I can’t say I share those feelings. While I think the 2D sections are just okay, they’re very short. I also think as far as pacing and traveling between fights, they did about all they could without distracting from the point of the game in my eyes.

Like yes you can make better platforming or exploration, but that’s not what the overall level is there for. It’s there for scale, setting, NPC conversations, etc. Add too much and you distract from the next fight, add too little and you might as well have a boss rush type game. Fine balance here and this is honestly the best I’ve ever seen a game like this pull off filler time.

That’s a whole conversation about filler in games but I think it’s harder than people realize to get this right.

From what I’ve read, the money goes to Microsoft. I got my copy via humble bundle subscription (a really good deal btw) so I got lucky. If it were me, I’d be looking for other ways to play it probably

That means a lot, thanks!

That’s totally fair and I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything here if you bounce off of the combat. Still, it’s worth a shot even if you don’t typically like rhythm games. I wasn’t super thrilled about the combat initially but it grew on me pretty quickly once I found that beat.

I really wanted to prove myself wrong because you sound like you know what you’re talking about. So I went and looked it up, turns out I was right to say what I said. Most of the major games out there report that more than half of their revenue comes from whales and those whales make up around 5% of their paying playerbase, sometimes more sometimes less. And in some games, that revenue is 60-70% of the total.

So that’s why there are 17,000 levels which that vast majority of players wont ever see. It’s because they’re chasing 5% or less of their audience.

But when it comes to games that are much smaller, I wasn’t really exaggerating to say that a small handful of players can outspend everyone else. When you have a player base in the hundreds and there’s like 20 people spending 50% or more in revenue for you, it’s going to affect your road map. In a larger game though, that percent will still mean tens of thousands of whale players.

And maybe your experience was different, maybe the games you worked on didn’t operate that way. But the industry absolutely does. It doesn’t mean you can ignore the 50% of revenue coming from regular players by the way, I’m just saying that the percent that spends enormously has almost the same weight in changing the games road map as the majority of players sometimes. Which is crazy to me.

Here’s the relevant Reddit post that was one of the sources I found.

Candy Crush Saga now has nearly 17,000 levels in it, so you’d be very wrong about that. Your average player might get into the hundreds, above average maybe thousands, but 17,000? They’re fishing for whales and not even that many of them.

This problem is way worse than people think and most mobile games on the store have the sole entire purpose of only hooking a small handful of whales. Then once they do, they mold entire games around just a few people. These companies that run apps like Candy Crush actively change the price of lives per player and watch the statistics of what they’re buying and when. It’s so sinister and the entire industry survives off of gaming addictions and whaling.

Mug moment

Minecraft believe it or not. Every few years I come back and install a mod pack and it’s like an entirely new game almost. Plus I love the factory and automation mods. The game just never seems to die.

I didn’t say they weren’t banning people, I said they aren’t really playing the cat and mouse game. VAC is a known system and it doesn’t actually affect cheating in any meaningful way since the game is free, steam accounts are easy to create, and time between VAC waves is extremely long.

Go play a few matches of CS2 on competitive without buying the premier and tell me that they’re doing anything at all that is effective. It’s gotten so bad that playing on non-premier games I will get a cheater in the lobby about 75% of the time. And premier isn’t immune but it’s about 20% of the time.

Most of what needs to be done is that their servers need to clean up and stop sending so much data to the client and also the servers need anti-cheat. There’s been some suggestions of this by people getting banned for moving their mouse to fast repeatedly, but that’s about all they’ve done of note.

If you think that the company who has almost entirely abandoned TF2 and left it to rot to cheaters is doing much with CS, I think that’d be a bad assumption.

I swear that Bethesda tries as hard as possible to mess up everything they do. There’s not much hope left for them so we just have to twiddle our thumbs and wait till they release Elder Scrolls 6, receive more awful reviews and outrage, and then get gobbled up entirely by Microsoft.

And yet they really don’t do anything about it, I have yet to see evidence that they engage in the cat and mouse game. A lot of cheaters have full inventories of skins and have been cheating for many years at this point with the same cheats

Look the perk system was bad but it’s wasn’t Fallout New Vegas bad. It was okay for a Fallout game but they probably should’ve done level ups by doing each 5 levels gives you 2 SPECIAL points to spend rather than spending normal points on the core stats.

Obsidian is off doing things and making games better than Fallout, they’d only come back because their studio isn’t extremely profitable and needs the cash.

Really though, please just go buy their games and play them. Outer Worlds got slated as pretty average but I’m still really excited to play that and Outer Worlds 2.

This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.

So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.

And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.

Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.

Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.

Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.

Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.

What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.

Okay so in plain terms (from what I can tell) they’re arguing that Spotify isn’t paying them enough because they have product A and product B. A bundle of A and B has their prices raised but only costs a dollar more than product A with its costs raised. So they’re arguing that they deserve a larger part of product A since B clearly isn’t adding much value to their platform.

Then additionally they claim that by offering product B as a standalone subscription, the price they’re setting for product B only serves to allow Spotify to pay them less for A in those bundles.

This makes sense because it’s a good way to reduce the money paid to the music side of the business by inserting new things into their services and then claiming that the new rate increases are due to that new service (that they don’t have to pay out as much to audio book companies for).

Yeah I think that if the tonics actually meant a lot more to the gameplay and the puzzles were a bit better designed, that mechanic would’ve made the game shine. If they did that and spent some more time tinkering with the levels, this game couldve been something much better.

There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe

Yeah I can’t blame you. I’d say that most of the levels aren’t worth experiencing but if you buy it just to try and beat the main boss level, that’s an okay time in my opinion.

Well, they did think of this. George Washington himself wrote about being weary of factions becoming too strong so that exactly this could happen. Madison also wrote about it and so did Jefferson. He actually suggested that this is the entire reason the judiciary needed to not be factionalized.

I think ultimately their interpretation boils down to that the mechanics needed to take over should have the bar as high as possible for the time. And then as time went on, these protections were eroded. The democracy has in fact been able to reign in really bad presidents before and quiet down large factions. So relying on good will and good duty is a recent thing.

Things have only gone off the rails entirely in the last 50 or so years. But I’d argue that George Bush did a ton to result in this. Keep in mind, executive orders were not meant to be used this way. They’re currently being abused to hell and that’s a loophole the same way that pardoning yourself as president is a loophole.

These loopholes are intentional because it’s sort’ve a “if you can’t keep these powers in check as a populace, it’s your fault” type of mechanism.