Community MetaSteam | March 2023 - You know, Wo Leon, we really are the last of March

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DrShrapnel

Shuwatch!
Oct 14, 2021
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Decent bundle, but I already have a couple of the games.
Wonder what the current state is with Graven? Seemed like it had promise, but I couldn’t get into it back when I tried a demo.
 

Futaleufu

Laughing Chojin
Mar 14, 2019
702
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Controversial opinion time: I think that there is a lot of hyperbole these days around "bad PC ports" and that many of the ports aren't actually bad at all. Sometimes games get pushed out the door a bit too early, no doubt at the behest of the publisher, but most PC games today show a level of effort from the developers that was completely absent during the dark times of the late 90s-late 00s.
I remember when games like Megaman X were considered good PC ports.

I remember terrible ports like Xmen Children of the Atom: it was based on the PS1 port which was already mediocre, missing a lot of animation frames, 30 fps, wrong aspect ratio, bad audio and required 16 MB of RAM when the whole arcade game is 32 MB. And a Pentium, when the arcade game ran on a 16 bit CPU at 12 Mhz.

But now: "oh, I got a bit of shader cache stutter, game is unplayable, pc sucks, I'm going back to my console of choice"
 

Alexandros

MetaMember
Nov 4, 2018
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I think the problem has occurred far too often in the last 6-12 months to be dismissed as an infrequent occurrence, at least in the AAA space. Sony alone has released 5 games on PC in the last 6 months (Uncharted, Sackboy, Miles Morales, Returnal, TLOU). Four out of those five have had problems at launch with Spiderman being the only exception. Even outside that one publisher, it really feels like you hear about a lot of PC versions of games having problems at launch. From memory, I can recall hearing about problems with Plague Tale, Gotham Knights, Call of Duty, Callisto Protocol, Midnight Suns, Dead Space, Forspoken and Hogwarts. This is just from the last 6 months. I recall reading about stuttering problems in Elden Ring a year ago.

I think the severity of the problem seems diffused among the PC gamer population because of a variety of reasons. First, there's so many games releasing these days, including indies, that when you account for taste or even budgeting, it's unlikely that a single person will be able to play all of the ones that have problems. Second, due to quirks of various hardware configurations, it is entirely possible that you never experience a problem that is affecting a large number of people or maybe you just brute force through some of them. For me personally, I've never run into the shader stuttering problem because I've played only 2 out of all the games I listed in the previous paragraph - Hogwarts and Call of Duty. Hogwarts was flawless for me, but I do recall reading about how lots of people were having performance issues with it. I think I was just able to brute force through all of that because I have decent hardware. Call of Duty is a whole other story.

One cool thing about this iteration of Call of Duty is that the PC version has more settings options than I've ever seen in any game. In fact, it has so many options that they also implemented a search bar in the options menu just so you can easily find what you're looking for. They put a lot of effort into the PC version and it is truly appreciated. But all that effort is not enough if you don't finish it properly. Because the game was incredibly unstable at launch. There were so many performance and connection problems with cryptic error messages that you would go mad trying to play the game. There was also nothing you could do to fix it and it didn't matter how powerful or weak your hardware was. I can't tell you how many times my friends and I tried to play together and someone or the other would keep crashing non stop. Like, we could not reliably play a full 8 minute match without someone crashing to desktop. All that effort they put into adding 200 different settings options (compared to the 6 options that the PC port of Bioshock had in 2006) meant nothing when people couldn't play the game for 5 minutes at a time. The game eventually stabilized for us with patches and driver updates but there are still people who are experiencing different problems with the game even to this day.

The point I'm making is that I don't think we should accept the current state of affairs because of how much worse things used to be or could be. This is a software quality control problem. It's also not something that happens to the software. It's something the developers do. I understand all software is going to behave in weird ways and break when hundreds of thousands of people start using it. So you expect that you'll have to fix issues that pop up after release. But if you want to tell me that Iron Galaxy and Sony did not know that the game takes 30-60 minutes to compile shaders when you launch the game then I have a bridge to sell you. They were not blindsided by this. They knew. It's why they didn't give out PC review codes to anybody until right before launch. I think you should be super annoyed by how this company is treating you if you are a paying customer.

