ampersandrew 3 hours ago • 100%
None of those made hundreds of millions of dollars.
ampersandrew 3 hours ago • 100%
So like...no mention of which patents?
ampersandrew 4 hours ago • 100%
Yeah, I think the strategy is so terrible that they can't believe it, but they've publicly stated that's the goal. I'm not sure what data they'd get out of it that they don't get out of Steam achievements, but more likely it's to brag about how many "active PSN users" they have, using a misleading number. Still, all I see when I see that requirement is online DRM.
ampersandrew 6 hours ago • 100%
It was faster to load the higher resolution data back in the early 2010s on HDDs, so I don't imagine it got any better for using compression now that we're on SSDs.
ampersandrew 8 hours ago • 80%
Starting with this one, it's a requirement on PC, yes. Hopefully they do away with it due to lost sales, but they're still at least pretending that they're somehow going to convert PC players into console players.
ampersandrew 8 hours ago • 100%
Nah, that's not some inherent quality you have. I played fighting games regularly for basically my entire life, but it was only about 5 years ago that I started to really learn how they work under the hood and focused on how to improve. You can too! Also, "learning how to get good" is a skill that transcends any one genre, so I recommend you try it on one game or another.
ampersandrew 9 hours ago • 100%
You play some more and get better. Nobody starts good at a game unless they spent that time getting good at a similar one. Probably right at launch will be tons of people at your skill level to learn with.
ampersandrew 13 hours ago • 100%
It's got other strengths. Particularly the "kill enemy" part of that chain, on higher difficulties, at least.
ampersandrew 16 hours ago • 100%
Doesn't Battlefield use dedicated servers though? I don't know of any peer to peer game that handles that many players.
ampersandrew 1 day ago • 100%
They're typically optimizing for fidelity and performance ahead of install size. Multiple LODs can balloon an install size quite quickly, but they'll give you better bang for your buck in other areas, and storage space is a concern that dissipates more in time, as you upgrade to newer machines.
ampersandrew 1 day ago • 100%
They paid more for it than they saw back in sales or expected new customers. What they've said publicly is that they won't be using this strategy anymore, because it isn't working. They claim free game giveaways are working, but I have my doubts as to how valuable those user acquisitions are.
ampersandrew 1 day ago • 100%
Expansion packs are a very old concept. That brand new game came out over a year ago. Also, it's $25 for both DLCs.
ampersandrew 1 day ago • 95%
The exclusivity deals appear to have been good for no one involved: Epic, Square Enix, Sony, or customers, so I think we've seen the last of them outside of things Epic publishes themselves.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 100%
7 games per year is a pretty good cadence! Most studios are on their way to being 7 years per game.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 100%
I haven't played Obra Dinn yet, but I keep hearing that anyone into that game is also into The Case of the Golden Idol, which I can confirm is fantastic. I'd recommend the DLC as well, which has a neat story hook to it after the main game.
I'm not sure how literal you meant the "fighting" tag, as opposed to something like a boss rush, but I'd call Skullgirls the best game ever made if you're into the multiplayer aspect.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 75%
We weren't per se. Only that a predominantly multiplayer game is a harder sell when the subscription is damn near mandatory, which is why there are so few multiplayer-only games on consoles that cost money up front anymore, and free to play games get an exception to the subscription service on PlayStation and Xbox.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 77%
I don't think it's singling it out to say that the just-about-required subscription makes it less appealing to purchase, whereas most multiplayer games have the PC version as an option.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 100%
Metacritic and OpenCritic scores are the best way to gauge whether or not they'll win GOTY at "The Game Awards" though, since the same people who awarded those scores are largely responsible for nominating and selecting winners at that show. So it's possible that as bugs were ironed out in patches and over the subsequent years these outlets all found their "Kingdom Come: Deliverance guy" who came to the game late that perhaps this new one does better, but it would have to do a lot better to be a real contender.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 66%
Because I'd say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you're not addicted, you're not spending time or money beyond your means. So I'd rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it's acknowledged as gambling. I don't know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they'll "binge" shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you're doing something else, including a show you've seen a million times.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 80%
I don't think that's a great excuse.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 85%
It does rely on a subscription though.
ampersandrew 2 days ago • 66%
The second game even repurposed large parts of the not-particularly-impressive campaign of the first game. They weren't going to fool me again by making me buy the same game a third time.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
Conscript requires a lot of time set aside to play it in order to make any progress, so instead, lately I've been playing Divinity: Original Sin. I had put it down toward the end of act 2, and it took a good deal of looking at a walkthrough to figure out how to progress from where I left off, since the quest log only helps so much, but I wrapped up act 2 and got to act 3. As combat-heavy as this game is, I do really enjoy the cut of Larian's jib, even when it's not as good as Baldur's Gate 3.
