ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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95

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2,246

Joined

1 yr. ago

Mindseye is $60, and it's much easier to stand out from the crowd when the crowd is all the way back in 2010.

I guess I just don't see what it offered that Gears of War didn't, and I thought Gears was much better.

I mean, if it's a technical mess, that's one thing, but I think this looks great. More importantly, we really haven't gotten many games like this in so, so long, and I'm hungry for it.

I don’t know how you one-up the first game.

Well, after playing Baldur's Gate 3, I've got no shortage of ideas. I really enjoyed Cyberpunk, but "this is the strength option" and "this is the hacker option" are nothing compared to how BG3 lets you come up with your own solutions through its systems.

It's going to be in a new city.

Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it's also more carrot than stick. There were efforts to make Linux versions of games after this adoption of DirectX, and they didn't take; I have a Linux disc for Unreal Tournament 2004 that came in the same box as the Windows one. What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren't working. They didn't manage to siphon PC gaming over the Windows Store, and Windows handhelds are demonstrably worse and sell worse than the Linux ones. Consoles' walled gardens are slowly crumbling from natural market forces to the openness of PC, and that includes a PC where almost all of those games work on Linux.

Microsoft does not have a position of strength here right now, and they know it, so they instead pivoted to just being an enormous publisher with a subscription service that's lucrative but has already plateaued.

His producer was. We got that answer in the past few years.

I don't know if it's something that only happened in digital re-releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, or if it always did this back in the day, since I no longer have a Genesis, but the music is different in the official modern releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles compared to original Sonic 3. It's better in 3.

I haven't tracked the performance in Proton for a long time, because I already used that information to make my purchasing decisions, but single digit percentage improvements in performance when running games via Proton has also been the case on desktops for a long time. If there's any further improvement to be seen from SteamOS's game mode rather than regular desktop, you should see it in Bazzite as well.

Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, Microsoft never gave much of a damn about making Linux versions of games. They did have an Xbox parity clause for games that came to other consoles, but that's pretty different than what you're saying.

Dual booting has existed for a long time. Microsoft keeps making it more annoying to do. For my next PC, I'm not even keeping a dual boot around as a safety net; I'm just doing Linux.

Did you know that Steam's monthly active user base dwarfs any single console out there? At this point, it's almost as large as PlayStation and Xbox combined; definitely bigger than the combined install base for each of their current gen consoles. Steam is more mainstream than PlayStation at this point. (However, the caveat is that the Steam Deck can't be purchased at Walmart.)

It might be, but the point of the Microsoft handheld is to grant access to Game Pass and games with lousy anti-cheat on a UI that doesn't suck like desktop Windows does.

If it's the one that got them their recognition, it's little more than arbitrary; luck, place and time; things that don't have to do with how good the work is. Some "masterpieces" weren't considered such until they were exposed to people over and over again, like The Mona Lisa at the Louvre or It's a Wonderful Life on TBS. I'd have a hard time calling a number of games masterpieces that I didn't care for, because this isn't objective.

Your mileage may vary, but there's a bug on the PC version that causes a boss to regenerate health tied to the frame rate. It happened to a friend and me, and we watched it happen to two other friends. Higher frame rates cause it to regen faster. There's a way you can cheese the fight to get around this, but maybe the method would be a spoiler.

(Also, I thought this game was bad and not in an interesting way like its successor is, but once again, your mileage may vary.)

Some of the best co-op I ever played was in Rainbow Six 3, but I played with 7 players, and I don't remember if it will let you mix and match humans with bots on your squad. You'll need a gaming VPN to play co-op, also, since the servers are gone.

Halo is always a good time, as is Gears of War, and it kind of sucks that outside of Borderlands, these are the most recent recommendations I can come up with, but this genre has been left to rot in live service hell.

That SteamOS compatible icon came to my Bazzite mini PC just before I brought it along with me for Combo Breaker. I suppose that leads into what I've been playing.

I competed in Guilty Gear Strive (0-2, sadly), Street Fighter 6 (2-2, which is better than I should have done given how little I practiced), and Skullgirls (a hard fought 3-2). Unless Street Fighter 6 gets a killer patch in the next few days with Elena's release, I think this is where I depart the Street Fighter train.

I also played some Devil May Cry 4 on the plane, and I'll likely do so again on the way back. I would have continued my save of Tales from the Borderlands, but I found out just before leaving that it doesn't have cloud saves. I'll continue with that and Kingdom Come: Deliverance back at my desktop at home.

We went through this song and dance with Indiana Jones and Avowed, too. If this was a strategy that lost them money, they'd stop doing it. It turns out they're just fine with having tens of millions of subscribers that like the idea of getting access to games like these for, in plenty of cases, cheaper.

But you'll see similar rates of players finishing the game that have far shorter runtimes. 100 hours is about how long it takes to finish the game, after all, and that percentage lines up quite well with the achievements for finishing the game. Engagement is a horrible metric for a game like Elden Ring that isn't trying to keep you hooked with anything except a game you like playing; no battle pass, no dailies, no events, etc. I'll bet A Dance With Dragons has far better engagement metrics than The Return of the King, but it's a stupid metric regardless, because they're books.

Categorizing this as engagement rather than just the number of people who finished the game seems incredibly stupid.