Community MetaSteam | January 2023 - A new season begins

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LEANIJA said:
Here's a short list of games I never played or only played for less than 30 minutes:

  • Team Fortress 2
  • CounterStrike 2
  • DOTA 2
  • Halo games
  • Fortnite
  • Unreal Tournament
  • Zelda games
  • Sonic games

and theres way more popular/iconic/classic franchises I never played because I hardly ever played on consoles (never owned one myself apart from a used PS3 for a while, and hardly ever played on that) and Im also not big into multiplayer/team based games (apart from WOW and Overwatch 1).

Conclusion: different people, different tastes/interests :p
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It's not even that I'm not interested, back in 2011 I didn't have a proper PC, and by 2015 I was just too intimidated by it lol
 
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LRB1983 said:
The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund now owns 6.07% of Nintendo's shares. If the West regulators does not see that the parameters with which they compete in the global market of countries with this type of regime such as China or the oil countries, it has a serious problem.
That said, I am still amazed that not only Nintendo allowed themself being bough this way, step by step, which is already surreal, but Japan itself allows the operation. The SNK thing was already sad not long ago : (.
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Its capitalism.
 
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Kyougar said:
Its capitalism.
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No, this has nothing to do with capitalism. It's more like arbitrary and capricious standard.
Regulators
The regulators acted against Microsoft with the dominant position of Internet browsers, they acted against them for Windows monopoly now they act against Microsoft for the purchase of Blizzard/Activision but they do not lift a finger against the dominant position of Unreal -Epic- with graphics engines, or its matrix company Tencent, and the acquisition a lot of studies. Japan itself acted precisely in the dismantling of Toshiba but now they do nothing when a big japanese active is sold to an oil producer country.
It has more to do with bribing regulators as seen in the awarding of the Olympics, as happened with Russia or the recent cases of corruption of the European Parliament's politicians with Qatar.
 
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LRB1983 said:
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot didn't boot on Steam Deck last time I cheked it but today worked well natively.
So ready for the imminent new DLC ^^.
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This happens quite often, a game doesn't work and the next day it works perfectly fine because there was a random proton update, happened to me with Chrono Trigger haha
 
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LRB1983 said:
No, this has nothing to do with capitalism. It's more like arbitrary and capricious standard.
Regulators
The regulators acted against Microsoft with the dominant position of Internet browsers, they acted against them for Windows monopoly now they act against Microsoft for the purchase of Blizzard/Activision but they do not lift a finger against the dominant position of Unreal -Epic- with graphics engines, or its matrix company Tencent, and the acquisition a lot of studies. Japan itself acted precisely in the dismantling of Toshiba but now they do nothing when a big japanese active is sold to an oil producer country.
It has more to do with bribing regulators as seen in the awarding of the Olympics, as happened with Russia or the recent cases of corruption of the European Parliament's politicians with Qatar.
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but there is no regulation on just owning shares of a company, it would only matter if they try to take over the company.
 
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LRB1983 said:
No, this has nothing to do with capitalism. It's more like arbitrary and capricious standard.
Regulators
The regulators acted against Microsoft with the dominant position of Internet browsers, they acted against them for Windows monopoly now they act against Microsoft for the purchase of Blizzard/Activision but they do not lift a finger against the dominant position of Unreal -Epic- with graphics engines, or its matrix company Tencent, and the acquisition a lot of studies. Japan itself acted precisely in the dismantling of Toshiba but now they do nothing when a big japanese active is sold to an oil producer country.
It has more to do with bribing regulators as seen in the awarding of the Olympics, as happened with Russia or the recent cases of corruption of the European Parliament's politicians with Qatar.
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It's capitalism, you just don't like who's playing the game.
 
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Mor said:
Sadly it seems to be Asia exclusive again, so, region lock incoming most likely
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While I don't want to give false hope, the same thing could have been said about SRW30 and we know how that went (and SRW usually has way more issues with licensing). An english Asia only release can still end up being a worldwide Steam release with Bamco. Let's wait until the Steam page is up before throwing the towel
 
I'm late for the achievements talk but I don't really care about them or go out of my way to find them.

That being said, I can't hide I usually get more than a bit annoyed when I finish a game and it shows something like 30/31 achievements unlocked! When it's 1 or 2 missing it drives me up the wall. Can't really explain why.
 
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Panda Pedinte said:
The talk about having played or not TF2 made me look when the game was released, it was in October 2007 and that made me feel old.
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I would have guessed a bit later than that, but not by much. I recently realized how old the Orange Box was (when I played Portal RTX and checked when I played the original).

Talking about old, personally, I've never played TF2 or Fortnite or CSGO or DOTA or LoL or PUBG for that matter.
I did however play a bit of CS (without the GO), back when LAN parties with literal CRT monitors were a thing.

#getoffmylawn
 
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I've always been more of a single player person, so my first real experience playing any multiplayer PC game was Counterstrike over LAN during college (in PC cafes near school).

There was a point where it became almost a social requirement to know how to play CS - it didn't matter if you were a nerd or not, even the athletes played Counterstrike. The OG layouts for Dust, Office and Mansion are permanently burned into my brain, I'll remember those maps till the day I die (and not by choice, lol).
 
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Durante said:
I would have guessed a bit later than that, but not by much. I recently realized how old the Orange Box was (when I played Portal RTX and checked when I played the original).

Talking about old, personally, I've never played TF2 or Fortnite or CSGO or DOTA or LoL or PUBG for that matter.
I did however play a bit of CS (without the GO), back when LAN parties with literal CRT monitors were a thing.

#getoffmylawn
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As long as we're talking olds.

