Piracy is always an option.

 

Eh. There's definitely legitimate issues with the Epic store. It's objectively inferior to Steam, in pretty much every way, and forcing players on it is obnoxious. And that's without the also legitimate worries of Tencent's involvement and the various shenanigans they get up to.

That said, the general reaction is a little overblown, yes.

 

I’m okay with competition and breaking up monopolies but forcing it that way when your actual service is legitimately of lesser quality is just a poor move.

 

If you buy a car and it doesn't work on day one, do you just shrug and wait until it does? Yes yes, there's a huge difference between a car and software, but handwaving the industry practice of "ship it now, fix it later" only damages the industry. This is how you get Battlefront, No Man's Sky, Mass Effect Andromeda, Destiny and Anthem.

What I miss are the days of buying a game, running the installer, and then double clicking on the icon to launch the game, without launchers and clients and all of that shit. I still remember when Dragon Age 2 originally released like that, before Origin launched a few months later that same year. Btw Origin's auto-patch is what killed Nightmare difficulty in DA2, because with Origin you couldn't unpatch to pre-1.03 anymore, so fuck Origin.

 

I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to say, as Steam doesn't really do exclusivity deals (beyond their effective monopoly, at any rate).

The reason Epic Store exists is because they've seen the amount of money Valve makes being the defacto PC gaming store and want a cut of it, and so they launched their store. In order to make it competitive for developers, they offer an 88/12 revenue split (meaning the developer gets 88% of the profit) with the 5% Unreal license fee (if applicable) being included as part of Epic's 12% cut, versus Steam's 70/30 revenue split that, for games made in Unreal, also requires the developers to pay 5% of that 70% to Epic. And then for customers, they make it competitive by securing exclusivity deals so that Epic is the only source for games like Metro Exodus.

The problem, and what all the furor is about, is that Epic's store is massively behind Steam in terms of features. For example, EGS doesn't even have a "shopping cart"; every time you go to buy a game, you have to buy each game individually before going to find the next one to buy, which can be a pain in the dick if you're trying to buy a bunch of DLC packs (I've also heard unsubstantiated reports of people being banned for making purchases too quickly and the system flagging their account as malicious). Epic Store just isn't anywhere near as convenient or functional as Steam, so when people see games they want to play locked behind an exclusivity contract and forcing them to use yet another nonsense middleware launcher platform that's objectively worse than the one they already had, they get annoyed.

TL;DR - Epic offers 88/12 split for publishers, so it's super attractive to them, but Epic Store is a massive dumpster fire from a usability and feature perspective, so customers aren't super happy about exclusivity deals.

 

https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2019/06/12/i-did-something-terrible-in-watch-dogs-legion

 

Avengers is ruined now

 

I get moving away from objectification and sexualization, but making the femme fatale look like a 35 year old soccer mom just goes too far in the other direction.

 

I mean, moving away how? Unless having ScaJo's face counts as sexualisation?

Never mind. Fair.

 

I thought about posting this in the Fallen Order thread, but it's relevant to games in general. That said, EA said "no lootboxes" in Fallen Order, but they said nothing about there being no "surprise mechanics".

 

Jim has the right of it again

 

Ugh...well...if I had the pc for it I'd just yo-ho matey the Fallen Order, but don't think my pc can run it. So...maybe I’ll play a friends copy if they buy it but not giving ea a cent

 

https://gamedaily.biz/article/969/exclusive-a-candid-conversation-with-eas-andrew-wilson-at-e3-2019

Interview with EA CEO, Andrew Wilson. He's a smart executuve, and the personification of all that is evil in the games industry.

A choice quote that particularly drew my attention because I didn't think even Wilson could be more of a disconnected-from-reality douchenozzle:

I'm not giving this guy even an inch of charitable interpretation, but even if I did, it sounds as though he's blaming the game's failure on player expectations. Not the hype train, no. The expectation that BW fans would get a game from BW that has what they loved about BW games instead of a BW-approved wannabe Destiny. And he namedropped Destiny, so all the memes about Anthem=wannabe Destiny were goddamn prophetic.

Players: we want a good game

Wilson: now you've ruined it

 

Endless Legend - the 4x game Civ 6 wishes it was? It’s a civ clone, certainly, though a bit more in depth (but not enough to be intimidating). It actually feels a bit like a combination of Civ 6 and Beyond Earth, though the good parts of both. On sale on steam for $10 right now.


