T w e n t y S i d e d
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast303
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
0:29 Shamus’ House
I’ll repeat this here for those of you who don’t listen to the show: Our family is moving. As of right now, it looks like it’ll happen in early July. I’ll do what I can to keep the content mill going, but you know it goes. Hopefully we won’t wind up with a five day internet blackout like we had last time.
6:56 Noita
Link (YouTube) |
32:50 Denuvo Anti-Cheat
Eurogamer has a run-down of the whole thing.
Like I said on the show, I uninstalled the Bethesda Launcher the moment I heard about a Doom Eternal update that installs anti-cheat at the kernel level. Now the question: If I previously installed the Bethesda launcher with admin privs, what are the odds that the update would need to ask for privs again before installing something like Denuvo Anti-Cheat? I know it’s POSSIBLE to set things up so that it never needs to ask for privs again, but Bethesda developers are demonstrably lazy and very likely to take the path of least resistance in any given task. And I’m 99% sure that in this case, the path of least resistance would require an additional popup asking for privileges. Since I never saw one, I’m reasonably sure that Bethesda didn’t mess with my operating system.
47:54 Mailbag: Civ 6
Hi Shamus
I was listening to your recent Diecast where you talk about buying Civilisation VI with that weird coupon from Civilisation V. I now see the Epic Game store is giving away Civilisation VI for free. Do you take this as further confirmation that the Epic Game store is out to aggravate you, personally, and damn the cost?
Best
Sam
51:46 Mailbag: EA Open Source
Hi Shamus! Hi Paul!
It’s less of the question, more of sharing the news, I suppose. So, here’s the link https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/gnevp8/remaster_update_and_open_source_mod_support/ . Basically, EA is making some parts of the upcoming Command & Conquer remaster open-source. And considering that the material they showed previously (trailer, graphics, music and such), I can’t help but compare it to WC3 Reforged. I’m, admittedly, a CnC guy, and not really a fan of Blizzard RTS formula, but I’m still not sure how to feel, that Blizz is stumbling, and EA is doing… these… nice… things… after CnC4 and Rivals. I just find it so puzzling, that I’m not sure why its happening this way. May be you can explain this alternative reality?
Best regards, DeadlyDark
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Alright Shamus, you finally got me to listen to one of these by mentioning Noita. (Which I shall now play while listening in the background…)
Yeah, the simulation in Noita is absolutely amazing. That’s one of the two big draws of the game for me, the other being the ability to mix-and-match your own spells from the random components. I really love simulation of fluids in games—Noita kinda reminds me of a puzzle game I loved from 2012, Vessel, which revolved around puzzles using similar 2D-fluid interaction.
The slowdowns Paul experienced are probably from sheer simulation overload. I’ve made wands I’ve informally thought of as time-slowing machines, because the sheer number of particles they put out slows the game down for a number of seconds. Usually because I’m launching like 20 or 30 particles simultaneously, all of which have lightning arcing between them, and which are freezing liquids around them, or emitting liquids of their own, or other things. There’s a couple of good mods out there which add a ton of interesting spell effects to play around with.
(FYI, the in-between area between levels Paul mentioned is called the Holy Mountain. Yes, each of them are called the Holy Mountain. Regarding beating Noita, I’ve got 201 hours at this point and I think I’ve beaten the game maybe 4–5 times so far? I’ve had fun the entire time, though, and I’ve often restarted when I just wasn’t feeling like continuing with the spells and perks I’d found so far.)
Ha! Glass Cannon. Yeah, I took that once. Pretty fun. No, wait, I actually took it a second time, on one of my most powerful runs ever—I had some mods active, and became so powerful from a combination of perk effects (including ones that restored health) that I literally could not die even with the 50 health maximum from Glass Cannon, until I deliberately submerged myself in lava (and even then it took over 30 seconds).
Heh, yeah, I know what Paul means about it often feeling like it’s my fault when I die, and thus not being mad about it. I knew I shouldn’t have blown up that explosive barrel next to the toxic sludge pool while hovering above a pool of polymorphine, but I did it anyway, and the outcome was hilarious. Really excited to hear Shamus picked it up, can’t wait to hear some thoughts on it! (Y’know, if you feel like it.)