Not playing TF2, SSGO nor PUBG is very old indeed. I played Quake Team Fortress back when there was the medic exploit where you could be on no team and you could infect both teams, but I also played those games I called out when they were new.

Le Pertti said:
Feeling old, i played Doom multiplayer over 33.6 modem!
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LEANIJA said:
we played Duke Nukem 3D LAN multiplayer in the IT room at my school once ;) also Unreal Tournament, which was the only time I played that game.

also with CRTs ;)
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Jealous of the modem owners here.
 
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Only old people remember getting yelled at every single day for keeping the phone line busy with the modem beep-boops while struggling to play multiplayer without lag. Back then the world was divided into HPBs and LPBs and I bet half of you don't even know what those acronyms mean. I'm about to complete 40 laps around the sun this week and god damn I feel old.
 
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I played through Pentiment this past week and really enjoyed it. The things that immediately stand out are the setting and the art style of course, but there are also some other aspects that I really liked. It is one of those rare RPGs that takes place in a single location (one town and it's outskirts) which allows the creators to infuse a lot of depth into the setting and characters. It is steeped in real European medieval history and folklore. There are loads of characters and while not all of them are important to the actual story, they all play a part in giving the town a feeling of being real and alive, especially because you encounter multiple generations of families through the game. There are so many small and subtle touches in the game that you will observe and appreciate. I really, really wish more RPGs focused on small but well fleshed out hub locations instead of the norm which is usually big, varied maps with nearly no depth or lots of repetition.

The second aspect of the game I really liked was that you cannot actually complete every quest in one play through. It's somewhat like The Last Express where the game world is progressing around you and there is only so much you can experience depending on your choices. The character traits you choose for your character will let you obtain some information while locking you out from learning other things. When you choose to go somewhere you will possibly miss out on something else you could have done elsewhere. That said, there are no correct answers to any questions the games asks so you are not missing out by not being able to complete all the content. It just means your specific play through is customized according to your choices.

The last thing I liked is that there is a decent amount of depth despite how simplified the RPG systems are. You choose your core attributes and skills once and you never 'upgrade' them while playing. It plays out almost like a 'choose your own adventure' as you just go to different places and talk to people without ever having to do anything more (outside of a few mini games). Despite that, you are always aware of how many ways the game could diverge from the path you are taking and also how the designers have worked to ensure that your game never gets derailed because you missed out on some information or outcomes. It's pretty short as well... about 12-14 hours to play through it. I always like that because it allows the game to have a focused narrative that doesn't overstay it's welcome. I don't actually think the game has much replayability because the story itself is pretty linear. In that regard it's a tier below a game like Alpha Protocol which was also about 15 hours long but was endlessly replayable.

So my question is why did no one play the game? It was reviewed really well by both critics and the Steam community, but from what little metrics we know and can extrapolate from, it doesn't seem like it did well. It has a 1250 peak CCU on Steam which is kind of pathetic. There are porn games that do 4x that (not to demean adult games. They just have a limited audience and are taboo in general).

There was a time when an Obsidian release used to be an event and everyone would be interested in it. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Last year they had two releases - Grounded and Pentiment - and both were seemingly ignored even though they reviewed quite well. Before this they had Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 and the latter did poorly by their own admission. I wonder what's going on. For Pentiment the reasons seem fairly straightforward. It released at the end of the busy season after all the big releases had taken away everyone's attention. Maybe everyone who was interested played it on Gamepass. I talked about this with a friend of mine who reviews games and he shared his perspective. He said that reviewers mostly don't care about day one Gamepass games because those reviews drive no traffic to their sites. Someone interested in those games will probably just play them on Gamepass instead of checking a review for them. He said Microsoft completely failed in marketing the game and sent it out to die with only a couple of tweets talking about it. Also this game (along with Grounded) are sub-$60 releases which meant no physical copies were made and that might have affected sales. He said that GOTY awards matter to get the game out in front of people and for that companies have to get reviewers to play and remember the games. Microsoft apparently just didn't do enough to ensure that. If you wanted to review the game on PC they sent Windows store codes instead of Steam keys and that's one more level of friction that might have resulted in fewer reviews. And just generally Xbox has by far the lowest mindshare among the 4 major gaming platforms. Microsoft doesn't seem to care though and they're just happy to continue to fill out the Gamepass library. I really do wonder how they do their cost-benefit calculations when it seems like they are happy to let games just fail commercially as long as Gamepass continues to grow.

TLDR: Pentiment is a nice game and you should play it.
 
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For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely.

"Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realised how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, 'Oh, that's, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there,'" she said.
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www.theguardian.com

Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around

More than 130,000 people were joining the new independent social media network a day in November. So why hasn’t it taken off?
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Yeah no shit, it's what I've been writing ever since I checked out Mastodon. It's hard to use and looks like a website for tech nerds.
 
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fantomena said:
www.theguardian.com

Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around

More than 130,000 people were joining the new independent social media network a day in November. So why hasn’t it taken off?
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Yeah no shit, it's what I've been writing ever since I checked out Mastodon. It's hard to use and looks like a website for tech nerds.
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Don't know if I agree about the tech nerds part, but I do find its interface needlessly complex compared to any other social media platform.
Maybe I'm just too old for social media anymore
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Mastodon's structure is confusing at first because it literally works different than Twitter, but "hard" isn't the word I'd use to describe it because the interface is pretty much twitter, lol.

The confusing part is most people including me didn't know wtf is "decentralized social media" and how/why it's built on it, just like kids these days would be confused of wtf IRC is, on top of that it's a network that requires effort to find content.
 
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