I hadn’t heard of this game before seeing it in the summer steam sale. It’s a 5 year old game too, which is strange, because I have played other games by this company, namely Endless Space 1 & 2, which are sorta 2d versions of Elite Dangerous. Quite fun if you’re into that sort of space simulation type of thing (which I am).


Anyways, first impressions are important, and right off the bat, the game is quite pretty, even for being 5 years old. It’s got a very nice color palette that makes everything pop. Nice UI, though some of the buttons are a bit small (though I didn't see if you could scale it up). Screen can get a bit busy at times with the actual hextiles and whether or not you have resources visible, and it can be a bit hard to see cities sometimes.


From the start, it immediately looks like a Civ game. You start with a settler on a hextile map, and the tutorial slowly goes through the different functions. You’re city has control of the adjacent tiles, and you get to control where your workers go (though worker cap isn't based on individual tiles, they go on their own meter). Uses production for buildings, uses for to grow pop, etc. First difference I noticed was that Research is empire wide, meaning all cities produce research points which you use to research (sort of like Stellaris and Unity, I would say). That means you don’t have individual city build ques tied up to research. You need 9 techs to unlock the next era. You expand your cities using burroughs to claim more hextiles, though each city controls a premade region and I don't think you can change the borders on those.


Gold is renamed Dust for lore reasons I guess, though it seems to function as you’d expect, as you can spend it to instantly finish a production.


There are ruins in the world, just like civ. Lots of different rewards it seems like. Dust is the most common, rare resources occasionally, but sometimes there are quests which can give you all sorts of shit, from hero equipment to special tech. You can automate units to explore and uncover them (and likely get ganked in the process)


There are neutral minor cities as well, and some of them have multiple cities. You can do a pacifying quest though, which will make them neutral and send you some workers as a thanks, or you can attack them directly and force the issue. You can assimilate them into your empire as well, getting some bonuses and the option to create special units.


First major divergence from civ is direct combat control. When you battle, it goes into a subscreen where you can individually control the units in an army. You use the overworld terrain and such to bottleneck enemies. It’s interesting. You can even design your own units and upgrade them with different items. Oh, and theres hero units that level up and stuff. Not sure if I actually like the battle system yet. AI is kinda janky it feels like, and armor and weapon level can lopside a battle pretty quickly. It uses an initiative system as well, so you can get all your archers to take a unit or two out before the battle really even begins.


There’s also a seasonal system. The game doesn’t follow the normal pre-civ to modern era kinda stuff, as it is a sci-fi game with goblins and hydras and elementals and spaceships. Each turn is like a day or a week, not exactly sure, but there is summer and winter, which effects tile production.


All in all, a really good game. Better than civ 6, not sure about comparing it to civ 5 though. I'd need more hours to make a comparison.

 

You are correct. Think of them like continents in Civ6. Made when the map is generated along "natural" cutoff lines. Sometimes it works well and you get one region separated from another by a cliff, a river or the like. Other times it it cuts across the terrain with little regard to natural features. Because you can't change the regions borders building a city next to it is usually a bad idea.

Also, each one should have at least one and up to three minor villages. If you do the quest for one, all in the region become pacified.

 

Switch Lite was announced yesterday. Price is $200 (compared to the original's $300). List of things that have changed:

• Handheld mode only
• 3.6'' high instead of 4'', 8.2'' long instead of 9.4''
• Slightly better battery life(?)
• No difference in game compability.

Note of caution on that last one: I've heard that sometimes performance can suffer from not docking the Switch to the point of being unplayable, but since I don't have a Switch myself I honestly don't know enough to say one way or another.

 

I play almost solely handheld and haven't encountered anything I'd call unplayable. Most of my library is first party titles or eshop downloads, though, so I may just not have the affected titles.

There is absolutely no need for me to buy a Switch Lite, but I want one anyway.

 

What's the game library like for switch? I don't have one yet but was considering it for Fire Emblem; however buying a system just for one game is dumb. What's the rest of the games look like?

 

Honestly, I feel like the Switch is for people who are already fans of all of Nintendo's franchises, because the library is mostly just latest installments. That being said, many people have bought the switch just for one game. Could be BOTW, Smash, Odyssey, even Monster Hunter. I've owned my switch for 1.5 years and honestly only own 2 games for it - BOTW (which is overrated) and Super Mario Maker 2 (which just came out). The next one will be Metroid Prime 4, though that's probably a 2021 release. Maybe I'll get something like Bloodstained, idk. It's possible to get older games on it, like Skyrim (and soon Witcher 3), but that's not really a reason to get one.