Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK)
Unsurprising that they find this, since that’s what their business is about.
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I basically skipped Legion back in the day, because of how ass the Legendary system was on launch, and never went back, so I never really did any of the raids.
I guess you mean getting knocked around by some orbs, which might instantly kill you because you fall off the platform? Stuff like that is basically the only thing that could be an issue.
From what I read in different comments, the final raid, Antorus, is supposed to have another boss, that could be a problem, Eonar.
Blizzard has actually changed one boss so far (Il’gynoth, where you have to use some blobs to blow up this big eye), although that was probably more because people deal too much damage and would regularly blow up the blobs on accident, the second they spawn, which was just annoying and extended the fight needlessly. Maybe they’ll do more changes, since you can clear these raids daily for the time of the event.
Still grinding World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. Less raiding this week, I’m only clearing each raid twice a day, instead of three times, but did a couple more Mythic+ dungeons to knock out achievements.
The next phase will start in a few days, along with “new” quests, but more importantly another raid to farm every day. At that point, I’ll probably only be running the raids on the highest difficulty, and skip all the others.
The Finals is rated Playable on Steam Deck and also uses Easy Anti Cheat, just like ARC Raiders.
The latest ProtonDB reports (~3h old) for ARC Raiders also say it works, but I don’t know if that’s for the playtest.
At this point, it would be weird if it doesn’t work on Linux/Steam Deck.
The Copilot part for the Game Bar is a Widget, that you can independently disable.
Even then, from what is written in the thread, it’s not like it actually does anything, unless you specifically use the Copilot feature for the Game Bar.
The only thing that might rub people the wrong way is that the widget is enabled by default.
The source is one single user on ResetEra, that doesn’t post any proof.
Another user refuted the claims and posted logs, that show what gets sent, which seemingly doesn’t include any Copilot data. The AI part only happens, when you actually ask a question to Copilot (duh). So the thread gets closed.
The article omits the second part of course, and everybody in this thread is just foaming at the mouth, because it’s Microsoft, so it has to be true.
True, we’ve seen the exact thing with WoW and Overwatch, after the teams formed Unions. Both games were immediately shut down.
It’s only a matter of time until the Diablo team forms a Union, which will of course also be the death knell for that franchise.
I’ve been grinding that World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. Monk is a lot more fun than Demon Hunter, so I’m glad I made the switch. I’ve done basically everything for now, most of the quests in all the zones, and I’m at the gear cap. For now, there are raids to clear daily, which I’ll do, and clear Mythic+ dungeons over and over for that “infinite” power, which I won’t do. In a few days the second phase will begin, with more quests, a raid and other things, so I’ll keep playing, but wind down afterward (until the next phase).
I finished the Forza Horizon 5: Rally Adventure DLC. It’s alright. The courses are more difficult than the base game, but the map is also so small, but still packed with courses, and you’re constantly driving through the same parts. Since you also need to do each race at least twice (one rally, one normal race) everything just kinda blends together.
Then World of Warcraft: Legion Remix has started. This is the second time they’ve done this mode, and the first time was some of the most fun I’ve had with the game ever. This time doesn’t hit as hard, but it’s still fun. I started out as a Demon Hunter, but found it kinda meh to play. So I’ve switched to my normal main class, a Monk, which is a lot more fun.
Finally started the Forza Horizon 5 DLC. First up, Rally Adventure. The DLC adds a new, small, but densely filled map (at least more densely than the base game). The new races also get a new game mode, a proper Rally mode (as you’d expect from the name). It’s just you alone on the track, trying to make it to the finish as fast as possible, while an NPC reads pacenotes to you.
As someone who doesn’t play normal rally racing games or watches real life ones, it’s fine. The game also asks you if you want to disable the visual racing line, which I did. That makes it a lot harder, since you can’t just immediately tell when you’re supposed to break, but with the rewind or just trying the race over and over again, it’s manageable. I also constantly switch cars, so I don’t get a consistent feel on how a specific car handles.
Then I also started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I wanted to get to this before all the GOTY-talk at the end of the year. I’m in Act 1, dunno how early, because I’m just running around, exploring everything, ignoring the main quest as much as possible. As you do in RPGs.
The game plays well, it’s pretty responsive, and hitting those parries feels good. The story is intriguing so far, but I haven’t seen a lot of it. Performance has also been fine for me, but I do have a pretty powerful PC.
A few annoying things are, every time you pick up an item on the ground a character has to comment on it, and there are not a lot of different voice lines, so that gets kinda annoying. Then certain parts of the game, like the cutscenes, are filled with pretty ugly post-processing effects. You can disable that stuff for normal gameplay, but then a cutscene plays that has just super heavy depth of field, chromatic aberration, weird artifacts around character outlines (that might be tied to the DOF), it’s weird. These are pretty minor complaints.
