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Latest Comments by Kimyrielle
Civilization VI announced, will support Linux & SteamOS
12 May 2016 at 6:13 pm UTC

Quoting: wojtek88With your logic India is the second most powerful country in the world. Do you really believe it?
I said "Size matters", not "ONLY size matters". India is lagging behind in development, that's the only reason why they are not considered a world power. Yet. They will be one day with absolute certainty. Like China, that's arguably now the second most powerful country in the world and will be #1 very soon - but has been a developing nation only a few decades ago.
You can safely say that size is -prerequisite- for being powerful, though. All major powers in the world are also large in terms of population. You can be large without being powerful (India, Brazil, Indonesia etc), but you cannot be powerful without being reasonably large.

Civilization VI announced, will support Linux & SteamOS
12 May 2016 at 6:08 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: hummer010Size = power isn't really true. Canada is the second largest country in the world, but we certainly aren't the second most powerful. I'd say it's more of a combination of size, population and perceived economic & military clout that defines power.

The goal of a nation like Switzerland would be to survive and prosper despite their geographical limitations.
I meant size as in size of population, not area. The US is four times larger in terms of population than the second largest western nation (Germany), so that's THE source of its power. And really - Civ reflects the "size matters" reality just nicely. Go large or go home. Like in real life. What Civ could do better is translating different population -density- to the game. Germany actually appears much smaller on a map than it really is (in terms of population). In Civ, nations tend to be pretty much evenly dense, which is not the case in reality.

Btw. Civ already has the "just survive" goal. You get the "ok, you made it" message. It just...doesn't feel like a victory. :D

Civilization VI announced, will support Linux & SteamOS
11 May 2016 at 7:57 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: wvstolzing
Quoting: KimyrielleI am however, genuinely curious what can still done to Civ to improve it.
It's hardly an immaculate concept -- from the ground up, there's so much to improve, to make it worthy of the name 'civilization', as it were. Sure, the core design has to 'gameify' a huge range of social-political dynamics; nevertheless it takes a bit too much for granted.

To begin with, you assume a godlike dictatorship of a nation-state back in 4000BC. Money pretty much has its 20th century significance from the start.

There's quite a bit of the designers' own political leanings informing the design -- in one of the past Civs, the stock exchange increased overall happiness in a city, for instance. And unless you're building an expansionist empire, you can't really aspire to any of the victory types.
You can argue for sure that the game glorifies both capitalism and imperialism with some of its designs. And yes, to make your civilization able to prosper you need to expand. But tbh, size DOES matter in real life international relations. The US is powerful, Switzerland isn't. For the simple reason that one country is large and the other isn't. Power in real life has nothing to do with how "great" a nation is. It's just a function of size. Translating this simple truth into a game where you compete against other nations to become the most powerful one, it makes sense that expansion is needed, no? They sure could relax the ultimate goal to be the "best" nation, but what would the new victory conditions be, then? What would be the goal in Civ for a nation like Switzerland?

I do agree with it being silly that the stock exchange creates happiness. It should create wealth and that's all.

Civilization VI announced, will support Linux & SteamOS
11 May 2016 at 6:51 pm UTC Likes: 1

I love the Civ series and have played every single game so far. It's great news to see this game announced and for Linux to beat!

I am however, genuinely curious what can still done to Civ to improve it. The last big and much needed improvement to the series was overhauling the outdated combat system in Civ V. I actually fail to see what features could move the series forward at this point, though. At least I hope it won't just be a graphics update, like the EA's yearly FIFA games. *giggles*

Changes to our Survey are coming, hopefully to make it easier and better
9 May 2016 at 2:56 pm UTC

If I may suggest - I would also think about dropping some of the questions from the monthly survey that won't ever see much change from one month to the next. Like what distro or GPU people are using. I...don't think people change these things all that often (and we see indeed very little change in the data). So I would rather ask these things like once in six months to identify longterm trends in these areas, and instead go for things more volatile than that for the monthly surveys. Say, which game(s) out of a list of 10 upcoming releases people are looking forward to most, or what games and/or genres are they playing right now, or what they see as the most pressing issues in gaming for the next 3 months.

Just an idea. :)

Parkitect theme park building sim now in Steam Early Access
6 May 2016 at 2:07 am UTC

Looks very interesting! I love business simulation games. :)

Feral Interactive are teasing yet another Linux & Mac port on their radar
3 May 2016 at 2:54 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: VlozThat's sounds ugly, but I personally prefer a lot of rushed ports with bad perf than a few optimized ones.
I mean, if your current pc isn't strong enough to play TR, at least your next pc will. I dont think that comparing windows/linux framerate is the priority right now when i see the tons of games i m awaiting on linux.
-Personally- I totally agree with you. I couldn't care less if a game only runs with 50 FPS in Linux but would run with 100 FPS in Windows. What matters to me is that it runs in Linux at all.

But this is not how a mainstream gamer thinks. These people fork out hundreds of dollars for graphics cards more expensive than the rest of their PCs just to make a game run with 110 FPS rather than 100, pointless as it might be. You won't be able to convince them to switch to Linux as long as they get even minimal better performance in Windows. But if we want to see more AAA games on Linux and more developers supporting it, getting more attractive for mainstream gamers is what needs to be done.

User Editorial: A different approach to calculating the popularity of Linux gaming on Steam
2 May 2016 at 8:55 pm UTC

Looking at the data it does seem that so far Linux didn't manage to bite much into the market share of other OSes. But it's also not surprising given that we're still lacking a lot of AAA titles and also suffer from many games performing worse in Linux than Windows. My guess is that there won't be too many converts from Windows until this is sorted, and that means we're likely stuck with the 1% share for a while. The good news is that the absolute growth we are seeing might convince more publishers to invest into porting their games, which (together with Vulkan) might help sorting the two obstacles over time.

PS: I never got the survey for Linux either. I am often getting it for Windows when I boot that to play MMOs (most of which don't even use Steam)...

Beat Cop is a rather unusual looking 80's inspired pixel art style adventure & time-management game
30 Apr 2016 at 11:05 pm UTC

I have to admit I one of these people who tend to dismiss the flood of "retro" pixel art in recent games as "Ok, you guys were just to cheap to hire a 3D artist", but I have to admit that in the case, it fits the theme well. Looks interesting.