Besides the ocean of technical issues that are mostly fixed now, the game is not even a tenth of what Mike Pondsmith and CDPR drooled and parroted the whole decade prior to its release.
It’s a beautiful looking FPS with enormous production values, PS2 era AI, no joke Vice City has a more lively world, and it has Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s depth for it’s "RPG" systems. Even when you accept the puddle deep experience and try to like it for what it is, the game gives a huge "fuck you" with how offensively quick the game ends.
As someone who loves the CP TTRPG and was an idiot to trust Pondsmith and CDPR, hating on C2077 was something that came from inside me.
It really annoys me how companies started leaned into blaming "haters" for any kind of criticism. Especially considering how quickly some people turn on whoever says anything critical of something they are hyped for.
Holy shit what a brutal read. If half of it is true (and it has every chance to be, as it is sadly “the usual fare” of male work toxicity and general ego trip), this company is a cesspool. Fuck.
I don’t want to let them off lightly for their journalistic quality – lots of their fans genuinely believe they know their shit and they don’t live up to that – but the fact they sold that prototype is more shocking to me.
Even if they’d get a million bucks for it and donated twice as much to charity, that is just not a thing you can do.
It’s not their property. Why are they auctioning that to begin with?
When auctioning, you need to tell people what they’re buying. Surely, at that point, you’d realize it’s a prototype.
That’s just a massive violation of journalistic integrity. That prototype may have cost £XXXX to produce, but if it falls into the hands of a competitor, the financial damage is significantly higher. Why would any hardware manufacturer send LTT exclusive hardware previews after this?
Yeah, lot of people really do trust LTT. Became apparent to me when prior to this event I came across a comment on lemmy talking about how LTT sponsored segments are ones they trust to not recommend crap. I had thought the default approach was to not trust sponsored segments regardless of who, what, or where it is from.
So some people dismissing this saying LTT is just entertainment to them doesn’t mean everyone sees it as entertainment, but a reliable source of recommendations and news.
The whole 'entertainment' angle is so ironic when considering what LMG is trying to become and how much money they are spending on that plan. They want to be seen as experts with objective, reliable data, but can't afford $500 of employee time to test things properly?!
Agree. As a casual viewer, I find LMG enjoyable as entertainment, but you can tell they’re playing it fast and loose. I’ve never had an inclination to rely on their reviews or opinions, there’s already so many better sources for that.
Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur's Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn't close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it's a notable part.
Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn't trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn... it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly "modern" games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It's clearly just a matter of "want".
I feel like I've just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald's in a roadside casino, and I've just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.
I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch "games" like this ever again.
You are in a similar position (it sounds like) to where I was a short time ago.I was so fed up with the state of things on the computer/console/handheld front that I just kind of did not want to play anything anymore. Two things, and adjusting my expectations, really helped:
Game Pass - I’ve had it forever, but now it is more important, since I’m not buying new games as much anymore. It’s a small monthly fee, and I can frequently be surprised by the quality of some smaller indie games.
RetroAchievements - This is my current “thing”, and hopefully it will be for a long time to come. You use an emulator that has support for RetroAchievements (the biggest one being RetroArch) and the correct ROM file, and you can earn achievements in thousands of old games, from the earliest days of mass-market computing and consoles (magnavox, intellivision, apple ii, fairchild, amstrad cpc, etc.), through all 8 and 16 bit consoles, and up to Ps1/2/PSP/N64/3DO/Dreamcast, with Gamecube, Vita, or PS3 likely to be the next “big” console release (probably Gamecube). Revisit your favorites from years past and play them in new ways to get all of the achievements, or try out games you never had (or systems you never had) for the first time. Biggest criticism is that they have a tendency of being “too hard”, but you can either just pick games that don’t have ridiculously hard achievements, or just not go for 100%.
I will absolutely be buying Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.
