Quoting: scaineI honestly can't be bothered to respond to that kind of negativity, except to point out that a) Skyrim is the 15th best selling game of all time. It's the fifth best-selling on PC. And b) I enjoyed it hugely, sinking around 130 hours into it over multiple playthroughs.

It's basically all the things I said, plus fun. It's a shame to hear it didn't live up to certain people's unrealistic hopes and dreams, but even as cynical as I am, I still enjoy an ambitious, generally well executed game, despite its obvious flaws.

There's nothing wrong with Skyrim. Hell my over 1000 hours between gameplay, mod installation, and Wine tweaking easily tells one how much I enjoyed it and that's before you add in the endless hours of YouTube videos. Every game in the franchise is on a similar scale for me (well, ok, Battle Spire and Redguard are more like hundreds of hours). That still doesn't change the fact that I'm also disappointed with, and a bit bitter about, the direction of both the TES franchise and Bethesda as a company the last 20 years or so.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd who knows, maybe someone will pick up the ball of gameplay depth they dropped from Oblivion onwards (when they started replacing deep RPG mechanics with clicky action combat) and do something with it.

It runs much, much deeper than that. The value potential in the TES franchise's gameplay was squandered after Le Fay left Bethesda. Rather than iterate and fix the broken systemic game elements as much as was possible in that day, after Daggerfall the Zenimax suits [External Link] pushed BethSoft toward more and more of a lore focused direction while excising and/or simplifying all the mechanics.
But hey, Le Fay and the rest of the original core trio behind Arena and Daggerfall have their own thing going now, OnceLost Games, and are supposed to be working on a new RPG, so maybe we can hope for a more updated mechanically rich spiritual successor to the DOS TES games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeActually, I heard my favourite let's players (Gametube) talk about this problem today: One said when he sees such a list of DLCs, he's got no idea what he needs and what not... and goes back to playing some DOTA. :D

Quoting: Eike...imagine you didn't follow the game grow, then you're sitting in front of a ridiculously long list of stuff and no idea what actualy are these "half-a-dozen “real”, game-altering, DLC packages" you might want.

So a bit of an illustrative related personal anecdote here. I picked up Cities: Skylines back when it first came out in 2015 and played for quite some time loving every minute of it. Before the first DLC came in I was finished with the vanilla experience and moved on to other media content intending to come back once the game had been expanded via DLC. Time-lapse to early 2019 when YouTube randomly starts recommending me Cities: Skylines videos and reminds me I was intending to play more of it.

At this point I start looking through the list of DLC and the related bundles. None of the bundles are just the essential game mechanic DLC. I don't need all those radio stations, as I typically turn off game music and have other stuff (documentaries, podcasts, et al) playing in the background. I don't need all the visual aesthetic stuff until and unless I get tired of the vanilla ones because I'm playing that much.

Doing my due diligence I try to find what are the DLCs I expressly need for added game mechanics. Every list I find is outdated, an abandoned incomplete WIP or includes at least some of the content I don't care about. After two weeks of collating data from various lists I finally have an essentials list and start pricing it only to realize I'm going to break my gaming budget for the year if I buy all those and I need all of them to play with the added interesting stuff I've now seen which makes me want to play again.

In the end I just shrugged and went off to play a mix of as yet unplayed backlog games and my standard gotos of the last decade, current Minecraft modpacks and Dwarf Fortress and didn't bother with the game I was really in the mood to play. If I'd had the option to drop $20 to $50 and play with all the DLC and mods I'd want for a couple months before canning the sub and going off to other games I'd have at least had the chance to play what I wanted to when I wanted to (ok, I did play a week of vanilla around a month later, but that just reminded me why I felt done when I did). I've had similar experiences with other Paradox titles previously as well *looks sidelong at Crusader Kings II.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PhlebiacIt doesn't list Proton in the Steam client, so it must be the native version they have been testing.

