A lot of this dark crap is not so much because of evil facebook, but because the algorithms themselves only exist to give us (collectively) what we want. They are a dark mirror of society itself.

The research experiments have no bearing on what people type into that search bar billions of times a day.

I actually think the misogyny and regressive wingnut politics seeping into what we used to consider civilised liberal cultures is actually a reflection of the world population as a whole. Half the planet has a phone more capable and connected than computers that only nerds had in 1995, but most people still live in autocratic, repressive, patriarchal societies. The internet absorbs and spits back that influence.

I wonder how Fortnight compares to the Steam total sales of every game every month. Higher user-base but unsure how many of them spend money.

All these clients piss me off but Steam needs a good scare to keep them honest.

Although I'm biased as fuck as I just got my first win in Apex and very little compares with it, borderline heart attack here. (With 1 kill, carried hard by two "John Wicks" as I refer to them) but damn that game is fiiiiiine. Though it's not Titanfall 2 which it encouraged me to replay, other than a few suspect encounters that game is still fucking phenomenal. It's the kind of Shooter campaign that probably gets other devs to cancel theirs it's so good.

Mordecai Walfish wrote on Feb 21, 2019, 22:10:
There is a reason people turn down graphics settings to shit settings immediately when playing competitively in these types of games. Not just FPS & input lag, but stability and the fact that with less stuff going on in the game, it is less prone to errors like this. With the shader bukkake thats taking place in most games nowadays best to turn that shit off.

This is the main reason why I play competitive shooters on console (yes yes burn the witch/peasant and all that), other than way more cheaters on PC, the fact that you are disadvantaged because you don't choose to make the game look like it's from 2003 is a major turn off.

It is an advantage even for monster rigs that get 100+fps on ultra, as less clutter and effects make enemies easier to spot. I know from flight sims that depending on how the game is made, lower resolution/bigger pixels can help you pick out targets and movement against background/sky as well.

Although Xbox is not a choice for PUBG. It's even more garbage there than on PC if you can imagine it. The inventory management alone is enough to take all the fun out. ApeLegs on the other hand, being made for consoles and PC at the same time by experienced developers with decades of best selling multi-platform shooters under their belt, absolutely slaps on every platform.

Tough luck for people like me that want the try-hard realishness inspired hunger games nonsense of PUBG though. Someone needs to come and eat their lunch soon, they have had enough time and money to sort it out. Still 100x better than the Arma mod though.

CJ_Parker wrote on Feb 21, 2019, 21:48:

Numinar wrote on Feb 21, 2019, 21:32:
It has the thing a lot of Firaxis games have...

Firaxis? Dude? BattleTech was developed by Harebrained Schemes and the engine is Unity so the long loading times are most likely related to their choice of engine. There are quite a few other Unity games with above average loading times even on SSDs.

I mentioned them as a developer that makes games that are great but also never run as well as they should based on how they look (Xcom 2/Civ have similar bugs and frame skipping to BT). I did not mean to infer they developed BT.

To be honest that's the proper oldschool PC dev way, no new amazing deep PC game ran great on the average PC back in the day, part of the fun of upgrading was brute forcing your way through shitty optimisation. Old Origin games were super famous for it, and anything ambitious seemed to be made for the devstations they were created for not the 486/2x66 or Pentium 60 you actually owned.

Nobody I knew could run the largest Total Annihilation maps until years after it released. (64MB ram was for rich people!) I honestly don't miss it but what I was saying was that BATTLETECH, like the Firaxis titles, is worth the pain and missed frames.

Eirikrautha wrote on Feb 21, 2019, 20:52:

Veinman wrote on Feb 21, 2019, 19:47:
This game is awesome, go play it. I waited far too long to try it.

Part of that wait was probably spent on loading screens, right?

The game itself is excellent. The five minutes I wait for the game to start is criminal. Ditto that for the five minutes for each mission to load. And that's vanilla, before any mods (which are also an excellent feature). If they could optimize this game, It'd be the best game released in the last few years. But I have to have a hobby to do while I wait for the damn thing to load...

That is too bad man, are you on SSD? Mine dosn't seem that bad for loads.

I never get tired of the Dune-esque spaceship and soundscape sequence that tried to hide the loading screen though so maybe I'm not feeling to the same way but I'm with you on the optimizations.

