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” ;)
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.
Reminds me of a recent xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3201
The quote is that it can download an application though
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.
IIRC people were testing cybertrucks for some auto-closing functionality, and if they encountered resistance, they would back off… Then try harder, slicing through hotdogs
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.
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.
Hell, I’ll deadass reheat my food mid-meal if it starts going cold, so I can enjoy the last bits just as much.
Ambiguous, yes; very ambiguous, though, sounds like you’re preemptively dodging any blame for misreading :P
Right, but that requires somebody to find and document exploitable firmware revisions, create and distribute hardware/software to exploit them, develop the aftermarket software/hardware, and all that potentially separately for each car model. And then that just becomes a war with the manufacturers, who might try to update their firmware more aggressively, lock things down more, and threaten/sue people working on such things.
I’m just gonna chime in to point out those are both realtime combat focused games, requiring reflex and quick thinking, which is a notable departure from roguelike. On the other hand, Slay the Spire is all about careful planning, making decisions one step at a time, taking calculated risks. There’s no turn time limit, no time-based combos or bonuses, or time-gated doors that give you extra items if you go fast enough.
Oh, and also meta-progression. Hades and Dead Cells are both built with a central system of grinding out unlocks and upgrades - in slay the spire, the only meta-progression I know is having to beat the game with each character to unlock the next, and having to complete a few runs with each character to unlock all cards… And then the real progression, where you can continue beating the game with increasing difficulty levels to unlock the next.
Ultimately, this might not matter for you, and even if it does, a slow strategic deckbuilder might still not be for you, and that’s completely fine.
Blaming AI for burning the planet is like blaming guns for killing children in schools, it’s people we should be banning!
modding support
As far as I know, terraria only supports resource packs, changing textures, sounds, text, that kinda stuff, right? tModLoader is a community project made by fans, and the game devs’ contributions to that are in the domain of being receptive, supporting it being on steam, and potentially answering questions or making small changes to facilitate mods.
But on the topic of changes, can’t forget how they added new content and put it behind a new difficulty, and then ended up doing that again. And then they added a special seed that has new content that bumps up the difficulty another level.
One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.
There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)
I feel like that’s something Kirby already does tbh