I also picked up Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, or the MvC Collection for short. I never had a Dreamcast back in the day, and I had probably only played a couple of hours of these games in arcades or via emulators in my entire life, so I never got to dig into these games before. I put together a ratio team using Justin Wong's 2024 ratio list of Dhalsim/Juggernaut/Thanos and even won some matches online with it, so that felt good. For a high-tier team, I do want to avoid as many of the mainstay characters as possible, not just because I'm not a rushdown player but also because it's more interesting to see anyone other than Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel on screen, so I might run Dhalsim/Dr. Doom/Cable. I don't imagine I'll stick with MvC2 for too long, since Skullgirls is, in my opinion, just a better MvC2, but it's fun seeing what I might have been playing if I had a Dreamcast in the early 00s instead of a Gamecube, especially with the next fighting collection on the way too. I also tried out X-Men: Children of the Atom in this collection, and boy can I not figure out how to stop the CPU-controlled Colossus. That dude expertly dodges my ice beams, seemingly can't be stopped once his armor is up, and will air grab me the second I try to super jump out of the corner.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
Well, sure, but in a few years' time, the definition of what a console is might change.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
It's a popularity contest in either case, so the winners will hardly change.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 33%
Out themselves with regards to what? For a game to win GOTY at the Keighleys, the best way to stand a chance is to be a game that the most reviewers played, and they're all going to cover the next Assassin's Creed.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
That last game didn't break 80 on metacritic. This second one would be quite the unlikely game of the year contender.
EDIT: Also just remembered that game doesn't come out until 2025.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 84%
I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don't think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they're still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don't know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you're so inclined.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They're just gambling because the world sucks, or something...
No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they're available, even if it's rare, so we're prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 100%
The core of lots of games revolve around random chance, and plenty of those exhibit no addictive behavior whatsoever. I'd certainly like to hear a research psychologist's take on it though.
ampersandrew 3 days ago • 92%
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.
ampersandrew 4 days ago • 100%
I don't think it's a good argument to say that it's okay for a game to inevitably die because they're doing better right now. Brink, Overwatch 1, and HyperScape are fully dead, btw. I'd rather be able to pay $60 and have a game I can play forever than save money on a game that's designed to self destruct.
ampersandrew 4 days ago • 100%
I'm way into fighting games. Even the ones with a battle pass and such can still be played offline (except maybe for 2XKO and Brawlhalla) and quite frankly can't match the content churn that other genres do in the live service space.
ampersandrew 4 days ago • 100%
If someone 50 years from now wants to see what this game Fortnite was all about, they should be able to get a reasonable approximation of it by booting it up and playing with 100 other people. That's what it means to preserve it. We've had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.
ampersandrew 4 days ago • 100%
The inevitable outcome for every live service game is that it becomes inoperable and unplayable, even the good ones. It doesn't matter if it's Suicide Squad or Fortnite. They all should still be preserved. Open source is appreciated but not necessary.
ampersandrew 5 days ago • 100%
You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that's very effective at preservation. Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies. But live service is just purposely killing games that didn't need to die.
ampersandrew 5 days ago • 100%
There's always Titan Quest.
ampersandrew 5 days ago • 100%
Any game that doesn't last forever was robbed of doing so arbitrarily. If they never updated Palworld again, in its current form, it will last forever.
ampersandrew 6 days ago • 100%
That deal only really made sense because it was with a company that did both things.
ampersandrew 6 days ago • 100%
Uh, this is a huge deal. Terrible news.
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
Luckily it's DRM-free. Back up your installers. I wanted to call attention to this, because in a very unusual move, it's being removed even for people who own a copy, whereas usually stores will only remove a game from sale and still host the files for existing owners to download.
The virtual rival thing could be cool. There's a lot of room for it to go wrong, and we're no worse off if it does. But replay takeover is huge. This is the holy grail of fighting game training mode features. You can go into a replay of a match and correct the things you did wrong or find answers to situations that are difficult or time consuming to recreate yourself in training mode.
I know most are probably talking about Path of Exile II or Diablo IV's latest expansion, but those are online-only, and I don't care even a little bit about "seasonal" content, so this is the one I'm excited for.
$50 for the base game, $70 with DLC included. Steam link provided. Also available on Epic.
