audaxdreik
@audaxdreik@pawb.social
- Comment on Microsoft’s New Xbox Strategy Starts with Windows and Ends with No Console 5 days ago:
I keep screaming about how the TPM 2.0 requirements of Windows 11 are insidious due to the ability to implement remote attestation now. I don’t think they’ll spring the trap immediately, but it’s locked and set and you’d be a fool to believe it won’t happen eventually.
Remote attestation allows changes to the user’s computer to be detected by authorized parties. For example, software companies can identify unauthorized changes to software, including users modifying their software to circumvent commercial digital rights restrictions. It works by having the hardware generate a certificate stating what software is currently running. The computer can then present this certificate to a remote party to show that unaltered software is currently executing.
- Comment on Nintendo Switch 2 Hacked in 48 Hours — But Here’s Why It’s Just the Beginning 1 week ago:
It still brings a smile to my face every time I play Mario Kart 8 on my Linux desktop using a PS5 controller.
I pay for games where I think money will get to the creators that deserve it, but Nintendo only gets my most sincere disdain.
- Comment on Microsoft and Asus announce two Xbox Ally handhelds with new Xbox full-screen experience 1 week ago:
I suspect handhelds are going to be the future for awhile now. It’s not just out of a growing demand or simply because portable graphics processing and battery power have improved (although those factors do help) but it’s another chance to:
- Push locked hardware
- Funnel to controlled storefronts
- Bring down and moderate the increasingly unsustainable AAA development costs
Those first two aren’t particularly surprising, they’re the key elements that Nintendo has honed in on while Sony and particularly Microsoft continue to struggle. Microsoft feels like they’ve just left XBox to languish while they focus on Game Pass as a means to ensnare you into their economy which is why they’re first down this path, but I think Sony will follow shortly. In an ideal world, I’d love to see Sony get back to hardware manufacturing with a Vita like device you could load Linux/SteamOS onto. Vita was a great little product, done so dirty.
But moreover it’s that last point, really. It’s hard to continue to push out these extraordinarily big budget, bordering on AAAA (lol) territory games that continue to flop. I know the Switch 2 is already doing stuff like Cyberpunk 2077, but that stuff can still be hell on battery life as well as requiring lower resolution and lowered visuals in portable mode.
I feel like Nintendo is making a big mistake pushing that 4K60 envelope with the Switch 2, although I see why they made that maneuver. The Switch was perpetually underpowered and they felt the need to close that gap, but they already struggle to push out big budget tentpole franchises as is illustrated by Mario Kart World being the only big release title. Also, I just want to generally point this out, Nintendo suffers from needing to up the stakes. It’s what lead to Mario Galaxy being such a grand adventure, then Odyssey going even bigger than that. Now we have Kart World because … gotta get bigger than 8 Deluxe somehow I guess.
I don’t know what any of this means or where it’s going, I just wanted to try and call out some of these observations. Turbulent times ahead, I don’t know that anyone really knows what the next 2-3 years will look like.
- Comment on CODE VEIN II — Announcement Trailer 1 week ago:
You’re not wrong. You didn’t even stick around for the pole dancing boss! youtu.be/m4f4z6fZh1I?t=651
- Comment on CODE VEIN II — Announcement Trailer 1 week ago:
Yes! The original Code Vein is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s very rough in spots and a lot of the levels feel like they’re just hallways to connect arenas, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had if it looks like it might be your kind of thing.
The character had a ton of options and the character builds in game let you unlock skills from classes for permanent equip so you could start to blend the classes together to your liking, creating some really cool builds if you put some thought into it.
It’s a silly game, but one I recommend if you’re just looking for a bit of fun and not expecting an overly engaging experience.
…
It’s been a few years, actually reinstalls
- Comment on Deathloop is free to claim on Epic Games 2 weeks ago:
YES! Thank you, finally someone else who sees it!
In my opinion, Deathloop is a spiritual successor to the OG System Shock as well. System Shock 2 and Prey (2017) both adopt RPG elements which is all well and fine, I adore both those games, but OG doesn’t have them and leans more on the interplay of immersive systems, really giving credence to the immersive simulation labeling that feels a bit more obtuse these days.
In OG System Shock, I really do feel you’re supposed to play with the Mission difficulty maxed so you have a time limit. It’s fine if you don’t, I’ve still never beaten it with the time limit on either Enhanced or Remake, but hear me out. System Shock (especially the REAL OG release) was an older game where you were meant to invest more time into it. You were supposed to do new game runs where you start from scratch, learn the world, learn the systems, and push further every time. It becomes more menacing when SHODAN is a real opponent that you can literally “lose” the game to.
