marelooke

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!

I'm sure that was earlier in the year, when those new year's resolutions were still going strong

What both Microsoft and Sony "sell" is a walled garden, the hardware is usually sold at break even. Moreover modern consoles are basically purpose built PCs with a custom OS (not unlike a Macintosh, really), so difficulty in porting is mostly a thing because it benefits console makers. Meaning that if you ignore the hardware what MS and Sony do isn't particularly much different from what Epic is doing. People just accept it because consoles used to be purpose built devices with custom hardware, so the segmentation was somewhat justified. This hasn't really been the case for Xbox and PS for a while now but they've successfully managed to maintain that perception with the general public. EDIT: and I purposefully don't mention Nintendo because, afaict they still actually do build "real" consoles.

Well, "bought", is a big word, but these are new to my (Gog) library: Freespace 2 (giveaway) Stygian - Reign of the Old Ones (backed a long time ago)

Someone had to go with the "average Obsidianite"... Gets me a free way to regain sanity through...entertainment This was initial character creation, game hung after it so I had to start over, current character is Middle-Aged rather than Adult, everything else remained the same though.

tl;dr Bottom line, if you have a beefy CPU with a bunch of bored cores (so any CPU with more than 4 cores for Arkham Knight) then Denuvo is likely to have little impact on your average FPS, while it does have a minor but noticeable impact on loading times and very much impacts initial game game startup time. There's also a minor increase in memory usage with Denuvo. No testing has been done with any hardware that has 4 cores or less (like i5 CPUs which are quite common still), as far as I know, and no testing has been done where the impact on the CPU has been measured either (as an alternative to using CPUs with less cores). Long version: Article doesn't list hardware used for testing, that I could find, so I'm going to assume they tested on some top of the line system, which obviously is not representative of what most people actually use. They also don't say anything substantial about testing methodology This makes their conclusions essentially worthless, so we'll have to focus on the linked YouTube video (which had a Reddit thread that was quite interesting and included a lot of details about the testing methodology and its shortcomings, but at least gave us something tangible to work with). Since most current day games are GPU limited, not CPU limited (barring certain strategy games, especially the turn based ones), using top-of-the-line hardware is likely not going to result in a noticeable difference in FPS, so if they don't actually measure CPU load it's hard to tell how much extra work the CPU needs, or does not need, to do (and it obviously will need to do extra work, encryption is not free). Testing on something that's more reasonable (eg. a quad core system) would be interesting to see since most games are incapable of using more than 4 cores (and afaiu Arkham Knight is among those), so a system where Denuvo actually has to share a core with the game would, imho, be a lot more representative and indicative of the effect it has (or doesn't have) than a system where there's a bunch of cores that are doing sod all anyway. The tests in the YouTube video linked from the article video appear to have indicated that while the FPS differences were minor on midrange hardware they were there (which makes sense, given that on-the-fly decryption can't be a "free" operation and will become more detrimental the slower your CPU gets), moreover they indicated a massive decrease in initial game loading times without Denuvo (which isn't taken into account with the benchmark) and minor increases of in-game loading times. It should also be noted that he only ran tests 3 times and let the game "warm up" each time (iow, only the first run for each (Denuvo and non-Denuvo) was from a "cold" boot, while in successive runs data was already cached from prior runs, as indicated by the fact that only the first Denuvo run had the slow game startup). This kind of decreases the value of the results, small sample size and not rebooting between tests isn't ideal, I'd argue. Whether 1-3 fps is significant is debatable, it probably isn't on a high-end system (then again, it might well be more than this on a lower end system), whether the extra CPU cycles amount to anything tangible has, as far as I can tell, been tested by nobody, so far. There also wasn't any testing done with regards FPS stability (people noted on the video that the Denuvo version appeared to microstutter at points, can't say I noticed, but hey), if the Denuvo version results in less stable FPS then an average isn't necessarily going to really tell us much about the actual quality of the gameplay experience. Whether the increased initial loading times (40 or so extra seconds, iirc) are significant is also debatable, and probably up to the individual. I know slow loading games irritate me (hi Destiny 2), but ymmv. The slower in-game loading times might be worrying to people on lower end systems since Arkham Knight streams data while playing, so quick movement around the game world might lead to more issues with Denuvo enabled (like there used to be at the game's release)

Been a while, but I've been busy building stuff (surprise!) My humble abode: By night: I've sort of slowed down working on it (which was mostly decorating the inside and removing some of the leftover T1 stuff) because it, errr, kinda starts to break the server (collision won't properly load, stuff like that). Inside: As I've never lived in the jungle before I started looking for a good spot there, which I found, at least for a humbly sized vacation home. The building to the left, in the back is the actual house, to the right (with the gate) is the Derketo temple, and the main plaza with a well, and the housing for my, errr, employees, as well as basement access. Some more environment shots: It's Lemurian architecture, so lots of bling, especially with torches at night (rather hard to capture in a screenshot) There's a pretty sizeable cellar underneath that has most of the crafting stations (except for the blacksmith/smelter) Eventually shoe-horned in a wheel of pain (which there really isn't room for), but I might just build something nearby just to house a Map room and that Wheel of pain without having to expand this in rather ugly ways. Mod-wise this uses: Lemurian Architect (didn't see that one coming, did you? ) Glass Constructions and more (for the marble floors) Pythagoras Support Beams (to be able to have the giant maproom without having to pollute it with pillars in really inconvenient spots) Limestone Buildings, a Greek server mod (the light touches on the desert base; like the white inner circles on the towers and the main stairs) LBPROE - No NPC camps edition (because building without is just a royal pain) EDIT: poor Kush-ites, getting censored...