Hey look it’s Soldat again.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jun 30, 2020, 11:53:
Hrm, Epic isn't making enough billions from Fortnite BR, to fund the Save the World mode? I was kinda interested in coop StW ... a few years ago now I guess, it'll probably be a hard sell to the coop crew to even bother trying it now. I'm sure Epic won't miss a couple sells from my group though, they will probably make hundreds of millions just from existing Fortnite players trying Save the World mode.

The main issue is STW constantly hands out V-bucks. If they remove that to let it be F2P, people who like that system will be furious.
V-bucks are entirely where Fortnite makes its money. Some Battle Royale players have figured out that if they purchase STW and play the handful of daily missions, they can get a surprising number of V-bucks for their BR cosmetics.

STW is pretty fun, but the story is done like a radio play. There aren’t cutscenes, just audio that plays when you do whatever objective you have. Some can overlap so you have multiple stories going on at the same time, which can be confusing to listen to, especially if they involve the same characters. The story is extremely funny, with great voicework, but again...no cutscenes. When playing co-op this means you’ll want to play without headsets or you’ll miss out on the great comedy.

Unfortunately the long term entertainment focuses too heavily on min/making weapons and traps, and not enough on adding new twists to combat. Due to incessant bots, the open chat has been disabled, making it VERY hard to complete the Storm Shield Defense missions that are required for parts of the progress. I’ve never finished the ones in the final zone because there’s no simple way to get three other high level players to join, and you DO need the help.

I do find it amusing that BoP is claiming the demise of something that has only been around for 4 years and is seeing only INCREASED interest. He claims he has no interest in a technology that isn’t mainstream...
While simultaneously being INSANELY defensive of Linux, an operating system that hasn’t made a dent in mainstream consciousness for three decades.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 28, 2020, 22:32:

Orogogus wrote on Jun 28, 2020, 22:12:
Why is the bar set so low? It seems to me that most of the big publishers have games with minimum specifications higher than "$600 Walmart laptop with integrated graphics."

As RedEye correctly attributed, hyperbole. The point is that the barrier to entry needs to be low enough for mass adoption. It needs to be plug and go.

To hit mass adoption, yes. To hit a level where it will at least continue to expand, no. It needs more AAA-quality games, which supposedly Valve has two more of in the works, and it absolutely needs more places for people to try it out. Corona has made that second part more difficult, but it’s a temporary issue.
As long as people are buying the hardware, developers will make games for it. The ones with rock-solid designs make money, the ones that never made it past the “imma dink around with VR” stage...don’t. Same rules apply to pancake titles.
Yes, it’s expensive. It’s not so much “need a top end computer” anymore, and later this year the new cards will push the bar to entry lower. Once a truly next-gen VR kit design comes out, original VR kits will be cheap to pick up on eBay.
I don’t think VR will replace pancake gaming. I absolutely play 90% on my monitor. VR is neat, very different, but just not suited to every game type. I’ve said it before, VR is the motorcycle of gaming. It’s not required, and most people still need a car (monitor) anyway most of the time, but oh boy is it fun when you use it. It’s a mini-luxury item that not everyone will be able to afford but enough people are into it to make it a sustainable business.

And unlike a motorcycle, you won’t die horrifically if someone else isn’t paying attention. Unless, as BoP has posited, you fall out a window.

fakespyder wrote on Jun 28, 2020, 17:15:
gtx1060 6gig that the marketing says is "VR ready". I have my doubts it can push the fps necessary, especially for more recent games.

I have a 1080, running on an OG Vive with Index controllers. The games that run badly, run badly on ANYTHING because they’re usually made by small teams who aren’t fluent enough in the engine they use to really optimize, especially for a locked 90 FPS.

Games like HL:Alyx are proof that it CAN be done, it's just probably out of reach for a lot of small teams.

This comment was edited on Jun 28, 2020, 19:36.

