I’m holding out some hope for GTA VI still. Reason being, while Cyberpunk promised to be super duper everything interconnected magic programming to follow an absolutely awesome but technologically realistic game (Witcher 3), I haven’t seen hype like that for GTA VI. The expectation is to get a well polished freeroam game with lots of fun toys to play around with, a story that’s hopefully long enough to be worth the game’s price, and a new Online mode that gets updates over time. Basically GTA V with a new city and a more polished game overall, but no exponential leaps - despite the fact that the budget is much larger than Cyberpunk.

But I mean MudRunner is also awesome. Couldn’t get into Death Stranding myself, just wasn’t feeling it. Should pick up Art of Rally soon. Tons of great AA and indie games out there if GTA VI flops indeed.

The good news is that the live service bubble burst so hard and spectacularly that we may see a return to actual good games getting funding after investors are done licking their wounds.

Did it?

I honestly have no idea what’s going on in that space anymore. I’m still playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because I’ve been extremely busy since about August 2023. Got into Act 2 yesterday! When I’m finished with that, I can get back to the game I was playing before BG3, which I STILL haven’t finished, which is Elden Ring. I got stuck there and bought BG3 lol

The only good thing about not having time to play video games is that you can fill the entirety of your video game time with awesome single player games.

It’s unfortunate, but if you’re developing a game and are in dire need of cash, Epic is your best bet.

Way before the whole store debacle, Epic also had a lot of grants and stuff, but those didn’t require you to give up publishing rights IIRC. Honestly, the EGS greed aside, they’ve been excellent for the gaming industry.

You already got an answer more or less, but to specify, Fitgirl is one specific repacker of games that a lot of people trust. She (or he, or they or it, nobody really knows) specializes in compression to make the releases quick to download on slow Internet connections. Of course if you’re sitting on gigabit download speeds or something, the decompression will take way longer than what you save from the download.

Hmm, how’s Switch piracy these days? If I’m emulating, I’m probably not going to be paying for games either since I can’t have physical copies

I don’t get how a Steam Deck is a replacement for a Switch tbh.

You buy the Switch to play Nintendo games mostly, though it’s nice that you can take it with you.

You buy the Steam Deck because you can take it with you and it has a huge library - but it has no Nintendo games, so it fails to scratch that one particular itch.

There is. Wubi was more about giving 14 year old me the confidence to try out an entirely different os.

but if someone asked me to buy them a Xbox I honestly don’t know which one is best… Xbox one series S? I think??

Aaaand they’ve already failed. Series S is barely better than the previous gen, it’s Series X that you want.

The only real benefit of having an xbox is that you cross-own the games with PC. BUT you’re restricted to the Windows Store versions, so you can’t play on Linux, so for me at least the benefit immediately washes away, as I no longer use Windows. Oh well, I’ll just buy my games on Steam and sure, SOME of them will be Microsoft games, but only titles in the like 2 or 3 franchises I care about, Forza and… Oh wait, it’s not like the next TES game is ever going to come out. So it’s just Forza.

VMs are still slow unless you’re talking linux on linux with KVM

Wubi was great because you got native speed to test Linux with, which was probably better than Windows for at least most versions of Windows.

That’s one yeah

There’s about 5 games a decade that are exciting anymore even, unfortunately. I might just have to give up gaming then.

Exactly.

It’s like promoting Linux to people: Why would I care that my operating system is open source? Or free for that matter if I pirate it anyway?

Some people never will care.

This doesn’t work. It will never work. You can’t shame conscious consumers into voting with their wallets while the other 99% keeps buying the bad practices.

Thing is, if nobody on Lemmy, and literally nobody in general who cares about anticheat, buys GTA 6, you know what effect that would have on the company’s bottom line? None, they’ll make record profits.

Yeah I don’t even want to talk about that at this point…

Anyone who wants “their IP” can find a way to do it regardless of any kernel level anticheat anyway.

Yes, that’s part of the StopKillingGames agenda as well. Allow us to control our own servers! For fuck’s sake, it’s CHEAPER for them, because WE’RE paying for hosting. A dedicated server costs money! And it keeps people buying into the ecosystem after the initial sales high because you form communities and then tell people IRL how awesome the game is. Assuming you have time for real life friends of course.

I’m not against the existence of a matchmaking system, or even against it being the default. Just give us a tiny menu item “Dedicated Servers” somewhere and keep that one around forever, even when the publisher is long bankrupt because the CEO blew all their profit on sculptures of oddly shaped penises or something.

It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).

I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.

I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.

Maybe you’re not coming across them regularly but they’re well known outside the corporate world - not to the extent of Microsoft but it’s not the last time they’ll be in the spotlight.

Indeed, not regularly. I only had the pleasure of hearing about them when I had a job that mandated it. They are explicitly targeted at business users.

It should be said that I’m not against games detecting cheaters and banning them from online play. It’s very specifically kernel-level anticheats that I can’t stand on principle.

Epic games launcher is no where best as bad as anyone says.

Is it better now? Last I used it, earlier this year, it still took me half a year for any UI change to happen when I did anything.

To be clear, I hated Steam for ages too. Only maybe 6 years ago I started actually buying games there. Before then I’d just pirate everything. The Steam application often had issues and I had no money before then anyway. But nowadays I find Steam more convenient than piracy. I do not find EGS more convenient than piracy. I do wish Steam had more meaningful competition.

It IS an 8 year old game at this point though - many games don’t get fixes beyond the first patch or 2.

I’m neither a, s nor p lmao.

So why don’t you move back to Russia? Presumably you still have a citizenship.

So many Russians abroad praise the homeland while enjoying the relative freedom that other countries bring to the table. Yet none seem to understand that others don’t want to live in Russia either.

