I could have sworn it went on sale exactly once specifically to raise funds for something, but I can’t remember what. I assume for Ukraine, but I’m not seeing anything in their steamdb price change history, anything from their website, or any talk about a one time sale.
If you’re too poor to afford video games, then you shouldn’t be playing them.
Shame there isn’t a gaming platform that often has tons of really cheap and often completely free games. One that has multiple storefronts, each with regular sales. Darn I guess that just means I’ll have to quit games entirely. For the sole reason of being too poor to afford overpriced hardware and overpriced games from a singular company regularly known for overcharging nostalgia bait games. Entirely because one person on the internet told me to, all so he could defend a billion dollar international company.
It doesn’t quite have everything you were asking for but you might like Space Haven. No cats, but you’re trying to keep your small group of spacefarers alive and your spaceship afloat. A lot of the game is resource management, managing faction relations, and doing small scale tactics as you fight against aliens, robots, and raiders. It has some of the small scale control over your spacefarers similar to Sims, but allows you the freedom to be a group of roaming mercenaries, set up your own little outpost on an asteroid to offer services, or raid everyone in sight.
It’s still in early access, but it has fairly active development with several updates having been pushed out this month alone.
I mean the game in question is the first of two remakes of Pokemon Red, and (if I remember correctly) the first official re-release of a remake of Red. I’m not going to say all of the releases are the same experience by a long shot, but it’s a little hard to argue they’re only now figuring it out.
If you want to say that it should have been made more available to current platforms sooner then that’s a different argument.
I generally prefer wired because I get really tired of dealing with batteries on wireless peripherals, wireless interference, and sometimes latency.
I don’t want to leave my controllers on the charger every time I’m not playing since that’ll drain their battery faster, but that also means my batteries will be at some unknown battery level when I’m starting a game up so it’ll last an unknown amount of time of use before dying, assuming it still had any power at all. Usually these days these types of devices have a way to warn you when they’re low on charge, but I generally play on PC and I don’t know for certain if the wireless controller I’d use could alert me. Then there’s the question of if I notice the alert in the middle of a game, or if I remember to charge it when I’m next able to, or if that alert interfered with something I needed to see/hear at a critical point in a game. Then if the battery dies in a game that could be funny, will probably be frustrating, but also could ruin something I was working a long time towards doing. If the battery is completely dead as in like I haven’t touched it in months, then it may also take up to a few minutes before it’ll have enough charge that I can actually use it since many wireless controllers cannot communicate using the charging cable. And of course the longer I use it the more that battery is going to wear out and eventually need to be replaced entirely. Obviously other mechanical parts also will wear and need to be replaced like the joysticks and of all of them the battery should be the most accessible to replace, but it’s still an additional failure point that can cause more catastrophic failure than many others.
Next is the less likely one these days since I feel that wireless integrity has gotten much better in the last few decades, but I distinctly remember constant frustrations during my first real forray into having a wireless mouse with it operating on a very similar wavelength to my Wi-Fi card and somewhat often just simply not working. It would be operating fine for 50 minutes then be completely unresponsive for 10-60 seconds. I also remember specifically that this mouse had some awful drivers that would crash or forget its configurations about once every 1-3 days, so coupled with that and the battery problem it was difficult to pin point the cause of any particular failure with that mouse. I’d eventually see if the drivers failed via an alert from Windows, the mouse would continue to fail if the batteries were low, and it would do things I don’t want if the drivers forgot their config, but for every failure that didn’t do any of those things it was difficult to know for certain what caused that and how to fix it.
Lastly was the latency which is probably 99% of the time not an issue, but adding in the translation layera between actions to wireless comm to driver to action input can be a frustration. The majority of the times I’ve noticed this are with a mouse that’s waking up from sleep mode, so not super relevant but I do know for particularly high octane games it could have an impact.
The alternative to all of these issues is dealing with a cable. I’d rather deal with the cable, the vast majority of the time.
