Xbob42

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

The issue I take with Valve’s margins is that by and large, it’s because they were first to the scene.  Yes, there is a value add with their efforts with the Deck/Linux, and the way they’ve expanded the storefront.  But I’d honestly trade all that in a heartbeat if I could for a Valve that was serious about making games again.  This is what happens when competition dies, a reduced focus on bringing homegrown creativity to the table, and centering your business about leveraging others’ work.  So of course they’d keep the standard rate that existed before digital distribution.  
 

Because they’re first and stayed first, they’re deserving of their cheese.  Lol, sure.

All this talk of what they "deserve" is so idealistic and disconnected from reality. Netflix has raised their prices every year for ages and the quality of their offerings has only gone down. Top Ramen went from dirt cheap food for poor people to hilariously expensive for being waxed cardboard. EA has charged full price as they rerelease a slightly more broken version of [name any game they make here] for decades.

No one is "deserving" of anything in this regard, that's a borderline children's fantasy as a concept in the world of business. They have all the leverage and that's literally all that matters. It's not about deserving or what you offer or anything like that. You can bet your ass nothing EGS does is worth their 12% cut, not even close. Nothing MS or Sony does is "worth" the 30% cut and you can bet your ass every publisher under the sun would scoff at their "support" if it meant keeping that 30%.

Conflating idealistic wishes with actual business is so bizarre and it's really funny how everyone keeps making excuses for the console manufacturers when it's the exact same shit, lol.

Also I would not trade any of that for a Valve that focused solely on games again. I like Valve games, but getting one real good game every 4-6 years is not something I care too deeply about when I'm already inundated with leagues of amazing games every other month nowadays.

3 hours ago, crispy4000 said:

They hyped up that Queen’s Blood tournament a lot for how easy it was.

Oh don't worry, there's Queen's Blood challenges later on that will slap your dick real good.

I guarantee you that getting your game in front of hundreds of millions of people is a lot more value add than EGS or whatever only taking 12% for most indies. I don't know how much "support" or what form that "support" takes from Nintendo, MS or Sony, but apparently most industry devs think the Steam cut is worth it, including ones that went running from Steam at one point, many of whom opened up their own shops. And some who've had their own shops for longer than Valve, like Blizzard. Including Sony and Microsoft. Including every Kickstarter indie game ever, and pretty much every notable indie game ever. Seems to me there's clearly value there.

But again, that's not my fight to fight. You sell your game, and I'll buy it. I'm not going to go out of my way to buy it in a way that maximizes your profit because come on dude, don't sign up with anything you don't agree with if it's going to hurt your bottom line. This is way overcomplicating the simple "you sell, I buy" nature of these business transactions. Do as you please of course, but please don't expect me to give a shit about the revenue cut someone is making. I expect these people to be smart and competent adults who are making decisions that they hope to be in their best interests.

To me, if things are so dire that paying industry standard rates to be on an extremely popular platform is enough to put the "squeeze" on your indie studio (but not all the other platforms??) then Jesus, fuckin' figure it out, man. 

I don't get how you type that up and think "and so Valve should willingly make a lot less money for no reason" lol

I'm sure Sony gives a lot more support than Nintendo, but you sure as shit don't see Nintendo lowering their rates. Epic offers more on their (vastly inferior and vastly less popular) platform, but the only reason they have that platform is because they filled their diapers over not being able to keep more of their Fortnite money, so clearly making a lot of money is important to them, so I don't buy their EGS "altruism" for one second. If EGS had actually accomplished its goal of ousting Steam, I could see those rates "unfortunately needing to rise" each year, bit by bit. We'd stop hearing about how hard it is for developers to make money and start hearing all these details about server costs and account maintenance and how much it costs to keep an army of support and IT around, etc.

Again, from a dev perspective, I totally get why you want more money. Yet from a platform holder perspective, I also get why you want more money. It, as always, is a matter of power. And Valve holds it, while Epic wishes they did. As a consumer, I really don't care that much either way, these are business deals for the suits to fight, our opinions are completely irrelevant, but I do think it's funny that the argument is always basically Valve should just make less money for some reason.

If you figured out how to improve your company's profits by 5%, you might be promoted to CEO. If you decided to lower your company's profit by 12% or more, they might feed you to piranhas. 

I keep trying to get into the first game, as I typically like to play through one game before playing the next (fun to compare what's changed/improved/regressed) even though I watched the story via some analysis review years ago. But man... I just can't get into it. I just hate the pawns, I hate how when anything casts a spell it takes a million years (making spellcasters boring as shit by just standing there is the lamest way to go, see Black Desert Online for how to make a caster play like a fucking beast) -- and I'm not even a caster! Just standing there waiting for my pawns to finish some shitty heal spell takes like 5+ seconds for a heal that only restores a certain part of my health bar. Meanwhile I can snack on 500 herbs I picked in a pause menu to heal faster and with less risk. So weird.

But those are just quirks I can deal with. The real problem is I can't get invested in anything. I don't care what any NPC has to say, I don't care about any of these quests, the world feels brown and dead and it's not fun to traverse.

