Video Game News and Miscellany

Far

Far

Frank said:
So Long Dark is out and I backed it at a level that gave me the right to name a minor location. If you play it, you should be able to tell what it is.
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The only survival game I've ever really enjoyed. I'll take a look the next time I fire it up.
 
Frank

Frank

Zero Esc said:
It says no gold items will be hated for money, but it's still a stupid and immersion-breaking way to handle the content.
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Like has been said by commentators again and again, no company makes these sorts of things so people won't buy them. They'll be just prominent enough that you'll be reminded of them JUST enough to drill it into you that you need to buy the item. This crap ruins games for me hard.
 
Frank

Frank

In lighter and more fun gaming news, a game that's been in development for 20 years was just released.



It's creator is, well, eccentric. Eccentric is a nice way to put it. Let's learn a bit about him.

How he feels about discounts:

I have decided it is just a nice thing to do for people who have been waiting years to play my game if I offered a 10% discount on the game during it's first week. After this ends, I want to assure anyone waiting for the game that Grimoire will never, ever sell at a discount at any time it is on the Steam store ever again. I won't permit it to be sold below it's retail value for any reason. I am too proud of my finished product to permit it to be turned into simply another commodity in a Steam sale. If Valve ever decides that sales of the product no longer justify it having a page then I will move it to another venue - but as the author I will never offer my game at a discount again anywhere. I'm not a corporation that turns out games like sausages and computes their price curves over rates of decay in market value. Grimoire is my unique and proprietary product and I only want to sell it to the most hardcore fans of the genre. I was never targeting the mass market or casual gamers. It is in the first paragraph of the original design document I wrote more than 20 years ago when I was putting a proposal together that described the entire game end-to-end in both story, design and implementation. It was an aristocrat's manifesto when it was written and the language was specifically that of an aristocrat declaring the game was not going to be designed to appeal to the masses. Only fans of the genre.
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His opinions on people playing his masterpiece:

So what you could do is, don't play my game.

Better yet, PM me your real email address and I will lock you out of the digital distribution system so you couldn't buy a copy even if you could come up with the cash, which is unlikely.

If you have the names of your friends or anybody even remotely like you, even people who live near you and may have distant kin relations in your family tree, send me all their email addresses and I will lock them out as well.

Grimoire is not junk and it's not mass market drivel. I don't want just anybody playing it. If I had my way I'd force anybody as part of credit card registration to take an online IQ exam. Anybody scoring less than 120+ would not be able to purchase the game for any reason, period. I'd send their money back. I cringe at the idea of ordinary dolts and Bell Curve average wreckers putting their greasy, stained hands on a keyboard covered with pro-wrestling stickers and playing my game. There's something about it unsettling. It's like if the Mona Lisa was opened to grade school children for scratch'n'sniff. It's horrible to think about.

This is another reason to never release it. I can't control who plays it. I certainly didn't work a decade and a half on the game so the unwashed masses could get hold of it. Wait a second, I'm going to plug the woodchipper back in.
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His Linkedin profile:

Most people consider me a polymath who is very strong in a variety of disciplines but a master of none. My strengths lie in a wide range of C# .NET technologies and related technologies, C/C++ coding in highly efficient cross-platform code, web services and microservices functionality, front end Javascript and JQuery frameworks for single page applications, HTML5/CSS design, SQL databases of many flavors, scripting program functionality and general problem solving applied to all kinds of different situations. I don't claim to be a lateral thinker to impress girls - I was born that way. It's not just an idle self-promotional gimmick with me.

Specialize in building dirt-cheap embedded solutions that outperform systems costing a thousand times more that are designed to run for eternity on low power in terrible conditions and never fail.

All my applications will run in a distributed environment with a fast network right through nuclear war, solar flares, earthquakes, moisture, heat, cold and neglect until they literally rust apart.

I have a proven record of writing software that operates 24/7 in hellish surroundings without requiring maintenance, configuration or even a display/input device on computers that cost less than a dollar with no writable storage. Anything built by me will cost less than what you spent on lunch per unit and will look like it should be running in the Batcave on ancient web browsers released twenty years ago.

I have been working on a daily basis on my web server technology for over 20 years. The full featured server fits on a floppy disk and executes on any OS because I use ANSI C with old cross-platform standards like Berkeley Sockets, SQL and Lua script compiled for any environment.

My architecture is running on 2 mining sites, an industrial warehouse and my 1st installation has been running 5+ years unattended with zero maintenance. I have clients describing my web server as being "supernaturally" robust under real world demands.
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First patch notes for the game!

Sapiens thinks if you have a clinically tested IQ of 183 it means you're better at solving the jumble in the newspaper. This is what Sapiens actually believes.

There are other things you can do with a super powered atomic brain nearly 6 full derivatives greater than the intellectual distance between the ordinary man and Koko the Sign Language Gorilla.

An ordinary man might be delirious and babbling after 72 hours without sleep, these bug reports forced me to bring on another 0.002% of my brain capacity to solve them with a few keystrokes and upload a new binary to Steam.

Bug encountered clicking GPC portraits on some machines
Bug encountered when modifying "SCALE" setting
Bug encountered with music volumes (this may or may not be fixed)


If you have a savegame going and you don't want to uninstall your current game, you can just delete your "game.cfg" file in your Steam common folder if you can find it.

