MudMan
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Well, yeah. Half as much in Europe as in the US, it should be noted. But yeah, it does seem many corpos will either spread the US hit globally to mitigate the sticker shock in the US at the cost of giving some to everyone else (or just as a convenient excuse to squeeze more money out of people). It sucks.
But you would still have to report that you refer to global GDP or to global prices if that’s what you meant. Those numbers are going to be different either way. And that’s not what they are referring to anyway.
Honestly, I seriously doubt that the harassment is from the AC fanbase, and as a side sucky thing in an ocean of suck, it also sucks for Ubisoft that their game is getting associated with the backlash. It really seems like these are just political actors and opportunists exploiting the nazi child outrage farms for views, more than anything else.
I’d be shocked if most of the outrage, even the one whitewashed as “Asian men erasure” was genuine at all. Especially in the game series that opened with “hey the Crusades were bad, maybe” and spiraled out into assassinating the pope and playing as multiple black people murdering slavers.
Oh, man, you may be right. I’ve gone back and forth the Igavanias so much I definitely don’t remember which “go underwater” upgrade goes where.
Gonna look it up because it’s gonna kill me otherwise.
Okay, yeah, got it. I remember now. They do a weird thing in that one where you have a bad way of moving underwater by using a weapon and you unlock the proper walking underwater thing after. So yes, you do need to kill enemies to get it as a random drop. It’s a super high drop rate, though. I think I didn’t remember because you have to be fairly unlucky (or be speedrunning and not killing enemies, I suppose) to not get it naturally, but you are correct.
RotN doesn’t have any progression requirements that aren’t scripted drops, off the top of my head, but I could be wrong about that. What ability are you thinking of?
Dawn and Aria of Sorrow do, but in fairness those are communicated in other scripted drops and are part of the “get the good ending” puzzles.
Yeah, well, the original Zelda flagged bomb spots even less, so…
It’s weird to me that Simon’s Quest gets so much grief for this when Zelda 1 and 2 (and particularly the localized version of those) were full of that exact “defer to the guide” nonsense.
In fairness, some of that stuff comes from trying to play older games out of context, since a lot of tutorializing used to happen in the manual, but not on any of those NES examples.
Well, hey, I’m going to assume the army of rabid fanboys doing free PR for Steam helps somewhat.
But it’s good to know you support Epic investing more of its money on funding third party games. We may agree after all. I’m not as much of a fan of the implication that it’s Fedi’s own fault that they’re less popular than Reddit and Twitter. I mean, screw network effects, right? Shoulda given users some incentive instead.
Again, Steam doesn’t promo its first party exclusives because making first party exclusives costs money and Steam doesn’t spend money. They don’t have to make exclusives because they have network effects that make every other game be in their store and give them 30% of everything they make. It’s free money.
Especially if you all flip the lid every time Epic pays someone to put their game on their store first or exclusively then there is not much to be done to leverage anything. Epic could co-market until they are blue in the face, but if nobody is buying any third party games there then a huge banner in an empty store is nowhere near as value than the SEO madness that is vying for placement on Steam.
You’re just making excuses for your monpoly because you’ve decided it’s YOUR monopoly even though some billionaire who isn’t you owns it. That’s not an emotional outburst, it’s an accurate observation. Me being frustrated at how insanely dumb that extremely widespread approach to life has become is emotional, I suppose, but I’d say entirely justified.
But nobody is complaining about Steam OS having a monopoly on PC OSs, the issue is with Steam having control of the PC gaming market.
I am exhausted by humanity’s ongoing inability to hold more than one idea in their heads at once. The world isn’t made of good guys that play for your team and bad guys that play for the other team. Can people be adults for one moment at some point this century? Holy crap.
Steam can ABSOLUTELY have a dominant position in one market while attempting to erode a competitor’s dominant position in another market.
Microsoft has a dominant position in the OS market that should be eroded by both competitors and regulators.
That dominant position includes having about 75% of the PC OS market.
Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.
One of those facts isn’t tolerable just because you’ve decided to make supporting a specific alternative in the OS market your entire personality. That’s not how that works. Microsoft should be held back from the areas where it has dominance (and that includes keeping them on a very tight leash when it comes to aggregating more studios under their gaming division) and Steam should be kept on a tight leash when it comes to their dominant position on the gaming digital distribution space. Ideally by having other competitors not only survive but thrive and grow to prevent regulators having to intervene in the first place.
Those two ideas are, in fact, entirely consistent with each other with no contradiction. I am imploring social media dwellers to stop treating every issue as a football match or get off the Internet.
I do not know or care about the personality or intentions of any of the executives in these corporations. Pick your variety of libertarian tech billionaire, I don’t intend to root for any of them.
This is a Godzilla “let them fight” moment where in my ideal scenario none of these people would have this amount of money or control over other people’s work, but since that’s the world we live in, them being in competition benefits me down the line, so I don’t want any one of them to get away with the whole thing.
Oh, yeah, they have to. All of those examples are from publishers that tried to have their own platforms and then could not sustain that option and had to come back to the Steam platform.
So they’re not big enough.
