Fenixp

Pausing like a maniac is the whole point of real-time with pause. It's designed to leverage advantages of turn-based combat (time to analyze situations, plan ahead, make proper moves, worry about positioning) with advantages real-time combat (immediate reactivity, inherently chaotic nature and unpredictability, need to improvise). 'Sides, build your parties properly and you won't ever really have to particularly worry about engagement, especially with the latest patch.

Fair enough - "getting more cash" just sounds a bit more reasonable to me than "people whined about it a lot". People always whine about stuff. Even in KS based around functional demo running on Unity, people are going to whine a lot.

Bah, Unity works perfectly well on consoles, NightDive just smelt potential for more cash if they get a publisher and ... failed. Not that they'd not fail if they delivered this reimagining instead of the promised remake.

You mean approximation and translation of reality into inherently unrealistic media by creators will inevitably be different from approximation and translation of reality you would personally expect from inherently unrealistic media? Well that is one shocking realization.

Anyway, Ubisoft... Alters the past in order for it to be politically correct: https://twitter.com/timsoret/status/966394424782655488/photo/1 Y'know, paired with the outrage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance having no black people and me just finishing 1984 for the first time (I know, finally) I kinda realized just how much truth was there to the "1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual" quote.

Neither creators nor distributors owe you anything, therefore, you can't demand any additional services of them. However, with software, you're paying for the license to use it, not for the media. You could easily think of the discs containing the software as a freebie you got along with your license for ease of use. Software companies, including gaming companies, have sold software in form of licenses for ages now - in order to gain higher degree of control over their end product. And as long as the creators themselves treat their creations in this way, I see no reason to treat them differently. You're entirely correct, owning a disk-based version of Planescape Torment only entitles you to then getting the same version of Planescape: Torment you've paid for in the first place - neither Steam, nor GOG, nor Enhanced Edition. I can't speak for Pink Floyd as music licensing works a bit differently to software licensing.

Getting 'yourself in a position', in my understanding of the phrase (and my understanding may be icorrect), means that you do an action in spite of realizing that you'll 'get yourself in a position' of some description. What I'm trying to explain is that I'm hardly 'getting myself in a position' when I respect the rules laid out for me and expect developer to do the same. So no, I'm not ignoring anything. That's going completely off the rails of the conversation tho. You mean you don't store your proofs of purchase more securely than videogames? Czech laws at any rate, however I'm pretty sure something of the sort is rooted in the European law as well. All right, to be more precise - I'd only do this to bypass an offline disc check, I of course tend to be more careful with online registered serial numbers. Nonetheless, the worst I expect is for the check to go "Yeah, that's not a valid serial code."

Not the point. It's perfectly legal to use an incorrect/different serial number to access software you have purchased and it's completely illegal to send poorly encrypted personal information over the internet without my consent. It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable for me to assume that no personal information will be sent when I use a different serial number. I do enjoy your insistence on ignoring the 'software bug' point tho - if you're perfectly fine with software installing unsolicited spyware on your computer and trust software developers to be infallible, well, that's on you. Receipts were enough of a proof of ownership for court of law during my divorce, I'm pretty sure their word outweighs that of 'Others'. It shouldn't, as in - when you lose a disc with software, you should not be entitled to a free copy sent to you on distributor's expense. However, if you have purchased license to use the software and lose the disc it's on, burrowing your friend's disc and copying it should absolutely be legal and moral, considering you do have the software license - as long as you have proof of purchase in your hands of course.

Do read Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies if you haven't. Which part of 'software bug' is 'putting yourself into that position'? The installer extracts a piece of active spyware on your computer and only deletes it in case of passing an arbitrarily set-up check, that's actually pretty easy to screw up. In fact, which part of 'Operating software I have purchased within confines of the law' should reasonably make me assume that my personal data will be sent over the internet? Receipts are a thing that exists.

I didn't play a pirated game in years now (Thanks to Steam/Origin and automatic refunds), but I'm using the first serial key I manage to google for a whole bunch of games and other software that I legally own - simply because it's often faster than finding box/manual/whatever. So yes, it's a smart idea until poorly encrypted personal information of a paying consumer gets sent over the internet, due to losing a serial, trying to save time or simply a software bug.