Ukrainians tend to be proud of their national identity - which, yes, I know, only Russians are allowed to be, but apparently many people don’t seem to care - so it’s pretty hard to convince them to go back to being second class citizens of yet another attempt at a Russian Empire.

They have no reason not to at this point.

Do you think a single Ukrainian wants to live under Russian rule now? The few I’ve spoken to don’t even want to be spoken to in the language and that was even BEFORE 2014.

Dude, most of Europe is also pledged to help the US when attacked. In fact the US is the ONLY country ever to have invoked article 5.

Ukraine is not a member but is strategically important to NATO because it’s strategically important to the Russian empire’s restoration, which we kinda want to prevent. Plus they’ll be a powerful ally once they can join, which they really want to nowadays.

Now the US could go full isolationist, but if a Russian-Chinese alliance takes over all of Eurasia, y’all are really going to lose out on a lot of trade and access to resources, plus might actually be susceptible to invasion if you have no allies left.

Worst part is, they got acquired the year after release, so even if KC:D 2 is good, their games in the more distant future are bound to be enshittified.

The freezer itself produces heat too though.

No idea what their real reason was, but the specific R* studio that made it hadn’t ported a single game to PC in years at that point. Midnight Club II of 2003 was the last one and none of their subsequent releases got PC ports. Which sucks because I really sorta wanted to play Midnight Club LA back then.

Past RDR, they haven’t done any games as a solo studio.

Could just be that someone at R* San Diego REALLY hated PC gaming?

Or they just fork and stop sharing source code. Self-sufficiency would just mean not having to depend on any future contributions. Nobody can stop them from having access to all the old stuff.

So what do you like about it and what do you dislike about it? I haven’t tried it yet, might pick it up when it costs about as much as a hamburger with fries, but probably not before.

Morrowind Expanded landmass

This one? Looks like they’re at least making progress you can download and play now!

The same could be said of Skyrim, but tons of people loved it and it’s still a great framework for modding if Bethesda themselves don’t give it a good storyline.

“they” haven’t improved in that they still put out shit games; They’ve improved 76 yes, but they still put out crap too.

On that note, how is Cyberpunk still 60 euros on Steam? I know it’s been getting better with the DLC and everything, but the game’s been out for ages.

That said, I might have to buy Phantom Liberty. I bought and finished the base game like 2 or 3 years ago I think and I really enjoyed it even back then.

Who even buys a new phone every year?

People usually clown on Apple users specifically for doing this, but every Apple user I know uses their phone for multiple years. In fact, Apple was giving users multiple years of software support while Samsung and others were only doing 2 major Android updates for flagships. Google was the one to FINALLY change the status quo in the Android world, so that’s good at least, others seem to be following suit. Previously, Android users I knew would just keep going without software updates. Luckily they mostly still receive security updates for a few years after the OS updates stop.

None of the manufacturers gives you a compelling reason to upgrade every year anymore. 10-15 years ago the changes were big because the first smartphones were shit compared to what you had just a few years later. Between the original iPhone and roughly the 5 or 5s, every upgrade was pretty major. Same on the Android side.

Now I think you’d have to go from an 11 Pro to 16 Pro to notice anything. And good news in that department, if you still have an 11 or 11 pro, that still got the iOS 18 update. Actually, so did the older XR and XS.

The only reason to buy a new phone every year nowadays is because Apple, knowing EXACTLY what they’re doing, changes the camera arrangement every year so clout chasers would know you have last year’s model. It’s stupid as fuck, but luckily none of the people I know fall for it.

It’s currently used by a billion people worldwide. If it was irrelevant, devs wouldn’t be worried about it breaking things now would they

If tracking being off by default was the issue, the share of Firefox users should be consistently under 1% because who even turns on tracking?

The reality is, nobody outside of tech circles uses it anymore. Hell, a lot of devs even prefer to not support Firefox if they want to do something non-standard that Chromium allows and Firefox doesn’t.

Safari sucks but it has actual usage numbers and is currently the only reason not to put a big ass “this site only runs on Chromium” error on a lot of websites.

The Safari-Chromium illusion of choice might be a better deal for iOS users but that would still be only 2 browsers to choose from. Mozilla ain’t gonna invest in anything that isn’t AI or advertising. Firefox on iOS is a pipe dream.

Before I get flak: yes I know Safari sucks

Here is my two cents: The author mentioned you can’t have a social app without push notifications: I hate the idea that everything should be able to grab my attention. Though obviously the support is needed.

But also, Safari is the last browser stopping Google from total market dominance. Firefox is irrelevant. And this is coming from a Firefox user who remembers when 2.0 came out…

I do wish things were better.

Hell yeah!

I believe it still works but it feels very dated. Still, it just feels very satisfying somehow.

This seems to be mostly driven by Chinese gamers wanting to play it for the Chinese mythology theme

Shit, I’m not even Chinese and I jump any time I see a game with Chinese mythology. Anyone got anything good, tell me! I used to be a huge 9dragons fan. Never got into Jade Empire, maybe I should give that another shot?

I wonder if we’ll see a huge influx of other Chinese mythology related games in the coming months, trying to capitalize on this.

If it’s within the coming months, they either had to be in development long ago or they’re dogshit.

But maybe some upcoming games will be announced with similar themes.

A horde of developers, so to speak

Freedom in games adds more surface for bugs.

Many of us have come to accept bugs in games that give you a lot of freedom. Sometimes they’re even funny.

The real reason they get so many awards is that they actually put out a game that’s fun, doesn’t hound you to buy microtransactions, has good replayability, etc.

When it was released last year, there were articles saying “you shouldn’t hold other RPGs to this standard because (insert whiny reason here)” because other devs were legitimately getting scared they’d have to start putting out better games…