I'm still moving forward slowly in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Not much else to report there without spoilers.
I beat Fallout 2 for the first time. It got off to a rough start by only really allowing you to use melee weapons, even if you didn't spec for them. It also ended in a rough spot by similarly not giving you tons of options for how to get through the final area, and the ones that were there reminded me a lot of 90s adventure games, with very specific solutions that you'd wonder how on earth you were possibly supposed to know that. In fact, once you get to the final step of retrieving the GECK, through to the end of the game, the game suddenly does a very poor job of pointing you toward what you're supposed to do next, which stood out because the game had been really good at it up to that point. The progression was also really strange. Most of the power progression is going to come from armor, but they're really stingy with letting you amass enough money to buy better armor, and armor and weapons rarely drop from enemies at all. Your lack of ability to take on combat encounters for most of the game limits how much XP you can earn, to the point where I spent 3/4 of the game at or below level 8, and then the last quarter of the game very quickly got me to level 18. Those issues aside though, the middle chunk of the game that forms most of your time with it was some of the best RPG stuff I've seen in the genre.
I then immediately moved on to Fallout 3, which I had played before over 10 years ago, and the last time I played it was before I played the classic Fallout games. Especially with Starfield fresh in my mind, I was expecting this to have aged worse, but so far, it really hasn't. Bethesda made a lot of smart choices with how they changed the progression, like giving you fewer SPECIAL points up front and letting you put points into what you want with every level up; plus they flattened the progression on big guns and lasers, which were previously (in Fallout 1 and 2) a stat you could put points into and then never use until the back part of the game. Plus, the quest design is miles better than Starfield. Sure you take a quest that looks like it's just a simple fetch quest, but when you get there, not only are you in the middle of a minefield, which already throws a wrench into the works of how the game typically plays, but then there's a sniper trying to detonate them on you too. Just purely by the game's systems, I get into a shootout with this guy, and my bullet happens to shoot the sniper rifle out of his hand, really showing the power of the sandbox in Bethesda games when they're at their best. That interesting thing that happens along the way in your quest is the thing Starfield needed so badly. Fallout 3 sure isn't perfect; the shooting feels bad, and they're too content to let you follow objective markers instead of using your head more, but it's good to be back.
I also started Life is Strange: Before the Storm ahead of Double Exposure. The opening scene was so bad that I almost put the game down then and there, but I'm told it gets better soon, and I did like the original Life is Strange.
They just made bribes legal and made the president above the law.
I'd just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you're on a train or some other location without internet access.
Nintendo's gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate's sunsetting. Evo's only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn't getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.
It's on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It's the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.
Now that the dust has settled, we’re ready to give you a comprehensive breakdown of the numbers for this year’s event! Let’s dig into some of the registration stats including individual game counts, country and regional data, and entrant crossover between the eight titles in Evo’s lineup.
The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history's largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike bracket. Plus, other nerdy data is here, including which players of game X also signed up for game Y, and what the most popular games by country are. Competition ought to be pretty damn good this year.
Gods Will Be Watching is the one that comes to mind for me. It's a strategy game of sorts with about 7 or 8 totally different scenarios where you're managing a very bad situation. In one, you're holding hostages while executing a heist, and in another you're wandering through a desert with limited resources. Each one is a balancing act, and a through line forms the narrative across them all. It was probably hamstrung by its punishing difficulty at launch, which was later addressed by additional difficulty modes, but there's a lot of room to iterate on this concept without it ever getting old.
They're not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don't follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.
She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn't long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.
But will they credit Eva's voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.
There's also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.
In the US at least, this is false.
Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.
It's a great game, but it's hard to argue that it didn't change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.
I just picked up Dread Delusion, Shadows of Doubt, and Stellar Tactics. I played demos of Dread Delusion and Shadows of Doubt a while back, and both of them blew me away; the former just launched out of early access and the latter is supposed to do so before the end of the year. Stellar Tactics is one that's intriguing, but I haven't played it yet. I've been playing Fallout 2 lately, and it made me want to find a CRPG that was more successful at what Starfield was trying to do; I typed in some tags into the Steam search, Stellar Tactics was what I found, and I think it'll scratch that itch. Stellar Tactics is also in early access, and it's been in early access since 2016 with no end in sight, but it's very systems driven, so I'll likely be okay with playing it early anyway.
I'm not gatekeeping anything. Spirit ashes to tank hits, apply status effects, and whatnot is almost as good as what a competent human is going to do. Summoning does make the game easier. Providing more explicit options for making the game easier outside of the numerous less-straightforward options will reduce the need to summon, which has implications on the availability of people to matchmake with. I didn't even take a stance on whether or not there should just be a more explicit difficulty selection, but it does come with trade-offs, and the ones that From made still allow you to tune the game to turn the odds in your favor.
