Regarding your point on not being able to be matched up against blocked players:
This is not healthy for a game with matchmaking to allow players direct control over its matching system like this. In a PvP game this would especially be a problem, but it has problems in PvE games as well. In this situation, meta players would just block other non-meta players, effectively lowering the matching pool to two different queues in a single large pool. In this scenario, it would be more efficient for the matchmaking system to just have two separated queues, which brings me to the next point.
I would argue the opposite. Vermintide 2 employs this exact thing and it’s been working pretty well - it actually does punish people who get blocked a lot by other people, and if you’re being blocked by a ton of people, there’s probably more than just “skill issue” and “you’re not running meta” going on. You do get sweaty people who block non-sweaty people, yeah, but it’s not hampering the community of the game in the slightest - and that game is waaaaaay smaller in size than something like Helldivers where you can get blocked by a ton of people and still play with other people due to the sheer size of the playerbase.
Unfortunately, a lot of our government is crooked as hell and Trump was basically able to put people that align with him into certain positions, such as two of the supreme justices that oversee very high profile cases such as the one where Trump argued presidents should have immunity from crimes done during presidency.
Then you compound that with the actual literal fascist party that is the Republican party who only care about lining their pockets with money and being ok with corporations running things, and you get the shitshow that is the US today where citizens will actually support a fascist insurrectionist who clearly wants to align himself more with Russia and potentially even China,and says things such as “I will be a dictator for one day” and “the US should pull out of NATO”.
I fear for this country and genuinely am glad I don’t live in the mainland USA - and I wouldn’t be too opposed to having my state go back to being a British Territory if Trump gets elected again.
Donald Trump continues to have a low favorability score among Americans, new polling shows, despite being the likely Republican nominee after winning the lion’s share of primaries and seeing off his only remaining rival....
I’ve been saying this more and more, but ever since 2016, the system has gone away from “vote for who you support” and more towards “vote against what you don’t support” for the presidential elections. We have somehow managed to have a good chunk of the US view these actually really important political processes as nothing more than blind fanaticism for “their team” - and that goes for both Team D and Team R.
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
Gun with bullets, then set out to change history by shooting 4 kings or something with a bullet. Then I’ll save the last bullet as a very last resort for anything.
Oh sick, does that mean we can sue Elongated Muskrat for the exact same thing? Pretty sure he abandoned “benefiting humanity” goal as well with SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal (formerly X.com), and Twitter.
iirc these are the guys working on the Knights of the Old Republic remake, right? Good news for that project if that’s the case, and good news for Saber in general!
the harm caused by this software was “manifest and irreparable.”
Except it’s arguably not, because it’s not like the 1 million copies of the game was stolen and could not be sold anymore. The game is still available for sale, and it is still making them money - all people did was pirate a single copy of the game 1 million times.
Also, if they sold 20.8 million units, and assuming every single instance of pirating was done by people who did not buy the game (read: lots of people bought a legal copy and “pirated” it anyways for better performance on Yuzu), they lost out on 5% revenue as of this time of writing.
Very sad Nintendo couldn’t sell another $60 million worth of games /s
Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”
Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.
Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.
Hot Take(?): Nintendo should stop making consoles and just allow their games on Steam since the Steam Deck is basically what the Switch wishes it could be
Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.
TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.
Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.
This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?
Funnily enough, what you said is pretty close to what happened in canon. The Emperor at the time (I forget who it was, probably Tiber Spetim) had a legitimate methaphysically-powered Gundam/EVA unit and used it to basically terraform the jungles of Cyrodill into what we see in Oblivion
So he basically modded Cyrodill with the power of Numidium.
Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.
So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.
Last time I’ll respond to you since it seems you’re a Bethesda fanboy - or at least a very ardent defender.
I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.
Then why did Beth go out of their way to include mod support for consoles for Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as announce mod support for console versions of Starfield? Plus people were clamoring for mods on console versions of their games even going back as far as Morrowind - but their games back then were more complete, so you are correct in that more people were okay with not having mods because at least the games were decent enough.
Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.
During 2006? Yeah, you’re correct - but interesting you’re bringing up Oblivion instead of Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even Starfield. Y’know, the games that have been pretty devoid of any worthwhile vanilla content.
My girlfriend has never really gamed. But she’s now forced to move less than she would like to (health problem) and she’s getting bored. I was thinking of introducing her to a game or two that we could play together. She’s not the real action game type, and seeing as she has no experience with controller/mouse and keyboard...
Adding to the cliche list, Animal Crossing is another game to consider since it’s very chill and can be cozy. Has collections she can work on filling out, she can make a dope island, and make her house into a perfect living space.
Another recommendation that might sound counter-intuitive but could work is Vermintide 2. It’s an action game that does have mechanical depth to it for the higher difficulties, but the game is very forgiving on the two easiest difficulties where you can just use whatever is fun and do decently well. The melee combat is very satisfying even when just going unga bunga, and it goes on sale frequently for like $5, so you both could pick up copies and have fun in a coop game where you’re bashing the heads of ratmen in with ease.
