It’s the responsibility of the game developer to ensure their game performs well, regardless of engine choice. If they release a UE5 game that suffers from poor performance, that just means they needed to spend more time profiling and optimising their game. UE5 provides a mountain of tooling for this, and developers are free to make engine-side changes as it’s all open source.

Of course Epic should be doing what they can to ensure their engine is performant out of the box, but they also need to keep pushing technology forward, which means things may run slower on older hardware. They don’t define a game’s minspec hardware, the developer does.

The “complicated” Fediverse signup process is actually the perfect filter. If someone isn’t willing to learn such a trivial process to gain access to an open decentralized discussion platform, then they really only have themselves to blame when they keep ending up in enshittified algorithmically-manipulated echo chambers.

Piracy is a service problem.

Late-stage capitalism (specifically public companies) are rather incompatible with singleplayer or “one-off” games that don’t have a long revenue tail of a live season or multiple DLCs/expansions. That really sucks for the whole games industry, players and developers alike.

I’ve already installed Arch on a spare laptop to assess the difficulty of switching over. So far I’m very impressed!

arch-install made the setup pretty easy, and KDE Plasma feels very natural for someone migrating from Windows. Flatpaks make installing/updating apps a breeze, and there’s way more apps available than I expected, including commercial ones like Spotify.

Most of the “muscle memory” habits translate across too, for example pressing Meta and typing “notepad” shows KWrite in the start menu. That was a nice surprise.

I can already tell it’s going to be viable for 90% of my needs, and the fact that there’s good free software to do everything from video editing to office tasks is really amazing. Linux desktop has come a LONG way.

Tech bros reinventing things poorly… a tale as old as time.

And yet Fallout: London - a community-made singleplayer experience - just hit 1 million players. It feels like there’s a huge mismatch between what many players want and what public game companies are chasing… they’re all going after online MTX and completely discounting singleplayer because it makes less money overall.

This reminds me of the time the Zoom CEO announced he wanted employees back in the office because remote work wasn’t as effective. It’s easy to assume the people running these companies are competent…

It’s just such an odd thing to remake. The old version still held up fine and can be played on PS4 or PS5, plus plenty of people would have gotten it for free with PS Plus. They must have really been banking on the PC platform selling well for all that effort.

The one thing that could cause serious porting pain would be the need to support high/variable frame rates. That could require a whole bunch of code to be refactored.

If they only released RDR on PS3, this explanation might make sense as the engine would be heavily optimised for PS3. But they also released on Xbox 360, which is the closest console platform to Windows in terms of architecture. It wouldn’t have been that expensive to port.

It’s just so insane to me that the community is having to make singleplayer Fallout games now because Bethesda aren’t interested.

I’d rather drink a verification can every 30 minutes.

Pretty massive screw up from the marketing team involved. To try and sell a hero shooter for $40 upfront from an unknown dev studio in a crowded market of free-to-play hero shooters is pretty risky. Even Overwatch 2 saw the writing on the wall and went F2P.

I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?

No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).

For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.

Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.

The reality is those other platforms won’t make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they’ve made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.

It’s the same reason a lot of indies don’t target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn’t make sense for small teams. Anyone who says “But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It’s literally two clicks!” has no idea what they’re talking about and hasn’t actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.

Witcher 4: Uma, The Jester Years

But in many ways, it would probably be easier for them to remake in first person, considering they’ve got the engine and a wealth of Fallout 3D assets ready to go.

I feel like they’re going to get into legal trouble with that name and logo.

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

Where this game shines is in storytelling and art. I thoroughly enjoyed it and rate it very highly, but I also really enjoy the walking simulator genre. It’s the perfect game to chill out and play on the big screen over an evening or two, very watchable for spectators too.

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.

“We had very little time and were crunching for months”

“I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”

“I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”

It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.

I would strongly consider just crying about the headphone jack. Like you I’m really annoyed that most phones got rid of it, but take a look at how many more options you have on gsmarena phone finder if you ditch it.

My main use case for it was sharing my wired noise cancelling headphones between my work PC and phone for zoom calls. But I ended up getting a nice pair of Bluetooth headphones recently and so haven’t used it in a long time. I’m sure it’ll still annoy me on occasion living without it, but if it’s only a few times a year I can live with that for all the options it opens up for new phones.

Such a beautiful game. My wife and I affectionately referred to it as “Rats”. Looking forward to whatever they cook up next, great storytellers.

Damn, I didn’t know that! What a shame they pulled out of so many markets. Their phones are expensive but they sure have all the bells and whistles.

Just a shame that Sony only sell them in a few countries. They’re quite difficult and expensive to get in most parts of the world.

I don’t want one. It’s a cool technological feat, but like a transparent monitor or flexible keyboard, it just doesn’t make sense for my needs.

Yeah I’m really surprised they didn’t go with a laptop screen rather than a monitor designed to be left in a fixed place! Whoever’s first to market with a good laptop e-ink display is going to rake it in.

I’m surprised we haven’t seen TPU cards (think Coral AI but at a larger scale) being made and sold for this purpose, especially if they’re faster and more energy efficient at AI-oriented tasks than GPUs.

Thermal cameras are also really handy for electronics repair and spotting invisible water leaks in ceilings.