Suppa7 wrote on Mar 15, 2019, 00:18:

Numinar wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 23:27:
I couldn't even imagine being possible in the 90's.

Sigh, you are the exact kind of stupid moron I'm talking about, you don't realize how fucking stupid you are.

Starcraft 2 became a drm ridden f2p game selling skins to kids

Diablo 3 has single player fucking lag, and because of drm no fucking modding... sigh.

Quake champions... no fucking modding, sdk's, level editors, or all that cool shit we got in the 90's.

Doom 2016 -- snapmap, instead of the amazing modding and editing community of doom.. they had a chance to totally bring back the modding scene of doom like the 90's and they went and consolized the shit out of the modding and editing.

So many of our favorite properties have gone to shit because of the drm and microtransaction beast unleashed by the mmo/steam generation of gaming retards.

So no, if you believe this is the best time in gaming history. You're pretty much fucking retarded. Having level editors and modding in the AAA space was expected in the 90's, now it's on life support. So gaming is nowhere near as cool as it should have been if people had not fucking bought stolen games... which is what drm is. Games you don't own nor control.

"service based games" was the biggest scam ever that began with mmo's, ceo's and greedy dev's asked themselves how they could bend over the average consumer retard and get you to pay more money for less content and boy the last 20 years has been full retard levels of anti consumer behavior unleashed by the internet giving access to the mouthbreathing half of mankind.

Modern gaming is a retard dystopia for anyone who loved the gaming properties of the 90's.

Dude I am as honored for you to call me a retard as I would be for the Westboro Baptist Church to picket my funeral. Your opinion is valid, modern games are not for everyone, but the way you view and interact with others that think differently to you is as fucked up as theirs. I'm just going to assume it's hookworm or something.

If those features you mentioned were as popular and important to people as you insist developers would include them for the extra sales. Some still do. It's just people need money to pay for all that work, and games are more complicated than they were back then when a Carmack could put one together with a little help and then upload his tools to a BBS.

The communists didn't make many good video games outside of Ttetris, why would anyone today make them for free? It's a difficult and expensive undertaking, but there are lively modding scenes for many of my favorite modern games, and independent developers are consistently mining my nostalgia to save on production costs by making games with outdated assets and design sensibilities, though rarely with success. The excesses of capitalism damage many aspects of our lives, but games seem to get off lightly for those that consume (As opposed to the poor buggers making them). They are certainly much cheaper than they used to be when corrected for inflation.

As for stupid, it's not for me to say. I'm no physics professor that is for sure. I'm sure your Mensa club is a lot of fun but I'll just have to miss out. Luckily I've got a shit ton of fantastic modern games to play.

jdreyer wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 23:49:
Thanks, Numinar. Sold, but I'm going to wait for a sale. I have a HOTAS, but I'll use my VR headset instead of Track IR.

I still can't believe that they got the rights to use those songs in that trailer.

Yeah sale would be super worth it, as with almost every game/module. There will less bugs, more missions and better documents/tutorials/youtubes by the time you get it as well so it will be a better ramp on experience for you, it's the wild west right now. I would have waited as well but my old man is in waaaaaay deeper than me and we like to learn them together. Classic multiplayer social pressure sale.

I know from the F-18 that it's super frustrating when you are on tilt and you've made 12 bolters and are down to a few hundred pounds of fuel and you can feel the panic making it worse just like the guy who washes out at the start of the film. But that makes it all the more satisfying when you do trap. This plane seems even more rewarding for that. The boat seems smaller in this monster that is for sure.

Suppa7 wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 20:27:
LOL you all complain about epic games but let's be honest, as soon as you all accepted drm an mmo's, you already fucked yourselfs. The fact that steam even exists... means that battle was lost 20 years ago when people bent over and gave up game ownership when PC RPG's were being rebranded mmo's...

When everyone bent over for everquest, ultina online, world of warcraft and guild wars 1 with drm... you all told the game industry you were worthless fucks who deserve to get raped. The plan since the 90's was always to remove game and software ownership from the stupid and ignorant masses of mankind.

