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Katana314 @lemmy.world
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Space Marine 2 Devs Cancel Beta To Focus On 'Best' Possible Launch
  • Generally, devs have felt very pressured when given multiple release date goals. By that I mean getting out a playable E3 demo, a “beta”, a demo, an early access for preorders…

    It means if, say, the character has always had a clipping issue with their holster but it’s not a priority, the team can focus on important work/bugs first and their QA just kind of acknowledges the weird holster. But anytime they’re releasing, every detail like that has to be trimmed up for however many levels are coming out.

    So yeah, I’m in favor of them avoiding any marketing betas if it helps them.

  • It's exhausting...
  • Okay, sorry, 93% is also an acceptable number.

    But like, 7% Republican votership is still…weird. And unexpected. Given that that party has contributed absolutely nothing but lies and murderers.

    If a hungry man is hanging from a rope over a pit of lava, I am not starving him by keeping food on my side of the pit, I am prioritizing getting him off the rope and away from the dangerous situation first, before addressing equity issues.

  • It's exhausting...
  • In a potential future where Democrats own 100% of the senate, and nobody sane is voting GOP, it’s also possible for third party candidates to make progress in elections since no one has fear of a batshit lunatic getting into office.

  • Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals
  • I’m trying this game on PSN, but often the dealer is just throwing high numbers at me and I can’t see any economic way I can match them with my own summons. Two bears in a row; what do?

    It’s my common issue with Roguelikes. You’re replaying the first level a lot and things don’t really develop much very quickly. I kinda just gave up.

  • Steam Summer Sale - Top Deals
  • As someone who never touched the difficulty, I think my smooth experience came down to considering the encounters more, not dial-mashing the controller. Some fights work a lot better with certain equipment. There’s three kinds of defense suitable for certain attacks: Shield, dodging, and sprinting (a certain enemy has a long gun attack, for instance, that’s good for sprinting).

    I think I did struggle a bit at an eventual “rush” segment, but that’s coming up near the end of the game.

  • it's a big deal jack
  • People need a reality check on their reality checks. Biden has been living with a stutter since he was young - it has nothing to do with age or senility. Those high-pressure, fast-paced debates just aren't a good platform to measure people up unless they're a showman. I feel confident in my own opinions, but I still freeze up in fast-paced debates where I can't look things up.

  • Changes in Forza Horizon 4’s Festival Playlist and Delisting from Digital Stores. | Forza
  • I’d go one further: The movement can come across as whiney and impossible to please when it echoes the message in a super-blanket way in places it doesn’t make sense, like this one.

    It’s like protesting government actions with “All government should be abolished so we can ALL BE FREE”.

  • Steam Game Recording Beta announced
  • Hopefully the rise of this feature doesn’t mean people accidentally have 8 DVRs running on their gameplay through various gaming apps (not to mention Windows’ Xbox Game Bar does this too)

  • You're in the right place
  • In the video game “Arcade Paradise”, your grubby father has you run a laundromat that you slowly convert to an arcade. It’s a pretty fun idea. And, you get to play on the machines!

  • This pisses me off so much
  • Eating and drinking on set is notoriously difficult to pull off. You see one take, but the crew has done about 17 takes of the same scene. Even with chefs on hand, they can’t bloat the actors up with food. Hence why in most dinner scenes, there’s a lot of cutting and mocked chewing but little goes in their mouth.

  • Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale
  • So, anytime people say this, I’m compelled to remind them: Unlike movie depictions, malware is generally incentivized to not be apparent.

    You install something, they infect, and then they do their best to ensure you don’t know that for the next few months, if ever. Meanwhile, anything as subtle as key logging or checking wifi-connected devices can give them info for some other attack.

    So, I can only say I hope I don’t have a virus right now - but I don’t really know. And I’m pretty sure those pirating groups have profit incentives beyond littering their sites with ads.