It has the thing a lot of Firaxis games have, where it's an awesome game on an engine that is flexible rather than fast.

Still might be the best game I played last year. Though there are about 5 games I feel that way about, BATTLETECH is definitely the single player up at 3am wish it was my real job winner.

VaranDragon wrote on Feb 18, 2019, 05:47:
That article about Heinlein is basically from an interview with Gregory Benford. Benford is one of my all time favorite sci-fi authors. He mostly writes believable "hard" sci-fi, which I suppose makes sense given his background in physics but some of it is truly on an epic scale.

If you haven't had the chance check out Benford's Galactic Center series. It starts of rather slow, but picks up the pace by book three or so. One of the few series that actually gets better and better with each new book.

Gets good at book 3 is to genre novels what “fun after the first 15 hours” is to video games.

Which usually means that shit is my jam and therefore this is an amazing recommendation and I’m going to hit up the library request system tomorrow!

jdreyer wrote on Feb 15, 2019, 02:00:

Flatline wrote on Feb 14, 2019, 11:46:
My main problem with Civ expansions is that so many of them add late game stuff, and like, that's maybe 10% of a normal game.

Also, I think I'm finally done with Civ. Civ 6 was pretty boring to me.

My main problem with Civ expansions is that so many of them add core mechanics that should have been in the initial release.

I'm not saying you are wrong to feel that way, but given that despite being very profitable there are very few decent clones of CIV, I'm guessing what you feel entitled to is actually very difficult to do in a core release and put off for that reason as opposed to greedy developer decisions. Keeping the scope tight probably helps get them out the door more than once a decade. Also trade and espionage are almost always garbage when they finally do add them.

CIV is complex. And very easy to do wrong. Numbered entries cannot be justified with new graphics alone, they change stuff to see if it helps freshen up the formula or solve longstanding issues with the design.

That said Alpha Centauri seemed to have every system including a deformabale world with climate change, a unit designer, narrative and all sorts of other shit even before the expansion. Maybe they really just don't make them like they used to.

But you know who is really fucked? Paradox. How the fuck do they make a Crusader Kings 3 without spending 15 years refactoring all the CK2 content into it before release?

As usual the angry internet mob is wrong. BFV is making all the right moves, I don’t think I’ve ever played the same game nightly for 4 weeks since early PUBG. Awesome update other than the epilepsy bug (just press the deploy menu button when it happens to avoid). The boring single player AI makes sense now as it’s perfectly suited to 4p co-op. 4 mission types on 4 maps spread over 8 scenarios is a good start but I hope they lean into it! Lots of fun, good chill way to practice teamwork and aiming.

jdreyer wrote on Feb 9, 2019, 02:58:
Axiom Verge crashed on Epic Store due to missing "steam" file…

"What is this 'testing' thing you speak of, and how can it help me?"

You can spend tens of thousands of man hours testing a game but that dosn't help spot a game crash caused by what you foolishly assumed was a non-invasive attempt to remove references to the platform competing with the one the build is being released on. I mean, I don't know if that is what happens but it sounds like it.

Even with the resources of a larger company, it's a pain in the arse to have someone run through a long game to completion, even if you shop it out to some sweatshop. It's probably a couple of days work even with a guide. Being it's not on physical media or multiplayer it probably seemed like a safe bet. It's been ported to multiple consoles successfully over the last few years but how much work do you think you do to make a build for epic or GOG? At most someone in mastering might have booted it up for a few minutes. Or at least that's my experience with much more expensive titles in similar scenarios.

Easy to see why they were tempted not to do a full pass on it. Still funny though. It's not like they lost sales by having it borked for a few days when it's free for two weeks.

Brilliant game though. One of the best. Not quite as ambitious or as fun with the action component as Hollow Knight but as a throwback to 90's console action adventures it's perfect, and is better than pretty much all of them excepting maybe SotN.

Great game. Best on Switch though, to get that full 16 bit metroid feel.

Slick wrote on Feb 7, 2019, 19:04:
Dling it now.

My main disappointment is that they announced they're not using the local VoIP anymore so you can taunt your opponents.

I had so much fun with soundboards I'd spam at enemies in the DZ while we wasted them. My fav was getting my squad at level 5 rogue, then camping out where there's only only stairwell to reach us, and spamming the "Warriors ... Come out and plaaaayyy" line from the movie. Just thinking of hearing those bottle clanks again makes me blush. We had so much fun

Very sad to see that go.