Some people do get demolished in 3v1. You've still got far better odds when summoning. It's a hard argument to make that it's harder, or else no one would summon in the first place. Spirit Ashes are one of a handful of ways that FromSoft tries to implement the multiplayer systems for people who don't have multiplayer as an option. It's in the ballpark of being almost as good as competent humans.
Star Wars Bounty Hunter - Official Announcement Trailer
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
Better than the people giving it a bad review for difficulty, it would seem.
Last I checked, bosses get an extra 50% health for each summoned player, which means they have double health with three players. Even if you disregard the damage output of three players, even scaled down to the lowest common denominator via scaling, they're just never as difficult when the boss has to split its attention between multiple targets.
That gets trickier when online systems are involved. Your slider is how much exploration you did, how much summoning you do, etc.
There's a revolving door of hundreds of players in the community at any given time. You can find a game in quick match with absolutely no skill-based matchmaking at most times of the day, so it's a total dice roll in that regard, or you can hit up the Skullgirls or Mix Masters Discord servers to find one at your skill level. Hunter Half Hands runs beginner tournaments, there are the Get Gr8 events to help learn the game, and there's a community danisen league to fill in for the game's lack of ranked mode that runs about 3 times per week in North America. This year, at Combo Breaker, the bracket was larger for Skullgirls than it was for Dragon Ball FighterZ. As far as I'm concerned, it's more alive than I'd need it to be, but I'm happy it's this alive.
How To Guess Correctly In Fighting Games
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.
Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Avowed
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
Streets of Fortuna- Announcement Trailer
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
A reliable insider says development on the PC port “is well and truly complete”…
SOLVED Is there anyone here fluent in Lutris who can help me decipher this install script?
I got Star Wars Episode I Racer from GOG on a sale for dirt cheap back around May 4th. I've been trying to get it working via Heroic ever since, particularly the multiplayer, which is fixed via mods. The Lutris script definitely does all of this super easy, but not only would I like to have it working via Heroic for the gamepad controls navigation, I'd also like to pay it forward and document these steps on the PC Gaming Wiki. Unfortunately, while I thought I could tell what this script was doing after scouring the Lutris script documentation, I haven't managed to crack it, and the Heroic install of the game complains about not having IPX installed when I boot it.
https://lutris.net/games/install/13260/view
With the Lutris install of the game and the Heroic install of the game side by side in WineCFG, I can see that that there are library overrides set for:
- dplaysvr.exe
- dplayx
- dpmodemx
- dpnet
- dpnhpast
- dpnhupnp
- dpnsvr.exe
- dpwsockx
All "(native)". For some reason they're sorted to the top of the library overrides and marked with an asterisk, and what's more, I don't see any hint of these ones in the Lutris install script, but they got set somehow, and I don't see the libraries here that are listed in the script.
There are also several ways to use the mod fix, including the DLL override and the EXE patcher. The EXE patcher just crashes and dies right away when I run it in the Wine prefix via Heroic, and I once again don't see any hint in the Lutris script that the patcher executable is being run. And if it wasn't clear up until this point, I did download the 3 files at the top of the Lutris script and extract them to the Heroic game directory.
Are there any Lutris experts here who can help me figure out what I'm missing?
UPDATE: The fix was, of course, very simple. Thanks to @[email protected]! The thing that prevented it from working was the wsock32 override. Just because it's not in the list of library overrides, that doesn't mean you can't just type it in yourself. I've updated the PC Gaming Wiki with instructions for any time travelers from the future.
Announcing Wayfinder Echoes - Forging Our Own Path (online-only game soon to be playable offline)
Wayfinder will continue as a paid, co-op title, with no in-game monetization. Coming June 11th 2024 to Steam.
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way better than the game just dying.
I don't think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I'm letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won't save you from Microsoft laying you off.
Lars Wingefors on why Embracer is going away, and what happens next [gamesindustry.biz]
When Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors declared an end to the company's nine-month restructuring program at the start of this…
For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn't do many interviews.
Personally, as the acquisitions were happening, I was rooting for Embracer, because they were clearly trying to rebuild the type of publisher that the big ones today used to be, offering a large variety of options so that you can have hits and misses and keep experimenting to find what your customers want, where today's big publishers make a couple of games per year, leaving most types of games they used to make on the table, even if they were profitable, because they're not the most profitable. It's hard to keep track of what these three companies even own anymore, after splitting with Gearbox and Saber recently as well, but just prior to this shuffle, Embracer absolutely had so many irons in the fire that plenty of them were catching my interest, like the old days.
