Note that “a lot better hardware” is still hella mediocre given the price tag.

https://www.gog.com/en/patrons

Launched the other day if you want to throw a bit of money to their cause

Releases in like 20 hours from the time of this comment!

https://yearofthelinuxdesktop.net/

According to the flowchart there, cachyOS or bazzite, also some other tools and recommendations, good luck!

Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.

The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.

For M$ to subsidize some of the cost of the hardware seeing how it’s their “next leap” for the Xbox? Or something along those lines.

I’d like my sidebar menu back

https://yearofthelinuxdesktop.net/

Good resource for those needing a bit of convincing and/or hand holding.

I’m not sure steam deck would even be considered “high cost” since you can get a refurbished unit directly from steam for about half the price of a switch 2.

And even a brand new one is still cheaper.

Plus there are parts and instructions available on how to fix and replace pieces yourself should that ever be needed, unlike some drift issues from Nintendo’s controllers where they basically tell you to spend more money or get bent.

Wasn’t that skull and bones?

A reminder that AA-AAA is basically just specifying how much money has been poured into its development. Not how much love, passion and hard work went into creating it.

Baldurs gate 3 is made by an indie game studio.

As in they’re independent and are not beholden to a publisher or external revenue sources that own their idea and forces them to take business decisions they don’t want to due to monetary reasons and outside pressure.

And yes, absolutely S+ tier games.

Cancel and try to redeem again, I sometimes end up in the dumb loop for no reason as well.

Not sure if this applies to you, but when it just released early on, there were difficulties between versions and save games from earlier ones didn’t play nice after updates, so I struggled to get through act 2, but then I disabled the auto update and played through it pretty much flawlessly, granted I had to start a new save file.

As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?

Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible

The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.

And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.

Also note that none of this is retroactive, will only apply to games released in the future, so having an end of life plan as a requirement from the get-go is pretty simple to work on when nothing was done yet.

“many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only”

So change your design? The corporate mind cannot comprehend this.

I agree that it’s rather unique blend of a walking simulator and does explore death and loss through an extremely lengthy story that has some touching moments, however the slog of the “meat” of the game is absolutely not worth it to get to the core of it all.

If you’re interested, I recommend watching the “game movie” on YouTube, where they just show the dialogues and skip almost all of the walking, granted even then you’d probably want to skip/fast forward through a massive chunk of it all where it’s the same animations over and over again. (Such as the load/unload/qpid sequence, etc)

The “experts” in this case are 2 teachers assistants in game design in one university weighing in on a whole swath of reasons such as financial impacts and other stuff, on which they are totally qualified to talk about.

We have reached the stage where if my son does his math homework, he should be referred to as a “math expert”, article’s a joke.

TotK was not worth 80$.

Should’ve been an add on to BotW for 40$

Or if you never had either, both as a “complete edition” for 100$ is fine too.

From the video during a cinematic sequence: “there’s somebody talking but I muted that part”

The visuals are nice but cmon, you can’t play it with no sound :/

Happy to see GameInformer back

As for games: two point museum and nordhold

2point Museum has been a blast with all the commentary, announcements and fun descriptions and nordhold scratches that tower defence with meta progression itch

Personally I have a pair of the cloud alpha, and had them for about 2 years now, they’re very good for what they are

I can’t speak to their other cheaper headsets but with this one I got, I feel that the quality between friends who had the version before it and the ones that were purchased by a colleague last month don’t really differ much in terms of quality.

Again, I can’t speak to their stinger line or other models. Maybe those were affected more by the HP acquisition.

If you like the headset, I suggest just getting the same one, wait for a sale or check price trends, these typically go on sale fairly often, be it the 2 or 3’s, the battery life is good, they’re fairly comfortable and if you have no specific reason to change to something else, using the same model will net you more or less the same experience as you had before

Absolutely this and wait a year for the DLCs to release with it

Necrosmith

With you on this, regardless of the method used, no app has any business running or snooping outside of the container that it was set up in. And this doesn’t just apply to desktop operating systems, mobile and entertainment consoles too.

I’d even take it a step further, that nonsense shouldn’t be on my machine in the first place.

Want to run anticheat stuff? Run it on your own crappy servers at your own cost and processing power. Live detect it through packets that are sent to you and are being processed, be it voice or input.

Whatever happens on my machine is none of your business.

If there’s a grace period, perhaps, however:

1. Steam does not provide installers for games, this means that whatever game you want, needs to be 100% functional and already be parsed/deployed/installed by steam on your hard drive.
2. That game needs to be DRM free, meaning that it has an executable available that can be launched without steam running or requiring any sort of authentication or input from the steam servers/services before being able to launch, play or even interact with the menus

So only the DRM free games will remain, and only the installed ones at that. Anything that wasn’t will be lost to the wind the moment the distribution service or storage (yours or theirs) bits the dust…

They’re called offline installers for a reason.

Exactly, the game publishers and distributors are often not the developers themselves. Only one to distribute direct in recent memory was World Of Goo 2, and even that was sold primarily through the Epic store.

Isn’t there a clause in baldur’s gate 3 terms that lets you transfer the game license once to a friend or something along those lines?

Not sure how that works but it’d be cool if we can have that apply for all of them (digitally) maybe like 3 times over the lifetime of the licensed game.

I agree with the sentiment and it’s weird that it can be applied to quite a few recent games, frostpunk 2 comes to mind as the latest one of these

Survivor, yes. Vampire style, no.

That game doesn’t deserve all the praise it gets for being a walkable slot machine simulator.

Up you go, needs more visibility

If you enjoyed that, I’d also recommend lil guardsman, similar responsibility, different mechanics and a lot more forgiving

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1111930/Underspace/

Kali.

Sumerian six for that desperados itch. Every day we fight looks like a solid Valkyrie chronicles-like gameplay, shows promise. Streets of fortuna has potential to be something vast, need to see how that turns out. Age of mythology looks promising, long overdue. And lastly dungeon clawler for those who loved peglin but wished it was a claw game instead of Peggle lol

They’re slowly building it up, patching bugs and recently (in the last 30 days?) released a few new pals

It’s just the cult of goblins going in, looting and then storing it all in your backpacks in your hovel. There’s occasional enemies and you need to outmaneuver or outgun them, or both. If that’s your jam, it’s great. But overall it’s just a miserable experience, especially when playing solo.

Truly a blessing and a curse