Fenixp

Well you did give me a mental image of Devil of Caroc walking on a pair of axes, so not all is lost.

Yeah I get the joke, but can't find the typo. According to Merriam-Webster that I linked, that's the correct spelling for plural of axis.

Huh?

This is good. The world would be a nicer place if we all just spent time truckin' instead of shooting people in the streets (that's what cool kids do today, right?)

That's not a lot of money, actually. To my knowledge, the original Fallout cost about 3 million, and the original Baldur's Gate somewhere between 4-5 million. Considering inflation, 4 million might easily end up being even smaller budget than what Fallout was operating on - and creating your own engine, now that's no joke. I'm pretty sure budget and length that usual RPG player expects out of an RPG is the reason why do many locations feel somewhat sparse in content in PoE.

I hate driving. I really do. It's stressful and ginormous waste of time. Euro Truck Simulator is better.

Any time you want Fatty, Clunky, Speedy and Tiny to help you intimidate someone, you just have to ask. Thank you, asking is way above and beyond your call of duty already, so I really appreciate it.

Of course I would, it'd be amazing to have the OST in my usual playlists as opposed to having to switch to other players. If you need some form of leverage, I can equip you with a brick and 4 aggressive rats to threaten Paradox with. (<- see my avatar for details, they're all as bloodthirsty and vicious.)

I'm just having podcasts playing in the background. The game is just chill, there's a threat of failure altho it's kinda difficult to fail, there's apparently a lot of skill to learn if you wish (or completely ignore if you don't), there's always something to strive towards and... I just spent time driving about Europe. And I absolutely hate driving in real life, by the way. I saw places that I have personally been to so I know how they actually roughly look and feel like and the game portrayed them extremely well, so when I visit those I've never been to, I feel like yes, that's probably not that remote from reality, except for scale obviously. And I have already found a few unique landmarks that I just had to go and google some info on (it's impressive how well the developers modeled these places, by the way) so I learned a bunch of stuff about places I didn't even know existed ever before. This is just ... Nice. And something I never expected to enjoy.

Yaay, I bought my first truck! It has ... Horses and engine and there are wheels somewhere. There's a die hanging from my mirror ... Thingy in the middle of the ... C-ockpit. I'm not a truck god damnit, I don't know these things! Why am I playing this!?

Where did you buy the game? Steam, GOG, Origin?

I got gifted Euro Truck Simulator 2, so I thought I'll try that boring game about boring trucks in boring Europe properly out of courtesy towards the gifter. So I just trucked about Europe for an hour or so and can't wait until I finish my work to do more trucking. Because I felt incredibly relaxed for some reason? I have no idea what hell's happening here, brain, but as long as you keep releasing all those pleasant hormones into my bloodstream, I'm gonna play more Euro Truck Simulator 2. Deal?

... And Tyranny. And throw it all up on Spotify. Justin also did soundtrack for Tyranny, right? It's excellent.

If it's the Definitive Edition, I'm pretty sure I've seen unofficial patch in their in-built multi-platfor mod browser ... Thingy.

Yes. Considering they cracked it, they have better knowledge of Denuvo than majority of the industry, and proved trustworthy on these issues over and over in the past. Nonetheless, you're naturally correct, they're also people and as such can be wrong. I'll choose to believe them based on what I've seen tho, and what I've seen was that, to my knowledge, not a single Denuvo game worked without online activation. Yes, out of respect to Obsidian, I am not going to be linking sites potentially leading to links to pirate Obsidian games. My respect to Obsidian happens to be greater than my need to be 'right' as it were, so if you don't want to educate yourself, be my guest - if you do, all you really need to google is "Doom 2016 Voksi", followed by "Devnuvo CPY". Anybody in this discussion can do this. That'll give you ample information to start with your research. Hell, perhaps you'll even discover something to prove my claims false, and if you do - feel free to share it, I for one am eager to learn. That's not what I said. What I actually said was: Look mkreku, I know you won't hesitate to swoop down to obvious logical fallacies in discussing piracy and DRM, even tho I'm not entirely sure why considering I was as courteous as I could be all the way through. When it comes to anti-tampering, Denuvo is actively working with encryption and decryption on your CPU/GPU - these are expensive, hardware-specific operations which can easily break if they're not getting constantly updated for changing software and hardware. Most games just attempt to obfuscate their code as a form of anti-tamper solution, which won't actually break their compatibility, thus the fairly essential part of that sentence stating "If there's another layer of problems in my games which go directly against future-proofing them" becomes kinda important. In fact, the effect can already be seen in lack of copatibility with Linux's WINE when it comes to Denuvo-protected games. And yes, I'll also call those attempts at obfuscating code mere extension of DRM as that's quite literally the only reason they exist, just as I'll call Denuvo DRM based on Denuvo themselves stating the only reason for their entire solution existing is to protect DRM - which is what started this entire discussion, isn't it? Naturally, there were many attempts at coming up with alternate solutions, and all of them lead to a disaster sooner or later down the line, infamous SecuROM leading the charge (I actually liked Boiling Point when it came out back in the day, and now I have two DVDs sitting in the game's case - entirely useless original DVD with SecuROM and actually functional one I got via piracy). But yes, you're quite correct, my statement didn't apply exclusively to Denuvo, and I never pretended it does. It is as they say: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Thankfully, my Boiling Point DVD is sitting over there as a constant reminder - perhaps you could use one yourself. Anyway, I'm tired of this discussion now and considering you're falling back to the usual cycle of insults and fallacies, I won't be posting on it anymore.

