pory

pory, 6 months ago

BG3 is an excellent game, but saying it’s unlike the rest of games because it “does its QA before launch” is very silly. Look at the 100GB of huge patches the game’s received, reading the pages and pages of patch notes for the bug fixes and also the basic RPG features added after launch like the ability to change your character’s appearance.

BG3 had more bugfixes and hotfixes than Starfield did by a long shot, the difference between the two is not the absence of bugs. It’s that BG3 under the bugs was a phenomenally VA’d/Mocapped game with a great story line, memorable characters, meaningful choices, and combat that doesn’t become a rote chore or a numbers go up game with randomized loot.

pory, 6 months ago

Don’t have to know anything about how the food’s cooked to say “wow, this is bland. This cost $80?”.

pory, 6 months ago

Edmund McMillen’s (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy) upcoming game Mew-Genics seems right up your alley!

pory, 6 months ago

It’s free to host a mod on github. Mods like this and the pride flag remover for Spooderman are just trolls seeking attention and outrage, so they have to make sure to be very visible and find-able. Nexus has no obligation to host those files and if the modders actually wanted to play the game with the changes (and enable others to do so) it’s totally possible to do that without Nexus. They upload to Nexus (which has a clear policy against this) so that they get exposure when “journalism” reports their mod being deleted (since talking about this is free Engagement™)

pory, 6 months ago

Returnal supports dualsense advanced features, you just have to plug the controller into the PC and disable steam input.

I used Returnal as the benchmark tool for the dualsense features (I don’t have a Playstation older than 2) and was amazed by them, then I realized that I didn’t like the actual game as a roguelike or a shooter so I return(al)ed it. But the controller features were sick

pory, 6 months ago

I’d argue that fighting and punishing hate speech would be protected by Tenet II, which takes priority over “other laws”.

pory, 6 months ago

If you’re playing heal mesmer instead of other healers, it’s for one of two reasons.

1: fun/roleplay, in which case carry on

2: because it does something actually better than just taking druid, scourge, firebrand, or herald. In Mesmer’s case, that’d likely be its insane mobility and 100% unique ten-man two-way Portal. It’d also be the only alac heal with a reflect skill that doesn’t suck ass to actually use on Matthias (I don’t think any other raid/strike boss cares about the difference between projectile negation and projectile reflection). So yeah, having at least one (ideally two) utility slots open is pretty vital to make heal mesmer not a complete joke / roleplay class. It’ll probably be automatically best in slot at Qadim since groups heavily rely on portals (plural) to maximize boss dps uptime, and will probably replace the heal mechanist + portalbitch virtuoso duo on HTCM. Ignoring the aura trait, having the build be rifle camp is excellent - it means you can have the other set be Mesmer’s excellent utility weapons. Focus for the best add-pull in the game, shield for one of the best channeled blocks, Pistol for turbo CC, Greatsword for the push on things like Rigom or KC’s orbs… Can you manage full Might on boon heal rifle chrono without taking Well of Action, or are you just relying on the rest of the subgroup to contribute some?

pory, 6 months ago

On the flip side, I’ve been using FX file explorer for this for years with no issues, but my roommate on the latest iPhone (a year ago) encountered a pretty horrific oversight in the default Files app’s way to handle this (and no option to use third party apps).

Whenever she tried to copy more than 2GB from the network drive to the phone via Files, the phone would completely lock up and freeze (and stop transferring, which I confirmed by looking at read operations on the home server). She had to hard reboot and copy the files over multiple operations instead of just queuing up 50GB of audiobooks once and letting it transfer in the background. It turns out the Files app handles network assets by loading them all into RAM and then writing them to the iPhone’s NAND, and if you try to perform an operation that takes more than the phone’s current available RAM it just does the Apple equivalent of a bluescreen.

pory, 7 months ago

Pof for $7.50 is utterly absurd.

pory, 7 months ago

I took the comment you’re replying to to mean “I was hooked, so when I read that sentence I stopped reading about this game so that I could go play this game”

pory, 7 months ago

Mobile Adapter GB is a remote device.

pory, 7 months ago

“it’s time to chew ass” - Dick Kickem

pory, 7 months ago

I didn’t buy this one. However, the biggest problems here are tied to the setting - there’s just not really a good way to do “Skyrim in space” that doesn’t just turn into “Skyrim with more loading screens”. “Space” is just too big and empty of a setting for that kind of game. Setting a sci-fi game on one planet would be fair game, or maybe even limiting to three or four fleshed-out worlds but this game tried to be set in “space”.