Like, the actual part where I'm fighting, as I said years ago, is good! But it's like wading through a swimming pool filled with pig shit to get to a candy bar.

That said, gonna keep trying. Maybe it'll finally click. Either way, I'm looking forward to the second game regardless, as I assume they've improved a lot since then. Also I hope there's a pugilist class and you can put one pugilist on each side of that Sphinx and speedbag punch her tiddies.

3 hours ago, TwinIon said:

Apple based their 30% cut on the horrific carrier controlled app distribution of the early 00s and Valve based theirs off of the cost of physical distribution. At the time, neither was really a bad deal. Now that digital distribution has become the norm it's basically unjustifiable for that high of a cut to become standard and the only reason that fees have remained that high is monopoly control.

 

If you're selling a product outside of one of those monopolies, fees go down very quickly. Etsy runs a store, and their fee is 6.5%+payment processing, so call it 10%. On Squarespace once you're paying them more than $23/month the transaction fees go to zero and you're only paying the 3% payment processing fee. If you're only paying for their cheapest plan, then their fee is 10% (which includes payment processing). Those are imperfect comparisons and I'm well aware that Steam offers a bit more value than just a website, but it's not 27% more value.

 

Sweeney and Epic aren't saints and I'm not necessarily defending them, but these fees are way higher than they should be and I think it's bad for consumers that they've persisted for so long.

How much do Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony charge?

Last I checked, it was 30%.

Thus, industry standard.

Also last I checked, Fortnite is available on all of those platforms, didn't hear Sweeney pitch a bitch about that.

Not wanting to pay 30% makes a lot of sense, picking and choosing when it's "okay" to pay 30%? Ehhh.

Wanting Valve to just give up a huge portion of their main revenue "just because" is really funny though.

24 minutes ago, Biggie said:

I prioritize sleep over gaming. My games ain’t going anywhere. But fuck feeling like shit the next day.  

Feeling like shit in the morning is what keeps me ALIVE!

9 hours ago, legend said:

Played through the gears and gambits main mini games. Pretty fun. But you know would make it even more fun? No arbitrary timers!  

 

The timer seemed much more forgiving in this one, but I stand by it being a shit game design! It would have been far more interesting to remove it and just keep the waves coming until someone died.

Know what cemented in my mind that Unicorn Overlord will never be for me? When I not only used the auto-gambit function for Gears and Gambits, but when you unlock the hard mode, it says "now you can't use auto-gambit" so I was just like "fuck you I'll use the same set the AI already made for me" and brute forced my way through the hard modes like that.

1 minute ago, best3444 said:

 

I don't know how you do it with that many hours. You must not get any sleep. 

It usually goes something like last night:

Think I've got maybe 20 minutes left, continue despite it being 1AM

Play for 2 hours

Realize I've actually got 3+ hours left

Go to sleep late and wake up feeling like absolute dog shit

Alright, just finished up. 138 hours, but I did all the side content. I kinda feel like at the end they did what they did with Remake, where they stretch like 5 minutes of content into 5 hours, but it is what it is!

"How dare you demand the industry standard you cocksuckers??"

10 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

Forget the other noise, everything concerning Kyrie is truly the worst addition to Remake/Rebirth.

Kyrie's the best, she slots into a story about evil corporations destroying the planet perfectly. She's the album company copyright claiming all the work you did!

24 minutes ago, BasemntDweller2 said:

 

K.

Look at this aggression!

1 minute ago, legend said:

 

Yeah I did eventually realize that it was very literal and did better at it after that. But there was something super weird about it where for some of them my mind would want to read their other side as being more "open" even though technically the other arm was "lower."   Something about the pose seemed weird. I don't think I ever quite put my finger on why it intuitively signaled the exact opposite to me for some of the opponent models.

Yesss, I had the exact same thought. To me that "lower" arm seems more like it's in the way, guarding the character, whereas the other one is usually pulled back!

53 minutes ago, BasemntDweller2 said:

 

 

I was speaking more to tufuck's response. 

Was his response an attack? Goddamn dude, next time you better jump in front of the quote before it kills the poor man.

6 hours ago, best3444 said:

You guys and your damn mini games. I don't understand how you can stand them. 

 

I completely dropped this game because of them. I haven't played in days and hope to get the will power to beat this before the GOTY comes out in the 22nd. 

It's fun to do lots of little things. There's nothing to "stand," it's like asking why people have fun at a casino, which is just minigames for people who want to lose their house. The idea of someone enjoying video games but not minigames makes my brain hurt. It's just a miniature game inside the game!

As for the Fort Condor timer, the trick for me was the neutral cleric units -- you sneak one or two in near your towers every once in a while, and eventually you have a nice little stack of them dealing damage but also healing your actual damage dealers. Them keeping your hard hitting units alive is the trick to not just getting fucking wrecked. You'll have a ton of trouble winning if you're not keeping thick meaty stacks of units alive. 1-2 fellas walking down the lane ain't enough. And taking advantage of fact that your placement line is pushed out farther once your units get deep enough into enemy territory (and no enemies are behind those lines, since they move it back) means you can also just straight up place catapults and shit right up against the enemy base. Once the big tower was targeting something else, I always started spamming these buildings.

