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It’s almost stopped me buying ANY games, at all.
At some point within a year or few of a release the odds of anything I find interesting showing up for free on epic is damn near 100%.
It’s the ultimate patient gamers bit: wait 2 or 3 years and that game you want will be $0.
(It’s why my epic library is now bigger than my steam library, despite spending $0.)
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply he did nothing at all.
He did a good job of pushing node shrinks, and did an awful lot of them awfully fast.
Though, my vibe is he was probably fired because he had the unfortunate issue of being an engineer and didn’t really have the ability to stay in proper CEO-speak and was talking and causing a LOT of damage to Intel with what he said, when, and to whom.
A good example is shitting on TSMC while being entirely reliant on them for client chips. The CEO thing would have been to just shut up and say how much you like working with them and how great the partnership is but uh, that’s not what he did.
Those both have a Ring 0 component, which is essentially presented as required for the crap to even work.
The argument being that you have to have that level of access for the anti-cheat software to be able to actually be able to do it’s thing, since if you just ran it with a normal user’s permission, it’d be subject to numerous ways you could have a cheat tool simply bypass it.
They’re probably not wrong about that, but doesn’t mean that we should have to essentially install a rootkit on our hardware to play online games.
Something that’s made shockingly unclear, for anyone who might be interested: you only need to have subscribed for a single month to have all the subscriber gated stuff unlocked.
I don’t really know how that’s a viable business model, but pay $14 or whatever, get all the expansions and inventory and whatnot unlocked, and then don’t worry about it until there’s another expansion you want.
They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.
These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.
My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.
Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.
Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.
It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.
The most hilarious part of this game is that Tencent’s rootkit anticheat is so awful it’s actively causing problems with other people’s rootkit anticheat.
I mean, it’s all awful, but I can’t recall a time when, for example, EAC was actively causing issues with other games and then being essentially impossible to uninstall because why would you ever want to actually remove a rootkit?
It’s not even really that bad: a new patch will force recompiling of the shaders in Fortnite, and by the time you hit the ground from the battle bus it’s usually… fine?
Like, yes, it’s a stuttery mess in the lobby and while landing, but who cares? That’s not gameplay where it matters in the least what the pixel-peeping frametime stats say.
This kind of thing is why I’ve just stopped caring about product reviews. It’s either pixel-peeping nonsense that nobody but the reviewer thinks is important, or it’s nonsense like ‘The new Gaming Blaster X 2000 Mega Pro! For $1499 it’s the best thing since the last thing, you should buy it, recommended!’ and you look at the benchmarks, and you see that last gen was 148 fps, and this thing is 158 fps on the minimums and like, who gives a shit.
You won’t notice this if you’re playing the game and not playing watch-a-stats-graph, and this has kinda become the norm for a few generations of reviews on everything.
Absolutely.
2.0 was 100% not the same game, but it was vastly improved and perfectly playable well before then.
I played at launch, but on PC, and it was… fine. In that, unlike Starfield, it was a game with characters and a story that was interesting enough to carry the buggy world and somewhat less than fleshed out side-quest mechanics.
But, like, there were enough buildings and set pieces and people and stories to actually sit down and spend 200 hours exploring the world without seeing the same stupid PoIs over and over and over again, while trying to care about the least interesting NPC companions I’ve probably ever dealt with.
And Phantom Liberty is fucking fantastic, so they took a bit of a turd at launch and turned it into an amazing game.
makes you dizzy
Fun story about VR and being dizzy.
I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.
Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you’re there, since boy, it’s shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.
Fallout and Skyrim VR
takes a lot of modding
To be fair, so do the 2D versions. VR Skyrim, at least, is super fun once you get the modding done.
As for general value: it depends.
I mostly play various “exercise” games like Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pistol Whip and Thrill of the Fight. The Quest is fantastic for those, because you can untether and go stand outside in a nice open surface and whilst you look like an absolute idiot, it can be a hell of a workout if you put in the effort.
