Who says the Linux community is crappy to newbies?
Don’t worry, we have that, too. ;) It’s a whole package!
Jokes aside, glad to help. Feel free to drop me a private message here or in Matrix if you have any more questions or something. Happy Linux’ing!
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn’t have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you’re better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I’m either not aware of or couldn’t list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It’s much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there’s no good-enough alternative, but that’s hardly Valve’s fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
You can always dual-boot, i.e. have both Windows and Linux… or multiple Linux installations, if you please.
Start with Linux Mint for greater stability and familiarity. Soon enough you’ll learn that distributions are basically fancy pre-packaged collections and configurations of mostly the same applications (they’re also called packaged), which should make choosing your distribution a bit easier. There are differences, of course, but you’ll need a deeper knowledge and more of a nuanced list of requirements before it starts to matter much, so don’t stress about comparing them and choosing “the best” for you - you’ll always be able to switch the entire distribution or reconfigure your own to fit your specific needs surprisingly easily.
Lemmy, too, has algorithms that determine what you see - how many upvotes a post has, how many comments, how recent, etc. The communities you subscribe to may have some high-quality, niche posts that you’re very likely to miss because they’re overshadowed by bigger, more active communities where posts simply gain more traction - RSS lets you circumvent that.
Catered feeds, for example.
You can create a feed that only includes Lemmy communities dedicated to a specific topic - like only those related to video games in some broad sense. Or a news-only feed.
It’s much more convenient that just subscribing to everything you’re interested in and then trying to filter out on our own (good luck not forgetting stuff), as you’re basically on the algorithm’s mercy as well.
Star Citizen is a game that’s been in development forever, all while attracting money in forms of donations and sales of in-game ships. A single-player game by the same devs, Squadron 42, is a somewhat similar story, except that people can’t even play it yet (as far as I remember).
A whale is a tern that often means someone/something that brings you the substantial part of your revenue, so in case of the games above, whales would be the players that spend most money on the in-game ships or donations to support development.
The “whale fracking operation” in this context probably means that the entire trailer is a yet another bait for the community to go crazy and bring in the money so that the devs don’t starve and finally deliver finished products.
The punchline is, however, that it’s likely not gonna happen anyway lmao
Your point is fair and works really well on its own, but in the context of the entire game, its systems, mechanics, and the entire experience they come together to create, I just can’t help but feel genuinely bored and disappointed regardless. The writing feels uninspired and generic; contrary to what some people have been saying, the writing isn’t a product of playing safe by the outsourced writers Bethesda used - it’s just bad, like a bad paint job on your car or poorly written software.
Even trying to side with the supposedly lowlife immoral inhabitants of the game’s world, you constantly hear either that they’re all family and friends (despite seeing one murder another because they got ripped off), or that they didn’t have a choice and still try to be “good”.
This isn’t what people expect from a Bethesda game in general, and from a game with ESRB rating of Mature (17+).
Again, ignoring my expectations that the game’s marketing specifically built to be centered around me being able to tell my story and stuff, it’s just poorly written and executed in the vast majority of aspects that matter in a game like the one Starfield is trying to be - the motifs aren’t clear, the storytelling is the most basic straight-up lecture in every quest that never tries to adhere to the “show, don’t tell” principles, the tasks you have to do are just boring and generic, too; it’s 2023, Bethesda has published and made tons of games of various genres st this point, many of a larger caliber, yet they still purposefully choose to go with the cookie-cutter quests that involve no unique one-time mechanics or animations, rely on mostly generated animations that feel out of place most of the time, and have you feel like you’re playing a game from pre-2010 that you should be able to play on a toaster, but are somehow told to upgrade to the latest hardware because the company couldn’t be bothered to develop and optimize a proper experience.
The pain scratches off at way more places than just exploration in Starfield.
Two things I really like are the artstyle and building my own ships with actual interiors, but the latter actually falls short due to massive restrictions in terms of said interior designs and the fact that space is basically a big mostly empty room to teleport to and from, akin to many other places in the game; no wonder an SSD is required to play, and for the worst reasons possible in a modern AAA title of that ambition.
I loved the game at first, but a lot of that was due to my huge interest in the niche it could cover, space, and science fiction, and white unfortunately, I’ve discovered way too many prominent flaws while simply trying to have fun like I always managed in similar games, even from Bethesda.
I hope that mods and DLCs may save the game, but none of that is ever going to fix the game’s broken carcass of poor writing and uninspired practices.
The tons of exploration you’re talking about are copy-pasted identical POIs, too, with the same enemies and objects in the same locations.
I honestly don’t understand what they expected us to be doing for the hundreds of hours and years they they hoped we’d be playing the game for. It’s certainly the most “ocean wide, inch deep” game for what it was marketed to be.
Yeah, you’re most likely right. I just never got anything more powerful since 2017 because it’s been more than enough for the games I play even today, and the games that won’t run well on my old trusty… well, they just seem to require a jokingly expensive investment on their lazy and sub-par programming work anyway, so I’m still giving it a pass. Not to mention that ray tracing still hasn’t gotten me to care enough to build anything that can run that even on 1080p at 60 FPS.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 0.89% (-0.06%)
So I’m a minority now? Really expected way more people to stick to this fine GPU.