Forty hours in, zero wins. Made it down to Level 6 and made it laterally to… an infinite wall? I climbed for about five minutes and then met an enemy and got shot off it. (Crazy how many lateral levels there are with no easy way to get to them.)
Glass Cannon was amazing. I took it with just the starting spell and it was still mowing through tanks.
My biggest problem is probably the enemies being aimbots; if they shoot at you and you don’t move, you’ll take damage every time. Much worse when some enemies can fire from offscreen.
And one-pixel rocks that still block movement. Those are the worst.
The ability to know what you did wrong is a vastly underrated part of games. I love Towerfall Ascension for this, the timing is just perfect for Looney Tunes-style deaths where you can see the bomb arrow impact next to you with just enough time to say “oh no” as it explodes, with the knowledge that if you had your dash prepared at just that moment then you could have swept through and disarmed the bomb to send back at your opponent. I think it’s because you can see everything that happens but there’s so much going on that you only really understand the parts you’re paying attention to, so your mistakes are due to prioritization instead of lack of information. The moment you realize precisely how you’ll die, your short-term memory can catch you up on what lead to that point.
By comparison, as fun as I find Warframe, it’s always a mystery to me when something finally takes me down. At a late stage in the game you’re basically in that double-glass-cannon state you mentioned where some weird interaction of abilities and mods has made you invulnerable right up until you suddenly aren’t. A lot of people insist that the game should be harder, but I think what they really want is for skill to have an impact on outcomes.
Alternatively, Tales of Vesperia has the other problem – it’s clear that I’ve been taken down by a massive crowd of enemies stunlocking me out of the animations for fighting back/moving away/using healing items, but it’s mystifying precisely what I was supposed to do to avoid being put in that situation. This might be on my impatience, as your attacks lock you into such long animations that an enemy can dodge out of the way, wind-up, and attack in between your attack starting and being canceled by that enemy’s hit. There’s a button for guarding, but there’s a huge gap of empty space after each of your attacks where you won’t enter a guard (so you need to release the button and try again in hopes that you’re out of the invisible cooldown), and if you do successfully guard then you are still broken out of guarding by more than a couple of attacks. Having looked a little into this, serious play requires a lot of knowledge of animation canceling in addition to prediction. Fortunately all of these rules also apply to your enemies, so as long as you win initiative and are the one doing all the unfair stunlocking then you get to see a ton of cool moves with very little risk.
Come to think of it, I’ve basically described Dark Souls, except Tales of Vesperia is perfectly willing to let you muddle on through while playing ‘badly’.
After our long discussion of various Civilization games over the past few posts, it seems like that knowing what you did wrong is one of the harder challenges with virtually all of the games in the series, where you’re losing but usually not knowing what to do differently next time. I imagine it’s the same for virtually any game, 4X or not, where there are many different strategies to win and thus it’s hard for the game to give advice and feedback beyond the most general. That’s an issue to be sure, and I’m not sure how you crack it for games like that.
Your mention of Warframe reminded me of playing Guild Wars 2*, where I could be doing perfectly fine and then dying really quickly the next second. I never picked up the feedback of what behaviors to fix like I did with more traditional MMOs like LOTRO or WOW.
*All of the GW2 veterans can feel free to call me a noob.
Moving in this climate, Shamus? From what I’m currently hearing about America, I’d be scared to step outside in any part of the country. My part of Australia mostly has things under control, and I’m still worried. Still, I really do hope it works out for you.
I recently renewed my lease. But only for 6 months, in the hope that when we’ve seen the back of this thing, rental prices might have dropped. There’s been some discussion, but no consensus, about which direction the market will go.
In terrible EULA news, Ubisoft just updated theirs. I’ve heard that all user created content now belongs to them, that they can exploit at will. If there’s anything in the content the creator doesn’t own, like a licenced bit of music or whatever, that Ubi can get sued for, they can turn around and sue the creator in return. No matter how interesting some of their games sound, I hate that attitude and refuse to give them any money.
I remember when the Mad Max game got patched to add Deneuvo. I uninstalled it that day. Pity, because it was a decent game.
EULAs don’t actually transfer liability like that, but it’s much better to write such an agreement like you wished it could be, because if you go to court every provision of it will be read strictly against the author.
If a contract was negotiated, it will be interpreted as though the parties negotiated on the wording; if one party unilaterally decided what the terms were, it will be interpreted as such.
