Right, there is little difference between them because they had the prior game in the series to build off of, but don’t just gloss over “and graphics”. The fidelity that we expect today is why you can’t just make the next Morrowind with 50 people, because people expect it to be better than Morrowind now that we’re 20 years removed from it. A smaller team than that made Dread Delusion; a larger one made Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. From those, if they’re fortunate enough to have financial success, they can build on it just like Bethesda built on Morrowind’s bones. What Obsidian made with a similar team was The Outer Worlds, which kept the fidelity up but the scope small, and I think it was the right decision, because otherwise, you end up taking 7 years per game like Kingdom Come. Those are great games, but it took 15 years to get two of them.

There is, because we expect more fidelity now than we did in 2011, and Skyrim was built on some existing bones. When you’re trying to make a game like that in Unreal that you haven’t done in that engine before, it’s going to be smaller (if you’re smart). Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t get to be that big without building on Original Sin 2, and the same can be said for Elden Ring; perhaps without a pandemic in the middle, those games might have even been made in more reasonable time frames than 5 or 6 years.

Not me, sorry. On desktop Linux, I’m always wired, and the bluetooth always just worked when I needed it on Bazzite or Steam Deck, connecting via the controller setup in the Steam menu, but maybe someone else here will know.

Yeah, Xbox controllers are pretty much standard. Comfortable, not overpriced, great compatibility with everything, no fuss. Newer ones, from the past several years now, will have Nintendo-style d pads, now that the patent has expired, and connect via bluetooth for wireless play or with a USB C cable to save on batteries. Speaking of batteries, it uses AAs, which means that you can actually swap them when they get low, as opposed to PlayStation controllers where batteries don’t last long and they aren’t really exposed for you to access them. I’m not going to tell you Xbox controllers are the be-all, end-all, but there’s a high chance it’s all you need.

EDIT: Even though I use Xbox controllers all the time, I forgot that the newest Xbox pads actually have d pads that are even better than Nintendo’s design. They look funky, but for my money, it’s the best d pad out there.

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.

I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.

But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.

It didn’t happen overnight, much like GameStop.

Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.

Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.

I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.

I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.

No one wants to scope their games back down either, especially when they’re met with complaints like The Outer Worlds.

I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.

GameFAQs was definitely responsible for anyone knowing the fatalities in Mortal Kombat games for a while. I was using it plenty in the mid 90s.

I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.

I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.

Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.

Yeah, I liked that one more than its reputation as well. In some ways, I liked it better than the 2 remake.

I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.

You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.

But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.

In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.

The campaign, yes.

Well, it keeps getting pushed back, not forward, so that helps.

I’d take GTA 4 or 5 over San Andreas, easily. And at this point, a large part of the appeal is GTA Online for a ton of folks; not me, but a ton of folks.

Which thumb? If your left thumb is still functional, when I had a hand injury in middle school, I got to be really good at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. If your dominant/mouse hand is still functional, anything mouse-driven ought to do, and that covers a wide range of genres from CRPGs to adventure games to 4X games and more.

I don’t know what they were testing, but if your output is text, it will be a lot easier for the AI to know it’s correct than any of the plethora of ways that video games can go subtly wrong, and that’s where my lack of faith comes from. Even scraping text from the internet, my experience is more often that AI is confident in its wrong answer than it is helpful.

It also only works as long as the AI can actually competently do the QA work. This is what an AI thinks a video game is. To do QA, it will have to know that something is wrong, flag it, and be able to tell when it’s fixed. The most likely situation I can foresee is that it creates even more work for the remaining humans to do when they’re already operating at a deficit.

If you’ve never had a gaming computer before and you’re on a budget, look up how to set up Heroic Games Launcher and make accounts with Epic and GOG. They give away free games all the time, and almost all of them will work on Steam Deck.

The Egypt one was definitely one where they changed it a lot. So much so that I no longer enjoyed playing them.

It’s a random statistical sample. They know that approximately 3 people for every 100 are on Linux, but it doesn’t matter which 3.

It’s a good game, but at least in RtwP, it could be a real endurance test. Most of my combats that went wrong did so because I had decision fatigue from having to march through so many enemy mobs.

It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.

Outside of delisted games, I always encourage people not to, but yes.

It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.

THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.

You’re on Lemmy, a site people use when they don’t like reddit. You don’t see any reason why there might also be a ton of people here who use Linux, an operating system you use when you don’t like Windows?

Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.

They kept the original title from the video, which is typically ediquette. The long and short of it is: from the perspective of someone who wants access to all of these games on modern platforms in an official capacity, especially for online play, it’s not a good package. There’s a lot of input delay, and the online experience is missing a lot of crucial features, not to mention some audio issues as a result of the emulation methods.

At the very least, this is the case on PlayStation. This same company put out the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, and it had a lot of the same problems on consoles. The input lag in particular was less of a problem on PC. To my eyes/ears/hands, the input lag isn’t a problem in SF 30th on PC, but I haven’t measured it scientifically, nor am I so familiar with those old games that I’d notice something is off; on PC though, it passes the sniff test. It’s possible the same is the case for this collection on PC, which would still suck for console players, but it would at least mean that one of these versions is still good. Also, in the years after SF 30th, Digital Eclipse has focused on the documentary aspect of their work, and Max Dood doesn’t really mention this or care much about it at all, but it is a major factor in the appeal of DE’s collections.

I certainly thought I wanted to play Enter the Matrix but as Neo, but I felt Path of Neo jumped the shark with things like MC Escher, fire ants, and giant Smith.

Your list here and the one above it are all full of great examples, and we didn’t even mention Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Better than nothing. Thanks! Steam’s DRM has reared its head more often thanks to, ironically, the Steam Deck and playing on the go in places without internet access.

EDIT: Although, the results thus far are a little disappointing. I went to the store pages for a few known offenders and didn’t see what I’d hope to see. Dragon Ball FighterZ, for instance, has no DRM mentioned by the extension, but that one was one of the most finicky for launching in offline mode. I brought it to a fighting game major on a mini PC, and if you didn’t authenticate it online on the same boot, the game would refuse to launch. I’m guessing it’s just the bog standard Steam DRM, and this extension seemingly only lists third party DRM.

Is there a tool you can use to check that against your own library? I never got the sense it was anywhere close to a majority of my library, but years ago, I was just cross checking my then-small library against a hand-maintained list.

Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.

As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.