41:20


...just sayin'

Really liked the first one The demos of the 2'nd seem uber-ambitious.

2/27?

I better gather my party before adventuring forth...

Bhruic wrote on Jan 15, 2020, 16:00:
Of course it's not the point Tim was making. It's the point I am making. It doesn't matter who is making the exclusives, I don't want there to be any exclusives. As a consumer, I benefit from having all the products I want on a single platform. Unless I'm getting more benefits from having them separated - which I'm not - I don't want them to be. Even if Epic were only putting Epic exclusives on EGS, I'd still be annoyed about it (well, assuming there were Epic games I wanted to buy).

It may annoy you but if the company developed it and they have a means to sell it directly to the customers, they have every right to exclusivity. It's their product. They incur all the risk of making it exclusive along with the development cost.

Otherwise when I buy something on the Epic store, why aren't I able to choose to send the revenue to Valve instead? Oh, just because Epic made the store front? Psh.

Kxmode wrote on Jan 15, 2020, 14:25:
That's a weak and invalid comparison. Netflix, Amazon, and Disney Plus produce their exclusives (e.g. first-party). Epic doesn't create the exclusives that appear on their store. A better comparison would be comparing Fortnite on EGS with CS:GO on Steam, Anthem on Origin, and Diablo 3 on Battle.net.

Correct. The whole argument of 'Well Valve doesn't sell Half-Life on other stores, so they're doing the same thing.' is a weak straw grasp.

A first-party game is developed using the same company resources as what could go towards the store itself. The store and the game are part of the same arm. What's different between 4 years spent developing a game by Epic, then selling it exclusively vs spending 4 years developing a tool for the Epic store? One wouldn't expect that tool to be made available for other store fronts, right? It's just one's service is to entertain, the other is utility.

Plus a first-party game reflects directly on the company. The risk of whether it bombs or not is entirely in the same hands as the store's developer. That's very different from being able to go out and just scoop up all the major block busters willing to side with you. Then even if a specific game fails in some way there's no loss of man-hours, company perception, etc..

It's a difference of leeching from vs contributing towards.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 14, 2020, 19:24:
Exactly how are they going to extract said blood. Steam, as we all know, is the well developed and full featured defecto monopoly. I mean what % market share does Steam have? Whatever it is I doubt it will change much because a new store came to town and had a few sales or gave away a few games.

By doing what they're doing. The exclusives. The free games are, among other things, to build up people's libraries so there's less disparity between a given customer's Epic volume of games in their personal library vs Steam (or anyone elses). That makes people associate gaming more so with their store over time. By enticing developers with their ultra-low store cut. Etc..

I'm not even bashing Epic here, but who else is willing to go this far to compete? They're on the path to being a major player -eventually- which is the only way to get there (one day at a time).

This is what I call aggressive. Passive would be focusing on their store's features, playing fairly in the marketplace (aka: no paid for exclusives) etc.

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 14, 2020, 18:59:
That was never their plan.
All they want is a tiny piece of the pie and by the looks of it they’ve been very successful.

Do you work for them? How would you know this?

Anyone throwing this much money around and being this aggressive is likely out for blood.

*removing below the belt comment*

This comment was edited on Jan 14, 2020, 19:19.

Wow! First time checking Blue's today. Guess SC's been out shined in the post generator front. lol

Think I'll save this thread for a nice relaxing wind down later this eve...
whom I kidding?

SC is un-rleased, un-launched, un-ready for prime time.

Lets put it this way, on launch day it was perfectly fair to write a formal game review for WoW.

Would you say it's time for PC Gamer to go and give SC a review rating? If you counter this I'm probably not going to bother arguing back. You can't compare the two in terms of state of release.

Besides by the game being declared as alpha by the developers working it, it is by definition unfinished. Lets get to no more character wipes at least, eh?

NasWulf wrote on Jan 11, 2020, 08:19:

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 11, 2020, 07:41:

NasWulf wrote on Jan 11, 2020, 06:29:
Well, you can look at it this way...WoW has been "in on-going development" for 15+ years, is it or will it ever be finished?