Considering interest of the KS campaign, I'd say 'yes'. More importantly tho, the original SS was a much more focused and tightly designed game than the second one - however, it was released like 4 years ahead of the time I'd wage it'd be more successful, and it had a really weird control scheme combined with some old-school design sensibilities that didn't really fit what it tried to achieve. Long story short: Design of the original System Shock would have been actively harmed by implementing RPG elements as they were seen in SS2. I'd even argue second game suffered by their half-arsed implementation itself, but it made up for that by a ton of other aspects.

Dunno man, on one hand, whenever I donated money for a KS project, I considered it flushed down the toilet and I never donated more than I was willing to flush down said toilet - I feel that's the only healthy way to support things on KS as nobody can ever guarantee you that the project you've donated will succeed. On the other hand, KS brought us some truly amazing stuff that would not be possible without it.

System Shock reboot put on hiatus. Apparently, feature creep is what killed the current version, but Night Dive does want to continue development. Yeah, that's what you get when you start promising stuff like fully-fleshed out RPG elements as a stretch goal for a game that never needed them in the first place.

I'd actually love to do that too, but I need a 'pause' button in my games to be able to put them down and pick them up again. Sad thing is that Dark Souls already came up with a system which should be a golden standard in games like these ('exit' basically acts as a 'save and exit' button, and the created save then gets deleted when you resume playing) - when you even have hard saves in your game implemented, albeit hidden behind a weird mechanic, implementing it should be rather trivial. So... I've no idea why next to nobody does.

I still wish all developers realized what From Software did and implemented games restoring their state when you quit/come back. Make your hard saves work however you want, but allow me to put the game down and come back to it whenever I want without losing progress

It's a Dark Souls thing (perhaps even Demon Souls, but I don't have a console so...) The game tries to make it clear that nothing is really sane and functional anymore in the word, I think.

Now that I got Dark Souls 3 in Humble Monthly, I can finally give it a whirl. It's ... A really good fun, actually. Seems to have perfected the formula from DS.

There's both context-sensitive leaning in games like Wolfenstein: The New Order or Far Cry 3 and leaning activated via button combination like in Dishonored - with added benefit of having analogue controls, so you can manipulate exactly how much do you lean. It's all about smart design as opposed to brute force design. In the past, when FPS games on consoles were starting off and controls were absolutely abysmal and unintuitive in them I'd agree with you. At this point tho, FPS control schemes on a pad matured quite nicely and there's nothing you can't do that old games wouln't have, aside from weapon shortcuts. (yes, including multiple ammo types/weapon modes, 10+ different weapons, inventory with useable items - see Rage or Doom 2016) It's true, but also rather irrelevant - putting aside the fact pads have analogue elements like pressure-sensitive triggers / analogue sticks so it's not like they'd be strictly inferior, being objectively worse at playing a SP game doesn't really matter a whole lot, challenge is still relative to the game in question and control method used. 'sides, when asked whether I want to aim better or have healthier wrists, well... Not a difficult question to answer, really. Of course, competitive MP is a whole different matter. As for inventory management, yeah, you're right. I still think good filters and sorting is more important than input method, but using a mouse for such UIs is more intuitive and unless you want to design two different inventory UIs, they'll be reduced to work with directional input as opposed to full mouse control.

Try playing a videogame on a device designed for inefficient typewriting. ... Oh, wait. Seriously tho, unless the game you're developing is highly specialized, when you need more than 14 buttons and 2 analogue sticks for anything other than shortcut keys you should rethink your design. That happens to be further reinforced by the fact that I have managed to bind controls of majority of old PC games to a pad and, while some of them were a bit clunky, most were perfectly playable. A well designed game just doesn't tend to need all that many control keys to be played.

I do love toast.

Portability and choice I'd say, I'm just not entirely sure how digestible the walls of text will be. Still, that's actually really cool as I'm bound to get Switch one of these days.

Wrapped up my Endless Space 2 game (in the end, I have peacefully betrayed everybody, forced them into peace and got a wonder victory. Oh, the wonder!) Now I'm in the process of wrapping up my second playthrough of Prey. The level design and the mechanical interactions still leave me a bit speechless.

Oh yes, there actually is a standout Amplitude trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBo-4f3b90o All right, carry on