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MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Whoever was worried about the Steam release of Scott Pilgrim not supporting crossplay, it's sounding likely that it'll still just be using the Epic online service and require an Epic account to play. Careful what you wish for I guess.

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MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Bad Seafood posted:

Sounds like a pass till I've got a better machine then.

Laptop gaming has its drawbacks.

DF's performance is still almost entirely single-threaded, unfortunately (the graphics are the only thing that can make use of a second core), so your per-core clock speed is likely to be the biggest bottleneck in running it and that bottleneck is going to be hit primarily based on two things: the size of your embark area (size of map you'll be playing on), and how many entities are active at any given time. You can play on a smaller map if need be, and can manually set the dwarf population cap in the settings if things are starting to chug. The free version is now at version parity with the Steam release, minus the fancy new sprites and music, so if you can wrap your head around that just enough to get a feel for how it's running the paid version should perform exactly the same.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

RPATDO_LAMD posted:

they're not even the same canon, you can do them in either order

Yes they are? Doom 64 is inferred to lead into Doom 2016, which very directly leads into Doom Eternal, there's just some timeskipping involved between each of them and Eternal has a lot of flashbacks that make the linear sequence of events even more confusing.

That said, yeah 2016 and Eternal are two surprisingly different games. The first is a nice compromise between classic and modern FPS sensibilities, the second is "okay, that again but twenty mechanics to keep track of at all times while zipping around at an even higher difficulty level". It also has the Marauders, and I know it's one of those things that people get memed on to just git gud, but I maintain, abjectly and absolutely, gently caress the Marauders. I can deal with everything else Eternal throws at me but they genuinely drag down the whole experience. Non-boss Doom enemies should not spend 98% of their time alive in an invulnerability phase. Period.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

HopperUK posted:

I understand getting lost in an actual maze but to keep turning right, and keep ending up in the same place, for *thirty minutes* without realising you're doing something wrong - how? I mean assuming the playtester was sober which they might not have been I suppose.

To be fair the entirety of that section of The Lair has about as many visually distinctive landmarks as you'd expect from exploring a giant anthill in first-person and even without a red herring path to deliberately lead me back to the start I still somehow managed to go in a big circle two or three times.

Good thing they never got me to do focus testing

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Paradoxish posted:

None of this would really be a problem if things like world size weren't treated as objectively good qualities. "I can go to that mountain over there!" isn't a good thing if getting there isn't any fun, and it's totally pointless if I can just warp to the top. Fast travel is dumb if your world is actually interesting and your game design doesn't force the player to slog back and forth over the same boring content, and creating a big world is silly if you can only manage to build enough content to fill a much smaller map.

But it doesn't matter because developers want to show off their massive maps filled with basically indistinguishable points of interest scattered around terrain that's mostly procedurally generated anyway.

Clearly the solution is to give every open world game the movement physics of Tribes: Ascend

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

StrixNebulosa posted:

If I could use a memory-deleting gun on any video games so I could play it brand new for the first time again, it would be Obra Dinn.

e: Second game I'd pick would be a tie between Dangan Ronpa 2 and the Hitman 2016 trilogy.

For me I think it'd have to be Ghost Trick, but DR2 is a good choice. Few games have gotten me to exclaim aloud like that last trial did.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

DerekSmartymans posted:

I never played Dangole RonPaul2 but I immensely enjoyed when the Let’s Play drama bomb went off out of nowhere.

That was an *experience* that made up for a slow forum’s year till then…

Pretty sure I was inactive for whenever that was, what'd I miss?

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Amazing. No wonder Slowbeef started to resent those games

wow what a terrible snipe

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Cowcaster posted:

even if you disregard every single thing about jk rowling herself the setting of harry potter seems so wholly empty and uninteresting, you'd get as much creative stimulus out of a fred basset videogame

There's an amazing amount of novelty to be wrung from a setting where even the approved setpieces and activities include so many threats to life and limb for the schoolkids, but you can only fall back on introducing new elements for so long. The books captured the idea of basically living in an on-again off-again thriller for several years, the movies captured the spectacle of a place where everything is doused in magic, but absolutely nothing of what's interesting about HP has ever struck me as something that would translate well to video games except maybe VR if you got a real A-team on it. Some things just weren't designed to hold up in other mediums.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Oxxidation posted:

rogue legacy 2's extremely granular progression can be a turnoff but i think your memories of the first are warped, it was a prototype for an entire genre and it's unplayable today

it was unplayable then too

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

victrix posted:

