IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.

And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.

And it’s why I hate capitalism as a consumer.

“People need an incentive to invent things!”

Well, if that incentive is making money instead of making a great thing, it’s probably not going to be a great thing. Great things make money.

Deathloop came out in 21. Though as mentioned to the other reply, steam says denuvo anti-tamper rather than DRM (and they claim to have pirated it a year ago), so this could be a different use case.

Just wondering if the anti tamper involves anything in the kernel now, since that was the use case that was originally targeted with kernel level code.

Yeah, and based on my search it looks like it had it right from launch, too. Though the steam page says denuvo anti-tamper, so maybe that’s not the same as the denuvo drm that (I think) uses encryption on certain parts of the code.

Fwiw, I didn’t notice any annoying performance issues. Apparently there is/was a stutter that was fps dependent, but the devs said they didn’t think it was related to denuvo.

I skipped buying Death Loop despite a decent sale on steam just yesterday because of denuvo.

It also made me more glad I just dropped Xbox game pass because that client didn’t show it used it at all (or if it did, I didn’t notice it), and it was on my wishlist because I had been playing it via game pass.

I wonder how many sales publishers leave on the table because of denuvo (both from people boycotting denuvo and from the lack of free advertising piracy gives) vs how many sales it generates because someone couldn’t pirate a game instead of buying it.

Like my own experience with this is when I was playing pirated games, I picked games based on availability of a pirated version. If there was a specific game I wanted to play, I might have looked for it, but failing to find it wouldn’t have meant I was headed to the store for it.

I later bought some of my favorite games after playing the pirated version. Great games made me want to give the devs money. Plus, people tend to talk about games they love, and others who hear about it might not go looking for a free version.

So all that makes me wonder if those who use denuvo are just paying extra for something that just hurts their sales instead of helping.

DMCA takedowns on any videos with one in the background unless they pay their Nintendo licensing fees.

Don’t forget invasive anti-cheat components that can reduce performance, introduce security risks into your kernel, might be spying on everything else for all we know, and still fail to prevent people from cheating.

When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.

Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.

Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.

I used my money to put one of their games in my library and when I noticed (after the refund window) that it was an Ubisoft game, I decided to play something else.

I don’t subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy.

Is it a collection of games or more of a mashup? Ie, do you get a menu where you pick one of many games that are independent of each other, or is there an overall narrative (or something) that ties them all together like the NES remix packs?

Imo work hours should result in equity and a say in how the company is run. Maybe a split like half the votes come from shareholders and half comes from the workers. And if the company does share buybacks, the worker share increases.

Or unionize and make it known that if the company is purchased, the union will walk out or start their own.

Could add a reference to the coup against Xi, too. Dunno if it’s true, but it’s probably something whoever is in control of the CCP would want to censor either way, at least until they are ready to openly replace Xi if it is true (though even then, they probably won’t be calling it a coup).

I have a Logitech mouse and keyboard. I don’t use their software even though it’s free. Other than the shitty switches, it’s a good mouse. Actually, the wireless connection isn’t great compared to the G7 (I thought I was getting frame stutters at first until I realized it went away if I plugged my mouse in). And the battery not being easily removable is dangerous, as mine was swelling when I opened it up to replace one of those shitty switches a few weeks ago.

But if they do try it, they’ll probably be quickly dethroned since mice and keyboards aren’t exactly difficult to make and even today the wear and tear is because they wanted to save a buck or two on switches (or were tricked into thinking crappy switches were good ones).

Maybe they just thought they had a monopoly.

More about monetizing everything, preferring services over products, designing for maximum profit, making anti-piracy a higher priority than performance (when pirates just remove that part entirely and end up with a better experience than paying customers), etc… they aren’t necessarily trained to produce bad content, but the bigger publically traded studios generally seem to be going down the enshitification path while smaller studios or teams continue to put out fun games that don’t just feel like a money sucking machine with a video game mask on.

Business majors confused that the things they were taught in school are failing to generate piles of cash.

There will be a point where APUs will make dGPUs obsolete. Their advantages are huge and it’s just the raw power and bandwidth that needs to catch up. Things like lower latency between CPU and GPU, and the big one: being able to use a shared address space. I don’t think even today’s APUs generally do that and instead set aside some system RAM to act as video RAM, but that setup involves a lot of copying data back and forth between video memory and system memory. If they both can just access the same memory space, that no longer needs to happen at all.

So it’s just a matter of fitting more compute cores on that package (which isn’t limited by chip size with chiplets) and scaling up the memory bandwidth until those advantages above reach parity with a dGPU.

It was good at the time because it was an improvement from the feudal system that basically said the king owns everything and allows subordinates to manage things for him with more layers down to serfs who were bound to the land they lived on. The people benefited because initially ownership spread out and different owners would compete with each other to attract workers or renters.

At this point, the issue is that things are getting consolidated and looking more and more like the feudal system, only with corporations at the top owning most assets instead of kings (which also creates a layer of indirection obscuring the true owners behind the corporations, other than some of the more attention seeking ones like Musk, Gates, or Bezos).

The exploitation of the colonized people and stealing their resources acted as a multiplier to this. Supply increased, so prices decreased for demand to meet the new supply.

Woah, really? I had just noticed that the play button is replaced by an update button when there’s one pending and was a bit frustrated because my gap between playing paradox game sessions is long enough that it usually says my last save might not work.

How is it for figuring out which version you need to go back to? Like would it be enough to use a file timestamp to match it to the version you would have used at that time?