Wallshadows wrote on Mar 2, 2021, 21:18:
I wouldn't have even thought this game would have 35 peopled tied to it let alone 150. That seems.... very bloated.

147 monetization experts, one programmer, one artist, one janitor.

Ozmodan wrote on Feb 26, 2021, 09:00:
Removing multiplayer will drastically dim my interest in the new title

Polar opposite for me. A focus on single player puts this game back on my radar after I had previously chalked it off as yet another GaaS multiplayer dudebro lulzfest.

I actually liked all three previous DA games. DAI (instead of DAO) could have been the best in the series with more focus and less of that MMO-like filler garbage. I hope that they really nail the single player narrative now that the shackles of multiplayer shallowness have been removed. As simple as the premise may be (demon invasion), the DA world is very rich in terms of lore and there are a lot of interesting characters, lands and places to explore. I'm cautiously more optimistic now that DA4 might turn out decent.

Xero wrote on Feb 20, 2021, 00:49:
Diablo was always Blizzard's mature franchise and should go back to it.

If we draw the line for "maturity" at age 12, I would agree. Otherwise, what's mature about it? It's a casual hack'n'slash clickfest, easy to navigate point&click top-down perspective, ridiculous cartoony monster names (like a guy named 'The Butcher') and the "carnage" is completely over the top exaggerated in a comical way.

Laughing Man wrote on Feb 17, 2021, 12:50:

JTW wrote on Feb 17, 2021, 12:16:
Good. Back in the early Medal of Honor/CoD/Battlefield days everyone bitched about how tired WWII as a setting was getting, as we'd seen nothing else in three years.

Instead we got 15 years of 'modern.'

Do you not play video games? Because I'm pretty sure BF1 and BF5 gave us nothing but ww2 for the last 5 years.

Battlefield 1 was set in WW1, dude.

RedEye9 wrote on Feb 15, 2021, 12:34:
That's cool of them to give the enhanced version to previous owners.

It's the least they could do after they had the gall to charge owners for the redux versions of the two previous games.

Mr. Tact wrote on Feb 11, 2021, 14:29:

Burrito of Peace wrote on Feb 11, 2021, 13:42:

Mr. Tact wrote on Feb 11, 2021, 12:51:
Uh, what? Why would UA want those?

Air shuttle service within the same urban area. Cheaper than helicopters and its in their wheelhouse.

I suppose. You'd never catch me in one. Even if the statistics said it was safer than driving a car.

It's not just safer than driving a car but also safer than regular airplanes which are already pretty damn safe (a quote from the article)...

Not only are electric motors more reliable than conventional engines, but they're also light enough that you can put several of them on a single aircraft, offering an extra margin of safety.

Sounds like a major win-win for the passenger(s) and the environment. Amazing technology that will hopefully be the future of aviation in general when electric motors can be made to run super-efficient.

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Feb 5, 2021, 12:45:
In order to be able to run this event they had to remove a planet and landing zone, as well as reduce the player count from 50 to 40. Even then performance has been by all accounts appalling. Heck, even with a RTX 3080 I'm only able to average 30-40fps, with frequent drops to tens or single digits.

CIG keeps bolting on features to an engine that cannot handle it. Just check out the Telemetry Page - not a single setup can average 60fps.

^ Sums up perfectly what all the "clueless haters" have been predicting all the time as a result of CIG's level of feature creep. There are physical limits to how fast bits & bytes can travel on a network. Their network infrastructure already can not handle a rather minor event of a still very unfinished game. Imagine what will happen if CIG actually manage to implement all the complex gameplay systems they have been promising. It's just not going to work out.

It's just the usual EA bashing. I'm no fan of EA either but I don't remember much complaining when Mafia Definitive (single game, not three) was re-released with no discount for owners of the original game at a price of $40.

Besides, there actually is a discount of 17% for Steam owners of Mass Effect 3 in case you bought the game on Steam between June 11th 2020 and before May 14th 2021. Because of an apparent error you might currently see +17% instead of the -17% discount on Steam but in reality the 17% is supposed to be subtracted, of course .

Otherwise there is hardly a fair way to deal with all the intricacies anyway. Some people might own one of the games or several ones on Steam or one of the games or some of them on Origin and let's not even get started on the DLC or DLC packs or the trilogy pack ownership and so on. It would be practically impossible to cross-track ownership across platforms and to apply a "fair" discount for all sub-cases of ownership. There is a very simple fix though if anyone considers $60 too steep: Don't buy or wait for sales.

theglaze wrote on Jan 22, 2021, 15:08:
IMO, Codies had to adopt an annual release to afford the steeply priced F1 license (a hallmark of the Bernie Ecclestone era.)