Modern gamers don’t really tolerate that kind of stuff because losing a good run to an 8 (or 10) hour time limit feels like a waste of your time, and I can sympathize with that. That’s why Deathloop pulls the idea of runs into a metacontext where you’re reliving the same day over and over again, learning the layout of the different areas at different times of day, making use of the tools available to you until you’re ready for THE DAY when you do THE RUN and basically speedrun the game.
Part of me wonders what a Deathloop without Wenjie’s preservation mechanic (I forget what it’s called at the moment) would look like where you’re forced to re-gather your favorite weapons from their specific locations each run would look like, too. But I get why it was included and I’m not ready to say it would 100% be a better game without.
Oh and Julianna obviously acts as the SHODAN antagonist stand-in even though I know their personalities and motivations are very different. You get how having an ever present, somewhat omniscient foe hunt you is kinda the same.
There’s more but I won’t ramble any further. I know they’re very different games, but you see the outline, right?
- Comment on Zynga shuts down Torchlight 3 developer four years after its acquisition 2 weeks ago:
I think a lot of it is timing, too. Remember, the first Torchlight was 2009, we’re talking pre-indie craze. There’s been no Super Meat Boy or Fez yet, I think. ARPGs hadn’t absolutely flooded the market yet and seeing a very competent and stylized, if simplistic Diablo-like back then could generate some interest. That carried on to the 2nd, which had a lot of improvements.
There’s a bunch wrong with 3 and Infinite, but they were also competing in a saturated market and, you’re right, the Torchlight “brand” didn’t really have enough luster on its own to carry a series.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 2 weeks ago:
I absolutely recommend it! Slope’s Game Room has an excellent, 2 hour retrospective you can put on while you work if you want a pretty good deep dive. Other than that, I recommend getting yourself set with some emulators so you can kind of dig through the series. A lot of the early games are difficult and I think it’s perfectly fine to kind of just pick through them a bit, get a taste, move on, return to the ones you like, etc.
You can absolutely feel the arc of design elements through the early series up to the pinnacle, Rondo of Blood. That’s because it was all being done by Konami teams, often who knew eachother or were handing the projects off. Rondo hits this sweet spot where you can feel the inspiration of old vampire novels combined with dramatic stage plays (the stages have dynamic names like Feast of Flames instead of just area descriptors), told with 80’s anime cutscenes, wrapped into a videogame package. It’s truly a work of art that both wears its influences on its sleeve and also that couldn’t really exist the way that it does in any other medium. So where do you even go from there? Symphony of the Night! It takes everything that works about Rondo and kicks it to 11 while flipping the franchise on its head with an absolutely rocking soundtrack and sprawling castle. You can enjoy these games in a vacuum, sure. But playing the series up to that point gives you a real appreciation for what they were going for and how they accomplished it. I don’t even think you really need to play them in order because going back and returning to previous entries almost feels like fitting in missing pieces of a puzzle.
The series flounders a bit when it hits 3D, but it will always have a special place in my heart. Koji Igarashi takes the Symphony of the Night formula and basically owns the handheld world, especially from Aria of Sorrow into the DS trilogy, A++. Ultimately I think he developed that formula enough on his own that breaking it off into the Bloodstained series feels right and good, I think he’s better off this way not weighed down by Konami and the Castlevania franchise, but in this way, we still feel that arc of development. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night actually took a bit to grow on me, but once it did, I saw it as the most Igavania game that ever existed, he has refined the formula.
All this to say that we just don’t get experiences like this anymore, where series have the proper time to cook and develop. Instead we get Concord where they pour millions into something and try and ram it down your throat, “You WILL enjoy this new franchise. You WILL pick one of these characters as your favorite to get invested in, even though we’ve given you no reason. You WILL make this your ONE game you play because … reasons?” Ditto Marathon. Ditto MindsEye (likely). Ditto all the other rubbish they keep pushing out.
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 2 weeks ago:
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
Agreed. I’m having a bit of a hard time articulating my ideas properly.
I think my overall point is just that it’s really hard to organize purposeful and effective boycotts these days, especially since no matter what the issue, there’s usually a counter movement dampening it. Whatever market forces are causing these companies to register the lack of interest and disdain the consumer market has, I’d like to identify it and capitalize on it because when the market adapts, it most likely won’t be to the consumer’s benefit.
