canis_majoris

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Can’t wait for a generation or two when Bethesda does this themselves.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Huh, it’s almost like when you make the same game 12 times, force shitty DRM, and then outright disable access to content, people are not going to support your business.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Nah, people know individual dev studios, they just don’t know which major tech organization owns and publishes their titles these days.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Steam’s big picture does a lot to remediate some of the challenges of working with a controller in a desktop environment. The ROG Ally additionally has switchable modes between desktop and gamepad and it allows for mouse movement with the thumbsticks and stuff in addition to the touch screen.

It also has this app called Armory Crate SE which is basically an Asus-branded game launcher like GeForce Experience where you can fine tune settings on each game.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

I remember following the Escapist when they transitioned to YouTube, after probably longer than a decade of hosting their own stuff on their own service. I remember seeing all these shows they had spun up, but they all had exponentially less viewership than anything with Yahtzee in it. There were movie reviews which I occasionally caught and a bunch of other content that I just didn’t care for.

I tried to get into the other creators on the platform but only Yahtzee had any staying power for me. Slightly Civil War/Slightly Something Else was great too when Jack started coming in. I’ve been a fan of Jack’s since his Red Letter Media days, when he was doing Pre-Rec with Rich Evans.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

They always had alternate content, it just generally sucked.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Yeah but Bethesda has the reputation of leaving it up to the modders, even long-term. Look at the 20 releases of Skyrim; some of them have the same bugs that they did on launch, classic Bethesda weirdness resulting from using the same busted-ass engine for 5 generations of games. Those bugs have only been addressed and mitigated by the modding community, despite there being a re-release and remaster on every single console for the last three generations.

It’s not that Bethesda can’t given the opportunity, but they tend to only do so when they are unable to rely on modders, like FO76.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

I’m sure I could boot up the 360 version of Skyrim and see some great classic Bethesda bugs.

I agree that Starfield was the least buggy release in ages. I had also heard that at some point they were being directed to adapt the idTech engine which runs DOOM to become the new base for Bethesda games, but I guess that hasn’t happened.

To whit I played a few dozen hours of Starfield and generally by that point with any other Bethesda game, I’d have found some stupid bug that causes me to get annoyed and quit, but I just got bored of the game because of the repetitive nature and the confinement to fast travel for everything.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

Destiny’s onboarding for new players is literally the worst. If you don’t have a veteran guiding you into the game it’s literally impossible to pick up. You want more interest in the game, then make it easier to actually pick it up instead of flat replacing the starter content.

canis_majoris, 7 months ago

They already released it on Steam and discounted it 25% - what a fall from grace.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

Get your crypto nonsense the fuck out of here and stay on your scam of an instance.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

If you’re only surrounded by suckers who have already bought in, how are you going to get more people to scam?

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

They’re not selling washing machines, they’re just trying to convert you to a Linux-using, FOSS-compliant Marxist-Leninist.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

I like all the dad-level humor with the awful, often punny Star Trek memes. They give me life.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

Endeavour has been great with Plasma. That’s how I’ve always configured it.

I can’t wait until they push the big Wayland update with KDE; I am using Wayland with an Nvidia card and it can be a bit unpredictable.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

Cool, can WoW be part of my Gamepass sub now? Thanks.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

No, I think they’re going to continue adding massive value to the Gamepass system to keep it afloat and competitive. Maybe a WoW sub is a bit of a stretch, but basically all other games will thrive on the platform. StarCraft 2 is still the benchmark RTS for competitive play. Overwatch and Diablo are not my cups of tea but they would also make great offerings on the platform. Most of Blizzard’s core franchises outside of WoW itself are heavily MTX’d out the ass, battle passes, cosmetics, whatever - even if it’s included in the gamepass sub, the theoretical higher volume of players will likely compensate for unit sales through the aforementioned MTX.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

It’s funny that I lead with this because I had a minute to think about it and honestly I kind of just don’t care. Dragonflight did not renew my hopes for retail, although it had some neat mechanic changes. Classic will be over for me probably by the end of January, unless they announce basically Classic+ based around the WOTLK talents. I am going to get my Shadowmourne, kill Arthas on heroic, and then go play FFXIV.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

I don’t think Sony is going to give up that easily, nor is Nintendo or Valve.