Fair enough. That was just a half-remembered paraphrase of a paraphrase. Either way, I got the idea it was now worse than what it had previously been. I can’t even remember who I was watching. But whatever the case, it certainly didn’t convince me to now sign up for Uplay.
However the US legal system is often based on who can afford the most lawyers, due to the many, many levels of appeal.
If Ubisoft steal your IP, you not only have to win in your local (county) court, but all the ones above it too.
The only safeguard against this is the fear of setting precedent, which tends to encourage out-of-court settlements.
That’s because the media is a bunch of Chicken Littles. Our town’s had 16 cases with no deaths.
Still, I think most places have mandatory two-week quarantines, so hopefully the move isn’t too far.
Specifically, the infection and death rates are wildly distorted by one or two places with deeply dysfunctional government. I can’t say more without risking involving politics, but a couple “locations” had policies that actively spread illness to the most vulnerable. It’s not simply gone otherwise, but also not destroying the country or anything.
Most of the cases in the US are in about 200 miles of NYC. Outside of that, the disease is pretty mild, but many of us are still in lockdowns just to make sure it stays that way.
The media is singing the Doom song. Pay about as much attention as you would to Gir (and if that makes no sense, go watch some Invader Zim instead of news for a bit, it’ll probably do your mental health some good).
I’m still in lockdown, but I’m currently in a personal care home (same rules as a nursing home, but not one), and I also live in a city/state that was hit hard because our governor didn’t lock the state down anywhere near as early as he should have. The state-wide lockdown’s over, though I have no idea when we get out. If I was free, I wouldn’t be out and about much, but that’s assuming that the event that put me in here (mom’s death and they all thought I was kidding about that mental breakdown) didn’t occur so I’d still be looking after an elderly person, plus it’s summer here now and really hot.
Actually right now would probably be best to move if you had to, people are still scared and most are still wearing masks and things. You’d probably want to aim for “not lockdown, allowed to move, rest areas open for long drives, but people scared enough to still take proper precautions”. Shamus, having no idea where you’re moving, just a heads-up, some states still have their rest stops closed, in case that’s any kind of factor.
Not to worry. I’m moving less than a mile. :)
It’s a MUCH nicer neighborhood, though.
I was checking the Steam Discussions a couple of days ago and I ran into this gem (bold emphasis mine):
The guy even copy/pasted this text and left it as a negative review of the game, which is basically like smacking your neighbor in the face because the mailman accidentally delivered your mail to their door. Actually no. This would be like smacking your neighbor in the face because the mailman delivered your mail to their door after you put the wrong address like a dumbass. All of this, mind you, after he had played the game for over 24 hours. Also, to add to this, he purchased the full version of the game with all the DLC.
People like these are the ones who sadly give the whole “entitled gamer” deal any credence. Now, if you look at the discussion you’ll notice that absolutely no one agrees with him, yet whenever someone likes to talk bad about gamers they pick people like him as examples, even though they’re the clear exception.
Yeah, it’s remarkable how many people seem to think that because they paid full price for something no one else should get it for free. One suggestion that comes up on the Paradox forums regularly is for Paradox to gradually discount DLC for some years until it eventually becomes free and part of the base game, and people always show up to demand that this not happen. As if their purchasing of something at an agreed upon price means the seller should never, or can never, choose to give it away for free later. Like, I’d probably be a bit annoyed if I paid full price for something and it then went deeply discounted or free the next day, but I wouldn’t the DLC I bought five years ago finally becoming free (if that were made clear beforehand)—then it becomes a competition between my patience and my thriftiness, which I would be an interesting way to satisfy people wherever they fall on that particular scale.
To put it another way, they chose to be early adopters, and have no right to blame people for their bad decisions in an industry that routinely demonstrates that even when the game is on the level early adoption is a bad play.
It really is a trade-off that exists in every single kind of purchase. It’s your choice. What do you want, the product or service now or do you want it cheaper? Yeah, sometimes you decide to pay up now and it gets cheaper a couple of days later. It happens. It’s inevitable unless you have inside information on sales or price drops. Yet for some reason some people get livid about it, as if they’ve been victims of a major injustice when it happens to them. It’s just bad luck. No one owes you anything. The fact that some retailers sometimes go out of their way to price match or give you the full benefit out of date doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it.
