Assassin’s Creed. The actual gameplay is almost never as interesting as just walking around a meticulous recreation of ancient civilizations as a digital tourist.

I don’t think that is true. In his final video (Source, trigger warning of course) he mentioned his failing health, chronic pain and a perceived betrayal by the speedrunning community. Not a word about the lawsuits in there.

The article makes it pretty clear. Jobst always implied the lawsuit was over the cheating allegations, which wasn’t the case. He claimed in one of his videos that Mitchell drove another Youtuber to suicide by suing him and forcing him to pay a large sum of money. As it turns out, that Youtuber didn’t have to pay anything at all. The settlement was just to take his existing videos down and not make any further videos about Mitchell. Honestly seems justified to me and not a good look for Jobst.

Mitchell sucks, but falsely claiming that he drove a person to suicide is a dick move to say the least.

I wouldn’t say they’re “crawling back to Steam”, not like they’ve ever left. This is clearly for their new Handheld/Big Screen UI. They’re seeing the success of Steam Deck and Steam OS and are trying to build a competitive experience on Windows.

I am specifically referring to RTX technology and not ray tracing in general.

There is nothing specifically “RTX” about the reflections in GTAVE.

The RTX reflections in the GTA:V:E are very satisfying I love all this.

It’s called Raytracing. RTX is just a marketing term Nvidia uses for their GPUs, GTAVE has nothing to do with it.

I think power efficiency should play a bigger role when evaluating the value of this card. In terms of frames per watt, it’s among the most efficient you can get, while the XT is pretty much the opposite.

I’ll give it another go, but my initial impressions of this demo unfortunately aren’t great. Very poorly optimized, buggy, and janky UI. The movement is super floaty, with a ton of input delay and slow animations. While the German voiceacting is good, it’s very noticable in many dialogues that it was translated from English. The environments are well crafted, but the overall graphical presentation has issues, in terms of lighting, reflections and especially the forced AA which causes tons of artifacts. The remade music, however, is wonderful. Really gives it that Gothic-feeling. I hope the devs can still turn this around, because there is definitely potential.

I’ve played the first two hours now, and so far it’s good but not exceptional IMO. Graphics look beautiful and it runs very well, even on my somewhat aging GPU. The setting and plot are interesting so far. The combat is fluid and fun. However, for an RPG, it’s very streamlined and light on actual Roleplaying elements as well as immersion. It’s the kind of game that reminds you that it’s just a video game all the time. Both when it comes to the design of the areas you travel through as well as audiovisual elements, like lootable objects playing a sparkle sound-effect etc.

Unfortunate for the employees but otherwise nothing of value was lost.

DLSS without frame generation is at least equivalent (sometimes superior) to a native image though.

It really isn’t though. DLSS produces artifacts, especially for quick camera movements as well as things like hair and vegetation. Those artifacts get heavier the smaller the native rendering resolution is. It also differs quite a lot between implementations. In some games it looks better, in others worse (e.g. Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Stalker 2).

But my point wasn’t to bash DLSS anyway. It’s a good technology, especially for lower powered devices. I use it in many games on my 2070s. But Nvidia using this technology to claim “4090 performance” on a card that really has far less power than a 4090 is dishonest and misleading. To make an honest comparison, you’d use the same settings and parameters on both cards.

*With heavy DLSS and frame generation. Total bullshit and false marketing by Nvidia IMO.

Does it have a proper suspend/resume function for games? For me, that’s pretty much the benchmark for reaching a “Steam Deck-level” experience. But I think none of the other handhelds have it.

Tablet

Great for watching videos, reading the newspaper and drawing (with a digital pen).

I actually don’t have a laptop anymore, because I found that a tablet could do everything I needed on the go with less bulk, longer lasting battery and no fan noise.

Smartwatch

Tracks my heartrate (had some issues with elevated heart rate before), guilt-trips me into doing more excercise, shows me notifications without having to get my phone out, displays the time with a customizable watch face.

