They just made bribes legal and made the president above the law.
I'd just as soon call this the death of co-op games. How many can be played without an internet connection? Split-screen, LAN, direct IP connections, and private servers are super rare now, and it sucks. Plenty of games in that chart from 2018 might not even be playable anymore, and plenty more can go down when Steam servers are down for maintenance or will be unplayable when you're on a train or some other location without internet access.
Nintendo's gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate's sunsetting. Evo's only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn't getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.
It's on GOG. Currently on sale for $3. It's the non-remastered version, but I doubt that will hold people back much.
Now that the dust has settled, we’re ready to give you a comprehensive breakdown of the numbers for this year’s event! Let’s dig into some of the registration stats including individual game counts, country and regional data, and entrant crossover between the eight titles in Evo’s lineup.
The largest Evo to date by unique entrants, growing by about 8% over the previous year, which makes sense since Street Fighter 6 is very young still and Tekken 8 is here for the first time. Guilty Gear Strive has hardly dropped off at all despite being 3 years old, and this will be history's largest Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike bracket. Plus, other nerdy data is here, including which players of game X also signed up for game Y, and what the most popular games by country are. Competition ought to be pretty damn good this year.
They're not. This same curve happens with PvP games. The ones that don't follow this trend are the exception, not the rule.
She was credited with a pseudonym. It happened plenty in the 90s, and this wasn't long after. That means probably Hollywood talent. Someone prestigious who thought taking this role would be bad for her career, or maybe her agent thought that. But times have changed in the past 20 years, so maybe we can know who it is now.
But will they credit Eva's voice actor by her real name this time? Whatever stigma there may have been in 2004 for being in a video game has got to be gone by now.
There's also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.
In the US at least, this is false.
Coming to modern platforms August 1st, from Aspyr. Nice to see all these old games from 5th and 6th gen consoles getting re-released on modern platforms when emulation was basically our only option before.
Better than the people giving it a bad review for difficulty, it would seem.
There's a revolving door of hundreds of players in the community at any given time. You can find a game in quick match with absolutely no skill-based matchmaking at most times of the day, so it's a total dice roll in that regard, or you can hit up the Skullgirls or Mix Masters Discord servers to find one at your skill level. Hunter Half Hands runs beginner tournaments, there are the Get Gr8 events to help learn the game, and there's a community danisen league to fill in for the game's lack of ranked mode that runs about 3 times per week in North America. This year, at Combo Breaker, the bracket was larger for Skullgirls than it was for Dragon Ball FighterZ. As far as I'm concerned, it's more alive than I'd need it to be, but I'm happy it's this alive.
The quest bugged out a few times, but with a bit of reloading old saves, I managed to transport some brahmin for about 3k caps, so I think I can afford that armor now.
They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you'd expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.
I can't speak to how Halo does it under the hood, but it's very common to have a separate skill rating for unranked and to just not surface it, which is exactly what you'd want here, since that's what prevents the brand new player from getting decimated in their early matches. You're saying that the social playlists affected the same ranking as the competitive modes? That would be strange. In my experience though, a lot of new players bounce off a game when they get matched against people who are only marginally better than they are, which can be a matter of that other player understanding one thing that the loser does not. I've seen people call their opponents smurfs, and then when you check the replay, you realize, no, that player really is only a tiny bit better.
So sometime since I last played Call of Duty, they got rid of unranked modes?
No, I'm playing with the one that isn't labeled "classic" in my GOG library. As far as I can tell, it may have cleaned up how that game interfaces with modern displays and maybe not much else. I'm level 7, and I just got to NCR with my posse of three companions. I had some encounters in the Wanamingo Mines and Vault 15 that wiped the floor with me, so I left them for now, though maybe with some guns I just picked up, Vault 15 would go better at this point. I'd love to get some better armor, but I have yet to find any in drops from enemies.
Is social matchmaking some synonym for skill based matchmaking? Because the latter is what it says they're implementing, and it really shouldn't be controversial.
Like everyone else, I've been playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It is more challenging than the base game so far, but not dramatically so. The game gives you plenty of tools to deal with it, including situational loadouts to give you more damage or defense depending on what's giving you trouble. Maybe a lot of people got too complacent with a single build that handled it all in the base game.