Rain World is a genuinely incredible game with some really, really cool stuff in it, and a really cool setting with an interesting story

But it is actively hateful and does not care about you getting through it, so if you want to experience it, you have to commit, it's not going to hold your hand (it will bite it and eat you though)

100% this. It's kind of reminiscent of OOTW/Another World in that respect, except OOTW was much more scripted. Rain World is so explicitly unscripted that it becomes a serious goddamn issue when any given screen transition could hold a bullshit instadeath to any of the roaming predators. Or when one happens to track you directly to your most recent hideout at the end of a tile-wide corridor, kills and drags you off, and then when you respawn (and subsequently disappear from its mouth) it turns around and eats you again, four loving times in a row with absolutely no possible recourse, tanking the stupid loving rank you need to maintain to progress at the stupid loving biome transition gates.

I love and hate that loving stupid wonderful game, and gotta say a price increase is going to be a hard sell.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Triarii posted:

It could be cool if there was, like, an open-world take on Descent. Fly around a galaxy Freelancer-style looking for contracts, but then all the nitty gritty of combat and discovery happens when you enter a derelict space station or planetary ruin and everything's much closer quarters.

I never realized I wanted this until you said it, and I don't even like Descent specifically.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

ymgve posted:

Outer Wilds small spoiler, should be safe to read: There's a dude in a hammock. Talk to him each time you encounter him to learn something useful.

I am still so loving pissed that it took me 20 hours to find that. I found him and spoke to him, exhausting his dialogue trees really early on, and figured that was it. Surprise, motherfucker!

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Just had a run-in with one of those "can you help out my tf2 team, there's a $19k prize pool" accounts. I thought that fell out of vogue a while ago.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Phigs posted:

If you're easily frustrated Outer Wilds is not a great game for that IMO.

Seconding this. I pushed myself to finish it and it's definitely one of the most unique experiences I've had in years, but the number of times it had me screaming out loud at my monitor was frankly concerning. It also still had some nasty bugs when I played despite being a year out from launch, one of which permanently reduced my walk speed by something like 70%, I think because I died by hitting terrain at a weird angle.

Fwoderwick posted:

I somehow went through 95% of the game before noticing there was an autopilot you can use when locked on to something. On the off chance you've not noticed it yet, it will generally make traversal between planets simpler, but pootling about on them by ship will still be on you.

I used the autopilot maybe about 16 times over the course of my run, and at least half of those resulted in hilariously catastrophic death by various improbable means. I think my favourite was when it steered me directly into the satellite, a close second is when I set course for the white hole and it got me there but just... didn't bother to slow down at all (there was a similar incident with the comet), and third place goes to when I had just barely broken atmosphere, set course for something directly above me, and the autopilot instead immediately applied full-force retro rockets. That one must have left an impressive crater.

Every time I mention getting killed by the autopilot people immediately respond with "yeah you gotta make sure your target isn't on the other side of the sun, duh" but no, you don't understand, this thing genuinely hates me.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Gromit posted:

Yeah ok, this is a red flag. An exploration game where you need to solve mysteries but also have a strict time limit AND have the do the same thing over and over is sounding like something that will not appeal to me. But I'll give it a bit more of a shot and see.

You shouldn't need to do most things twice, but that is largely up to luck and circumstance. The loop of Find Thing - Get Stuck - Go Elsewhere - Find Answer - Where Was the Thing - Why the gently caress Isn't it Waypointed - Finally Find it Again - Almost Done - Time Runs Out - GOD loving DAMNIT - Have to Wait For Specific Time-Based Event to Try Again - Completed Task Gets a Waypoint Now That it's Useless... is easily my #1 complaint about the game.

#2 is when you figure out one of the more obtuse puzzles but don't execute the solution quite right, get zero feedback, and start looking for other solutions.