Let’s hope they’ll introduce some solid competition into the GPU market.

I have a perfectly capable gaming PC but more often than not, I choose to play on the Steam Deck instead. I already sit at my desk for work most of the day, so it’s nice having a dedicated gaming device that I can take with me and sit in the garden or on my sofa. And of course I can take it with me when travelling.

That won’t do much. Each of the spam accounts I’ve seen is on a different instance.

There was a lot of panic about “killer games” in the 90s-00s. Politicians and parents blamed video games for school shootings. Nowadays nobody cares about the topic at all, but the strict rules remain. Steam just kind of ignored the local laws so far, but now decided to actually adhere to them.

That depends… many games blocked in Germany on Steam also can’t be activated in Germany.

Technically yes, but they didn’t actually require it in the beginning and they even sold it in regions without PSN.

Steam refunds are easy and convenient. I wouldn’t personally bother doing that just to post a “protest review” either, but it’s definitely possible to do without losing any money.

No, that’s incorrect. None of the previous games required it, except for multiplayer. For example you could play the Ghost of Tsushima campaign just fine without an account. This one seems to be entirely singleplayer and yet requires an account for no reason.

so… I take the multiplayer parts are going to be going away soon-ish, as offline mode is incoming and 1€ pricetag atm? Is this a last squeeze for the game?

Maybe, but it’s worth noting that Ubi gave away the Crew 1 for free back in 2016, 7 years before it shut down. So I wouldn’t necessarily take this sale as an indication of a shutdown coming soon (though it definitely could happen).

FWIW, they’ve announced they’ll add an offline mode to this game. Personally I liked this game less that The Crew 1 when I played it during a free weekend though.

I’d love to get another singleplayer game as well, but I’ve accepted that Valve is just unpredictable. I’m sure they haven’t given up on Singleplayer and we’ll get another singleplayer game… at some point. Their previous game was the fantastic Half-life Alyx after all.

That is very much not their official website. Looks pretty sketchy in fact, with that “GTA V Download APK” link on the bottom.

It’ll likely be like 2020, you can play offline but it’ll be a much less detailed version of the planet. They pretty much have to use streaming for the high-detail environments, as nobody would have the disk space for it otherwise.

My post was talking specifically about peoples’ reactions to the World of Goo 2 launch though, including the part you quoted.

That’s not the point, because that’s not the situation here. The game isn’t exclusive, wasn’t pulled from any stores and was funded by Epic games. You don’t see Valve-published or funded games on EGS either.

There are games where the criticism against Epic was completely valid. This isn’t one of those.

Yeah, with a launcher- and DRM-free version, I think the hate is quite misplaced here. It’s especially extreme on reddit. There is an irony of people who are supposedly against exclusivity writing things like “No steam no purchase.”. I guarantee those people never complain about a Steam-exclusive game not being on GoG or EGS.

Should be very easy to install it on the Steam Deck from the website, especially as it even has a native Linux version.

I’ve spent a total of $5 on the game and FWIW, I think I got my money’s worth. The game’s development is severely mismanaged and I don’t think it’ll ever realize its vision, but I think it’s worth checking it out even if it’s just for looking at some of its technological achievements.

You get ten ships to fly for the free fly event.

I hope they’ll improve the management side of things. Planet Coaster has great building tools, but without good economy and progression systems, I quickly lost interest in my parks.

That much is a given. Nintendo never goes for top-performance (well, not since the 90s) and it wouldn’t make sense for them either.

I’m not impressed by this. Doesn’t seem like much of an RPG anymore, but like a generic action game with thin slices of RPG elements at best. I don’t mind the game not being open world, but the levels shown seem to effectively be linear corridors without any variety in how to approach a situation.

This game was announced in January 2023, and its name is the name of the book from 1905 it’s based on. Don’t really see any malicious intent here.

Just an account.

I think they then accepted an exclusivity deal with epic🤮 and that’s when they lost me completely.

That didn’t happen. Heck, the game shut down before the Epic Games Store even existed.