Titus wrote on Aug 28, 2024, 14:01:
Gulikit KK3 Max and Flydigi Vader 4 Pro are both $80, have hall sticks, gyro, paddles and are Xbox, PC, PS5 and Switch compatible. Easily a better buy than any Razer offering.

Neither one of those are actually compatible with Xbox/PS so there's always that.

I was pleasantly surprised earlier this year when I picked Everspace 2 up and played through the story. It reminded me a lot of the things I loved about Freelancer. Definitely looking forward to this expansion and would highly recommend Everspace 2 to anyone with fondness towards the arcade space shooters of the 90s and early 00s.

AMD's marketing/communication teams are basically entirely to blame for this launch. The architecture itself is fine, but the expectations and pricing are the problem. It's still under consideration for me as I've been in need of any upgrade for a while, but there definitely isn't any excitement at current pricing. It does make it very easy to wait for Intel and potentially the X3D parts though.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Aug 22, 2024, 12:11:
I think it's bordering on delusional to expect double digit percentage jumps in performance in silicon year after year at this point and believing the press releases of any company is, well, let's say "naive".

This is the first time since launching Zen that AMD's marketing materials have basically all been lies. Especially when it comes to their IPC claims which have been at minimum accurate but typically a low ball until Zen 5.

The shifts they did over the course of BL3's lifetime generally improved the game from a mechanics level. The fact that it was basically impossible to farm with friends without exiting and restarting killed any replay value for me. None of the games have had what I would consider a good story despite having several entertaining/interesting characters and the only story bits that really stuck with me at all were some of the DLC. Hopefully they don't fall too much into the games as a service type trap that so many ARPG style games have.

Mr. Tact wrote on Aug 17, 2024, 07:34:

thestryker wrote on Aug 16, 2024, 22:59:
I do feel like it got to the point where I have to start doing the math on everything now because my brain wants it all to work perfectly.

I believe that is called "Factorio Syndrome".

I opted for just upgrading everything that had throughput at the same time to avoid it.

I will say being completely new to this game I did make the mistake of actually building around the vortex and kind of want to nuke everything after I finish my current milestone.

I'm not quite that far in as I'm poking around figuring out how the various mechanics work. I just unlocked fluids before going off to do other things today and the mechanics depth is pretty fascinating. I do feel like it got to the point where I have to start doing the math on everything now because my brain wants it all to work perfectly.

I'm not sure why anyone signed off on bringing Marathon back as an extraction shooter. Going by a chunk of the commentary I saw when they revealed it a lot of other people wondered the same. When you've got a successful franchise that's effectively games as a service turning another franchise into the same type of thing is generally a recipe for failure.

Xeth Nyrrow wrote on Aug 10, 2024, 15:28:
I wonder if Embark is going to reverse course on ARC Raiders and go back to the PvE only as i feel they were also trying to jump on the PvPvE extraction bandwagon way too late too.

When I saw the reveal for this my first thought was "oh is a western dev doing an EDF style game?" until I saw the PvPvE/extraction part of the announcement and immediately lost all interest. Hopefully they do opt to pivot as the concept certainly seems sound.

Cutter wrote on Aug 9, 2024, 16:45:

Mr. Tact wrote on Aug 9, 2024, 15:53:

Cutter wrote on Aug 9, 2024, 15:07:
WKRP was one of my fave shows as a kid. The three eps I'll always remember were that one with Les talking about 'Chi Chi' - love Johnny's reaction. The turkey drop, and when the religious group was going to boycott the station for playing John Lennon's Imagine and Arthur told them to go pound sand.

Yeah, I remember laughing out loud when Johnny mutes the mic, tells Les the correct pronunciation, and Les keeps using the wrong one. Worst thing about WKRP, they didn't license the music in a way which would have allowed them to do DVDs of the series. I probably would have bought those... oh well.

Huh, was licensing music for shows even a thing back then? You'd think that would fall under Fair Use as the music wasn't the focus of the show and only served in the background to illustrate it was a radio station.