Not a valid comparison, yet. Since launch WoW was a working game with plenty of content.

by your reasoning, SC is a working game(*) with some content. I could go right now and buy a package, download the client and play the game just like I can with WoW. Sure I'll run out of thing to do quicker then WoW, but it's a similar comparison. If you couldn't currently play SC as a game then I'd say your reasoning is well-founded. If CIG came out today and stated that the next update is released version 1.0 and anything else added like more ships, planets, etc. is paid DLC (like WoW expansion packs) would that meet your reasoning for a "finished" game and my WoW comparison? Or, is your view of a finished SC the version that has all promised content from the current road map in-game and playable and it's not "finished" until then?

Again, when is an on-going developed game "finished"? When the dev states this is released version 1.0? or when they say, ok guys/gals, no more updates just game-breaking bug fixes i.e. CoD / Battlefield / DOOM 2016?

That's not a valid comparison at all. SC is no where near a product ready for retail. Yeah development is different with SC in that they push out semi-working builds every 3 months instead of tackling the majority of bugs in beta, so it's a little more of a playable alpha than most games would be (it's how they keep things funded without going to a publisher).. but yeah. no.

The time has not yet come to tell everyone, hey go pick up SC it's time to dive in! SQ42 will be the first one to step into that territory, which is why I'm keeping a close eye on it. To me current SC is what's getting us SQ42 and SQ42 is what will secure the road to SC (so it better at least be fucking solid).

Kxmode wrote on Jan 9, 2020, 15:41:
I guess this is the fault of Chris Roberts for not explicating stating the game isn't an MMO, especially since it's explicitly mentioned on their...

The goal is to have a single shard universe. There's still more tech in development to get it there, this is just to test the recent release of Server Side Object Container Streaming (first iteration of it) which allows the servers to stop the tracking of entities that aren't near other players.

Before this the server tracked every object, npc, etc. in the game. They're stress-testing the servers with this more recent update (it's what allowed them to add the newest planet without breaking the servers, and will bring us the next star system this year).

Server Meshing is the next (and final) hurdle to allowing an MMO experience. That will allow the servers to dynamically break out areas across multiple servers as the population in an area increases.

Quinn wrote on Jan 8, 2020, 17:56:
Wasn't it Oblivion or maybe Mass Effect that had this already and worked wonky? I remember selecting an area on the face that then glowed red and you could then shape that area the way you liked using your mouse. According to some below, even more games have this already.

Also, at first glance I thought EA patented their ability to directly manipulate the looks players created. Imagine I log into Red Dead Online and my accidently perfected Rade Šerbedžija look-alike was reset to some ugly hill-billy.

Not either of those, no. I do remember one that worked that way, but I'm having trouble remembering which specific game it was.

Riahderymnmaddog wrote on Jan 8, 2020, 15:06:
Well that genius! I do hope you don't plan on infringing on my typing on a keyboard patent

touché

HorrorScope wrote on Jan 8, 2020, 12:52:
They don't seem to discuss when you unlock Bethesda games refresh it also effect the timing of the game, physics go wonky, things move faster than they should. Does this address that? Or did Bethesda finally get around to fixing how frames and game speed were tied together? It wasn't impossible to unlock prior, done tried it years ago.

I'm guessing it fixes those issues because based.on some posts I've skimmed over in the past this fix has been being used by the Skyrim VR crowd for a while now (they all run over 60hz). I didn't notice any complaints.

Also the mod only goes up to 300hz, ha HA new Asus monitor owners!

This comment was edited on Jan 8, 2020, 16:50.

I'm going to patent logging in to an OS.

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 7, 2020, 17:59:

Drayth wrote on Jan 7, 2020, 17:44:
And jdreyer, you've been thirsting for a good SC thread for a while now... hope you're happy. : p

And what exactly defines a "good" SC thread? I mean, aren't they all essentially the same?

A bunch of angry, jaded peeps arguing about Every. Single. Post...? Yeah, I guess you're right.

...but not as vocal about that thirst....

Beamer wrote on Jan 7, 2020, 14:11:
Star Citizen doesn't need a defense squad. Either it comes out and is a good, or at least decent, game, or it doesn't/isn't. Trolling random websites for any message of it to defend it will have zero impact upon that.

This is the stance I've adopted. I try to chime in when things seem grossly misrepresented, but I'm feeling the compulsion to bother less and less as of recent.

If SC makes it or breaks it it's not going to be due to the crowd here.

And jdreyer, you've been thirsting for a good SC thread for a while now... hope you're happy. : p