I'll post a cool vid I made in the Div 1 when I get home

Private chat/discord/XBLA parties/Teamspeak/garbage people ruined the golden age of locational voice. PUBG still has it thank goodness but it's just not the same as it was.

Part of what made Halo 2 so awesome early on was everyone with Xbox Live got a mic with their subscription, and there was no party chat, so the trash talking, spying on other teams and then busting their plays by blurting out what they were up to was all part of the meta in a way we just don't have anymore.

Agent.X7 wrote on Feb 8, 2019, 00:54:
So I saw a bunch of my Origin friends playing this and decided what the hell. It's free, right?

It's actually pretty fun. Like, I wish Overwatch was this fun. I just spent 2 hours having my ass handed to me, but it was fun anyway.

I still wish they had mechs, though.

The sign of a good BR game is the 100 times you lose in a row and keep booting it up with joy and hope in your heart.

This game is fucking great. The dynamic weather, the ocean physics, the multi crew multi ship battles. The music and art are super coherent as well. But it does ignore most modern gaming conventions, intentionally and to a fault. It’s not a roller coaster of content served up on a silver plate for your lazy ass. There is no K/D ratio to check. It’s just tense as fuck every time you spot a sail on the horizon which is as it should be.

My biggest fear is they walk back too much of what makes it unique. I’m not a huge fan of the magic cannonballs either. They seem too plentiful and put a stop to those epic chases all too quickly when they hit.

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Jan 31, 2019, 21:55:
Ugh, I am so far behind on games. I need to finish Subnautica still, and the sequel is already out.

I think this might be a repeat of the last announce thread for this but hey, some games deserve it! Such a great game. It's like hearing a song in a musical genre you don't like that's so good you forget where it came from.

I hear Subnautica was good in early access, but I played it after release when it was fully cooked. There is a narrative and win condition to it that made it very fulfilling. I can see how it works without that (Like Kerbal and Factorio) but since it's not quite as mechanically deep as those games I'm not sure if it would have hit me the same way without it.

Plenty of time to get it done before this expansion hits!

Muscular Beaver wrote on Jan 28, 2019, 15:47:
Not unexpected at all. Freesync monitors pretty much always have worse input lag than their G-Sync versions (and other limitations). You cant magically make them as quick as G-Sync ones, nor should you expect that software conversion doesnt add more input lag.

I will continue to buy full G-Sync support monitors instead of the inferior versions.

My ASUS panel is 3 years old now, but at the time the exact same panel cost 30% where I am for the gsynch version. Same refresh rate range, response time, quality, all that.

Same power video card from team green cost 30% more as well.

No, it's not as good, the card runs hotter than the Nvidia one, freesynch only works at 40-90 fps (Which is where all my games run at QHD anyway) but a 30% premium for a slightly more polished product? No thanks. I spent 1400 AUD total for screen and GPU as it was. I'd consider getting NVIDIA on my next upgrade if they could run freesynch as well as my radeon does, but apart from anti competitive nonsense I don't see why they couldn't have been doing that for years already. Perhaps the low sales have convinced them to play ball and try and open up to customers like me with a lot of pennies sunk in displays lacking their fancy expensive chip.

Yes. Play it.

One of the best things I've ever done on a computer. Reminded me a lot of super early adventure games, with death and minimal handholding but moments of wonderment and surprise even dozens of hours in that you feel like you earned, as opposed to being led to by an invisible director.

I also hate survival shit. It often feels like busywork. Games are there to escape thinking about fulfilling basic necessities! But in this game it worked, mostly. In a factorio-style motivation of "I don't want to deal with this fishing shit so I can eat and drink, how do I automate/trivialise it?" as a method to push you forward in the story and tech tree.

As you get deeper and deeper and discover more secrets to add to your paper map (Super old school here, no automapper!) and build outposts to keep you supplied and act as a point of reference and safety, and you start to feel like you are actually getting to grips with this planet, you will still get surprised and freaked out by the weird crap and nightmare monsters you manage to discover because you are always pushing your luck. The sense of exploration is something I haven't felt since Ultima Underworld/Morrowind. (Most recent Zelda had a bit of it but that is a far more sterile/robotic world)

Later on, when you build your sick giant mobile sub and find yourself 3 kilometers down in a volcanic/acidic super hostile underwater cavern and there are supertanker sized monsters lurking about ready to bite if you make too much noise and you have to go on EVA to burn out parasites draining energy from your only source of oxygen and food is just insane.