Certainly all of Overwatch 2's issues were known and well documented before Baldur's Gate 3's release, I think people have just put two and two together (or more aptly, put the two next to each other for comparison).
I wish more people realized the same and stopped buying shitty games, while rewarding the good ones.
I grew up during the “old times”, I remember how it was so I’m quite wary of new games, but I think a lot of gamers are much younger than me and when shitty predatory practices is all you know, it’s probably difficult to believe something different can exist.
I didn’t want to buy BG3 at first because I probably won’t be able to play it, no doubt it’s a masterpiece but I can’t stand isometric view, I don’t like turn-based combat and click-to-move, but when I saw how AAA devs reacted to Larian integrity, I bought it anyway and I will at least try, hoping someone will develop a mod to make controls more “bearable” for players like me.
Even if they don’t, I firmly believe it’s money well spent, AAA devs are still attacking Larian for petty reasons, it means what they’re doing is extremely good for the players, they deserve to be supported by all means, let the current “AAA practices” rot.
EDIT: in case someone else is interested, I found modders did it! Hope they work on Linux:
using a controller with BG3 actually feels really good. you can also adjust the zoom so you are more in a third person view as opposed to isometric (nearly over the shoulder camera). you can also play the game real-time with pause, which may or may not help push you along as you say you don't necessarily jive with turn-based.
i hope these things help you get into BG3. i personally LOVE isometric view and turn-based tactics but even if these things don't appeal to you, the game itself is such a breath of fresh air that i do not see myself putting it down for a long, long time.
I don’t like their move to a web configurator, but they’re not explicitly excluding firefox. Firefox doesn’t support WebUSB. Mozilla has privacy and security reasons why they don’t support it outlined here.
I gave up on Logitech after buying a Logitech “Harmony” universal remote years ago. Normally you just have to toss a code or two into a universal remote to get it to work with your device, but I guess that would have been too easy for them.
Instead, you have to download their terrible app, create an account, connect the remote via usb, and give logitech all the details about every device you own that you’d like to use it for. Want to change a single detail? Gotta plug the remote back into the pc, launch the app, sign in, and wait until your firstborn goes to college while it apparently connects to the last working Commodore 64 hidden somewhere in the Amazon rainforest.
I should not need to report to some corporation every time I want to change the slightest thing on the remote I paid good money for.
You don't have to plug the remote in to your PC. You can use the mobile application.
Regardless, how would you have designed it differently? The DB of devices has to be updated all of the time. Not all of those devices are IR controlled. Some are BT. Some are 802.11. There has to be some means of pulling down data, common configurations, and providing a mechanism to change those configurations within the context of a single UI. The Sofabaton remotes are implemented in a very similar way.
it has an app that allowed you to change settings without plugging in the remote. I agree with you in that the system was poorly designed possibly intentionally to keep things locked down from their perspective. there was no reason to have a server when you already have to buy a "hub" in the end the hub was storing the settings since it worked without internet connection. it was an unnecessary hurdle for users.
Ok now this is sad, but it made me burst out laughing. This is an org that allows actual gambling with actual money on actual gambling machines in a sports game rated 3+, while having a cards minigame makes a game 17+ otherwise. These guys want to make sure a person is old enough to… Do what, exactly? It’s titties, isn’t it? They always only go after the titties.
"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”
Justice Stephen Breyer*, somehow arguing the opposite of what you’d think this paragraph means.
A lot of people just can't cope with the completely normal interest in sex that starts at puberty, and they want to bend the world backwards to pretend that this is a switch that flips on people's heads exactly at 18. I get that it's a complicated matter to handle, but it's also a fact of life.
There are right and wrong ways to protect kids and teens, but banning tits is just a display to appease parents who don't really want to think about it. If they did care about their well-being they'd focus on being more watchful towards creeps in online platforms rather than policing raunchy fictional content and convincing themselves teens aren't figuring out how to get it anyway, as they always have.