Exactly. Just like EA. It is curious how one company (EA) is the devil for doing this while the other (Codies) gets a pass. I have personally never understood the outrage over annual releases anyway. If you want the current roster and for your sports game to be as realistic as possible then, yeah, you need to cough up the cash for the annual update. If you are more looking for new features then skip a game (= a year) or two and wait until they introduce something new. Simple as that. Buy or don't buy, depending on preference.

Sequella wrote on Jan 22, 2021, 12:51:

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jan 22, 2021, 12:12:
Welp, goodbye Codemasters. Your sim racing games are going to take a meteoric nose dive in quality and depth.Thankfully, SimBin is still around.

Nah... they're just going to take whatever racing games Codemasters has now and resell them virtually unchanged every year with the year slapped on the name.

Has Codemasters been doing anything different? Or are you telling me that F1 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 have all been totally different games, developed from scratch each year with massive new features, improvements and new-everything?

Liars. Of course they profit from the practice. Geo-blocking did not magically program itself into Steam. Valve included it at the request of gaming publishers and of course they did so because of the money involved. Valve did this to retain the publishers as happy customers.

Mr. Tact wrote on Jan 20, 2021, 18:26:
While I haven't researched it deeply, a casual look at a couple of countries told me it would not be easy for me to move permanently as a retired person.

Yeah, no one really wants old people. For a permanent stay permit in most countries you usually have to be a very rich retiree and take part in some kind of investment program. Otherwise you can only apply to stay longer than a visitor (a visitor visa is typically three months) but you can't usually stay longer than six months, at which point you have to leave the country in question for an unspecified time. The absence typically has to be a few months at a time. You can't just leave and return shortly after since that would be considered abuse.

As for NZ in particular, for a two year retirement visa, you have to be age 66+ and you need to have...

NZ $750,000 or more to invest in New Zealand for 2 years, and another NZ $500,000 to live on, plus an annual income of NZ $60,000 or more.

After this visa... if you meet the visa conditions, you can apply for another Temporary Retirement Visitor Visa.

So, you gotta be reasonably rich and receive a nice annual pension for a "permanent" (unless they decide to change the rules within any two year period) retirement in NZ.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jan 20, 2021, 15:39:

Dev wrote on Jan 20, 2021, 15:16:
I mean I can tell you, it will be at least a year until everything is settled out. In large part because it will take a bit to vaccinate but even when we vaccinate everyone who wants it by summer, there's still going to be like 40% of the population of US who won't do it, and we need 90% for herd immunity. So it will have to burn itself out.

BTW, we still haven't seen the full effects. Turns out that something like 10% of people hospitalized from covid die soon after they get better and are released because covid did a number on their organs and there's timebombs sitting internally.

Well, and then there is also a chance that the virus mutates to a different spike protein, making all vaccination and immunity null and void. Let's hope that it is just a fluke and not reality. The study has not been peer reviewed*

It's not as gloomy and doomy as it may seem. The BioNTech vaccine has already been proven to be effective against the British B.1.1.7 variant. And I just listened to a podcast yesterday with professor Christian Drosten (one of or possibly the Germany's highest ranking corona virus expert) who said that changing mRNA based vaccines (like the BioNTech or Moderna vaccines) would be a relatively trivial matter taking only four to six weeks plus whatever time it may take to receive new validation which could be considerably longer than the actual scientific adaptation process to a mutated variant of SARS CoV-2.
The current situation is that most mutations (minor mutations of the virus happen all the time) are totally harmless and are covered by current vaccines/immunity. Those very few spike protein mutations that may slip by certain vaccines or vaccine types should be easy to handle by vaccine adaptations especially if mRNA based vaccines are involved.

Good guy CD Projekt can do no wrong. As long as the game is awesome who cares?

Rhett wrote on Jan 15, 2021, 20:11:
Wow, if I played Hitman and spent all that money on H2 I would be PISSED. Fuck Epic.

Nope. Don't fuck Epic (or only a little bit ). This one is 100% on greedy IO Interactive. If they decide to create a game series where you can play the first game inside the second game and the second game inside the third game then they should maybe not change their publishing strategy between games in a way that makes this game integration process very inconvenient for their previous customers. We don't even know if Epic approached them with an offer or if IO on their own account deliberately decided to publish on EGS but it doesn't even matter. It was a piss-poor decision with regard to their existing customer base either way. A decision made by them, not Epic.