Gib007 wrote on Jun 28, 2020, 16:41:
Until third-party sellers sell the Valve Index VR kit, I won't be allowed to have it. Gibraltar will never be on the list of countries Valve ship to. Even Google still doesn't allow us to have Merchant accounts on their Play Store. We're like in the top 5 GDP per capita in the world.

Huh, that's odd. You'd think MORE companies would want to ship there if people are generally better off.

Cutter wrote on Jun 27, 2020, 16:00:

theglaze wrote on Jun 27, 2020, 15:54:
Just don't take away my car liveries of scantily clad hentai babes

Oh no. That's certainly next on the chopping block. There isn't anything the moonbats won't be coming after if anyone is offended in even the slightest amount. Big Brother is coming to be sure. Another year or two they'll be opening the "re-education" centers. Doubleplus good, comrade.

The confederate flag is a symbol of people who thought slavery was a-ok and were willing to go to war over it. There's a pretty big gap between that and some cartoon boobs.

This is like...the third tank arena combat game in the last few months. Tiny Tanks appears to allow more players, but looks less polished. This one looks pretty solid. For only a couple bucks, I may pick it up.

wtf_man wrote on Jun 24, 2020, 19:04:

Resolution Games, the leading VR and AR game studio behind Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs, Bait!, Acron: Attack of the Squirrels and more

Since he is joining that... I guess we can put Mr. Hall in the category of "washed up", along with the likes of Richard Garriott, Warren Spector, D.W. Bradley, etc. etc.

Ah yes, since he’s joining a company making well-reviewed titles, he’s clearly washed up.

Xero wrote on Jun 21, 2020, 14:55:
Picked up Titanfalls 2 despite not really caring much about the original and barely playing it. The reviews claim for it to be one of the greatest FPS ever so I said, 10 bucks, why not? So far, pretty good. The bullet impact, weight of the guns, and sound effects are real good. Level design has been pretty good so far but I can't help but feel it's too static. There are like no environmental interactions or physics whatsoever. Still, it's got my attention so far so we'll see how it goes.

Oh, the later levels get very interesting. One in particular is a huge standout, but to avoid story spoilers I’ll just let you discover it.

I hope bigger publishers are watching this list, seeing the Index consistently on it. Maybe we'll get some good high-end games on Steam, instead of Facebook buying them all up. Happy to see the new Star Wars game is fully VR capable. Honestly, if your game takes place 99% in a cockpit, it should have VR support. It's the easiest VR conversion possible.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 20, 2020, 21:16:

You...download an installer? For what?

I downloaded a server installer for a game I intended to run a dedicated server for. It's been a couple years so I honestly don't recall what game. I'd installed Linux solely for this purpose. Again, due to the time gap, I'm unsure what version, but it was a fairly popular one.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 20, 2020, 21:16:
Did you check the repos for your distro first to see if the package you wanted was there? Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie...all the major DEs have user friendly package managers that you install software from.

I found nothing of the sort. I pulled the file directly from the game maker's website.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 20, 2020, 21:16:
In fact it is literally the second thing you see on a fresh install in all the major distros, the first being your user creation.

Nothing of the sort greeted me. I made my user and was dropped onto a desktop with a browser. Again, AS MUCH AS I RECALL.

Here's the thing: it was a shit user experience. Maybe Linux has improved in the user interface department since then, but try my experience out and then tell me if you'd ever, EVER give it another chance:

Quake 3 is released simultaneously for Linux and Windows. What a momentous occasion, and the world was watching to see how it went. Well, I decided to try linux at that point. That was in 1999. It was a trainwreck, and online help was pretty much nonexistent. It was a huge waste of time, and when I finally got the game to run, it ran like garbage compared to the Windows version. What a colossal waste of time that was.

Go another decade, and a game came out that only had a Linux distribution for the dedicated server, despite the game being Windows based. My completely shit experience described at the top happened.