I love how everybody was all “NEVER GIVE ANY INFO ONLINE” until corporations realized you could make bonkers money, then it very quickly shifted to “GIVE ALL YOUR INFO ONLINE”
Mostly because it has the best character: a wholesome pro wrestler who helps kids and orphanages. Also only speaks in jaguar and always has his jaguar mask on.
Action-RPG colossus Elden Ring is reportedly getting a free-to-play mobile adaptation with in-app purchases, which takes inspiration from miHoYo’s Genshin Impact. It’s being published by Tencent, who apparently acquired the licensing rights to Elden Ring back in 2022 and put a few dozen people to work on a prototype, even as...
LG should actually be LN - you’re sitting in the intended and expected position of the chair, following the rules of the chair design to a T. LG would probably be the same position but scooched to one side of the chair so another person could sit, and LE should actually be the same position as well but with a manspread.
I hope not, it’s two different systems and I personally prefer VT’s system.
Vermintide is literally “click button”, but the intricacies come from the weapon itself; what is the combo order for light and heavy attacks, when can you weave certain attacks into other attacks (e.g. doing Light 1 -> Heavy 2 -> Block Attack -> repeat for dealing with heavy armor units with a halberd vs Heavy 1 -> Light 2 -> Block Cancel -> repeat for hordes), the properties of each weapon (how much stagger does it cause? Can it cleave through lots of enemies? Does it do more armor damage or is it better for non-armor enemies?), how much can you block vs dodge attacks with each weapon… it’s more akin to something like a first-person Dark Souls or Dynasty Warriors.
Mount and Blade, on the other hand, doesn’t really have an in-depth combo system with weapons being more or less the same and I just turn up the sensitivity so I can flick the camera to do extra damage ez pz. Not really engaging imo.
If a game copies what another game does but does it better and/or gives it own spin on things (which PalWorld arguably does, considering that you can have your Pokemon Pals fight with machine weaponry and also enslave capture people as Pals), I don’t see how that can be a bad thing. Otherwise, people should be up in arms about every roguelike Metroidvania or Soulslike game.
It’s neat how they thought of so many different scenarios. You don’t get any other gods mentioned in paladin dialogues as far as I can tell. I played a PC of Tiefling, Drow, and Half-orc paladins so far and none of those had any “Paladin of” options to choose. SH just happened to be my face this run and I guess if you...
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....
I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.
Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.
This question popped into my head when I was playing Void Stranger. I just got done with the game and will probably never play it again despite not finishing it. The game is genuinely amazing but it just gets so demanding as you progress through it. I ended up watching the second half of the game on YouTube....
XCOM: Enemy Within. I haven’t beaten it in general (got really close on Normal), but I’ve been specifically trying to clear Classic since that’s the mode where the game is mostly fair for both the player and the AI; the AI literally stops pulling punches and the game stops skewing RNG in the player’s favor.
It’s the dragon I’ve been chasing for over a decade; I’ll squadwipe on a mission that fucks up my entire run, ragequit, and not touch it again for a year or three, then go “how come I never beat it?” and start the vicious cycle again. BUT GODDAMMIT, IT’S SO FUCKING FUN TO PLAY (except for Newfoundland, all my homies hate Newfoundland).
This is only vanilla btw, don’t even get me started on my Long War “attempts” (read: repeated wipes within the first couple of months).
EDIT: more gooder english and PTSD flashbacks of Newfoundland mission.
The core of it isn’t YouTube drama as the dude is actually committing a crime I believe, but a lot of the comments surrounding it is 1000% YouTube drama - same with the SSSniperwolf and JacksFilms stuff with one YouTuber stalking and doxxing the other on their Instagram and getting away basically scot-free because YouTube prefers one over the other and the fans of the perpetrator said they were 100% justified in stalking and revealing the other YouTuber’s home address.
Because A) you have to research the charities as a lot of them give very little (or sometimes don’t, in this case) to the actual cause they are championing, and 2) sometimes people are more likely to donate to a face they know rather than an organization.
iirc Crit1kal used to donate practically all of his YouTube earnings to charity waaaaaay back in the day with pics of the monies being given. No idea if he does it now still, but I’m confident he would show the receipts if it was in question.
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
But gamers don’t actually need to understand game design or why a certain choice was made.
I said this in another thread: if it’s a shit design, it’s a shit design. Knowing why the shit design was made does not suddenly make it not shit. In fact, I do not care to know why you made that decision in the first place - if it’s bad, then just own up to it and either try to fix the issue or actually resolve to do better next time.
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
Off-topic, but when I mentioned this in a different thread, an actual answer I got is basically the fediverse is really similar to reddit - how can the culture be any different?
Anyways, if the fediverse starts to become Reddit 2.0 I think it would be high time to go.
