I once made this argument to a game dev community on Reddit and was called crazy for it. There are games where I literally have to remove my headsets when they open. Devs that make games for pc should understand that pc users don’t just use their pc to play games, but also for other things. So volume control is obviously tied to each individual app/program.

I would like it if all games launched a simplified settings menu first thing after you open them up, before any cutscenes or intros.

I haven’t played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I’ve seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I’ve watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.

To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that’s worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I’ll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke’s story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it’s some weird generic character that’s there just to perform a function in the world. I’ve played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.

An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can’t just constantly regurgitate something to someone’s face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.

Nowhere so far. We have 0 gameplay for it yet. Maybe soon we’ll get to see something as they stated that the game will come in 2025.

I’ll bother and explain why you’re being stupid and not understanding the thing you yourself posted.

From the definition of factors of production on Wikipedia:

"In economics, factors of production, resources, or inputs are what is used in the production process to produce output—that is, goods and services.

Simply put, rent is paid at INPUT, for things like land, in order to produce OUTPUT, which are things like goods and services. What Steam provides is a SERVICE, an output. You don’t pay economic rent on outputs, you pay economic rent for inputs. Steam’s service being: marketing and distribution of games in place of others, plus integration with analytics and a bunch of other features.

The comparison you’re making is the same as saying you’re paying rent to your team of marketers and accountants…

You could make a point and argue that artists are paying economic rent for Adobe suite, and that game developers are paying rent for unreal engine fees. Without those things, which are inputs for production, neither artists or game developers would have a product at all. Steam only comes into play once the final product is already done. You don’t need Steam before the game is a product at all, which corroborates that Steam is not economic rent, for it’s not a payment made for an Input in order to produce an output.

Also, in what way is the marketplace for games fixed? It’s not a finite resource. There’s no finite number of how many stores there are out there, anyone can go and make their own client and store. There are games and developers that up to this day make their own standalone launchers.

Steams offers a service, the best one in the block. You don’t want it? You’re entirely free to go and figure it out yourself. No monopolistic behavior in sight.

They are in the same universe, and they are both FPS, and that seems as far as similarities go. But maybe it won’t be just that, maybe they’ll tie the plot of the new game to the old ones somehow, maybe the ship marathon crashed in the alien planet where the whole extraction thing happens, and maybe that’s the reason? I’ve never played the original games, but recently watched a youtube video about them and it seems that it was really loved by bungie, and they took many of the lessons from it to make Halo. My bet is that someone at Bungie has always kept those games in a corner of their memory, thinking about how they could revive them one day. Usually, when old franchises are revived, it’s because of some execs trying to make use of their popularity. But it doesn’t seem to be the case here, as Marathon was quite an obscure game.

This could be cool if you managed to grab a second-hand board for cheap.

It knows it wants to be an AAA game in 2024, and we all know what that means…

And paid expansions.

Yeah, I guess that would be the ideal. But starting with just non-commercial use is already way better than what we have today. People could use those resources to learn how to make games, and also to preserve videogames for the future.

They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don’t want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don’t need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.

I’ve played twelve hours of the demo, ten of those last Sunday. Had a lot of fun. Was playing the game with a friend, and we loved the pvp part. The coolest thing about the game is that you can make and design your own trampler, using buildpieces. After we made our first trampler, we went around the servers trampling on everyone. We won a fight 2v3 and another one just after that in a 2v4 situation. Our trampler was designed from the ground up to be run as a two-men team, and it worked like a charm. I was above running guns and engines, and my friend was below piloting and running repairs, in a fully enclosed box of steel.

Ladder climbing is important, but most ladders are short ones. You only need to climb the radio tower once every hour or longer. It’s only when you extract.

I bought that game many years ago, played two matches, never could find a game anymore after that. Still have found memories of it though.

It’s Steam Next Fest rn, so I’m trying my hand at a bunch of demos. The ones that caught my attention so far were the demos for SAND and Sulfur. Sand was surprisingly fun despite the absolute god-awful performance. And Sulfur is just uniquely charming.

It took me a second to compute that Rare boss was talking about the boss of the game studio Rare and not a rare occurring boss in a game.

Baller move from the devs. I wish we lived in a world where the source code of older games were all released and freely available for non-commercial uses.

I like watching his reviews of new mmos and games, usually mine and his taste in gaming align, but I have known for a long time he is an asshole. But this one was a new public low for him (don’t doubt he has said way worse shit in private though).

Honestly, very few of the indie games release with microsoft and Epic banking are truly good. The best indie games right now are the ones released and self-published through steam, you just have to find the ones you like. Steam Next Fest is a good start if you don’t know where to look. The next one starts next monday, October 14th.

This reminds me of Bioware and Dragon Age, they changed everything for the second game and completely ignored why fans loved the first one.

I mean, RIOT has been under Tencent for years at this point and they are mostly doing the same things they did back when they were independent. Only thing you could say that they probably changed is to focus even more on making “cute characters” that sell really well.