You could live quite happily off indies these days, but it’s hard to ignore the thrashing leviathans. I’m not sure how much I really care about them anymore, but they do take up a lot of the oxygen in the room. And they seem to control a lot of platforms/storefronts as well …
- Comment on When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one 2 weeks ago:
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is media literacy as it relates to gaming - specifically about the design conversations developers are often having amongst each other that players only vaguely feel. Let me elaborate:
A good example is the Castlevania series. From early on, Castlevania was always both refining and reinventing itself. Vampire Killer and Castlevania feel to me like a kind of A/B testing to see what hits. When Castlevania prevailed, they immediately began iterating on the formula with both Simon’s Quest and Dracula’s Curse figuring out different modes of gameplay through nonlinear level design and changing characters. Super Castlevania IV was already a remaster of sorts starring Simon Belmont. Of course followed by the all time greats Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. It had trouble jumping to 3D with the N64 entry which was just called Castlevania again and eschewed the burgeoning Metroidvania/RPG elements of its predecessors.
This eventually leads us to Lords of Shadow which I can certainly respect as a good game with a dedicated following, but it never appealed to me and I had a hard time putting my finger on why. It’s because it’s not just a reboot, but one that kind of wholesale grabs the QTE/cinematic/rage mode game mechanics of the 2010’s and stuffs them into a Castlevania package. It’s difficult to say anything isn’t a “true” Castlevania game in a series that was already very loosely defined as “gothic action probably with Dracula somewhere?” but it had very firmly stepped away from the conversation of its own series.
Even if you’re new to the Castlevania series today, I think you can find great satisfaction in trawling through the depths of the franchise, playing them in chronological release order, and appreciating the various thematic and gameplay elements that each entry contributed to the series. I think gamedevs could learn a lot by looking at this evolution, too. Take look at the Release timeline and note the space in between early entries.
Nowadays, a big game will spend multiple years in development. Inspirations it may have taken from the gaming landscape are years in the past, assuming it even picked up on them when they were peak. When that theoretical game exists, someone may then take inspiration from it and push it into their years long development. The needle moves sooooo … slowly …
And because of that, as we all know, they’re willing to take less of a risk on creating innovative games. There’s this prevailing notion that there are only “good” and “bad” game design concepts and if you mash enough of the good concepts together in a package, you’ll have a good game. They’re all homogenizing because they’re no long trying to deliver on a product to entice you to play it, they’re trying to force a platform/market on you. Take a look at Concord or Marathon or MindsEye or any of the other monumental flops. Kind of like the DCU in my mind; you know the proper thing to do is take the time to build out the world and characters by giving satisfying entries that serve people the things they’re craving. But they keep jumping the gun. If you really wanted Marathon to succeed as a GaaS, why not create a single player game first and allow players to get accustomed to the world and give them something to value to pull them away? The eagerness with which they keep sacrificing projects to snap the trap shut early and make their money back should be a big clue.
Anyways, speaking of MindsEye, I was watching this video earlier which speculates the game was supposed to be another metaverse platform called Everywhere, akin to Epic’s Fortnite. Nobody wants an everything game. Nobody wants an everything app. I don’t want ONE game that I play for the rest of forever, that’s not a thing I ever wanted. They’re trying to forcefully dictate the market at us and everyone is just gagging. As consumers I don’t think we can put effective boycotts together anymore but the market is so utterly saturated and overwhelmed that you literally cannot get people to care. It stands at the complete opposite end of what the article discusses and I think that’s worth meditating on.
- Comment on MindsEye boss claims game's negative reaction ahead of release has been paid for in "concerted effort" against studio 3 weeks ago:
The game looks fiiiiiiiiiiine but I’m already exhausted at the thought of another $80 USD price tag with DLC/microtransactions and forced multiplayer elements.
AAA studios are all doing the same sorts of things and putting just a little twist on it hoping it’ll be enough to persuade you away from all the other AAA games and studious out there doing the exact same thing.
I’m not a hater, I don’t hate your mediocre looking game that absolutely fails to stand out from the crowd, but I’m not gonna buy into your advertising for it either. To anyone who finds a home in this game and enjoys it, I’m legit happy for you. Mostly I’m just never going to think about this ever again.