And getting upset when the discount isn’t even close to your purchase date is the height of pettiness. “What? I purchased this two years ago and now people are getting it for half the price? Or even free? This cannot possibly be legal!” Look at people getting ravingly mad when Valve decided to make Team Fortress 2 free to play. “How dare they? What does it matter if I got literally thousands of hours of entertainment out of this game? I feel conned! I can’t believe I wasted my money!”
And the worst part is that all of this stems from Valve’s insistence in benefitting the customers. They’ve been treated well for so long by them that they take it for granted, and as soon as a minor inconvenience looms in the horizon they’re up in arms about how unjustly they’re treated.
“The fact that some retailers sometimes go out of their way to price match or give you the full benefit out of date doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it.”
That commentator loved to throw around the term “Customer Service”. Getting a price match in those cases may be good customer service in the sense that they are “above and beyond” customer service. Great, but don’t feel entitled to it.
Was just reading a comment from Scott Meyer of Basic Instructions fame about his time at Walt Disney World and how the staff was empowered and encouraged to keep an eye out for a guest that could use special treatment and give them a “Magical Moment”, and yet you’d have guests who caught wind of this policy coming up to employees and demanding their own Magical Moment on the spot.
I bought all the CK2 DLC at 90% off or something, that’s basically free.
Free in the sense of “about $18”?
I can’t imagine doing that. In fact, in the past I’ve waited for… I think it was Mystik Belle? …to come off sale so more of my money went to the creator. You should not think of the price of a game as money you give the publisher/developer/… to get the game, but money you give them to support them and to reward them for doing something good.
And if it turns out they did bad (*cough* ME2 *cough*) then you know not to give them money in the future.
At the time of purchase, you decided that X purchase price was worth the value of the game that you were getting. It’s unfortunate that there was a sale later (on a rival platform!), but that doesn’t invalidate that you received good value for your money when you bought it.
Getting angry because something you bought went into sales the next day is stupid, indeed. The one thing I can see as something scummy, but I didn’t mind when happened to me, was when Ubisoft recently made a sale on old Assassin’s Creed games. Two weeks after the sale ended, they went free. So bait players interested to buy them for some money and then make it free when they’ve spend the sales price and nobody is left who would’ve ever spend a dime on it. I don’t really have a problem with this either, though this does feel deceptive, make the player think he’s seeing a good chance to save some money to get it when instead is making him spend more than they know he will in two weeks.
Steam do have a system for that: one of the valid refund reasons is “this game went on sale a few days after I bought it”. You can refund it and then rebuy it on the sale. It’s something I don’t plan to use, even if they accept it. I don’t feel it’s a valid reason.
EDIT: Actually, I think AC going free was actually one week after the sale ended, two after it started.
It’s still got the two-hour gametime limit. I tried it for Phantom Brave when it went half-price the next week, but I had ten hours on it and it was rejected.
Initial refund requests and rejections are automated. Escalate your ticket so actual people look at it instead.
Epic Games has sales? What for? I signed up for an account because my wife really wanted to play The Outer Worlds. That is still the only game we have paid for. My account currently has 14 games in it. They give things away for free so often it has literally set up the expectation that everything on their site will at some point be free, so why would I pay them for anything?
They also have essentially unlimited coupons for $10 off any game of $15 or more, to spite publishers who objected to their sale of “$10 off any game of $15 or more”.
Statistics. They usually only have one free game a week and their library is large and ever expanding. The chances of a specific thing you want going free is very low. Would you wait years to play a game you want to play right now ?
Re: slow updates on GOG
I asked the devs of Overland[1] why the GOG releases were always weeks behind Steam, and they basically said they uploaded the files, and it was out of their hands. Either they or I then pinged GOG, and it seemed to wake up whatever employee was on duty to re-verify the game that was uploaded, and it was then available for download. Thinking about it more, I think part of what’s going on is that GOG only has one copy of the game for download – like, you just upload all of the files, and then that’s the game on GOG. That’s my guess, based on how few games offer previous versions for download, or update-patchers, etc. So, given that there’s only one master copy of everything GOG has to re-certify the entire everything to make sure it doesn’t crash, etc; This is then even slower if you need a Linux release, since they probably have fewer employees that check non-Windows builds of games.