AI dungeon is the shit. I trained a few games to be very much identical to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe, incorporating elements from both the games and the books. The best part about it is that you can always modge it in the desired direction, either by rewriting its prompts or doing something that essentially negates or ignores them.
Doubt we’ll see anything worthwhile like that in any 3D capacity, though, as there’s much more limitations there - primarily the corporate KPIs
CS:GO is dead, though, and neither of the popular and beloved entries to the series was ever solely focused on the competitive scene - the community and the casual fun also matter in the world of Counter-Strike, and that’s one of its parts that can be enjoyed on a controller just fine. Of course I don’t expect to be able to perform just as well or better than the M+K players when playing on a controller, regardless of its gyro capabilities, especially in the competitive modes. Counter-Strike is just much more than just a competitive game.
This isn’t what’s happening, though? What are you on about?
It’s not a standard xbox controller. There’s a gyro with several ways to handle it, including flick, which does take a little time to get used to, but works really well as a mouse substitution for such an environment. Some people are just that good with a thumbstick as well and can easily enjoy casual gamemodes.
Steam Deck is a capable beast, even for a game like Counter-Strike.
Gotcha, thanks again, mate!
That’s unironically much simpler, easier, and quicker compared to what you and I want. I the development world, stuff that’s quick and easy to fix often gets a higher priority so people just over it and focus on something that takes much more attention and resources for a longer period of time.
But I’m basically coping here because I really do hope they come around to enhancing the ship builder to be even more customizable and robust. At least lemme choose my door and ladders placement.
Same. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one thinking about these things - I’ve seen many people complaining about then in other places as well.
If only that convinced Bethesda to patch the ship builder and make it a true masterpiece…
We’re getting really lengthy here, and while that was fun while it lasted, we’re clearly both set in our ways, so I’ll answer to only a few topics that don’t simply revolve our beliefs. I know we’re just going to back and forth, ultimately saying “I’m right, you’re wrong” anyway.
I mean at that point why play it though? I figured you’d just see the gameplay videos and move on. Maybe you want to go in entirely blank? Honestly, and controversially I feel the same about a recent purchase I made, Red Dead Redemption 2. I played 26 hours and feels like I barely played 2 hours worth of enjoyable content for myself. That said, my friend’s dog did the mo-cap for the dogs in the game and it’s nice to see.
You’ve proven my point by saying that despite having spent 26 hours playing the game, barely 2 of them were worth it, and no Steam refund is going to listen to your definition of the amount of hours that count for an actual refund. You had no demo to try, and no amount of gameplay videos is going to answer the questions like “How would I play the game?” and “How would I enjoy that?”; to a certain extent, demos don’t either, because they’re not a complete experience and complete experiences count, but they’ll definitely give you a much better feeling of whether you should spend your money on the game.
That’s one reason to pirate a AAA game: you know you might like it, but you don’t want to become a metric on another chart for the sharks to pat each other on the back and say “See? We did it! We were right! They bought the game!”, even if for a 0.001% of the original price.
Kudos for casting your dog there, though. Good boy/girl.
I’ve seen it with a few streamers, it’s uncommon but it happens. Now we are also seeing the rise of paid pirating platforms which are clearly making money off of others’ work as well.
Now, we all generally denounce people making money off any sort of pirated content, be it cinema, books, games, or anything else. It’s about a lot of things, really, but none of them is profit - certainly not these days.
Yeah, that’s absurd but the point is that clearly there is a line there and it’s not yours to draw. It’s the copyright holders. Some people offer Steam family sharing, being there physically or sharing a Steam account requires 1 copy of the game and can only be played by one device at a given time. That’s the line developers draw and it’s on us to determine how we want to share our artwork. I think that’s pretty fair. If I make something, I can determine how I share it, it’s not up to anyone else to take my creation from me, even if that means I don’t lose the original copy.
I buy a book you wrote. Would you insist that I don’t share that book with anyone else and instead tell them to go get their own copy? You’ll most likely say ‘no’ once again, that’s something we both agree on, and a game is no different. Nobody is taking your book away from you, it still is yours in every regard, but you don’t get to control whether people can lend it. It’s sharing, i.e. caring, and sharing often leads to increased sales and exposure through various channels.
You even said it yourself that “there is a line there and it’s not yours to draw”, yet in the same paragraph you say “If I make something, I can determine how I share it, it’s not up to anyone else to take my creation from me, even if that means I don’t lose the original copy.”
Make what you will of it, but you stumbling like that over there clearly shows how neither approach is universally correct and simple, especially given the amount of people and their individual circumstances involved in each case of sharing, piracy, or buying a single copy exclusively.
Here’s for the ones who don’t care about opening the link for one reason or the other:
Update 2.0:
Phantom Liberty:
This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.
That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!
The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!
The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!