Microsoft has tried, with sheer force of capital to buy out these players and couldn’t understand when they were denied. In tech you can do big mergers and acquisitions with sheer capital but Nintendo is a pride and joy crown jewel of Japanese industry, and no amount of money would allow MS to buy them.

MS’ big push for accessibility and cloud gaming makes them ultimately platform agnostic over time, because they are leveraging the cloud technology to deploy their catalogue on any machine with an internet connection and a screen.

“Classic” Microsoft, the EEE (envelop, extend, extinguish) strategy that made them assholes through the 90s and early aughts hasn’t been nearly as prevalent in the current Nadella era. More often than not MS has been forking open source projects or simply contributing to them in their own ways rather than building proprietary systems.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

This is the second article today where I saw Todd Howard talking about severely nerfing aspects of the game. Earlier this morning I read an article saying similar things about the space suit system - initially they were going to be a lot more punitive on what you can and can’t wear based on environmental conditions, so you’d need a suit for cold, a suit for toxicity, a suit for radiation, etc.

canis_majoris, 8 months ago

Yeah the hazard warnings are pretty useless now, because they’re not actually that dangerous or meaningful. I didn’t even know that it caused damage, I guess I haven’t been on a severe enough planet.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

One of the main issues with Stadia is that they didn’t even do the basics. I saw basically no marketing, and on top of that, I heard all kinds of rumors about the business model that were entirely false. They made no effort to combat the misinformation. It was never the case that you literally had to purchase the game on top of the subscription fees, but that was like the number one issue brought up in every discussion.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

I know, right? Service has been down almost an entire year.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

I stuck with Gamepass because I am a PC gamer. I toyed with PSN but the PS5 controller was not natively recognized by the client at the time I was testing it, which is dumb as fuck. Steam will pick up the controller and use their drivers for most games, but the PSN service just didn’t work with the PS5 controller natively.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

The menus are pretty fucking awful. The map is really really bad. For a game that’s like 90% based around fast travel you would think they would have a map that makes sense.

Skyrim never improved on any of these aspects even though it got re-released like 15 times. I still have to use UI addons a dozen years later. I love that Bethesda has a great, strong modding community, but it’s really really shitty that they’re constantly relied on for regular, baseline things that shouldn’t be bad.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

Skyrim needed UI mods, and to wit, still needs UI mods, despite being re-released like 15 times with limitless opportunities to improve basically anything - instead they focused on high resolution textures, which is something that the fanbase basically already makes on launch week.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

It’s better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it’s been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I’ve ever played. It’s funny because they were getting worse.

Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played on launch.

It does get better with time, but it’s inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I’m still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

The indoors Fallout map is the worst thing ever. I don’t think it’s ever once helped me out of a jam or cleared up confusion. If there are multiple levels (and there always are) it’s all just slapped together in a single plane on the map so it makes less than zero sense.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

That’s fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It’s not an excuse.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

They have a duty to moderate public-facing systems. This is a link/bookmark sharing system, so obviously bookmarks that are pointing to things that are illegal are going to be dealt with.

canis_majoris, 9 months ago

It’s fun and finished. Too bad you don’t like it but it’s a really enjoyable game for most players including myself.

canis_majoris, 10 months ago

Framework laptops are interesting and I hope eventually the modularity allows the components to go down in price. Right now I was looking at a 16 (which all sold out within 3 hours of pre-order launch) but it comes out to easily over 3k CAD for a disassembled kit, skimping on RAM and an SSD.

canis_majoris, 10 months ago

It’s a perfect digitization of D&D 5th edition - it’s like having an automatic dungeon master using the rules and regulations we’ve been playing with on paper for ages.

It has a massive plot that can vary wildly on playthroughs depending on how rolls go, just like the real version.

It’s four-player co-op with PVE in an age where cooperation is increasingly rare outside of competitive team games.

It’s a well designed, properly built, finished product that can be expanded on with DLC, rather than using them to address core gameplay issues. (looking at you Paradox)

canis_majoris, 10 months ago

Yeah because Twitter is not a real place. The actual D&D community spoke with their wallets and they said “we like a good, finished product without stupid terms of use” and all bought BG3. People who don’t even play D&D bought BS3 to play with folks who do play D&D.