[1] BTW, this is a really cute game, although hard as nails, even though it’s turn-based. It also seems a bit unbalanced even after many patches, and definitely has snowball-itis, where if you do well early with the random generation, luck, skill, whatever, you keep doing well, and if you struggle early on you keep struggling until it’s game-over. It’s better with the latest patch, but I’ve still not gotten past zone five-ish out of…six?
Re: ring-zero anti-cheat
Yup, it’s League of Legends, plus other games by Riot Games. Here they explain that some cheaters use cracked copies of Windows to cheat, so their anti-cheat needs to run at that level to detect such cheat-programs. Given that they’ve got a robust player-reporting toolchain, and I saw referees in a video of a a tournament, this seems like it’s unecessary. Of course, I’m the guy running Linux, who doesn’t care about the hyper-competitive online-ranking world, so I’m not their target demographic. (Especially because I can only play at lunch on my work computer – they don’t have a Linux client.)
I mean, for one that’s some dedication to cheating, I guess that’s what happens once money are on the line or do they mean that even “casual cheaters” will go to such lengths?
So way, waaaay back in the day when CD recording hardware was not yet standard but was just becoming available our legislators, probably being pressured by the music industry, started working on this law that would basically have any device capable of recording CDs be physically sealed, you would file for recording and a government employee would come, unseal your writer, verify that you’ve only recorded what you’ve filed for and none of it infringes on copyright and then reseal the device. To clarify, this law never even went under vote and the initial proposition was clearly stemming from complete ignorance of the technology involved (for one the legislators probably assumed that CD writers would be large industrial machines used by companies to print huge number of discs at a time rather than they would replace the read only drives in pretty much every PC).
So this is a bit like that, except you have to house and feed the employee, give them the keys to your house and let them go through your unmentionables and hope that once he’s fired he’s not going to ever misplace or outright give your keys to anyone.
Shamus, there are programs that provide virtual backgrounds to streams without the need of green screens. For example, Intel Realsense, Personify ChromaCam, and TriDef SmartCam. I’m sure there are others too. I know that Zoom has an option to do it natively. No need to paint your wall if you don’t want to.
Depending on the quality these can still leave a bit of a fuzzy border, but for most people’s purposes they should be fine (and of course, for best results you can use both). For picture in picture face cam during a game stream from a person who doesn’t do streaming as their primary thing (the use I’d expect Shamus would want?), I see no need to paint the wall.
There are also apparently deployable green screens you can buy, like a wire oval that you just set up behind you. And I’ve also seen people do just fine with a green sheet hung on the wall, as long as you get it smoothed down with the right lighting. This is where the combo play comes in again, as you only need the bit where you head is to be chroma’d out perfectly, while the auto-crop software can just cut out the rest so any wrinkles aren’t noticed.
I don’t particularly care about the timeliness of patches on GOG. As long as they get released eventually, I’m cool with it. No, the thing that bothers me about GOG’s patch policy is that at some point they appear to have stopped providing patches for actively developed games for Linux. In the old days–by which I mean maybe two years ago–you could update your game by downloading and running a small patch file or script. Those days are gone. GOG is still updating Linux games, mind you, but the only way to get updates now is to re-download the entire game. I note that installers for even simple games can easily run to a gigabyte or more. I am not going to waste my time downloading an entire gigabyte for the sake of a few minor balance changes and bug fixes. For bigger games, it’s even worse. The Battletech installer, for example, is just shy of 14 GB. I am not doing that. I don’t care if there have been two, maybe three, major patches since I installed the game. It’s just not worth it. If I ever have to re-install the game for some reason, maybe I’ll download the new installer then. Or maybe I won’t, because I’ve still got the old installer saved on my backup drive.
Now I don’t know for certain that this is the case for every actively-developed game with a Linux version. Frankly, I don’t own that many games that are still in active development. I could just be unlucky for some reason. But I do know that whenever I get a notification from GOG that one of my games has updated and I jump to the game’s downloads page I don’t find any patches. There’s just a big, fat installer with the new version number on it. I don’t think I’m going to buy many actively developed games on GOG any more. I was thrilled when they started getting Paradox games but, given the frequency with which Paradox pushes patches and updates, I’ll almost certainly end up getting Crusader Kings 3 on Steam instead. I refuse to re-install that game three or four times per year for the next five years.