Anyone who was a PC game nerd in the 90's is pretty fucking mad that the PC gaming future became a fucking f2p, live service dystopia because moronic masses kept feeding money to games they didn't own and hostile anti consumer practices.

Epic games is hardly a fly on the wall in this battle, the fact that they are working on game streaming to seal all games permanently behind a drip fed encrypted stream eventually will come and I'm sure you'll all bend over for that too.

The battle was lost as soon as the stupid masses got internet. In the 90's we were protected from the mmo mouthbreathers and half-life and counterstrike addicts who enabled gabe to steal half-life and counterstrike.

The internet undermined gamers ability to hold these companies accountable.

You don't speak for me, and I was as full 90's PC nerd as you can be. Your theory that all the bad things in modern gaming are conflated/caused by the MMO moment is interesting, however I don't think there has ever been a better time to play video games.

Every game I have ever owned I can play within minutes if I want to. But for the older stuff, I don't want to. Not for more than a few dozen evenings or so a year with true classics like UFO Enemy Unknown, Alpha Centauri or Star Control 2. The new stuff is great, past five years it has never been better. There are gaps, games they don't make because they don't make enough money or are difficult/risky to do and games that are dated and in desperate need of a modern, proper update. But as much as the 90's golden age of PC gaming was worthy of the title there is a reason GoG isn't the biggest retailer in this space. New shit is real, real good. And there was always garbage products and business practices.

And some service games are phenomenal. Maybe you need friends/family to enjoy them properly but there are moments in Sea of Thieves or Destiny or Battlefield I couldn't even imagine being possible in the 90's. Factorio, Subnautica and Kerbal are beyond anything we had back then. DCS may not have the single player content of 90's sims but the sim itself is so far beyond what we had in terms of fidelity and multiplayer capability you would not have believed it possible back then.

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 15:11:
I played the pen and paper Cyberpunk 2020 when I was younger, and there were definitely on females in it. Sickens me to see ProjectRed thinks they are sooo woke.

It's the most woke and simultaneously most soullessly style first setting though. I mean, punk is in the title. Body mods, trans-everything, the ultimate libertarian capitalist free for all.

These game settings from the 80's/70's were made by hippies or at least people influenced by those decades and the crazy pre-internet nonsense going on then. Often progressive as fuck, and regressive in all the ways old people were without always realising it at the same time. Lady Gaga is super on brand for this and I imagine it didn't take that much convincing. I'm not a fan of her tunes but she does her 100% and you gotta respect that in any artist. Lets just hope they do stunt casting better than Bungie.

The fact that our memories/interpretations of these old games are dominated by our experiences made by our half grown testosterone dominated 15 year old male brains and dipshit friends in the early 90's does not change the fact they are full of some wild shit that may sicken adults with a temperamental constitution.

Honestly I preferred it back then when reactionary conservatives demonized and tried to ban role playing games. Co-opting them and then trying to claim the progressive themes that have always been in them as being PC culture ruining their hobby is just too dumb.

jdreyer wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 20:45:
Wish I had time to learn this.

Nobody has time to learn it properly. The real pilots trained for thousands of hours and memorised 1000 page manuals and had to pass 6 hour oral exams and did hundreds of dry landing before crashing into a boat. Since you wont die or get fired from your dream job you can learn a bastard casual version of it though.

And have fun. Any time you would spend in any game is enough to enjoy DCS.

It's much harder than the F18, but everything is. That thing is basically a (very fun) videogame. But Even with less than an hour under my belt it's rewarding.

I used to think these sims were for grognards only and that calling them games was a crime. But they can be games. They are appropriate for people to enjoy however they want to (Outside MP servers that will have certain rules, but most are fairly chill).

Have a few whiskeys, Watch a quickstart youtube video. Print a startup checklist or just start a warm start mission so you can punch throttle and go.

Cost is the main problem, each plane costs as much as a full price game. And working out what buttons to bind when there isn't a good diagram to go off of. (As with this module. I'm sure someone will put a guide together eventually)

I've got mostly hand me down stuff but it's a lot of money to get started. You really want a decent HOTAS and trackIR. Pedals for warbirds or any plane unless your stick has twist, which some people say isn't enough but I'm ok with that. I also don't do PvP which has a lot to do with it.

