pory

pory, 8 months ago

The S is a stellar emulation box that doesn’t need to be jailbroken. It’s a hell of a lot easier to configure than a custom Linux distro like RetroPie and the hardware packs a punch. I don’t own one, but I’d be more likely to buy a series S than a PS5 or series X.

pory, 8 months ago

No way in hell they’re gonna still be supporting the Series S in five years.

pory, 8 months ago

Unity would like that though.

pory, 8 months ago

You did have to pay $100 to play this one on day 1. The plebs that bought the $70 version had to wait a week.

pory, 8 months ago

Bioware just fired a ton of their top staff. This game is going to be nostalgia bait at best.

pory, 8 months ago

Everything I personally use works on the beta version through the collection method.

pory, 8 months ago

I am also concerned, because the game giving raw gold for low-effort (or zero-effort) farming is uncharted territory. Previously, it’d give value in laurels (t6/t3 materials) and mystic coins - when a player wanted to turn those into anything other than stuff directly crafted with those materials, they’d need to permanently remove gold from the game by using the TP. The only sources for meaningful chunks of raw gold (not valuable materials) have always been tied to time gated content like metas and instanced content, and it’s almost certainly how this 10 year old game has avoided inflation issues.

There’s a third type of login farmer between the “get 5aa” and “do weeklies” ones - the one who does the stuff that doesn’t require leaving a menu, like salvaging 10 items, identifying gear, AFKing in the daily activity, viewing a Vista, or some of the combat ones that can be done without leaving lion’s arch like breaking a bar (training golem).

pory, 8 months ago

A dime’s around 18mm across, here’s three 18x9mm ruby kites for $36. Same site has seven 14x10mm rubies for $23 and ten 10x10mm rubies for $30. But a dime-sized round ruby is gonna run you $71 a piece on there. No clue how legit this site is.

pory, 8 months ago

BG3 has plenty of bugs, some of them game breaking. Look at the litany of fixes they delivered in each patch. It’s not about that. It’s about releasing a game that isn’t a “service”, and just a purely high quality game - tactical combat that works well, characters with good writing, a solid plot hook, a distinct graphical style, phenomenal voice acting and mocap (which matter more for this genre than they would in, say, a third person shooter).

pory, 8 months ago

The standard argument here is that you’re not supposed to look in every container for loot. However yep everyone I’ve seen play this game including myself is an absolute loot goblin. What if this rotten fruit basket has a +2 greatsword or boots of elvenkind!

I think there’s a mod that adds a button you can click to “loot the room” - characters make perception rolls and “find” anything of value and put the items into their inventories. Haven’t tried it but might be your jam.

pory, 8 months ago

Huh. I just looked up twitch drops for the game and I have those items. I never made or will make a larian account. Bizarre.

pory, 8 months ago

But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn’t have to be like it is.

As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3’s Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.

Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it’s something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it’s a shame that it’s all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.

pory, 8 months ago

Yeah. BG3’s exceptional because it doesn’t need to sacrifice that stuff.

pory, 8 months ago

You’re arguing about visual fidelity with someone who uses their TV to “convert 24hz movies to 120fps”. It’s the equivalent of the guy who got into a heated debate over Italian food with a Redditor that also posted about drinking his own piss on /r/piss.

pory, 8 months ago

Amazon already tried, with a Twitch branded game launcher and included game licenses for that platform in Amazon Prime.

pory, 8 months ago

Any other character I’d agree with you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Lae’zel is into that.

pory, 8 months ago

I’ve been watching a friend play and absolutely noticed that the romance stuff is a lot slower. everyone wanted to jump my wizard bones about 18 hours in, though it’s very easy to just not flirt with them. Meanwhile she’s 28 hours in and Shadowheart (who was trying to get me in bed with her in the first 10 hours of my play through) still hasn’t propositioned her.

pory, 8 months ago

The win comes later once gamepass gets netflix’d. It’ll only go on like this for so long before there’s UbiPass and EAccess and Sony Prime and so on and so forth. Then a few years after that, when the services finally get pushed back against and die, everyone who just kept buying games on steam/gog/itch/whatever (or pirating) just keeps on not paying sub fees. Like nothing ever happened.

pory, 8 months ago

Subscriptions and those that use them are a worse deal for indie devs, and it only becomes an even worse deal as big name publishers put their new AAA games in the subscription and demand a proportionate slice of the pie.

My opinion / analysis of the situation is that it’s only going to get worse for non-AAA and non-backed indies as “$180 a year gets me aaaaallll thiiiiiis, why would I spend a whole month’s of gamepass on your one game” becomes more and more common.

Furthermore, there was never a world where Netflix stayed as “$15/mo for everything”. Other corps want their own Netflixes. So they pull their content and put out another subscription. There’s no world where MS Gamepass stays the only subscription-based game service in town, and when users are paying for three gamepasses, they’re even less likely to buy a cool game that’s lacking AAA polish for $10.

However, unlike movies and TV, no game has really become exclusive to Gamepass (some tried with Stadia, which thankfully died). There are shows that were exclusive to HBO Max that cannot be legally acquired anymore. Players that want some degree of ownership of their games can buy them on Steam/Epic, or if they want full ownership of their games they can buy them DRM-Free like on GOG. Those guys can keep on doing that through the rise of the “wow it’s genuinely a good deal” gamepass, the “more corporations want their own gamepass” phase, the “prices go up and quality goes down now that we’ve got an audience” phase, and the “service is going away forever” phase.

It’s game buyers that’ll keep indie games alive. Subscription models are a poisoned treat that benefit indie games right now but are already shifting to be a huge blow to the indie game scene.

pory, 8 months ago

i say $180 a year because it sounds like less of a “good deal”. More people are willing to write off “$15 a month” than they are “$180 a year”.

pory, 8 months ago

Grappler Baki-ass post

pory, 8 months ago

Bioware fired 50 top employees recently. It’s dead Jim.

pory, 9 months ago

Even then, as long as sales on Epic keep sucking, no revenue split will make the devs more money than just releasing on multiple platforms. Certainly 70% times $60 times however many steam copies sell is a higher number than 100% times $60 times their epic exclusive sales.

The old Epic system would subsidize the “fewer people buy your game at all if it’s on Epic” factor by just paying the devs up front with a big chunk of cash. Basically ensuring a “successful launch” even if nobody buys the game. This new system is probably less enticing for developers who know how many more people are willing to buy on Steam than Epic (and also if they want to release on non-Steam platforms there are always the indie friendly Itch and the DRM-free GOG)

pory, 9 months ago

www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/880

pory, 9 months ago

They did detailed, stylistic, expressive animations for ANIMAL BODY LANGUAGE. and yes, you can talk to random rats and squirrels.