When I wasn't playing that I was playing Fallout 2. It's continued to be just what the doctor ordered after watching the Fallout TV show, but now I really feel bottlenecked by my gear. I don't know if guns exist in the game that will do enough damage to take down some of the tankier enemies I've found, but if they do, I definitely can't afford them. I haven't even managed to find any armor to equip over my starting Vault 13 uniform, and there's always a huge money sink for certain unique items or quests that eat into my savings just as I became a thousand-aire. I'll have to find some ways to earn more caps quickly.
And when I wasn't playing either of those, I was playing more Skullgirls, but I'm always playing Skullgirls, so that's basically the free space on my bingo card.
That line about "only 20% stick around for the multiplayer" isn't exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that's the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game's player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.
StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I'm looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there's usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a "cursor" character such that it doesn't matter what input device you're on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn't the only way to do it though; it isn't coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can't really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they've gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It's just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can't other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn't feel like it's missing something. I'm the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.
And of course, for me, it's a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they're going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can't be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.
As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.
Concise, entertaining, and backed up by math. The editing is on point here, and it's an interesting way to frame a situation I've been in myself thousands of times.
They finally just let you put points into the primary attributes on level up! Hopefully they carry it through to the next (hopefully) Pillars of Eternity game, because I always took issue with the flat bonuses you got to offense and defense on each level up. Plus the rest of this looks good too.
A simulation sandbox game that seems like it's got potential. I hope it's got more of an objective than something like Dwarf Fortress with tons of ways to get there, personally.
A reliable insider says development on the PC port “is well and truly complete”…
I got Star Wars Episode I Racer from GOG on a sale for dirt cheap back around May 4th. I've been trying to get it working via Heroic ever since, particularly the multiplayer, which is fixed via mods. The Lutris script definitely does all of this super easy, but not only would I like to have it working via Heroic for the gamepad controls navigation, I'd also like to pay it forward and document these steps on the PC Gaming Wiki. Unfortunately, while I thought I could tell what this script was doing after scouring the Lutris script documentation, I haven't managed to crack it, and the Heroic install of the game complains about not having IPX installed when I boot it.
https://lutris.net/games/install/13260/view
With the Lutris install of the game and the Heroic install of the game side by side in WineCFG, I can see that that there are library overrides set for:
- dplaysvr.exe
- dplayx
- dpmodemx
- dpnet
- dpnhpast
- dpnhupnp
- dpnsvr.exe
- dpwsockx
All "(native)". For some reason they're sorted to the top of the library overrides and marked with an asterisk, and what's more, I don't see any hint of these ones in the Lutris install script, but they got set somehow, and I don't see the libraries here that are listed in the script.
There are also several ways to use the mod fix, including the DLL override and the EXE patcher. The EXE patcher just crashes and dies right away when I run it in the Wine prefix via Heroic, and I once again don't see any hint in the Lutris script that the patcher executable is being run. And if it wasn't clear up until this point, I did download the 3 files at the top of the Lutris script and extract them to the Heroic game directory.
Are there any Lutris experts here who can help me figure out what I'm missing?
UPDATE: The fix was, of course, very simple. Thanks to @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de! The thing that prevented it from working was the wsock32 override. Just because it's not in the list of library overrides, that doesn't mean you can't just type it in yourself. I've updated the PC Gaming Wiki with instructions for any time travelers from the future.
Wayfinder will continue as a paid, co-op title, with no in-game monetization. Coming June 11th 2024 to Steam.
Huge W. Maybe the Stop Killing Games campaign, combined with some very real market realities, will save more games like this from companies with the liberty to do so. Unfortunately, it sounds like multiplayer will likely still depend on Steam servers rather than supporting LAN (I'd be happy to be proven wrong), but this is way better than the game just dying.
I don't think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I'm letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won't save you from Microsoft laying you off.
When Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors declared an end to the company's nine-month restructuring program at the start of this…
For those who missed it, Embracer is split into three new publicly-traded companies, Asmodee Group (focused on board games) and two tentatively-named groups comprising their video game business. Wingefors, the CEO, and still (I believe) majority share holder of these three new companies, doesn't do many interviews.
Personally, as the acquisitions were happening, I was rooting for Embracer, because they were clearly trying to rebuild the type of publisher that the big ones today used to be, offering a large variety of options so that you can have hits and misses and keep experimenting to find what your customers want, where today's big publishers make a couple of games per year, leaving most types of games they used to make on the table, even if they were profitable, because they're not the most profitable. It's hard to keep track of what these three companies even own anymore, after splitting with Gearbox and Saber recently as well, but just prior to this shuffle, Embracer absolutely had so many irons in the fire that plenty of them were catching my interest, like the old days.