Also, in a fight it’s like Super Mario RPG, where you can hit specific keys at the correct time to deal extra damage or for the dodge/parry to avoid any damage. Hitting the offensive buttons is not much of a problem, but the game does some stylish camera angles and shakes a bit, which can make it difficult to time button presses for the defensive moves. There are options to disable these, but the camera shake option doesn’t seem to affect combat, and if you disable the camera movement option the battles look so much duller, with just a terrible, static angle. I think I just have to get used to it. It also doesn’t affect every enemy, some are definitely worse than others.
Still, I’m having fun, just gotta play more of the game.
I use Arch btw
Played it for a bit last year, shortly after the 1.0 release.
It’s probably a better game than Megabonk, but I think the Auto-Shooting part doesn’t really work in first-person, if you have to do all the aiming yourself anyway.
Still fun for a while.
I just used the Wanderers Crest the whole game, mainly for the normal downward pogo.
For some reason the game forces you into a specific crest a few times throughout, which I just find weird and unnecessary.
I think flying enemies are absolutely terrible to fight, especially early game.
Runbacks are the things everyone has already been talking about. There were two in the whole game that I thought were terrible, so it could have been worse.
However, for boss runbacks especially, because your corpse is in their room, it discourages leaving and coming back later. This can of course lead to just bashing your head against a difficult section and getting frustrated even more. In Hollow Knight your ghost at least spawned in front of the room so you didn’t have to commit to fighting the boss, even if you had to make it back there again.
I guess because of how much of the game is optional and non-linear, the devs couldn’t often really plan on when players will have which ability or upgrade, so some stuff felt kinda underutilized, for long stretches of the game.
Why are so many shard drops above places, where 75% of them will fall into unrecoverable spots? For rosaries, you at least get the magnet, just add the shards to that or something.
Finished my Hollow Knight: Silksong 100% playthrough. Great game with some weird, frustrating and outright bad segments, that make you question what the devs were smoking.
Then I also beat Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. I was pretty close to the end two weeks ago, before I took a break because of Silksong. Only one small boss and the final boss was left, but hunting for the rest of the secrets still took a while. It’s definitely better than Circle of the Moon, which I played before this, just because it doesn’t play like absolute cheeks. Graphics and Music are a major downgrade though.
Next up is the final Castlevania GBA game, Aria of Sorrow. I’ve played the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow on the NDS years ago, and I remember it being great, so I have high hopes for this one.
Then I started Megabonk. It’s Risk of Rain 2, but as an ASS game (Auto-Shooter Survivor game, like Vampire Survivors). Each run is 1-3 loops of a single map, and there are only two different maps in total. Characters, weapons and leveling are like VS, so your choice is for a starting weapon and each characters innate passive. Then you also earn money during a run to open chests for different items, like in RoR. While I think the game is solid, you have to like the gameplay enough to be fine with just not much variety in the visuals.
Been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong. I’ve seen credits twice, and am now in Act 3. Currently going through the world again, looking for stuff I missed.
While I do have a good time with the game, I can’t say I love it, because it has a few too many frustrating sections and maybe a few parts that were a bit too difficult for me to really enjoy.
Probably not worth it solo for $70/70€ right now. Gameplay is still supposed to be good, and while the story is supposed to be not as cringe as 3, you still get the outdated meme references and “fellow kids” stuff.
If you got some buddies to play coop with, maybe? Chatting on Discord, making fun of the game, usually makes everything a lot better.
Performance can be terrible though, but if you got a top-of-the-line PC you can possibly just brute-force it.
That’s been a thing for a while now. Basically all the big, modern games, that are also on current gen consoles want SSDs (some are just SSD recommended on minimum specs, but required for higher specs). BG3, Cyberpunk, many of the Playstation Studios games, some Xbox studios stuff, etc.
Hardware Unboxed recently did a video, if the drive speed matters (mainly about PCIe SSD speed) and tested with HDDs, SATA SSDs and NVME SDDs. They found that some games will give you a notice if they detect an HDD, but almost all will still run, even if the specs say an SSD is required. Most of the time, the initial load times will be loooooong with an HDD, but otherwise the games still work, although a few had graphical glitches because of slow asset streaming. Once you get to SATA SSDs, it starts to matter a lot less, and with an NVME you just want the biggest drive for your budget (like <10% difference for the initial load times, if at all, between PCIe 3.0 and 5.0).
As we get more and more games that use DirectStorage (or similar technologies), the number of games that truly require SSDs will most likely go up, until then HDDs should still be fine, as long as you’re ok with slow load times and maybe some more texture pop-in.
Started Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, after I finished Circle of the Moon last week. It looks and sounds worse than CotM, but it’s a lot better than that game, because it doesn’t play like ass.
Some other meh stuff is still there, like the game is kinda easy, and exploring the map is an absolute chore for the first half (maybe two thirds), until you finally get the means to open up all the blocked paths and get access to proper teleporters. Still better than double-tap to sprint though.
I haven’t finished the game yet, I might be near the end, but didn’t make it before Hollow Knight: Silksong, which I gotta play first.
Still grinding that World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. New phase started this week, along with the next raid. I’ve been playing so much the last couple of weeks, that it’s definitely getting stale, but I’ve been saying the same thing for a few weeks already, and I’m still playing, albeit a bit less.