Sounds about right :(

Stellaris was like that early in its life, too.

provides a way for micro transactions to pay out mod developers.

No.

Absolutely not.

I’m sorry, I like the idea of mod devs earning incomes, but this just opens the door to too much drama, attention farming, infighting, and trouble. Every paid mod I’ve ever seen is a hot mess that cooperates with zero other mods.

Mods should all be Apache licensed, free, with prominant support/donation links and maybe paid cosmetic features. Or a DLC/update sponsored by the dev, if they want to go that big.

The poor state of Stellaris QA is incredible.

It feels like one of those friends you adore, with a constantly relapsing, and worsening, drug habit.

The price fixing part is an issue, but they don’t technically do any illegal price fixing. They just say they don’t want to see your game cheaper elsewhere - you can drop prices elsewhere AND on Steam though.

I mean, if Amazon or Walmart tell a supplier “we’re doubling our cut, but you can’t price any lower in cheaper stores. Don’t like it? We will drop your brand and ruin you,” people scream bloody murder.

…Because that’s exactly what Amazon and Walmart do! It’s awful, and it’s not okay if Valve does it either.

EGS is a victim of Sweeney’s absolutely massive ego, but still, I think they’d have gotten a lot more business if every game on there was 20% cheaper. No one can compete with Steam on software features at this point, so it’s either niche angles (like GoG being DRM free), discount stores (eg key resellers), or ‘1st’ party discount shops like EGS could be.

Have not played it yet, but for me, personally, E33 looks like one of those “better to watch the cutscenes on YouTube” games.

I bounced off Witcher 3 too. Watched friends play a lot of RDR2, not interested.

…BG3 was sublime though. I don’t even like D&D combat, or ‘Tolkien-esque’ fantasy, but holy hell. It’s gorgeous, it just oozes charisma, the map is great, and was quite fun in coop.

They should be reigned in as a monopoly. That’s how it’s fixed. Nothing drastic either, just stop Valve from (say) dictating prices outside their platform, and do the same for Amazon and Walmart while they’re at it.

The ‘Steam is a pseudo monopoly’ thread was NOT like this. It was a bunch of commenters simping for Valve and Gabe, even here on Lemmy.

…Which is why they can charge 30%, and Gabe has a few mega yachts.

To be fair, they are too big.

They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.

My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.

100%.

I got the first Korean 1440p “overclock” monitor, and 60-> 110hz was like night and day many years ago. Sometimes it’d reset from a driver update (as the graphics driver had to be patched to work with overclocked DVI back then), and I’d immediately notice even poking around the web.

Some with phones. I got a Razer phone 2, and 120hz was incredible. I went from that to an iPhone 16 plus (60hz), and it feels sluggish to me.

Another caveat is that 120hz is more “convenient” and less stuttery for most video. 24fps does not evenly divide into 60, but it does for 96 or 120. An once you start seeing choppiness in video, your eyes can’t unsee it.

…Isn’t this a bit ironic, considering GTA’s/RDR’s writing of (loosely) “plain folk’s plights?”

It’d be like CDPR going all in on DRM/corpo surveillance tech. And NO, CDPR Bot, that was not a suggestion!

I answered elsewhere.

But a friendly warning, OP: you will get downvotes for using too many emojiis on Lemmy, heh.

Minecraft is gorgeous with a few mods. Or, more practically, a good modpack.

It’s also quite complex (with a good modpack).

And building requires a lot of mouse precision. And other kids their age are probably playing it. TBH among all these answers, it’s the obvious choice, if you ask me.

Aimlabs is quite literally a mouse precision training game. It has different ‘tests’ and courses for different skills.

Very effective in short bursts, but your kids might find it boring after awhile.

That’s basically all large fandom/hobby subs now, in my experience.

And yeah, don’t forget the shallow memes or fear of arbitrary banning.

Want to use equipment? Grind chore for the XP to meet the level requirement.

Want to beat a quest handed to you early? Grind XP

Want to complete side quests? All of the boilerplate fetch/kill quests.

I mean this respectfully, but you were holding it wrong.

First off, Odyssey was too big, but I enjoyed it! The voiced side quests were great, especially those heavily involving Kassandra. The Atlantis DLC was sublime. But:

• You don’t worry about equipment beyond your level!

• Leave future quests in the journal!

• Fetch quest? If you’re bored, skip it! TBH I Cheat Engined some money in.

Odyssey requires no grinding, as it has waaay too much filler as is. It is a game that’s utterly miserable if you give into completionist impulses, but pretty neat if you don’t.

…Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t particularly enjoy the combat, and the main story is so dull I don’t even remember it, aside from the Atlantis bits. It’s not a masterpiece. But I remember the experience of trekking across Greece quite fondly.

JC2 multiplayer was tons of fun.

They could make a mod for a newer game to drive up sales. Not like a hardcore game mode, but a big sandbox to mess around in.

Nah, this is an ongoing thing for me, for years across different Nvidia machines… Besides, my 3090 is on a riser anyway.

It wasn’t dramatic running Proton in Linux, within a few percent, and I mostly only tested modded Stellaris and Rimworld which are kinda weird examples.

I mean, does anything in The Finals or this game feel like slop?

This was a few patches ago, but I tried to get modded 2077 faster, and could not, at least not on my setup. And I really tried because I need every drop of FPS on my aging 3090.

…That, and I had some HDR problems anyway.

For reference, I’m on W11, but neutered severely. No defender, no background tasks, services or anything, and a bunch of power plan tweaks. On the linux side I’m running CachyOS. Tested with GoG Cyberpunk, can’t remember what patch, but it was on a shared NTFS partition, and CachyOS Proton on the linux side.

