ampersandrew

No LAN is a no-go for me lately, for multiplayer games. I’m tired of games being designed with forced obsolescence. Sometimes you get lucky and the game has LAN but doesn’t list it on the features, so I figured I’d ask.

Really? It advertises co-op on the store page.

Does Roboquest have LAN? Searches in the forums lead to dead links for answers.

I’ve definitely been eyeing Solasta since BG3. Is it combat heavy enough that it could be a podcast game? It’s unclear how story focused the base game is, and I get the sense that player made content is the draw.

Flawlessly. The default controller mappings aren’t bad either, though I did tweak them a bit. It doesn’t actually have controller support, so you’re either using the right stick as a mouse or relying heavily on the trackpad, but you’re going to want to use the buttons for a few things, like pause/unpause, for instance.

There were a couple of games from Black Isle back then too. That’s the sort of deal I’d like to see, but I also don’t expect it to happen.

I mean, I’d buy it, but I’m not convinced it would do gangbusters.

I’ve been playing Starfield, and I think I’m getting close to just wanting to wrap it up. I may or may not want to get a larger ship before that happens, because the starter ship has been a bottleneck in seeing through some of the other faction quest lines. At the same time though, better ships are expensive, and I’m not sure I want to grind missions with better money payouts to get there. This game should be better.

While traveling, I’ve been playing Pillars of Eternity on the Steam Deck. I’ve got 5 party members now, and I’m level 3. I think I’m about to get access to the stronghold that has its own button on the UI. Really enjoying this one so far. Thankfully, it exposes all of its dice rolls to help me learn the systems better.

I’m reading between the lines of what Jirard said in his recorded calls and his response video when I say this, but I got the sense he and his family wanted that dollar value to be significantly higher so that they could have more control over what it gets spent on. People are more willing to do what you want them to do when you give them $1M than if you give them $1000. Still not a great reason to hold on to it if so, but hardly fraud.

I’d like to live in the world where multiple devs are making D&D games in Larian’s engine the way there were a handful of Infinity Engine games 20 years ago. Replaying BG3 is great, but it would be nice to have new areas, characters, and calls to action while still having the freedom to just “verb a noun” the way you can in BG3.

Things look incredibly bad.

I don’t think that they do. They still had the money. It’s now been donated, and Jirard is distancing himself from the charity and not running them attached to IndieLand anymore; the trust is gone, so it would have been difficult to get people to donate anyway. The only smoking gun I could see they had against him was the money still in the account (at the time). The accusations about the golf tournaments had no numbers attached to them, only that “there must be more money there”, and it felt very unfounded and as though Jobst just needed another video out for his baked in sponsor slot. From what I can see, Jirard did exactly what he should have to make amends, and now that a bunch of people have all been encouraged en masse to lodge complaints to the IRS, the rest of the truth will come out of that inevitable audit, because I sure didn’t feel like I got it from Jobst’s follow-up videos. His and OrdinaryGamers are two channels I’m certainly not interested in watching again. If you’re going to do something resembling investigative journalism, then act like it; don’t preamble your video telling me how I should feel about something before you’ve presented your facts.

Achievement data is a percentage. Since there were no giveaways, PS+, or Game Pass offerings to skew the data, there’s no reason to believe that the percentage would change across other platforms or across people playing the game offline. The achievement we’re using is the one for beating the game, as is the finite number of 1.3M that Larian offered in their infographic. Yes, that number does include early access purchases. Why wouldn’t it? Those are still copies sold, and they’re still included in achievement data.

If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies.

I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.

I haven’t finished my first run through the game yet, but I do keep hearing about NG+. There are all of these factions to check out, some of which should be opposed to happening in the same playthrough as certain other factions, and they built a game around NG+, so why not have you commit to one faction in the course of a shorter game, and then build the opportunity to play through the other factions into NG+?

I’m not hating my time with Starfield so far, but hardly a few minutes go by while I’m playing before its obvious shortcomings annoy me. Most of them I think (and hope) I can easily attribute to their ancient tech that they probably ought to throw straight in the garbage.

You know, it’s funny. My assumptions, which I think I’ve made clear are assumptions when I talk about them, are that Starfield is what it is largely because of technical limitations. I think, if I’m wrong, the remaining possible answers are far more disappointing. Are the side quests bad because that’s what the engine allows them to feasibly build? That sucks; they should ditch their engine. Are the side quests bad because the designers don’t know how to design good quests? That’s worse. You can extend these kinds of assumptions to the way space travel works, the way their conversation system works, etc.

Let’s change that expectation. Baldur’s Gate 3 won best multiplayer at the Game Awards, and it’s not a live service. In a talk with some friends, I realized how antagonistic the relationship between players and developers always ended up as well when the developers make more money with more “engagement”. Diablo IV will get fun builds nerfed into the ground; Baldur’s Gate 3 will let them rock, but only in the pre-existing difficulty levels before they add in extra challenge modes for fun. That’s the difference.

Meanwhile, Agent Under Fire multiplayer for the Gamecube is more fun than any live service FPS I’ve ever played. It certainly didn’t require years of support to be that fun, and you only need one other person to play it with, but preferably 3. Very easily doable regardless of how many people are in matchmaking.

Used to be our favorite single player games came with multiplayer modes attached to them. You didn’t expect them to get years of content. You just enjoyed them for a little while with some friends and then moved on. Not only is that totally fine, I’d argue it’s preferable.

Well, you can stick to instances that federate with Threads even if/when they misbehave then, but having the option not to is pretty great, from my perspective.

I’m a Linux user. That “fragmentation” is probably a good reason for why that hasn’t been extinguished either. So as far as I can tell, yes, I’ll enjoy the resilience that that implies without fear of it being extinguished.

I always saw that as a feature, not a bug. The feature that prevents it from being the last E.