sylver_dragon
- 1 Post
- 141 Comments
Valheim.
Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.
The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.
I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.
And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.
Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”
do anticheat count as antivirus?
No. But, from the article:
Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage
The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.
I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.
That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.
It’s rather amazing that this one guy keeps churning out fixes for FromSoft’s complete inability to understand multiplayer.
That said, I do plan to try the vanilla setup first (finishing up Shadow of the Erdtree before we change over). I just worry about my wife and I dropping into a session and having some rando who either wants to faff about; or, we run into the type of toxic behavior which seems to inundate online games. We had pretty good luck with Vermintide 2, back in the day. But, with way too many years of playing WoW, we’ve also run into a lot of assholes. And we just don’t have the patience for that sort of thing anymore.
There’s probably a lot of nostalgia in the choice, but my all time favorite game is Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero. The game was just the right mix of fantasy, adventure and humor for a young me, and I still go back an play it about once a year. A close second is Valheim. It’s kinda my “cozy game”. I find building and exploring relaxing, and there’s enough fighting to keep the game from getting boring.
This is exactly the problem, they have no accountability for bad updates causing hardware to become unusable. So, Q&A just becomes a needless expense and untested firmware is dropped on users. Sure, you could try and sue, or more likely get fucked by a binding arbitration clause. But, the cost would be far beyond what the device costs. So, it never makes sense. There need to be fines when this shit happens, which are significant percentages of worldwide revenue, to scare companies into actually testing updates before they are released.
In the end, all we can do is shake our heads and remind folks to never buy HP. They put out great products 30 years ago, but those days are long gone. Now, they just put out crap.
I’d be curious to see how they handle the problems which have cropped up with similar systems in the past. Player housing, for example, can be an absolute nightmare. I was actively playing UO back when they implemented player housing, and it was a clusterfuck. You couldn’t go three steps without slamming into someone’s house and most of them ended up being owned by a few big guilds, because space was at such a premium that no one else could afford one. And with the land so littered with houses, they had to create an alternate world to quest in, which specifically didn’t allow player houses. I can also see the systems they are designing becoming a playground rife for griefing. Look at that nice home you built. It would be a shame if someone diverted a river into it while you weren’t online.
MMO’s greatest strength can also be their greatest weakness: and that strength is other people. The more open and free-form a world is, the easier it is for the griefers to find and exploit edge cases.
While it was fun to watch the GME stock shitshow, the fact remains that the short selling hedge funds were right: GameStop doesn’t have a good business case anymore.
GME should have died years ago and this is just the people who are currently holding the bag trying to scrape some value off the bottom of the barrel.
“We are investing more, not less, into the evolution and growth of this game,” NetEase continued. “We’re excited to deliver new super hero characters, maps, features, and content to ensure an engaging live service experience for our worldwide player base.”
Translation: We’re gonna monetize the fuck out of our playerbase.
I have one as well in my PC of Theseus, it’s been an ongoing part for more than a decade now. But, I also haven’t used in in a year or more.
It’s kinda funny to think back at how excited I was when my father first installed a CD-ROM drive in our home PC and knowing I could now get some of the newest games which were coming out on PC at that time. And now, I don’t even know if my optical drive is still working.
I notice path of exile has sucked xi xinpings cock exactly zero times
In 2018, Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, acquiring 86.67% of the company’s shares.
-source
I enjoyed Path of Exile, and may give PoE2 a go. But ya, GGG looks set to deepthroat some Xi Xin Pooh cock,
I wondered why Samsung, a company that literally produces military weapons, wasnt on the list.
The PDF you linked: Designation of Chinese Military Companies.
Samsung is Korean.
And while I’m sure the Chinese Government would love to dig out a map from the Han Dynasty, claiming rule over the entire Korean Peninsula, I doubt Samsung is making weapons for them.
Once again, the opposite of “live service” is not “single player”.
Thank you. As someone who loves multiplayer games, I like that I have had a lot of options lately. But, this whole “live service” crap needs to die. Sell me a game and then go away. If you want to release an expansion and sell me that, great, I’ll take a look. But, quit trying to sell me a subscription.
