The Miscellaneous PC & vidya Games Thread

[Josquius]

I tried to play elite dangerous again.
Tutorial... A bit wonky and arcadey, not like space travel at all, but maybe I'll get used to it...
Then into the main game. I have a quest right away to go to a station in a nearby system. I do and... Err.... It doesn't complete.
It seems I have to take any quest from one granter? Maybe?.... I take two quests. One of them is asteroid mining. I find a resource extraction point and.... Yeah... No clue of what to do and trial and error fails. My laser does nothing to the asteroid.
This game really does seem to be the MMO shit I remember and a sad legacy for frontier. I fear we will never see a true successor.

Other issues are the ridiculous system of accessing menus as if they're screens in your cockpit, the mad controls (why the hell isn't M galaxy map?), the unskippably long docking scenes, the unintuitive galaxy map...

Yeah. This game just angers me.

[Tamas]

It's not THAT bad.

Think of it as American Truck Simulator in space. The flying and docking etc is great ambience, you can set yourself objectives like I used to choose a faction I'd try and help gain influence in a system. Once you kitted out an explorer ship exploring can be really cool.

[Jacob]

RPS article about the upcoming Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader RPG currently under development at Owlcat (Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous):

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/warhammer-40000-rogue-trader-is-warhammer-mass-effect-and-you-can-own-planets

Sounds like it could be pretty good.

[Syt]

Steam is 20 and looks back at the past two decades:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steam20?snr=1_4_4__118

I like the chosen memes/graphical references at the header of each year.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

It would be nice if they celebrated with announcing HL3, but yeah... that's not going to happen

[Josquius]

I remember when steam was new. I hated it and resisted it until I had no choice.
Hence my steam username is an email address I no longer have.

[Syt]

Huge upheaval in the games dev world, for a summary see here: https://www.pcgamer.com/why-every-game-developer-is-mad-right-now-explained/

In short, Unity have decided to change their pricing model (their CEO said a while ago that any developer not monetizing their games was *checks notes* "a fucking idiot."

Starting Jan 1st, 2024, if you reach certain thresholds of revenue and/or installations, you will need to pay $0.20 to Unity per installation.

Oh, and this will apply to all existing Unity users. If you released your Unity game 10 years ago, you also fall under it (Unity say they will count revenue starting 1st Jan 24, but previous sales will be counted as installs - so if you sold the amount of copies that put you over the threshold in the past 7 or so years, any new install will cost you).

The response, especially from indie developers was ... not enthusiastic to put it VERY mildly.

When asked to clarify what "number of installs" meant, Unity was putting out confused signals. At first they said that yes, every install counts, including early access, demos, free game giveaways, or if existing users uninstall and re-install the game.

Then they said on Twitter that no, re-installs etc. would not be counted.

Only to then clarify that of course re-installs would be counted, but games on Gamepass shouldn't worry, they'd bill Microsoft directly, and there'd be "a solution"(TM) for e.g. charity bundles.

To then finally loop back again with this statement:



Which someone summed up as:



Obviously, even if they walked the decision back 100% now, trust among developers is shattered in how it was announced, how they didn't seem to even know what they meant by "installs", and that they apply it to everyone retroactively.







I thought this number from the article was interesting. Goes to show how big mobile gaming has become.

[Syt]

I also like the "90% of our customers won't be affected" stat in the Unity communique. I assume they include all hobbyists who installed it once to play around with it in that number.

[Josquius]

Sounds annoying but reasonable to begin with but then yes. The reinstalls stuff is crap and then everything after that... Wtf.
First I've heard of this, I don't use twitter, and blimey.

[Syt]

I'm not on twitter, either; saw it on Reddit and PC Gamer.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Former EA executieve eh

[Syt]

Saw an article that American Truck Simulator has announced Arkansas as a future expansion. Seems they're making decent progress.

From Wiki:


Green = released
Yellow = in development (seems order is Kansas => Nebraska => Arkansas)
Red: TBD

[Josquius]

Curious they're expanding squarely into shit states but haven't done many of the more interesting ones on the east coast. I guess theyre just that committed to having everything tied together?
But even following that surely louisiana would be far more interesting and add some variety.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

at least they're fair: in that game all country is drivethrough country

[Syt]

Since RPGs are back on vogue for now, there's been a remake of Wizardry (the very first one) coming out recently:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/