But time? Don't worry about it. If you have time for any normal game you have time for this. You do need to fly every week to remember the basics, but I still take months off and can come back to it fairly quickly. You can learn a little each night and find it very rewarding. I tend to watch a video, play for a few hours, rewatch video and play a few hours more a few days later to lock it in. Also find someone to learn with. Failing together is fun, and learning all the little idiosyncrasies together helps speed it up.

Osc8r wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 18:47:
TTK still 0.01 seconds?

They do make good trailers though... just a shame about the gameplay.

Some guns and some situations yes. Getting shot in the head or riddled with hot lead from a high ROF gun puts you down fast. The meta has moved towards teamwork and sector artillery/smoke which is super thematic and suitable for the time period.

I can see how it's not for everybody, but in the setting it makes sense that bullets fucking hurt (Except MMG's, for balance and fun reasons they need to nerf them close up to stop everyone picking them, when they should tear people in half at any range under 100m. I don't think anyone wants to play that game though. Maybe they should take them out entirely or make them 2 man teams or something). It's coming together as a great game. I've clocked almost 100 hours on it with family and friends. It's our go-to game. I don't miss the modern shit from BF4 and BF1 still stands alone as it's own kind of thing with a different feel to guns, TTK and strategy.

I just wish they made the tanks and planes that warrant it proper multi crew vehicles, like in ARMA. Have a commander that can spot, driver and gunner. Then you could make them as scary as they should be while making it a huge investment in manpower. 64 players per server doesn't seem like enough though if they start doing that.

VaranDragon wrote on Mar 14, 2019, 10:10:
What Im playing (learning) at the moment.

I spent all of ten minutes so far in it, really need to hit the books. But the dozens of hours on F18 got me a 1 wire on first attempt! Bind something to DLC though or it will be a nasty deck settle like literally every landing I make. I don't think I've ever seen the meatball I'm so off scope.

It looks and sounds so good though. Seems like a much livelier, fully featured module than ED's official ones. Can't wait to casually learn to be terrible at it. I don't have the time or inclination to memorise the natops cover to cover but it dosn't seem like that will be necessary. It's still way easier than the warbirds I've tried.

For something that is intended as a two person aircraft it seems doable solo with AI so that is good. But all that weapons/radar/ecm stuff that is no longer needed on the stick/throttle is now needed for analogue flaps, wing sweep and some other nonsense and I reckon HOTAS setup is harder than getting a wire. Was hoping there would be good default bindings for popular sticks.

theglaze wrote on Mar 13, 2019, 15:40:
I haven't read what people have typed, pardon me if this has been said, but an idea I have is:

Half-Life 3, Portal 3, and LFD3 haven't been developed because Valve doesn't have the pressure of competition on Steam to bother with making their own in-house exclusives to attract/keep users to their platform.

Perhaps the success of other platforms will wake up the giant that is Valve game development?

I think those games have not been developed because Valve has ALL the data on what is popular and what people play.

And those games are not it. Not in the numbers required for the production value they deserve. And making AAA is more expensive for valve, they don't have the army of disposable cheap entry level game devs that are required for modern full price games.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Mar 13, 2019, 11:45:
How To Further Encourage Piracy 101.

I don't know if pirates need encouragement. I've been there. The main motivator is having inadequate disposable income to buy the hot shit you desperately want (And if I was in my teens/early 20's a new game from Xcom man would probably qualify). I'm sure some people pirate for political/self-justifying ethical reasons though. I wonder what the percentages really are on motivation.

HoSpanky wrote on Mar 13, 2019, 08:08:
Releasing in stages is a good plan, actually. The original’s main issue was all the multiplayer was divided by each game. This way people will naturally move from one to the next for the online multiplayer and the playerbase won’t be scattered.

I’m excited about this, as long as they don’t try to act like it can command $60. $30 or below and it’ll probably do quite well.

As for it looking old, Halo 1 looks mreh even with the update, but halo 2 and ESPECIALLY 4 look incredible. H2 was rebuilt specifically for this collection, and 4 was visually IMPOSSIBLY better looking than anything else at the time. Gears3 was the same way, both looked like something from two console generations ahead.

