As someone who likes the fishing mechanics, fish frenzies sound interesting.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Added a special cutscene after you’ve helped your new neighbors grow their family to the max.

Wait, are you a midwife in this game?!

I'm confused as well. Not sure if this is something added in 1.6 (which I haven't had much time to play yet) or something I'm just forgetting already exists.

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Quoting: tarmo888

Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: tarmo888NFTs enable securely buy/sell your items on secondary markets without an intermediate, the blockchain is just a permissionless distributed database. Steam is against this because they don't want the items traded on secondary markets, they want you be vendor-locked to their platform.

This is where I tend to get lost when I try to connect theory to practice. In theory, it sounds great. In practice…what secondary markets exist between games? If I buy some ultra-deluxe Pokéball in Pokémon: Crypto & Currency edition, I can't exactly use it in Call of Duty, nor can I take a sniper rifle into Stardew Valley. I can certainly imagine horrible cash-grab cross-overs where you buy like a skin in one game and another game allows you to use it there, but that's quite superficial, and merely requires coordination and cooperation between the games involved, not a blockchain per se.

Secondary market doesn't mean "same item implemented in multiple games. Secondary market means the same item sold it multiple markets.

I see! Thanks for the clarification.

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Props for an inventive trailer, I guess…? What did I just watch? :dizzy:

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$40 base game
$372 dlc
---
$412 total

WHAT. THE. HELL.

I don't understand this mentality in PC gaming as-a-hobby that there's some magic upper limit to what's acceptable to spend on a single game. If I have $400 dollars of disposable income that I want to spend on gaming, it's totally fine for me to buy 15 $20-$60 games; we'll all share nervous laughs about the state of our unplayed backlogs, and several of them will sit unplayed in my library forever or I'll play them for an hour or two and discover I don't enjoy them. But spend that same $400 on a single game that I really enjoy and have gotten over 675 hours of entertainment from? Expressions of incredulity and disbelief!

And it's so strange, because it's not like this happens in other hobbies. Those people who make model train sets that fill their basements, they don't start making a model, get to spending a hundred dollars on it, and go, "Oh, guess I couldn't possibly keep on expanding and improving this one! Gotta start over with a brand new model now!" In lots of hobbies people barely bat an eye at spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a single piece of equipment, but a game with optional extras that adds up to more than $150 dollars? Burn those greedy money-grubbing devs!

I could understand this better if Stellaris was only ever sold as a full bundle for full price and you couldn't even get into the game otherwise, and if this were the norm for all games with no cheaper games available, but neither are the case here: Stellaris goes for $40, and regularly discounts to $20, which will still give you dozens or hundreds of hours of fun. I also don't see $10, $20, etc. games going anywhere, there'll always be plenty of cheaper options around if you fancy them instead. If the combined cost of Stellaris + DLC is not worth it, in your personal estimation, that's fine – Paradox is hardly immune from criticism, and have made their share of blunders, and people have different tastes – but articles on their games inevitably seem to devolve into this sort of "Because I, personally, don't find it a worthwhile deal, it can't possibly be a good deal for anyone" nay-saying. I don't play any sort of subscription-based MMO (for various reasons), but I also don't go around loudly scoffing at how World of Warcraft costs $156 per year (at the best rate) because I assume the people who are playing it are getting their money's worth of entertainment from it.

People who are serious about their hobbies are prepared to pay serious money. (As even a cursory glance at hobbies outside gaming will attest.) Everyone has a different limit on what they're prepared (or able) to spend, and that's fine, as long as we respect those differences, and I think it's time we stop artificially limiting individual games to how much we think they should be allowed to cost – that's what the free market's about, after all, a game can only be sold for what people will pay for it.

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Bought the Season Pass for the discount since I'll end up buying it all anyway, and the additional information on The Grand Archive story packs sounds like it's exactly what I've been wanting in the game for literal years now: an expansion of lifeforms that aren't sapient species, and the ability to go around cataloging them and creating a galactic zoo. :grin:

Plus the new crisis in The Machine Age sounds pretty interesting, now I've finally experienced all three original crises after >600 hours in-game. :smile:

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Some good changes here, especially for ships. I like building diversified transport networks with everything the game has to offer, but ships have historically been just too fiddly to be fun. Not having to put down buoys everywhere should make using them much more viable!

