Much as I'm looking forward to this, I always hate seeing multiplatform support locked behind stretch goals on these things. If you're not developing with multiplatform support in mind from the start, you're just setting yourself up to waste a lot of time and effort later down the line. Hopefully if that goal's hit they get that porting work done early on (and integrated into the core codebase) instead of just trying to do a porting job after the fact. Given the state of Wine/Proton nowadays I'd sort of rather they just stick with a Windows version, if Mac+Linux wasn't already in their sights.

Anyway, I guess I'll probably break my own "don't Kickstart videogames" rule and contribute to this one regardless. I can be bought via nostalgia, it seems!

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Quoting: eldarionA pitty they will work on multiplayer before all single player features.

I don't really care about multiplayer myself, either, but for a feature like that, it is extremely useful from a development perspective to bake it in as close to the beginning as possible, rather than trying to add it in after the fact. That way you don't discover right near the end that you've made some fundamental assumptions early on which make implementation that much more difficult, etc. IMO it's a good idea to be doing it so early.

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Bah.

I know a lot of folks really like the new update, but for me it was the final straw which made me abandon the beta branch and try to avoid it for awhile. I know they've said they put a lot of work into making it fast/smooth/whatever, but it just *feels* dog-slow to me. Visible little flickers when a menu activates. Little rendering delays when a window closes so there's a black area visible on the main window until the client catches up. It's just so infuriating. I hate how every app nowadays is just some Electron-or-whatever webapp, and optimizing that kind of thing properly is nearly impossible. I really miss native widgets.

The whole shader-rendering thing is annoying as hell too; I know they'd theoretically put in some "fixes" for that but it still seems super sub-par. I was really hoping that this lousy update would've spent more time in beta to get more of this kind of stuff figured out.

Anyway, crotchety old-man talk here. Just venting, apparently. Alas!

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Ooh, excellent! As someone who's got exactly zero interest in investing in anything VR, I'd always wished there was a non-VR version of this so I could at least play the thing, even if I'm missing out on gimmicks. Seems like I might have to take the plunge soon, then!

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Quoting: 1xokBefore that, I hadn't played commercial games for over 15 years. I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and at some point I got tired of the dual boot installation.

Hah, yeah, that was more-or-less my experience as well. There was the occasional Introversion title to buy, and I'd spent some time on Minecraft by that point. I think the first few Humble Indie Bundles had been out by that time as well, which was kind of exciting, but not having games available on Linux was a pretty nice way to Not Have To Exercise Self-Control in regards to buying games. For the most part I just didn't 'cause it was an awful lot easier to not have to jump through hoops (dualboot, then-less-globally-useful-Wine, etc).

It's a bit of a shame that what seems to have really broken the floodgates was Proton. I was cautiously optimistic for awhile that we were headed into a renaissance of native ports, but that proved to be mostly short-lived. Ah well! I'll take what I can get. :)

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Excellent, though that advice is weird.

I actually missed the Psychonauts train back in the day and never played the original until earlier this year, and then went on to play 2 via Proton. IMO it improves on practically every aspect of the original. I'd definitely highly recommend it. Though I do wonder how it would work for someone who's never played the original -- I suspect it might be weird in some unintended ways, instead of just the intentional weirdness.

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I still find it infuriating when game companies don't include "release the server software" as part of their game retirement plans. Like, sure, obviously you can't keep running your servers forever, but that doesn't mean you have to kill off parts of your game when that time eventually comes. Obviously that's something that's easier done when you plan for it from the start, but killing off parts of your game like this is callous and anti-consumer.

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The online requirement thing continues to bother me about this series. I got one of the HITMANs for free (or near free?) ages ago but couldn't bring myself to play more than like 5 minutes of it after discovering that despite being a 100% single-player experience, it was gonna cripple itself if I didn't let it phone home constantly. No sale from me, faceless corporation! (*That'll* show 'em, eh?)

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The Hitman series has always been annoying like this, wasn't it? I think I got the first "HITMAN" (in the newer "rebooted" line) free from something, or maybe part of a bundle, and I'd give it a quick go, but their always-online bullshit led me to uninstall it pretty much right away. I'm not even sure if I finished the first mission.

Definitely a shame that something like that slipped through GOG; I still don't really buy much through GOG, but I've always appreciated their relatively unusual stance about things like DRM. Hopefully there's not too much more of this boundary-pushing going on in the store -- always-online requirements may as well be DRM, even if it might be technically not. GOG's still more principled than any of the other major options at the moment, so it'd be a shame if they were inching towards the other norm.

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Oh, nice! This already ran just fine in Proton, but I do love to see native ports. IMO the game's not as good as Epistory, alas, and very weirdly it often doesn't feel like a typing game really. Instead it's much more tactical: you're never stuck in one spot anymore (like many of the Epistory "arenas"), so you can often survive pretty easily just with character mobility, rather than raw typing speed. You've also got to keep an eye on your mana bar, because using the "special" attacks (fire/ice/wind/whatever) will drain mana. An interesting twist is that you can modify those attacks with further modifiers, like "FIRE RAY LONG <enemyword>" will fire out a long ray of fire, instead of just the usual little fire bolt. The result is that you end up moving around the map a lot and picking out the best sorts of attacks that you think will work against the current enemies, but you very rarely get into a raw typing-speed fugue like would often happen in Epistory. It's almost like the typing is a mere standin for an "action bar" of abilities, like you'd see in a Diablolike-or-whatever, rather than the main focus of the game.

Still, it's nice to see Fishing Cactus being willing to mix up the formula so much, and even though I don't think it works as well as Epistory did, I'd still recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good typing game.

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