In most cases, probably. And then there’s Nintendo.
Discord has some information about it in their press release about this:
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally
“A narrow use case” is not the same as “no use case.”
It was good, but I always liked the mod that added the songs from Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
- Reviews are mixed: not a great start
Agreed, puts a damper on everything else that follows.
- Requires 3rd-party account: fuck that
Also agreed. If I buy a Steam game, I’d generally much rather it be accessible through Steam and do not appreciate when games are sold on Steam for other platforms.
- 60 euros base game: expensive, especially when the game has mixed reviews
Not the worst price, but yeah I’d definitely expect a much better review score to justify that price. In the absence of a good review score this would be something I’d have to know I’m going to enjoy before I’d consider buying it full price.
- 175 euros DLC’s: are you fucking kidding me? On top of 60 euros for the base game, there’s another 175 fees for content?
I don’t know for certain about this particular game, but I do know people were shitting on Monster Hunter: Rise for the exact same reason: a seemingly exorbitant amount of DLC available from release implying it’s a cash grab and just trying to milk more cash out of the player.
That being said, in my opinion MHR wasn’t even half as bad as the naysayers would have you believe. MHR on release on Steam had a lot of DLC, sure, but it didn’t launch on Steam. It launched on the Switch then later was ported to Steam with all of the same DLC they had worked on since its launch a year prior.
Almost all of the DLC was exclusively cosmetic skins, and almost all of those were part of bundles available for significantly cheaper prices than each one individually. I don’t recall the exact prices but I believe it was something like buy 10 skins individually for $2/ea or buy all of them in a bundle for $5. The real price for any sane person for all 10 skins would be $5, but this showed up on Steam as 11 DLC items with a total of $25. Multiply this by the 6-10 ish bundles they had on the title’s release on Steam to get a huge quantity of items and a massively inflated price compared to what anyone who wanted everything would realistically pay, assuming they paid attention.
I don’t know that CoD is doing a similar thing here, and I certainly wouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, but I dislike this argument against them because it can be very misleading.
- purchasable CoD points: so pay to win?
Not necessarily P2W, but yeah I’m not a fan of MTX either and again wouldn’t give CoD the benefit of the doubt to have a good or fair monetization model.
You could always play with mods. One of them adds pollution scrubbers, which you can surround your base with to make sure biters are never prompted to attack in the first place. I have several hundred hours in one save that has a metaphoric wall of filters that has yet to be attacked outside of a few instances when I was expanding.
Out of curiosity and just for the novelty of doing it, I found another mod that made a combinator device which would output the current pollution for the chunk that it was contained within. Using that, I set up a whole system to turn on the exact number of scrubbers I needed to prevent any pollution from leaving my base. Never actually implemented it because it was wildly impractical, but it was a fun project just to see if I could do it.
He certainly blue it…
They do indeed, that being said in a roundabout way and assuming normal gameplay. Technically speaking if you weren’t producing any pollution then you could destroy every tree on the map and wouldn’t prompt the aliens to attack until you got to the trees close to their bases. Destroying trees in the base game simply allows for less pollution to be absorbed before it slowly creeps towards alien bases.
The amount they absorb is already small enough that it can easily be overcome hence why pollution can escape forests and why you can receive attacks from aliens in the forests, but it’s still larger than the terrain pollution generation and those small amounts add up as spreads farther.
My suggestion was more about creating a more direct response from the aliens. Instead of allowing a little more pollution to spread potentially towards them, it would create more pollution thus bring able to directly prompt an attack if too many trees are destroyed.
The only thing I’m not certain about is I believe pollution has data about where it came from and I believe aliens target the biggest source of the pollution that prompted their attack. If this is how they work and you then added destroying trees to this list of potential sources of pollution then the aliens would be prompted to attack a clearing a trees with nothing in it. Presumably assuming normal gameplay the player would be destroying these trees so they could make way for something they’d be building there, so those buildings could be attacked, but still it would then be theoretically possible to have them scramble to attack nothing. And you could also prompt these attacks remotely with artillery.
