NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on WW2 shooter Squad 44 from Offworld updates Easy Anti-Cheat enabling Linux support 16 hours ago:
ER2 is also MUCH less oriented towards the sweaties.
The Expanded Squad Universe games are just a deranged phenomenon. No actual progression outside of a match but it is basically always half people roleplaying (generally in the most racist way imaginable) and half the most insanely sweaty people on the planet. Like… pro FGC players care less about the moment to moment than those Squad players.
But yeah. Easy Red 2 is REAL good. And it looks like the new DLC dropped today.
- Comment on Nintendo Direct Confirmed For Tomorrow, 27th March 2025 2 days ago:
I think Switch 2 is more likely.
I obviously don’t know their financials, but I am going to assume a month or two isn’t going to change things all that much.
So they can either launch for Switch 1 (and everything else) and be “just another game”. Or they can launch for Switch 2 (and everything else) and be the ONLY game. Plenty of “nindie” games did exactly that during the, quite frankly disastrous, first year or so of the Switch 1 and it was amazing for their studios.
Launching as part of the XBOX Boy or whatever MS calls their handheld is also an option. But MS is almost definitely going to take advantage of the albatross that was the Series S to have significant cross compatibility.
- Comment on Upscaling is actually good (as an option) 3 days ago:
Yeah, taht is more or less where I come down. “AI” upscaling is spectacular. Frame gen is much more hit or miss
The main problem is that, as with most things, people are stupid. They don’t understand that an outlet like Digital Foundry or even Gamers Nexus are going to be harsh on upscaling/frame gen because it actively makes it hard for them to give you guidance on what performance you can expect. So “This is horrible for benchmarking” becomes “This is horrible”
- Comment on Painkiller - Announcement Trailer 1 week ago:
Painkiller. A franchise where I like every game considerably less than the previous one.
Still, OG Painkiller and its (first) expansion was REAL good. I also loved that you were just some nebulous dude who was murdering the generals of Hell to be reunited with his wife in Heaven rather than a rogue demon/angel or a CIA wet works agent or whatever we are up to now.
- Comment on The System Shock 2 remaster comes out June 26th 1 week ago:
That comes up every time there is a re-release or a remaster.
If you are content with your setup, cool.
But this is Nightdive. They cook. It is already confirmed to have a subset of the community patch as well as improved visuals and hands and controls. So in terms of “worth it”… it probably is for the vast majority of people even slightly interested in SS2.
- Comment on The System Shock 2 remaster comes out June 26th 1 week ago:
System shock 2 is still a spectacular game
- Comment on Japan's prime minister is mad about Assassin's Creed Shadows where players can destroy the contents of religious sites 1 week ago:
Considering what a shitshow tourists are in Japan? I completely get why they would comment on this rather than just say “It is a video game, who cares? Next question”.
Last time I was in Kyoto I swear a local priest/monk was about to throw some 'bows when a German tourist an his family just walked straight across a zen garden.
Still, the endless chud culture war is always incredibly tiring. And here I am playing Rise of the Ronin instead (the PC port is ass but it is functional ass!). Chuds hate it because women exist. They SHOULD hate it because you can totally gay seckz Sakamoto Ryoma. Sort of like how Nioh “got away with” acknowledging the existence of Yasuke because all the chuds tuckered themselves out before finding out he was in that.
- Comment on ARK DLC Trailer Slammed For Being Made Entirely Through Gen AI 1 week ago:
Generative AI “art” is incredibly useful for small creators to prototype works. Whether that is storyboarding/previs or making a presentation to show investors.
Once that work is ready to be shown to the public? All work must have an actual creator. Whether that is an asset pack you purchased because it is “close enough” or an artist that you contracted/hired.
But also? Studio Wildcard (the company behind Ark) is very established and have been making games for over a decade at this point. They should have artists on staff who are already familiar with the style and design bibles of the Ark universe.
- Comment on Video Game Workers Launch Industry-Wide Union with Communications Workers of America 1 week ago:
The problem is that they can’t.
Crunch is a product of poor project management and underfunded projects. Neither of which are things a union can really fight against.
So what triggers crunch? Oversimplifying, but the investor/publisher says “Yeah, we are cutting you off. Go gold in 2 months”.