There are separate licenses for home video for whatever reason. It may have been because TV shows getting home video releases was rare at the time of the deals. Basically there are a ton of shows that didn't get home releases because the music rights alone would have been too high or they went through and dubbed/removed all of the music.

SP and MP are combined progression that alone is the biggest of QoL improvements. I'm enjoying it a lot and don't really care about the additional account for MP, but they definitely should have disclosed it up front. Sounds like they're using the Epic backend for the easy cross play which makes sense.

I'm still just mostly surprised Microsoft is still just recognizing unions. It's so weird not seeing a US company do everything possible to squash their formation.

Cutter wrote on Jul 19, 2024, 16:28:

thestryker wrote on Jul 19, 2024, 14:55:
It wouldn't matter whether or not the FTC could enforce anything anyways. Their argument doesn't really make much sense given that console folks have to pay for multiplayer. So basically Microsoft consolidated their game pass tiers so the only one without multiplayer is the PC version (console doesn't have multiplayer the other two do).

The price on game pass was always going to go up as it offered way too much for the cost so the move itself isn't really surprising.

Yes, but MS said it wouldn't do that regardless if we all know they would. The approval of their Actiblizz takeover is conditional on those promises. The FTC actually takes those things seriously because they're important. It's not like MS had their suits and lawyers in a room saying, 'Sure we won't raise prices, bro! Pinkie swearz! Lulz!' *wink wink*

Regardless, America became a de facto corportocracy the moment Reagan stole the election and NAFTA appeared. Contrary to what Huey Lewis and the News may think, the heart of rock 'n' roll is no longer beating.

Microsoft didn't agree to any such thing though so... there's that. As for the second paragraph: yes.

It wouldn't matter whether or not the FTC could enforce anything anyways. Their argument doesn't really make much sense given that console folks have to pay for multiplayer. So basically Microsoft consolidated their game pass tiers so the only one without multiplayer is the PC version (console doesn't have multiplayer the other two do).

The price on game pass was always going to go up as it offered way too much for the cost so the move itself isn't really surprising.

Most of the issues the author has are completely avoided by logging in regularly. I haven't used the Ubisoft launcher in forever, but the old version you could do a workaround to launch fine. The battle.net one sounds hilariously terrible, but I imagine there's some way to prevent that as well.

Do I think having a bunch of launchers is good? No, not really, but I'd rather have that than any sort of software access monopoly like is found on phones. There's no money in it for publishers and they'd probably argue loss of money, but being able to launch everything through something like GoG Galaxy or whatever store you buy from without launching another launcher would be a great customer centric move.

Wolfen wrote on Jul 7, 2024, 10:40:

The Flying Penguin wrote on Jul 7, 2024, 10:01:
I can't wait. Planning on starting a new game in the Northern Forest, which is the only starting biome I've never tried begore. After that I might spend a lot of time fixing a couple of my old game saves.

So far everything they've mentioned has got me stoked.

Meanwhile they will be removing a bunch of nodes out of that area haha.

They wrecked it so hard if you started your factory there. I will say I wasn't really upset as the consolidated resources was broken, but I am be somewhat sad there won't be a point in revisiting my biggest build.

El Pit wrote on Jul 7, 2024, 11:59:

The Flying Penguin wrote on Jul 7, 2024, 10:01:
I can't wait. Planning on starting a new game in the Northern Forest, which is the only starting biome I've never tried begore. After that I might spend a lot of time fixing a couple of my old game saves.

So far everything they've mentioned has got me stoked.

It will be the desert for me. And I won't be using any maps on the internet and will find my (moved) nodes myself.

I'm torn between the rocky and dune deserts, but the mountain north in the dune desert annoys me so I'm leaning rocky. Now that you can just put markers everywhere on the map I only use internet maps for hard drive hunting (I'm so bad at remembering about doing this so when I do I usually want to get some fast).

