Keyrock

We're getting a ODPixel, Bruno, and GLaDOS cast for the OpenAI Skynet vs Chinese Legends match.

I finished chapter 3 in Phantom Doctrine. While the difficulty has increased a bit, I definitely still feel that the game is too easy on normal difficulty, provided you're good at stealth. Disguises, especially with the actor perk, are just way too powerful in this game. The actor perk is the single most powerful upgrade you can get in this game, it's ridiculously OP. My hope is that hard difficulty is more than just more enemies or enemies with higher stats; I'd like to see maybe longer and/or wider vision cones and a change in the fundamental way characters react when you move from a restricted area to an unrestricted area, and vice versa. Right now, an enemy can be looking right at you as you walk through a doorway from a restricted area to an unrestricted area and, because they can only see you when you are already in an unrestricted area, they don't get alerted and trigger combat, despite the fact that it's plainly obvious that you just left a restricted area. I'd also like it if there was some kind of sound radius for takedowns. Right now you can walk up to and knock out an enemy (or civilian, for that matter) that is standing adjacent to another enemy and, so long as neither your character not the enemy being knocked out are in a square in the vision cone of the other enemy(e.g. they are facing away from you), they don't notice you knocking out a person that was literally right next to them. It would be cool if hard difficulty had a 2 or 3 square radius of noise around the victim being knocked out that any other character within that radius would hear the takedown taking place and trigger combat. The rules of stealth in normal difficulty are just way too easy to exploit once you understand how they behave and provided that you have a bit of patience. Anyway, despite my criticisms I am definitely enjoying the game. It's a feather in the game's cap that I very much intend to replay it, provided that hard mode actually provides a challenge to a stealth focused player, like myself.

The RTX memes are great.

The look on NoTail's face when he shook hands with Fly was ice cold. There was real animosity there.

From my point of view the Jedi are evil

We had the first OpenAI Skynet vs Humans match today. The humans in question were Pain Gaming, the first team eliminated from TI8. Humans won, so I guess we still have a couple of years before Skynet kills us all. save.us.john_connor LGD vs Liquid up next. This could very well be a preview of the grand final.

Have they managed to make it not run like **** yet?

^ Much ado about nothing, In Current Year you're not allowed to have a sense of humor on social media without a bunch of people getting their panties in a bunch. CDPR, being a public company, take the cowardly (and smart from a business standpoint) way out and apologize for something that doesn't mean anything. That's the world we live in. Makes me all that much happier that I don't exist on social media. Anyway, for Switch owners out there:

Will I have to suck it down?

EG vs OG is going to be hype as **** today! NoTail vs Fly, the deathmatch!

I need Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord in my life now, but I'm probably going to have to wait a couple more years. The Sinking City looks interesting. We're getting quite a few Lovecraftian themed games in the near future. It will be interesting to see if any of them actually manage to nail the atmosphere and can properly mind **** us.

*lowers pitch-fork* That's all good news. I'll give SteamOS a go since it's...free! Give it a few weeks. Right now Proton is only in the Steam Beta client and it has some issues (namely segfaulting) on some systems. I think we can expect some bumps in the road at first. Unless you want to be one of the first and provide Valve with bug reports and feedback, which is cool if you do want to do that, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're an experienced Linux user, I would wait until at least the first round of issues are worked out.