Why companies treat PC gamers like this is a whole other can of worms I'd rather not open right now. But you know they don't pull this kind of bullshit with the console versions of their games. One, because they make more money there, so they prioritize the Playstation version of any game. Second, because those platforms actually enforce quality standards and they would just not be able to release games there if they tried the nonsense they can get away with on PC. And there's nothing anyone can do about that because there will never be any entity enforcing quality standards on PC. And lastly, because gamers are quite possibly the least discerning consumers around.
See, that's the thing: I review games as a hobby and I have actually played several of the games you mentioned before they even launched. Out of these games, two had serious enough issues on PC: Callisto Protocol and Gotham Knights. The first also had plenty of issues on Xbox and the second was a mess on both consoles and PC.

Out of the rest, most of them were demanding on the hardware or unoptimized regardless of platform (Plague Tale, Forspoken, Hogwarts, Elden Ring), some had quite minor issues (Dead Space, Returnal) and Midnight Suns had shader compilation stutter which was annoying for the first ten or so minutes of the game. At the same time, all of the games that I played had comprehensive graphics menus, support for PC-specific technologies like DLSS and robust stability.

So, it is true that AAA games are pushed out the door prematurely and that's an issue. It's also true that the shader compilation thing is PC specific and as such it creates a bad first impression for games that are impacted. However, having played extensively through several of these games, I disagree with the notion that modern PC games are crap, that publishers and developers don't care about the PC versions and that we've gone back in time to the mid 00's era of disastrous PC ports. There are issues that should be worked on and resolved but I find the general reaction somewhat hyperbolic.
 

dex3108

MetaMember
Dec 20, 2018
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After thinking a bit about it it really looks like that TLoU crashes when loading new areas. As I said before almost all crashes I got were during some scripted moments/cutscenes. First crash I got was basically 5 seconds into the game when Joel is entering house talking on the phone, second crash was when Joel was moving beam in the tunnel to go through squeeze section, third crash was when Joel was jumping from closed section to open one, 4th crash was when Tess was opening door for Joel and 5th one was when Joel and Tess entered warehouse area during the cutscene.

I could see the case where area was loading in the background in all of those cases. So theory could be that game is not flushing previous assets from the memory while trying to load new ones and basically overflows memory and causes crash.
 
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Paul

MetaMember
Jan 26, 2019
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I could see the case where area was loading in the background in all of those cases. So theory could be that game is not flushing previous assets from the memory while trying to load new ones and basically overflows memory and causes crash.
Just to be sure, you don't have windows virtual memory (page file) set to manual (and to some small value, like 2-8GB), right? I had it set to manual (12GB) and the game crashed for me during the shader compilation, but once I changed it to let windows set it, it never crashed again.
 

dex3108

MetaMember
Dec 20, 2018
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Just to be sure, you don't have windows virtual memory (page file) set to manual (and to some small value, like 2-8GB), right? I had it set to manual (12GB) and the game crashed for me during the shader compilation, but once I changed it to let windows set it, it never crashed again.
Page file is set to be controlled automatically on all drives. I tuned settings to be below 8GB VRAM per in game meter that you see in settings when picking options. And game runs great at 70-100 FPS but as I said it crashes basically every time when something scripted or half scripted happens. That is why I think that it's happening when area loads.
 
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spindoctor

MetaMember
Jun 9, 2019
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I decided to ask AI to chime in on our discussion...



Then I wondered what response I'd get if I reversed the question...



AI didn't pay attention to the question when copying their homework...



Are you stupid?



What the fuck are you even talking about at this point?
 

Spookyfriend

Junior Member
Jan 27, 2019
124
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Razer is gonna refund Resident Evil 7 and Village Gold...



in Razer Gold. In other words, they keep your money :(
I pay with CC , if that is the case I am going to raise a raise a chargeback request

This is what Razer Support post on reddit less than 1 hour ago

We are aware of an issue that has arisen with the Resident Evil titles key, and want to assure everyone that our team is actively working on a solution.
We understand the frustration that this has caused our customers and we want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently reviewing the situation and will be reaching out to all affected customers as soon as possible to provide updates and assistance.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work towards resolving this issue.
 