As for Fortnite being bigger than EGS… well, yeah, it is. So much so that Epic themselves report on the two separately. And Fortnite makes more money than every other game in there put together.
10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way. They are the only thing growing in the space. Everything else pulling money is aging games, 5-10 years old, that have a fossilized playerbase mobile-style. The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else. Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.
Yeah.
And that’s a fantastic showcase of the bar you need to hit to not be effectively toiling in the Steam mines. Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, Call of Duty? Not big enough. Still have to deal with Steam.
It takes being significantly bigger than the entire Epic store to even consider not doing Steam on PC. And none of those is even close to having a viable platform for third party releases outside of Epic, which is perhaps the last one standing on that front and currently not managing to get a foothold. And judging by the rabid fanboy backlash anytime they try to do something nice to attract devs, not even finding a path towards one at any point in the future, either.
That’s a bad look for competition on the PC market. There aren’t that many Fortnites or Minecrafts coming in the future. Gaming investment is drying up and gaming is becoming a cash business, rather than an investment business. And the cash flows to Valve.
Which is entirely a result of Steam abandoning any human intervention on their curation system, first by trying to crowdsource it and when that didn’t work just opening the floodgates and implementing the lightest possible moderation, social media-style.
So okay, do they want to avoid exploits? Go back to curating the library. That’s how it used to work, it didn’t need to be an automated, hands-free process.
But if you’re going to let everybody upload to it then you are on the hook for the costs of moderation. It’s not a valid excuse to charge more for the privilege of being slotted against shovelware. It’s not a viable argument at all.
You think the current cut Steam is taking…
… is preventing shovelware spam?
Have you been on Steam this decade?
But hey, yeah, nobody is advocating a 0% cut for Valve. Epic is doing this because they need to attract developers and most of their money comes from Fortnite anyway, so it’s something they can try.
But Valve has a looot of ground between 0 and 30% and a lot of ways to give back to the developers that built their empire. And I don’t think starting by treating smaller devs as well as they treat major corporations would be a bad start at all.
You have given money laundering via making terrible games a suspicious amount of thought.
I mean, one could argue that this is on Steam to manage, and that the way to manage it shouldn’t be “we’ll just keep 30%”. It was Steam who spent an inordinate amount of effort and terrible half-assed attempts automating game curation so they could have fewer people looking at approving games the way other first parties do. If Valve wants to Uberify game distribution they have an onus on moderation and on protecting the developers using their platform.
But that’s irrelevant because nobody needs them to lower their cut to 0%. 20% would be great. 10% would be fantastic. Flipping the current order of things to give more money back to smaller games and keep more money from bigger games would be more than good enough. Whatever arbitrary bar you think would stop this entirely imaginary scheme they could meet and it’d still be an improvement.
Hell, I have never laundered money, but from what I hear out there 30% may not be enough to put a stop to that. That may be a decent return for some squeaky clean money out of Unreal asset flips. Should Valve set their cut to 50%? You know, in the interest of international security?
That was a serious reach, friend.
My go-to is GoG, but I definitely want Steam to lose some market share in favor of literally anybody else. I will worry about moving that extra share towards GoG when the market isn’t a full on monopoly.
But hey, yeah, stop using Steam and go to Gog whenever you can. You heard it here first. DRM-free software should be your first choice.
Hah. That does makes me feel ancient for more than one reason.
Titanfall is a particularly rough example for those comparisons because it’s only a last-gen title, technically. There was a 360 version, but it was a downport, technically the original is Xbox One. The 360 version definitely does look its age, though.
It was an extraction shooter set in the Apex Legends/Titanfall universe, apparently.
So we’re gonna need some citation on the “cultural net positive” issue, I’m afraid.
Be mad at public companies if you want, but take some time to go find whoever convinced gaming execs that Escape from Tarkov was the next PUBG and they had a chance to slot in as the next Fortnite. You could have gotten a new Marathon campaign instead, speaking of cultural net positives.
I think it’s almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn’t new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn’t resurface until what? No Man’s Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it’s the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur’s Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is… a bit of a shock.
That is entirely possible. My setup seems to be in this sweet spot where the normal performance is high enough over the cap AND the framegen gets you enough extra smoothness AND the VRR is able to eat enough miliseconds off the hitches that it is noticeably improved (but crucially not perfect, so if you’re more sensitive than me that may also be part of it). Still, even if it doesn’t help for everybody it’s worth a shot and not covered in the video.
I bet there is something to having to load the world in chunks in the underlying engine and then having to render the chunk all at once in UE5 that makes UE5’s struggles even worse. Still, the game was a shadowdrop, you have to assume they could have taken some time to try to figure it out a bit better.
The worst case scenario is that further optimization isn’t an option, but… I mean, even if it is related to what people think it’s related they should be able to find some way to ease some of the load off. The observation that a lot of the performance hit is related to hardware Lumen alone points that way. Especially since having a faster base framerate does seem related to having smaller hitches. But hey, who’s to say? I guess we’ll see where they go from here.
No, the point is the DF video never even tested framegen or upscaling before deeming the issue unsolvable in this video. I’m just trying to offer additional options to tune settings they don’t cover in the video that may help.