I always thoughts gears 3 was a bit rubbish to look at. Too many concessions to get the 4p co-op in graphics and level design, though I think the compromises worth it. Gears 2 just seemed so much more ahead of it's time once you got past the meh intro, and PC's had a few less years/GPU cycles on the X360 at that stage. Gears 4 is super worth it on Gamepass though. Play on PC for eye melting super optimised cover shooty action.

But $30? That would be nice but the whole reason this collection is coming to PC and I reckon at full price (Or maybe ala'carte) is the same reason Sea of Thieves did for full price. It's a trojan horse for Gamepass! Microsoft is giving up on becoming a Sony, and is instead aiming to be a netflix. For games.

Super worth it. One sub has all games on both PC and XBOX1X so my daughter and I get to have have epic pirate lans, and when mum isn't looking, soon to be fascist space marine saving humanity time! Gotta teach these kids history and all.

Slashman wrote on Mar 13, 2019, 10:56:

Primalchrome wrote on Mar 13, 2019, 10:29:
In what is a sort of response to accusations of anti-consumer practices and the fact that the Epic Games Store lacks all but the most basic aspects of the Steam client....

Sergey Galyonkin (@galyonkin), Director of Publishing Strategy for Epic Games Store, liked the tweet from popular russian gaming-and-pop culture account @turbojedi which reads: ”The most remarkable thing about the whole Epic Games Store movement is gamers, who are accustomed to the fact that videogame developers/publishers owe them something by default, finally discover that unpleasant aggressive assholes with hysteric requirements are sometimes still sent to fuck off.”

Okay...I won't buy your game then.

At some point Epic is going to have to compete with something besides paying off game devs for exclusivity. Because if that is their strategy going forward it is going to be rather expensive.

As evidenced by the fact that the developer can comfortably offer refunds. That says a lot about their financial status. Epic is footing the bill.

Well, they have a publishing arm as well as a storefront. I guess it is kind of weird to run both those businesses. Petrol stations can be a little like this though, and I am sure there are other similar models.

Cash strapped indies can sell exclusivity, probably lose a lot of exposure in the process (Or who knows, maybe the outrage can translate to sales as other people who never heard of this see it?) and get a bit financial backing. Very difficult to get in this hit generated business. Not to mention if Epic does get some traction, you have a storefront that while basic isn't also flooded with IOS ports, hentai games and other assorted garbage to the point where the chances of the right people seeing your game is rather limited these days.

Blizzard and Origin have exclusives. But they are also publishers first stores second. Why begrudge them their incompetence? And nothing wrong with not buying a game till it comes on Steam or never if you feel strongly I guess. I just love games so much I will get them where they appear. Even if it's a God of War on a console, Zelda on a cheap tablet with less grunt than my phone, or through the motherfucking DCS launcher piece of shit for a pretend F-14.

I bet if the exclusive is good enough, like the Satisfactory beta that emptied our Factorio Server last weekend, people like you will swallow their pride and get it. HL2 did for the baby shit sandwich themed mid 2000's Steam.

Didn't you guys bust your multi client cherry with gog a decade ago? Why would this be a lost sale?

Exclusives suck but monopolies suck more, and gog/ubi playing nice with Valve didn't really put a scare into them. A bit of aggression in the marketplace should help devs and consumers. I'll assume the cash advance helped Julian Gollop and employees plan out their release with a bit more surety than buying a lotto ticket. This is a good thing. Maybe. I mean seriously what's the motive to only having one store? How does it help? Don't we all have 1000 times more ram than we had when steam was released? However bad the launcher is, it's waaaaaay better than that baby vomit colored Counterstrike launcher was for the first few years.

But what if that next thing is RTX? But like electric car engines the amount of effort required to catch up with the existing technology and it's massive headstart is so high that there is no way it will ever get there without piggybacking on legacy cards. Almost like how we had crappy hybrid cars before we got rockets like the newer teslas and maybe eventually ones that normal people can afford.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Mar 9, 2019, 00:51:
Hrm... I'll try it, but BFV Conquest is in a pretty good place right now, hate to see DICE losing their focus trying to cater to the BR market.

