I’m not gonna do work to buy their games, I’ll just pirate them if they make it more annoying than buying.

Yea, that’s what I did and mean by searching Steam. It’s probably not available in Estonia like every other Sony game.

I never heard of it and searching for it on Steam doesn’t give any results so I’m guessing it’s not even available here.

1. Skyrim with a ton of mods
2. Stellar is with a ton of mods
3. Minecraft with a ton of mods

I would pick Baldur’s Gate 3 if I can bring my wife to play with me, then we may actually get to act 3 by the 5th year and not even need another game.

Sony already stopped selling their games in my country due to them not wanting to put Estonia in the PSN country selection list but I guess I’ll pirate their games even harder or something.

I tried playing Sims 3 again recently and holy hell is the performance bad. Like the FPS is running at whatever I cap it at but there are constant freezes and stuttering with no FPS drops even with all the recommended performance mods. I then remembered I stopped playing for that very reason ages ago and now my desktop is like 100x more powerful.

I really like 4X games but nothing new in that genre has really drawn me in. Stellaris was the last one that I really played a ton of and still do. I actually wanna start a new game with all the new expansions but playing without Gigastructures is heresy, hope it gets updated soon.

I’m sorry you misunderstood what I said. I was saying that Sony is encouraging piracy by making it impossible to play their games legaly in some regions, including mine.

Personally I don’t think piracy is wrong with the exception of indie devs. If you think you are fighting corporations by pirating then yea, that’s dumb but I haven’t heard that stance yet.

If your only option to play a game is moving to a different country then I’d say it’s the most justifiable. If you only have a PlayStation piracy won’t really help you play PC or XBox games though so I don’t see how that would help.

Is Sony saying piracy is justified by making it not possible to buy this game? I guess if I have to.

So what Sony is saying is that I should just pirate the game since there is no legal way to buy it?

Yea, I have zero hope that Sony has dropped this completely. They will most likely wait for the attention to die down and push it through, that’s just how these shit companies work. Even their wording is ambiguous enough to mean that.

Personally I’d prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That’s not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.

Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there’s a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.

It actually does, it’s something people get their accounts banned over.

Never heard that criticism about Outer Worlds and I wouldn’t agree with it either. The story and world felt consistent to me.

Haven’t you played Old World Blues? It was like the best DLC while also 100% jokes, even more jokes than Outer World while being the best DLC.

Fallout 4s writing was pretty objectively bad, the gameplay was a huge improvement though.

Fallout 3 was pretty disappointing to most people who were expecting something like Fallout 1 or 2 but the story was definitely more competent than Fallout 4, still mediocre though. Never heard anyone call it revolutionary.

New Vegas was made by Obsidian, not Bethesda and it’s a solid way to compare what good story looks like.

Nazies are too stupid to even draw a swastika properly. There is zero hope they are capable of understanding satire.

I still remember when the Java edition was supposed to get a modding API…

I’m going to be angry about microtransaction once the game actually runs. A 5800X3D and 7900XT should not be getting 20 - 40 FPS with medium settings at 1440p.

Thankfully I started in tech before video games were really a thing but I have had coworkers from gaming industries and they were the most jaded people I had ever met when they started out. They were also universally shocked how little work they had to do for the money they got.

Large centralised social media platform should all be banned. I miss the times when all you had was forums hosted in someone’s basement, the Internet was a better place. Short form video content is the worst of the bunch though.

You know what’s a really good defence: Not being based in the fucking US.

Even if something like this passed the majority of EU governments wouldn’t adopt it. Like the EU copyright directive, only about 4 countries adopted it. The EU is a trade alliance, not a federal government, it doesn’t have the authority override local law unrelated to EU wide trade.

I used to work in private companies and any annual pay increase was whatever the union managed to negotiate for. It was usually between 1% - 3%. I quit after they moved the office to another city and required everyone to be at the office even though the people I worked with were in different countries. My current job is a government one and for as long as I have worked here I have gotten an annual raise of 10% - 20% and the working conditions are so much better. I’m never working in a private company again.

At this point Bioware is just a skinsuit worn by EA. Once the skinsuit gets too stinky they will dispose of it and buy a new studio to make a fresh suit.

There are actually a few unreal engine games where you can’t disable AA in the settings and I have tried to play with it on but I just end up disabling it in the ini files anyways because it looks bad. I have not encountered AA that does not make the game look blurry.

I have never met anyone who doesn’t disable motion blur just outright so didn’t think anyone would ever defend that.

I don’t really play racing games or Forza so maybe it’s unique to Forza or racing in general but every RPG, action, adventure, strategy, survival, shooter and sim game I have played looks worse with AA and ray tracing is not worth cutting your FPS in half for.

The first things I always turn off are motion blur, anti-aliasing and ray tracing.

Motion blur just makes it look like you’re drunk, anti-aliasing makes everything look like it’s smeared with vaseline and ray tracing tanks your FPS for not much added quality.

Oh, yea, they have a verification server for shadowbans but it isn’t strictly necessary for matchmaking, if that verification process were removed you can still play. The seemless coop mod for example does that.

Matchmaking is also peer to peer as far as anyone knows but I can’t find any info on how messages are handled. It’s entirely possible those also work on their peer to peer system but even if not a server that serves short text snippets with coordinates to all these players could be run on 20 year old hardware so not even costly enough to register.

Elden Ring doesn’t use a server, it’s peer to peer.

My first instinct was to check if this was an Onion article…

I definitely didn’t have Elden Ring gets a gotcha game on mobile on my 2024 bingo card.

The reason why Amazon is bad is because they undercut their competition to drive them out of business just to then raise prices and create a monopoly. What is happening with Steam and other launchers is the other ones are refusing to compete on features and instead are trying to create monopolies with exclusive games so people would be forced to use an inferior product.

Creating a limitation that X features aren’t allowed to exist on a gaming client would solve no issues here as Steam isn’t even trying to create a monopoly, they just have the best product currently and everyone is free to out compete them.

Not necessary, no but it adds value to it’s users and thus making their platform the most popular.

Like Epic’s launcher is the perfect comparison for this: It has the bare minimum features available to sell games and people hate it for it’s lack of features. It’s not necessary for Epic to add those features but clearly people value those in their choice of platform.

What evidence? If you prefer alternatives, then those are available

It’s clear why people prefer Steam: it has good features. But the other launchers should complete by making better features not forcing Steam to remove features.

Oh, you can already do that with Discord with the in-game overlay and anyone else is free to implement stuff like that too. If you mean that there should be a open source alternative for the Steam client then you can check out Lutris, it can be used to launch steam games.

Why? All those features already exist as separate companies. Discord for chat, Nexus for workshop, like 5000 places run their own marketplace etc.

How would it be better for everyone if you have to set up 5 separate things? That’s currently the issue with Epic’s launcher that it does nothing other than let you buy games so it doesn’t provide the value Steam does.

I’m pretty sure that if she had the power to do so she would have deathsquads going after anyone remotely suspected of being trans. I was in her telegram group just to watch the crazy unfold and she is absolutely batshit and hates trans people with a burning passion.

Oh yea Empress may be the most transphobic person alive currently