Unfortunately, Embracer did this with a lot of debt, and comes to this wisdom all to late:
> I'm a firm believer in equity. I think debt in general is quite dangerous as a tool. You should be careful to carry too much in gaming.
And then he basically immediately disregards this wisdom with the next sentence. There's an old saying from Warrent Buffet, "A rising tide floats all boats…only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." And Wingefors was naked.
Full disclosure: I'm friends with the guys who run this podcast and have appeared on other episodes, but I thought this story was particularly interesting and worth sharing.
Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! www.stopkillinggames.com
Hi, folks. A bit of an unusual problem here. In some Proton games, in semi-predictable places, I'll get this audio crunch noise. It's not deafeningly loud or anything, but it is distracting sometimes. I first heard it when playing Starfield, and it was most common when loading into a city environment. This crunchy audio sounds kind of like when Hollywood simulates corrupt or glitchy video recordings, and it's in addition to, not really in place of, the other audio in the scene, as far as I can tell. Because Starfield is a sci-fi game, I initially thought it was either supposed to be there or that it was there for everyone on Windows as some kind of Bethesda technical shenanigans. Then I noticed it in Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game I had played through 7 years ago on PS4, so I was familiar with the sounds in that game. It was much more rare there, and I had a hard time pinning down a pattern. As I'm now playing through Pillars of Eternity II, it's much more noticeable, as it tends to happen whenever you continue the dialogue to the next step by hitting "1. Continue" or whatever other dialogue options the game gives you, but how frequently it shows it can vary wildly by location. Sometimes I won't hear it for hours, and sometimes it's every time I click to continue the conversation.
I wish I could show you what this audio sounds like. I encountered an area in Neketaka where this glitch happens frequently, so I set up OBS and recorded it, only to find that the audio glitch didn't make it into the recording. "Maybe it's my speakers?" I thought, but I also get this glitch through headphone jack with a shielded audio cable. I tried the game on Steam Deck, which also defaults to running the game through Proton instead of native, and the same scene via cloud save was glitchless. I found some search results saying that some "audio niceness" value may have been exceeded, but when I turned on logging, I didn't see any evidence that that's what's happening to me as the thread explained that I should, and trying the advice they offered anyway, I saw no difference. I've tried Proton 7, 8, and experimental, and they all behave the same; Steam Deck says Valve selected Proton 8, for what that's worth, and my kernel is newer than the one Steam Deck uses, though that is Valve's custom kernel. I'm on Kubuntu 23.10 and kernel 6.5.0-26-generic.
There are a couple of reasons why I chose to run Pillars of Eternity II, in particular, via Proton that I won't bore you with, and I may be able to get around this more-pervasive-than-average problem for this game specifically by running it natively, but I'd still like to solve this problem for all of my future Proton games if possible, and I can fairly reliably reproduce the issue here to be sure that it's gone after making changes. Does anyone know where I can start looking? Has anyone run into this problem personally?
This is a really good interview. tl;dw is...
- their next game was going to be D&D, but they changed course and are doing something else now
- Vincke has a vision for "the one RPG to rule them all", and each of their past three RPGs is a step closer to it
- the next game is not going to be that master vision but one step closer toward it, with their previous 3 RPGs proving out emergent design/multiplayer, story and consequence, and personal stories/performance capture, respectively
- Vincke would like to have this next game done in 3 years compared to BG3's 6 year development cycle, but realistically expects 4 years, as long as there isn't something like COVID-19 or a war in Ukraine to impede their progress
She looks to have retained most of what made her cool in +R, except there's no Instant Kill for her to route into. Looks like a cool addition to the roster.
I'm considering prioritizing buying GOG games when available, because they're DRM-free, especially now that there's a partner link through Heroic to show where my purchase is coming from. But a thought just occurred that those Windows-encoded videos were a problem on Steam until Valve started re-encoding those videos in other codecs on their servers. To my knowledge, there's no legal way to distribute Proton with those codecs. Will I run into video playback problems on GOG games run via Proton? How has your experience been with that sort of thing?
Separately, I also remember Vulkan shader compilation being a problem, but it sounds like it's less of an issue on modern versions of DXVK. Still, I'd be interested in hearing if stuttering problems for those things have been resolved as well, in your own experience.
A bit of a media push for this game is coming out now. It looks great in motion, and this is a good breakdown of the game's main systems. I can't help but feel like they copied Street Fighter 6's homework, but I love Street Fighter 6, so I'm not complaining.
