marelooke

There was a lot wrong with DA:O but the newer installments still managed to "fix" everything that wasn't broken. If only a better studio (well, or one not managed by EA, at least) had gotten its hands on that engine, the things that could have been. I think I...need a moment. *sniffle*

Wasn't the issue that it couldn't deal with multi-core CPUs? I seem to remember having to force it onto a single core to stop the game from crashing to the desktop. Awakening otoh, I ran into a game breaking bug. Given the state that expansion launched in I guess it was already a miracle I made it that far in before encountering issues, but I digress... I decided to wait for a patch for the issue, which took a long time to arrive so I never actually got back to that playthrough. Heh, I still have that game on discs too, so I actually wonder how that's going to work now that all the BioWare infrastructure is gone, can I even still get the DLC to work, for example (there's download on EA's site, so I hope they have that covered)? Could be a fun ride just to get all that working again

I nabbed Lust for Darkness and Agony in a sale bundle on Steam (for about half what one of the individual games goes for normally) Agony's take on Hell rather intrigued me when a video was posted around here when the KS happened (afair this didn't have any of the nudity and stuff, just the level design). The game appears to not have been able to live up to the hype, gameplay wise, so it's always been on my "maaaaaybe if it's really cheap", so here we go Lust for Darkness similarly has an interesting aesthetic and mature theme and while the main plot is apparently rather predictable the backstory is supposed to be interesting.

But did he shoot first?

Dangerous decision, this is why I still haven't finished Dragon Age: Origins' Awakening expansion. One of these days I will get to that, I'm sure

Didn't EA provide installers of some sort before forcing everyone onto Origin though? I kinda remember being salty about that one (that and buying a disc version of ME3 only to be forced onto Origin, Half Life 2/Skyrim all over again)

Not really surprised and I would be even less surprised if Origin would disappear entirely in the future and/or that others would follow suit. Building a better Steam than Steam hasn't exactly been proven quite as easy as many made it out to be, nor will it probably be quite as cheap as many expected it to be. Not to mention that people sooner or later get fed up with the insane fracturing of the landscape. With all these stores and their associated subscription services I would be entirely unsurprised if piracy was on the rise again, just like for audio/video content. Piracy is a service problem, after all, and service appears to be getting worse again.

Well... FNV was literally unplayable at launch for a lot of people (including yours truly, who could play for a maximum of 15min without a CTD), so that kinda didn't do it any favours. Took a very long time to get it to a playable state and it's still one of the more buggy games in that engine (might have to fight Fallout 4 for the honour). Anyway, don't have all that much time to game due to house renovation projects so mostly mucking around in games that don't require any form of commitment, been creeping closer to 100% on Skyrim and been doing some more building in Conan Exiles (should check out that new dungeon as well at some point)

As long as they don't kill the modding scene they'll be fine unless a game that is simply better comes around with at least as good modding support. So far nothing like that appears to be on the horizon. I mean, the modding community is arguably what has kept their games relevant in the first place, bit weird that no-one has attempted to capitalize on Bethesda's stumbling yet by providing good modding support...

As I said, I've had issues with it with each and every game I've bought through it, all of those being MS first party titles: Forza Horizon (FH) 3, Forza Motorsport (FM) 7 and FH4. All three suffered the exact same issue having me re-download the games multiple times to try and sort it out (these are not small games either, for those unaware), on top of some other issues specific to some of the titles. Moreover FM7 also had the great idea to tie language settings to the Windows Store, meaning that since I play most of my games in English, but don't have an English Windows this means my Windows Store language is forced onto English (which doesn't mean the Store UI is English, oddly enough), which translates to all games that use this mechanism also being forced onto English. This then resets every single patch (of either Windows Store or FM7). Making it a huge pain in the rear end since this setting can't be changed without a game restart. For those wondering why not just install an English Windows: I only use Windows for gaming so I generally don't care what the system language is, and since the localized Windows version was over 100 EUR cheaper at the time the choice was pretty straightforward... Since the language is tied to the license, I'd likely have to buy a new license if I wanted to change it (or do "dodgy" stuff, or, you know, developers could just let people pick their locale settings instead of trying to be "smart") My takeaway from all of that was: Windows Store is a technical mess held together with low quality duct tape MS has zero interest in actually improving it further than the absolute minimum necessary given how in over three years the same major issue has persisted (note that this wasn't exactly an isolated case either, practically everyone who pre-loaded one of these games suffered from this). Other reasons that I could understand (though not all of them are necessarily my reasons): not wanting to tie a MS account to Windows 10, no need to make it easier on them than necessary avoid yet another account/launcher (while it might be installed, if you don't use it it at least doesn't eat up background resources. Edge also comes pre-installed, and many people only use that once: to install another browser) modding (the MS Store is supposedly extremely modding-unfriendly, even when not using the encrypted format) isn't cheaper than any of the competition, while still offering less features (it does sort of have reviews, though, but afaict they're limited to your language, so they're rather useless for me here) tries to push yet another subscription service (on top of the 10 you already have for music/video/consoles, and who-knows-what-else at this point) has a terrible UI/UX has no Linux support (and more than likely never will)