Aside from chopping too many trees, that’s already how the game works. I don’t remember where exactly it is but there’s a button somewhere around the minimap or map UI to toggle whether you see a bunch of things on the map like robots, player names, your power lines, trains, and of course pollution.
The pollution toggle is pretty helpful for figuring out where alien bases are beyond the reach of your radars because they absorb pollution and organize attacks after they go above a certain threshold. Since they absorb it, if you see a gap or dip in the pollution for a particular area, there’s likely a base there.
You could theoretically make the chopping trees prompting attacks part work too by making a mod where each tree cut down produces a small burst of pollution, assuming of course that a mod like that doesn’t already exist.
Edit: when you set up a new save in the world settings you can adjust some of these thresholds and values. You can make the aliens more or less likely to attack, the terrain absorb more or less pollution naturally, the pollution spread more quickly or more slowly, etc.
Edit 2: just remembered that you can check every machine and they’ll tell you how much pollution it produces as well. There’s even a few mods that include machines with negative pollution production. I used those mods at one point in a previous save to make a fairly large base that didn’t have any turrets despite a significant alien presence on all sides of my base. I simply made sure that no pollution ever could spread beyond my metaphoric wall and had several hundred hours of play without a single attack.
Pollution also prompts them to attack.
Terrain can naturally absorb some of it and trees can absorb even more but will eventually die from it, so they’re just a temporary stopgap. Eventually when it reaches the aliens, they too will absorb it until they reach their limit then they’ll organize attacks.
That being said, I can’t remember if it’s specifically pollution they absorb that causes them to evolve into stronger forms or if it’s any pollution you produce that does it.
There’s also Clone Hero
In my experience, most people who complain about the length of time it took to develop something like a game have no experience in relevant fields and don’t understand how long it really takes to do the bare minimum for even a 30 hour game experience, much less to make it a quality experience.
I could hammer out a “game” with dozens of hours of “content” in a week that perhaps a single digit number of people will buy before immediately requesting a refund. Making something good is what takes time. It involves a lot of steps of going back, seeing what works and what doesn’t, revising, and reiterating.
Breath of the Wild by comparison also took about 6 years to make with a team of 300 people. Silksong apparently was developed by a team of 3. While I doubt they were living the high life the entire 6 years, I also have doubts they were working each other like slaves. Therefore I believe they were likely working at a more normal pace for game development, and it simply takes that long to make a quality experience.
Given the current administration, bold of you to assume that they would spend a penny more than the absolute, bare minimum on healthcare, transport, etc
The latest Call of Duty game, Blacks Ops 6, is estimated to have a budget between $450,000,000 and $700,000,000. 1/10th of that budget ($45M to $70M) is still more than the entire development budget for The Witcher 3 at $35,000,000. The only thing they would likely need to cut back on is their marketing budget of $35,000,000.
You could probably make a hell of a lot of AAA games for the same price as GTA 6.
In my opinion you really don’t have to think to do quite a bit of stuff and enjoy yourself in Factorio. I think if you want to think about what you’re doing you can figure out ratios, making nice blueprints, building circuits, and all sorts but I have a few friends who had hundreds of hours of fun in the game never once considering anything like “what would I need to get a full blue belt of green science?”
The anti-thinking approach would be “I need red science to get this tech, so I’ll set up machines for red science”, “my iron gears going into red science aren’t keeping up so I’ll build more iron gear assemblers”, “my copper going into red science isn’t keeping up so I’ll build more furnaces”, “I have more red science than my labs can use so I’ll build more labs”, etc.
Personally, I don’t mind seeing the exact production numbers and doing a little math to figure out exact numbers of assemblers necessary, but it’s just as valid to build more X assemblers until the X belt is full, then when X’s ingredients start to run out you can repeat that process for its ingredients.