I’ve got to hand it to the video game industry, making people pay to beta test a free-to-play game is a baller move.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh man that is tempting, especially since I never bought the expansions and they're bundling them for free to owners of the base game now. I actually reinstalled the original game a couple months ago, but didn't really feel like starting over in an inferior interface (the lack of jumping and dodging compared to modern games is a real hurdle for me, I feel so glued to the ground). I might even get a couple friends to join.

The gameplay in GW1 is entirely different, I'm not even sure I'd call it an MMO to be honest.

It can be, or not be. I played it on dial-up or a similarly slow connection back in the day, so I basically had to play solo: by the time I finished loading a map, any other party members would be far ahead. The henchmen system was a godsend for me and I played most of it solo. It was still fun to chat in the cities, though, exchange advice, find help for the tougher missions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

"We believe that companies need to work together in order to build the open metaverse in a way that’s interoperable and fair,” said the guy who openly hates open source operating systems. This could be an April 1st post.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yeah, I kind of wanted to play it, but knowing it’s Ubisoft and all the hoops I’d have to jump through and EULA I’d have to accept, even free doesn’t sound worth it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

@Eike

Calling the PC "Steam Machine" again, is this stupidity or some severe balls?!? emoji

I think at the end of the day, the media and people in general were always going to call them Steam Machines 2.0 anyway. By owning up to it, Valve acknowledge upfront that their first go at it exists and did not do that great, and that they’re coming back having learned their lessons. They’re not trying to hide it under a new name.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Those specs don't mean much to me since I've always only used Intel and Nvidia hardware, but if the price is right, I might revise my decision not to upgrade my gaming gear for several years and get a Steam Machine just to support the effort. It's at least better than my 1050 Ti for VRAM, probably a better CPU, and it would make room on my main SSD if I gamed on a separate device.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nice! More people should experience this worthy successor to Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

@Shmerl

Having focus on its own DE and not keeping up with the times is a downside for Mint. Even Ubuntu stopped its own DE efforts for that reason.

Maybe I’m an outlier, but the DE is a large part of why I choose a distro in the first place. I left Ubuntu when they adopted Unity instead of Gnome, and if Mint dropped Cinnamon I would probably go distro-hopping again. I often see Mint + Cinnamon recommended specifically because it feels familiar to Windows users, and IMO that’s a major advantage when we’re talking about new users who just want a computer that works. Every time I use XFCE on an obsolete device because I need something lightweight, I get pissed at everything having different names and being managed by different programs/menus than I expect.

@Shmerl

My point is that I find it a bit counter productive to recommend such distros for newcomers from Windows, since it results in them having problems.

Well, that depends. I imagine a lot of people switching from Windows are doing so precisely because they don’t want to renew their hardware just yet. For those, the odds of the kernel not supporting gear they’ve had for some time are significantly lower. (Then again, screen dimming has never worked on my laptop under Linux and probably never will, so who knows.) For REAL GAMERS who upgrade every year, yeah, that would be a concern.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thanks lilovent, I couldn't remember if it was optional or mandatory.

Even if they ignore the link that lilovent posted, they risk absolutely insane backlash if they use it and are caught doing so by gamers, let alone Valve. Not sure what Valve's response would be, but the gamer response is brutal.

On high-profile games, sure, but I don't think it would bother serial shovelware makers if a few of their games got review bombed. They're already making trash as it is. As such, if it had been optional, I would have been surprised that so many chose to do it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

My biggest surprise is that so many game devs choose to self-report rather than keep it hush-hush to avoid turning principled potential buyers away. Does Steam penalize developers that don’t disclaim it?

View this comment - View article - View full comments