  • Microsoft backs up Geoff Keighley after he ignited console warrior outrage over the Gears of War: E-Day trailer
  • If this helps the flame train derail a bit:

    Most Source engine game trailers, like Half-Life 2, are “pre-rendered”. If you record a sequence of gameplay as a “demo” (kb-level file that records player movement in a level) then you can record that demo into a video at a much slower rate than the gameplay, capturing every frame; as well as add camera motions to it. There are guides for individuals to do this using the “startmovie” command.

    It’s just a logical way to ensure the video is seamlessly presented, especially since framerate optimization comes late in development.

  • I'm getting old
  • I'm really not sure how the isekai genre comes up if we're to look for good writing. Every isekai protagonist seems like the definition of a Mary Sue, or whatever the male term is.

  • It's Not About The Nail

    5

    Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy released

    store.steampowered.com Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy on Steam

    Join rookie attorney Apollo Justice and his mentor, the legendary Phoenix Wright, in this collection of 3 games! This title features 16 episodes (including previously DLC-only episodes) and supports English, French, German, Japanese Korean, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese.

    Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy on Steam

    An HD re-release of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Dual Destinies, and Spirit of Justice, for Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PS4.

    0

    Many players have become "patient gamers". What are games people might miss out on by waiting for sales?

    Sales follow the tradition of supply and demand. Products come out at their highest price because of expectations and hype. Then, as interest wanes, the publisher continues to make some sales by reducing price to tempt the less interested parties.

    But this isn't the formula for all games. While we might agree that games from 2000 or even 2010 are "showing their age", at this point 5 to 8-year-old games are less and less likely to be seen as 'too old' by comparison to hot releases. Some publishers have picked up on that theme, and doubled down on the commitment to the idea that their games have high longevity and appeal; making the most of their capitalistic venture for better or worse.

    I recently was reminded of an indie game I had put on my wishlist several years back, but never ended up buying because it simply had never gone on sale - but looking at it now, not only did it maintain extremely positive user reviews, I also saw that its lowest all-time price was barely a few dollars off of its original price.

    In the AAA space, the easiest place to see this happening is with Nintendo. Anyone hoping to buy an old Legend of Zelda game for cheap will often be disappointed - the company is so insistent on its quality, they pretty much never give price reductions. And, with some occasional exceptions, their claims tend to be proven right.

    In the indie space, the most prominent example of this practice is Factorio, a popular factory-building game that has continued receiving updates, and has even had its base price increased from its original (complete with a warning announcement, encouraging people to purchase at its lower price while it's still available).

    Developers deserve to make a buck, and personally I can't say I've ever seen this practice negatively. Continuing to charge $25 for a good game, years after it came out, speaks to confidence in a product (even if most of us are annoyed at AAA games now costing $70). I sort of came to this realization from doing some accounting to find that I'd likely spent over $100 a year on game "bundles" that usually contain trashy games I'm liable to spend less than a few hours in.

    For those without any discussion comments, what games on Steam or elsewhere have you enjoyed that you've never seen get the free advertising of a "40% off sale"?

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    Game genres where "It's just more X content" is more than enough

    We get a lot of sequels in the gaming world, and a common criticism is when a series isn't really innovating enough. We're given an open world game that takes 40 hours, with DLC stretching it out 20 more, and see a sequel releasing that cut out it's late 30 hours because players were already getting bored.

    Meanwhile, there's some other types of games where any addition in the form of "It's just more levels in the series" is perfectly satisfying. Often, this is a hard measure to replicate since these types of series often demand the creators are very inventive and detailed with their content - this likely wouldn't be a matter of rearranging tiles in a level editor to present a very slightly different situation.

    What I've often seen is that such games will add incredibly small, insignificant "New Gameplay Features" just so they have something to put on the back of the box, but that tend to be easily forgotten in standard play (yet, the game as a whole still ends up being fun).

