KubeRoot

Regarding the last paragraph, developers have adapted, and now include more complex/obscure secrets meant to be shared by people and solved together. Though of course if players just look things up before even trying then you can’t stop them, but that’s their own fault.

The modern scourge are dataminers, who will immediately jump to digging through game files and spoil puzzles in the communities trying to solve them. Not all of them will do that, but it only takes one to ruin the fun.

Also Tunic is an absolute banger of a game, would recommend, just don’t spoil yourself!

Worth noting is that you can also get factorio DRM-free on the website, and then downloading mods is locked behind logging in with your account - same as playing multiplayer on online-mode servers. But mods are also just zip files that you can also download from the website (still need to log in and own the game), so same as games with steam workshop, people will share mods same as they share game files.

If that’s too inconvenient for you to pirate, well, “piracy is a service issue” ;)

*sweaty

Opinionated sweater is when somebody offers to refund the sweater they gave you as a gift

Ah, reminds me of this good old collection of stories http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

Funnily, with gold you don’t even need heat for things like forming coins.

As far as I know, if you go that way, you’ll find yourself fighting the engine as all the other tools are being adjusted to fit nanite+lumen+TAA, and you’ll still get bad results. That’s on top of them just not developing solutions that work without that whole stack.

Unreal, latest and greatest? Hah, good one! It might be latest, but Lumen can go die a hole, and fuck every single technology forcing more reliance on temporal accumulation. Also fuck screenspace reflections, those are basically designed to look good in specific cinematic shots while causing artifacts all over the place while actually playing.

Unreal these days is more like making the game run 10x worse and take up more space while looking better in specific cases.

I definitely agree with having more people try Godot, especially if they’re willing to contribute when they run into roadblocks they have to fix.

Ended up ranting about metaprogression, oh well.

I appreciate games that know what they want to be, and have an intended difficulty for you to experience/master (I also have nothing against adjustable difficulty and/or accessibility options, but I like knowing what the devs expected). I also appreciate roguelikes’ uncompromising approach, with the original concepts like non-modality, and expecting you to face challenges to get rewarded instead of bypassing them.

Metaprogression… Goes three ways. There are games which get easier as you upgrade across runs (which either get easier than they should or start too difficult), games where beating them at a difficulty unlocks harder difficulties (love that, as long as there aren’t too many things to separately unlock, since it lets you ramp things up to your comfortable difficulty while providing a ultimate challenge to reach), and games where you unlock content as you play (can be good for easing players into the game, but take it too far and you’re back to having to put X hours into the game to get the full experience)

Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Luck be a Landlord do the second (StS has ascensions, Dead Cells has IIRC boss cells, LbaL has floors), but they do things differently in other regards. StS has you unlocking content based on accumulated score across runs with a specific character, but it doesn’t take too long. It also has a true ending that you can’t do on your first runs. Dead Cells seems to have a ton of content and upgrades that take a long time to unlock. LbaL doesn’t have any other metaprogression IIRC, but it does lock at least two important mechanics to specific floors (and up).

Heaven’s Vault.

I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.

But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.

While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.

Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.

On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?

In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.

I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.

Huh, it’s been a long time since my playthrough, but I feel like the game was very “emotionally engaging”, what with the struggles of all the characters, both the Hearthians you can talk to and the Nomai whose writing you get to read. I found the story really moving, and the nonlinear way it’s told and the way it’s weaved with the progression to be amazing.

I’m going to say yes, but if you just can’t enjoy the “proper” experience, but you enjoy it with the slight “cheat”, then that could be better than not playing.

Worth noting is that the time it takes to start raining varies, food respawns, creatures move around. If you can’t make it to the next shelter and die, you restart the cycle in the same way - but if you grab enough food to hibernate and go back to the same shelter, you might find it easier to progress on the next cycle.

That’s funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.

Of course I’m not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.

I don’t think the line is that fine in that case, considering all random mechanics in Balatro give ephemeral rewards that only last until the end of a run, which is an isolated instance of a game with limited playtime, those mechanics cannot be paid for with real money, the resulting rewards cannot be sold for real money or traded with other players, and generally cannot affect any other players in any way, not even visually through cosmetics.

As far as I know, Balatro is only really being targeted because it’s stylized after poker, with the enforcement having no actual understanding of what the gameplay looks like.

I think at bigger risk from actual laws would be MMORPGs where you can get random loot drops from enemies/chests, and those also tend to have markets where people grind valuable drops and use in-game trading to transfer them to other players in exchange for real money.

Reminded me of What Remains Of Edith Finch, it has a segment working on a line cutting fish heads off. Grab fish, put in guillotine, cut, next, over and over. The monotony and pointlessness of it, and what it does to the psyche.

Yes, the publishers have control over that, which is why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to praise Steam over games on it going on sale.

That’s just the thing - the publicly visible rules are about the keys, but the email that’s part of evidence isn’t about the keys. (Also, steam isn’t just distributing the game, but providing other services for workshop, cloud saves, multiplayer, forums)

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

One point on perception - doesn’t the sun appear somewhat yellow because the blue light has a stronger tendency to scatter, meaning that the roughly white light of the sun is less blue, with all the blue color of the sky being taken away from the color of the sun?

I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.

That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.