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Came here to suggest it and here it is, the newest comment! The modding scene is insane, too, for such a relatively small and unknown game.
I love Starsector. I just wish it was written in something more performant than fuckin’ Java. But, if it were, there probably wouldn’t be the mods for it there are today.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing a quest line of my own. Honest.
Oh, it’s not just your pet peeve - The Queen really hates it, too!
- He’s going to court without a lawyer, which is always always always a bad idea (I wish that weren’t the case but it is a fact);
- He’s tried to claim he doesn’t own or operate the business in question;
- His defenses are spaghetti thrown at the wall:
His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, fraudulent inducement, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, and unjust enrichment.
Many of these (in fact, all but the arbitration clause; that’s probably from their TOS but won’t save him) are SovCit arguments and simply do not apply. They’re going to be dismantled in seconds in court, and I know that with at best a slightly-better-than-layperson understanding of the law. This guy is going to get thoroughly Bowser’d.
As reported by Torrent Freak, Ryan Daly, the alleged owner of modding company Modded Hardware, has denied any wrongdoing in court — even that he owns and operates the business at all.
Daly mostly responded to the lawsuit’s claims by saying “denied” and otherwise claimed he lacked “sufficient information to either admit or deny the allegations.” His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, fraudulent inducement, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, and unjust enrichment.
This guy sounds halfway to SovCit and entirely fucked.
Check out some trailers for Falling Frontier, it looks like it has a lot of potential at least.
Also, Star Sector: https://fractalsoftworks.com
If you think that an arbitration company isn’t going to end up sympathetic to the people signing their cheques after some amount of time in operation, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Even if the loser pays (and that’s not a guarantee, some companies foot the bill regardless to make it seem like the better option to the consumer), it’s still the company contracting the arbitrators and the consumer doesn’t get a look in on that, so future business is absolutely an incentive to put the thumb on the scale. “After all, both parties agreed to be bound and waive their right to trial, so what are consumers going to do?” is the logic. Most will drop it after losing arbitration, and there are savings on court costs there too.
I don’t assume arbitration wraps up in any arbitrary amount of time (🥁). I say it’s quicker than litigation because it is, every single time. Because it is quicker it is also cheaper, every single time. Small claims court is different again, and not at question here, just to head that off at the pass.
You however do assume a lot like my location and the location of the suit I brought though, based on my vernacular, and I’d recommend against that. “Mate’s rates” could put me in the UK, or Australia, or New Zealand, or even some places in South Africa and other former colonies. None of those would be accurate.
If you push everybody into arbitration, you’ve already got the arbitrator in your pocket and your costs will still be less than litigation in 99% of cases - even class action. I don’t think you understand just how long and expensive and unpredictable litigation can actually be, but I’ve brought suit before so I do. It took four and a half years to get an initial court date from first filing the complaint. Not the trial, just a date so the judge could hear the facts of the case and opening statements from attorneys. Four and a half years of paying my attorneys, as a private individual, with a lot less money than you might think. And they were giving me mate’s rates; I’ve worked with companies where the legal work billings were in the tens of thousands per day for a single participating law office. That shit is expensive.
Maybe Valve did this to fuck their customers, but they don’t really have a track record of that, and since in the majority of cases arbitration is without question an anti-consumer move, I’d say that if your aim is to paint Valve to be the villains for this then it’s going to be an uphill battle.
Arbitration is always cheaper and faster than the courts, because the courts are very backed up especially since the pandemic, and there’s a lot of admin cost which doesn’t exist in arbitration. That is why almost every other company is trying to force arbitration. So if the goal was to save money, forcing court would have the opposite effect.
Yes, and at wholesale rates it’s a pretty good bang-for-your-buck, as an advertising scheme. Advertising is a numbers game about getting as many eyeballs as possible on the product, and I know I actively check for free games on the Epic launcher most weeks. Even if I don’t ever buy anything because of that specifically, it keeps the app on my computer and keeps me checking back in.
Edit: And I shit you not I just opened it to check 'cause I can’t remember if I looked at this week’s free game. Turns out it’s a good thing I did too, the Fallout collection is free right now!
(dammit, see what I mean?)
Just checked Steam and yeah, 59.5 hours, last played May 2021 (I think I was using it to test GeForce NOW). It was kind of fun with friends, but we got to the point that we had guns and a pterodactyl and i felt like I’d seen pretty much everything the game had to offer, so when life happened and we all fell off, i just never reinstalled it. That was before all the DLC got released, so quite a bit further back than 2021! And it doesn’t look like the bugs and jank ever got fully ironed out, even after all this time.
Fun fact: aggregated crowdsourced predictions for sports games have ~55-60% accuracy. That means if you get enough of them and play the odds you get, you’ll win more often than not; the challenge is getting enough people to participate. I knew a guy who started a company doing exactly that; we lost touch but they were doing alright last I heard from him.