I think it’s up to the devs to provide patches like that, and GOG isn’t providing any tools that make it easy. Like theoretically, you could just have a script that checks checksums to find what files have changed, and then put those into a big list for the patcher to use, but devs already have enough work dealing with upstream bugs and playtesting for Linux. So they do the easy thing, which is a big file to reinstall the game completely.
Maybe GOG doesn’t provide developers with handy Linux patch tools. Nevertheless, Linux patches used to be commonplace. While most older patches have vanished, you can still find patches for some Linux games that are no longer being developed. What’s more, Windows patches are still available, even for new games. I get that developers’ effort-reward ratio is lower for Linux than for Windows, but it still seems more likely to me that GOG has changed rather than that developers have.
I hate game updates. I need to be able to pick an choose when updates happen or I become a Shamus-like rage monster. GOG updates is far *far* superior for me. Nothing infuriates me more than wanting to use software and a computer telling me I can’t because what the computer wants is more important. Doubly so when it is a game. If I want to spend 20mins playing a game, I want to game. An update is basically a 10min loading screen.
Then there is the destroy-the-keyboard kind of update. An update that changes the game for me. For example I remember a Battletech balance patch that changed the weapons. I was ~3 missions from the end of the game at that point. I had zero desire for balance to change at all. I had my mechs just like I liked them. I was making my endgame push. If I had to fiddle at that point because the rules of the universe changed, I would have simply deleted the game instead. Updates for me are confined exclusively to new games and new saves.
Thankfully I know how much updates bother me. So I went out of my way to prevent the game from ever knowing there was an update. It is giant pain in the ass to do this for a Steam game, but possible. (Manually turning off the LAN so Steam never sees the internet for as long as the game is played.) Less frequent updates that are easier to deal with is a feature for me. So GOG all the way.
Rage and anger usually are wormsigns for frustration. Frustration comes from a desire or goal being perceived as unreachable. Kinda like if you have AI that is unable way to its target, and bugging out.
That is why roguelikes with savescumming often do not feel as rage-inducing as “hardcore” roguelikes: They *do* offer a way to continue, and the player having that option makes all the difference, even if they ultimately do not take it: They are in control of their fate, so there is no frustration of a desire, and consequently, no rage.
This does also explain (since Shamus mentioned this in his Civ VI write-up – which I greatly enjoyed, by the way) why we tend to get “irrationally angry” when the PC foils us: With a human, we can negotiate, finagle, strongarm, bedazzle, cheat – we can find some way to deal with the problem (the goal/desire is to make the problem go away, naturally). But the computer does not accommodate. It either works, or it doesn’t – and if it doesn’t, chances are that a solution will take a lot of work.
This is why I never use ironman mode in XCOM, or really any other game that has it. If I run into a section of the game that was poorly-balanced, or the game just hits a brick wall of difficulty later on, I need the option to save-scum. Bonus points if the game just lets me adjust difficulty in an already-running play-through. Super ultra deluxe bonus points if they have actual cheats in the game for me to use.
Mythbusters did an episode on dripping water torture that demonstrated the effect immediately: the testing host could lay there with water dripping on her face for hours of her own volition, but when they went to phase two and put on the restraints it took only minutes before they had to take them off again (the episode of course had a very prominent “do not try this at home” warning). All it takes to turn a nuisance into literal torture is the removal of choice.
I got sick of running out of lives in TOME due to random bullshit deaths (and bullshit unlock requirements), so I looked up the save file location and started using manual backups- now I’m good enough that if I actually deign to play carefully I can win within the prescribed limit, and when I die because I screwed up I usually let it stand. Which should actually work for just about any game with local saves, though you might need to do more restarting to swap them back in.
From EA’s 2019 financial report:
“After generating strong financial results and robust stockholder returns from fiscal 2014 through fiscal 2018, we did not perform to our expectations during fiscal 2019…While we are disappointed with our fiscal 2019 results, we understand the challenges we face, and we will continue to focus on how we can apply the strengths of our Company to capitalize on our opportunities.”
EA is doing nice things because they were hit in the wallet. Their loot boxes are under threat from regulation, their latest IP, Anthem, isn’t doing so well, the latest Battlefront game holds the most downvoted comment of all time on Reddit, and it’s, uhh, optimistic to say that Mass Effect Andromeda 2 would sell well (by EA standards) if developed.
