I'm actually not a huge Hellraiser fan, so it's possible my internal model of the franchise isn't up to snuff, but it feels weird to be running around with a shotgun blowing things away like it's just another boomer shooter. Hopefully the atmosphere/tone isn't lost in fast-paced action combat. To my untutored gaze it feels like kind of a mismatch.

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Aha, seems my vacation is somewhat well-timed, then, in that it doesn't matter that I'm away from my PC! :D

Looking forward to this, even though I'll certainly end up resorting to cheating to make it through, as I ended up doing with the original.

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I really hate that that "Lossless Scaling" component is proprietary. Obviously I don't mind buying proprietary closed-source software in general. I do, after all, purchase games on Steam (and other storefronts). But a utility like this being closed source would mean a never-buy for me. I've seen too much closed-source software die over the years. By all means sell the software if you want, of course -- it's not the pricetag I object to. But if you care about your software, and care about it still being usable N years in the future when your own interest / availability / life situation has changed, you don't make that kind of thing closed-source.

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@wytrabbit

I love the game but I keep wishing for a renewable energy source option, or coal/oil sources that are endless. Moving and rebuilding critical systems over large distances is super tedious to me

They've said "no" to "green" energy sources apart from Geothermal because they're too game-breaking. Geothermal gens can only be placed on a finite number of geysers, so they don't have quite the same problem.

As for coal/oil, though: all resource nodes in the game are infinite and generate a constant supply of material. Your coal + oil power systems will keep working forever. I've yet to do a playthrough where I haven't left my coal gens up for the entire game, even long after their power output becomes completely insignificant compared to what I've built later. The only nonrenewable resource in the game is, weirdly, the leaves+wood you'll often be collecting in the very early game (when you just have Biomass Burners), since foliage doesn't respawn.

Also: there's never a need to move + rebuild systems. You can do it if you want, of course, but that's a choice you make, not a necessity. As you expand and build new factories all over the (gigantic) map, you can just leave your existing stuff happily producing material as-is. Those factories aren't gonna stop working.

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I am surprised there wasn't a controller support before

For awhile there actually was some basic controller support, but it was never very good, and they ended up ripping it out so that at least community controller mappings could have free reign to do whatever they want. The basic problem has always been that the entire UI/UX is very mouse+keyboard focused; you don't want console users to have to pretend to control a mouse cursor, for instance, and there's always been far more keybinds than you'd be able to fit on a controller. The way to implement them properly is with a from-the-ground-up controller-focused UI/UX, which CSS didn't really have the internal drive to get done themselves. So, they basically ended up outsourcing it to the folks doing the console port, and then merged their changes back in for the forthcoming 1.1. It'll be interesting to see how it works, though I'm not a controller user myself.

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@Elurztac

Well for Cyberpunk the 1.6 version still exist.

Ah, good to know! I admit I didn't really look around re: Cyberpunk; I'd finished my playthrough by that point and wasn't really interested in starting another. It's definitely nice when studios do make use of the "betas" tab for that kind of thing; I know it's a not-unheard-of practice. Perhaps the "problem" I was worried about with these big overhauls is less common than my impression of it. :)

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I remain of two minds about huge updates like this to already-established games. On the one hand, it's good that games are being kept alive and evolving to meet the desires of its playerbase, but it's a shame that the old versions of the game often effectively cease to exist (outside of presumably-illegal shenanigans). Like a hypothetical person who enjoyed the pre-2.0 version of this game but doesn't like the changes brought by this 2.0 release is kind of hung out to dry, yeah?

As a more concrete example I've got more experience with: I finally bought and played through Cyberpunk 2077 when it was at v1.6.x, and had a great time going through that playthrough. Then shortly after I finished it up, CDPR released their own 2.0 update which changed a lot about the game, including changes that I'm not personally super fond of. I'm really glad I finished up that playthrough before that patch dropped; it would have really sucked to have been halfway through and then suddenly find out I'm playing a totally separate game.

It just feels like the kind of change which would make more sense for an Early Access title where you already know that the game may radically change, except that we're dealing with games that were already theoretically "done."

Anyway, dunno -- I have no skin in this particular game, since I've never played it (or even consciously heard of it). Just something that always comes to mind when I hear about huge game-changing updates like this.

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I love that little 4AM detail as well. Not only are they engaging in malicious layoffs so their c-suite can buy more yachts, but the people who are still there get to constantly crunch to keep the game alive. What an effed up industry.

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You can always torrent the game you once bought or if there is a title you WOULD buy, but it's not "legally" available. It's common sense that if you pay for a game with your hard earned money, it's just yours.

Kind of the whole point of the Stop Killing Games campaign is that this is not a solution because the games in question stop working without the backend servers running as well. The game which kicked off the campaign, Ubisoft's The Crew, even sold physical copies on DVD, in stores, and those copies are just as dead as anyone who bought it virtually. Access to the game binaries/data isn't the problem here.

These petitions are just too soft of an approach.

The UK petition is just one of many actions that the campaign is taking: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/countries [External Link] -- They've also been working directly with lawyers and governmental representatives in other countries, and more or less trying to find any chink in the armor that they can. Unless I'm misremembering, Ross didn't think that action in the UK was especially likely to succeed anyway, given the legal precedents over there (though it was more likely than anything in the U.S., of course).

Would use demonstrations and right to demonstrate in front of the associated departments there in the UK. Or can you actually gather there anymore to public places in numbers legally to demonstrate?

As someone who's spent a lot of time protesting and demonstrating in numbers, I think the implication that issues like this would somehow be magically solved by gathering in public places to be laughable. By all means protest and demonstrate as the situation warrants, of course, and doing so can be quite cathartic on a personal, emotional level. But I personally take a pretty dim view as to the ultimate effectiveness. And, honestly, with everything else going on in the world these days, I personally couldn't fathom the mindset which would lead one to try and go protest this cause in person. I agree it's an important cause that I believe in, and I'd love to see games stop getting killed too, but there are currently some rather bigger fishes to fry out there.

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I've been eagerly awaiting this for some time now! It was great to see it pop up in my notifications yesterday. The first two in the series are utterly delightful, too. Still stuck into Satisfactory for the time being, but I've already got this installed and ready to go for when I tire of factory management.

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