... is where I've seen far calmer and more rational discussions on Pillars of Eternity than in most other places on the internet. I've even talked pages upon pages with Sensuki who apparently also has a bit of a reputation for harping on the game, yet he was able to explain his points far more rationally and without all the emotional pathos. What will I do is precisely what I did with the original Pillars of Eternity: Wait for the finished product and judge it based on its own merits. Considering Pillars of Eternity quickly climbed up among my favorite RPG games of all time, I won't judge Obsidian's decision making process, into which even you yourself don't have full insight I might add. In other words, you're trolling. Well that's nice. Your points truly deserve to be taken into consideration.

Yes, you'll persuade a lot of people by essentially calling us idiots for liking a system you dislike. I'm sure there are games which'll cater to your genius somewhere, but perhaps you should consider joining a science institute or a research team at some university to challenge your astronomical intellect and fuel your ego instead of playing videogames designed for us, lowly rabble of humanity.

While bypassing Denuvo, cracking groups kinda had to figure out how does it work. In fact, the first way Denuvo was bypassed for Doom 2016 was by 'registering' demo versions of Doom with Denuvo, essentially pretending to be other games. Now this leads to more shady parts of the internet, so no, I'm not going to post random links - they're easy enough to find, I assume you can do that yourself. Naturally, there's no official source - Denuvo wants to obfuscate the way it works as much as humanly possible. Fact of the matter is that if the encryption ran entirely locally, it would not actually be that difficult to bypass. As I said tho, at the end of the day, if part of the executable exists purely to make DRM harder to crack and has no other purpose, that part of the executable is DRM. Even if there is an older/newer version of Denuvo that doesn't actually need internet connection, it hardly matters. And the official FAQ for Denuvo on Denuvo's website quite literally states: It's designed to prevent users from tampering with DRM. Also note the peculiar wording in what does it not require of its end consumers, just by the way, specifically mentioning always online. Interestingly enough, there's not been a single Denuvo game which would not require online activation. This all reminds me of Red Dwarf, really... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-NnVpvQ78 If you really want to call that banana an orange, sure, be my guest - it's just semantics anyway. If there's another layer of problems in my games which go directly against future-proofing them and we're going to call this layer "anti-tamper" instead of calling it "DRM" for all good this does, I don't want anti-tamper solutions in my games either. Or oranges for that matter. Well... It depends. You can't modify the .exe file, naturally, but most mods don't work using .exe modifications regardless. And then it depends on which parts of the executable are actually encrypted.

First of all, this is not true at all, pirated versions get regularly updated - all that does change is that player has to wait for the updates a bit longer and updates only get applied if they're relevant. Secondly, even if pirates don't get to play the DLC or don't get the newest patch, they get to play their games for as long as they can run or emulate supported systems. Generally I take a product that actually works over one with DLC, thank you very much. Wrong. If a game with Denuvo goes uncracked, yet again it's the publishers alone who get to decide when does it die. Game disappears from Denuvo's or publisher's authentication server and all you're going to get is some form of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A7Hsf63vuc It's fantastic to cheer for DRM, isn't it? Anyway, I'm out of this exchange - at the end of the day, you as a consumer get nothing out of forms of DRM such as Denuvo. Nothing at all but harmed. Developers, you know, the actual people who create the content we know and love also get nothing out of DRM. The only ones who do derive use out of it are publishers, and it's not even monetary gain as that effect has never been proven - so the only thing publishers gain is control over the product you've purchased. If that's what you want to defend, well... Be my guest.