Some of the Command and Conquer games were given away for free back in 2010. Giving away parts of the source code for games you already gave away for free is one of the easiest ways to appeal to gamers, at low cost to oneself.
Source1 – https://s22.q4cdn.com/894350492/files/doc_financials/2019/Proxy-Statement-Annual-Report-Combined-Book-2019.pdf (Page1)
Source2 – https://www.cnet.com/news/get-3-classic-command-conquer-games-for-free/
On the other hand I know there’s a bunch of people starved for news about DA4. And sure, we can argue that EA is doing this to garner goodwill, and they gave away Sims 4 to sell the DLCs, and Origin had a regular giveaway of older games for a long time because they wouldn’t earn them much money and they wanted to get people to make an account. I mean all of this is true, at the same time all of those were, you know, beneficial to the players. Now, I totally believe that the real metrics of EA’s goodwill towards the customers should be judge at the next major release but they’re such a big entity that the CnC might be a project with people who are honestly invested in it.
My heart broke when I heard the rumors that they were turning DA4 into a live service game.
I’m honestly trying not to learn too much until there’s more concrete stuff, but I hang out (virtually) with some dedicated DA fans.
On the topic of Noita and physics simulation: so they developers are Finnish, and some of the sources of inspiration that they cite are older Finnish games, such as Liero. I know something about these, because as a kid in the 90s, I chanced upon one of the then ubiquitous shareware game download sites, that hosted exclusively Finnish titles. I became… kind of obsessed with it for some reason, and ended up playing almost everything they had.
Game development in Finland in the 90s was kind of doing it’s own unique thing, including the internally very popular “cave flyer” genre. Some of the were cave flyers were really big on the physics and particle simulation, and managed some pretty impressive stuff for the period. The one I remember as a favorite was “Wings”, which did the per-pixel fluid simulation way back in 96.
Wings got a sequel a few years later, and it ended up becoming *the* game in my college computer lab, complete with competition to create the most interesting new weapons in LUA. Here’s a screenshot from that one, illustrating some of the water dripping, almost exactly as it does in Noita: http://www.wings2.net/screenshots/screen3.png
First of all, congratulations Shamus on the new house! Finding a house in two days must be some kind of speedrunning record.
I, too, own Doom Eternal on Bethesda.net. I got a discount on Gamesplanet and I thought for the reduced price I’d deal with Bethesda’s launcher. Anyway, I let them install the update to Doom Eternal before I even knew that Denuvo was going to be a thing. However, real life got in the way before the update was finished and when I finally got back to my computer, I had heard about the anti-cheat malware (is it a fair assessment to call kernel access software malware?). In the meantime the update has finished but I haven’t launched the updated game yet.
The thing is: I still don’t have Denuvo installed on my system. It doesn’t show up in my installed programs. Now I’m wondering if Denuvo just doesn’t show up on my system (the internet claims it should – at least every article about getting rid of it assumes it shows up in your installed apps). Or maybe I need to launch the game to make the installation happen. Well, at least I have no reason to use Bethesda’s excuse for a game launcher until this is sorted out.
I’m also somehow looking forward to the Command & Conquer remasters. I own the originals and thanks to some crafty people I can get them running just fine on my system; even with better resolutions than the good old 640×480. I also don’t think the shinier graphics add anything to the game. Considering all this I really shouldn’t have any reason for wanting those remasters but somehow I kinda do. Must be nostalgia. Thanks, I hate it.
Re: new house
Congratulations!
Also about the office chair. It is indeed true that these move better on hard floors. But keep your floor protector! It is not made to protect the carpet, but it is actually made to protect the lacquer on wooden floors. If you do not use one you will end up with a lot of ugly scratches (and applying new lacquer is a nightmare). I have a floor protector now for the wooden floor in my rented house. As an added bonus, the chair moves better over the floor protector than it does over the floor.
These floor protectors should be very durable, but they are made to withstand pressure, not flexing. By using it on a carpet you will induce a lot of local flexing so I think that is the reason they do not last very long in your current situation. On a wooden floor it will probably last very long. If you ever have to use an office chair on carpet again, maybe replace the floor protector with a solid 2 cm MDF plate. I doubt that will break as quickly. (it will be butt-ugly, but it will be out of your line of sight anyway ;-).)