I don’t use it because there’s no official Linux client, and they don’t have Linux versions of games even when they exist on other platforms. Linux is what I use, so I’d have to go out of my way to use their platform.
Why bother? Steam gives me a fantastic user experience, almost all the games EGS has (and probably more), actively invests in my platform of choice, makes innovative hardware products like the Steam Deck (which I love), and prices are very similar.
EGS gives me… some free games and holds exclusives hostage? That’s not enough to win me over. Give me a good user experience, not bribes.
If games didn’t run on Linux, I wouldn’t play games. I did that for years before Steam on Linux was a thing (well, aside from occasional Linux-native games like Minecraft and Factorio, or a game I bothered to get running on WINE). I only booted into Windows when my friends pushed on me hard enough to play something with them.
My computer is for software development first (mostly hobbies) and playing games second. You seem to have different priorities, and that’s totally cool too.
The sad part is that this sets the standard (again) that companies can market the hell out of an unfinished game, release it buggy as hell, and still make an amazing profit. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
Eh, I dunno about the rest of you, but after 2077 I feel pretty good. Tuned out Starfield and the initial craze and feel…no fomo. I wait for games like BG3 to come out of early access before playing, and only play the games in early access that are actually worth it, like Sons of The Forest, which was pretty decent even at launch (when the fun bugs are still in, and weapons have not been balanced in the slightest!)
I’m hitting the now old classics, Battlefield 1 is excellent, Inscryption is awesome, and the AA and AAA games I do play are quite polished.
If you can count on games just being shitty at launch, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll play the last of us in a few years. I played Days Gone recently and loved it. There’s enough good games these days to have a packed steam library.
It’s such a trash game mechanic because it forces realism where there is none. You have faster than light travel in your game? Why don’t you have teleporters? You have magic in your game? Why don’t you have a Bag of Holding? If you are going to impose the constraint on the player for balance or gameplay reasons then at least make it fun, have a mechanic that is interesting in some way. Maybe teleporters and bags of Holding are expensive to build or don’t get unlocked until you collect 10 flippityboos but at least reward progression and picking up objects and don’t turn every decision into agony.
RuneScape has an excellent fast travel system. In fact, it has a whole bunch of 'em, and you have to work for them; either by completing quests, or by training your skills. You can also get items to expand your inventory somewhat, but they only work for specific item types.
RuneScape did it pretty well for sure yeah I always felt like there was a good level progression for items like at level 60 in old school bronze items were just straight up trash lol
Even if they think it’s a fun mechanic, they fundamentally fucked the amount you can carry imo. Should be higher than it is by default, because I straight up don’t want to waste skill points on that.
Then they’ve fucked the amount of cargo you can have on a ship. Either make it infinite, or ridiculously high even for a small ship.
I’ve got multiple freight containers on my ship, and apparently each can only carry about the same amount as my character??
Oh don’t worry, I’ll pour the exact same scorn on people who pour money into EA’s yearly sports games, Activision’s yearly shooting games, every fucking mobile game ever, and all the nicotine stained gamblers propping up their local bookies.
But lets not pretend it’s “supporting a project” or fundraising in any way, shape or form. It’s throwing money at greedy cunts because they have an addiction problem.
And while gambling becomes ever more heavily regulated, gaming seems to avoid it. It won’t manage it forever, and $1000 pretend spaceships are pushing boundaries that will bring regulations down on the whole industry.
Haha fair, they’re absolutely trending towards a release though. I don’t think most people truly understand the scope of Dev work that’s gone into this game in the past decade.
Oh, if it’s pure “people support”, let’s remove the pledge store and just have donation button. One that doesn’t give you anything in game, but supports the project.
Star Citizen uses clever psychology and social engineering to make people spend obscene amounts of money on in-game ships. I know people who are so catches and addicted to this shit they spend their family savings on the new ships. And that is by design.