    The specific series that come to mind for me with "Level-driven games" are:

    Hitman - the way the levels are made naturally necessitates some creativity both from the level makers to come up with unique foibles and weaknesses to each target, and from the players to discover both the intended and unintended methods of elimination. Ace Attorney - While they series has come up with various magical/unusual methods for pointing out contradictions in court, the appeal is still in the mysteries themselves, and it's never needed much beyond the basic gameplay, and the incredibly detailed and well-animated characters to hook people in. Half-Life - For its time, anyway. While its Episodes certainly made efforts to present new features, quite often the star of Half-Life games isn't really in any core features or gameplay mechanics, but in the inventive designs of its levels, tied in with a penchant for environmental storytelling; making you feel the world was more than an arrangement of blocks and paths. For a long time, the wait for Valve-made episodes was alleviated with modder-made levels hoping to approach the inventive qualities of the original games. Yakuza - While the series has undergone a major overhaul moving to JRPG combat mode, for 6+ games it satisfied a simple formula: Dramatic stories driven by cutscenes, as well as a huge variety of mini quests, of boundless variety and very low logic. For many of their games, they weren't doing a whole lot to re-contextualize their core gameplay, being fisticuffs combat, and it still worked out well (plus, they're continuing to go that route for games like Kiryu's last game)

    To open up discussion, and put the question as simply as I can: Which games do you follow, that you wish could be eternally supported by their devs, by simply continuing to release new "level packs" or their functional equivalent, with no need to revamp gameplay formulas?

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    Occult Crime Police Case 2: Medium at Large

    Occult Crime Police is an indie-made, Ace Attorney-inspired mystery game about a local town sheriff investigating crazy occurrences in her small, four-figure population hometown of Boomtown, USA.

    The game is CRAZY-detailed with its animations, humor, tons of "Present Evidence" conversations, and it's available for FREE (or whatever donation price you'd like to offer). You don't go to any courtrooms, but it's the same idea, similar to the Edgeworth games; winning arguments to accuse the murder through contradictions and collected evidence.

    The first case has been out for a while, but recently they've premiered case 2: Medium At Large.

    And yes, there is at least one stepladder joke.

    0

    Blue Bikes adding E-Bikes to their fleet in Somerville/Cambridge

    www.bostonglobe.com Bluebikes is adding 750 e-bikes to its bikeshare system - The Boston Globe

    This marks the first time e-bikes will be available in the state through Bluebikes, with 50 of the fancy new rides arriving Wednesday in the Greater Boston area.

    Bluebikes is adding 750 e-bikes to its bikeshare system - The Boston Globe
    2

    Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane (AA-inspired game)

    store.steampowered.com Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane on Steam

    In Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane, you play as a defense attorney who practices law in a world of fantasy and wizards. You must defend clients accused of various crimes committed using magic and use the rules of magic to prove them innocent.

    Tyrion Cuthbert: Attorney of the Arcane on Steam

    Just happened to come across this one on Steam, and the reviews are generally positive. Not expecting it to reach the best points of the best Ace Attorney games, but certainly seems to be worth a try.

    1

    Dead by Daylight x Chucky

    Apparently coming to the public test beta on Steam today.

    0

    [video] Bill Nye got it right back in 1995

    Short segment on the subject, but he was aware of the issue long before many other channels. (If timestamp code does not work, go to 11:00)

    8

    Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate

    store.steampowered.com Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate on Steam

    Join Dangeresque, the world's greatest private eye/crooked cop, as he puzzles his way through 3 bite-sized roomisodes in this classic-style point n' click adventure.

    Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate on Steam
    1

    Massachusetts tax free weekend starts tomorrow

    www.mass.gov Sales Tax Holiday Frequently Asked Questions

    The sales tax holiday for 2023 will be held on Saturday, August 12 and Sunday, August 13. Most retail items of up to $2,500, purchased in Massachusetts for personal use on these two days, will be exempt from sales tax.

    This should apply to internet purchases as well as retail, up to a $2,500 limit on a single item.

