Which makes sense, since otherwise you could claim someone is dead and just social engineer yourself a free account.

Hey its me ur [dead] brother.

You’re a person of good taste! 7 days to die is the go-to co-op game in my friend group, and my wife and I are big fans of The Forest (still haven’t gotten the sequel but I hear it’s great).

As for bad early access games, I literally have a category in my Steam library called “mistakes” where they live so I can hide their shame.

Yeah, I’ve been burned a few times but things like this and Rimworld (back when it was still EA) redeem the concept of early access for me.

It looks like that takes care of the worst of the initial bugs, at least those that I experienced. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this game develops from here, especially now that the developer is unexpectedly rich after just the first day of sales. It sounds like he already had a great track record of listening to his community during the pre-release alpha testing, so that’s encouraging.

Good call mentioning pre-orders as well. I never did it back in the age of physical media, but there was at least a reason for it then. Now the only reason to do it is to get some bonus skins or other garbage with your buggy game.

I mean, let them try? I, for one, basically stopped buying new games (with the occasional exception for an indie dev). By the time the worst bugs are fixed, it’ll be on sale for 50% off anyway.

I was going to ask, “Who the hell pays for cheats,” but then I remembered that the mobile gaming industry is a thing. Sooo, I guess there’s pretty well-established precedent for this sort of nonsense.

Thanks for pointing this out. It looks, from other articles, that this rumour is completely unsubstantiated anyway so I guess it’s a moot point. Now that I think about it, 16 billion seems pathetically low for the money-printing machine that is Steam.

I see game piracy getting increasingly popular if this rumour holds weight and comes to fruition.

Sure, but according to the article Gabe only owns about 25% of the company, so conceivably if MS throws enough money at them, surely enough people will vote in favour. I certainly hope this never happens, of course.

Even more dramatic is that if a repair service provider discovers a third-party spare part that was installed in a Galaxy device as part of a previous repair, they must immediately disassemble the smartphone, tablet or notebook into its individual parts and inform Samsung of the details of the respective incident.

Well this feels illegal (or certainly should be). Imagine taking your car in for a repair only to find out the shop functionally scrapped it and told on you to Ford, all because they noticed you had changed a tire.

At this point I don’t even really care if a game has a native port. If it works with Proton there’s a good chance it’ll run better than the native version anyway. If that saves developers time I’m fine with it.

Graham Wagner even reminisced about a bug he came across while playing The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, stating that adding ‘glitches’ into a then-hypothetical second season of the show was “definitely on [his] mind as a concept”.

Now I’m seriously hoping there’s a scene in season 2 where a character walks into a room and every object on every surface just sorta freaks out and clatters around, a la the traditional Bethesda physics engine insanity.

What’s the context here? I’ve never played it, but I thought it was generally well-liked. I’m guessing the publisher is up to some nonsense?

You make a valid point, I just personally disagree that this was good timing on their part (and for the record I’m not downvoting you or anything). A better time would have been before the show dropped - granted, they likely didn’t anticipate its overwhelming positive reception.

I know I’m in the minority here, but I bought FO4 after watching the show and immediately installed the highest-rated mod pack on Nexus, assuming with a game this old it’d work great. I’ve been playing their games since Daggerfall and believe that modern Bethesda games are best played modded - at the very least with the unofficial patches that fix issues with the base game. I only found out a few days after starting my run that there was an incoming patch that’d ruin my fun.

Anyway - it’s not the end of the world. I’m used to patches breaking mods and having to replace them or wait months for them all to get updated. Just having some fun slagging on a publisher that, in my opinion, timed this badly. I don’t regret the 10 bucks I spent on the game, as I’ll eventually get back to it.

I mean, technically yeah - the criticism here is just that Bethesda chose the worst possible time to drop an unnecessary patch considering the influx of new players from the TV show’s success.

Good call - that could be it for a good chunk of them.

Bethesda has so far stayed quiet about the update’s reception, so there’s no clue as to whether an official fix or even an option to rollback may be forthcoming.

My bet is they “fix” it in 6 months once most mods have been patched, this breaking them all over again.

I bought it last night and only have a few hours in. So far it’s pretty great though. I look forward to seeing it continue to develop, and according to reviews posted by pre-release testers the developer is very open to community feedback.

It’s definitely not a fully complete game yet, but I expect I’ll get at least a couple weekend binges out of it before I shelve it and wait for more content.

Also, it’s working perfectly in Linux (through Proton) so extra points there.

Sigh

I hate myself for buying my last two Paradox DLC at full price. I even enjoyed them, I just hate what it says about that company’s control over my dopamine.

The DLC will continue until morale improves.

That’s what I thought when I saw the number of mods in that pack, but after a bit of tweaking (a few mods that cause crashing in Linux) it’s been quite stable. I’m only about 10 hours in though.

Unfortunately with the upcoming FO4 patch in a few days, a lot of those mods are gonna be broken for a few weeks/months. Bad timing by Bethesda on that front.

The show caused me to finally buy FO4, and so I immediately hopped onto Nexus and downloaded the highest-rated mod collection for the game. It has over 700 mods, so something tells me I won’t actually be playing much of the game for a while yet. (I wouldn’t deign to play a modern Bethesda game without mods.)

I’m thrilled because I’m always happy for new RimWorld patches and DLC. Also, the theme of this DLC is exactly what I’m into. On the other hand, I’m annoyed because I was feeling like playing it again soon and now I have to wait for the 180ish mods I use to update, which will likely take at least a few weeks. Such is life on the rim.

Yeah, that’s definitely probably my overall fave DLC for the reasons you mention. I also really like the psionics introduced in (IIRC) Royalty. I’ll admit that the base implementation was kinda unimpressive, but the framework it added allowed modders to create really cool stuff like the big mod that adds like a dozen different psionic paths. (Can’t remember the name offhand, maybe one of the vanilla expanded mods).

Rimworld has probably the only DLC I’ll happily pay full price for. I mean, I play with literally over 100 mods so I never quite know what’s from the actual DLC, but the DLC has thus far always added really cool new features that those modders can build off of. It’s really worth the money, and they’re a developer I’m always happy to support.

I think you mean they want mods to fix the broken game while they sell you DLC that no one asked for but will inevitably buy anyway.

No, I’m not addicted. I can quit any time…

Ah, yeah, playing on official or public servers is definitely gonna be a mixed bag in terms of location. I’ll admit I didn’t really consider that as I’m lucky enough to have a good group of friends with similar gaming interests, and we’re all within about 100 KM of each other. I just ended up building a server and self-hosting out of my home.

I first picked up that game maybe 5 years ago, so I can assure you that Ocean House was plenty scary even in a modern-ish context.

YES! The haunted hotel is hands down one of my all-time favorite moments in gaming. Even with the game’s primitive (by modern standards) graphics, I don’t think I’ve ever played through a scarier experience. I think the only thing that comes close was my first few hours playing The Forest.

I wouldn’t think that most WiFi setups in and of themselves would lead to much, if any, added latency. Wiring up your systems is always ideal in terms of reliability, but plenty of people (I’d bet most) game online via WiFi. I’d suspect that if you’re dealing with latency issues it’d be from playing on distant servers or some other bottleneck in your network.

One couple I regularly game with are on Starlink and I believe both their computers are on WiFi and lag is (generally) fine for them when playing action-survival games like 7 Days to Die, Ark, and Valheim. Their only issues are generally from when Starlink has a momentary hiccup.