So far each Destiny 2 session has ended when the game booted me to the login screen. The game's pretty good or I'd have long since given up but its sure trying to make me quit. As for TOW, well, not touching Epic Store and the Windows Store has given me nothing but grief in the past so not touching that either. EDIT: for some reason felt like picking up my Nier: Automata playthrough. Turns out the game erased my progress. So well, there went that plan.

I was playing Shadowrun: Hong Kong, but I got distracted by Tyranny. I'll show myself out. Mostly still messing around with Conan Exiles, been building more stuff. Had a Purge spawn inside my base, nasty surprise. That's supposed to only happen if they can't reach whatever they set their sights on, so I'm guessing maybe some of my mob building components aren't correctly recognized by the game since there was kind of a massive gate that was easily reachable... Or the AI is just too stupid to figure out doors and stairs, that's equally likely, really.

Keep having connection issues in Destiny 2 and I'm simply about to give up. The last three missions I've done I've gotten disconnected partway through each time and I've pretty much had it at this point. Can't even blame it on the new expansion rush either as this crap had been going on prior to the Steam move. Ugh, well, new dungeon in Conan Exiles, let's go check that out instead I guess.

If it takes their entertainment being affected for some more people to wake up to how the system works then I'll take that as a win.

EGS does not allow reviews, nor does it have forums, ergo the Matrix quote. Whether Mr. Sweeney's words carry any weight when it comes to their events will remain to be seen when push comes to shove. So far he's been about as reliable as your average politician, I'm going to just assume there's no public events coming up anytime soon with any risk of him having to eat his words (iirc the "big" Fortnite event already happened this year).

"What use is freedom of speech, if you are unable to speak."

Moon's haunted...

More Destiny 2, tried some Gambit. Seems like the improvements to connectivity don't extend to PvP. Nothing's as demotivating like getting booted from a match because the game's networking is trash, especially if you've been doing really well too. Wouldn't be nearly as bad if PvP wasn't basically mandatory in Destiny 2 (but then I would never play it as the terrible servers suck all the fun out of it)

Weird, many in my clan (mostly US, afaiu) also had queues, wasn't a problem for me (EU). Though the game was constantly "connecting to servers" (meaning it was teetering on the verge of timeout, as far as I can tell) but I managed to get through the first two missions on the Moon fine and also completed the Black Armory mission I got disconnected from before (non-Moon areas appear to run a lot better, so I might just go and level my Titan for now) Bit of a shame about them being unable to handle the load but honestly the game experience has, barring the fact that everything requiring network is slow (like buying things from vendors etc), been a lot better than what I experienced prior to the Steam switch (where I'd regularly lose progress due to disconnects, at some point I half-joked that half my game time on D2 was re-doing progress I lost due to disconnects) Haven't tried any PvP or Strikes yet, so maybe disconnects will still turn out to be a big issue there but so far so good and if they finally manage to gracefully handle overloaded servers and other types of disconnects now then I might play quite a bit more of the game (and maybe even more PvP, heh)

Are you telling me that Fat Larry or officer Chunk weren't serious characters?

Depending on your needs the supported file systems are also something to look at, modern Synology products supports Btrfs which can protect your files against corruption, the only other file system with that functionality is zfs, as far as I'm aware.

Oh yes, technically I also bought Elite: Dangerous on sale, but after putting in a support request due to keyboard layout issues that didn't get a response in over 5 days I've just submitted my first ever Steam refund request. Congratulations, Frontier Support.

I should add this for more evidence

Well, someone must've brought that Kickstarter to my attention, I'm betting it was you!