Depending on the ubiquity of the union at a given company, the only thing they can really do is say “Yeah. We aren’t working more than 40 hours in a given week”.
That… isn’t going to make the publisher or investors provide more money. It will just mean that what goes gold is even more broken and even less complete. And that just means the studio will get shut down even faster and it will be even harder for union outlets to get funding in the future.
Game dev is so fundamentally broken and the funding market is so dire that I very much consider it to already be in “it can’t get much worse…”.
But stuff like this and the countless sex pest “revelations” are very much a case where People need to learn what unions can and can’t do.
I would strongly encourage listening to the Remap Radio podcast when they talk about this. They are very much leftists and actually have firsthand experience (at Vice) of what unions can and can’t do for their members. And that often is more about making the good times better and trying to make the bad times less bad. And game dev is very much in the bad times and has been for years.
- Comment on 6 years and 1 prolonged delay later, Xbox is still calling "incredible" Hollow Knight: Silksong one of its "upcoming games" 1 week ago:
I mean… basically every platform is calling it an “upcoming game”. I want to say even fricking Nintendo have put it in a few sizzle reels?
Yes, it is a scientific fact that acknowledging Silksong adds at least another week until it releases. But it is also THE biggest indie game out there.
- Comment on Chrono Trigger Is Timeless 1 week ago:
Yeah. I also assumed it was closer to 40 but figured I would check howlongtobeat.
And yeah, if you know what you are doing you are going to be closer to the golden ending than not on any given run. But if someone is doing a genuinely blind run (rather than following gamefaqs) they have good odds of missing out on the truly optional character, missing a lot of good loot, possibly missing out on the semi-optional character, etc.
- Comment on Chrono Trigger Is Timeless 1 week ago:
CT is one of the all time great JRPGs… if you put the effort in.
But it is very much a product of its time between missable party members and even mechanics that penalize you for opening treasure chests too soon.
Conceptually it is cool as hell that there is something like five or six main endings and then a bunch of variants and special/joke endings. But… this is a 20-30 hour JRPG and ain’t nobody got that much time. Although, different re-releases have helped speed those up.
All in all? The big set piece moments are some of the greatest in gaming. The moment to moment are… from the early 90s. I would probably recommend grabbing a totally legit dump of your SNES cartridge, playing until you get bored/annoyed, and then watching a lore video.
- Comment on Valve "followed" 1.7 million Steam users for over a year, and now reports those gamers spent $20 million on microtransactions and another $73 million on games and DLC 1 week ago:
Would that even count as a “whale”?
Less than 20 dollars per user on “microtransactions” which the article goes on to define as “in-game transactions”. And 73 dollars on direct steam purchases of games/DLC which very well could just be a single newly released game.
So… one “battle pass” or two or three cosmetics for a live game and a new game or a season pass or two of DLC for an older one?
- Comment on Morrowind-inspired indie RPG Ardenfall releases in early access this year 2 weeks ago:
Ardenfall looks good and I vaguely recall liking the 2022 demo.
But it is interesting how everything is “morrowind inspired” these days. Which was especially egregious with stuff like Dread Delusion. Those aren’t “Morrowind likes”. They are Gothic.
Sort of like back in the 10s (?) when any even slightly retro aesthetic FPS was “a DOOM game”. Which was REALLY funny with stuff like Strafe where EVERYONE hated it because it didn’t feel enough like DOOM… because it was just Quake 1.
I loved Morrowind and I loved Gothic and I loved Kings Field so all this shit is great for me. But it is real annoying and I am concerned when an otherwise amazing game will get clowned on because there was more Daggerfall or Gothic than Morrowind in the “Morrowind inspired game”.
- Comment on Vampire Survivors devs launch official wiki "free of ads, banners, and all of the junk that gets in your way" 2 weeks ago:
A lot of devs of “wiki games” have been doing this lately.
Digital Extremes/Warframe did it a month or two back. And a lot of people have speculated that wiki.warframe.com/…/WARFRAME_Wiki:Stakeholder_Ana… and the old fandom equivalent “explains” it but that is inherently tinfoil and biased speculation.
