Aaand, almost two months later, the vast majority of issues reported (and there weren't even really that many) have seemingly gone completely ignored. Would've been nice to have at least gotten a cursory "we'll look into this" on some of those. Ah, well.

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Quoting: KimyrielleStupid question, but do we know for sure that the Linux port will have the Always on thing? For all we know it could be a piece of Windows middleware that doesn't compile in Linux. Not that stuff like that ever happens. :D

Heh, that's certianly a point. For once some middleware we DON'T want ported over!

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Quoting: Armand RaynalWarez also exist for games on GNU/Linux ;)
They are just a bit harder to find ...

Yeah, I'm sure - I've always been opposed to using them in general, though. I've certainly used them in the past, to for instance play games that I'd owned via Wine, whose DRM schemes would fail otherwise. It's something I philosophically detest, though, and technically opens you up to more risk that you're already taking on. I'm already trusting unsigned binary blobs on my machine, and now I've got to trust that the modifications I've found on some shady corner of the internet are good as well. Obviously "tainted" cracks would tank a cracking crew's reputation pretty damn quickly, but still.

The fact that there's always been ways to bypass DRM like this doesn't make it philosophically acceptable to me.

Been awhile since I've let myself get into this little rant of mine! I've been bending more and more ever since Valve stepped into the Linux arena - it was easier to be "pure" about this kind of thing when all I had to choose from was id, Loki, and Introversion titles! Apparently I've still got a line in the sand somewhere, though. :)

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Quoting: Stupendous ManTrying not to be negative, but what's with the recent trend in game titles? Hitman, Tomb Raider, Doom etc, these games are years old! Why can't they just call them Hitman/Tomb Raider/Doom N+1? I'm old enough to remember when the originals were released, maybe that's why I get so easily confused!

But seriously, what is the reason for this? Don't they expect us to be able to count above 2 or 3?

Yeah, it's pretty ludicrous. I think it's generally done when the developers/publishers/whoever feel as though they're 'rebooting' a franchise rather than putting out a brand new sequel. Still reasonably obnoxious, though. Has this been happening in movie franchises too? I seem to think so, but I'm pretty unplugged from that area of popular culture, so I may be imagining it.

Edit: I'm fond of the word "ludicrous" today, apparently! :)

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Quoting: GuestWell I'll break the chain by saying, I couldn't care less about "always on", as long as the game is worth the money and runs without problems, it makes no difference to me.
It's not like I'm going to care in 20 years time if it is still able to go online.

I'm outing myself as an old geezer here, but I still occasionally play the games I was playing 20 years ago, because I still find them fun (although nostalgia is obviously a factor there as well). I have no doubt that someone'll release a day0 crack to disable that always-online nonsense anyway, so 20 years down the line if I wanted to play this new Hitman, it'd probably just be a few seconds of searching away, but still: it's a hoop I shouldn't have to jump through for a game I bloody well paid for. Not to mention that I shouldn't have to download probably-technicaly-illegal DRM bypasses just to play the game.

I've also been foiled more than once while on trips, thinking I could while away a few hours at an airport playing a game on a laptop, to find myself stymied by DRM restrictions like that. (Admittedly, airport wifi is more ubiquitous now than it used to be, but it's still not always dependable.)

In the end it boils down to this: There are already plenty of failure modes for playing a game - drivers change, OSes update, hardware flakes out - adding yet another arbitrary layer in there which is almost by nature guaranteed to fail at some point just seems ludicrous.

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Uggggh at the always-online requirement. That'll probably be enough to keep me away. My connection's quite stable as well, but that's one thing that bothers the hell out of me.

I wonder if I've been unknowingly playing other games which have requirements like that; I should set Steam to offline and work up some iptables to block traffic and see how well the games I play do...

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Finished up Saints Row 2 a week or two ago (which was fun despite the pervasive performance/stuttering issues which have already been mentioned by other folks here), and have been digging into Saints Row 3. Was a nice breath of fresh air after the SR2 performance problems - driving is actually fun again!

I'd started on Alien:Isolation the night before the SR2+SR3 ports dropped and, alas, I have yet to get back to it. Once I finish up with SR3 I'll probably dive back in there.

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Quoting: apocalyptechThe game must be, I dunno, compiling shaders or something when that's happening, because in all cases, the second time through playing it, there's always basically no stuttering for me. The opening cinematics of both SR4 and SR3 were basically not watchable for me on the first time through, but then on the second time they play totally fine.

So yeah, I'd tried out SR2 last night as well, and basically experienced the exact same thing, though I had more latent stuttering in SR2 than I've seen in the other games, so the performance there could probably use some more attention. I'm guessing it's just got to compile-and-cache some things during the initial runs, and can read from that cache on subsequent runs.

Anyway: IMO the performance on SR2 is fine once you get through those initial periods of lag. I've only played for an hour or so, but it was running great by the end.

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The stuttering thing on the initial videos is something that happened to me in both SR4 and GooH as well, and persisted for a little while when new areas of the map were opened, etc. The game must be, I dunno, compiling shaders or something when that's happening, because in all cases, the second time through playing it, there's always basically no stuttering for me. The opening cinematics of both SR4 and SR3 were basically not watchable for me on the first time through, but then on the second time they play totally fine. (And similarly, the occasional stuttering when going into new areas went away once I'd moved through them once.)

So certainly weird, and definitely doesn't make a good first impression, but at least (in my experience, anyway) it does go away.

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Ha, I would totally play Shadow of Mordor like this. You're already an undead ranger being kept alive by a ghostly wraith who doesn't let you Actually Die under any circumstances, so why not be a floating head, too?

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