please let it be pork...
skulblaka @ skulblaka @sh.itjust.works Posts 4Comments 1,352Joined 2 yr. ago
skulblaka @ skulblaka @sh.itjust.works
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2 yr. ago
[...] 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.
Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.
Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you're the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.
But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn't really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.
I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses' movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign's design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn't doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can't solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can't. They weren't designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it's no longer a raid boss, you've lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I've seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you'll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.
I've played quite a lot of Nightreign.
In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you'll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don't do it.
In solo you're fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I'm usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn't at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.
You'd think so, right?
We're at 56 pages of this now for a nice round count of 1400 charges
So far as I am aware all of these are publicly searchable court cases
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.
Hm. Maybe you're right then. I am both not an astrophysicist and am a bit stoned so I'm definitely willing to admit arguments here. I thought internal heat generation was the problem they were cooling far more than solar radiation but I could definitely be wrong.
On a Sci-Fi Star Wars spaceship though I think the internal heating is definitely going to be the bigger factor.
Sure, but unless you're quite close to it and have the surface area of a planet, you're not going to be catching a lot of that solar radiation. Some of the outer planets of our own solar system are very large, and very frozen, and unless you're that big or bigger and that close or closer, so are you.
There's an awful lot of space in between stars as well. So if you're traveling anywhere, you're spending a lot of time outside of ~10 AU from the nearest star. Solar radiation doesn't play a big part out there.
It's more accurate to say that space doesn't have a lot of easy access to external heat sources. Your local temperature is pretty much going to stay your local temperature without some significant effort being put into it. If you're a rock, that's cold. If you're a spaceship full of humans and electronics that continually emit heat to operate, you're going to stay pretty warm and shedding heat is an engineering problem that must be solved.
When I was a kid we had a dog named Monkey
In the South? Yes, definitely.
- The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn't expect them to leave the southern border undefended.
- It's extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I'm ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that's about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you'll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You'll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.
- Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it's confusing) are not all racist, but uh... you'll see more who are, than aren't. If you're any shade of brown you're going to have a rough time. If you speak with a "funny" accent you're going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn't want to roll those dice, it's still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don't like.
Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don't take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn't have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I'm not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it's already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn't stop them.
Like 10+ years ago I had a "private photos" app that would open up two completely different photo vaults based on what pin you entered. I didn't even think it was a big deal at the time because it makes perfect sense to do. I'm amazed that hasn't become standard practice in the meantime.
Flying in from outside the US during this time to then attempt to drive all the way across the South
Both. It's both. I hope they stay safe. There are like 4 different major threats to a foreigner on that route.
Sure, maybe. But my yard has frogs and fireflies in it and my neighbors' don't. That seems pretty empirical to me.
Man I'm the complete opposite. I grew up in the hood, if you had nice things, you wouldn't have them for long.
Driving nice cars and wearing name brand clothes just states "I have more money than you and I'm proud of it" which is a) universally a dick move, especially when you drive that fancy car past a dozen homeless every day, and b) makes you a mark. Oh you're driving a Benz? You've probably got valuables in it, let's take a look.
Nowadays I still drive a beat up old car and wear off brand clothes, both because I can't afford better but I also don't want to even look like I can afford better for the above reasons. It's just being an ass and also putting a target on yourself.
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to 'God' are all answered at about the same 50% rate.
-George Carlin
Look man, we work with what we've got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.
There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we'll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don't need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn't even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.
This was in 1999. I haven't lived there in a while but I'd bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.
We still like the grocery store because you can't go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can't pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that's a promise.