owe their success to the skill of their employees and knows how precious having such a solid team is. You can’t replace that with an expensive CEO or by throwing money at the problem later on. Valve has the best among the best and wants to keep them happy and working for them. They understand that they do best when they’re not subject to corporate micromanagement, pressure or threats of layoffs. The results speak for themselves.

Tim however did that classic business move of sacrificing everything for short term gain and on the long run they’ve completely ruined what used to make the company good.

All of the huge problems that I saw with it so far.

• 1: It completely changes the lighting so everything is perfectly lit like it was taken in a professional photo studio, even where it makes absolutely no sense, completely running the atmosphere the developers were intending to set.

• 2: It sometimes downright changes the looks of the characters so bad that they look like another person

• 3: It creates a ton of distracting artefacts.

• 4: It makes everything look like it is of the same style

Seriously, it’s like they took the essence of the Half-Life 2 Cinematic mod and made an AI that applies it to any game.

I wish the damages they had to pay were enough to bankrupt them. “Companies” that do this sort of stuff are purely parasitical in nature should be taken down.

I’d even argue that when it is blatant like that law practicing licences should be revoked and the higher management of the company jailed for attempted extortion.

IMO Supreme Commander failed to capture the original game’s soul. You had a sense of an epic battle going on when playing. I think it was because it always devolved into playing all zoomed out, watching tiny strategic icons moving across the map, blinking and disappearing. I can’t even tell you what any of the units looked like because we almost never see them. The fact that they gave generic names to units and structures such as “level one point defence turret” didn’t help either.

BAR does a much better job of keeping the player zoomed in and into the action, seeing and feeling so the cool details of the battle going on. Heavy plasma batteries blowing up chunks of advancing armies and terrain, lasers blowing up individual targets in rapid succession, sending debris flying everywhere, this was all what TA was about.

I understand that, but if a third-party was to make a mod that restores the old names, I don’t see how they could possibly be held legally liable for it.

I wish someone made a mod for this game that restored the names of the units and buildings to all their Total Annihilation equivalents.

The Specialists was amazing. Expect for the players who were min-maxing it, but they were rare. Most people were playing it for the fun of it.

I don’t get it. Google is just as bad, if not worse than Microslop when it comes to stripping their users of their privacy and control over their own devices. Why would that be an even remotely acceptable alternative to Windows?

The HDMI forum sure is making a great job of making DP the new standard.

The HDMI connectors were fragile and getting loose from repeated use anyway. They suck.

Leave it to NVidia to think that adapting their bloatware to Linux is what will make Linux users come back to them instead of not making proprietary drivers that suck.

I do want them to stay alive and sort themselves out though. Otherwise in a few years it will be AMD who will start outputting overpriced crap and this time there will be no alternative on the market.

They’re already not interested in seriously putting competitive pressure on NVidia’s historically high GPU prices.

With China working hard to catch up with chip production, it is only a matter of time before we start seeing attractively priced Chinese made GPUs on the market. No idea how long it will take though.

So you end up paying more in a few years than you would have paid to buy instead. And you are limited in how much you use it. And I imagine you have to deal with bandwidth and latency issues. And you don’t get to keep it.

The future is stupid.

Onion article idea: Among rising prices in server costs, Amazon is moving away from addictive MMOs and is transitioning to manufacturing methamphetamines. “It provides the same result with less overhead cost”

Please drink the verification can

My B580 runs all games I’ve been throwing at it just fine at smooth framerates and stability. As long as you don’t care about ray tracing and resolutions above 1080p. I’d say it’s perfectly mature for an entry level gaming GPU.

Although I admit I bought it only because my old GPU died and I needed something ASAP but didn’t want to pay a price that felt like highway robbery. I am still hoping for a reasonable mid-range GPU to eventually become available, even if it is a used one, just so I can upgrade to a 144K display and maintain smooth framerates.

Good if true. Intel needs a break because the last thing we need is another monopoly in an industry where creating competition from scratch is near impossible.

I also hope they continue to upset the GPU market. The B580 is a huge break for those who want a usable gaming GPU that doesn’t cost 4x what a GPU used to cost.

It was. Now it’s just AI-infused spyware.

If I understand well, even if you were able to install F-droid through the store (which you can’t because Google doesn’t like it), you won’t be able to install apps with F-droid anyway if they implement this.

No idea, I refused to even entertain the idea of purchasing it after EA pressured everyone to buy it by putting them at a disadvantage against those who bought it and even kicking them out of a server if it changed maps to an SF map. EA hasn’t gotten a penny from me since.

EA has been dead to me since the mid 2000’s when they turned Battlefield 2, which I had purchased at full price, into a severely unbalanced Pay-To-Win game.

It only went downhill since then.

Fucking great. $800 Arc B580’s with proprietary drivers that are shit for Linux.

Maybe Fairphone should criticize Graphene OS for the non existent support of Fairphone devices.