Frame gen, for the record, is fundamentally a crutch. Specifically for CPU limits. It serves no other purpose. If you don’t need it as a crutch you don’t need it, period. It takes you from wherever you can get natively to hopefully closer to your monitor refresh rate. If you can reach your refresh rate then you don’t need it in the first place.
Or at least it does that in the default implementation from GPU vendors where you’re locked into uncapped, non vsynced FPS when using it.
I’m calling out that there seems to be a specific implementation here to use it with a frame cap. And with that fame cap if you can get yourself to, say 45-60 fps you can get a semi-decent 90 or 120 cap out on the other end that does trim down some of the stutters, especially if you also have VRR to eat a few extra miliseconds.
So it’s not ideal, you’re effectively locking the game to 90 or 120 and then trying to scrape by at 45-60 and double up with frame gen just so you can use an AI frame to slide in between the 45-80ms spike and eat the rest of the time difference with VRR. But hey, it kinda works, at least in my setup. Crutch or no crutch it makes the game more playable for me. I don’t have the tools to measure exactly how much more playable, and I’d like to see DF test it, but at a glance it seems to help.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t look into the cause and patch improvements, but if it can take the game from unplayable to playable for some people on some setups that’s a good thing.
Heads up, because I imagine the DF guys were too PC master race to notice, but you can smooth out a lot of the hitches by using framegen.
There’s this weird implementation in the game where if you set frame gen to auto it seems to automatically turn it off if you’re over the fps cap and then turn it on when you drop below and it’s worth giving that a shot. It took some tweaking but I did end up finding a mix where between that and VRR with a low enough cap to maintain it most of the time but high enough to get acceptable latency the game is… mostly playable?
It was still a shock to go outside for the first time (most of the hitches seem to be around outdoors traversal) and it’s still not perfect, but it did clean up a lot of it. Well, some of it. Your mileage may vary based on hardware and expectations, though.
Well, let me solve that for you right away.
You need neither of these things. Games and entertainment are not a priority if you’re in a “this current economy” type of situation.
If you already have one, that’s the right one for the money, probably.
Was Nintendo Life “misrepresenting the value of a Switch 2 over a Deck”? Myeeeeh, not sure. I’ll say I agree with their premise that “Steam Deck fans Seriously Underestimating the Switch 2”. In somewhat petty, immature ways, as demonstrated very well here. Does the Steam Deck “obliterate the Switch 2”? Probably not, no. I’ll tell you for sure in the summer, I suppose. That said, their listicle is brand shilling as much as this post is.
Are these two things different and have different sets of pros and cons? Yeah, for sure. It’s even a very interesting exercise to look at the weird-ass current handheld landscape, because it’s never been wider, more diverse or move overpopulated. The Switch 2 and the Deck will probably remain the two leading platforms until whatever Sony is considering materializes, but they’re far from alone, from dirt cheap Linux handhelds to ridiculously niche high end laptop-in-a-candybar Windows PCs.
If you want to have a fun thread about that I’m game, but fanboyism from grown men is a pet peeve of mine, and even if I didn’t find it infuriating I’d find it really boring.
For the record, between these two? Tied for price, Switch 2 will be a bit more powerful and take advantage of specifically catered software from both first and third parties, has better default inputs, a better screen and support for physical games. Current Deck is flexible, hugely backwards compatible, can be upgraded to a decent OLED screen and has fewer built-in upsells.
And as a bonus round, Windows handhelds scale up to better performance than either, have better compatibility than the Deck and some superior screen and form factor alternatives… but are typically much more expensive and most (but not all) struggle with the Windows interface and lack hardware HDR support.
We good? Because that’s that’s the long and short of it.
That’s not what that says.
It says “if you can’t get the other thing (…) AND your frontal lobe is too squishy to cope with the FOMO”.
I’m not saying you need to buy both, I’m saying if you’re an adult you can live with a cool thing existing and you not needing to have it immediately without resorting to taking sides based on marketing bullet points like a toddler.
Sure! I mean, why not? Hell, release the game DRM free in the first place on all platforms, huh? Why did we have to wait a decade and buy it twice before we could get the DRM version of any part of it, after all?
But you weren’t complaining about it yesterday and you’re way closer to the right outcome today. I would much rather have a DRM free version of some part of that game than not.
Wait, does it? Oh, man, it does! I actively remember the praise, where did I get so much Mandela effect from this? I didn’t even think to look it up, I was so certain.
In any case, here’s to being actively wrong and still having made your point. Eternal is the lesser game in general, and I have played it much less, but it’s still telling I straight up forgot and invented an alternate scenario about it.
Nobody did. It was one of this weird wave of interesting multiplayer setups that just didn’t have the competitive cleanness of the established stuff and nobody ended up caring about.
It was midly interesting to try out once, but let’s say there’s a reason they didn’t do a MP mode in the sequel and every reviewer praised that choice.
Huh. I didn’t know this. This seems like a big deal. Makes me even more willing to consider Heroic’s GOG support semi-official, considering they support autopatching and cloud saves under GOG. It really feels close-to-native, especially given how sluggish Galaxy can be on Windows for large libraries.