Studio execs look at the mountains of money which have come from online games like WoW or Fortnite and get gold fever. They dream of having a permanent siphon attached to their customers’ wallets and so will ignore any warning signs that their ideas suck and keep chasing the subscription model. And, in the end, it’s not the execs who really suffer when these things don’t pan out. They blame “market forces” and “soft demand”, fire the development team and then spin up the next stupid idea, either at the same company or at a new one.
A brick and mortar store has a lot of overhead. And, even with merch sales, GameStop doesn’t have enough to offer to differentiate itself from online stores for that same merch. Why would I take the time to walk/drive over to the GameStop to buy some cheap crap from China, when I can go online and buy that same cheap crap from China for less online. Especially, when I can often get it direct from China (via AliExpress or the like) for even less? Without the sales of physical media and the used game market, there just isn’t a viable business case for GameStop anymore. Sure, I found the whole GameStop stock meme funny too. And it sucked that some big fund tried to short them into the dirt. But, looked at from a dispassionate perspective, the current business model is doomed.
It’s not nice as something to target, but it makes sense. Employment is about more than just straight money. When evaluating an employer, I consider everything from the top line salary, to benefits, work culture, work life balance and work environment. The non-tangible factors can mean that I would be willing to take a lower salary. That is why companies will do things like decked out rec rooms or the like. And ya, I might consider a lower salary to be part of something I love or believe in. E.g. If NASA were looking for remote cybersecurity workers, I might consider a lower salary that I would get elsewhere, just to get to be part of NASA.
Employment is a negotiation between you and your employer. And while I do think technical folks could really use a trade union (something like the IBEW for electricians), for now you have to represent yourself and make sure you get what you are worth. And this might mean not working on the thing you are really passionate about. Especially if the people in charge of it are a bag of dicks.
So, the goal is to try and fragment the market further and hope that makes more money that putting out good games, across the current landscape of platforms? I mean, maybe. But, isn’t that exactly the reason Sega gave up on making its own console and started putting games out on other platforms. It works if you are the winner of a console war, otherwise it sucks to be the “also ran”.
Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment? Light doesn’t work that way, it bounces and scatters, meaning that a room with a light in it should almost never be completely dark. I always end up ignoring the “adjust the gamma until some wiggle is just visible” setup pages and just blow the gamma out until I can actually see a reasonable amount in the dark areas.
Yes, really dark places should be really dark. But, once you add a light to the situation, they should be a lot less dark.
Good riddance. I understand the whole Mii thing got popular and Microsoft wanted to chase that wave. But, they were just such an obvious “me too” addition to the XBox 360 at the time and coincided with Microsoft changing out the functional XBox 360 main panel for the ad laden shit-fest that was the newer designs. But, maybe I’m just old and hate superfluous crap between me and playing my games.
I don’t see in what way having a PSN account would make Horizon Zero Dawn safer on PC.
It’s safer for Sony’s stock price, as they can report higher numbers of people on the PlayStation Network and greater “player engagement”. What, you thought this was about improving the experience for the customer? No one gives a fuck about them.
This “transformational technology,” as he says, will “accelerate the velocity of development and unlock truly novel game experiences that will surprise, delight, and inspire players.”
Oh look, buzzword salad. Apparently though, the Netflix execs bought it. Not that I thought that Neflix has any business trying to run a game studio in the first place. But, this sounds like the same sort of bullshit which has cause many companies to burn billions of dollars on “blockchain”. I suspect this “AI driven” drivel is going to end up in the same landfill as ET and NFTs.
- sylver_dragon to
- •
- www.youtube.com
- •
- 2Y
- •
But have you considered, line goes up?
Sadly, there are probably a lot of developers who are burning the candle at both ends to push this out the door, on an unrealistic schedule. And who will then burn the candle in the middle as well when the release is a buggy mess. Only to finally be tossed aside like so much trash when the game fails to realize these unrealistic expectations. And all of that will squarely be the fault of management, who will wipe away crocodile tears with the profits this game will generate. Just not the profit they unrealistically promised investors; so you know, the game was actually a failure. Fuck EA’s management, the world would probably be a better place if the C-Level suite and board room got emptied out by some disaster.