I dunno if that translates to other areas, but I’d sure be interested to find out. Valve certainly has the audience size to get enough participants, and that audience are from all walks of life so it’s a more accurate cross-section of the populace as well.
… now that I put it like that, I’m a little jelly. That sounds like really interesting data.
Lol I think we were replying to the guy at the same time even - don’t worry, I gotchu (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
And no you right, about FromSoft and Sanderson - that guy’s a hero, in my book! I got my little sister into his work, she just finished the Mistborn/Alloy saga, so I gave her Stormlight to start on. So good.
I think this was a reference to Miyazaki saying it’s the size of Limgrave: https://gamerant.com/elden-ring-dlc-map-size-shadow-of-the-erdtree/
Like OP meant
Yeah okay Miyazaki, “smaller games”, like how SotE was “the size of Limgrave”
I’ve gotten as far as generating an infinite procedural terrain for the stock Unreal doll to run around in, so I have some sense of what a feat it is to even get close to building a full game with art and sound and mechanics. This looks great, congratulations on hitting the point where you can show it off, and good luck with the release! 🙌
All massively ambitious games attempting to capture the scale and freedom of a Bethesda title, but released with so much jank it makes Bethesda look like Nintendo. I played Gothic 2 and 3 some, and some of Risen, and they were fine for the time - not a lot of competition back then. But nowadays, there are so many god-tier A-plusplusplus titles released and releasing that I couldn’t 100% all of them if I dedicated my remaining years to it. Jank-ass RPGs, no matter how expansive and lovingly crafted, don’t stand a shit-fume’s chance in hell of catching attention in the current climate. So this is sad, but they hadn’t put out any real bangers and I don’t think the next PB project was gonna change the landscape.
Hard agree. I vividly remember having such a blast tossing enemies around with the Force, but if I think just a little harder I remember the jank and clunk of everything around those moments. It was fun for the time, but with the sheer explosion of truly outstanding games in recent years it wouldn’t stand a chance of catching any attention if it was released today.
I’m buying this partly because it looks really good, and partly because ThePruld is the cinematic director and that motherfucker is a genius. If anyone has played Dark Souls and not seen We Are The Souls, I can’t recommend it enough. Also check out his other animations, they’re much sillier and the frantic Italian just makes it better.
This news, from January 2024? https://www.pcgamer.com/dark-and-darker-dev-claims-nexons-preliminary-injunction-has-been-dismissed-court-rules-that-the-game-cannot-be-considered-an-infringement-of-nexons-copyright-or-trade-secret/
First reported by TheGamer, a member of Dark and Darker developer Ironmace has stated on the game’s Discord that they have achieved an early victory in staving off Maplestory publisher Nexon’s copyright lawsuit, with a South Korean court dismissing the publisher’s preliminary injunction.
I have to ask, because you didn’t bother to link it and I also had not read the news. Which, believe it or not, isn’t a personal failing.
If you’re okay with much older titles, Master of Orion 2 has been my go-to 4X for 30 years. It holds up really well.
If you want something a little newer and absolutely brilliant, and you don’t mind sacrificing some 4X for some RPG, you could try Starsector: https://fractalsoftworks.com
Neither of these are particularly similar to the Total War games, though, in case that’s a deal breaker.
Eh, I still wouldn’t call it a scam. Words have meaning and scams are intentional; this team just couldn’t do what they thought they could, and made a mediocre version of what they had planned. Game development is hard. I’ve tried to get started on simple little projects in UE and Unity a couple times, and the furthest I got was a model that could run and jump on an endless procedural landscape (before the game crashed because the map got too big I mean).
So yeah, absolutely call it a bad purchase, but I don’t think it’s fair to say they were out to “scam” anyone. We got a game, and it wasn’t even truly terrible - way better than that Gollum “RPG” for example - it just didn’t live up to the hype, and better games in the genre exist like Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, PoE, etc.
I believed in Chris Roberts because of Freelancer and backed it on Kickstarter, and have watched from the shadows as the story has unfolded. I occasionally dipped my toes in to see how it was coming along, but the performance was awful on midline hardware so I put it back down and waited. Now that the turmoil at the top has come out and people are leaving, I don’t hold much hope for the future of the game.
I think the reason it gets a ton of hate is that Roberts had gone and proven that Microsoft were absolutely right to take Freelancer away from him so it could get finished. They weren’t shackling a maverick genius, they were mitigating losses from his poor leadership.
Maybe check out Starsector by https://fractalsoftworks.com. It’s written in Java so it runs on basically anything, and it’s 2d top-down but the detail on the ships is great. I love this game very much because it scratches most of the itches I was hoping for from Star Citizen.