FFXIV. I was playing it for the story… then Dawntrail happened.

Considering how many websites were temporarily obliterated by the left-pad fiasco, being an npmjs maintainer might be an even higher power-to-effort ratio (by virtue of a near-zero denominator) than being a billionaire CEO.

Marketing is extremely important for a game’s launch because it’s the only opportunity for a game to make a first impression and set expectations, and to gain player goodwill. When an announcement trailer is presented as the final spot on TGA, the audience expects a game worthy of that spot. Geoff did the game no favour by doing that, or by doubling down on twitter. They’ve cocked up the marketing and ruined player goodwill that may have caused some people to overlook the product’s multiple issues on release.

Coming back from that takes a lot of fucking effort (see: No Man’s Sky), which they’re obviously unwilling to give, so why would players waste their time for the promise of a better game? Highguard is a failure of design, a failure of management, and a failure of marketing; and I’m not at all sad that it’s getting flushed down the drain.

It sucks that the first to feel the effects of this entirely predictable failure are the workers.

That would be true in a vacuum, but there have been plenty of examples of “good” games completely fizzling out simply because they were unremarkable in a saturated market. Lawbreakers was a fairly well-received objective-based team shooter with interesting movement mechanics. It was killed off because it couldn’t compete with Overwatch for players’ time. Then there are the countless battle royale games released during the reign of PUBG and Fortnite, and all the wannabe Halo-killers, CoD-killers, WoW-killers… history is littered with the corpses of “good” but otherwise unremarkable games that thought they were the shit.

Highguard isn’t just a failure of a game, it’s a failure on the studio’s part to learn the lesson: players’ time and attention are limited resources, and you need to be exceptional to compete in a saturated market.

They didn’t just make a bet. They made a bet on the horse with broken legs.

“We are absolutely cooked, chat.” - Alan Wake (writer)

Something needs to fill the gaping hole left behind after Concord’s death.

Better not look at the microcode running on your CPU at a higher privilege level than the kernel, then.

It gets fast-paced and exciting when the boss has An Idea on a Friday afternoon that must be completed before the end of the week.

I’d take a confessional booth over an open office floor.

Something about child processes, maybe?

The lesson should have been learned when Lawbreakers died: you can’t release a game that is just “good” into a saturated ecosystem and expect it to succeed. When a game has to compete with six others in the same genre, especially deeply enfranchised titles like Apex or Forkknife, it must be exceptional. Highguard falls well short of that. It’s the most average, design-by-committee, risk-averse, trend chasing, white bread, picket fence product I’ve played in a long time. It’s a glass of lukewarm tap water. It’s unsalted butter on toast. And that’s before Keighley and studio management fucked up its marketing.

If a game has to fail in order for some management type to finally engage that lump of tapioca pudding inside their cranium and let the game system designers create a better game, I won’t shed a tear for it. And if this is what the studio made up of alleged “industry veterans” can achieve, I won’t shed a tear for it either. We need better games, not more of them.

Dead Space 1 remaster. I categorically refuse to give any money to EA (even before the Saudi buyout), and that’s their only game I’m even remotely interested in that isn’t available through alternative channels.

You spent the better part of the week spewing contrarian nonsense. What are you trying to achieve? Are you farming downvotes?

I’m going to guess (this is speculation) that Shotbolt & co. are sanctimonious, self-serving ambulance chaser dipshits. Wolfire and Epic opened the sluice gate and they wanted a slice of the cake in a different jurisdiction. Whatever payout the “gamers” might ever receive (this is NOT speculation) will amount to literal pennies while the lawyers barristers take home millions.

Absolute hogwash.

Even HDR is still “beta” on KDE iirc.

That’s a weird comparison because HDR is never going to happen on X.org (nor probably in the X11 protocol or clients). Wayland is being actively developed and the developers took it from something that can be made to work with some effort and some concessions to something that will reliably work in most cases. The year isn’t 1987 – software isn’t being written by nerds for nerds who can tinker and fix issues or add new features as a patchwork of unmaintainable code.

My home PC, about once a week, or whenever I have to install new software. My work PC, about once a month because the nvidia driver takes fucking ages to update because of DKMS.

As for the servers under my professional care… it depends. Most of the servers that I made run Debian that I update three times a year whenever the downtime is acceptable for the university (spring break, late summer, early december) or if a CVE needs fixing (e.g. xz-utils). One internet-facing server that I inherited still runs Ubuntu 16.04 because some teachers can’t possibly live without some legacy software and will throw a tantrum if upgrading is even mentioned – that one gets zero updates, and I got the dean’s promise in writing that I wouldn’t be held responsible for it.

The big virtualization server still runs ESXi 6 because the university didn’t want to pay for a lifetime license when it was available, doesn’t want to pay for a subscription now, and doesn’t want the downtime required to fully migrate to Proxmox VE. So it gets no updates. Plus it has a bad SSL cert and I need Chromium’s thisisunsafe to bypass the error.

It’s fucking rough out here.

That was the UK.

Wayland has an actual future. It is being actively developed. Issues are being fixed and new features are added at least somewhat frequently. X11 might survive past the heat death of the universe, but it will be a stale, fossilized codebase maintained entirely by a small group of opinionated people.

My work PC has a 3080 and the latest nvidia-dkms in the Arch repo. I haven’t had a single display-related issue for probably a year.