It has some unmatched highs, absolutely, but you might have to push through some pronounced lows to get there.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

There has been a sudden absolute rash of phishing accounts adding me, all with the following patterns:
  • female name, usually with an ascii heart, and some anime girl avatar
  • account is 1-3 years old with a single-digit number of badges and maybe a handful of friends
  • perpetually in-game in TF2, thousands of hours on record
  • profile description mentions being a 3D artist ("Blender + C4D"), playing tf2 since 2018/2019, and their favorite maps
  • will wait a weirdly long time after being added to say anything, and when they do it's always "what's your casual lvl in tf2", before proceeding to say they're down a team member and need help to win the $19k prize pool

So in case anyone's still gullible enough to fall for one of these, stay vigilant I guess.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

buglord posted:

Can’t help you there but the part where everyone screams from taking hunger damage at the same time is at least in my top 3 Lets Game It Out moments.

I think the end of Junkyard Truck made my #1, which is surprising given how low-investment it was. It was just so genuinely and completely unexpected.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

So Shadow of War is in the GOG sale, and there are apparently some significant downsides to playing the game without the Steamworks integration; nevermind the lack of friends list integration features, apparently there's just straight up no function to reassign your champions to move them between regions. Is that as big of a deal as it sounds like? It sounds like kind of a big deal.

Then again apparently Shadow of Mordor just retired the Nemesis Forge, Vendetta missions, and leaderboards so who knows how long SoW's Steamworks functions will be around either.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Mierenneuker posted:

I think it happened at the end of 2021, it was not a recent thing.

Okay so I was going off of this support article which is dated this month and refers to a January cutoff date. I tried actually searching and you're close, this happened in January of 2021, evidenced by such articles as this, which links... to that exact same support article, including an identical copy-and-paste of its current contents. I then noticed that it says "Updated" next to the date, so... they overwrote the original post date with an updated version of the article that does not actually contain an update? Crawling the snapshots on archive.org reveals that, yes, the page is seemingly "updated" every few days or so. What a uniquely useless/misleading way of timestamping your support articles.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Cowcaster posted:

in other news pizza tower comes out this week, that snuck up on me

Oh poo poo I'd completely forgotten. Can't believe it's finally happening.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Oxxidation posted:


like portal 2 isn’t a good comparison on those merits because it does commit to its setting and characters, even if they’re inherently absurd. high on life would probably be a better example

"I'm speaking in an accent that is beyond her range of hearing" is still one of the most memorable single lines in any Valve game to me purely on the weight of how surreally idiotic a thought it is, even if it was far from the funniest or most engaging. It also would've absolutely ruined the joke if Chell had any kind of response to it.

Makes me wonder if you could rip out the protagonist's lines in Forspoken, BL3 style, but leave the armband in. Might be an improvement. Although I'm sure that'd be a whole minefield all its own in the argument of representation.

e: lmao $93.49 CDN for the standard edition, what the gently caress kinda clown world we living in here

MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 24, 2023

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Pigbuster posted:





Pizza Tower is loving perfect.

https://twitter.com/thatguy_hat/status/1618672457996709889

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

I've just been going whole hog on the Meet Your Maker demo. It's kind of amazing the variety of level designs I've already seen at play, and the different ways you can gently caress with people. Wide open arenas full of those full-coverage plasma-firing cubes and flying enemies that offer just enough cover to not be impossible, constrained corridors that pack traps around the most unassuming corners, routes that lead you through multiple challenging gauntlet rooms full of enemies and/or traps. And of course, people already out there buildin' dicks:


Shoutout to whoever took the time to paint the entire exterior of their base to resemble some sort of hanging housing, this poo poo takes a while:


Personally I've been trying to specialize in "gotcha" trap design. The very entrance to my base is deliberately timed so that it will likely kill the little carrier dude who you can follow to the goal, if you're impatient. Also as a general rule you start off with only two rounds for your bolt gun and have to retrieve them once fired, so here's one of the first things you see once inside:

You enter via the red ramp and there are paths to your left and right. On the right is this guy. If you grapple to him, you have to watch out for the spike floor. If you shoot him, his corpse ejects backwards into the acid cube. I left one of the sides of the cube open, and some of the more intrepid participants have successfully grappled through it quickly enough to recover their bolt without dying (I'm always impressed when they pull that off), but it's claimed a good handful of people who got greedy and fumbled the recovery. It's always entertaining to watch that part of the replay and see them slowly process that "oh, that's in there now, huh".

