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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t play AAA games anymore (haven’t in years) but I still feel somewhat sympathetic to their plight. What has happened to them is the same thing that happened in the music industry and the film industry and a long time ago in the book publishing industry.

    The marketplace is too crowded with quality stuff and so it’s extremely difficult to compete with what’s already out there. The only real answer is to take massive risks and hope you can hit a home run. Unfortunately, AAA studios just like big movie studios aren’t set up to take risks anymore. They’re set up to spend a huge amount of money on a project that’s supposed to be guaranteed to succeed. Indies can survive more easily in this space because they’re small so they can take more risks.

    It’s like the dinosaurs after the asteroid impact. The big ones are dying off and the tiny ones are surviving and will eventually become birds. Or something I dunno!




  • The problem with these games is ranked online multiplayer. Back in the arcade days no one knew the damn frame timings. People just played and had a good time with each other in person. Console ports brought that experience home so you could enjoy it with friends and family, without needing a roll of quarters. No one had any issues with anxiety over these games because you were just hanging out with friends playing a game together. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If your brother’s Ryu was too good, you just challenged him to beat you with a different character.

    Online ranked play takes all that away. It makes the competition serious even if you don’t want it to be. Now you’re always being matched up against an equally skilled opponent playing their best character. You never feel like you’re making progress because every match is tough as nails. For people who thrive on competition, that’s great. For everyone else it really sucks!






  • It’s really critical for me, to have it feel good.

    Daggerfall also had this issue with missing but you could get your accuracy up a lot more easily and then you’d hit pretty much every time. The graphics of Daggerfall are of course much less advanced than Morrowind but the “thwack” sounds in DF feel chunkier and heavier, and the simple animations have an abruptness to them that really works for the game. It’s quite strange but combat just feels better to me in Daggerfall than Morrowind.

    Of course Morrowind has the far better atmosphere, music, worldbuilding, exploration and all that. DF has the truly gargantuan dungeons though!



  • Yes. Previously the alternative was payday loans, which charged exorbitant interest rates.

    People have tried to ban these sorts of predatory loan businesses before but it usually forces people into the hands of organized crime loan sharks who charge even more exorbitant interest and exact brutal punishments on people who don’t pay up.









  • It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.

    When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.

    As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.

    But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.