Meanwhile gambling for children makes a lot of money, so why would they care about the psychological issues that it causes on developing brains.
Microsoft isn’t going to revive anything. I don’t understand how people still think that Microsoft will improve things when they have such a poor track record for their current studios.
They brought back battletoads so never say never. They definitely need to unfuck whatever is going on in their studios management wise though. Too many duds and games stick in development hell
Hehe, 9 year old me teaching myself Turbo Pascal from library books in an effort to learn how to make my own computer games. I was shamelessly ripping off Battletoads with my own game called "Body Building Frogs"
For anyone playing it on Steam Deck, the devs are going to be adding Face It Anti Cheat which is incompatible with linux devices. And for anyone who needs virtualization for work and other activities, Face It Anti Cheat forces you to turn it off from bios before playing the game.
I use Linux, but cheating in multiplayer competitive games just destroys games. I can see where they're coming from.
I mean, stuff like this isn't a fantastic solution, but there really isn't much of a fantastic solution.
considers
Maybe it'd be possible to sell some sort of glorified USB dongle that a wide range of games could use that has a trusted computer inside and then stream sensitive data to it and have it only expose data to the host computer if it's necessary for the player to see it. That won't help with, say, aimbotting, but it could deal with "see through walls" hacks and the like. And you could implement some anti-cheat checking stuff on the dongle that you can't easily do remotely for stuff like aimbots, like get access to all mouse movements and such.
That could also be cross-platform. Have someone like Valve sell it.
Man, I don't use linux or a steam deck, but that seems like a poor choice in the long run. Seems like more people are using linux for gaming all the time.
They said that cheating is way more important to battle than the 1% of gamers on Linux. I can see the point. Epic doesn't exactly stop it. It's only a matter of time that cheaters get rampant IMO.
I believe that Linux players just can't join official servers and they plan to have community servers eventually.
There are already community servers, but at present you don't earn XP on them. I believe they've said that eventually they will change this, but I don't know the timeline. As long as they get it done before adding Faceit, I think it'd be a perfectly fine compromise.
I really wish "recommended" would at least have some information about resolution and fps requirements, is that recommended for 120fps at 4k? or 30fps at 1080p
Based on regular CS performance this is either concerning or they figured out a lot of performance bugs. I’m surprised they aren’t recommending more RAM as if I remember correctly 32gb and high-core count processors were generally always recommended for bigger cities.
I was about to disagree, then I realized I was looking at the minimum specs rather than the recommended. They do seem pretty intense but I also forget that the 2080ti and the 9700k are nearing 5 years old
Damn 5 years? I had a chance to use the 2080ti and the Radeon 7900 XTX with high-end games. I saw them improve from like 60fps to 80.
It's a 40% perf increase but it doesn't feel like hardware has improved that much since then
putting aside the ethics of DRM in general (ew) and that this developer has already made a fortune on a mod virtually unequaled... my biggest problem with this kind of thing is that bugs happen. "mines" implies that the goal will be to do something malicious to pirates. so what happens when there's a bug in the detection code, or in the auth server, or when you didn't test it on some specific quirky hardware-software combo, or when a cosmic ray strikes the RAM stick and flips the wrong bit?
a paying customer gets fucked -- or a lot of them do. all for the petty greed of someone who can't envision the obvious fact that the actual pirates will just fuzz your bomb logic and patch it out within two days.
As a formerly hardcore, now infrequent pirate, I wholeheartedly agree with this.
I’ve even pirated ANSYS at one point because the cracked version was a lot more reliable than the version I had for free, due to shoddy DRM (FlexLM, what a garbage licence management).
While mod authors are free to charge money for their mods, including DRM in a mod for a game that doesn’t have DRM (beyond basic steam account check) is kinda messed up. Adding deliberate bugs to mess with pirates is even more messed up. Why waste time making your product worst with drm and intentional bugs just to piss pirates who would never buy your product in the first place anyway?
It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.
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