NarohDethan

There was a fish in the percolator!
Apr 6, 2019
9,122
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I pay with CC , if that is the case I am going to raise a raise a chargeback request

This is what Razer Support post on reddit less than 1 hour ago

We are aware of an issue that has arisen with the Resident Evil titles key, and want to assure everyone that our team is actively working on a solution.
We understand the frustration that this has caused our customers and we want to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently reviewing the situation and will be reaching out to all affected customers as soon as possible to provide updates and assistance.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work towards resolving this issue.
Yup, if they try to pull that shit just do a chargeback, it's not that you'd want to buy again from them if that's the case.
 
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tetel

MetaMember
Jan 7, 2020
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I hope we don’t have to wait that much for Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE to get Steam port.
Well, actually, from the recent interview on Gematsu:


Initial announcement said 'first on Switch' so who knows really but that's a bit blunt compared to the usual 'we have nothing to announce'.
Anyway, for comparision, Danganronpa Summer something something came to PC after 8 months or so.
 

Censored

I didn't delete that post!. Get my post back!.
Oct 8, 2021
1,221
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Well, actually, from the recent interview on Gematsu:


Initial announcement said 'first on Switch' so who knows really but that's a bit blunt compared to the usual 'we have nothing to announce'.
Anyway, for comparision, Danganronpa Summer something something came to PC after 8 months or so.
Sad :(
I hope it’s just marketing strategy to avoid people wait for other platforms ports, the game looks very nice. If not yuzu+deck as usual.
 

ezodagrom

JELLYBEE
Nov 2, 2018
1,871
4,894
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Portugal
www.youtube.com
New rumor that the RTX 4070 is going to cost $600.

 

TheGreenArrow

Ask me about my podcast damn it
Nov 20, 2018
417
712
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www.thecellarletters.com
Razer actually replied (probably AI written) mentioning their Razer Gold wallet for the refund, so I immediately asked for a proper refund and contacted Paypal.
The request has been immediatly accepted and got my money back.
Fuck them, next step I'm deleting my razer account
just submitted claim through paypal. I feel scammed lol
 

madjoki

👀 I see you
Sep 19, 2018
3,070
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New rumor that the RTX 4070 is going to cost $600.

Is this out of season april fools?
 

Paul

MetaMember
Jan 26, 2019
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It is actually interesting to compare TLOU and RE4R.

I like both games. RE4R has more interesting/fun game design, in my opinion.
But TLOU has more emotionally resonant, impactful story and unbeatable graphics and general presentation.
Overall I think I would have to give the edge to TLOU, but it is close. I do place a lot of value on story and characters. Leon and Ashley are kind of non-entities compared to Joel and Ellie.
 

d00d3n

MetaMember
Jan 26, 2019
319
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I tried to continue playing Forspoken. I previously thought that the starting sequence in New York had understandable quality issues with how the story was presented (due to being too ambitious), but those kind of issues seem to permeate the game. The arrival in the first populated fantasy city does not give a good impression. Why does the game jump to black screens and shift the camera angle so often? Who thought it was a good idea to lock player control of movement and the camera during extended sequences that make you wonder if the game has crashed? Why does the game open up a type of codex to show added entries during pivotal story moments? Zero thought seems to have been given to immersing the player in the experience, which is too bad, because the world seems quite intriguing. The annoying street smart lingo from the main character sometimes breaks the immersion as well, but I don't understand why reviewers are so preoccupied with that aspect over the glaring design issues with how the story is told.
I continued to play Forspoken and finished it with a lot of optional content completed in about 70 hours. The game probably had some addictive and interesting properties to keep me interested for all that time.

I stand by everything I wrote about the story presentation, which is frankly quite bad. The good news is that the really slow sections with a lot of hand holding, weird camera angles and annoying loss of player control are concentrated in the first couple of hours of the game.

After a certain point, the main story is very much in the background, and free open world exploration turns out to be the obvious focus of the experience. And the open world exploration is pretty decent. Story content is almost non-existent in the open world, so the experience is perfect for having something to do with your hand and your unused brain power when you listen to podcasts. No annoying factory produced Ubi style characters and dialogue to be distracted by! What you do is using an ever expanding arsenal of magical abilities to parkour across the world, upgrading those abilities by performing actions in the world, beating combat encounters ranging from easy to somewhat challenging, solving puzzles, beating mini dungeons, beating bosses, and getting new gear as well as items to upgrade your gear with. For me, that experience was not less engaging than the one I had with Vampire Survivors or the Diablo IV beta. The game is much prettier to look at as well!
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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Unless you literally cannot wait and it's a Nintendo first party game (Mario/Zelda), buying a game like Live A Like Remake and not waiting is stupid.
I find very little difference with you not wanting to wait for Diablo 4 on Steam, and yet I don't say your point of view is stupid.
 
