Would love to see them come to the fediverse, even if it was just something as simple as a bot. Their site is all RSSed up though. Can sub to the whole site here: aftermath.site/feed
It has a great “add feed” that can search for websites with feeds. So you can simply search for “aftermath” and it will find it — as opposed to knowing the feed already, or going on the site and then looking for the feed there.
You can also search for other sites or topics and build your own self-curated news sources without any algorithm.
If you end up not liking Flyn you can export your feeds as an OPML file and move to another app (just make sure that one has an export as well so you don’t end up locked in).
Blizzard cut their teeth and grew most of their oldest fans on RTS’s, and now don’t want to make more RTS because the average gamer wants to play an arena game, battle royal or rpg. The RTS market is there, investors just don’t see it because RTS tends to be more niche and players putting in more hours overall compared to more casual friendly genres.
To be fair, I reckon a well made SC FPS could be pretty rad if you got to play each species/unit type. Playing as a Zealot or Dark Templar would be awesome.
I remember those rumors. Yes that would have good. I think though that almost every game rhat comes out is trying to be the next call of duty or the next fortnight. Run n gun arcade style shooter with goofy guns and gadgets and microtransactioned to hell.
We didn't. The new publisher (Gearbox) apparently did.
EDIT: Apparently it was already started by the original devs even before the acquisition, see the comments below. I must admit, the multiplayer was wonky so there is some merit to it.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. Gearbox is developing a mobile game to take advantage of owning the property, along with whatever they plan to do with Risk of Rain 2 now. Returns is from the original studio and is more of a love letter / farewell to the franchise.
Hopoo, the original devs, were already making this and got to finish working on it after the purchase. It adds new content and refines the gameplay of the original (movement feels better and the game just generally plays better) - it was also designed with modding in mind.
This was a project by the original developers, not by gearbox. The original game, while incredible, had stability, optimization, and probably most importantly, multiplayer issues.
The community had asked for a way to play together online without third party solutions, but the code base needed to be rebuilt to facilitate that.
Won’t even take their free ‘gifts’, worse than Origin when it comes to spyware and data collecting. I can’t understand anyone who willingly puts EGS on their device but complains about advertisers on other platforms collecting info about them.
Worse is, that Epics Spyware finds its way onto Steam releases as well with their online services… And don’t get me started on other cancer like mod.io
Hold on, a platform-agnostic solution to mod integration (mod.io being one example) is now a bad thing compared to the platform-exclusive one (Steam) we usually get? Isn’t it inherently better if I can get games wherever I want and still get mods instead of them being of course all locked to Steam after Steam Mod Downloader got disabled?
You are putting words in my mouth. I never said I’m opposed to mod support across platforms. In fact, I wish that more games would do this. I looked into mod.io for a bit and have to apologise, though. It seems I fell for the privacy concern myth, if you can call it that.
I still oppose some implementations of it. The game “Ready or Not” especially is atrocious with its mod.io implementation. You can only install + enable, or uninstall mods there. No disable option what so ever. Really fun with mods that are multiple GB in size, like maps.
The free games are 80% shovelware not worth playing, 15% indie experiments that have the potential to become a full game with another development iteration, and 5% AAA games that can be bought on sale for a fiver anyway.
I doubt much of their Fortnite money is actually being spent on licenses for these games. They likely negotiate some kind of “do it for the exposure” deal with the smaller developers in order to keep the flow of free games going.
Chances are the games given out for free will end up in a Humble Bundle at some point anyway. Which is when you acquire a steam key anyway.
I’m going to guess the majority are people that don’t care that much, rather than people with such good security knowledge that they can stop a games distribution platform from spying on them.
Also, Epic is inherently online. Like, it needs an internet connection to distribute the games. Is it even possible to use it for that whilst also stopping it from phoning home?
Well yes, they don’t care that much, so I’m not see the hypocrisy you implied.
The Internet is a series of tubes. The tubes that deliver you file content are rarely the same tubes that carry usage and telemetry data. You can also open or close these tubes at will. Like a Valve!
In order to decide if they want to send you the games, they need identifying information in the form of your account, otherwise they won’t give you the games, which may well be in a different “tube” (it’s okay, I know they’re called ports, you can use real terminology).
Any programmer worth their salt will know that the way to prevent this kind of tampering is to make the phone home data go through the same port as the account data. That way you can’t block it and keep using the service. This especially makes sense since the phone home data will necessarily be tied to your account.
Right? Can you imagine what they could have been if they just sold the same games as Steam but tried really hard to just be a really good platform? lol
Because ads are something I dont want to see in general. EGS is something I knowingly use and want on my pc to play games. The choice is what makes it different.
That’s one interesting thing about this: They trained the players so hard to associate their store with the free weekly giveaways and only the free weekly giveaways, that’s all everyone uses the client for now, and never mentally considers it to be usable for anything else.
The effect is pervasive, too. Games factually have not released if they’re epic-exclusive. They’re not discoverable on PC, as nobody would ever imagine checking the Epic catalogue for a game they’re looking for. That’s not what you open Epic for, it’s those 1-2 free weekly games and nothing else.
In their bid to vie for developers not consumers they went so far too far that they have managed to alienate the concept of “selling games to players” in the consumers’ minds, therefor making their store automatically unable to compete at its main intent.
Mind you, there are far more problems with it. Among which is that despite having so little in there, discoverability and navigation are downright terrible! It’s an interesting lesson for frontend/UI design I imagine.
Exclusivity is bullshit. I had to wait ~7 years (IIRC) before I could play Borderlands 2, because it was Steam exclusive. I refuse to spend money on any game that’s not available on at least two launchers. (Or, ideally, doesn’t require a launcher at all.)
