Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: BreezeI hear the AI sucks. I guess I will find out. It always bothered me that the higher difficulty levels in Civ V gave bonuses because it just meant that I couldn't win earlier.

Yeah, the devs said they'd make the AI less stupid, but from what I've heard, it's anything but. The diplomacy engine still seems to make the same completely dumb "We have been friends for 1000 years? No, we're at WAR now!!!" decisions it made back in Civ I.

I remember one game of Civ V where my two allies goaded me into attacking a common enemy, so I complied. Then my allies suddenly declared that I was warmonger, became former allies, and teamed up to stomp me into the ground.

Haha, that actually happens a LOT in that game. Any Civ, that is. Don't ask me why developers other than Firaxis can make sophisticated AI for their games, and theirs behaves like a complete lunatic on crack. One should think AI is a major feature for a single player game.

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Quoting: BreezeI hear the AI sucks. I guess I will find out. It always bothered me that the higher difficulty levels in Civ V gave bonuses because it just meant that I couldn't win earlier.

Yeah, the devs said they'd make the AI less stupid, but from what I've heard, it's anything but. The diplomacy engine still seems to make the same completely dumb "We have been friends for 1000 years? No, we're at WAR now!!!" decisions it made back in Civ I.

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Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: GuestAlthough I do find the reviews still very mixed.

It's the recent ones which are mixed, overall reviews are fine. After DXMD I started to actually read the negative reviews, because it turns out often people rage over quite silly subjects like DLCs or preorders. The game itself could be fine.

This seems to be a total disease of most reviewing systems as of late: People abusing reviews to make a political statement against a studio, instead of judging the GAME. As much as we might hate some DRM systems or DLC practices, but criticism aimed at that has nothing to do with the quality of the game. By all means, people can mention it in the text, but they really should stay away from downgrading a game's score because of it. It's unfair to people who want to get an impression about a game's quality.

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Quoting: boltronicsI'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

Bethesda is in the best position to start adding GNU/Linux ports. Surely Bethesda took note of how much interest there was in running Doom under Wine - many months after the game was released, no less. Further, unlike EA (with Origin) and Ubisoft (with Uplay), Bethesda don't have a store client. That's one big road block they don't have to contend with. Lastly, Bethesda is the most likely of the three to release a Vulkan-only game, which presumably means less QA work for them to deal with. If they released a game with GNU/Linux support this year, I wouldn't be too surprised (but would be very happy).

Despite my general pessimism, it still looks like 2017 has quite a lot going for it.

Gosh, I so wish you'd be right about that. Bethesda is literally the only publisher not yet on Linux I would love to see starting porting their games. Personally, I couldn't care less about EA or Ubisoft games (I don't own or want any Ubisoft games, and the newest EA game I have is SWTOR, which just had its 5th birthday...). I realize that having their mass-market games would be helpful for our platform in general, but these two haven't made any truly good games in a long, long, long while. What they are churning out is the video game equivalent of Michael Bay movies: Lots of explosions and no substance worth mentioning. Don't need that.

But Bethesda? I am keeping a Windows partition around just for their games. In all honesty, I don't quite understand why some of the bigger publishers are so reluctant to support Linux when they already support Mac. The economies of scale work in their favour even. Our 1-2% market share would translate into a nice extra profit for them, and for a company their size the porting costs would be laughable.

Normally I would say chances to see Beth jump on the Linux train anytime soon are a pretty close approximation to zero. It's not that their CEO had overly nice things to say about Linux. But then again...I didn't think we'd see Square Enix porting a large portion of their more recent AAA catalogue, either. But they did. So..who knows! We're about to get the single most important game of 2017 soon (Civ VI), so we had a good year already and it's just January! Let's see what else will happen. :D

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Quoting: scaineStay clear of stretch goals, definitely. They would be great if and only if you could pledge based on the stretch. So I pledge my £25, but we don't meet the stretch, but that's okay, my money isn't used.

Stretch goals are a bit of a pet peeve of mine. How often do you find a list of stretch goals where they arranged 5 stretch goals, the first 4 of which you couldn't care less about, but you REALLY want the 5th to happen? To the degree you actually don't want the game at all if it's not getting funded? Like the 5th goal being the Linux port, after such super important things like localization for countries you never heard of before.

So yes, the only logical course of action is to wait and see if the 5th goal is likely to be reached and then (only then!) pledge. If it's not reached after all, cancel your pledge on the last day. No, that's not a nice thing to do, but neither is supporting a platform only as a stretch goal. *shrug*

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Quoting: AnxiousInfusion

Quoting: GuestNever have and never will do crowdfunding. Don't do pre-ordering either. Crowdfunding to me just makes no sense from the consumer's standpoint.

Crowd funding is no place for consumers. Consumers will have to wait until after the product comes to market.

Sorry, but that's complete rubbish. Crowd-funding was invented -specifically- as an alternative to venture capital or similar means of funding. Its very point is to allow regular customers to band together and fund projects that otherwise might not get funded by traditional means. People don't seem to get the idea that crowdfunding is nothing but small-scale venture capital funding. It involves risk. There is no guarantee that you will get anything back. And if you can't afford and/or stand the thought to lose your pledge then you need to stay away from it, indeed.
But for many of us, it has worked nicely and will continue to do so. As Liam's article pointed out, the art of crowdfunding from the customer's perspective is proper vetting. Telling projects with good chances of success apart from the doomed ones. That's really the gist of it.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: KimyrielleIt's funny how they needed longer to "assess the feasibility" of the port than making the actual port.

Again, people don't seem to understand what feasibility means. I did explain it before, but to explain again.

Checking the feasibility of a port doesn't mean it isn't being worked on, it means they may have hit unexpected problems they were trying to overcome. I don't know any specifics, but it's clear it was being worked on for some time to be able to arrive so soon.

I know what feasibility means. And I find it...funny...that it took two or three months for them to decide whether or not they can make the port. All source code can be ported by definition, and any porting house worth their salt should know if a Linux version of any middleware components used in the game is available. Closed source components are pretty much the only real obstacle for a port I can think of, and researching that part doesn't take months. I don't know what the problem -really- was, but "feasibility" wasn't it. At least not only.

Anyway, water under the bridge. We get the port and that's what matters.

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It's funny how they needed longer to "assess the feasibility" of the port than making the actual port.

But glad to see it's coming!

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Great news. I know that some people are opposed to VP's "ports", but personally I don't care what makes a game run as long as it FEELS like a native port. That and the Linux porting scene can use some competition. Right now it's Feral carrying most of the burden, and as much as I like them, but they can't port all games all by themselves. For the time being we really need 3-4 porting companies churning out both legacy and brand new AAA Linux ports on a monthly basis.

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Quoting: SnowdrakeThat's some good news for sure !
Did anyone know if codeweaver is still putting some effort on D3D11 support ?

I don't know, but proper DX11 support should be one of the higher priorities for WINE right now. Maybe the only one for the time being. WINE is getting increasingly irrelevant for gamers, as it's currently unable to run most modern games. Not even with the usual hiccups we're used to when running games in WINE, but simply not at all. Games are using DX11 these days and have been for a while. Meh, even older ones are sometimes losing WINE support these days, when the devs make updates to their graphics. Elder Scrolls Online and Star Trek Online used to run in WINE and no longer do.

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