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Latest Comments by eldaking
Steam broke some huge all-time high records over the weekend
14 December 2020 at 2:57 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: The_Aquabatit surprises me taking into account how buggy Cyberpunk currently is. It's a bad sign that devs are getting away with buggy releases imho.

There isn't any issue that can't be circumvented by throwing truckloads of cash into marketing (this is the basis of our society) - the hype for this was absurd, there was no doubt it was going to be huge. They delayed just enough that it wasn't unstable enough to spiral out of control in a vicious cycle of bad press, and then tried to overcome any problems by sheer size. Sure, thousands of people will be turned away, but they have millions.

And also, spending money into easily scalable things like high-fidelity 3D graphics (get render farms and more artists, probably contracted from other companies) or more content (story, enemies, places, quests, items, etc). You can't necessarily just solve a bug faster by hiring more and more programmers to look at the same piece of code, or by giving the same programmers more cash, but you can throw money at other things to dazzle people into letting it slide. On a related note, you might get negative press by abusing your workers, but is it cheaper to pay for more marketing/PR or to not abuse the workers?

I'm just a bit disappointed that so many people are buying the game instead of downloading the illegal "Hacker Edition". I mean, it makes sense thematically, doesn't it?

Open Source Game Achievements with Gamerzilla
12 December 2020 at 4:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

This looks very cool. While I don't have much hope that major studios will use this, it opens a great possibility for FOSS games of all kinds - from engine recreations that might have trouble re-implementing this element, to the reasonably big projects, but maybe even small games like Sudoku or Solitaire implementations? It could also be very useful for non-FOSS indies that want to use itch or distribute in other, non-Steam channels.

Achievements can be pretty important (though it is all over the place, not all games make good use of it). It may seem like a small thing, but goals to accomplish are a crucial element of games. Comparing yourself to your friends, having a register of what you accomplished, having different side-goals to aim for, getting cool landmarks for progressing are all natural elements of gameing.

Check out 30 minutes of the upcoming TMORPG Book of Travels
11 December 2020 at 12:57 pm UTC

Quoting: furaxhornyx
Quoting: eldakingI feel intrigued by the idea of "tiny" MO. MMOs tend to be a hellhole and not only because of griefers, scalpers, and obnoxious people: in order to force people to interact, they make it impossible to play the game at your own pace. You have to grind to keep up with others otherwise you won't be able to do the meaningful things, have to pay attention to the meta to get grouped up, have to repeatedly craft only whatever is in higher demand, and so on. I enjoy exploring vast (and lived-in) persistent worlds and doing story quests and such, but I don't want to commit to a MMO because it is usually time-consuming and unpleasant.

I'm not sure, though, how this one will work. It sounds more like "interact with strangers, but just a little" than "occasionally join your friends".

Or maybe by "tiny", they mean "small servers", like The Fourth Coming (T4C) back in the day, and their servers of 200 people

I was expecting this on top of the rest - honestly I didn't even consider that it might try to have everyone on a single server or something.

Check out 30 minutes of the upcoming TMORPG Book of Travels
10 December 2020 at 5:35 pm UTC Likes: 2

I feel intrigued by the idea of "tiny" MO. MMOs tend to be a hellhole and not only because of griefers, scalpers, and obnoxious people: in order to force people to interact, they make it impossible to play the game at your own pace. You have to grind to keep up with others otherwise you won't be able to do the meaningful things, have to pay attention to the meta to get grouped up, have to repeatedly craft only whatever is in higher demand, and so on. I enjoy exploring vast (and lived-in) persistent worlds and doing story quests and such, but I don't want to commit to a MMO because it is usually time-consuming and unpleasant.

I'm not sure, though, how this one will work. It sounds more like "interact with strangers, but just a little" than "occasionally join your friends".

Valve upgrade the Steam browsing experience in the latest Steam Labs experiment
10 December 2020 at 4:04 pm UTC Likes: 4

Thank god for this, at long last sensible tags and categories. I noticed in the last sale they were using those categories and it was great, and I'm really glad it is being rolled out for the rest of the store. This is exactly what I wanted.

Browsing using tags was completely useless before, as searching for "strategy" returned just a bunch of FPS that people thought were brainy and a bunch of generic card games. Further tags didn't help either, as people tagged absolutely everything with "wargame, RTS, base building, simulation, grand strategy, resource management, tactical". And, to add gravy on top of the mess, people would just tag Paradox games as "Action" and "RPG" to make negative filters useless as well.

Oh, and Simulation, the category that (even when tagged sensibly) included Flight Simulator, The Sims, SimCity, Rimworld, Factorio, Universe Sandbox and a bunch more. I'm so glad that they "split" this one in particular into sensible groups.

And it's also a way to browse only the very few specific kinds of action game and RPG that I'm interested in (though this wasn't that bad with tags, and the main issue is finding stuff I liked in the first place).

I just find it a bit weird that Puzzle was tucked away into "casual", with no further subdivisions. I'd like a way to separate the likes of Portal and Talos Principle from Sudoku and Match-3, for example.

Failbetter Games announce romantic visual novel Mask of the Rose, prequel to their others
3 December 2020 at 8:37 pm UTC

Quoting: kaimanI loved the writing and stories in Sunless Seas, but the game mechanics weren't really my thing. Here's hoping that this one will be a better match for me :-).

Same thing. I watched some gameplay of Sunless Skies, because while the setting, the characters and the stories all looks amazing the driving around, the shooting and the transporting stuff back and forth make playing it myself a big no. A "dating sim", though, looks way more reasonable.

The Humble Explore & Expand Bundle is live with plenty of space strategy
1 December 2020 at 7:57 pm UTC

Hmm, Sins of a Solar Empire should work perfectly with Proton/Wine - though this is the older, outdated version (of a game that is already old-ish): I have only tried with the newer one, Rebellion. It is a nice game, an even mix of 4X with RTS.

GalCiv 3 is a good game with a few expansions, but very borked. Stellaris is the main attraction, though I see it at a level of USD10+ so not better than normal.

The Humble Sweet Farm Fall Bundle is live with some great picks
17 November 2020 at 8:49 pm UTC Likes: 4

I really thought this was a bundle of farm games. They missed a great thematic opportunity (and it's a pretty good theme too).

What have you been gaming on Linux recently? Come have a chat
8 November 2020 at 2:59 pm UTC

I have been playing some Europa Universalis 4, Charterstone Digital Edition and Thermo Sudoku. I have been defaulting to the familiar those days (well, never played Charterstone before, but it's a worker placement boardgame).

Valve rolls out Steam Playtest to devs, new Steam Beta up with Linux improvements
5 November 2020 at 11:11 pm UTC

Quoting: BielFPs
Quoting: slaapliedjeI mean the Stop button in Steam should be specific for games that crash in a weird state where they won't exit on their own.

Exactly the case with Magicka 2, you can exit through the game's interface, but the game process in linux will run forever until you finish your user session or (now) use the steam stop button.

I have had this issue with games before, though of course now I won't remember which games. It is a minor issue, so I just ignore it most of the time.

A bigger pet peeve is Civ 5 (and Civ BE) where I close the game, and Steam even recognizes it as closed (no stop button)... but the music still plays in the background until I kill the process manually. But even this I'm willing to live with.