The Flying Penguin wrote on Jul 7, 2024, 10:01:
I can't wait. Planning on starting a new game in the Northern Forest, which is the only starting biome I've never tried begore. After that I might spend a lot of time fixing a couple of my old game saves.

So far everything they've mentioned has got me stoked.

It ought to be really interesting starting there in 1.0 especially since you haven't before so there won't be any "oh man that's not there anymore..."

This comment was edited on Jul 7, 2024, 21:24.

I used to play this pretty much every update, but they had a bunch of technical overhaul and so the rate of new things being added went down a fair bit. Now I hop in and play randomly when there's an update with something or the urge hits. I'd been playing again when they announced node changes for 1.0 which basically meant anything prior was going to require extensive reworks. Fortunately the modding community is utterly insane and there's a huge rework compilation which changes how most things in the game work. For anyone with the game who isn't aware of the modding: https://ficsit.app/

Due to wanting to keep story aspects out of pre-release they've held back quite a bit of new stuff which can be seen in the background of this trailer. I'm mostly curious what they're doing story wise since they'd said they dropped development of boss type creatures to focus on the building.

I know when I first got the game I was really hoping for Sanctum style creature attacks, but the building is just top notch and really interesting. The only quibble I have with the game is that it's pretty easy to back yourself into a corner with building factories before you're familiar with the tier scaling.

It has definitely been a death by a thousand cuts type of situation, but generally speaking still plenty of people playing. They waited much too long to shift development cadence and got known for "nerfing fun" which is never good. I'm still having fun when I play, but I've also been slow rolling it with the game.

They've slowed down the release of warbonds, and focused more on how they balance. The GM has used the temporary "everyone gets x stratagem" more often. A new biome was also recently added, they cut down on the amount of fog type visual obstructions and removed the negative effect that took away a stratagem slot.

They're doing a lot of good stuff, but it's not the flashy type of things that will bring players back. Perhaps when the illuminate make their appearance that will, and the game will be in a better state when that happens.

I think they fixed the spawns problem for fewer than 4 players. They certainly have tried to at least twice, but I haven't checked myself. I imagine folks on the subreddit will have mentioned one way or the other.

The game has never looked like a good sequel to the first Space Marine. It really just looks like a reskin of their world war z game and I'm not sure who was asking for a more in depth melee system. I'd absolutely love to be wrong about the game as I played a lot of Space Marine, but I've seen nothing that sells me on this one.

I've really enjoyed The Riftbreaker so picking up the DLC was a no brainer. Being able to build a giant base that can pretty much defend itself along with having a powerful player character delivers well on the power fantasy.

While I'm not a fan of the survival mode the demo does give a decent idea of how the game itself plays. There's just a ton more in the way of biomes and research along with the story campaign of course.

It has been a breath of fresh air that they've done community first development and only the campaign is gated behind the paid DLC. They're still working on coop multiplayer which certainly seems like it should be a lot of fun.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 21, 2024, 15:27:
Hmmmm...a new racing game based on the driving from Rage 2? Kidding. That would suck.

Not the point I know, but Rage 2 used Avalanche's Apex engine not id Tech.

I'm also a little surprised the freebies have continued, but it's entirely possible they've been driving enough growth to make it work out.

I've never understood why people put Steam on a pedestal as though Valve hasn't done a ton of shady shit along the way. They forced Steam on everyone buying Half-Life 2 and their earlier games multiplayer while it barely functioned. EA had a better refund policy on Origin which basically forced Valve's hand before EU regulation came around. Those are just the first two things that popped into my head. It turns out Valve is just a shitty giant corporation like every other one is.

Personally speaking my priorities for making a purchase come down to price > publisher/dev > DRM free. Generally speaking best price wins, but after price it's EGS for indie games (self published or indie publisher only) or GoG for DRM free otherwise it's whatever happens to be most convenient (games that require third party logins/platforms I try to get on the native platform just for simplicity).