Seriously I’d get a Fairphone with GrapheneOS in a heartbeat should it become available.

Corporate jargon translation:

“It’s going to limit innovation” = “We won’t be able to use those new ways of ripping off our customers anymore”

Unknown Worlds was already dead anyway.

The team had already lost any chance of recreating the greatness of the first game when their sound designer made unbelievably stupid comments on social media, leaving the company no choice but to fire him.

This is very sad because I loved their stuff ever since the Natural Selection Half-life mod.

One thing that I hope they didn’t carry over from the first one is the ad-libbing of 90% of the NPC’s lines. The voice actor is not good at improv and constantly resorts to swearing and throwing insults out of no where for cheap shock value whenever he hits a block. At first it was funny because it was different to what you’re used to but it got old really quick.

A government that cares for is people would ban this shit and procecute any company trying to find ways around it.

My trusty GTX 970 was doing almost everything I needed it to do (the only bummer being it couldn’t run HellDivers2 smoothly) but it died this week. The B580 was available at MSRP so I jumped on it. It is at least twice as powerful as what I used to have so I’m confident I won’t find it under powered for anything I’ll throw at it for the next 5 years.

Playing in 4K with raytracing is just not worth paying an extra $700+ to scalpers and price gougers for. I bet you stop noticing the difference after 5 minutes of gameplay.

Buys a B580 at MSRP

Laughs in smooth framerates in 1080p with all that extra money in pocket

For me anyway, my loss of interest in the DOOM franchise began when they started dehumanizing the Doom Marine and started stacking fantasy/medieval elements to the main protagonist and his arsenal. They turned a futuristic space marine who just got punished for punching an officer into some sort of fantastic demigod thing. It got really bad in Doom Eternal already.

I like my DOOM games when it is a battle of sci-fi military forces against demonic forces. Human technology versus the hordes of hell. But now with Dark Ages Bethesda turned the franchise into a more violent and edgy Skyrim.

AMD is laughing. They were already overpriced and bad value for the money.

Imagine living in a country that has turn to shit so long ago that you can’t believe that it is possible for people can be motivated to work without resorting to the constant threat of being left to die if they don’t.

You forgot: expresses a complete lack of moral capacity to understand why he should feel bad about it.

And then it turns out they were working on Half-Life: D0G.

NGL, that would actually be awesome

I still sometimes hear music from the game used in videos

About time someone puts pressure on NVidia and AMD to bring GPU prices back down to normal levels

The 7800XT is over one year old and they’re still selling it for $500. That used to be the normal price for a bleeding edge GPU that was just released and then within six months the price would drop below $200 new, at which point it was a good deal for anyone wanting a decent GPU that will last them a few year. Ever since the pandemic, with the scalpers, NVidia and AMD realized they can just charge highway robbery prices and get away with it and aren’t offering anything reasonably priced anymore.

Intel smelled blood and are going for that newly opened gap in the market. I’m just waiting for the independent reviews to make sure there aren’t any major issues and probably going to have one in my new machine next year.

No shit. They keep ramping up the prices for cards that have the size and power consumption of a household appliance while they completely ignore the market of people just looking for something that runs a game smoothly in 1080p without overpaying. On top of that anyone who bought a card in the last 5 years just don’t have a reason to upgrade right now.

The Battlemage series might turn out to fill that gap. But even there it will only capture the market of people who have been holding off buying a new GPU for almost a decade.

This is ironically what I loved about Subnautica. The game does not hold your hand throughout. You don’t have a map, you don’t mindlessly follow waypoints, you are not being given a guided tour through the story like some ride at Disneyland. You have to learn to navigate the area yourself, memorize landmarks, and figure out what you have to do yourself with the clues around you. It is a bit of a whiplash at first when you are so used to being babysitted and guided throughout a game but I’ve found it to be the unbelievably rewarding once the “click” happens. You can absolutely miss important (and dope AF) events if you miss the timings that the game gives you. You are treated like an adult by the game. You really get the feeling of being a lone explorer, planning and going on expeditions to gather what you need whether it is resources or blueprints and it will all be you.

The risk-reward situation of exploring increasingly complex and disorienting ship fragments, slowly cutting through blocked doors with a laser while seeing your oxygen levels dwindle and hoping you can find your way back out in time were absolutely fantastic to me. The way the gameplay and the way you travel through the world entirely changes the moment you unlock the PRAWN suit, and one again with the Cyclops are absolutely amazing.

I wish this game clicked with everyone the way it did for me. It is easily my top 5 best single player experiences ever and I only wish I could forget it so I could discover everything again. But The Outer Wilds never clicked for me like that so I can understand why some people might not like it.

One thing that is very noticeable is that the sound/music design. The original designer isn’t working at Unknown Worlds anymore after making some very regrettable comments on social media and I’m not expecting him to come back. As a result Below Zer0’s sound design was OK but pales in comparison to the amazing atmosphere that was set in the original game. Unless they manage to find a very talented sound designer it might miss the mark again.