As for like, traditional games, it’s less rosy: there’s very little market, thus very little software support, thus very little market, which means there’s very little software, which means…
There’s a ton of gems all over the place if you’re after slightly more social activities, but I’d say for single-player game experiences you’re going to be limited for good options that run exclusively on the headset.
That said, there’s a LOT of options in PC-tethered VR that are fantastic, assuming you can/want to tether to a PC. If you don’t, that’s fair, but all the really really in-depth experiences require a pretty beefy gaming pc. Stuff like HL: Alyx, because it’s (still) probably the best VR-native game that’s been released so far.
There’s also the VR-versions-of-PC-games like Flight Simulator and various racing and space games that are worth checking out if you’re interested in them, and VR adds a lot to those experiences, if you can run the VR versions with sufficient performance which eh, is a whole different ball of problem.
not as chatty as it used to be back in the days
I think that’s kinda a generational problem. When you played WoW 20 years ago, all the chatter was in the game, because where else would someone be asking where Mankrik’s wife was?
Kids these days (and old people who are paying attention, too, I guess) just join the Guild discord because it’s persistent chat outside of the game with push notifications and streaming and you can listen to shared playlists while raiding and all sorts of shit you just can’t do in the game.
So sure, MMO people don’t chat in game as much anymore, but there’s still a vibrant meme-sharing-and-yelling-at-the-hunter community in Discord now.
For sure. It’s nice that low-ish power CPUs with iGPUs went from ‘roughly a box of melted crayons’ to ‘competitive with current-gen graphics’ in what, like 2-3 years?
And, of course, there’s no reason Nvidia couldn’t make a 15w variant later either since it looks like both AMD and Intel have CPUs competitive in that space now, rather than it just being a one-off design like the Steam Deck’s APU is.
Well, the article is talking 65 and 80w, so uh, that’s probably sadly not where these will end up.
There’s a big gap between the 15w tdp on the steam deck and either of those numbers, especially in battery life (unless measuring battery life in minutes) and the fact that 80w in a steam deck would be less gaming console and more portable burn generator.
For laptops, though, yeah, that’s looks pretty remarkable given that roughly equivalent laptops now use quite a lot more than 65w for that alleged performance.
secret shop page
This is a luxury brand staple: it engenders loyalty because it makes the whales “better”.
You can’t buy certain luxury bags or watches or cars or whatever unless you have spent a giant pile of money on crap you may or may not want as the price of being allowed the special sales.
Same thing.
Crap title: it’s a lot of ‘if’.
If they’re being honest with performance.
If they don’t have any development issues they might have a next generation in a year or two, that might be on par with current CPUs, maybe.
I don’t really believe any manufacturer’s benchmarks, and I especially don’t believe it about a product that doesn’t exist yet.
I mean, ‘take the money, build an empty factory’ is what tech companies do when you give them a money helicopter.
Maybe we should stop giving them any money and just nationalize these failed businesses that need bailouts? (Yes, yes, Intel isn’t failed - yet - but my point is still valid.)
If they’re important to the national security or whatever, then they’re important enough to go through that process for too.
the hybrid route of “Yea you can play as long as you want, but as soon as you give us money you will be required to give us money forever to play” route is counter productive
100%.
There’s a couple of games I would probably be playing and spending money on that follow that monetization method and the problem is that… I don’t play one game endlessly.
If you cancel and go away, you’ve made returning to the game a pretty substantial hurdle, and for me at least, I’m just… not going to.
(Also FFXIV’s utterly incomprehensible login system that requires six logins on five thousand different pages under nine names doesn’t help since every time I try to come back I can’t remember how to even log in to anything.)
Or maybe I don’t buy enough?
I dunno, I’ve just kinda changed what games I play to things that appear to also be the same kind of stuff that Epic is making deals to give away for free?
Also, in fairness, I do buy the occasional game for console even if it’s available on PC as sales permit, but we’re talking a game or two a year at most.