Unfortunately, Embracer did this with a lot of debt, and comes to this wisdom all to late:
> I'm a firm believer in equity. I think debt in general is quite dangerous as a tool. You should be careful to carry too much in gaming.
And then he basically immediately disregards this wisdom with the next sentence. There's an old saying from Warrent Buffet, "A rising tide floats all boats…only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." And Wingefors was naked.
Don’t Do the Do - The Perils of the 2014 MTN Dew Game_Jam [Hot Button podcast]
Full disclosure: I'm friends with the guys who run this podcast and have appeared on other episodes, but I thought this story was particularly interesting and worth sharing.
The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games [Accursed Farms]
Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! www.stopkillinggames.com
Crunchy audio coming through some Proton games on desktop but not on Steam Deck
Hi, folks. A bit of an unusual problem here. In some Proton games, in semi-predictable places, I'll get this audio crunch noise. It's not deafeningly loud or anything, but it is distracting sometimes. I first heard it when playing Starfield, and it was most common when loading into a city environment. This crunchy audio sounds kind of like when Hollywood simulates corrupt or glitchy video recordings, and it's in addition to, not really in place of, the other audio in the scene, as far as I can tell. Because Starfield is a sci-fi game, I initially thought it was either supposed to be there or that it was there for everyone on Windows as some kind of Bethesda technical shenanigans. Then I noticed it in Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I had played through 7 years ago on PS4, so I was familiar with the sounds in that game. It was much more rare there, and I had a hard time pinning down a pattern. As I'm now playing through Pillars of Eternity II, it's much more noticeable, as it tends to happen whenever you continue the dialogue to the next step by hitting "1. Continue" or whatever other dialogue options the game gives you, but how frequently it shows it can vary wildly by location. Sometimes I won't hear it for hours, and sometimes it's every time I click to continue the conversation.
I wish I could show you what this audio sounds like. I encountered an area in Neketaka where this glitch happens frequently, so I set up OBS and recorded it, only to find that the audio glitch didn't make it into the recording. "Maybe it's my speakers?" I thought, but I also get this glitch through headphone jack with a shielded audio cable. I tried the game on Steam Deck, which also defaults to running the game through Proton instead of native, and the same scene via cloud save was glitchless. I found some search results saying that some "audio niceness" value may have been exceeded, but when I turned on logging, I didn't see any evidence that that's what's happening to me as the thread explained that I should, and trying the advice they offered anyway, I saw no difference. I've tried Proton 7, 8, and experimental, and they all behave the same; Steam Deck says Valve selected Proton 8, for what that's worth, and my kernel is newer than the one Steam Deck uses, though that is Valve's custom kernel. I'm on Kubuntu 23.10 and kernel 6.5.0-26-generic.
There are a couple of reasons why I chose to run Pillars of Eternity II, in particular, via Proton that I won't bore you with, and I may be able to get around this more-pervasive-than-average problem for this game specifically by running it natively, but I'd still like to solve this problem for all of my future Proton games if possible, and I can fairly reliably reproduce the issue here to be sure that it's gone after making changes. Does anyone know where I can start looking? Has anyone run into this problem personally?
Baldur's Gate 4 Isn't Next For Larian; Something Bigger Is Coming | Spot On | Gamespot
This is a really good interview. tl;dw is...
- their next game was going to be D&D, but they changed course and are doing something else now
- Vincke has a vision for "the one RPG to rule them all", and each of their past three RPGs is a step closer to it
- the next game is not going to be that master vision but one step closer toward it, with their previous 3 RPGs proving out emergent design/multiplayer, story and consequence, and personal stories/performance capture, respectively
- Vincke would like to have this next game done in 3 years compared to BG3's 6 year development cycle, but realistically expects 4 years, as long as there isn't something like COVID-19 or a war in Ukraine to impede their progress
Guilty Gear -Strive- Starter Guide - A.B.A
She looks to have retained most of what made her cool in +R, except there's no Instant Kill for her to route into. Looks like a cool addition to the roster.
How does Heroic Launcher work for WMV-encoded videos on GOG games run through Proton?
I'm considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they're DRM-free, especially now that there's a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there's no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing?
Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it's less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I'd be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.
MaximilianDood Hands On Preview of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
A bit of a media push for this game is coming out now. It looks great in motion, and this is a good breakdown of the game's main systems. I can't help but feel like they copied Street Fighter 6's homework, but I love Street Fighter 6, so I'm not complaining.