Most recently, I used the Raspberrian version or whatever on my Pi to get Pihole going, which took way too long to configure, and then it decided the password I'd set up wasn't REALLY the password, and I was locked out. Good times yet again, haven't bothered to reinstall the whole thing again.

Every time I've tried Linux, it's been nothing but frustration. I will admit, ZERO of those times was I installing Linux for anything other than a singular purpose, and "checking out a new OS" wasn't that purpose. Every issue wasn't seen as a learning experience, it was seen as an unnecessary roadblock to my goal. Each miserable experience only cemented my opinion that the OS was designed by people who didn't REALLY want their elitist OS to become mainstream. Has that changed? Maybe. How many times do YOU try something that blatantly wasted your time? I'm not really willing to give Linux another shot until there's something that I want VERY badly that only it does. And that that point I'll want to install the OS and beeline for that specific thing, and I'll bet I'll be held up by things hidden behind command lines yet again.

Meh, the linux environments I've tried have been a dumpster fire in terms of user functionality. Here's this file you've downloaded, an installer. It even has a pair of gears as the icon. Double-click it, and....well, nothing happens.

10 minutes later, I've surmised that I have to open a command prompt and execute an embarrassingly long (embarrassing for Linux) string of bullshit to start the installer. How would anyone, ever, guess that? Why do I need to have a goddamn user manual to LAUNCH A FUCKING ICON?

"BUhT ItS MoRe SecUrE n StAbLe!"
Sure is, because it's been designed by people who ONLY care about those things, and completely gloss over that it's about as comfortable as a bed of nails. Which is fine for people who like to feel exclusive. But it'll never, EVER make it to mainstream when you have to use a command prompt to accomplish small, basic tasks. So, fuck you, Linux. Maybe I'll give it YET ANOTHER shot in another 10 years, when I expect they still haven't learned what a goddamn acceptable user interface is.

Cutter wrote on Jun 20, 2020, 16:24:
So Tasi, Forbes, and Metacritic are all pro-censorship? They're consumers expressing their displeasure with a product. They have every right to do that regardless of the reasons behind it. It's not like those other end aren't doing the opposite and giving it a 10/10. What's the point of a critic website if you have to agree with one political group's set of values and rules in order to have a voice?

But most of them AREN'T consumers. They're people who do not own the product, and therefore their reviews are uninformed. I don't care if they're bombing it or giving it 10/10, if they haven't played it, they aren't contributing anything real. All they're doing is diluting the pool, which makes their opinions 100% worthless, AND the opinions of those who played it worthless, since it's impossible to tell one from the other. So now they've destroyed the "user review" section, and people will have to, again, rely solely on official site reviews.

It's a pretty fun game. The sequel is bigger and prettier, of course, but that doesn't diminish Injustice. It still looks good and plays well.

Lol, Satisfactory's forums on Steam are full of people saying "waaaah I still won't buy this!" and it made third place on the list.

It's a great game, even though it's currently unfinished (but the dev team has been VERY active since it's initial release a year ago). If you like factory building and exploring, this is a game you'll enjoy.

Excited for Ampere, hoping it’s a big leap and doesn’t have a large chunk of the die taken up by special-use cores like the 2000 series.

It’ll probably be the video card that makes me finally upgrade my processor from a 4790k to something a little more beefy.

Well that's a shame, I was interested in this game. Oh well.

Looks like they spent longer writing up that game description than making the game.

Cutter wrote on May 31, 2020, 18:32:

Mordhaus wrote on May 31, 2020, 18:21:
Why would anyone buy a game that has been out and exclusive for over a year, but still is in "Early Access" designation? That would just be rewarding developer laziness and mediocrity.

Indeed. Still EA, a year later, and only 10 points off? Thanks but I'll be waiting on this one for some time.

Ah yes, ignore the insane progress they’ve made with the game and pretend they’re DayZ’s lazy dev team. Factorio, its very clear influence, is STILL in EA, after like...I think 7 years now. Also, Factorio has famously *never* been on sale.

You’re only depriving yourself of a great factory building game.