I played a few demos yesterday and, overall, there's a lot of stuff that's interesting. Also a few metroidvanias that are borrowing heavily from Hollow Knight

Still, I'd add to Liam's list Gravity Circuit and Takara Cards which are both native and have proven to be fun.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

In case anyone was wondering, their statement contains the usual non-apologies or any admitting of culpability that's standard corporate speak:

Quoting: Timmy's PR department[...]The video game industry is a place of fast-moving innovation, where player expectations are high and new ideas are paramount. Statutes written decades ago don’t specify how gaming ecosystems should operate. The laws have not changed, but their application has evolved and long-standing industry practices are no longer enough. We accepted this agreement because we want Epic to be at the forefront of consumer protection and provide the best experience for our players. 
[...]
Saving payment information by default is a common way to streamline the checkout process, so players do not have to re-enter their payment method every time they make a purchase. We’ve agreed with the FTC to change this practice, and we now offer an explicit yes or no choice to save payment information.
[...]
If a cardholder sees an unauthorized transaction on their statement, they may report it to their bank to have it reversed. When that chargeback is initiated, it is common industry practice to disable the associated account as a fraud prevention measure. We’ve updated our chargeback policy to account for non-fraud related scenarios and will only disable accounts when fraud indicators are present. We have restored thousands of accounts that were banned due to reported chargebacks under our previous policy.

It strikes me as a little incongruous that a company that took three years to add a shopping cart to their game store—a pretty universal feature in ecommerce—could make claims that the specific failings cited by the FTC and carefully worded in their statement were because "everyone else was doing it!"

Oh well, let us just hope that other developers don't start jumping off bridges, lest Epic follow suit. It wouldn't be their fault then either.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ZapporNo mention whether the Linux version works well or has any issues... I guess that's a good sign! :-D

No issues that I could find

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LinasIs it just me, or do they keep making the same game?

I haven't bought Isonzo yet but I did play Verdun and Tannenberg. And yeah, they're both WW1-themed and relatively-realistic shooters. However, as with how in real life the fronts had their own idiosyncrasies and natures, the respective main modes of each title are fairly different; Verdun is trench warfare and all of the back and forth on an advancing or retreating front; Tannenberg has more maneuver and space with different chunks of the battlefield being fought over at the same time and affecting other positions in the process. They certainly feel different enough in practice even though they have a lot in common mechanically like being squad-focused.

The emphasis on mountain warfare—as well as sapping and the engineering side of things—does make it seem like it'll make Isonzo play out in a different way. I'm curious to see if the "dynamic battlefield" concept works out well.

And, well, if Verdun and Tannenberg are any indication, it will be possible to switch from one front to another in-game if you have the other titles installed.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

QuoteOnboarding without emails or password prompts. With just a few clicks, Steam players can jump into a game while an Epic Games account is created under the hood for their Steam account.

No thank you! I had an account many moons ago to help test Unreal Tournament 4. Deleted it when it became clear that they were not going to work on it further. Developments since then, such as casting themselves as the saviors of PC gaming while poaching games as exclusives when they were about to release and NFT nonsense, have contributed to my dim view of them. To me this is just another attempt to buy their way into market share by boasting that they have "x amount of users!" same as they've done with their giveaways.

This is theoretically better than GOG's own attempts given that Linux is claimed to be supported. But, well, seeing is believing. Hope it's actually easy to use and seamless for both devs and users.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quote[...] not that I would recommend it considering the ridiculous micro-transactions involved in the game.

Bit of an understatement given that apparently it costs nearly £90k to fully upgrade a character

Still, cool that it works even if it does require some faffing about with network settings.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So far Old World has been pretty fun. I enjoy that it's more focused thematically and there's lots of interesting interrelated systems. Runs pretty well though there's the late game slowdown when processing turns that's endemic to the genre. Ambitions for leaders is a neat mechanic and way to win the game.

I'm not sold on combat and I think the AI is too spammy with units. My few wars have turned out to be a matter of having a bigger standing army at the beginning of the conflict to be able to deal with the horde of units that move in from across their empire in a single turn. I haven't really noticed much tactical considerations in terms of terrain/army composition yet and the order system of pooled moves has done little to give either side an advantage. Still, I think I have to play more as the intricacies of this sort of thing aren't obvious after only a dozen or so hours.

Quoting: GuestYou're not own any games on steam.

You don't own anything you buy on GOG, either. You're simply acquiring a license. You cannot share, transfer, sell, etc a game by those terms either. That's standard on all digital goods for better or worse and singling out Steam is disingenuous, at best.

Putting your Linux build on GOG involves messing about with FTP and having someone manually mess with things on their end. Which, to me, drives home about how little GOG actually cares about Linux users. It baffles me how many people waste their time in every article about any game posting and arguing how they'd want to see it on GOG. The platform is a right pain for both users and developers and they've had years to change and have done nothing about it. In my opinion it's better to spend that energy and money on platforms that actually treat Linux users as normal, first-class, customers like Steam or itch.io.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: rustybroomhandleYes, people's favourite reason to visit a web site is so that the site owner can speak to them like he thinks they're assholes. You falsely assume people read every word you write. In this case why would someone who already knows how to use syncthing do that?

It seems strange to me to come to a site, not read a short article, ask a question that was covered explicitly by aforementioned article, and then get offended that you're referred to the article for the answer and claim that there should be no expectation that someone reads the entire article. A "whoops, sorry, didn't see that somehow" seems more sensible instead of doubling down on silly outrage.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

QuoteNintendo Joy-Con and Pro Controller support

Bought a Pro Controller a month ago and was really surprised that it isn't supported yet.
There were a few custom drivers around, but not one of them got the controller working for me. Just weird behavior with the controller turning itself on and off constantly when connected via Bluetooth (and nothing at all via USB).

Hopefully, once this kernel is "safe" for Manjaro, this will no longer be a problem.

Odd, because I've used my Pro controller a couple of times via bluetooth in the past without those issues. Played for a couple of hours with friends without disconnects. Worked with both Steam and in Retroarch. I assumed it was already supported in the kernel or, well, that SDL2 handled it.

I doubt that Manjaro does anything radically too different than Arch (though given their devs' track record... ) but maybe you're missing udev rules somehow? The steam package ought to have created /lib/udev/rules.d/70-steam-input.rules and that should have a couple of entries for the pro controller.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAs for you criticisms... yeah, that's just basic HoI4, I'm afraid.

As someone who has close to 2000 hours with the game, no, my criticisms are not just business as usual. If anything, invasions of mainland Europe by Allies were the complete opposite in previous versions—getting crushed by the Axis in a short time. Likewise, the Soviet AI used to take multiple times more the casualties of the Axis (sometimes to an absurd degree).

I love mods too and play them a lot but the current ability of the AI to use the systems within the game is really dire and I don't think that that will be solved by modders. The only exceptions I can think of is that the Soviet AI does use scorched earth policies sometimes and also builds railways as mentioned in the review.

View this comment - View article - View full comments