    0
    GameDeals @lemmy.world Katana314 @lemmy.world

    [Fanatical] Build Your Own Bento Bundle 2 (Min. 3 for $6: Corpse Factory, The Last Friend, Gal*Gun, Nurse Love Syndrome, others)

    0

    The planned Anti-Facecamp Update

    Facecamping has pervaded DBD since its release, and this anniversary, Behaviour announced a planned change to the game's core mechanics to disincentivize camping.

    The changes are not live, or in any PTB, and there has been no date announced for it; nor has there been any demonstration of its particulars yet. As of yet, we've just had the concept described to us.

    The summary, from their website:

    ----------------- With this update, whenever a Survivor is being face-camped by a Killer, a meter will build over time. This meter is only visible to that Survivor. Once it’s completely full, they will be able to escape from a Hook without need of another Survivor, gaining Endurance and the Haste Status Effect. Note that this system can activate in both the first and second Hook stages.

    WHAT IMPACTS THE METER FILL-RATE?

    The meter fills when the Killer is nearby, with the rate of fill increasing based on the Killer’s proximity to the Hooked Survivor. Please note that this will not impact instances of proxy-camping, nor the times when a Killer is actively defending a Hook from a group of swarming Survivors. In fact, the presence of other Survivors in the vicinity will reduce the meter fill-rate, though the rate itself will never be negative.

    WHAT DISTANCE QUALIFIES AS FACE-CAMPING?

    A Killer being fewer than 5 meters away from a Hooked Survivor will significantly increase the system’s fill meter. Between 5 and 10 meters, the rate of fill will still raise, albeit not quite as quickly. If the Killer is more than 16 meters from the Hooked Survivor, the system will not activate. Please note that the presence of additional Survivors will have an impact on the rate-of-fill, slowing it down.

    WILL THIS INTERACT WITH PERKS?

    If a Survivor can self-unhook as a direct result of being face-camped, they will be able to use any Perk that triggers following an unhook – for example, Dead Hard and Off The Record. Survivors who escape via this system will also be granted the Endurance status as usual.

    WHAT ABOUT TWO-STORY MAPS?

    As it stands, this system will remain active and function as intended on Maps with multiple floors like The Game or Midwich Elementary School. We’d like to clarify that this may possibly lead to edge cases where a Killer is falsely punished for face-camping, so we will be monitoring this closely following release and adjusting as needed.

    --------------

    What are your thoughts on this system? Do you think we'll see it hit live? Do you think it can be abused? Crucially, will it fix face-camping? Or do you think tunneling will become the next point of blame for people's fun?

    3

    July 2023 Developer Update (Hook grabs removed!)

    forums.bhvr.com Developer Update | July 2023 - BHVR

    Summer is upon us, and The Entity’s Realm is heating up. Between an extra special guest making his long-awaited debut and the return of a classic summertime event, our next update is already packed with content. But we’re just getting started: We have loads of exciting features and balance changes i...

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    GameDeals @lemmy.world Katana314 @lemmy.world

    The Steam Summer Sale is on now!

    steamcommunity.com Steam :: Steam News :: The Steam Summer Sale is on now!

    Find discounts on games of all kinds (and on Steam Deck too!) now through July 13th on Steam

    4

    [Meta] What are some recommended image/clip uploading sites?

    I have traditionally used GFYCat for a few things, but their uptime has been questionable lately; on last use, clips that I uploaded stayed in the "Encoding" phase indefinitely, and were discarded when I came back. Searching for "video hosting site" tends to produce ads for many business-focused cases, not necessarily made for embedding into a site like Lemmy.

    3

    Looking for advice about a novel that's grown too long

    I’ve been working for several years on a novel, and in a lot of ways it’s been fun. I have some very interconnected themes, some plot twists that tread the line between being surprising, and meaningful, and a fair few characters that develop through a lengthy confrontation.

