How so? It never once affected me and I consider myself a consumer.

I see, yeah that’s the second argument against epic that I’ve read so far that I would call valid. I never thought about them just doing a google and closing doors.

Marginally worse UI/UX (could be improved a bit by now, I haven’t used it for over a year)

Marginally. It does not deserve all the hate.

Way harsher build in DRM

Doesn’t this just affect pirates? I don’t really care as long as it doesn’t mean that performance is sacrificed.

No proper offline mode. Its an opt-in feature you better have enabled while your connection worked and even then you have to reconnect every other day

Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t Steam also needs to phone home when you want to switch to offline mode?

No controller support. I start the Epic launcher over Steam so Epic games get the Steam controller support

What are you going on about here? Every single title I played from the EGS I could play with controller just fine (I don’t do K+M so I play everything with controller and I never had a problem games just auto-recognizing both my bog standard xbox controller as well as whatever is build into the ROG Ally. Also the 8bitdo fighting stick works out of the box).

No mod support

First real argument against EGS I’ve read so far. But doesn’t mods just replace files in the file system anyway? What would you need a storefront support for?

No forums and communities (I know a lot of people don’t need these, but still a missing feature for others)

Yeah, they aren’t for me either, but I can see that there are people who would see this as something positive to have. But then again, isn’t everything running in discord today anyway?

no community reviews, you better belive what the paid critics tell you

I trust those reviews a lot more than fickle gamers who review bomb games because some dev said something that goes against their beliefs.

What does Epic offer other than doing the same things Steam does but less well and in a different app?

I’m not going to count, but by my best guess I have now 100+ games on EGS that I haven’t paid a penny for. For me that’s a rather large incentive to have the EGS client installed on my PCs. And once I have both installed anyway, I don’t see any difference between buying on Steam vs. Epic. I just use whatever is cheaper at the moment.

They have a cart like any other storefront. I’m not sure if this was something they had from day one, but at least it’s not something new to the store at this point. But even if there weren’t a cart, how realistic is the scenario for the typical user that they go and buy 10 games all at once? Sounds to me like some fictional scenario to heap unwarranted hate on the epic store.

I mean I get it if someone says “I don’t really mind either way, but if I had to choose I’d rather buy on Steam because it’s slightly more convenient”. But the EGS gets so much hate everywhere and my question is what the problem is with the store that would warrant that much hate? I really don’t understand where that much vitriol is coming from.

I don’t really get that sentiment. You buy a game -> You download the game -> You press the icon on the desktop/start menu/wherever -> you play the game.

What does it matter what store the game was bought on? The buying experience is a typical store experience on each platform. On my fiber connection the download speeds between epic and steam are both maxing out, and both synchronize saves across my PC and Ally. What else is there that makes one store so much better than the other, other than fanboyism and nostalgia?

Now you’re talking about the quality of a game. That’s a completely different discussion. I obviously take a good, short game over a long, bad game as well. But given that the quality is equal in all aspects, I would always take the longer game over the shorter one.

Baldur’s Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length

I could take courses on rhetoric for the rest of my life and still wouldn’t be able to disagree more with that statement. If anything the game could need an act or two more.

Honestly, whenever I see someone complaining about a long game I wonder why they are in such a rush to finish it. What’s the problem with a 500 hour game? Just take your time. No need to finish it whenever you’re done with it, even if it’s only years later. But I guess gamers today just need their next dopamine fix and can’t be bothered anymore to invest some time into a game. After all the next overhyped game is just a week or so away and it absolutely needs to be played right at release! Best make every game like a 2 minute tiktok so gamers can consume at an even higher rate!

To me, FSR2 always looks like shit. I use it when playing on my SD or Ally and the results always look horrible.

Depends on the TV. For gaming, it would be essential that it has some form of gaming/low latency mode.

Also, why would you pay extra for a “good” main board? That’s literally the one thing where you can go cheap without a problem if you’re not investing in the high-end segments of the other components.

As a sidenote: have you looked at something like a SteamDeck for your kid? It’s a full fledged PC that you kid can hook up to the TV and if you want to watch something on it the kiddo can still use it with the build in display. the base model is also dirt cheap for what you get.

Same here. The only obvious bug I encountered was that Gale somehow was convinced that he and I spent a night together, which we definitively didn’t. I liked Act 3 best though. It felt like all the threads that were set up in the first two acts were coming together for a satisfying /interesting conclusion (stuff like the stolen Gith egg for example). I feel like the 3rd act swims or sinks depending on how many plotlines you’ve set up in your game until then.

I genuinely felt tears well up in my eyes as we watched the Torment Stag boss fight – that moment cemented the fact that I want to play this game.

I somehow have my problems trusting a reviewer who gets teary-eyed because of watching some gameplay video.

Press the left stick during dialogue choices and a little window will tell you what stats are used and if you get any boni on the rolls.

Or cool nonstandard boxes. But retail hated them so now we get easily stackable standardized game cases and we better be happy about it or else.

Well, isn’t that exactly where Microsoft wanted to go in the first place all those years back when Sony made fun of them in E3?