Just past there sit the decoy ceiling spikes (you can see the same acid cube in the background):

You don't even need to worry about them. They're just kinda there, being vaguely threatening, and the game incentivizes destroying traps, so you might shoot at or melee the spikes. See anything special about the block underneath them though? No of course you don't, nobody plays the game slowly enough to pay attention to where fake blocks might be unless they've already been caught off guard recently. That is a fake block underneath the spikes, and underneath that fake block is another acid cube. If you're quick enough to react you can still recover, but that little beauty is probably my #1 most effective trap somehow. It might be even more effective if I put an upward-facing bolt launcher down there instead, but an acid cube only costs 10 points! It's so economical!


Protip: Make your base kinda lovely-looking on the inside. Allow the immovable default blocks to bleed into your design. That way, when you place a fake block (which is stuck with the dark default block as its appearance), it won't stand out so much. Put them in ceilings, build them into corners, anywhere someone is likely to try and be hasty or double backwards, then hide nasty stuff on the other side. or good stuff! I've seen some freaking expertly-trapped caches.

Speaking of, my level's cache sits at the very bottom.

I built the path over top of it and sealed it off on all sides except for one (which is then also covered by another fake block). The route to the main goal is, of course, to the left. The route to the cache is in that pit to the right. You can even come at that pit if you drop off to the left and turn back around, I left a little opening under the path here that you can take to find it. Half the people who come into my base search all over Hell's half acre when they hear the cache's telltale hum, they go to the left, they go past, underneath, and back around to a random dead-end courtesy of the default level generation, they go in every possible direction except the one that would lead them there. It's uncanny, something about the way I've built this seems to render that path on the right completely invisible to everyone who passes through (including before I painted a line towards the main goal when I noticed people getting way too turned around while looking for the cache). I've been working on subtly signposting it because I want to see someone find it, and still nothing. Mind you, it is possible to seal off entirely if you're a dick, so after enough dicking around most people are probably just making that assumption.

Game's fun. The rate at which you unlock stuff is kind of arduous, but the only thing I really feel gimping me is the absence of certain traps and trap upgrades for my own designs. Depending on the price point, I may very well have to get this when it launches proper.

MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Feb 12, 2023

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Oh my god I have a new favourite 30 seconds. I was suddenly raided by a pair of players (didn't even know that could happen), and apparently when you do that you get the ability to revive each other pretty much without penalty, which makes it a lot easier to do a complete run. They'd grabbed the GenMat, were on their way back, and this whole beautiful series of events happened:

https://i.imgur.com/zXCRtKY.mp4

I was wondering how the hell there was a death token in that upper hallway with literally no traps.

e: Even better, on their way out next run they became the first ones to find my cache. Good on them!

MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Feb 12, 2023

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time



This is MYM, not a tower defense game oh my god

e: People are already discovering the "tank the FPS into the single digits to make it impossible to react to hazards properly by covering literally every block on the map in textures and decals" strat. The hosed up part is that it works.

MonkeyforaHead fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Feb 12, 2023

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Ciaphas posted:

this makes me think the game is tecmo's deception except multiplayer, is that accurate because i am all for that

More or less! I see a lot more solo raiders than duos, and when raiding in pairs you can revive one another seemingly as many times as you want to avoid restarting a full run (as long as you don't both die at once like in the above clip) but it's also very easy to kill one another in cramped spaces. The only other games of this type that I'm aware of are King of Thieves on mobile, and Catch Me, a Steam game that no longer exists because of course it relied on a master server, and sadly nobody played it.

Pigbuster posted:

lol. Is MYM like Mario maker in that you need to beat the level yourself to have other people play or does it let you just be as mean as possible with no repercussions?

Mierenneuker posted:

I watched someone stream it yesterday that noted you DON'T need to finish a level before you can publish it. So you put those hooks behind corrosive cubes that aren't seethrough all you want.

Clarification: yes, you can be a massive twat with your level design and don't need to complete a verification run, but they've opted for a different set of restrictions to compensate.