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Quoting: LoudTechieOoh I know the answer.
You can just include a piece of data you also include in the drm of the game in the nft and sell it from a developer approved wallet/signing key(means the same in this case).
This way the blockchain itself is the proof as long the first wallet it came from(which by design is tracable in most blockchains) is the approved wallet, the data is the same as the hardcoded value and the current owner has the key of the last wallet we know it's legit. We still have to check if multiple players have the key of the currently holding wallet, but that can simply be achieved that the wallet contains sum too attractive to steal or by embedding some kind of hardware id hash in the transaction.

The blockchain is that monitoring database you talk about. It's inneficient, because for it to be trustworthy thousands of copies of it have to exist. It's big, because it tracks much more than only your ownership. Making changes is intentionally expensive, because otherwise everybody would be doing it, but it's possible.

This is the one thing blockchain can actually do. Assign ownership to a single instance of arbitrary data it can still be copied, but the copy can be recognized as such.

Interesting, thank you! This hypothetical DRM would have to be Internet-connected so it could check the state of the blockchain every time you try to play the game, right? So you can't copy it to an air-gapped machine while you own it, then keep playing after you've sold it?

Quoting: PenglingTimely video about NFT/crypto/Web 3.0-gaming from the excellent Jauwn [External Link], who covers these things from the perspective of an actual gamer. :tongue:

OK, that part about the game that tried to steal and repackage a free open-source game but did it so incompetently that the original game creators were able to push an update that made the rip-off unplayable was hilarious. :grin:

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Quoting: tarmo888NFTs enable securely buy/sell your items on secondary markets without an intermediate, the blockchain is just a permissionless distributed database. Steam is against this because they don't want the items traded on secondary markets, they want you be vendor-locked to their platform.

This is where I tend to get lost when I try to connect theory to practice. In theory, it sounds great. In practice…what secondary markets exist between games? If I buy some ultra-deluxe Pokéball in Pokémon: Crypto & Currency edition, I can't exactly use it in Call of Duty, nor can I take a sniper rifle into Stardew Valley. I can certainly imagine horrible cash-grab cross-overs where you buy like a skin in one game and another game allows you to use it there, but that's quite superficial, and merely requires coordination and cooperation between the games involved, not a blockchain per se.

But OK, maybe instead of items in games we could buy and sell games themselves. It certainly sounds like an appealing idea. But how would it actually work? As a permissionless database, everything in it is public, and anything traded on it can be seen by anyone. You could trade some sort of "token" that you now "own" a particular game, but…what does that mean? You still need to download it from somewhere server somewhere in such a way that everyone else on the blockchain can't just download it as well (so you can't have the token include any sort of "key"), which means we're back to some sort of centralized database monitoring who "owns" each game to be able to dole them out (and of course, the games would require some sort of DRM to make sure you couldn't just keep playing them after you've sold them!). And if you have such a centralized database already, you don't need to add a blockchain onto it, you could just have that database (or multiple centralized databases with a hand-off mechanism).

I agree that Valve would like you to stay in their ecosystem for economic reasons, but if Valve and Epic Games suddenly both decided one day that they'd like people to be able to sell games between their platforms they could do it without any blockchain technology.

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Quoting: NezchanI see the Ironclad and the Silent as usual, but I'm not sure about the skeleton. Not sure if the Defect and the Watcher are going to be back, or replaced with entirely new characters this time around.

It's an…odd choice, to my mind. Naïvely, I'd imagine they'd either go with all new characters, or have all the originals + one or more new ones. Not "half the originals, + a new one". One of the screenshots on Steam shows the Ironclad in play with some new cards, but also Ghostly Armor and Shrug It Off looking to be nearly identical to the first game. Maybe they're following the Civilization principle of "⅓ the same, ⅓ improved, and ⅓ new." :grin:

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe basic "blockchain" concept is a clever solution which has, ever since, been looking for problems it is actually appropriate to solve and instead finding problems it sucks at dealing with.

It'll be interesting to see; the first laser was also described as "a solution looking for a problem," and then we found lots and lots of problems for which lasers are a really good solution. I'm curious to find out if, in a couple of decades, blockchain technology will be similarly ubiquitous or still looking.

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