skulblaka

I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.

I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.

Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?

This is an absolute win on all sides

From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.

That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.

Kids do.

Their problems are smaller than us adults’, but they feel those problems with the same intensity we do. Being ostracized from your social group is a big problem even for adults. It’s worse for kids.

And kids, being kids, will bandwagon the hell out of anything. If somebody clowns on your shoes every day, give it a week and half the school will be doing it. Give it a year and you’re “that guy with the shoes”.

Is your brand of shoes important in the long term? No, not at all. Your social status in high school also, largely, doesn’t matter in the long term. But “the long term” is difficult to keep your eye on when you’re looking at 4-8 years of pointless bullying in your future.

All this to say - yeah I think this is pretty dumb, but it’s important to the people who are living it. And something that’s important to a child should also be important to their parents, in my opinion. I was the kid with the ratty shoes and the hand-me-downs. That stuff can really do some permanent damage to a kid’s psyche.

Does this mean that every middle schooler needs to have a fresh set of Jordan’s and a fitted suit every year? No, of course not. But if I can spend an extra $50 once every two years to make my son happy then why wouldn’t I?

[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.

They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]

This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.

There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.

Family share is actually great for this now.

It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.

But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.

So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.

My DnD DM talked about this constantly for like a year straight, so I haven’t played it but I can vouch for it being a good time for old wowheads.

Ayyy ToME oldhead gang represent. Been playing since about 2014 myself.

The modding community is what really kept breathing life into that game for me for so long. I’m hoping once we finally see the next (final?) DLC expansion that the modders will pick the game back up again. It’s been very stagnant for a couple of years now, presumably waiting for DG to release his expansion like a sudden kraken as is tradition. But it’s been 2 years now since the last update (which was primarily a scaffolding update for the Lost Lands content to come) and I imagine everyone who would be otherwise interested is now hanging in a limbo of not wanting to start work on a project when DG might drop a major update at literally any time and invalidate a bunch of your work.

Even just the regular base game kept me playing for years and years though. Solid 10/10 freeware game. I used to bounce between ToME and DCSS (also freeware, also recommend, this one actually gets regular updates) pretty regularly and that kept me covered on dungeon crawling roguelikes for the better part of a decade. I still keep coming back to them on occasion though, I’ve played a bit of both of those games within the last 2 weeks.

My_House.wad has been making the rounds on YouTube semi-recently as an example of the sort of fuckery that has been made possible by the progression of doom modding.

If you’re not familiar with it, do yourself a favor and go in blind for an hour or so and then only look up a video when you’re stuck.

If your hardware is lower end it isn’t useless. If I skip that then I get pretty bad stuttering in some games when new things are loaded in. If I let them cook in advance then that doesn’t happen.

If your GPU is good enough (or your game potato-friendly enough) to compute shaders on the fly without issue then yeah it’s pretty much useless.

It comes down to how much the publishers care about their own product. Devs shoveling third party kernel anti-cheat into their product often cause those games to be Linux incompatible. Devs bundling their own unnecessary launcher with the game and requiring it to run the launcher in order to run the game sometimes cause those games to be Linux incompatible. It often isn’t even the devs themselves making this decision, which is why I blame the publisher more than the developers in most cases.

But with how robust Proton has become these days there isn’t a whole lot outside of those two cases that will make a game not run on Linux. It’s pretty intentional at this point.

You would have fought him in Brannoch Castle shortly before finding Beigis and Bartholomew and going to Mammon’s World.

Guilty got moved from being a story boss to being a secret superboss more befitting his actual lore, that’s all. References removed from Brannoch because he isn’t there anymore.

Quest 64 Hard Mode makes an attempt at fixing this. I’m not real far into it yet (Dondoran) but I’m enjoying what I’m seeing so far. I’m not sure how hard the “hard mode” is going to be late game though… Regular mode was already pretty oppressive without Magic Barrier.

I would agree with this if Zuck hadn’t been in the news recently talking about how Meta is desperately filling their userbase with bots, on purpose

I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.

Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.

That’s extremely specific to “AI-generated images” and “in development”

This is basically a non-statement.

Hackintoshes have been around since the 80s and this has never happened.

In 2009-2012 Apple did levy a successful lawsuit against Psystar for doing this in a business environment. But they’ve never enforced bricking a consumer Hackintosh and I expect they never will.

Well it sure as hell didn’t work on my Tarnished in Elden Ring proper

This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:

Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.

Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.