For those wondering if Valve was still pushing forward with their Linux efforts, the answer is a definitive and emphatic yes. While Steam Machines fell flat on their face, SteamOS is alive and well and has been regularly updated. In the past couple months there have been quite a few updates in preparation for a major update coming quite soon. Also, those using or familiar with Linux probably know about WINE, which is a recursive acronym that stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. Anyway, WINE is a project that's been ongoing for 25 years and it's a compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux. Recently, the development of WINE has rapidly accelerated and has been bolstered by a couple of related projects, namely DXVK and vkd3d. In the past, for graphics, WINE translated DirectX executions to OpenGL. DXVK instead translates DX10 & 11 executions to Vulkan and vkd3d translates DX12 to Vulkan (which is actually a lot simpler than what DXVK does since DX12 and Vulkan are so similar). While DXVK and vkd3d are still relatively new projects and there are a lot of kinks to works out (often in the form of graphical glitches), they tend to come with a much lower performance penalty than the old way of translating DX to OpenGL. Well, now the cat is out of the bag and Valve have revealed a new version of Steam Play for Linux that integrates Proton, a modified version of WINE that uses DXVK and vkd3d. This now allows you to install and play non-native games on Linux using Proton through the native Steam client seamlessly. Furthermore, it has been revealed that Valve were the ones that funded the development of DXVK and helped fund vkd3d and helped in much of the recent development of WINE. Right now only a few games are officially supported by Proton but unsupported games can be forced via overrides. Obviously, your mileage may vary. Combine this with Steam TV, Valve's Twitch competitor that's linked to Steam and SteamOS starts to look a lot more attractive. One of my biggest criticisms of SteamOS, when I gave it a spin, is Steam lacking integrated recording. The problem is that in SteamOS gaming, which is Steam Big Picture Mode, and your desktop are in 2 separate sessions. This creates a problem for recording since Steam has no integrated recording and you need to switch to a different session to run any program from the desktop, so you can't really record gameplay from SteamOS without an external capture card or jumping through several hoops of fire. Now, with Steam TV, it's only a matter of time until Valve integrate streaming directly to Steam TV into Steam itself, which will make streaming to Twitch or saving the recording to the hard drive that much easier since it's just a matter of redirecting the built in recording software to output to Twitch or a file on your hard drive or whatever. In fact, I'm pretty confident Valve will just do that themselves and let you chose where you want to stream to or save your recording right into Steam and you won't have to do any workarounds. This is all speculation, of course, but it seems like the logical next step. Anyway, long story short, Valve have not given up on Linux, in fact they've been directly and indirectly responsible for Linux gaming being in a better place now than it's ever been. Things continue to move forward, but these things take time and we're also talking about Valve here and we all know Valve works on Valve Time.

Artifact Beta begins in October, playable build at PAX West I'm probably the only person here excited for Valve's DotA themed card game.

So it's going to be like the good old days with bloom? Ah yes, the good ol' games using way too much bloom period. That was even before the age of unnecessary lens flare.

So wait, do you play as New Dante or 5 O'Clock Shadow OG Dante in Devil May Cry 5?

^ He's obviously trolling, Thingolfin, it's what SonicMage does. Anyway, on the slate for today we have 2 upper bracket matches: VGJ Storm vs OG EG vs Secret I honestly have a hard time in choosing a winner for both of these. If I had to choose at gunpoint I'd go with VGJ Storm and Secret, but both of those are 55/45 IMHO and could go either way. Then we have 2 lower bracket matches: Optic Gaming vs Serenity Virtus Pro vs Mineski I favor Optic in the first match largely because it's a BO3. In a BO1 I would give Serenity a 50/50 chance because they're so unpredictable, but in a BO3 I think ultimately the better team wins and I think Optic are the better team. In the second match I have Virtus Pro winning. They looked pretty bad yesterday and VP always seems to be a disappointment at TI relative to their performance earlier in the year, but I just can't see the team that most people had as favorites entering the tourney going out THIS early.

My favorite part of the trailer is at approximately 58 seconds where the female character slides into cover behind a traffic cone. I'm going to give a traffic cone, and I think I'm being generous here, quarter cover at best.

I'm already looking forward to a whole bunch of games over the next half decade or so where everything is way too shiny and reflective so that the developers can show off ray tracing.

Well, this was unexpected:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbcppLD0Kl0 From the game's website: The developer, Mimimi Games, were the folks that made Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, a game I've gushed about on these forums many a time and which was my personal GotY 2016. It's due for a release sometime in 2019 on PC, PS4, and Xbox 1. To say that I'm excited about this would be a severe understatement.

Supposedly it's a pretty big jump in performance over the last generation, around 30%, but we won't know for sure until we get solid independent benchmarks.

The Newbee vs Winstrike match was super tense. Great stuff!

Valve launched their own game streaming platform Steam TV today, coinciding with the first day of the main event of The International. It is linked to and integrated with your Steam account and is obviously intended to be a competitor to Twitch. Who knows if it will succeeding in giving Twitch any real competition (lord knows Hitbox and Azubu didn't), but it would be good it Twitch had some real competition, much like it would be good if YouTube had some real competition. If nothing else, the interface is pretty slick.