There have been recent leaks that indicate Valve is working on something going by the codename “Fremont” that is basically just that. Also some 3D models of a new Steam controller that’s much more like A SteamDeck without the screen were included in a recent update.

We’ll see though, Valve does have a bit of a problem staying focused on what they were working on when they come back from their holiday break, and sometimes things get cancelled because they lose interest over the break.

Personally, I prefer Infinite over the first two. Maybe I’m biased because I played Infinite first. But to me the story seemed a bit more polished and coherent.

I want to like this, but some of that mocap animation looks really off. Especially in those scenes with the idol and where indie is slamming down that stone. Looks like the mocap actor was holding back and that the idol weighs less than it should. It’s probably going to be okay, but after the excellent mocap work in games like God of War, where the animation really conveys a sense of weight, and in comparison to the Indiana Jones films this looks a bit floaty and like Indie is pulling his punches.

I felt like Nova’s not being special was what made it special. It was the closest to stock android while having a bunch of little tweaks here and there that allowed for more custom setups.

Why would you want another year of their software for free? This is their second screw up (apparently they sent out a bad update that affected some Debian and RHEL machines a couple years ago). I’d be transitioning to a competitor at the first opportunity. It seems they aren’t testing releases before pushing them out to customers, which is about as crazy to me as running alpha software on a production system.

I’m sure you have reasons, and this isn’t really meant to be directed at you personally, it’s just boggling to me that the IT sector as a whole hasn’t looked at this situation and collectively said “fuck that.”

I feel like a lot of what made the Bioshock games good was Ken Levine’s social commentary. And while we’ve had Bioshock games that he didn’t write or direct, and it would be silly to argue that he is the only one capable of writing a good Bioshock story, I do think he understands that it’s more important to say something with a game, than just churn out another title within the same world.

Rapture wasn’t just a dark underwater city, it was a Libertarian utopia, with all the exploitation and unchecked capitalism that would come from that. Columbia was a Christian Nationalist utopia, with the cultish brainwashing, revisionist history, and racism that is common in that worldview. I hope the team in charge of the new games understands that the series is more than the locations, and the “Big Daddies” and “Little Sisters.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love more Bioshock (if it’s good), but I’m glad we’re also getting Judas from Levine’s new studio, because I have a feeling it’s going to feel more like Bioshock than whatever the next official Bioshock game ends up being.

Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).

From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.

It’s also arguably a bigger problem for the bad publishers like Activision, who have been trashing their own reputations for so long that even if they buy a huge “World Premiere” ad spot at the Game Awards, once I see it’s an Activision game, my brain just automatically turns off any interest I might have had in a game, because I know that even if the trailer makes it look interesting, it will ultimately probably be a disappointment due to greedy management. There are plenty of good indie games to play, and if and when Activision does publish a good game, I’m much more likely to believe word of mouth of the people I trust, than the recommendations of publishers, who are generally just out to push a $90 deluxe edition preorder of whatever is coming out next week.

If someone told me 4-5 years ago, that the year we got really incredible sequels to both Breath of the Wild, and that cool new Spider-Man game on PS4, my most-enjoyed game would be an indie Lovecraftian light-horror fishing game, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Not a zoomer, but I loved Spider-Man, didn’t play BG3, but I still think BG3 should win. My Spider-Man 2 experience was too buggy for me to consider it for GOTY, the story was great, and if they had delayed the game until next year, I probably would have considered it a contender then.

BG3 was an event though, I’m not really into RPGs but it felt like that game was everywhere like Animal Crossing: New Horizons was in 2020.

Thanks to the Dodge brothers, that’s practically a requirement for publicly traded companies.

I think it’s just for media sharing, like posting screenshots and video clips.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits really is an excellent game, I’ve done a couple of playthroughs at different difficulty levels, and there is so much more depth to the gameplay than I realized on my first playthrough. It’s fun, challenging, has a decent story, beautiful environments, and some really cool bosses. The fact that it’s an indie studio’s first game still blows my mind.

Just wanted to add my own recommendation of Kena to anyone who might be interested, even though it’s a more recent game.

You make a very good point about cutscenes. I’d love if there there was a frame gen & upscaler that exclusively worked on pre-rendered cutscenes to fix the issues in older games of cutscenes looking way worse than gameplay. I know for popular titles, there are sometimes mods that replace the cutscenes videos with upscaled versions, not having to fuss around with that could be really neat. But for gameplay, I’d much rather play at even 50fps native with variable refresh, without artifacts or additional latency, than a faked 120fps that still runs at 60hz of latency with added artifacting.

The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).

That makes two delisted Marvel-IP games in my Steam library. I haven’t played Avengers yet, but I have a feeling that this probably isn’t as big of a loss as when Deadpool was delisted.

I recently played through Dredge, and enjoyed it so much I went ahead and spent the time to unlock all the achievements. I saw the news of this delay on Steam, and was really glad that pretty much all the comments there were praising the studio for not pushing something incomplete out just to hit a deadline, and encouraging them to take all the time they need.

Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That’s probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they’ve been falling behind for the past few years and can’t afford to keep up. Not that I think it’s good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I’m more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.

With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.

Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?

That’s Mark Laidlaw.

(Technically Jonathan Coulton, but I couldn’t resist with Mike Laidlaw being in the title)