By the way, it seems like there is also some outrage on the interwebs about having to rebuy HITMAN 2 but wasn't this the same for HITMAN 2 if you wanted to play the first HITMAN inside the second game? Wasn't there a "Legacy" pack as DLC or as part of the season pass? Or was that "Legacy" pack always free? I bought HITMAN 2 GOTY on sale which includes the "Legacy" pack so I have no idea but I thought that you had to originally pay if you wanted HITMAN inside HITMAN 2, no?

aka_STEVE wrote on Jan 12, 2021, 14:15:
The new Z590 is the first time Intel hasn't made users dump their stuff for a new socket design , in like decades ...

So they are definitely feeling the heat... ( just like their processors )

Uh, no?

This is the 2nd generation of CPUs for socket 1200 (Comet Lake + Rocket Lake). It's been like this for ages, notably during the tick-tock years that Intel has always had exactly two Core/chipset gens on the same socket before switching to a new one. Alder Lake which is still supposed to come out in late 2021 (doubtful imo) will move on to socket 1700. All of this is business as usual for Intel.

VaranDragon wrote on Jan 7, 2021, 09:08:

RedEye9 wrote on Jan 7, 2021, 08:29:

Beamer wrote on Jan 7, 2021, 07:55:

VaranDragon wrote on Jan 7, 2021, 07:12:

Jonjonz wrote on Jan 7, 2021, 06:44:
* Emboldened, whipped into a ever madder frenzy, this pro-Nazi mob will escalate the violence until Oklahoma city type bombings become the norm.
* With social media platforms reinforcement and active spreading of fear, hate, and chaos, fascism will continue to rise and this land will eventually be run by a fascist dictator.

I keep hoping this will not happed, but so far, this is the direction things are going.

This will never happen because as soon as Biden takes office (or within a few months at the latest) the US will once again be at war with some third world country and the rednecks will be mollified by their hate for the foreign black\brown\yellow man. I'm not a Trump supporter, never was, but I can't shake the feeling that he lost by a margin, because he wouldn't suck up to the military industrial complex and their escapades into "enemy" territory and opted to openly demonize liberals and minorities within the US instead as his populist policy.
I really hope I'm wrong about this first part though

Of course you're wrong, but about Trump, who dropped more bombs than any other president in history.

Conservatives weirdly seem shocked by that, because they think he was peaceful. The reality is they simply haven't paid attention. The man dropped more bombs than Obama, Bush, FDR, etc.

Helps if you supply a source.

If I'm reading this correctly this is just an all time year high. It's not higher than the total munitions expended in all of those years of Bush\Obama combined. It's not like Biden will stop the bombing in Afghanistan either, I'm concerned that he will open up another front with another country in addition to all the other military adventures that the US is already involved with.

Yeah, and it's also only a year high for Afghanistan in particular. There is no way that the Trump administration dropped more bombs globally than the Obama administration. Obama bombed the bajeezus out of Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan during his terms which must have amounted to quite a lot of hardware.
The relative peacefulness is one of the few positive things about the stable genius. His middle east politics also led to pretty good results taking the pressure off Israel by making UAE and Bahrain acknowledge the right of Israel's existence which is a rarity among Arab states.
Pretty much everything else was a catastrophe though so good riddance and hopefully Biden can serve well as an interim president while the Reps and Dems rebuild from the inside.

MeanJim wrote on Jan 6, 2021, 13:03:
Player count dropping... on a single player game... roughly about the time it takes to play it. I wonder why?

...

Fion wrote on Jan 6, 2021, 12:23:
It's also single player so one can assume in the month since launch, a decently large number of people have beaten the game.

It's easy to check via Steam achievements how many players have finished the main story of CP2077. It's 24.7%. The Witcher 3 after all these years is at 26.5% but its main story is also much longer, no?

Laughing Man wrote on Dec 27, 2020, 12:01:
People watch too much shark tank. Investors at this level are simply ATM's with a promised % returned on money invested. They have no say in development. This isn't some startup company, even after all this they're still valued at 2+ billion. Not bad for a company with around 250 employees worldwide.

CD Projekt already had over 400 employees at two studios when The Witcher 3 was in development and they are at over 1,100 employees now. Granted, this is the number for the group so it includes GOG staff of about ~150 people but the CD Projekt Red dev studio had at least 750 employees as of this undated blurb on their website...

CD PROJEKT RED is headquartered in Warsaw. It has offices in Krakow and Wroclaw, with teams working on the Studio’s upcoming releases, as well as a Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo and Shanghai offices tasked with coordinating sales and marketing activities throughout the United States, Germany, Japan and China, respectively. The Studio’s international team comprises over 750 world-class professionals specializing in programming, animation, graphics, design and production.

^ 150 + 750 = 900 so it is likely that this data on the website is slightly dated. GOG had a small share of layoffs rather than staffing up so it is also likely that the gap between 900 and 1,100+ is made up of employees working at the studio.

A new generation of suckers...