I bought this on GoG at least a year ago... as Cutter said, it's a little underwhelming. Your mileage may vary, but I have yet to finish it.

The combat is okay, the storyline is okay. the NPCs are somewhat good (so far), but ... I don't know, it's not really engaging and fun to me. Disclaimer: my playthrough is/was as low murder as possible, aside from straight chaotic evil type enemies, I have not killed any NPCs at all. Your powers are much weaker as a result.

DuckDuckGo making their own browser? Cool, we need more competition and non-Chrome/Chromium browsers. Of course, the article says 'built from the ground up' but uses Edge/Chromium rendering, so I'm guessing it's yet another Chromium based PoS destroying internet standards in Google's favor.

I still can't figure out how these guys fucked up Warhammer 40k DoW 3 so badly. I should have been an easy win.

I don't have much hope for CoH 3.

Ugh. I loved Dark Horse's comics back in the day, and they have still put out some great stuff recently. Anytime I see that some small studio gets acquired, I fear the worst, although I don't know much about "Embracer Group" to be honest.

VaranDragon wrote on Dec 21, 2021, 09:23:

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Dec 21, 2021, 08:13:

Blizzard will never please everybody for a game like Diablo 4, people will complain no matter what they end up doing.

Im sorry but that's not true. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Or in game developer terms, if it's perfected, don't change it. There are a lot of issues with Diablo 2, that could have been improved upon in Diablo 3. Most of those were ignored, and instead a completely different game emerged. There are some things though that Diablo 2 does perfectly, and for some reason those were completely torn down and replaced with Warcraft 3 influenced BS.

One of those things that D2 does nearly perfectly is itemization, and more specifically the way that information is presented to the player. It's clean, elegant, simple and has never been bested in any cRPG game to come since. This is an example of something that needed to be left alone for D3 (and it wasn't). There seems to be a definite push for D4 to return to some of those "values" with respect to affixes and suffixes, which is a good thing. Hopefully they make the presentation of this as intuitive and simple as it is in D2. It's one of those things that just "works".

Well, I do need to go back and look at either D2 directly or some side by side pictures of their item descriptions next to D4, because I don't recall D2 being that far off from this prototype version of D4 in terms of item text, at least by the 'end' of D2 development.

But I think you're kidding yourself a bit if you think 'everyone' will be satisfied if D4's itemization was made to look as close to D2 as possible, I guarantee some people will be pissed off that they didn't evolve it enough, or whatever.

Random comparison I found after googling for 2 seconds: youtube I didn't watch this guy's 25 minute video, but I scanned through quickly for some pictures of both. They don't seem that far off to me, what exactly do you want done differently for D4 than their current item descriptions? D2 was pretty verbose, especially for yellow randoms. For the record, I don't really have a dog in this fight, I've played dozens of RPGs and ARPGs with various levels of information given, nothing bugs me except for being too vague or opaque.

Too much information? Lol, people would complain about the stats being too vague if they didn't put all of that in there.

Blizzard will never please everybody for a game like Diablo 4, people will complain no matter what they end up doing.

Graphically, I like how it looks quite a bit. Their PoE-lite system... eh, it looks like it could be good, but don't forget Path of Exile basically spent ten years fiddling with their Passives system and they still aren't satisfied. I expect Diablo 4 won't finalize their Paragon system for years after release.

That metro system mod seems like an incredible piece of work already, but I wonder if there was a technical limit preventing more than the one car, and it looks like no NPC passengers inside either?

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I wonder if engine limitations like that made CDPR scrap the subway/metro in the first place?

What that video doesn't show, is an hour earlier, when that buffalo flipped that turtle over in the first place, out of pure spite.

Welp, there goes the future of Back 4 Blood.

It's still not 'finished' but there is some really interesting potential. I hope they put Kill-Feeds back in, as well as a more 'normal' scoreboard. Fix those two, and you are well on the way to a better BF experience. I'm hoping they will add more guns over time to the main BF2042 experience, but Portal already has a lot of extra weapons. Specialists are a bad choice (to me) compared to classes, but oh well, they still have some variation and most have utility. Maybe add something to the Engineer specialists like a free repair tool, like the medic classes have a free revive and/or free health gun.

BFV's fortification system is the biggest missing advance from previous games; aside from that, there are still the standard random amazing Battlefield events, sniping an enemy out of a vehicle mid air and stealing it, great C4 or other ambushes, classic flanks, etc. that make the game series great. Just don't expect to charge in as easily in the 128 player mode, there will be a LOT more random snipers etc.