Why the fuck didn’t the launchers just have a standard API so that every game is available on every launcher? That would have been best for consumers, as it would’ve made exclusivity impossible for every launcher. Instead we have this awful system where it feels like 90% of games are exclusive either because of greed or laziness.
This is a good point. Everyone harps on Epic’s exclusivity, but there are a huge amount of games that only exist on Steam. Most of these never go on other platforms, and many that do, do so only years later.
When put like this, it sounds a lot like Steam and Epic are similar. Of course the difference is that, as far as we know, Valve doesn’t pay for this exclusivity - except indirectly by visibility.
Most people seem to be at least aware of this fact, but they seem to be okay with it because it’s (at least not publicly known to be) paid exclusivity on Steam.
I always thought this was the strangest viewpoint. As a consumer, I’m inconvenienced by exclusivity exactly the same whether someone was paid or not. I’m really surprised that any consumer would care whether it’s paid. In my mind, if a consumer goes to their local store specifically to buy Product Y, and they find that the store doesn’t stock Product Y, they’re disappointed / upset no matter the reason it’s not stocked at that store. But apparently there are consumers out there who would withhold their opinion until they went home, did some research, and established whether the manufacturer of Product Y was paid to exclusively sell the product at another store. Only at that point would they be upset. If they learned that Product Y simply wasn’t stocked because the manufacturer refused to stock it in their local store, these consumers (apparently) remain happy that the system “works as intended.”
Also, most/all of the launchers encourage exclusivity by encouraging developers to make their games rely on a proprietary API. This encourages technical lock-in, and it’s basically a fee (in terms of development hours required) the developer needs to pay to launch the product on additional platforms. Consumers are apparently okay with this too, and I also find this strange.
Anyway, my opinion is that consumer view on launchers is wrong, obviously. Nearly all of them have features about them that encourage exclusivity, and they’re pretty much all bad for that reason.
Yeah that’s the point… They said they never bought anything from epic games. I was wondering if they really never bought an unreal game. Why are people butthurt about that question?!
When you buy from Taco Bell, you’re also buying a product made by a farming company, but you’re not buying from that farm.
Same with EGS/UE. People are happy to buy an Epic Games product, but they won’t buy it from EG, because their store is shit.
There aren’t that many comparable situations where a company both makes a product and has a storefront, without that product being exclusive to that storefront. Perhaps buying Honda, but only used, never from a dealership?
But when someone says they don’t buy Honda shit but than buy a used Honda, wouldn’t you say that’s weird?
The Epic Game Store was in part trying to get money in when the Unreal Engine was falling behind with Unity’s popularity. The hatred many people show for Epic Games is irrational, in my opinion. Especially when you consider that all the “arguments” against Epic Games are the same people had against Steam when it was new. It doesn’t really make sense and just seems like hate for the sake of hating.
It just seems so much like hypocrisy. Everytime Steam brought a new feature, like achievements, cards, communities, etc. people were falling all over themselves hating Steam for it.
And know they hate Epic for not offering these features?
The same with exclusive titles. People regularly hated on Steam for having a monopoly on the market and that they therefore could take increasingly bigger cuts from developers. Epic takes less money in exchange for timed exclusivity and many developers like that they get more money for their games. Why do gamers dislike that?
If you dislike Honda as a company (for subscription key fobs, or crappy warranty practices, say), you can still like the cars without giving the company a single dollar, by buying used cars. I suppose this doesn’t quite work, because EG is still getting money for UE.
Perhaps an inversion: Amazon Basics are usually trash, and many consider giving Amazon money distasteful, yet the storefront is definitely quite effective and the shipping fast. Denigrating one while using the other is common.
As for the different treatment, the people behind UE seem to make decent decisions (especially in the light of Unity’s recent decisions), while the people behind EGS have done nothing but aweful anti-consumer crap. They’re both owned by the same company, but behave differently, so different treatment seems reasonable.
That being said, there’s lots of people in gaming communities who whinge just to whinge. No changing that. I don’t get much of the hate for Steam, but I do agree that having a monopoly is bad, no matter how benevolent Valve is right now. EGS should have been the silver bullet to that situation, but the silver was arsenic, the bullet was hollow point, and they tried to shoot us instead of Steam.
When Epic stops trying to kill user fteedoms and divide the market, and instead make a competitive service, they’ll get far less hate. They’ll still get hate, that’s gamers, but winning by damaging the market is always bad.
The little red ball things that give you health when you kill them make exploring the map so much fun. I made it a challenge to see how far I could explore without resting at a grace by actively seeking out those red ball enemies and it was so much fun.
I’m finding it a bit underwhelming to be honest. It was so hyped, but it just feels like Dark Souls 4. I don’t find the open world really adds a lot apart from a lot of empty space filled with crafting components. The worlds in souls and sekiro were so carefully crafted and put together and I feel like the open world ruins that a bit. I guess after Sekiro did something similar but significantly different, I was expecting Elden Ring to be a bit more innovative. If I hadn’t already played the hell out of the three Dark Souls games I might enjoy Elden more. I’ll probably still beat it though and might change my opinion by the end - I certainly hated Sekiro and Dark Souls at times before I came to love them.
I hope this is one of those times were the company making the the game knows just how intensely popular their game is and don’t advertise and hype it for 2 years prior to release. It’d be nice if they just launched their trailer, then have the game come out a month later.
There’s no way they’re launching this game in January. Start telling yourself now that it’s not coming out until fall 2025, that way anything sooner seems like a bonus.
Yeah, it would be nice, I feel like games shouldn’t be announced any more than 6 months from release, and preferably less, but this is the world we live in.
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