- Comment on Bungie appears to have plagarized an artist's work and style in their extraction shooter "Marathon" according to this Bluesky post 5 weeks ago:
It’s hilariously awful because, as a fan of the original Marathon trilogy, the aesthetic of the new game is the only thing that appealed to me; and it was stolen.
I have no interest in an extraction shooter. You can make an extraction shooter if you want, but you gotta make something that players can get emotionally invested in first. Original Marathon players won’t recognize this and new players won’t care so what was the fucking point of any of this, I’m going crazy. This industry has lost all direction
- Comment on I'm looking for the Holy Grail of multiplayer gaming 5 weeks ago:
Trackmania, although depending on how you want to slice it, you might consider it ONLY grinding.
Incredibly low skill floor (4 button racing sim) but with near infinite skill ceiling as you learn to master all the nuances of movement, surface types, tricks, etc.
Endless amounts of content with the seasonal campaigns, tracks of the day, and weekly shorts, but also just a full blown track editor for community content on the side. Each track is like a little puzzle where you memorize all the details then try and get your best performance. Play in an online server with your friends and just chat, listen to music, or watch a movie in the background. Find your favorite style and master it: tech, dirt, NASCAR, lol.
It’s my favorite game to just turn my brain off and drive.
- Comment on Ex-Bungie Developers Create TeamLFG, A New PlayStation Studio - Game Informer 5 weeks ago:
After stating its studio would be based in Bellevue, Washington, the statement explains that the “LFG” in the studio’s name stands for “looking for group,” a common internet acronym for people searching for people to play games with.
“Our first game is a team-based action game that draws inspiration from fighting games, platformers, MOBAs, life sims, and frog-type games.”
Studio named LFG and cites MOBAs as an inspiration. More MP only, GaaS stuff.
- Comment on Every. Single. Game. Ever. 1 month ago:
Being kinda serious for a second here, I think this is a byproduct of chasing ever higher production values in service of “realism”. The more they try to spackle over all the cracks, the more the ones they can’t/don’t become obvious to the player. Just like movies, videogames often require a bit of temporary suspension of disbelief.
I’m not gonna write a whole essay about chasing some perfect, mythical balance here, but it’s a design aspect that I feel a lot of developers just don’t consider at all. Maintaining a high level of illusion is extremely difficult and not even always all that worth it. Sometimes it’s just nice to admit you don’t know why that enemy dropped a glowing hamburger that restored 25% health, but those are the rules you’re playing by and you don’t have to question it.
- Comment on Anon uses Windows 1 month ago:
A lot of the advice out there is anecdotal - ask a dozen people, get a dozen answers.
For my part, I installed plain Arch on a custom built system. I use the Nvidia proprietary drivers for my 3080 and I’ve had no issues with drivers or gaming. If you’re talking retro, RetroArch or other assorted emulators have you covered no prob. If you’re talking modern stuff, Elden Ring works online with its Easy Anti-Cheat and I play a ton of Trackmania which chains Uplay launcher (ugh) and have even managed to install mods with Openplanet which is a Windows only mod manager. One time my friend was telling me about an old Windows 3.1 pinball game. I downloaded it from abandonware (myabandonware.com/…/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night…) and just launched the installer with WINE, it even placed a shortcut for it on my app launcher (kinda hated that actually 😅). I feel like that worked more flawlessly than it would have on Windows 11. Most games simply launch with Proton, however sometimes you do get weird issues that may involve trying some different versions of Proton. Dark Souls III for example still gets angry at anything beyond 8.X or whatever.
I think a lot of people look at the troubleshooting you have to do in Linux and dread it as an utter failstate of the system. Not true. In Windows when your system is hosed you’re likely down for a reinstall or patiently waiting for Microsoft to do their part and patch it. On Linux, when something goes wrong you pop the hood and take a look. You don’t HAVE to do it, you GET to do it.
Moral of the story is, your best bet is to try a dual boot if you can and give it a go yourself. I suspect the issues a lot of people are having is because they get too carried away with customizations and system configs. I try to keep most things basic unless I have a really good reason to alter them.
- Comment on Anon uses Windows 1 month ago:
I’m a big Linux advocate these days and my best advice is to set realistic expectations. If your intent is to recreate your Windows experience exactly, you’ll always be left disappointed. There’s simply nothing better than OneNote at what it does, but I migrated my note taking habits over to Obsidian and I’m perfectly happy there now. Turns out I didn’t need 90% of OneNote’s immense functionality.