They also regularly wipe the Persistent Universe for a reason, and the reason is not this bullshit aUEC farming, but the fact that ships bought for real money do not get wiped, stimulating purchases for your very real cash.
By going to release and having equal persistence for ships bought by all means, they’ll immediately slash their profits so, so bad, and they know it. They don’t want to go release.
One of my friends was trying to talk me into playing it because I like space games. When I found out about the wipes I was no longer interested. I don’t want to put a bunch of time into a game if I’m just going to lose everything periodically.
An all-time great turnaround. Truly up there was No Man’s Sky’s resurrection from the dead. Cyberpunk 2077 is a masterpiece now, especially with Phantom Liberty.
Its crazy that they burnt through almost a billion and theyre nickle and dime’n people for ship insurance/ single player. If I gave their crowdfund a penny (and waited 12 years), I’d be demanding a free game.
Wah. Stop putting up with crunch and make something artistic for once, instead of the next annual COD w/ season pass and BR mode.
I laughed when Chris Judge said that and he’s damn right. Sales =/= good game unless you’re a suit or investor, and surprise, I don’t give a shit what someone who’s probably never played a video game thinks makes a good game (it’s not battlepasses, skinner boxes, and FOMO).
It didn’t say in the article but why the hell are people sending threats? Knowing the types of gamers that send threats it’s probably a really fucking dumb reason, isn’t it?
Out of every esports event that could face issues I did not think anyone would be crazy angry about Nintendo. Did someone get blueshelled too many times in Mario Kart? I mean, what would drive people to get intense about Nintendo?
Smash (specially Melee) has always attracted questionable people. So if it had happened there I wouldn’t be surprised… but this is for Splatoon of all things.
Specially melee? When the fallout happened, it was significantly more ultimate personalities who were confirmed problematic, mainly due to the fact that someone younger is more likely to have been playing ultimate(melees an over a 20 year old game), which would lead to a higher chance of a negative interaction.
Splatoon also has some animosity towards nintendo as they were also behind the smash scene because they know that nintendo does not ultimately care about them, as caring about them leads to how Arms fizzled out.
Nintendo games might be very family friendly, but Nintendo as a company has a well-earned negative reputation in a lot of verticals including esports and community events.
The article doesn't clarify where the threats were coming from, so it may be for different reasons. And obv it doesn't justify harassing and threatening random employees though.
Threats are obviously not justifiable and are not okay but Nintendo has been earning a lot of badwill with gamers recently with their decisions to disallow small esport events. They have also aggressively copyright struck videos in the past that realistically just gave their awesome games free advertising but that’s not okay with them, etc
They seem to make a lot of really dumb business and especially community decisions despite making some incredible games. It’s not too surprising some people would feel burned with that.
Apparently Nintendo doesn’t let small esport competitions to take place. They want to be the only ones. But at the same time that’s just as dumb a reason to send threats as what you said lol. There is never a good reason to send threats regardless
I need to preface this by saying it’s really stupid that anyone’s sending threats, but I think the reason they’re doing it is because Nintendo has made a very hard-line stance against small esport events. You arent allowed to host events without their permission
Nintendo is my favorite gaming company, but man, their IP lawyers are absolutely vicious. Granted they’re also in Japan, the poster boy for a corporate-owned country (I lived there several years, no joke, if you think big corps run the US you ain’t seen nothing yet) which makes American IP law look like Chinese IP law, but even for a Japanese company, they’re brutal. What I find rather ironic about it is that a measure they took to protect their image and that of their brands from controversy over bad gamer behavior, led to bad gamer behavior directed at them. But either way, to these idiots sending threats, it’s a classic instance of “this is why we can’t have nice things”, ruining even the fun we were allowed to have for everyone and probably making it even less likely that Nintendo will reverse their policy.
Gotcha. I can see why people are upset. But threats? I guess I was right in thinking it was a dumb reason. Nintendo can go fuck themselves for sure. But at the same time if you are the type of person to send threats over trivial bullshit you are still a garbage human.
