I don’t want to let them off lightly for their journalistic quality – lots of their fans genuinely believe they know their shit and they don’t live up to that – but the fact they sold that prototype is more shocking to me.
Even if they’d get a million bucks for it and donated twice as much to charity, that is just not a thing you can do.
It’s not their property. Why are they auctioning that to begin with?
When auctioning, you need to tell people what they’re buying. Surely, at that point, you’d realize it’s a prototype.
That’s just a massive violation of journalistic integrity. That prototype may have cost £XXXX to produce, but if it falls into the hands of a competitor, the financial damage is significantly higher. Why would any hardware manufacturer send LTT exclusive hardware previews after this?
Yeah, lot of people really do trust LTT. Became apparent to me when prior to this event I came across a comment on lemmy talking about how LTT sponsored segments are ones they trust to not recommend crap. I had thought the default approach was to not trust sponsored segments regardless of who, what, or where it is from.
So some people dismissing this saying LTT is just entertainment to them doesn’t mean everyone sees it as entertainment, but a reliable source of recommendations and news.
The whole 'entertainment' angle is so ironic when considering what LMG is trying to become and how much money they are spending on that plan. They want to be seen as experts with objective, reliable data, but can't afford $500 of employee time to test things properly?!
Agree. As a casual viewer, I find LMG enjoyable as entertainment, but you can tell they’re playing it fast and loose. I’ve never had an inclination to rely on their reviews or opinions, there’s already so many better sources for that.
Holy shit what a brutal read. If half of it is true (and it has every chance to be, as it is sadly “the usual fare” of male work toxicity and general ego trip), this company is a cesspool. Fuck.
Do not buy a "gaming chair". They're a scam meant to take money from suckers. Whatever your budget is, you can find an ergonomic actual office chair meant for sitting that will vastly outperform a "gaming chair" in every conceivable metric that's important to a chair
I've used ergonomic chairs before that absolutely destroyed my back. I think it comes down to finding a good brand and a high quality product, regardless of the style of chair.
putting aside the ethics of DRM in general (ew) and that this developer has already made a fortune on a mod virtually unequaled... my biggest problem with this kind of thing is that bugs happen. "mines" implies that the goal will be to do something malicious to pirates. so what happens when there's a bug in the detection code, or in the auth server, or when you didn't test it on some specific quirky hardware-software combo, or when a cosmic ray strikes the RAM stick and flips the wrong bit?
a paying customer gets fucked -- or a lot of them do. all for the petty greed of someone who can't envision the obvious fact that the actual pirates will just fuzz your bomb logic and patch it out within two days.
As a formerly hardcore, now infrequent pirate, I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I’ve even pirated ANSYS at one point because the cracked version was a lot more reliable than the version I had for free, due to shoddy DRM (FlexLM, what a garbage licence management).
Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur's Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn't close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it's a notable part.
Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn't trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn... it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly "modern" games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It's clearly just a matter of "want".
I feel like I've just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald's in a roadside casino, and I've just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.
I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch "games" like this ever again.
Certainly all of Overwatch 2's issues were known and well documented before Baldur's Gate 3's release, I think people have just put two and two together (or more aptly, put the two next to each other for comparison).
You are in a similar position (it sounds like) to where I was a short time ago.I was so fed up with the state of things on the computer/console/handheld front that I just kind of did not want to play anything anymore. Two things, and adjusting my expectations, really helped:
Game Pass - I’ve had it forever, but now it is more important, since I’m not buying new games as much anymore. It’s a small monthly fee, and I can frequently be surprised by the quality of some smaller indie games.
RetroAchievements - This is my current “thing”, and hopefully it will be for a long time to come. You use an emulator that has support for RetroAchievements (the biggest one being RetroArch) and the correct ROM file, and you can earn achievements in thousands of old games, from the earliest days of mass-market computing and consoles (magnavox, intellivision, apple ii, fairchild, amstrad cpc, etc.), through all 8 and 16 bit consoles, and up to Ps1/2/PSP/N64/3DO/Dreamcast, with Gamecube, Vita, or PS3 likely to be the next “big” console release (probably Gamecube). Revisit your favorites from years past and play them in new ways to get all of the achievements, or try out games you never had (or systems you never had) for the first time. Biggest criticism is that they have a tendency of being “too hard”, but you can either just pick games that don’t have ridiculously hard achievements, or just not go for 100%.
I will absolutely be buying Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.
I wish more people realized the same and stopped buying shitty games, while rewarding the good ones.
I grew up during the “old times”, I remember how it was so I’m quite wary of new games, but I think a lot of gamers are much younger than me and when shitty predatory practices is all you know, it’s probably difficult to believe something different can exist.
I didn’t want to buy BG3 at first because I probably won’t be able to play it, no doubt it’s a masterpiece but I can’t stand isometric view, I don’t like turn-based combat and click-to-move, but when I saw how AAA devs reacted to Larian integrity, I bought it anyway and I will at least try, hoping someone will develop a mod to make controls more “bearable” for players like me.