And paying customers will still get to suffer. Remember, there's still 0 evidence that piracy directly translates to a significant number of lost sales - but there's more than enough of widely documented evidence of paying customers suffering for publisher's ... Rights. And yes, that game cracking isn't inevitable is what was said about Denuvo, and multiple DRM solutions before it - they all got cracked, and pirates always got the superior versions of the product. The only way to prevent this is moving significant portions of games into cloud, which incidentally is exactly where we are headed. That way, publishers will get to decide precisely when will a game see the light and when will it die. Not the future I'm looking forward to, exactly.

Yes, and paying customers are the ones who end up suffering, while pirates just have to wait a bit longer to get the objectively superior version of the game.

Well... Do you have a 768p 4:3 one? Seriously tho, just try it, 1070 should handle 4k fine. Probably.

The whole thing with performance is very dependent on implementation. If Denuvo is implemented well, only parts of the executable which aren't critical to performance will get encrypted - say engine initiation. It'll prolong initial loading times somewhat, but not that much and it's not big of a deal. But if developer encrypted, say, AI calculations, execution of the game would get slowed down drastically. So as usual there's no easy answer - Denuvo may negatively impact performance, but it probably doesn't.

It connects to Denuvo's servers, sends your current hardware hash and ties the game's copy to it for either an arbitrary period of time or until hardware changes, whichever comes first. This fact got mentioned multiple times throughout this very thread, that's what's so hard to understand about it not being DRM. When it connects to the internet to authenticate copy of the game, it most certainly is DRM. Additionally, the entire reason for Denuvo to exist is to protect other DRM schemes from getting circumvented. It's literally an online activation that exists to protect other online activations. You're right that Denuvo will work with whatever developers decide to implement alongside with it, but when a system works as an integral part of DRM and serves no other purpose, I'm going to call it what it actually is as opposed to buying into Denuvo's PR bull****. I also don't think I really need to mention how exactly is it bad that many games now need two independent online services running at all times to function. It's all good tho, thus far all major releases containing Denovo got cracked.

