https://isthereanydeal.com/game/outer-wilds/info/
Store low at the major retailers (incl. Steam) is $15
Minecraft and Starsector, on the other hand, freaking love Linux. They’re dramatically faster.
Vanilla Minecraft, maybe, but vanilla Minecraft can run on two potatoes and a rusty spoon.
Running with shaders, there’s a noticeable performance hit on Linux - I drop 20-30 FPS in Mint with the latest Nvidia drivers. Going from ~80 FPS to ~50 is noticeable.
In vanilla Minecraft, going from 300 FPS to 350 FPS is kinda moot.
Not everyone wants to play a game that relies on responding to cues.
Overuse of one mechanic can make it unappealing.
I feel the same about games that rely on reactions during cutscenes or climbing. On the one hand having to be on edge all the time is annoying, but on the other, the absence of interaction can hamper suspense.
For example, I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West lately - There’s a lot of climbing, and the devs love to throw a mid-climb “post you’re hanging on starts to fall” gag, but with no reaction mechanic, it’s pretty much always harmless and kinda feels “why bother”
Was also curious, so I did some searching. Review bombed feels like a deliberate word choice to shift the blame but this article sums things up:
TL;DR, souls-like game already walking a fine line balancing difficulty & fun released a major overhaul that significantly altered the balance, allegedly making late game easier at the cost of early game getting harder. Players did not like the changes and expressed that in reviews. Dev has issued updates but it takes a lot to earn back those review points.
For what it’s worth, from what I can tell from the outside looking in, it looks like the fixes have been well received.
Ehh, I think it’ll be a looong time before machine learning can make meaningful character interactions.
It may be able to make maps faster, slightly better versions of something like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft (both already sporting functionally “infinite” procedural generation), or fill a city like Cyberpunk 2077’s with slightly less mindless wandering NPCs, but I don’t think it’ll help make story-based RPGs bigger in a useful way
The NPCs that stand out in an RPG do so because they typically have a well-crafted, and finite, story arch which is incredibly difficult to do with machine learning and trying to make things more procedurally generated.
They’re going to holistically synergize the market capitalization to optimize a paradigm shift for shareholders.
They expect it to bomb and they’re going to flood it with microtransactions and vague “AI-enhanced fetch quests” or some bullshit.
They’re not trying to make a better user experience, squash bugs, or polish the story, they’re “extracting value” - I’d stay far away from this one folks.
Yeah, the billion dollar game developer doesn’t have the resources to test preview editions of the only PC OS their game is designed for. They’re just a small startup of ~20k employees. How are they supposed to allocated anyone to patching a game from their most popular franchise?
You’re right, it’s the consumers fault for being biased.
As someone who played a lot of U2:XMP back in the day, I can confirm this is the case. Honestly I’m not sure why Epic killed their master servers, since it seems like something that can run on a toaster in a supply closet, but good that it was relatively easy for the community to reverse engineer and adopt.
They were talking about Nova, not Lawnchair. Nova hasn’t officially been abandoned, but they were purchased by a big data broker a few years ago, and just a few months ago Branch (Nova’s owner) laid off almost all of the Nova Launcher development team.
Nova is not dead, but the writing is on the wall.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a law, AB 2426, to address concerns over “disappearing” purchases of digital media, including games, movies, music, and ebooks.
Hot take - everyone is hitting on nostalgia, but personally I think there’s more to it than just that.
Low-res games invite the player to use their imagination, something that gets lost in the pursuit of hyper-realism.
Unlike most modern AAA games, games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or BOTW/TOTK invite the player to use their creativity - not just in problem solving, but also in how they view the world.
This was just an inherent feature of older games, due to the limitations of technology, but now it’s a luxury in a world that’s increasingly trying to script or control how you think and interact at every turn.