    I’ve started to consult an editor about tuning it into something publishable. Due to the way I was writing it, I only recently got the tools to calculate a total word count, and we realized that in the end, it’s far longer than I wanted it to be; on the order of 370,000 words.

    Apparently people like George R. R. Martin can sometimes get away with this length, but I understand this is way out of line for a first time author. I’ve been looking at ways of trimming this down, and admittedly, there’s a few chapters with low hanging fruit I can get rid of; but I think I’m in need of a lot more than that. My editor was suggesting getting rid of entire main characters that don’t have as much development as others.

    But at a lot of turns, it feels like trimming out X causes 5 other problems (plot points lost, throwbacks disconnected) that might threaten to either make the book soulless, not make sense, or even fail to reduce word count when I tie things together.

    The option of simply splitting it into 2+ books has been there, but…it doesn’t seem practical. There’s a very clear villain, with a steady buildup to their dethroning, that would feel unsatisfying pushed off to another story.

    If I assume publishers, or even just readers, would show only mild interest in a 300k word book, it makes me feel a bit stuck. I’ve already committed a lot of time to the story, and it feels grueling to go back and redo large parts of it; while also aiming to make it shorter.

    Curious if anyone has thoughts on what they’d do in this situation.

    6

    Boston - GLX Community Path now Open

    www.somervillema.gov GLX Community Path to Open on June 10 | City of Somerville

    “I am grateful to the many incredible, determined Somerville residents, activists, elected officials, and staff who labored to make this dream a reality (...) The Community Path is the product of so many hands, so today we celebrate both the path itself and the pathway that got us here." ―Mayor Katj...

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/73425

    > Boston has always been a confusing city for transit. Recently, in an effort to improve the Somerville region of the city, the construction group extending the green line completed work on a walking and biking path that follows the green line's tracks, connecting the Magoun Square area, through to the new stations at Gilman Square, East Somerville, and Lechmere. > > The most significant part of the new extension is that it takes pedestrians and cyclists past two major obstacles of the area; the MacGrath Highway, a four-lane road with high-speed traffic, scant crossings, and a history of cyclist deaths, and the "Inner Belt" area, a network of blocked-off rail tracks for the railways coming from North Station. > > The community path's new end destination at Lechmere takes pathgoers through Cambridge Crossing, a rising center that runs many outdoor events, through to connections that take people across the Charles River Dam into downtown, or through North Point Park and the pedestrian North Bank Bridge to reach Charlestown and the Navy Shipyard.

    1

    Boston - GLX Community Path now Open

    www.somervillema.gov GLX Community Path to Open on June 10 | City of Somerville

    “I am grateful to the many incredible, determined Somerville residents, activists, elected officials, and staff who labored to make this dream a reality (...) The Community Path is the product of so many hands, so today we celebrate both the path itself and the pathway that got us here." ―Mayor Katj...

    Boston has always been a confusing city for transit. Recently, in an effort to improve the Somerville region of the city, the construction group extending the green line completed work on a walking and biking path that follows the green line's tracks, connecting the Magoun Square area, through to the new stations at Gilman Square, East Somerville, and Lechmere.

    The most significant part of the new extension is that it takes pedestrians and cyclists past two major obstacles of the area; the MacGrath Highway, a four-lane road with high-speed traffic, scant crossings, and a history of cyclist deaths, and the "Inner Belt" area, a network of blocked-off rail tracks for the railways coming from North Station.

    The community path's new end destination at Lechmere takes pathgoers through Cambridge Crossing, a rising center that runs many outdoor events, through to connections that take people across the Charles River Dam into downtown, or through North Point Park and the pedestrian North Bank Bridge to reach Charlestown and the Navy Shipyard.

    0

    Have we seen a "Fall through the world" glitch yet?

    This category of glitch has been common in many types of games. It occurs to me that if someone ever, intentionally or unintentionally, triggers it in TOTK, they'll just end up in The Depths.

    5