Map design also is a bit weaker this game, with some maps simply WAY too open, for how good sniping and now LMGs are. I'd like to see them do a map revision pass or two and just add more simple structures, whether they be actual buildings, or just rocks and 18wheeler boxes or something, to cut down on the mega sniping lanes that are in some maps. Then, ADD MORE FUCKING VEHICLES per team, per mega map, damn.

It's also seemingly worse than previous BF games, in that it's really easy to get multiple rounds of inexperienced teammates, or teammates who refuse to play as a group/team. Then just as I am about to rage quit, I get a couple great squads of experienced or at least teamwork-friendly players, and it's like the good old days.

RedEye9 wrote on Dec 17, 2021, 10:12:

Lord Tea wrote on Dec 17, 2021, 08:20:
No love for Radeon owners.

The chart has two different specs for minimum and recommended video cards.
Radeon is included in the Ray-Tracing Off portion.

Yeah that's a little annoying, they have no plans to use AMD's version of RT at all, which is arguably better coded?

*EDIT* Or are they really saying that ray tracing without DLSS is basically unplayable?

Cryptocurrency being illegal worldwide would definitely put a damper on mining, because currently the mining operations are not exactly small, and they draw an insane amount of power. Whole power stations, even in the USA, have been devoted to mining operations, most are publicly known. They would be shut down quickly if mining cryptocurrency was actually made illegal.

Unfortunately even major financial groups have started tentatively buying into cryptocurrency, it's available on every phone/PC payment application, Paypal, Venmo, etc. so I don't see it getting made illegal anytime soon, at least as a whole.

I would like to see proof of work coins get made illegal pretty much immediately, the mathematics of power use for those, particularly the biggest example, Bitcoin, simply does not work for human survival.

Bodolza wrote on Dec 16, 2021, 15:03:

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Dec 16, 2021, 13:21:
Well of fucking course a Tencent controlled company is going to invest in Blockchain bullshit

Yeah, because no American-owned company would invest in blockchain gaming.

Of course they will, they are amoral and greedy as well.

Not too terrible. I'm looking forward to DL2, and it looks like I can probably play a fair amount of the game with RT on.

loomy wrote on Dec 16, 2021, 20:20:
It's interesting that people are now reacting strongly to how these false-scarcity digital items are actually unlimited-supply digital scams.

The inevitable crypto crash when people realize that crypto is useless and worthless could cause the next recession lol

Yes. This particular Stalker 2 situation is funny, but globally, the economy may be fucked. Of course, the odds of millions or billions of people coming to their senses near simultaneously is... quite low.

I think they will be able to push cryptocoin pyramid and money laundering scams for quite some time.

Also, NFTs/Blockchains/whatever Technology else aside, what fucking person wants their face put into a video game, with "the highest possible level of realism" ? That seems horrific.

Well of fucking course a Tencent controlled company is going to invest in Blockchain bullshit for mobile games, because that's an amoral, greedy thing to do.

Well, no shit. NFTs are literally just a way to rip off actual artists currently, and issue DMCA strikes against their accounts, by NFT holders.

They bring nothing of value to any arena, and are literally just a more complicated hyperlink. It's mind boggling. No problem is solved by their use, but many problems can be created by their use. Money laundering, game companies making games more grindy and addictive/skinner-boxish just to dangle NFTs in front of people's faces as they are on the metaphorical treadmill, just so they can have higher retention numbers and take a percentage of virtual sales for each transaction later... ugh. It makes me want to quit gaming, or at least quit buying any large studio/publisher games.

Blockchain is a solution to a non-existent problem. Plenty of other games have sold hats or skins or whatever before this, without blockchain. This is also not going to even be a 'real' blockchain, GSC Game World is going to control the blockchain at all times, and I doubt any customer can peruse the entire record. At any time they can render somebody's model or jpg or whatever utterly useless, either by shutting down the servers or just literally deleting it. Energy costs associated with this.. who knows. It will be additional energy wasted, additional servers used, in addition to the game by itself. Even assuming this is energy cheap, this is just going to be used for money laundering, most likely, with some skimming percentages off the top by GSC Game World in the marketplace they will control.

We're literally watching the dissolution of human civilization in real time; I'm only being slightly melodramatic here.

GG greed, you remain undefeated.

Ugh. Good luck, yet another novel that doesn't translate well at all to a movie.

I should re-read the Rama novels, but I swear they are mostly just sci-fi teases, where there is no big story payoff until like the third or fourth novel or whatever. Good luck once again, gathering a billion dollars to make the four movies.