Helldivers 2 director turns to community for advice on how to get meta-enthusiasts to stop kicking other players (www.gamesradar.com)
Trump's plan to end the Ukraine war is to totally cut off funding, says Putin's closest EU ally (www.businessinsider.com)
Trump “will not give a penny” more to Ukraine if he becomes president, Hungary’s prime minister said....
Donald Trump stung as new poll shows how unpopular he is (www.newsweek.com)
Donald Trump continues to have a low favorability score among Americans, new polling shows, despite being the likely Republican nominee after winning the lion’s share of primaries and seeing off his only remaining rival....
"I'm hit!" (lemmy.zip)
Unmoderated and now extremely delayed federation - is it time to move? (kbin.social)
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
Choose your items (lemmy.zip)
Elon Musk sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming betrayal of its goal to benefit humanity (apnews.com)
Report: Saber Interactive buys itself back from Embracer in $500m deal (www.gamesindustry.biz)
From Bloomberg (via archive.ph): archive.ph/63F4L
Tears Of The Kingdom Was Pirated 1 Million Times, Nintendo Claims In Lawsuit (kotaku.com)
Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu' (www.pcgamer.com)
Nintendo says Yuzu played a large role in encouraging piracy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Pokémon Legends Z-A - Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com)
‘Switch 2’ is targeting March 2025 and was delayed to avoid shortages, new report claims (www.videogameschronicle.com)
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com)
What games do you recommend for my girlfriend?
My girlfriend has never really gamed. But she’s now forced to move less than she would like to (health problem) and she’s getting bored. I was thinking of introducing her to a game or two that we could play together. She’s not the real action game type, and seeing as she has no experience with controller/mouse and keyboard...
Conservative MP Says He Trusts Porn Companies Won’t Leak Digital IDs of Canadians Who Visit Porn Websites (pressprogress.ca)
You can also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity! (lemmy.world)
In case you don’t believe me about the deductions…
Tekken 8 players divided as devs add “Tekken Shop” with microtransactions (www.dexerto.com)
I guess this is probably going to be the new shitty norm with bait and switch for reviews then nickel and dime afterwards.
For my head canon, it doesn't (sopuli.xyz)
Skull And Bones Open Beta Review: It’s Meh, Matey (kotaku.com)
Street Fighter Vs Mortal Kombat
Which of the two fighting franchises do you prefer most? I preferred SF likely because I liked the roster of characters from dhalsim to blanka....
Sooooo milk first (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Frustrations with Cities Skylines 2 are starting to boil over among city builder fans and content creators alike: "It's insulting to have a game release that way" (www.gamesradar.com)
Elden Ring is getting a free-to-play mobile version with in-app purchases (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Action-RPG colossus Elden Ring is reportedly getting a free-to-play mobile adaptation with in-app purchases, which takes inspiration from miHoYo’s Genshin Impact. It’s being published by Tencent, who apparently acquired the licensing rights to Elden Ring back in 2022 and put a few dozen people to work on a prototype, even as...
Hmmm... (sh.itjust.works)
Lawful Neutral (lemm.ee)
deleted_by_moderator
Here Are All the Game Industry CEOs Who Took a Pay Cut to Prevent Layoffs (hard-drive.net)
Obsidian's next big RPG Avowed is looking to Vermintide's 'masterclass in having a sense of hitting and impact' to make its first-person sword-swinging feel weighty (www.pcgamer.com)
Palworld Devs Says They Have Received Death Threats Amid Pokémon 'Rip-Off' Claims (www.ign.com)
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is making the utterly bizarre decision to lock New Game+ behind a $15 upgrade (www.pcgamer.com)
If you respec Shadowheart as a Paladin you get a few extra dialogue options specific to [Paladin of Shar] (lemmy.world)
It’s neat how they thought of so many different scenarios. You don’t get any other gods mentioned in paladin dialogues as far as I can tell. I played a PC of Tiefling, Drow, and Half-orc paladins so far and none of those had any “Paladin of” options to choose. SH just happened to be my face this run and I guess if you...
GTA 6 and Alan Wake parent companies are locked in a trademark dispute over the letter ‘R’ (www.gamesradar.com)
The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....
What's your favorite game that you will NEVER finish?
This question popped into my head when I was playing Void Stranger. I just got done with the game and will probably never play it again despite not finishing it. The game is genuinely amazing but it just gets so demanding as you progress through it. I ended up watching the second half of the game on YouTube....
Not noice (sh.itjust.works)
Sea Of Stars Developers To Release Patch That Removes The Completionist (noisypixel.net)
Hideo Kojima: Death Stranding, our first child (original IP) after the establishment of KJP, has over 16 million users worldwide 4 years after its launch (as of December 16, 2023). Thank You. (twitter.com)
Nitter link: nitter.net/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/…/1735820385340584237...
Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com)
apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...
'There's almost nobody left': CEO of Baldur's Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs (www.pcgamer.com)
Suffering and success.