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Too bad the basic gameplay loop of the game has never been fun. I’ve installed the game multiple times over the years, after seeing it showered with praise, and it’s always the same; some minor corner of the game is improved, but the basic actions of exploring, resource gathering, combat, and most importantly flying your spaceship all feel like ass. I’ve legitimately played multiple Roblox games that have a better grasp on how to design ship controls, and Minecraft was making significantly more interesting procedural environments before it even fully released.
I’m pretty wary of corporate propaganda, but from the article this sounds like a pretty clear case of some greedy people taking advantage of Valve offering to cover all arbitration costs. Yes, they’re doing this to cover their ass, but it’s not a malicious move and I don’t see how it could be interpreted as anti-consumer.
Lol this is an article about how shit optimization has been for the last several AAA game releases. Even quite capable desktops often have performance issues with the mentioned games, because the PC ports weren’t optimized enough and/or tested on a wide enough range of hardware. It’s a real shame, many of them don’t even look significantly better than the last generation or two. It’s just graphical bloat as devs get lazier and lazier the beefier the GPUs get.
I agree that the exclusivity is a bummer, but on the other hand multiple games exist today that would not without Epic’s funding. I just don’t buy games on the Epic store (everything I own on there was from a free giveaway). When they come to Steam, I get to buy them on my platform of choice, and the injection of capital means they’re much further along than they would be otherwise, if they would even exist without the funding. I just think of it as an Early Access period.
Yes, from an objective standpoint I would of course prefer an open cross-platform standard, but while it’s the sort of thing I could see Steam adopting and even contributing to, Epic definitely wants the lock-in. And while Epic would obviously love to be a monopoly, as long as they have less market share than Steam, they’re an anti-monopolistic force as a direct competitor to Steam.
In this scenario, boycotting games that include the EOS SDK is a pointless gesture and the only reason to do so is if you’re worried about the telemetry in the SDK, which from the documentation and from Satisfactory dedicated server logs is pretty minimal unless you log into Epic through the game. It sounds like your main issue is the exclusivity, which has nothing to do with the SDK, and would be effectively “voted against with your wallet” by just not spending money on the Epic store. But as long as Epic keeps offering significant chunks of cash for timed exclusivity, it will remain an extremely attractive deal for any game without significant pre-relrase hype.
But… you’re basically arguing for more exclusivity by effectively boycotting the majority of products that choose to release on the Epic store, as most of them will include EOS functionality. Why is steamworks fine?
I’m a valve fanboy but they’re only company that’s even got a prayer of monopolizing the PC games market. Epic is if anything an anti-monopolistic force here – the Unreal Engine is the Epic product that’s threatening market dominance.
RoR is likely turning off some of the functionality but the EOS SDK is still used in the binary. I’m assuming here, I don’t know the specific implementation, but if there’s a check box and you don’t need to restart the whole game after checking it, there’s no way it’s somehow removing EOS from the program. It likely just disables various functionality, but I bet it’s still making a couple calls to verify the existence of the EOS network, just like Satisfactory does.
Games (and programs in general) have to be built with support for any environments they want to run on. If you want to release your game on multiple storefronts and take advantage of their built in social functions, you need to build in support for those functions, even if they won’t be used in some cases.
I mean if you don’t log in, at least the dedicated server only makes two calls to EOS. The SDK is in the game, sure, but if you’re not logging in to Epic then I don’t really see the threat. It seems like classic sinophobia to be totally blasé about any data Steam (or Coffee Stain) want to collect, but to avoid the entire product because Tencent might be able to associate your IP with the fact that you own the game.
I mean, it’s there so the game can utilize Epic’s online services, like achievements. Doing so requires the use of the EOS SDK. So it’s not like they can just include a check box to disable the functionality; that would require an entirely separate release of the game. It’s already not doing anything besides making sure the EOS server exists unless you’re engaging with Epic systems. At least that’s the case for dedicated servers, but I would assume that it’s the same if you only select Steam multiplayer (or single player mode).
You don’t have to install the launcher to play games that use EOS. You don’t have to make an account unless you want to log into Epic, which is not necessary to play the game (unless of course you bought it on the epic store).
The only arguably bad thing about EOS’ inclusion is that it can collect some telemetry about you, which Epic currently claims to be pretty sparse.
I really like how deadlock does it; you just have to hit the creep with player damage in the last few seconds of its life, and then your whole lane gets the reward, which can’t be denied. But it also generates a little orb that can be secured by either team; if no one pops it, it automatically goes to the killing team. It has the HOTS thing where farm gets shared pretty much evenly among everyone in the lane, but there’s still enough gameplay to the creep killing that it’s engaging, instead of just standing in lane passively and getting XP for it.
Eh, there was definitely a couple years where the market was flooded, but at this point there really aren’t any notable games in the genre other than League, Dota, and Smite. Deadlock being a third person game puts it in direct competition with Smite, though it’s also got more shooter DNA, which is aiming to bring in the overwatch crowd refugees. And at least IMO it already feels better than Smite, or any of the other abortive attempts at a third person moba over the years.
Been really enjoying this, much more than I ever liked Smite. They have a ton of great ability and item designs from Dota to draw on, but it’s significantly more approachable. I really like how the last hitting and denying works. The balance is still getting dialed in but I’m having a good time while it does.
facepalm it’s not an “ad tracking component”, it’s a test of a new API that, if adopted, will let sites opt in to a much less invasive anonymized system for evaluating the effectiveness of their ads, instead of the current crazy amount of personal data they scrape. The data is anonymized in a double blind scheme, and it’s already way less data than every ad is grabbing.
The base game already had some pretty badly designed fights that rely on deceptive animations and timing for their difficulty, and the DLC really triples down on that. The more games they make the more bullshit the fights get. I like a challenging fight, but when you have to die to a boss 20-30 times just to see all of their attacks, and the attacks are designed to not be legible the first time you see them… It’s just not very fun game design. I think FROM is a victim of their own success and this is the inevitable result of constantly trying to one-up the last hardest flight in the series. At a certain point it stops being rewarding and just becomes a grind.
Remakes can be awesome – the recent System Shock remake is an excellent example of doing it right. The problem, as it always is, is capitalism and greed, which lead to lazy money-grabbing remakes of games that didn’t need it. Many games that get remakes should have just gotten patches – Dark Souls is a prime example of this. The remake barely looked better than the original and changed things about the gameplay, not necessarily for the better.
For me Doom 2016 was a hugely more enjoyable experience than Eternal. 2016 is arguably one of the greatest linear single player shooters ever made. Eternal felt like a chore once you had all the tools unlocked and I lost interest shortly after. I could have lowered the difficulty so weapon selection didn’t matter, but that was clearly not the design intent.
Ultrakill does the “swap between weapons quickly for interesting combos” much better IMO – it’s not necessary but it’s a value add and it’s super fun to pull off.
I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.
Fedora is a great first distro! I do recommend looking at the GNOME ui, as it’s what Fedora (and vanilla Ubuntu) use; I really like GNOME but it’s not for everyone as it’s pretty opinionated and innovative. Linux Mint is another popular choice for newcomers, it uses a very simple UI that will be very familiar to any Windows user.
Animal well is great, but still has one massive problem; the keyboard controls can’t be rebound, which is an absolutely unforgivable miss in 2024. Beat the game but had to use a controller… I really don’t understand why he still hasn’t added this basic feature.