It'll be interesting. It took them way too long to fix that epilepsy issue, and the menus are still cancer, but BR with the BFV gunplay and movements sounds awesome.

A lot of UI overhead I'm not sure I trust them to deal with but we will see.

Also how healthy can the servers be when the game is not free? I expect long wait times if we can get a game at all in AU. Or maybe the death of conquest servers if it turns out to be too popular.

saluk wrote on Mar 3, 2019, 20:20:
Erm... it's an app that is basically linking to the website to submit government form requests. As the government in question is pretty high on the injustice scale, yes, some of those documents are going to also be unjust. Google can't just ban an app without good cause when it doesn't violate TOS (this would also be unjust).

They could look at updating the TOS, but one that would provide grounds to ban this app, while not also providing grounds to ban some apps I think most would agree are OK (say, a bank app that allows you to submit a loan application) would have to be pretty narrow. Still worth looking into.

Apple has a little more discretion here, which is pretty shitty some of the time when they don't allow something onto the store that they should, but might help here.

But the real issue is the Saudi regime. Not the app. The app can in fact actually help in some ways - I heard (heresay) that if a woman can access her husband's phone, this gives her a bit more flexibility than she would have had to try and go in person to an office to try and convince them to increase her travel permit etc. I don't know if that's true or propaganda. But either way, banning the app doesn't ban the forced slavery/prostitution of saudi women. Once again, congress barks up the wrong tree.

And complaining about google and apple letting the app be there is a third step removed from the actual problem.

I would like tech companies to take a principled approach to authoritarian regimes but it is just not going to happen. Ever.

Also it'd be a bit rich making them lose money to take a stand whilst we sell armaments and intelligence services to these countries, and in the case of China buy their ethically suspect goods.

It's all shit that would be heavily reduced though, if we elected governments that would take a stand and regulate/conduct diplomacy in a way that would disincentivise this behavior at home and abroad. But most voters consider employment and the economy more important than morality so we get what we deserve.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Mar 4, 2019, 01:59:

Cutter wrote on Mar 3, 2019, 11:55:
Love the concept. Looks fairly low-rent however. Would love to see something like this as a first person survival game.

Ugh, no. The last thing the world needs is yet another FPS Survival game, we're practically inundated with them!

We are inundated with middling ones. If it takes a hundred piles of garbage to get a Subnautica then I say keep 'em commin.

Honestly the setting is ripe for it. Ancestors did not do it for me at all. I'm thinking Populous scale but fun as an RTS, or stone age version of Battlezone 2.

Creston wrote on Mar 2, 2019, 11:18:

Numinar wrote on Mar 2, 2019, 02:22:
BL3 is great and all but why not have another go at Brothers in Arms?

I don't think they own that IP?

I don't know why they wouldn't but I also only read the first link in google because lazy:

https://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/06/03/gearbox-software-new-brothers-in-arms-game/

APE. OUT.

BL3 is great and all but why not have another go at Brothers in Arms?

Expand it a bit, go for some solid co-op, would make a great shooter/strategy wargame. Something platoon level like Company of Heroes? Loved the first two games.

Been having a great time with it but I imagine the PC version is a nightmare of compatibility and cheaters. I'm sure there are mouse emulator dudes on console but I can handle them with positioning and teamwork, hackers just ruin servers. Got family and friends to play with on XBOX and it runs like a dream if you ignore the infinite load bugs that hit now and then.

I'm guessing I'm in the minority though. Only half a dozen full conquest games in my region at night. Guessing this is the last one of these they do for a while, unless they make some kind of new amazing change in direction, like Modern Warfare did for COD.

I would love them to lean into a more sim-like vision, and there are hints of that with the quick TTK and nerfing/limiting of team spotting. It still feels like an early 2000's shooter in all the best and worst ways at times and maybe people just don't want that anymore. It's like everyone ignored the best bits of PUBG, which were the bits where it was like ARMA with gunplay and movement.

Netcode seems great though. Playing with mates 600-3000km from the server and there is minimal visual nonsense or moments where you feel you got robbed. That alone makes me not nostalgic at all for the old games.