ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I've definitely been eyeing Solasta since BG3. Is it combat heavy enough that it could be a podcast game? It's unclear how story focused the base game is, and I get the sense that player made content is the draw.

I know I am.

Flawlessly. The default controller mappings aren't bad either, though I did tweak them a bit. It doesn't actually have controller support, so you're either using the right stick as a mouse or relying heavily on the trackpad, but you're going to want to use the buttons for a few things, like pause/unpause, for instance.

that article is the most gpt thing I’ve read in a while.

I figured, given the title.

Some of my favorites for 3 are the same for 4.

Streets of Rogue and Vagante are challenging roguelikes that scale effortlessly for co-op of various numbers of players. There's also Mercenary Kings, which I admit I enjoyed more than most, but it's like the cross section of Mega Man action with Monster Hunter structure. Much more recently, Baldur's Gate 3 probably hits its sweet spot at 3 human players, since you want to have an NPC slot around in your party of 4 for the story quests that are relevant to that NPC.

I've been playing Starfield, and I think I'm getting close to just wanting to wrap it up. I may or may not want to get a larger ship before that happens, because the starter ship has been a bottleneck in seeing through some of the other faction quest lines. At the same time though, better ships are expensive, and I'm not sure I want to grind missions with better money payouts to get there. This game should be better.

While traveling, I've been playing Pillars of Eternity on the Steam Deck. I've got 5 party members now, and I'm level 3. I think I'm about to get access to the stronghold that has its own button on the UI. Really enjoying this one so far. Thankfully, it exposes all of its dice rolls to help me learn the systems better.

I'm reading between the lines of what Jirard said in his recorded calls and his response video when I say this, but I got the sense he and his family wanted that dollar value to be significantly higher so that they could have more control over what it gets spent on. People are more willing to do what you want them to do when you give them $1M than if you give them $1000. Still not a great reason to hold on to it if so, but hardly fraud.

I'd like to live in the world where multiple devs are making D&D games in Larian's engine the way there were a handful of Infinity Engine games 20 years ago. Replaying BG3 is great, but it would be nice to have new areas, characters, and calls to action while still having the freedom to just "verb a noun" the way you can in BG3.

Things look incredibly bad.

I don't think that they do. They still had the money. It's now been donated, and Jirard is distancing himself from the charity and not running them attached to IndieLand anymore; the trust is gone, so it would have been difficult to get people to donate anyway. The only smoking gun I could see they had against him was the money still in the account (at the time). The accusations about the golf tournaments had no numbers attached to them, only that "there must be more money there", and it felt very unfounded and as though Jobst just needed another video out for his baked in sponsor slot. From what I can see, Jirard did exactly what he should have to make amends, and now that a bunch of people have all been encouraged en masse to lodge complaints to the IRS, the rest of the truth will come out of that inevitable audit, because I sure didn't feel like I got it from Jobst's follow-up videos. His and OrdinaryGamers are two channels I'm certainly not interested in watching again. If you're going to do something resembling investigative journalism, then act like it; don't preamble your video telling me how I should feel about something before you've presented your facts.

Let's change that expectation. Baldur's Gate 3 won best multiplayer at the Game Awards, and it's not a live service. In a talk with some friends, I realized how antagonistic the relationship between players and developers always ended up as well when the developers make more money with more "engagement". Diablo IV will get fun builds nerfed into the ground; Baldur's Gate 3 will let them rock, but only in the pre-existing difficulty levels before they add in extra challenge modes for fun. That's the difference.

Meanwhile, Agent Under Fire multiplayer for the Gamecube is more fun than any live service FPS I've ever played. It certainly didn't require years of support to be that fun, and you only need one other person to play it with, but preferably 3. Very easily doable regardless of how many people are in matchmaking.

Used to be our favorite single player games came with multiplayer modes attached to them. You didn't expect them to get years of content. You just enjoyed them for a little while with some friends and then moved on. Not only is that totally fine, I'd argue it's preferable.

Well, you can stick to instances that federate with Threads even if/when they misbehave then, but having the option not to is pretty great, from my perspective.

I'm a Linux user. That "fragmentation" is probably a good reason for why that hasn't been extinguished either. So as far as I can tell, yes, I'll enjoy the resilience that that implies without fear of it being extinguished.

I always saw that as a feature, not a bug. The feature that prevents it from being the last E.

And we're free to move to another instance that has the access, or lack thereof, that we want.

That's not really an issue though; or at least, I'm not yet convinced it's one. We're here because we don't want to have compatibility with Reddit, and I'm on Mastodon because I don't want to have compatibility with Twitter.

But then if other instances don't want those features, isn't the worst that can happen that instances just de-federate from Threads? I know the history of EEE, but I don't see how that can even work here.

PC gaming has only had a slow, steady rise since Steam entered the scene. But perhaps one other catalyst might have been the Games For Windows initiative (not "Live") that standardized controller support, added some extra marketing oomph, and gave more incentive to make the same game on PC and console rather than making two entirely different games (sometimes with the same title, like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter).

None of these solutions are lazy, and I promise you they have large server side components too. From what I can tell, shooters are just especially cursed when it comes to cheating, and there's no real way to stop it.

I can't speak for Gamescom, but PAX East has been shrinking, too. Exhibitors don't want to show up. They've been doing that thing you did in high school to pad your essays by increasing the margins on the side to make it look you wrote more than you did. Except instead of an essay, it's a show floor.