To beat the timer, it's about stacking overwhelming damage, not necessarily countering every little thing the enemy does. Sometimes I'd just leave a lane unguarded except for a single unit to eat damage while I built an army on the other side. Depended on the stage.

Of course, no need to bother if you're not enjoying it! Plenty of other stuff to do, just an optional thing.

On 3/10/2024 at 11:20 AM, legend said:

 

I didn't find that one so hard. I did find the 3D brawler pretty tough though. I apparently am really bad at reading "which arm is down" when it's your turn to strike  

Haha, I know what you mean, I was bad at this at first too, because the wording was a bit strange. It literally means just look at which arm is hanging lower once the enemy is "tired" and has that blue aura. You have like a full 3 seconds to swing, so no need to rush it. At first I thought they were talking about during punches or something, as I kept thinking about the original minigame which was just "fuck you": the game.

Oh boy, just got the

materia... time to become the ultimate glass cannon!

Ahahaha, the chocobo ability in the

region is great. So dumb, so fun!

27 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

What are you talking about? I was just forced in a Chocobo race to move the story along. Plus the mini-games to get to that section. The Golden saucer is one big mini game lol. 

Yeah, you do some to move the story along. If you think that's even remotely close to all of the minigames, Mr. Mainlining the Story, you'd be in for a rude awakening if you actually tried to 100% each zone! There's entirely unique minigames dedicated to most of the protorelics, with hard modes!

8 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

100%! I'm careful to point out my concerns as a taste thing rather than an issue with the game itself for this reason. Plenty of folks love this stuff, but it irritates me personally. I also find the GTA series to be a complete yawn, but a *few* folks disagree... 

I mean, I've always found Rockstar games to be big snoozefests. Even when watching people who love the games play them, I feel like half the time they're barely even paying attention. Because nothing that happens is terribly interesting or fun!

2 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I know FFVII  OG had a lot of mini games, but, for my tastes, Rebirth has just too many. I also realize that many are optional, but they are still dragging down the story and combat for me after logging 30 hours. 

Big opposite for me. JRPGs are all about the minigames. Glad to see they went all in for Rebirth. Remake was so fucking dull in comparison. Darts... breaking boxes... I guess the motorcycle part technically counts? It was just hallways, combat, mostly serious story. The opposite of what I want out of any Final Fantasy.

Also, like 90% are optional, there's no way they're dragging down the story. You're choosing to engage with them!

Frankly, I'm glad they're there. While the combat is much improved over Remake, at 90 hours in I like novel things to do, not just fight shit and watch cutscenes over and over. That's exactly what turned me off of Remake.

22 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

I mean, they deserve protection.

 

this board likes to hate them, but in today’s environment they definitely need them. 
 

people keep talking about their awful decisions, but I don’t see them making many. Killing Roe was awful, but when you listen to constitutional lawyers, it was probably the right decision legally. There was nothing in the constitution that supports the original decision of Roe V Wade. Abortion should have been codified into law in 2009, but you couldn’t even get the DNC to support gay marriage back then. 
 

Otherwise they haven’t really made any bad decisions, just decisions the left doesn’t like.

lol @ the idea that anything is "constitutional"

lol @ the idea that we should give a fuck about the constitution over the welfare of our citizens

lol @ thinking they now need extra protection than they have in the last 50 years, apropos of nothing

I loved the addition al Fort Condor challenges. Still sad that Queen's Blood is the main minigame with Fort Condor being a side thing. It takes 700 years for Queen's Blood to start getting interesting, around the time where you get cards that you can drop on top of existing cards.

Abysmal stance, F

Chapter 10: 

One issue I do have is they make it really obvious that the AI just has like a 95% chance to swap to attacking the player character rather than spreading out attacks across all characters that are in combat. This can lead to incredibly silly fights where you swap characters, and despite all the enemies being in the middle of attacks halfway across the field, they, apropos of nothing, all launch their big attacks at a character you switched to half a second ago.

This can also make some combat scenarios incredibly frustrating, especially coliseum-style challenges. This is because in some of those you have a ton of enemies all using a lot of undodgeable, unblockable attacks all at staggered intervals to where if you get hit even once, you can be chain attacked until dead with literally no way to avoid it... with the exception that you swap characters, in which case their minds snap and most of them will stop and change targets. Problem is, the game doesn't communicate how any of this works, so I imagine a lot of people are going to have some very frustrating encounters that they legit won't know how to solve, and the actual solution is patently silly.

I think the entire thing would work a lot better if enemies had a slightly higher chance to attack whatever character is being controlled, after a slight delay (with the delay being shorter and shorter if you're swapping a lot, to prevent cheese) rather than the current solution of "I SAW THE INVISIBLE PLAYER SPIRIT MOVE, GET 'EM" -- that said, I'm playing on Dynamic, this might just be a Dynamic difficulty issue.

There's plenty of ways to help mitigate it: provoke, protect, barrier, swapping, etc. I just think it makes things a little weird.