This game has made the rounds before, but now it's got a slightly new title and plenty of new gameplay footage. Finally, more campaign FPS games!
This one's been in early access for a while, but it's finally hitting 1.0. If you're unfamiliar, it's a procedurally generated murder mystery immersive sim. A murder happens, you scan for evidence, track people by their address in the phone book, and make connections with red string yourself. When I played the demo a while back, someone came home while I was snooping in their apartment, so I escaped in a vent and ended up in the apartment on the floor below them. I waited for *that* resident to finish preparing their dinner and sit in front of the TV so I could leave through their front door and get out of there. This game is awesome.
I'm on Kubuntu 24.04, rocking a build that was pretty darn high end in 2021 with an AMD 6800 XT, and of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order was already old news by then. Proton does miracles, but this game freezes my entire machine. The last time I saw something like this happen was with Monster Hunter World in 2018, on a much older version of Proton. I can reliably get the game to freeze my machine in the opening level of The New Order, even across multiple versions of Proton, even with the renderapi launch parameter that should switch it back to OpenGL. Of course, even if I report this to Steam support, they'll tell me that they only support Steam Deck and not bespoke Linux desktops, and the game works fine on my Steam Deck, but would they be interested in some logs and a bug reported against the GitHub project? This is assuming no one here has an easy fix, of course. But if not, how would I get the logs? I wouldn't know what I'm looking at in those logs, personally. I'm also not sure if they'll write out correctly. Because it freezes the entire machine, I end up having to hard shut down the computer by the power button, and once or twice during my experiments, it failed to mount my game SSD (a separate drive from where my OS is installed) at boot, and I had to set up the automatic mount in the partition manager again. So assuming that doesn't impact the ability to write out the logs, I can collect them with some instructions, if you kind strangers in the know wouldn't mind providing them, please. And if Valve is interested in looking at them.
They are no longer going to be any form of independent from Sony/PlayStation anymore. The Final Shape's sales were never going to be able to prevent this from happening, says Jeff Grubb on his morning news show (paraphrased).
Whelp...I'm out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)
# The Tournaments These are going to be skewed through the lens of what I was personally interested in watching, but there was a lot worth watching. **Mortal Kombat 1** SonicFox took their 7th Evo championship this past weekend using at least three different characters, by my count. Strangely, they took the title in a mirror match against Nicolas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEYVZzJnQEs Nicolas and his twin brother ScorpionProcs have been on a tear through the Mortal Kombat scene since the world emerged from the pandemic, and they're both so young that they still need a parental escort to these events. The two of them have both been taking wins at different majors, typically only challenged by the likes of SonicFox and Rewind. ScorpionProcs didn't make it into top 6 this time around, but Nicolas got very close this time. **Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike** 3rd Strike is a game I tend to like more in theory than in practice. The parry system is awesome, but it's also so pervasive that it basically invalidates zoning, a major component of most fighting games that introduces some variety to play styles. Being 25 years old with no patches, in an era where characters like Sean were designed to be bad on purpose, it also settled into a rigid meta. That meta is Yun and, if you're lucky, Chun-Li, which is what the top 6 looked like in Evo Japan this year. The top 6 this weekend somehow had 6 different characters, if I'm not mistaken, including when players picked a pocket character, like Elena as a counter pick. Ordinarily, the most exciting match will be grand finals, not just because the most is at stake but also because it tends to be where you'll find the two best players in the closest competition. 3rd Strike this year is the exception. The star of the show is a player I'd heard about months ago from Justin Wong videos, Hayao. I had been following this person in particular through the entire bracket, hoping for him to bring a Hugo to top 6, and he delivered. He unfortunately was masterfully counter picked by his opponent in winners with a knowledge check that he just didn't have the answer to, but Hayao's match in losers quarterfinals was one of the all time greatest fighting game matches I've ever seen, on the 20th anniversary of Evo Moment 37. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8DpmASk_ho **Skullgirls (community tournament)** Personally, this is my main game, so it means more to me than any of the 8 games that Evo ran in an official capacity this year. It may have only been a 47 person bracket (it's harder to convince great players to sign up for a community tournament when there's no promise that Evo will avoid scheduling conflicts with other games), but the developer threw up a pretty substantial prize pool--from what I can tell, it was over $16k--and there were at least three great players who had a shot at winning the whole thing, Dekillsage, Reis, and SonicFox. Dekillsage finally took a bracket over SonicFox, winning decisively from the winners side of the bracket after sending SonicFox to losers. Unfortunately, there will be a bit of lag on the VOD, so I don't have it ready this morning to link to. **Guilty Gear Strive** One by one, my friends and I watched all sorts of top players get eliminated as they narrowed it down to top 6. The Strive scene is packed full of people who could have taken it all, and neither of the previous two Evo Vegas champions, Umisho and Leffen, made it into top 6. I like watching him play, but I never would have predicted Nitro would take it all, playing Jack-O', no less; the previous two years were both won by Happy Chaos players. Congrats to Nitro! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwUYASA9hc4 EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot! I love the things that the crowd gets into at big majors. There will be "See ya later!"s during Marvel 3 and "TO MEMPHIS!" in Street Fighter 6, but I heard a new one when Zando came on stage and played his Asuka. Asuka is a zoner who's playing Magic: The Gathering in the middle of a fighting game match, and he can cast a bunch of spells that send out cubes, giving the opponent no choice except to block for 10, 15, or 20 seconds in some cases. It's strong, but it sucks for the viewing experience and for the defender. So, facetiously, the crowd will yell "CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBES!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ik06KNRJIo **Street Fighter 6** I didn't follow the Street Fighter V scene very closely, largely because I didn't really like Street Fighter V, but Punk got his win that sounds like it was a long time coming. There was some phenomenal adaptation from both players. Punk with his masterful shimmies, that his opponents would catch on to a bit too late, and then Punk getting stingy with his meter on three different rounds that cost him three different games as his opponent Big Bird capitalized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-C435HjNhg # The Reveals SVC Chaos shadow dropped after the KOF XV finals, which caught everyone off guard. I would have thought that this would be part of a Capcom Vs. SNK collection, but the fact that this game is re-released at all bodes well for a CVS collection later. The reputation this game has is that it's the worst of those three games that SNK and Capcom collaborated on, but it's good to have it re-released with rollback anyway. Somehow, Heihachi returned. Death is already meaningless in fighting game stories, but Bandai Namco has been beating the "Heihachi is dead" drum for a while now and even leaned into it in the reveal. It seems the only thing they're capable of killing is Soul Calibur. RIP. Guilty Gear Strive showed off the next four characters coming to the game. Dizzy is a fan favorite, and I'm excited for her XX era song, "Awe of She", to be added to the Strive soundtrack. Venom is another fan favorite, but I wasn't sure if he'd be added due to his similarities to the current version of Jack-O' in the game. I never would have predicted Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Street Fighter 6 showed off Terry Bogard, and his face looks weird.
The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history's largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike bracket. Plus, other nerdy data is here, including which players of game X also signed up for game Y, and what the most popular games by country are. Competition ought to be pretty damn good this year.
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
I got Star Wars Episode I Racer from GOG on a sale for dirt cheap back around May 4th. I've been trying to get it working via Heroic ever since, particularly the multiplayer, which is fixed via mods. The Lutris script definitely does all of this super easy, but not only would I like to have it working via Heroic for the gamepad controls navigation, I'd also like to pay it forward and document these steps on the PC Gaming Wiki. Unfortunately, while I thought I could tell what this script was doing after scouring the Lutris script documentation, I haven't managed to crack it, and the Heroic install of the game complains about not having IPX installed when I boot it. https://lutris.net/games/install/13260/view With the Lutris install of the game and the Heroic install of the game side by side in WineCFG, I can see that that there are library overrides set for: - dplaysvr.exe - dplayx - dpmodemx - dpnet - dpnhpast - dpnhupnp - dpnsvr.exe - dpwsockx All "(native)". For some reason they're sorted to the top of the library overrides and marked with an asterisk, and what's more, I don't see any hint of these ones in the Lutris install script, but they got set somehow, and I don't see the libraries here that are listed in the script. There are also several ways to use the mod fix, including the DLL override and the EXE patcher. The EXE patcher just crashes and dies right away when I run it in the Wine prefix via Heroic, and I once again don't see any hint in the Lutris script that the patcher executable is being run. And if it wasn't clear up until this point, I did download the 3 files at the top of the Lutris script and extract them to the Heroic game directory. Are there any Lutris experts here who can help me figure out what I'm missing? **UPDATE:** The fix was, of course, very simple. Thanks to [@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de](https://swg-empire.de/u/bjoern_tantau)! The thing that prevented it from working was the wsock32 override. Just because it's not in the list of library overrides, that doesn't mean you can't just type it in yourself. I've updated [the PC Gaming Wiki](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_I_-_Racer) with instructions for any time travelers from the future.
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some *very* real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way better than the game just dying.
I don't think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I'm letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won't save you from Microsoft laying you off.