The next Elder Scrolls or Fallout will not be set in space. Even if the combat and role-playing systems and character writing stay Starfield / FO4 / Skyrim levels, the strengths of Bethesda rpg design won’t be completely incompatible with the setting the way they are in Starfield.

pory, 7 months ago

Yeah, I agree. The reason BG3 was a bigger success than DOS2 is because it has the Baldur’s Gate / D&D license (and has broader appeal since the system is one that a lot more “casuals” understand thanks to the real-play podcast boom), not because it’s a much better game than Divinity. If Larian’s next game isn’t D&D, it’ll probably not sell as well, regardless of quality. In a way though it should relieve some of the pressure on the studio.

pory, 7 months ago

!the name Frisk is a spoiler too if we’re spoiler tagging an 8 year old game!<

pory, 7 months ago

Works fine on Sync, which is a bit unfortunate.

pory, 7 months ago

Oil floats on water.

1. cover yourself in water
2. wait for it to oil
3. sink

pory, 7 months ago

And he don’t run out of the going back in time potion or nothin’ WHOOOOOOOOP

pory, 7 months ago

This mod wasn’t “used at a tournament”. An online tournament was held, and the guy running the Twitch stream was using SF6’s spectate feature to display the match. Said guy had a naked mod installed. None of the tournament contestants were using mods (or if they were, said mods didn’t cause any issues).

pory, 7 months ago

Since you’ve already been corrected on the assumption that players used/saw the nude mod, I’ll just point out: Fighting game tournaments almost never use “lan”. Two players sit in front of one console and one monitor, and plug in their own controllers. Super high budget tournaments like EVO might use dual-console setups for finals day, but when you’re chewing through an open bracket it’s just silly to double the required amount of hardware per station.

pory, 7 months ago

Matches in in-person tournaments happen with both players on the same console. It’s not possible to cheat in a 2d fighter online using mods, because the game’s multiplayer data is directly peer-to-peer: if I install a mod that makes my kick faster, it’ll be a faster kick on my game but the normal kick in your game, causing the game state to desync (if the kick hits you on my game but you hit me first in your game, both of our games are now playing out different scenarios but still controlling their instance of the “opponent” with the opponent’s inputs)

What happened in SF6 was a tournament streamer had a boobie mod installed, and was using the in-engine “spectate” feature to put a match between two players on stream. Neither player saw the streamer’s mod, it did not have any effect on the competitive integrity of the match. It was just a funny moment of a streamer’s horny-on-main SF6 install being exposed on stream.

pory, 7 months ago

So use a tool like this for call of duty multiplayer lobbies, not globally. Who cares if people “cheat” in single player games?

pory, 7 months ago

It’s not a block on these sites, it’s there to prevent porn and piracy sites from showing up in the “suggested” page that every privacy conscious user already turned off completely.

pory, 8 months ago

They’ve been working on a new game ever since Spire stopped getting regular updates. The project was in Unity though and this little dancing game was a three-week “jam” game so that Mega Crit could try out the Godot engine and see if it was a viable alternative to Unity for their next real project. Turns out they do like Godot and have ported their in-progress game from Unity to Godot and can now continue development!

pory, 8 months ago

Ah sorry, didn’t mean to be fully past-tense there. One of the programmers swapped off the jam project after two of the three weeks to begin the work porting their next game to Godot, because 2/3 of the jam time was enough for Mega Crit to go “ok yeah we like Godot”

pory, 8 months ago

If my private trackers don’t have what I’m looking for, DHT search engines like btdig always have my back when it comes to audiobooks.

pory, 8 months ago

One guy buys, rips DRM, uploads to pirates. That’s how almost all piracy works, someone usually had to buy a legit copy.

pory, 8 months ago

The centralized pirate guys need to get the content from somewhere. Usually by cracking or obtaining a retail copy, rarely by stealing one.

pory, 8 months ago

It’s more or less a stage in Smash Bros Brawl for some reason.

pory, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Personally I’m hoping 1030 isn’t even a Deck. Putting the Deck internals in a set-top box with better cooling and lots of I/O would make an amazing competitor to PS5/XSX and a straight upgrade to XSS, and they could price it a lot cheaper than the Deck because they wouldn’t need to put a screen or battery in (and they could make it even cheaper by selling it without a controller since it works with Xbox/PS/Nintendo ones already).

Steam Machines failed the first time, but now that the Deck has gotten a lot of people comfortable with (a vastly improved) SteamOS there’s no reason to think they’d fail again, especially if Valve themselves were putting out the flagship “standard” unit that companies like ASUS could iterate on.

pory, 8 months ago

Their plan for when Fortnite stopped pulling in money was for their Epic Games Store (that they propped up by paying devs lump sums just to not launch their games on Steam) to actually make Steam levels of money because surely exclusives and freebies will make people spend money on their store. Turns out there’s a lot of people that will never spend a dime on EGS, either because they won’t install it or only use it for the free games.