Yep, I just switched to those. My impression is the kernel bits are open, but it still connects to a proprietary blob.

…I am not an expert, correct me if I am wrong.

Not well though.

In virtually every instance of gaming I’ve tried, Nvidia is measurably slower on Linux than Windows (where apparently that’s not the case with AMD), with the sole exception being Java games like modded Minecraft and Starsector.

That, and (on my 3090 desktop) I still hold my breath wondering if Nvidia will make my setup blackscreen. And I’m not even using it for display out! This will continue to be a fundamental issue with the drivers closed source and separate from the kernel.

Point I’m making is, if gamers suddenly had to use linux overnight and reviewers benched it, AMD would suddenly appear much more competitive.

Clearly, even AMD wants you to switch to linux, heh.

…I’m not even totally kidding. A mass migration would be a huge boon to their business and leave Nvidia scrambling.

That’s it, sorry.

Yeah, that sounds dreamy. It could certainly work.

And yeah, the problem is not just Microsoft but Mojang. Mojang is an extremely conservative/careful dev, even before they got bought by MS. It’s why the game hasn’t enshittified too bad, but also why development seems to move so slow for arguably the biggest game on Earth.

Collaborating via a repo like that would be… a lot.

Again, it’d be awesome and I think it would work, but it would be a massive step even if Microsoft wasn’t in the picture.

The MultiMC dev came out as a raging anti LGBT, right? That’s why it was forked into Prism (hence the name “Prism”)

Man… there’s been a lot of drama in the MC modding scene.

EDIT:

As pointed out, this is wrong. MultiMC was involved in a separate controversy over distribution, and PolyMC had a dev kick most of the main ones out of the repo, and bigotry was involved in the later.

Thanks for the info.

But I meant the other way around, eg a Java client connecting to the bedrock ecosystem. Is there no way to do that?

I thought it was compatible with a translation layer?

…I suppose that’s a big technical hurdle.

I get that. It’s like saying “just install Linux to run this,” but weird thing is OP already runs Linux and understands Android emulation, so I’m assuming their technical proficiency is enough to install a JE mod. Or maybe the mod isn’t as functional as I assume.

Do you play on a server?

I haven’t found fun modded ‘communities’ since like 1.7.10. All Forge modded servers I’ve tried either seem to be ‘commercial’ servers with zero render distance and basically no community, or ghost towns.

Genuinely curious; why play Bedrock instead of Java Edition when Bedrock is so much trouble on linux? RTX?

EDIT: In hindsight, if this is to play with friends/family stuck on Bedrock, that makes perfect sense. Translation layers might not be as good as I thought.

It has. There have been major rewrites of parts of the codebase, like Sodium, Cubic Chunk, server frameworks, just to start.

Major performance issues, and associated code fixes, have been repeatedly reported to Mojang’s tracker.

The issue is that any major modification is inherently incompatible with other major modifications, hence most persist for one version (or a few) before the devs burns out maintaining it. There are two solutions to this:

• Get Mojang to pull in large optimizations. Thus far, they have been uninterested in this (though some controversy over Optifine may have left a bad taste).

• Pull the changes into a modding framework. Understandably, Fabric/Forge aren’t willing to pull in a huge overhaul they’d have to maintain. Mojang may have similar feelings.

Some modifications (like Sodium) minimize vanilla changes to prioritize compatibility, and are popular to the extent that some other mods implement workarounds for them specifically. But this is rare, and it’s still problematic.

But also a relatively unified, inclusive, and liberal world government? And yes, quite xenophobic, and militaristic, and shady/oppressive with stuff like ONI. And the xenophobia was kind of understandable.

The places in the trilogy were mostly East Africa: https://www.halopedia.org/East_African_Protectorate

In other words, I’m pretty sure the Trump administration would classify the UNSC as ‘woke’ upon deep analysis. Which says a lot.

For those that don’t know, Stability AI is already a zombie, even in the local ML community. SD3 was a flop, they shed all their devs/projects worth anything, and now with Qwen/Longcat SAI is beyond obsolete.

Apparently EA didn’t get the message. They invested in a broken, burning company who’s only decent results are free and old?

…Sounds about right.

Or a rambling 1 hour video.

Why not both? One section for owners, one for pre-purchasers (maybe it has to be in their wishlist?)

It would give owners a clean space, allow pre-purchasers to ask questions, but rob trolls of attention (which is the most important thing).

That’s the issue, isn’t it?

I see this on the internet a lot. People posit things like “wouldn’t it be awesome if these fired devs got together” or “Why don’t they make good stuff anymore? Wouldn’t it be great if somone made a thing like this old beloved thing…”

…Except it’s already happening. Or happened.

And there’s just so much noise on the internet, it’s largely unknown to the folks who’d be interested.

To be clear, I’m not blaming OP, and I’ve done the exact same thing myself. But I still find it kind of… sad.

Anyway, thanks, I am bookmarking Exodus and Archetype Entertainment now.

This makes me think of the Ellisons buying Star Trek and Avatar. Why wouldn’t they shutter or castrate two notoriously ‘woke’, expensive, questionably profitable franchises?

Same here :(. Though to be fair, the Saudi’s political leanings aren’t a perfect parallel.

Yeah. There’s domestic pressure for this anyway, unfortunately.

Gundam

The physics of the mechs (from my very sparse knowledge of Gundam) are pretty questionable, lol, which is fine because they’re there to be spectacular.

Hard, relativistic STL sci fi can still get super weird, see: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a