I want you to know if my back is ever in the corner again I am more than willing to bring on as much as 0.005% of my brain power online to fix the game and keep the troops fighting. Any time not spent playing Grimoire is wasted playing life, which will never give you any Perk Keys like Grimoire does. Remember that.
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His game sold 1000 copies, now regale in his egomania!

http://steamcommunity.com/games/650670/announcements/detail/1444946018260474150
 
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figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Zero Esc said:
It says no gold items will be hated for money...
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Yeah, but do they mean it like "you might have to grind a little extra if you're not a skilled player" or do they mean it like "you'll have to spend 600 in-game hours to get basic equipment necessary to finish the game if you don't shell out money for the loot system"?

The reality is likely to be somewhere in-between, but I'm wondering just how bad it's going to be.

Oh, and Darksiders 2 had a loot drop system that was augmented by real money DLC purchases. I'm not sure about the original release, but it was possible to finish the "Deathinative" version without caring much about any of the DLC unlocks. However, the whole loot system completely screwed over the difficulty curve. There were wild swings from things being a cakewalk to even basic enemies being a chore to finish depending on how recently you'd gotten a good weapon drop. I'm worried this loot system is going to do the exact same thing.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

As much as I really loved the first Shadow of Mordor, I'm comfortable not buying any WB games again. They have continually evolved into the worst type of developer, and there's plenty of other things to play.
 
Tress

Tress

If people would stop giving them money for shit like this, they would stop trying it. Systems like this get implemented because they work. I blame all the idiots who hand over their credit card info for this problem more so than I blame WB.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

Which really sucks, because the game itself seems like a fantastic extension of the first game.

And one of very few games I was eager about this year.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Tress said:
If people would stop giving them money for shit like this, they would stop trying it. Systems like this get implemented because they work. I blame all the idiots who hand over their credit card info for this problem more so than I blame WB.
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Whales are ruining gaming!
Down with Whales!

--Patrick
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Sara_2814 said:
Sort of video game news: The Secret World is getting a TV show.
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Funcom sort of hinted at this at their last shareholder's meeting. Ultimately though, the success and failure of this show is going to depend on two things:

- Getting it onto a streaming service, because the networks would gut this into PG.
- Getting it a budget comparable to early seasons of the Walking Dead.

Hope it does well; big fan of the game.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
AshburnerX said:
Funcom sort of hinted at this at their last shareholder's meeting. Ultimately though, the success and failure of this show is going to depend on two things:

- Getting it onto a streaming service, because the networks would gut this into PG.
- Getting it a budget comparable to early seasons of the Walking Dead.

Hope it does well; big fan of the game.
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Dei got me into Secret World a while back, and I have to admit, if the game had come along a few years earlier, when I was still in my All-MMOs-All-The-Time phase, I probably would have gone completely apeshit over it.
 
Dei

Dei

GasBandit said:
Dei got me into Secret World a while back, and I have to admit, if the game had come along a few years earlier, when I was still in my All-MMOs-All-The-Time phase, I probably would have gone completely apeshit over it.
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I only play that game to make money to buy more clothes, or gain skill points to make builds to get more clothes.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Dei said:
I only play that game to make money to buy more clothes, or gain skill points to make builds to get more clothes.
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Well it's gone F2P and completely relaunched. Like, Tokyo is only starting back up this Wednesday relaunched. But you should be able to get most of your cosmetic items back if you log back in with your old account info, get Agartha on a new character, and use the "TSW Cosmetic Transfer" button on the Delivered Items pane.

That's on the Secret World Legends client, not The Secret World client. The old launcher lets you play the older version of the game on a no-progression server.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
fade said:
Wait what?

...

What?


...

...

WHAT?
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It's a story about a man, Talion, being corrupted by the lure of power; continually crossing moral lines in order to reach his goals. He's allied himself with the undead, orcs, ghuls, and is now seeking the power of rings, the type of which he knows to have turned other men into nazgul. Shelob is giant and terrifying spider, to her everything that lives is simply food. She's scarred and bloated, but still an ancient evil with unknown powers of presumably great extent, and she has an uneasy truce with Sauron. Obviously the only way that she could tempt Talion is with boobs.
 
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fade

fade

Staff member
It would probably work on me.

"Foul creature! Stain upon Eru's grand design whose mother even the Ainur do know know from whence she came! I challenge thee in the name of the white tree of Gond... Ooooo boobies!"
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

fade said:
It would probably work on me.
"Foul creature! Stain upon Eru's grand design whose mother even the Ainur do know know from whence she came! I challenge thee in the name of the white tree of Gond... Ooooo boobies!"
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There's a relevant Oglaf involving a gorgon, but I'm not g0ing to go looking for it while I'm at work.

--Patrick
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

We Happy Few now has a publisher: Gearbox! And in typical "fuck everyone" Gearbox fashion, the game's price on Steam was immediately doubled from $30 to $60. This is despite not only still being in Early Access, but also originally being a successfully crowd-funded campaign. And now it's being touted with pre-order bonuses and a season pass. Because of course it is.

Naturally, Jim Sterling covers this debacle quite well.

 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Y'know, sometimes I feel like Gearbox's best days were when they released Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and then they've just been on a steady slide downwards ever since.
 
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