All right, I have finished my Clean Hands/Ghost run of Dishonored 2 yesterday. This took me around 30 hours, but I have replayed some bits and I'm a slow gamer, not to mention my need to see EVERYTHING. I'd say the game should take a competent stealth games player like 15-20 hours to achieve ghost/clean hands, or about 10 if you just fight through the game and murderize everybody (and even less than that if you don't bother to explore in the process.) Yes, I'll write a wall of text now and yes, I don't care if anybody reads it. Level Design I have got to start with this, because level design in this game is a highlight and a standard entire industry should be striving towards. It's on par and sometimes even surpasses classics such as Deus Ex or Thief - no big surprise, considering Harvey Smith, of System Shock and Deus Ex fame, is also currently level designer at Arkane. And it shows. Levels not only offer an insane amount of approaches for the player to take, all of these approaches are also organically integrated into individual levels to create a believable locale as opposed to playground for the player, but which also happen to be a playground. The level of detail is absolutely astounding - each apartment has a bathroom and a toilet for instance, but it doesn't stop there. At a glance, you can distinguish whether the apartment belongs to a rich or a poor denizen. All rooms have their in-world purpose and are logically connected. Levels also tend to offer a lot of verticality, considerably more than in the original game. While it's still not a rule, you're able to reach rooftops surprisingly often, and you'll be moving about tall, multi-storied structures with ease. And the best part is that I seldomly looked at a building and thought "Oh, that's a platform for the player there." - it was more along the lines of "Oh look, that balcony has a bit more modern look than the rest of the building, somebody attached it after building got constructed." You'll also see a lot of variability in level design - from dust storms which blind enemies for a while, through ever shifting clockwork mansion all the way to time travel. I won't spoil, but what the game designers attempted here is incredibly, and they succeeded. Sound design tied to level design is absolutely perfect, mind you. Now, there are some small issues, like enemies sometimes being placed into a location where they have no way of getting to, but these are rather rare. What feels a bit more obvious given insane detail of the rest of the game are apartments which are inexplicably sealed off by barricades, but I suppose wanting Arkane to model every single room of every single building in every single level would be a little insane. Karnaca Closely tied to level design is the world design - and Arkane did not disappoint. Apparently, a year of development time has been spent purely on creating and writing this place to bring player a believable experience. Waves of architecture, social shifts and immigration was simulated, inspired by southern coastal cities of Europe and America. You can see how the industrial revolution affected Karnaca, and how does it deal with its own, local problems and considerations (strong winds blow over the plateau it's built beneath, so massive wind corridors to direct the wind and wind turbines to make use of its energy had been erected). It doesn't end there tho - you can see many details of much more mundane nature, like most rich people's houses built anywhere in the vicinity of silver mines having mechanical air filters to help with the dust. And while the game's story is rather poor, lore is incredible, and the game contains tons of enviromental storytelling of just about anything from "How did that building get infested by bloodflies?" to "Why are overseers searching that apartment?" Based on various notes and books you find around the game world, conversations you get to overhear and acts you get to witness, you feel like a part of a larger world, which lives and breathes. Karnaca is filled with rich culture and history, but it goes beyond - it's a part of an intriguing world you get to explore through books, maps and various mentions. Gameplay It's a much more refined version of the original Dishonored, but it's not more than that. One big advantage over the original is that the whole game has been designed to be playable without supernatural powers which you may choose to refuse at the start of the game, bringing a huge shift in gameplay style. Second is that you get to choose your character - you can play as Corvo or Emily, each getting their own unique set of powers. In addition to lethal gadgets, you also get a decent amount of non-lethal ones, but not to the point where every lethal attack would get a non-lethal alternative - so you get your good old sleep darts, but also stun darts and ... Um, neurotoxin darts. You also get stun mines that zap enemies who approach them, because of course you do. You may, this time around, do a non-lethal drop assassination, where you direct your accumulated energy from a fall into a powerful punch in the face. How you or your victim survive this when executed from 150 feet is anyone's guess. Gameplay also tends to be more varied - typical stealth sections tend to be interrupted by parts of the levels with bloodfly infested buildings, which is where you'll get to fight things even on non-lethal run. Game also introduces purely mechanical opponents, whom you may destroy without getting a kill. While we're at the topic, AI was improved tremendously from the first game. They notice open doors that weren't open previously, missing friends, disabled security devices, and they work together on locating the player. The moment AI becomes suspicious, the entire dynamic of their patrols changes up indefinitely and they may warn others, changing their partols too (or interrupting them from an idle activity where they weren't patrolling at all). Generally speaking, the less you disrupt the natural going-ons in a level, the easier time you'll have sneaking through it and the more suspicious guards are, the more you'll meet them in areas you think already cleared. Other than that tho, it's still good ol' Dishonored, for better or worse - and yes, it also offers the insane attention to detail of the original and its crazy amounts of reactivity, leading to huge replay value. Problems? Problems! Let's start with the obvious skeleton in the closet, technical issues. While they got more or less fixed for owners of nvidia cards, AMD users still get the shaft. But even owners of good builds sometimes encounter game crashing and such. It's a mess, but Arkane is actively working on improving their mess and thus far, each of their patches was a big improvement. There's not just that tho. I've encountered some minor irritations like getting stuck in a vent that protagonist refused to climb through for whatever reason in spite of doing the same thing seconds ago. It might have been me making sounds, but I have noticed guards sometimes spotting me through a wall. This is a very rare bug I assume, but once, when saving on a mobile platform, the game has inexplicably moved me like 10ft to the right upon loading the game, exploding the barrel I was holding and alerting everybody. Don't save on moving things. Guards can also rarely get stuck, with the only way of un-stucking them being rendering them unconscious or murdering them. And then there's pet peeve of mine with Dishonored in general, and that's the fact you can't unequip the blade that I wasn't using 90% of the time anyway, leading to such 'hilarity' as accidentally murdering somebody because I pressed the wrong button. Oh well. The biggest problem I have with the game, however, is the storyline. It's incredibly straightforward, offers very little emotional investment and generally only serves as a reason to go to the places you go to as opposed to being compelling in itself. I would welcome at least a twist, even if it was as poor and predictable as in the first game - but nah. TL; DR and Summary: Dishonored 2 is not without its problems, but it's everything Mankind Divided wanted to be and more. If you have an nvidia card, buy it. If not, either buy it for a console or wait for more patches. You might think "But Fenixp, you're a Dishonored fanboy, you're not to be trusted!" - and yes, I am, but all this means is that I hold second game to a much higher standard. It lives up to it. Edit: Oh right, dem graphix, here's my screenshot gallery. That's not remotely maxed out, by the way.