Good stuff. Also I fucking loved God of War but there is no way to really compare the two, that game is definitely one that wants you to see and enjoy all 150 million dollars of art and sound in the thing but sometimes that's what you want in a game.

BIGtrouble77 wrote on Jan 25, 2019, 15:48:

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 25, 2019, 14:43:
with just a few tweaks you could shoot moar faster https://www.bluesnews.com/s/196905/etc-etc

Dilemma... play game at shit frame rate and have excuse for why I'm so bad... or fix frame rate issue, enjoy game but have no excuse for my mediocrity?

Or just accept you are garbage, will never compete with young people on medical grade amphetamines and dual 2080ti's and enjoy the brief moments of drunken ramboesque murder brilliance you pull out of your ass occasionally. I endure the constant, savage negative KD embarrassment because I am enduring it with family and friends (And rum).

Like that guy in Band of Brothers said, the secret to good soldiering is to accept that you are already dead.

As for the framerate bug, hard to see how that dosnt exist in everything without some crazy rollback netcode or other code magic. I think it's once of the strengths of the consoles in equalising/flattening the performance profile for all users.

And in pubg's case it seems to be an advantage to have a slower rate of fire in terms of recoil control, actual DPS disadvantage in a fast TTK game seems marginal. My feeling is if you are ever in a situation where 20-200ms makes a difference in the outcome you have already failed tactically, even if you come out on top.

Muscular Beaver wrote on Jan 26, 2019, 06:19:

Sepharo wrote on Jan 26, 2019, 05:45:
It's the same way they made the first one and it turned out great.
And also the same, I'll be waiting until it's more done.

If its cheap I will get it instantly.
You can be pretty sure they will not fuck it up. As you said, they already proved that.

You would think so but history is littered with bad sequels and mediocre expansion packs to amazing breakout one of a kind still pining for new content two decades later games.

TA:Kingdoms, Supcom 2, yuck! Though expansion packs to good games are often solid. Probably because of building on established tech lets the content creators go wild. OFP2, MOO3 and Star Control 3 were heartbreaking but I don't think they were the OG devteams, just publishers trying to cash in with well meaning but ill equipped teams.

Since this is the same team doing the same style devcycle I'm super keen. But no need to pre-order/beta test (unless cheaper tyhan full release!). Waiting for Subnautica was definitely the right move. Unlike Kerbal or Factorio it's a game that probably works best once completed. The authored feel to the world and story structure felt outstanding. Once of the best games I played last year.

Mordecai Walfish wrote on Jan 25, 2019, 17:40:
Very well made game, but the owners of the DB IP are actively trying to sabotage the game's prosperity by disallowing competitive tournament play. Clueless corporate cretins.

Japan, which can be argued as being the greatest hotbed of digital creativity in our beloved hobby, has finally worked out how to make decent PC ports of it's games. (Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen ran like a dream, though Nier:Automata and Dark Souls games are devastatingly sad missteps)

This seems to be one of the good ones. Resolution stuff could be an issue but fighting games struggle with that kind of thing, the other Arc Systems games are no different.

But business and labor laws wise they are on another planet. Kind of a good thing, whats the point of having a whole planet if everyone marches to the beat of one drum, but as an exporter of culture it can be pretty wild and confusing when a rights holder drowns the golden goose publicly and violently for seemingly irrational reasons.

Yep, still brilliant. Those canned co-op missions with mildly randomised patrols were so awesome. Great SP mode as well. Also the helicopters felt weighty in a way that was missing from ARMA until ARMA3 had it's chopper update. Oh an the thing everyone remembers, the star-navigating escape mission for the downed airman story. Good shit.

Like Company of Heroes or Battlefield 1942 though (And maybe to a lesser extent PUBG), it was a "Lets ignore all the conventions and try and do this in a new and interesting way" risky venture that you just don't see anymore but the genre desperately needs. ARMA3 is a good platform but feels weighed down by it's own history and limitations.