vulgarcynic @ vulgarcynic @sh.itjust.works

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5

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423

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've been slowly playing through the first one. Its a pretty decent game. There's some unique stuff they're doing lore/world wise. The combat could be tighter and the waypointing could use some work but there's a great core and lore. This could be Spiders breakout game.

Forza Horizon!

Flashbacks to the guys doing coke at parties in college.

Thanks for the rec! Typing on it now. Pretty decent so far. I dig the hover on the word as i swipe

Also posting from a Pixel 7 running Graphene for abouta year. No issues, I use Fdroid for most apps and Aurora when I have too. Only bummer is I haven't found a good FOSS keyboard with swipe. Really miss gboard for that and gif insertion.

I have seen credits on that game probably three times since it's launch. Anytime they release it on a new platform I instinctively snap it up.

I do agree that the world feels pretty empty, but it is Mars in their defense. The gameplay loop is so good though. And sometimes there's no better feeling than grabbing a sledgehammer and leveling a building.

Hopefully you're able to make it through! There's a little bit of variety introduced to the environment around the half to three quarter mark.

I don't begrudge him running a successful business. And I didn't give a shit about who you feel I can or cannot defend. Lol.

I built my entire cloud storage strategy around Google drive because it had very simple integration with my previous seed box provider. Like, I could run Plex from the cloud through them directly off of my Google drive and then mirror that to local storage.

Super slick and easily usable setup. In a push to completely de-google my life the past 2 years I had to figure out an effective migration strategy off of that stack.

It was a total pain in the ass. Not to mention moving the rest of the people on my family plan off of Google as well. The majority of them are fairly tech savvy and even with that in mind we struggled.

I am now 100% self-hosted and learned a shit ton about docker along the way but, I couldn't imagine trying to do the same thing with a group of entry level users.

The last sentence resonates with me. I too wore a robe and wizard hat back in the day.

Phil's out of the circle of trust. Don't believe a single thing from his mouth.

I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.

I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of "The Club" that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don't know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.

Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.

I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn't worth it.

I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.

Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve's cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.

If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.

A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can't still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.

There's an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people's things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.

When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn't just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.

Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they're offering becomes a lot easier to see.

I'm not sure when exactly my cake day is but have been hanging out with you shitters a while and truly dig it here.

So much of the community interaction and openness to real dialog and sharing reminds me of the internet I grew up on. Thanks to each and every one of you.

Favorite moment: following discussions on the element channel and actively having a voice in defederating from communities that didn't align with the goals of our community. Being empowered to shape what this place was gonna look like really drew me in and made me want to keep coming back!

Cheers y'all!

Vulgar

I gave up on expandable storage and a headphone jack. Bought a nice portable player with a DAC, but I respect dying on the hill.

I've eyed some Xperias. How are the security updates?

Size is the main reason I moved to a foldable 2 years ago. I'd love something reasonably sized instead of everything being giant phablets.

Are we married to the same person?

Then we also kick the cops in the nads.

I couldn't disagree more. I played through as a 100℅ hacking corpo my first run and it was great (120 hours total give or take). I only used guns when necessitated by the mission at hand.

To double check it wasn't a design issue, I played full melee / gorilla arms after the 2.0 update and am having a blast at around 40 or so hours in.

These play through were on literally every possible platform (Stadia, Xbox 1 & Series X, PS5, Steam Deck, GeForce Now, desktop 3080 and recently 4080 mobile) so graphics weren't always the primary draw.

If you choose not to engage with the world or systems, that's a choice but it certainly isn't a failing of the game. There's an incredible world and cast of characters in Cyberpunk.

There was a great response to this from Gabe several years ago (looks like 13 years ago, fuck, I'm old)...

https://www.totalgaming.co.uk/93-of-steam-users-born-on-january-1st/