Steele Johnson wrote on May 25, 2025, 17:56:

Staunch wrote on May 25, 2025, 00:17:

Steele Johnson wrote on May 24, 2025, 17:52:
I'm also not a big fan of review bombing, particularly before the game is released. Many times on steam, the people giving negative reviews have played the game for less than an hour. Kind of ridiculous

How long should someone be forced to play a game they don't enjoy before they're allowed to give a negative review?

You tell me. Let's say it's a ~40 hour single-player game. How long do you think it should be for someone to give a detailed review?

I don't see why you can't give a negative review if you know you don't enjoy playing the game or have technical difficulties after 10 minutes.

I haven't played Dragon Age since the first one so don't have anything to say about this one, but I did work out a few stats from the reviews out of curiosity.

When I checked, there were 40,307 total reviews, 28,007 positive and 12.300 negative. Of the positive reviews, 152 of them had less than an hour of playtime, of those 10 were refunded and 12 had "woke" in the review text. Of the negative reviews, 378 of them had less than an hour of playtime, of those 81 were refunded and 52 had "woke" in the review text.

So really here we're talking about just over 1% of all the reviews of the game for both positive and negative reviews with less than an hour of playtime.

Doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on May 25, 2025, 08:41:

Staunch wrote on May 25, 2025, 00:17:

Steele Johnson wrote on May 24, 2025, 17:52:
I'm also not a big fan of review bombing, particularly before the game is released. Many times on steam, the people giving negative reviews have played the game for less than an hour. Kind of ridiculous

How long should someone be forced to play a game they don't enjoy before they're allowed to give a negative review?

Hummm, I am going with at least once. Like I am not saying they have to play it all the way through, but maybe play it at least once for maybe five to 10 minutes?

Steam already has you covered there; it doesn't show the box to write a review unless you have some playtime in a game, as far as I could see.

Steele Johnson wrote on May 24, 2025, 17:52:
I'm also not a big fan of review bombing, particularly before the game is released. Many times on steam, the people giving negative reviews have played the game for less than an hour. Kind of ridiculous

How long should someone be forced to play a game they don't enjoy before they're allowed to give a negative review?

JTW wrote on Apr 22, 2025, 21:43:
(it was $3 on release.)

My original order email from May 2nd 2006 for all 3 DLCs has the horse armor at $1.99, the Orrery at $1.89 and the Wizard Tower at $1.89 for a total of $5.77.

Maybe there was a cheaper bundle that included all 3. It was almost 19 years ago so I can't remember.

But yes, I totally agree it wasn't a big deal.

Jivaro wrote on Nov 23, 2024, 12:42:
I am not a programmer and my last programming language learned was Basic on a TI-99/4A. This question is rooted in all sorts of ignorance...but...

Does a service like Steam stop supporting older OSs due to technical differences between new and old OS platforms or do they do it so you have to buy the remastered versions of games? or both? a little of everything? Security?

My understanding of this specific situation is that Steam ships with a version of Chromium and Google no longer supports newer versions of Chromium running on the older operating systems so if Valve want to update the version of Chromium to get security fixes they either need to drop support for the older operating systems or take on the maintenance burden of keeping Chromium compatible with them.

Mr. Tact wrote on Jun 5, 2024, 14:35:
I have heard good things about Fastmail.

I've been using Fastmail for almost 8 years and it's been pretty solid for me.

And Sony has now backed down: https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929

In addition to the 60% off, Noita just released an update with a bunch of new content.

Frans wrote on Feb 7, 2024, 15:16:
Aware of that, but given that cookie chatbear-session-1 for a frequent visitor of the news forum is maxed out around 3800 bytes, that leaves less space for all the others combined. I guess I'll lower that limit to 3600 and then we'll have to see how it goes. It just means fewer remembered threads for everyone.

Is this to mark which messages in the thread are new? If you're okay to rely on JavaScript a little more for this, it could also be put into local storage of the browser which has much larger limits and isn't sent to the server on every request.

RogueSix wrote on Jan 20, 2024, 13:46:
I wish there would finally be a 100% DirectX compatible alternative to Windows. I would switch in a heartbeat. Gaming is the only thing keeping me on Microsoft's shit OS.

Data point of one here but I switched to Linux early last year and have only had to boot into Windows for one game throughout the whole year. However, I don't really play competitive multiplayer games so I don't need to deal with anti-cheats that don't work which I've heard might be a problem. Valve has done some pretty incredible work with Proton.

They did a tech demo of their engine a while ago which is pretty interesting.

Happy Birthday!

Yakubs wrote on Nov 20, 2023, 23:29:

Staunch wrote on Nov 20, 2023, 19:28:
I've had a lot of fun with this one. It's a really interesting mix of city builder and rogue-lite. The early game starts out a little slow but has a lot of interesting decision making later on.

It's a neat, unique game. However, I found it lost its charm for me as I raised the difficulty. It feels annoying that you can't actually explore the map because it scales the difficulty too quickly. But on easier modes, the game is too slow and there's a lot of waiting.

Yeah that's a fair assessment. I played it as a pretty chill game early on without raising the difficulty much, the music and visuals are nice and it's not particularly challenging at the easier difficulties. Later on I bumped up the difficulty and have been enjoying some of the interesting decision making it has when you're trying to balance priorities and goals. It's nice that it can work both ways.

I've had a lot of fun with this one. It's a really interesting mix of city builder and rogue-lite. The early game starts out a little slow but has a lot of interesting decision making later on.

BicycleRepairMan wrote on Nov 9, 2023, 19:53:
I kinda got stuck in braid and never got back into it. But it was awesome.. and The Witness may be my favourite game of all time. I hope one day to see a third game from this guy , he is a genius.

He occasionally streams development of his next game on Twitch (but doesn't always leave vods up): https://twitch.tv/j_blow

There's also an updated trailer here: https://youtu.be/E1repvdGU9I

Jim wrote on Oct 29, 2023, 14:40:
which I guess means you find it and download it from some website, because otherwise how would you get it into your PC?

If you own the cartridge it's not usually that hard to rip your own ROMs. You can get a RetroBlaster which lets you do it over USB. I tend to play all my Switch games on PC these days after ripping the cartridge.

jdreyer wrote on Oct 10, 2023, 17:00:
I heard they are thinking of remaking The Princess Bride. Insanity.

Inconceivable!

Solemn-Philosopher wrote on Sep 29, 2023, 13:35:
I enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn when I played it earlier this year, though it did wear thin by the end. Is the sequel fresh enough to warrant a play through or is it just more of the same?

You can definitely hold off and pick this one up later if you just played Zero Dawn recently, unless you're heavily invested in the story and world, which Forbidden West does a good job expanding on.

In terms of gameplay it does have some improvements, but not enough to keep it fresh if Zero Dawn was wearing thin by the end. Also some parts were a regression as you have to do some machine farming to unlock overriding for the more powerful machines when you complete their cauldron which felt a bit tedious.

I finished it recently and at some point in my playthrough just decided to push the main story to complete it. I haven't played the DLC so I might pick this up on PC at some point in the future to play that.

Bodolza wrote on Sep 11, 2023, 12:38:
"Incredibly, some of Steam’s early adopter accounts are still actively in use today, a full two decades after their creation."

Nice bit of casual ageism there. I didn't quite make the mark. I created mine in January 2004, so still have a few months until 20 years. I bet I'm not the only one on this board, either.

October 10th here, so a little under a month for mine.