At the end of the day though, Linux is FOSS: it’s made by people, for people, to solve the computing problems people have. There are a variety of solutions out there. Reexamine your workflows and be open to fitting new solutions to them, there are just SO MANY choices out there for how to handle most problems.
Aside from that, there’s always going to be a small learning curve. People tend to view that as simply a hassle that takes time to overcome and while that’s not entirely wrong, it very much undercuts the real value of learning how to operate and maintain the OS that you most likely use every day, all day. It’s extremely hard to accurately describe the value of investing that time and having an OS that isn’t bloated with corporate nonsense and fighting you to dictate your workflows into their intended patterns so they can agitate you with ads and paid services at every step. There’s a reason we all come out sounding like zealots and while I acknowledge it can feel a little cult-ish, who you gonna trust? Your online nerd community or a corporation who has shown time and time again that they do not value you as an individual user?
- Comment on Anon uses Windows 1 month ago:
It’s not entirely clear from the post, but allow me to provide some further context as I received this same pop-up myself.
I had purchased a legit Windows 10 Pro license with my own money for a custom built PC. Was always a trim installation because that’s how I roll. Still got this out of nowhere when I booted back into my Windows partition the other day, was unclear what app or process pushed it. Some update either added a new app responsible for pushing these desktop level ads or enabled a pre-existing notification feature I had previously disabled. Just a typical Win10 toast notification a few moments after logging in. Dismissed it quickly and did not care to investigate, but that’s about as bad as you can really get, IMHO. They’ve slowly been pushing the bounds, but here we are: ads straight to the desktop.
- Comment on Tesla Stock Price Reaches 'Death Cross' Status 2 months ago:
Second paragraph?
Tesla is just the latest to see the symbol of bearishness, which occurs when a company’s 50-day moving average crosses and drops below the 200-day average.
As an example,
- Comment on Marathon | Gameplay Reveal Trailer 2 months ago:
The aesthetic is impeccable, but I can’t even begin to see anything from the trailer that makes this stand out as an MP shooter? I was already not interested in the slightest because I’m just not down for any sort of GaaS these days, I want single player experiences, but WTF was that?
They threw in some kinda line about death not being the end … in 2025? Death and rebirth is not a new thing. Go play Deathloop instead, I think it’s tragically underrated and the MP can be totally ignored if you like, although its asymmetric design is also interesting if you want to engage with it.
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 5 months ago:
With the Switch 2 announcement, it’s kind of clear that they aren’t even trying to be a tech company anymore. While not every last one of their consoles released was a true innovation, it did feel like something that was built into part of their brand. Now we just have the Switch 2 which is mostly what you’d expect with some decent QoL upgrades.
Nintendo is pursuing the walled garden approach. You’re barely even buying a console anymore, a lot of this hardware has more or less converged. What you’re buying is access to the cultivated ecosystem. Like everything else these days, they entice you in with the big, recognizable brands and hope there’s enough else to keep you there. Emulators straight pierce that veil and it’s why they went so hard on them.
I’m not criticizing (too heavily) the people that choose to hold on to the franchises they love, but once you step outside and choose alternatives, there’s very little to bring you back. Pokemon lost me a few gens ago, honestly not the biggest Zelda fan, and Mario alone won’t do it for me. Metroid and Starfox are scattershot … Personally I’ll stick with the Steam Deck and wait for Switch 2 emulation to roll around. And if it doesn’t, there are just so many other games to play these days.
- Comment on There are Minimum Wages, Why Not a Maximum Wage? 7 months ago:
I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.
The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!
www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/…/index.html
This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less. There’s no telling how directly and flagrantly he’ll benefit from a Trump win, either.
- Comment on Elden Ring: Shadows of the Erdtree will come with a day 1 patch with various improvements 11 months ago:
This kind of infuriates me. On rare occasions loading into the game (unmodified) it’ll glitch out and forget to render the borders for a good 5 minutes or until first teleport. Like come on! I can see it! I know you’re doing it!
Another game, Code Vein (shut up, I love it, just embrace some trash from time to time) did the same thing. I could tell because the layering was messed up and your partner’s nameplate would render over the black borders by mistake …
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.
This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.
- Comment on Steamworks Development - AI Content on Steam 1 year ago:
Disappointing, but somehow inevitable.
"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "
So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it’ll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I’m not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.
I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it’s all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.
I certainly think it’s possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you’re committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won’t be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can’t think of any other base this really appeals to.