So all that Fortnite money they used to pay devs to not release their games on Steam ended up being a failed investment, and they’ve had to change their incentives from “we’ll give you a huge lump sum that’s about equal to what you’d have made with a successful Steam launch” to “well we’ll give you a better revenue split if you launch exclusively on our store that guarantees you get 10% of sales volume compared to Steam”. Turns out 60% of 1m sales is better than 80% of 100k sales.

pory, 8 months ago

Low seed count? You only need one seed. That’s the point of torrents.

pory, 8 months ago

People would have to buy and refund this one to bomb it, versus overwatch which was f2p. It’ll probably settle at “mixed” or “mostly positive” until blizzard does something to try to squeeze more purchases out of the playerbase again.

pory, 8 months ago

I grabbed my first nzb from drunkenslug, but Google results for an nzb client seem to be SEO-spammed and full of clients that are their own indexing platforms. Is nzbget good? It’s the only one I could find that doesn’t look like it’s trying to sell me something.

pory, 8 months ago

Spiders be like OoOowoOoO

pory, 8 months ago

If you’d need to open a menu and fiddle with the UI to switch from axe/axe to sword/axe on soulbeast, that saves nothing over the current situation where you open the inventory menu and fiddle with the UI to swap weapons.

pory, 8 months ago

Check that your client is whitelisted by the tracker. Some trackers wait to approve the newest versions of qBittorrent.

pory, 8 months ago

Hah. That’s pretty bad.

That was already how it worked if you had the commander blocked, you would still be able to see and join the squads of commanders that blocked you but not people you chose to block. Backwards-ass functionality. Hopefully if they fix this bug they also let a commander’s block list prevent people from /sqjoining or clicking in from LFG.

pory, 8 months ago

🦀

pory, 8 months ago

It’s preserved the same way every other off-the-market game that isn’t entirely based on a server is preserved, by pirates.

pory, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

The part that makes it confusing is that all of that also applies to a stiffer open-world western RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. Nobody’s calling Skyrim (or more recently Starfield) an immersive sim. Half-Life often gets included and that game is completely linear and your three interaction choices for combat are “shoot with gun (including wacky woohoo gravity gun)”, “whack with crowbar”, or “sneak/run past”.

Is Elden Ring an immersive sim?

Honestly, the defining thing that modern “immersive sims” have that “rpg shooters” don’t is usually just “physics gun”. Gravity gun from HL, goo gun from prey, telekinesis in Dishonored. Sure it lets you “use the environment” instead of just shooting the zombie with a bullet, but you’re often just using the environment as a bullet.

pory, 8 months ago

That’s about using emulators in retail mode which nobody with half a brain thought was gonna stick around. You pay $20 to unlock developer mode and do all your emulation stuff in there. Retail is for playing actual xbox games.

pory, 8 months ago

So there was no way for individual servers (chat rooms?) to disable the anti cheat and let people “steal” models and potentially crash other users, but also benefit from the variety involved with mods?

pory, 8 months ago

I don’t run anything on the server because I don’t need to. I have my home server mounted as a network drive in Windows, so I just point Kopia’s database at a folder in there. It’s stored as an encrypted backup, and I’ve got the config for Kopia backed up in a few places (and the encryption key as well) so if the worst case scenario happens to my PC I’ll just reinstall Kopia on a fresh windows install + HDD, restore the config from the backup, then restore the backup.

I also have a backup target to an older 8TB drive that I leave with a friend and update whenever he visits for extra safety, if my whole apartment with my PC and server burns down I’ll at least be able to have an outdated snapshot and lose only a month or so instead of decades.

pory, 8 months ago

Linux runs Starfield with no problems. If it’s on a computer and doesn’t use restrictive DRM to control how and under which circumstances you run the software, it’s not an exclusive. Microsoft doesn’t have exclusives anymore, which is a giant pro-consumer move that doesn’t get enough applause in the gaming community. That doesn’t mean they need to develop stuff for one specific DRM box owned by their biggest competitor to be “anti-exclusive”.

pory, 8 months ago

Pokémon is an exclusive because you have to pirate it / break the console’s DRM to play it on PC. Also, Proton and Wine are explicitly not emulators - that’s actually what WINE stands for (Wine Is Not an Emulator). Starfield is natively available for more than one platform and not only does the Proton compatibility layer handle it but it’s being sold on Valve’s store and the top played game on the completely Windows-free Deck. Games that are released on one console and PC aren’t exclusives. God of War just isn’t on xbox and Starfield just isn’t on Playstation.

Do you need to buy a console to play it legally? If no, it’s not a game exclusive to that console. I have a PC. I can’t play exclusives like Demons Souls Remake without buying Sony’s $500 DRM machine. I can play non-exclusives like Starfield without buying Microsoft’s $300 DRM machine.

pory, 8 months ago

I said Pokémon is an exclusive because it’s not released on other platforms. Bloodborne would still be a PS4 exclusive if an emulator could run it.

pory, 8 months ago

There’s no such thing as a “Linux PC” though. A PC is a PC. Your PC can run Starfield with proton, or it can run it by installing windows, or it can run it by putting it in a windows VM.

Even if a game can only run on Windows and Xbox (say one of those GAAS shits that has invasive anti cheat), that’s not an exclusive either. It runs on more than one platform. There’s a developer endorsed way to buy the product on more than one platform. Exclusive means one platform - you can’t buy and play the game unless you own one specific device.