One, you need a complete unbroken path from entrance to goal that your slow-rear end little Harvester dude can travel. He can't jump, so you need to build slopes for him anytime the path goes up or down; you can't block the path with acid blocks or have him traverse fake blocks that become hollow for the return trip or whatever. You can't just have, say, an entire room along the route with a floor that suddenly gives way into a mess of spikes and acid and explosions, or a twenty block long tunnel of acid cubes with a trap at the end that's out of range of your own projectiles -- unless you can come up with some way of tricking the raider into entering that room of their own volition, such as with tombs. Tombs being the bonus objective per-map that generate in a random fixed place and are quite enticing to raiders. There are no restrictions on building around them.

Two, traps can't detect people through occupied spaces. Fake blocks, acid blocks, those are threats to you and can absolutely be used to obscure vision in clever trap design while creating a space that can be fired through, and I had a fun time getting through one such hallway myself, but you can't just create a hallway of completely obscured death. You can create a hallway with, say, the endlessly-refreshing fire traps built in such a position that you can't safely get to them to shoot or disable them because they're all covering one another and built over acid cubes, but this all loops back around to the last point:

Three, death is cheap. Maintaining a base somewhat less so. You don't lose resources when someone raids you, unless you opt in to "overdrive" mode where you gain double resources from kills but lose a significant chunk when someone successfully escapes. Raiders have nothing to lose except time, patience, and cheap consumables, but after every ~24 hours of your base being active it will expire and demand resources to refresh. If the base has accumulated enough prestige through deaths and upvotes (upvotes being much more heavily weighted than deaths), you can do a prestige to cut the cost of reactivating in half and expand your point limit slightly to fit in a few more traps. Once you hit a certain point threshold spent on traps, your base's threat rating will go up between one of three ratings so people have some idea what to expect, and it allows you to waste more points on general architecture if you want to stay within a certain hazard rating. It's mostly pretty smartly handled and dickass design is punished when people start ragequitting, but I do worry that if this game starts pulling in big numbers people will find ways to exploit the system. Create Feeder Squads to rack up death counts and upvote the worst designed maps, that sort of thing. For now, it seems to be self-regulating well enough, but we'll see.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

This acid cube was meant as a joke. It now has more kills than a majority of my traps, because people keep doing this:
https://i.imgur.com/wewHBWE.mp4

Never underestimate the compulsion to destroy an already-spent trap.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Sab669 posted:

I flagged 2 of my maps as "Social", go try 'em :haw:

Search for Eldora and Ypsilanti in the Social Raid menu

Not getting any results? Maybe that part isn't working for the open beta or we need to be Steam buddies or something, idk

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Ciaphas posted:

this game rules, "demo" my rear end

It is the full game, it's just only available as an open beta through the 13th for now.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time


Wait, is this a full release of a Pico-8 game? I swear I've seen a Pico-8 version of this on Itch a couple years back.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

THE BAR posted:

Oh good Lord, Hardwar's on Steam. I hope it still works for multiplayer, but just the ability to play it hassle-free with cutscenes and music would be wonderful.

loving Zero Wing had a port pop out of nowhere yesterday, of all things. The arcade version though, so it's an interesting novelty but not the version with the hilarious intro and actually banger soundtrack.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

I remember there being a whole discussion back when the refund system was implemented, about how the devs/publishers are left on the hook for a certain percentage of the refund value that comes out to a bit more than they originally earned from the purchase. Which in most cases is kind of a drop in the bucket but I think there were a few outliers where refunds on small indie games were costing them significantly out of pocket and drove them off the platform altogether.

So I just try to avoid refunding smaller/cheaper games unless they leave a really bad taste in my mouth.

How 'bout that end of support for older Windows at the end of the year, though? My only way of using some of my games (and a couple DAW's and a video editor) is on a Win7 VM, so that's gonna go straight down the shitter. I was a bit miffed when XP support ended because I still have an old netbook, but apparently the number of people still running Steam on Win7/8 is more than their entire Linux userbase. That's gonna raise some hackles.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

credburn posted:

Hey gang, what's the best set of headphones I should get? I've had an awesome set for a few years but it finally needs replaced. It had (kindasorta) 5.1 surround!

