My personal opinion is that better than this in a money driven capitalistic economy is not possible. The pressures to keep growing and to make more are too great and most companies will do anything to make line go up. Valve has been very steady and metered in their ways over the years compared to any other company I am aware of.

If we change the external pressures, as in change our entire economic model, then sure, better can be had, I assume for all companies everywhere not just valve.

Looking at how other tech areas have all consolidated into monopolies or oligopolies, valve is the best case scenario for PC gaming.

Imagine anyone else being in control. Activision? EA? Ubisoft? The gaming industry is not immune from disgusting money hungry corporations stepping on the users to squeeze out every little penny they can. Valve has never done this and has kept others in check for the longest time. The day we lose the current version of Valve will be disastrous for the industry, I’m pretty sure.

Forced upscaling and blurry TAA is compensating for the fact that they can’t push graphics much further on the hardware we have. The current hardware progression has stagnated, combined with the fact that we are seeing more diminishing returns in graphics as they improve, requiring more power to deliver less of a noticeable difference.

But it doesn’t mean these games won’t look great when you disable the fakeness and run it with brute force GPU power 10 years from now.

I honestly think the current graphics we can achive are fine and where the true improvements should come from are better animation and actually good art direction.

I see DLC mentioned and first thing I thought was did this game already release and I had no idea about it? If it’s already out and no one is talking about it does it mean it’s trash? Turns out it’s still 2 months away from releasing.

But it’s true this is paradox games we’re talking about, more of a dlc studio than a games studio.

This is the same culture that will absolutely not speak out or ask for a change in ingredients for fear of dishonouring the chef and the staff.

I liker Cyberpunk 2077’s soundtrack so much I incorporated that specific style of music in my general listening habits because of it.

Sorry I wasn’t clear, I’m a big fan of Valve’s efforts, it’s just that they are the only ones right now and I’m wondering how long until they too fall like the rest of the industry.

I was thinking of developments in the industry as a whole. Valve themselves have been the only beacon of hope, but for how long.

I have bought games on steam that I already owned and played on other platforms, just because I wanted to support the dev and have a copy on a reliable platform. But with recent developements I do wonder more and more how long it will stay reliable.

The developer, Spiders, seem to be experts at creating mediocre games with very small budgets, and again they didn’t quite have the money to take it all the way with greedfall, but they did make more than a mediocre game in my opinion. For me it was memorable enough unlike others mentioned in this thread.

You enabled in your settings to see porn, steam keeps it disabled by default. They even give 3 different options for the level of prudishness that you want. Go to store preferences and disable sexual content and you’re done.

You enabled in your settings to see porn, steam keeps it disabled by default. They even give 3 different options for the level of prudishness that you want. Go to store preferences and disable sexual content and you’re done.

I wonder how a must of a click smells like. Ah, you mean must have clicked. Autocorrect am I right? Right?

What happens? Many games get released?

I have finished Mankind Devided, and while it’s a good game it is also very restricted and very small in scope compared to 2077.

I’ll bite. Patched 2077 is better than making devided in almost all aspects, although both are worth it.

And why I’m clenching it for the day Gaben leaves. It will probably be disastrous.

The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product and a track record of investing in open source and consumer benefiting solutions is being defended online. Shock.

The thing just launched. There will be stock of it if only people waited a bit. The fact that people need it this second is what makes the scalping business so successful.

Isn’t Bazzite just Fedora with more stuff baked in. If anything, Bazzite is supposed to be even easier and more compatible.

But they said ARM.

I grew up and decided that games have a place in my life to give experiences, you grew up and decided that they are a source of burst distractions. I guess age has nothing to do with it and it’s just about personal preference.

Since they are probably working on other stuff as well could this mean that Icefrog is the only lead who can take a project to completion reliably within Valve’s organizational structure?

Inject this hopium into my veins.

They could just be one moba, one hero shooter and one last man standing, all online and all competitive.

Well, I guess your are right that everything is derivative. I also think some things are more alike than others and also some markets are more saturated than others. When Half-Life came out it was in a saturated market of FPSs but it also revolutionized the market. When Portal came out no one could compare it to anything other that a student project. Half-Life Alyx is still considered the no 1 most polished and complete game in the VR space. We’ll see the impact that Deadlock will have I guess.

I percieve them as different to your run of the mill EA or Ubisoft, so I expect more from them. That’s on me I guess. I’m not angry though, just disappointed.

The point stands that it’s derivative. I’m convinced Valve can do better.

I was thinking of maps.me but I understand this is actually a fork of that. There’s wikilok for proper trail navigation. And others that are less popular but still use the same base for mapping.

How is it better than all the other openstreetmap apps?

Hope to see another single player experience from Valve, doesn’t matter if it’s HL or something else, just don’t make it multiplayer focused.

They have all the talent, budget and time they would ever need. No amount of hype will ever detract from a good game. Hell even cyberpunk managed to stay afloat after a disastrous launch and will be remembered positively by people that played the patched versions. I don’t believe the hype thing either.

I’ve heard the explanation that they’re not working on the half life series because they want to have bigger leaps in innovation, but then they work on a moba/hero shooter.

There’s something special about a game like red dead 2 or ghost of tsushima that makes you stop and just enjoy the scenery. Games with good graphics have their place, it’s just that they need to also have all the other elements to be any good.

I have the same impression after comparing it recently to Spotify. On Spotify there is no dislike button so I can’t say, please don’t play this song anymore, I can only ban the entire artist which is definitely not what I want and also not as easy to do. Then when it comes to generated playlist out of one song, the Spotify songs seem irrelevant to the song they start from, while the yt songs are at the very least in the same genre.

And the interface works fine, I’m never sure what people talk about when they say it’s not good.

Today, yes, I agree. It’s really hard to compete with them anymore. But 15 years ago when everyone was rushing to capture the market, there were many opportunities to do so. Steam and valve were never infallible, but at least they took feedback and stayed consistent, unlike their competitors.

They are a monopoly because they’ve had the best product on the market consistently for 15 years. There used to be huge resistance to them and their drm from gamers, but they have shown over many years that they are trustworthy, unlike others that have tried this.

This is not an Apple or Google store situation where proper competition could not exist. They were always up against giants like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft or more recently Epic.

Recently upgraded both CPU and GPU for better VR performance. Before this my 3070 was struggling a bit with cyberpunk on the 4k TV. There’s also productivity and AI stuff people deal with these days.

There’s plenty of needs that require more and more power.

that most real, non childish adults don’t care for?

You are simply making things up. The reboot sold incredibly well, about 5 times more than the originals in fact, and received universal acclaim. People have grown up with the character and were happy to see that evolution. The original creator and you have become out of touch with the reality of this franchise.

Your expectation for things to never evolve and grow says more about you than you seem to want to face. But the same as you think that there are plenty of games that fill the void of deep narrative action games, I can say there are plenty of basic hack and slash games to go around, just go enjoy another one.

David Jaffe is unhappy that his generic revenge puddle of spit character has actually grown in depth and is truly interesting now.

What do you mean? What happened? Which Google product?