For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn't do many interviews. Personally, as the acquisitions were happening, I was rooting for Embracer, because they were clearly trying to rebuild the type of publisher that the big ones today used to be, offering a large variety of options so that you can have hits and misses and keep experimenting to find what your customers want, where today's big publishers make a couple of games per year, leaving most types of games they used to make on the table, even if they were profitable, because they're not the *most* profitable. It's hard to keep track of what these three companies even own anymore, after splitting with Gearbox and Saber recently as well, but just prior to this shuffle, Embracer absolutely had so many irons in the fire that plenty of them were catching my interest, like the old days. Unfortunately, Embracer did this with a lot of debt, and comes to this wisdom all to late: > I'm a firm believer in equity. I think debt in general is quite dangerous as a tool. You should be careful to carry too much in gaming. And then he basically immediately disregards this wisdom with the next sentence. There's an old saying from Warrent Buffet, "A rising tide floats all boats…only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." And Wingefors was naked.
Full disclosure: I'm friends with the guys who run this podcast and have appeared on other episodes, but I thought this story was particularly interesting and worth sharing.
Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! [www.stopkillinggames.com](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)
Hi, folks. A bit of an unusual problem here. In some Proton games, in semi-predictable places, I'll get this audio crunch noise. It's not deafeningly loud or anything, but it is distracting sometimes. I first heard it when playing Starfield, and it was most common when loading into a city environment. This crunchy audio sounds kind of like when Hollywood simulates corrupt or glitchy video recordings, and it's in addition to, not really in place of, the other audio in the scene, as far as I can tell. Because Starfield is a sci-fi game, I initially thought it was either supposed to be there or that it was there for everyone on Windows as some kind of Bethesda technical shenanigans. Then I noticed it in Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I had played through 7 years ago on PS4, so I was familiar with the sounds in that game. It was much more rare there, and I had a hard time pinning down a pattern. As I'm now playing through Pillars of Eternity II, it's much more noticeable, as it tends to happen whenever you continue the dialogue to the next step by hitting "1. Continue" or whatever other dialogue options the game gives you, but how frequently it shows it can vary wildly by location. Sometimes I won't hear it for hours, and sometimes it's every time I click to continue the conversation. I wish I could show you what this audio sounds like. I encountered an area in Neketaka where this glitch happens frequently, so I set up OBS and recorded it, only to find that the audio glitch didn't make it into the recording. "Maybe it's my speakers?" I thought, but I also get this glitch through headphone jack with a shielded audio cable. I tried the game on Steam Deck, which also defaults to running the game through Proton instead of native, and the same scene via cloud save was glitchless. I found some search results saying that some "audio niceness" value may have been exceeded, but when I turned on logging, I didn't see any evidence that that's what's happening to me as the thread explained that I should, and trying the advice they offered anyway, I saw no difference. I've tried Proton 7, 8, and experimental, and they all behave the same; Steam Deck says Valve selected Proton 8, for what that's worth, and my kernel is newer than the one Steam Deck uses, though that is Valve's custom kernel. I'm on Kubuntu 23.10 and kernel 6.5.0-26-generic. There are a couple of reasons why I chose to run Pillars of Eternity II, in particular, via Proton that I won't bore you with, and I may be able to get around this more-pervasive-than-average problem for this game specifically by running it natively, but I'd still like to solve this problem for all of my future Proton games if possible, and I can fairly reliably reproduce the issue here to be sure that it's gone after making changes. Does anyone know where I can start looking? Has anyone run into this problem personally?
This is a really good interview. tl;dw is... - their next game was going to be D&D, but they changed course and are doing something else now - Vincke has a vision for "the one RPG to rule them all", and each of their past three RPGs is a step closer to it - the next game is *not* going to be that master vision but one step closer toward it, with their previous 3 RPGs proving out emergent design/multiplayer, story and consequence, and personal stories/performance capture, respectively - Vincke would like to have this next game done in 3 years compared to BG3's 6 year development cycle, but realistically expects 4 years, as long as there isn't something like COVID-19 or a war in Ukraine to impede their progress
She looks to have retained most of what made her cool in +R, except there's no Instant Kill for her to route into. Looks like a cool addition to the roster.
I'm considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they're DRM-free, especially now that there's a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there's no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing? Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it's less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I'd be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.
A bit of a media push for this game is coming out now. It looks great in motion, and this is a good breakdown of the game's main systems. I can't help but feel like they copied Street Fighter 6's homework, but I love Street Fighter 6, so I'm not complaining.