not surprised, that one turned up on prime like two months after I bought it
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Itâs really frustrating to me that PC OEMs are so disinterested in the low end. You had a half-assed attempt at Steam Machines (including some from e.g. Dell that just plain had Windows) but nothing serious since ~2015 when, ironically, CPUs just fucken stalled out on perf. I have a friend Iâm cobbling a PC together for right now and she is straight up going to have a circa 2011 CPU paired with a used 1070 from a guy who retired from the BTC mines.
Itâs a failure of the prebuilt market that the cheapest way to get a PC competitive with consoles on price is to hit up craigslist for disused workstations and throw a âbudgetâ graphics card in.
I donât think this is necessarily a failure of OEMs as opposed to just, the direction that computer hardware has taken (the then-lowish end was a lot more compelling in like 2008-2010 due to the CPU and the GPU market of the day), nor that a PS4 is even now anywhere close to strictly worse than a PC (a lot of games get bad PC ports, a console only costs $200 and never has anything go especially wrong with it), and Iâd say thatâs actually significantly improved from last generation.
I am genuinely curious what Sony and Microsoft think they can do to motivate the next generation though because there really isnât much there. Microsoft is I think straight up turning the Xbox into a bespoke cheap PC and vice versa which is a sensible enough move, but Iâm not sure where that leaves Sony, because their 2020 console is going to deliver 2016 CPU/GPU performance and that will be that.
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Did you see the stuff about the Microsoft store seemingly downloading the same packages as the Xbox version for State of Decay? The speculation is that theyâre moving to making Xbox binaries run on Win10. Not ideal but if it gets us the improbably good emulators and fucken Halo (finally (jesus)) Iâm down.
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Itâs the opposite direction: Universal Windows Platform apps can run on Xbox basically unmodified because they are both effectively just Windows 10 under the hood
Yes, but also it seems like they are working towards the opposite:
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Literally just Son of Games for Windows Live. Who knows how many times theyâll need to try this shit before it actually takes off.
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Halo tho. It makes no sense for them to very publicly (expensively?) retool the big olâ Halo anthology unless theyâre using it as some kind of beachhead product.
I am excited about it being accessible far and wide like the original PC version/demo of Halo CE.
The 360 emulator seemed like a weird flex until I saw copies of Skate 3 and New Vegas in bluray cases at Target.
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I can not get over the mess that is this game
Every day thereâs something new
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the default level 1 abilities and weapons in anthem are actually stronger to use throughout the entire game (thereby making loot meaningless)
this is actually really interesting from a game design psychology perspective,
just making the numbers bigger made the players feel like they were making progress on a curve until they noticed this
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sounds like a feature not a bug
make all loot meaningless
no more loot
10 Likes
I know exactly how they screwed up between damage increases and level scaling: you give lower-level characters a % boost to soften the straight stat detriment theyâre at, but if you later change your numbers on the item itself, the level scaling can easily overwhelm the stat gain. Say you have items getting 5% stronger per level and you set the level scaling to be 3% boost per level under; if you decide later items should only get 2.5% stronger, you tripped it and now this happens. Itâs tricky because the actual formulas are more like 10 different step-growth formulas applied across 80 levels or so and the numbers compound rapidly from deceptively slow bases.
Another issue they should have put safeguards around: item level vs character level. If you get sloppy mixing level scaling checks between item level and character level you can cause this as well.
WoW had this problem for a patch at one point and I had to build some tables to flash a big angry red so I didnât trip the line, too.
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this rules
I feel bad for poor bioware who everyone just wants to keep making fan expo knockoff joss whedon elf aliens and for some reason are doing this instead but I love every minute of it
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PS4 era bioware is a lot like PS2 era squaresoft, like âwe absolutely forgot how to do the thing that everyone liked us for, but we will come up with the strangest ways to make up for thatâ
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Well, Square hasnât found their way out of that bag yet, so
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Itâs just great because I never even liked the thing Bioware was supposedly good at, so this just makes it funnier.
More like die-oware amirite
Remember, they wanted this thing to be known as âthe bob dylan of video gamesâ
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I mean, the ideal bioware game loop is like âI have to go grind out some alien sputum so I can resolve a quest about a queer couple who are having trouble conceiving in the Shadow Realm.â it has an audience.
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I just always found their stories very boring. And their combat engines tolerable at best. the ME games just made me wish someone else had made the combat.
Oh, and in the case of Jade Empire, ridiculously racist. Like holy shit how they havenât been called out more for that amazes me.
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