I am curious how much of their growth is attributed to cheaters creating infinite accounts to claim free games so if they get banned on one account they just switch to another one.

Dead By Daylight has this problem where the game was free for like a week on Epic games, and if you play with a cheater in the game (pretty common because the anticheat is nonexistent), its almost always from an Epic account with some random character username.

“Bro just one more post processing technology, trust me, just one more and all the clarity issues are going to be fixed, just one more. One more and that’s it, it’s going to look native, just one more. Just let me do one more, please.”

Literally Digital Foundry for the last like, 10 years.

Every time a new scaling tech or TAA method or whatever comes out, they talk about how it is so good and has next to zero flaws. Then a new one comes along and suddenly they start talking about all the flaws the previous one had and how the new one is “nearly perfect.” And then you look at the footage they are showing and its literally best case scenario, minimal to no camera movement, and little to no large or close objects moving at a high speed. Footage designed to minimize the flaws and maximize selling you on the tech, regardless of how little that is actually going to happen during real world gameplay for literally anybody.

Yeah, but accidentally clicking the quit button when you meant to click options or whatever and the game just instantly dropping you at the desktop is equally as annoying. Two click exit is a good compromise. Four is way too many though.

Game developers should add text size options to be big enough or at least legible enough at small resolutions like 240p. This can help scale UI design too accomadate for potentially huge text sizes.

You should play Policenauts. Its a visual novel adventure game from Hideo Kojimas early days in 1994-1996 following a private eye investigating a disappearance on a space station.

When you load a save file, the game gives you a summary screen of the events in the game that have happened so far (at least it does in the SEGA Saturn version that I played). Its the first instance I recall of this happening in video games, and I do wish it could return in more games. Its possible that other games had this before, but if there was a game that did, I dont know it or remember it.

Every game after Before the Storm sucked. Even Before the Storm was only okay, not a good as the first game, but holy moly was every game after total garbage.

Interested to know how they are sourcing their DRAM chips, and if they know that pricing something high in a bad global economy and a shortage of supply is an easy way to kill early adoption of something.

As a Stellaris Mod Enjoyer, this is extremely helpful. No more game saves breaking because all my mods updated to the newest version of the games, hopefully.

I hate Ubisoft, but I actually do think this was decided to happen before they unionized and is just bad timing.

Decisions to close studios like this never happen so quickly and usually take multiple months between the time the decision is made to the time the actual closure takes place.

It is possible that the studio caught wind that they were being closed and decided to unionize in order to capitalize on the bad PR. But this is all speculation since we don’t know every detail, and both sides will leave out various details to give themselves an advantageous position in the conversation.

I’d rather get whatever the newest/best I can afford when I need to upgrade. The 1080 Ti is tired but it still works well, so I don’t feel enough pressure to spend the money yet. Ive been looking at the 5070 Ti, but the price is still too high having only just dropped to MSRP in my area.

Also, I never trust second-hand GPUs like I never trust second-hand hard drives. Too much money in it for someone to lie about the condition, or whether they smoke or not, etc. Less hassle when I buy new, especially if I need to RMA, even if it is a higher initial cost.

I’d love to have an RTX card if they weren’t so overpriced. My 1080 Ti is getting tired of skipping upgrade year due to absurd overpricing.

Breath of the Wild was a mid game, and a bad Zelda game outright. It ditched nearly everything that players had come to expect from a Zelda game. Tears was way better, but still lacked the feeling of being a Zelda game. If you removed all the Zelda assets, would anyone be able to truly call it a Zelda game? With Link to the Past all the way to even Skyward Sword I certainly could.

But the effect the games financial success has had on Nintendo as a whole has been devastating. Nintendo is the kind of company that will learn all the wrong lessons and none of the right ones. They are literal Monkey Paw thinkers. They saw the PS1 outpace the N64 and thought “people want disks, okay lets pick this really odd format disk with a tiny storage limit instead of using normal ones.” And then when the Gamecube failed they said “oh, people must not want powerful hardware I guess, lets just sell people the same hardware again so its underpowered this time but add a motion control gimmick.”

So when BotW was a financial success, they immediately believe that all of their big games need an open world, or need to be vast departures from what players expect from each series. It is truly tragic.

Because they would make Nintendo look tiny by comparison.

Okay, but if we take care of the problem that people have, legal regulation would not be necessary. We wouldn’t have to have a trillion laws stipulating all the various minutae of what we should or shouldn’t do because of how harmful it is or isn’t, people would be able to figure this out on their own. Less laws in general is better, when the population is intelligent enough to understand that you don’t drink bleach because a computer screen showed those words to you in that order.

Opiates wouldn’t need to be illegal because people would be intelligent enough to know how harmful it is and thus wouldn’t use it. A law wouldn’t need to be created listing every known or unknown opiate derivative that is banned or for whatever use. People would just be smart enough to know.

Basically, too many people aren’t using their own brain. AI is definitely a helpful tool, but not if you’re an idiot and believe it to have any actual intelligence. Its not there to replace your doctor or teacher, it is there to help you with word processing, pattern recognition, or other such language based tasks. AI used as a tool is queried for things like “check this passage for overly repetitive terms and suggest improvements that keep the same meaning.” AI used by an idiot is queried for things like “what do my lab results say about my health?”

I suppose this is too far advanced for humanity at this point. Laws are important, but too many laws begins to speak about a general decline in intelligence.

To be fair, much of the memetic hazard posed by various technologies is not actually the fault of the technologies, but a fault of the person having no self-control, no accountability for their own actions, or having some form of undiagnosed medical issue they are unaware of.

Its like saying video games cause school shootings: the problem isnt the video games, its the person. The video games are an excuse to shift blame and accountability away from the person.

Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:

In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.

Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that most people reading this probably don’t know this because they are too young, but these games that came on more than one floppy disk usually required you to insert at least 2 disks at the same time, one into both of the available drive slots. Then you would swap one or both out, depending on where in the game you were and if you needed to save or not. Each drive only appeared as a letter to save (usually A: and B:, which is why computer harddrives often start at C:, fun fact), and sometimes it didn’t prompt you to make sure after you selected one of the drive letters from the ingame menu that showed you nothing but the letter of the drive. So if you selected the wrong one, that sucks for you because they sometimes didn’t bother to check if there was already data on that disk or not before writing, which could cause data corruption, usually towards the end of the game.

Honestly this list reads like the person who picked the games doesn’t actually play games and just listed the most popular/ most talked about games, but to make it not that obvious they asked that one “weird” person groupchat they were invited to once that is full of actual gamers to provide like 3 games for the list lol

I only preorder a game if I know I want to play it right when it comes out and want to be able to preload the game, and if it comes from a developer I know will not disappoint me (FromSoftware, Kojima Productions, anything from Yoko Taro, etc.).

In the past I used to preorder to reserve a physical copy as soon as it was released, but there is generally no need for that anymore. This makes me both happy and sad, because for all the hassle it was, I kinda miss some aspects of the simpler times. In some ways, I do wish the world could rewind to the 2000s.

Early Access is different from preordering because you gain access to the product instantly, and generally can influence the direction of the game in a hopefully positive way. Providing feedback on what works and what doesn’t is an important part of playing and early access game. A lot of people seem to ignore this.

EVGA 1080Ti owner here. Definitely not happy with the way NVidia has been acting for a while.

The loss of EVGA GPUs was already tragic enough because of NVidia. Now their recent actions? Not happy.

Finally, a programmer that actually knows what he is talking about… PirateHardware…