Remember when people started sending death threats to the CDPR over the Cyberpunk delays? People had been spending way too long sucking Witcher 3’s dick so they automatically though CP2077 was gonna be the next game of the decade.
Threats are never justified, but I do see why they did it. “If we cant do it, you cant either” is a pretty common mentality, and this is a surefire way to completely shut down the official events.
The worst bit is now, if nintendo caves at all and pulls back their draconian behavior, these people will count it as a victory achieved via threats and likely encourage their use elsewhere.
Depending on your definition of “unofficial”, nothing. But at some point you need to make media to tell people about your tournament, or you want to stream the tournament, and doing either of those without using Nintendo’s copyrighted material/trademarks is impossible.
Developer feedback is usually about answering questions that the players have, or finding bugs that were missed in QA. What Bethesda is doing is quite a bit more ridiculous.
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
To anyone who might care, you can identify an apple as a low-quality orange, but that doesn’t also mean the apple is a low-quality apple; they’re optimized to different ends. That is, I think, the point of the expression.
But, if we’re trying to evaluate them on something like taste, which is entirely subjective, yeah, I’m comparing those shits. And, I’m going oranges all the way.
You shouldn’t compare apples and oranges because they are both great but for different reasons and purposes. It isn’t anti-intellectual to recognize that apples are way better for pies than oranges are but if you want some amazing juice and don’t want to go through a whole process to make it good; oranges are the way to go.
This and the many other examples I didn’t want to fill this page with are the reason why it’s a saying. It’s much faster than prefacing what exactly said apples and oranges are going to be used for before giving a real answer and I personally feel it shouldn’t at all be taken literally.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc…)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
And space travel isnt actually a fun adventure, but the point of a video game is to romanticize the concepts. Not make them as boring and realistic as possible
I agree. Unless that’s the whole point of the game you are making, and then it’s just the nature of the game. Flight Sim is one of my friend’s favorite games, but not so for me. At least they aren’t telling people that they are wrong about it being boring because it’s realistic and realism is better or some crap.
There is, in fact, a very heated debate on whether or not simulators that stay true to form are actually games. With the argument being, they are either toys or simulators.
“I had fun playing with it” isnt exclusive to games, as a ball is not a game but I would gladly throw it against a wall for hours by myself with some music.
But lots of people would likely shit on an attempt to rebrand those things as “video toys” when the distinction is largely only relevant to people studying design, so the heated debate is mostly between academics and pedants.
There’s lots of actual stuff in interplanetary space that you can pull on for inspiration on how to make an interesting game.
You can have counters with shady trader types that are only in the vast gulf between the systems, there could be rogue planets with billion year old abandoned cities to explore filled with automated defences for you to fight and interesting loot at the end. Distant ancient asteroids that contain the seeds of the first life in the universe that when you interact with temporarily give you status change that you can only get from asteroids and temporarily gives you super strength or something, allowing you to complete missions in a way you otherwise would not necessarily have done.
The way these kind of side quests are supposed to work is the player is plodding along trying to get from point A to point B and on the way they get sidetracked by this side quest (the clue is in the name Bethesda). Maybe it changes their priorities or how they’re going to tackle and upcoming mission. Side quests are not supposed to be independent standalone things, they’re supposed to integrate with the main story. They’re not supposed to be something you find easily there’s supposed to be something you come across on your own as you’re exploring the environment, but you can only do that if the developers bothered to provided environment for you to explore. If they just teleport you to your destination then there’s no opportunity for this kind of emergent gameplay.
Loads of stuff you can put between the star systems.
That’s a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
Yeah it’s quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they’re realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they’ve been working on the greatest game ever made and when told “no you haven’t” they’re responding by saying “you just don’t get our vision”.
It’s an ok game. I’m actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it’s been 12 years and we’ve had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
Funny thing is, they don’t care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price… they simply don’t care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
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