Even if they don’t, I firmly believe it’s money well spent, AAA devs are still attacking Larian for petty reasons, it means what they’re doing is extremely good for the players, they deserve to be supported by all means, let the current “AAA practices” rot.
EDIT: in case someone else is interested, I found modders did it! Hope they work on Linux:
using a controller with BG3 actually feels really good. you can also adjust the zoom so you are more in a third person view as opposed to isometric (nearly over the shoulder camera). you can also play the game real-time with pause, which may or may not help push you along as you say you don't necessarily jive with turn-based.
i hope these things help you get into BG3. i personally LOVE isometric view and turn-based tactics but even if these things don't appeal to you, the game itself is such a breath of fresh air that i do not see myself putting it down for a long, long time.
While mod authors are free to charge money for their mods, including DRM in a mod for a game that doesn’t have DRM (beyond basic steam account check) is kinda messed up. Adding deliberate bugs to mess with pirates is even more messed up. Why waste time making your product worst with drm and intentional bugs just to piss pirates who would never buy your product in the first place anyway?
It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.
Ok now this is sad, but it made me burst out laughing. This is an org that allows actual gambling with actual money on actual gambling machines in a sports game rated 3+, while having a cards minigame makes a game 17+ otherwise. These guys want to make sure a person is old enough to… Do what, exactly? It’s titties, isn’t it? They always only go after the titties.
"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”
Justice Stephen Breyer*, somehow arguing the opposite of what you’d think this paragraph means.
A lot of people just can't cope with the completely normal interest in sex that starts at puberty, and they want to bend the world backwards to pretend that this is a switch that flips on people's heads exactly at 18. I get that it's a complicated matter to handle, but it's also a fact of life.
There are right and wrong ways to protect kids and teens, but banning tits is just a display to appease parents who don't really want to think about it. If they did care about their well-being they'd focus on being more watchful towards creeps in online platforms rather than policing raunchy fictional content and convincing themselves teens aren't figuring out how to get it anyway, as they always have.
Meanwhile gambling for children makes a lot of money, so why would they care about the psychological issues that it causes on developing brains.
Microsoft isn’t going to revive anything. I don’t understand how people fill think that Microsoft will improve things when they have such a poor track record for their current studios.
They brought back battletoads so never say never. They definitely need to unfuck whatever is going on in their studios management wise though. Too many duds and games stick in development hell
Hehe, 9 year old me teaching myself Turbo Pascal from library books in an effort to learn how to make my own computer games. I was shamelessly ripping off Battletoads with my own game called "Body Building Frogs"
I think diminishing returns make 240Hz not worth it for the average competitive player. There are 2 exceptions:
You’re very competitive
You’ve got the money to spend
Here’s one way to look at it 60Hz is 1 refresh every 17 milliseconds. At 165Hz it’s every 6ms and at 240Hz it’s every 4ms. So from that perspective whatever premium you’re paying is to have the opponent’s head appear on the screen 2ms faster (also impacted by other hardware induced delays). For context, the average person’s response time to visual stimulus is about 250ms.
It’s definitely nice to have and I haven’t gone above 165Hz myself as a disclaimer but you will need to consistently hit 240 FPS in games to make use of the extra refresh rate and that requires a beefy CPU and/or GPU depending on the game. Especially if you want your 1% lows (FPS dips) to stay above 240 as well.
To my eyes, the main benefit of a higher refresh rate for fast paced games is the smoothness of motion (at least CSGO which is what I play). If I can track an enemy’s head then I’m good and I don’t think you need 240Hz for that.
It's hard not to empathize and immediately jump for pitchforks but... does she have any proof of this, or other people that can confirm any of these? From what I've seen all we have is her word.
I mean, remember few years ago when the internet collectively descended on Mick Gordon or Chris Avellone? And then only after years it came to light that they didn't actually do anything wrong and were falsely thrown under the bus by other people or companies? Or that thing with Bayonetta's VA and everyone coming to her aid even though in the end she was the one outright lying about the whole situation? Or the Disco Elysium situation, or probably dozens of other internet dramas fueled by emotion? I think we should collectively wait for something more than one person badmouthing on the internet before we jump to conclusions.
Listen, I’m not at all saying she’s lying, but I do not know her and people do shit for inexplicable reasons all the time.
She is getting a lot of attention, something I’m sure many people would not enjoy, but some of that is definitely being driven to her YT channel, so the whole “nothing to gain” position isn’t really true.
This is an important point. We're all pissed at LTT right now so are eager to jump on any story that supports that narrative. I'm not saying I don't believe Madison (what she says pretty much lines up with what I would expect). But before we convict Linus in the court of public opinion, we should allow him to argue in his defense.
PCGaming
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.