- Comment on Vampire Survivors devs launch official wiki "free of ads, banners, and all of the junk that gets in your way" 2 weeks ago:
Relative to a fandom wiki: I guess? Although you are inherently going to have the same content theft problems where the vast majority of modern wikis are just ripped from the game guides that games media are still paid to prepare.
Relative to an official wiki with developer backing? No, it is not a replacement.
Also: I would generally be very wary of any of the plugins to redirect you since they have VERY broad permissions to… hijack your browser traffic. If you are keeping up to date and monitoring them you are probably fine but that feels like a great example in waiting to find out a bad actor pushed some code last week…
- Comment on Half-Life 2 RTX | Demo with Full Ray Tracing and Dlss 4 Announce 2 weeks ago:
Makes sense.
It is the fundamental problem with anything with “realistic” “raster” lighting. Visually you want it to look like what a city street actually looks like. Lamp post there with a nice bright bulb in it. But the actual lighting needs to look like it was filmed on a sound stage with a blue filter because THAT is “realistic”. So you have a lot of lighting trickery and so forth. The texture of the light source/bulb might be super bright but it is actually three invisible light sources that project the light that was baked into that scene.
When you switch that over to RTX? Maybe you hand tweak it so you actually get light from that street light. And, as anyone who has actually walked around a city at night can tell you, that shit is bright as hell… which makes all the areas where a street light isn’t REALLY dark and kind of creepy. Or maybe it is the phantom light sources that made things look nice that now make things look wrong.
We ran into this a lot at the start of the RT generation. Some parts of Control looked AMAZING and other parts look like… an office building. Some parts of Cyberpunk 2077 looked gorgeous and straight out of a Nicolas Refn film and others looked shiny and splotchy.
Its why I am so excited that the new DOOM is going to require Ray Tracing. That is gonna REALLY suck since I am “Team AMD” but it also means that level designers will be targeting one lighting scheme and can design around that.
- Comment on An official Elder Scrolls Oblivion remake will release as soon as next month, claims report 2 weeks ago:
I would be amazed if it wasn’t since Bethesda proper heavily depends on user mods and the remake would likely want to reuse at least the logic in the .esm files (or whatever they were back then).
That said: Expect all existing Oblivion mods to not work without a LOT of effort (so all the usual anger) and likely an even bigger push for the Creation Club/paid mod marketplace.
- Comment on Sci-fi and fantasy are at odds in Split Fiction, which makes no sense 2 weeks ago:
Which gets to the crux of it. Unless you are reading REALLY hard sci-fi, most of the tech boils down to “a wizard did it”.
Like, the OT of Star Wars is 100% a fantasy series and it was only the EU (and later the PT) that tried to explain the tech and make it more sci-fi. Similarly, a lot of the litrpg writers think Sanderson is a softy and go ridiculously hard on explaining their magic systems in greater detail than actual textbooks.
And, at the end of the day, they are all just different shades of speculative fiction that primarily use magic/tech/magitech as a plot device to explore the impact on society of whatever metaphor the big bad is.
- Comment on Sci-fi and fantasy are at odds in Split Fiction, which makes no sense 2 weeks ago:
I have long standing issues with fares and the narrative shortcuts and tropes he uses.
But yeah. Watched the first hour or so on a stream and it was pure nonsense. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what SFF even is (there is a reason we just call it “Science Fiction and Fantasy”) but even what writing is. One character can never shut the fuck up about how “I am going to get published. Were you published. PUBLISHED” because apparently this dystopic future where machine learning steals ideas from people and combine them into the best stories ever told doesn’t have ebooks.
I got on a Whitest Kids You Know kick recently and they were talking about when they jacked off one of the guys on stage in a massage parlor skit. And I think it was Trevor (RIP) who couldn’t stop laughing about how they were dumbass kids who had no idea how ANYTHING worked and that was the basis for so many of their skits.
And yeah. That is definitely the rosetta stone to fares et al’s writing. Whether they are talking about undercover cops or writing or what it means to be a child of divorce.
- Comment on Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns – Official T-1000 Gameplay Trailer 2 weeks ago:
They replaced Sonia Blade’s VO with ronda rousey because they apparently wanted incredibly wooden delivery of every single line. rousey is a terf who was also a sandy hook truther up until she got clowned on so hard by the reddit wrestling community (the same one who keep insisting that nobody could possibly have known about what vince mcmahon was doing one door over from their office…) that she insisted she was just asking questions and had changed her mind.