The first thing that always gives up the ghost on my headphones is the cord, so I went with a Bose pair several years ago that has a detachable cord. Good audio quality, comfortable, I think they were under $100, I've had to replace the cord 3 times and the ear cushions twice, but they're still going!

credburn posted:

Oh! I suppose it would be best to have a mic. I'm going to be using it for gaming, mostly.

Just bear in mind that a headset is, as a baseline, going to have worse sound quality and a lovely mic unless you get into a significantly higher price bracket. Good pair of headphones and a cheapass desktop mic will probably be cheaper and at least one of them might be decent quality.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Well Valve finally blocked the old Steam app from connecting to the chat servers so you now have to use their fresh new pisstake of a separate app for that. If you even CAN use it.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Lt. Lizard posted:

The only way I can see the whole "the golden age of gaming was actually x years ago!" sentiment being somewhat true, instead of being a nostalgia brainrot, is if the person saying that is a die-hard fan of one of the genres that had their boom in the past and are pretty thoroughly dead now, like MMORPGs, RTSes, or arena PvP shooters (or whatever the hell was the name for the genre of things like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament).

The golden age of gaming ended with the release of golden horse armor

Ironic, really

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Why do I keep holding out any kind of hope that Rare will stop directly encouraging the loving psychopaths that comprise 99% of the Sea of Thieves playerbase

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

KazigluBey posted:

Elaborate?

I'm one of the crowd who likes the PvE in SoT. I'm not exactly keen on the PvP even in cases when I'm on even footing, but the real jizz in my eye is that I'm never on even footing; the game's open design actively incentivizes getting the drop on people when they're busy halfway across an island, or finding a smaller boat than your own to punch downwards at, so naturally, that's what happens, to the point where nine times out of ten nobody even bothers looting the poo poo they just sunk, and the game's former dedicated PvP mode, the Arena, was shut down last year. Hardly anybody was using it because they're not interested in consensual skill-testing PvP, they just want to grief.

So naturally the recurring question of private servers/instances keeps coming up in the discussion forums, but Rare have put their foot down: this will not ever happen, because PvP is a part of the core experience, so stop asking. Threads on the subject will be locked the moment a mod notices, and you will be pointed to a now 3 year old newspost about the extremely limited, alpha-state rollout of... private instances, which so far as I can tell are still invite-only, reserved exclusively for a few big-name streamers, and have the additional kink of disabling progression systems altogether. So... there are private instances, despite their insistence to the contrary, but no, you still can't have them. And invariably the topic keeps coming up, over and over again, because it's a real issue that they simply refuse to address, and threads keep getting locked, sometimes with warnings issued.

And then they go and make a news post patting themselves on the back for how many thousands of accounts have been suspended, probated, or outright banned over the last year in the name of "maintaining a safe, inclusive, and fair environment for our players". :shrek:

So, the rules as enforced by both Rare and the community managers are:
  • Grief as much as you want! The game is PvPvE, not PvE! (though really it's not PvPvE either, since the PvE'ers don't want to PvP and the PvP'ers don't want to loot)
  • Just don't cheat or be racist while you do it.
  • This is our vision for the game, so stop asking us about it. Or else.
  • But see our newspost from 3 years ago about the possibility of private instances for people who aren't you.
But clearly the solution is just to "git gud", as parroted by every navel-gazing gatekeeper who doesn't actually want you to do so because they can't stand dealing with one another, they just want the easy targets to stick around. I've never seen another game that's such a disparate pairing of chill, fun grind and corrosive, disastrous community and managers.

MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Omi no Kami posted:

How psychotic is the pvp playerbase in Sea of Thieves if I just want to solo a tiny schooner and gently caress around with PVE content? Is this a dark souls thing, where the guys who are into pvp are really into it and existing on the server is an invitation to immediately get blown out?

The PvE stuff is really chill, but finding someone who won't attack on sight is like finding a unicorn. There'll be good and bad experiences, but I'm just so sick of the bad experiences always overshadowing the good ones.

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MonkeyforaHead
Apr 7, 2006


God, you vindictive bitch, why can't I ever have any "me" time

Oh yeah, another mandatory thing for Sea of Thieves is an SSD, so hope you've got 100+ GB free on one or every load screen will last upwards of 4 minutes, including respawning

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