Quoting: AkienApparently Dead in Vinland has a public Linux beta branch: http://deadinvinland.com/2018/12/18/linux/ [External Link]

Those plus Shadow make this a reasonable month to not pause for me, and Desert Child might be a solid bonus or no.

For the service change, I like that everything is visible up front now and Classic maintains it as a good deal to keep, but I'm not sure how I feel about the pricing tiers. Lite feels like a fairly niche thing for most people as $45 or $60 per year for trove and a 10% discount feels a bit skimpy. Basic is more or less how I, and I suspect most of us, operated month to month on Monthly with a scant handful of the available games being of interest most often. $20 for more or less the previous status quo feels a bit heavy an uptick but it's hard to judge from where I sit. I kinda hope they made pausing less buried with the other changes but I'll find out at a later point.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Honestly, while I don't care for the new interface I also really didn't care for the old one and have mainly loaded games from outside their library interface for ages now. I practically treat the Steam client as a mix of IM client and old DOS TSR type utility that other software needs around in active memory to run but which I don't directly interact with unless some config work is needed (himem.sys comes to mind). Remote Play Together seems much more valuable on paper, but I've not had time to give it a try in practice because it's a horrid time of year to find gaming time outside my normal tabletop gaming group night.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: denyasisWho doesn't want to be Han solo?

Harrison Ford

On topic, I've gone back to the Dwarf Fortress well for the first time in about five years. There's some really nice quality of life improvements in there. Recurring work orders with conditionals are a great example that make it much easier to keep certain recurring tasks like clothes, food and booze less full of micromanagement. Quite a bit of the old lag spiral when you grow your fortress has seemingly been culled now too. Adding DFHACK (as a dependency), Text Will Be Text and the Vettlingr 32x32 tileset makes everything really nice looking.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMeanwhile I suspect the Chinese don't really care--they're just doing it so they can say "We're a leading country now, we've got space capabilities like the big boys, so there!"

That's also the story behind the current push to the moon by India. It's not so very different than the political motivations behind the original US/Soviet push to the moon either. Personally I couldn't care less about the national motivations to fund space exploration, well as long as unlike a significant segment of the US they don't include massive defunding efforts, provided the people doing the actual work are motivated by the science and/or the steady march of human progress more than by the jingoistic competitive BS that moves national policy most places that try.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: serge

Quoting: vlademir1Switching from *Buntu to Antergos is a project I've had on the table for a few years anyway

i think you have to choose another distro Antergos is dead:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Antergos-EOL [External Link]

EndeavourOS will be it's sucessor. Release date: 15th of July
https://forum.antergos.com/category/7/announcements [External Link]

My first thought on seeing serge's post was "ok, maybe give Manjaro another test go" but if Endeavor will provide essentially the same base level install Antergos would have I may have to give it a shot. Hell, I'd be all over a straight Arch install, but for how long it took me to be fully functional the last time I tried (it's why I've been riding *Buntu for half a decade).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Switching from *Buntu to Antergos is a project I've had on the table for a few years anyway. Finding time to backup everything I need to (my Music directory alone took near three hours of disk copying time) and time to format my main partition and install has been my main bottleneck. This is just one more major reason to force myself to do it when I'd otherwise be relaxing playing a game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Their store doesn't even have a bloody shopping cart, something considered generally integral to all online transaction design in the modern world and thereby a day one requisite feature for an online storefront, and their own roadmap [External Link] targets that as six months or more out with a store page redesign as a near term project (three months or less) taking the priority. To me, that whole roadmap screams "we're still in alpha here" (as they haven't finished implementing all the basics most people expect of a modern online storefront yet) and they are *already* negotiating exclusives out from under other stores. I personally wouldn't want them trying to support Linux themselves at this point when they haven't even figured out how to handle UX for a store yet let alone becoming a true competitor to any of the existing storefronts.
In short, I find their business priorities suspect when they're more focused on growing their customer base than presenting an experience their existing base wants to repeat (the lifeblood of this type of business).

View this comment - View article - View full comments