Someone like tom cruise or donnie yen is deeply problematic but at least is entertaining. rousey is a shitbag who makes everything she has ever been in less enjoyable.
- Comment on Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns – Official T-1000 Gameplay Trailer 2 weeks ago:
I have finally figured out why the modern MK animations are so horrifically ass. They are trying to replicate the old pseudo-FMV of the original games but with high fidelity models. So everything looks incredibly stiff the moment an attack animation ends because it is just skipping/fast forwarding frames. So you have all the floatiness of a Tekken while somehow being even more stiff than MK2 was.
Still. T-1000’s moves look fine? I haven’t kept up with the series since I noped out on 11 (?) because of the Sandy Hook truther terf but is Bobby’s moveset actually built around grandma? Or is she his assist and just front and center for some reason? And I will admit that I found the fatality to be emblematic of all the problems I have had with modern MK where it is just gory and boring? Like, it is very much a reference to the movies but… you have a liquid metal monstrocity. Give us some body horror amped up to 11 so it is funny as hell.
Also, while I am whinging: I assume that wasn’t ACTUALLY Bobby Patrick because they didn’t say it was. But it really sounds like the VA was emulating modern “I have smoked three packs a day for 50 years” Bobby and not 90s B Pat.
- Comment on Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Studio Will Work On Several Projects Simultaneously, Insipired From CDPR 2 weeks ago:
And not a single black person in any of them.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 2 weeks ago:
There were no sex cards, but if memory serves you could “romance” Jaheira (while effectively standing on the still warm corpse of her husband), Aerie (I remember that being kind of fucked but it has been 20 years), Viconia, and one of the boring dudes.
The “romances” weren’t particularly well written but… they honestly aren’t much better these days. We mostly just, as a culture, have moved on from needing everything to be a storybook romance and understanding that sometimes you just need a bang. Which makes “romance” in games a hell of a lot easier.
But also, since BG2 (well, NWN), Bioware have basically made their entire thing “romance options” and so forth. Similar to how Obsidian and Owlcat decided the real culture war was Turn Based versus Real Time With Pause. And Larian realized that we could do all the environmental nonsense that was originally only an option for tabletop games with GMs who didn’t know why you were asking when it last rained.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 3 weeks ago:
None of what you listed is “new”. Also, Morrowind wasn’t actually “strange” in the slightest. Plenty of fantasy RPGs had elements of sci-fi and weird bug shit (see: Wizardry and even Might and Magic) and the “you can screw up the main quest” was similarly common at the time. Planescape I’ll give you.
Which is also true here. BG3 is not “strange”, It is literally the third Baldurs Gate game and continues most of the same themes and concepts. Yeah, it is a whole lot more gay but even that is not out of the ordinary for CRPGs at this point and had been pushed by companies like Larian, Obsidian, and Owlcat. Hell, the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages deserve a LOT of props for how horny and gay they were and normalizing the idea of picking the right dialogue options for a sexy card cutscene (also see CD Projekt Red).
And KCD2 is one of the most bog standard power fantasy games out there.
- Comment on The MechLock wall mount for Steam Deck looks ridiculously slick 3 weeks ago:
So…
Is this an obesity thing? I remember back when I thought the switch joycons were “cool for docked mode” but was shocked when I found out how many people just put it on its (horrible) kickstand and played with their arms at their side. And when researching a kobo discovered that there is an entire culture of people who prop their e-readers on their chests and buy projector dongles as “page turners”.
And now this.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to videos@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on EA has open sourced Command & Conquer: Red Alert under GPLv3 4 weeks ago:
RENEGADE!!!
- Comment on Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 4 weeks ago:
Honestly… yeah.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an “I almost flunked out of college because of WoW” story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let’s ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those…). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That “I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want” equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
- Comment on Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 4 weeks ago:
I can’t speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just “addictive” because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to “escapism” than not when you get into that “one more turn” cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the “This is fine if you are 13” system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings… which will go down great in an era of “Eww, trigger warnings are woke”. But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is “safe” for him to play a new game. And… it is kind of concerning how often the answer is “no”.