OP
Mor

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,109
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Well, actually, from the recent interview on Gematsu:


Initial announcement said 'first on Switch' so who knows really but that's a bit blunt compared to the usual 'we have nothing to announce'.
Anyway, for comparision, Danganronpa Summer something something came to PC after 8 months or so.
wait and see
 
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fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
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I find very little difference with you not wanting to wait for Diablo 4 on Steam, and yet I don't say your point of view is stupid.
Diablo 4 will not appear on Steam if the merger is blocked and anything can happen with the merger.
 

fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
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Like the last Call of Duty ?
Moot point anyways as right now the merger seems to have a positive outcome.
CoD's Steam page at least appeared during the official announcement of the game and Steams twitter even hinted to it coming. Diablo 4 is coming very soon, there has been an open beta, people can pre-order it on PC, but no sign of Steam release.

Would be a gigantic dick move by Blizzard to suddenly announce a Steam version after people have been able to pre-order it on BNet for a long time.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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So yeah, anyways, I started Paranormasight on a whim yesterday. Not sold on it for now but it still has potential. It's, a little on the basic side for now, but it certainly isn't shit. I wasn't expecting an horror level this low, but it's not automatically a bad thing, as I'm crept out by Japanese horror and not a big fan of jump scares.

My only MAJOR complaint as of right now, which I hope is dependant on the route you are in or if you already reached an ending : there is a fucking huge action you can decide to take a some specific points of the story by using the left trigger, let's call it doing a salto.
Each time I was offered the option, I didn't use it.
Protagnist : Lul, whatever, Salto !
 

sprinkles

Junior Member
Dec 8, 2018
625
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After finally beating Metroid Prime (yay, I can still actually finish games I bought for the Switch), I returned to Chained Echoes last weekend. I had started it a few months ago, but other stuff got in the way. Playing on Steam Deck, now 20 hours in.

At a glance you see the FFVI and Chrono Trigger influences, even a bit of Suikoden got mixed in at the start of Act 2. But the world building feels more like a Trials of game, I am totally loving it. It misses an editorial check or two, but as someone who played Zero/Ao no Kiseki with parts machine translation and still enjoyed the games, I don't mind goofy language here and there that much. Not loving all the characters (Robb is an arse), but having characters to hate on is part of a good story imo (Lenne's brother is a fucking war criminal).

The game's combat ranks among the best JRPG systems I have ever played. No grinding required, buffing/debuffing and then hitting weaknesses feels so rewarding. I can't remember a game where switching party members mid combat made so much sense. I fought some optional (Class Emblem) bosses yesterday. At first I thought I was underleveled/geared and got stomped on but after a few tries of changing the starting party, different skill & ultimate usage I (barely) won. I felt smart.

Plus Act 2 adds Mechs, everything gets better with adding Mechs.
 
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tetel

MetaMember
Jan 7, 2020
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My only MAJOR complaint as of right now, which I hope is dependant on the route you are in or if you already reached an ending : there is a fucking huge action you can decide to take a some specific points of the story by using the left trigger, let's call it doing a salto.
Each time I was offered the option, I didn't use it.
Protagnist : Lul, whatever, Salto !
There's an explanation for that (and for the entire salto system) in the first or second hour of the game (well, in the prologue).
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,870
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There's an explanation for that (and for the entire salto system) in the first or second hour of the game (well, in the prologue).
Checks playtime... Ugh, I knew my reading OCD was acting up yesterday...
This short VN is totally not going to be short for me.
 

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
3,282
11,713
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Guys, I'm doing it



I am switching from my decades old win7 media/surf PC (I have a separate win10 gaming PC) to a little Celeron box
You will always be in my heart Win7 :wd_salute: :loudly-crying-face::wd_heart:

PS: does anyone know where I can find an old office 2010 pro iso? Microsoft pulled all isos and even heidoc has no backups. (key is still good)
 

didamangi

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.
Nov 16, 2018
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Jakarta, Indonesia
steamcommunity.com

Kyougar

No reviews, no Buy
Nov 2, 2018
3,282
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