Useless gaming news & chatter

[Soulflame]

Multiple things are killing OW2 for me, and yeah, the battle pass is on that list.

I've been less than enthused about D4 up to this point, and hearing there is a battle pass is not helping my enthusiasm for sure.

[Samwise]

Multiple things are killing OW2 for me, and yeah, the battle pass is on that list.

I only spent about a week in OW2 so the gameplay differences didn't get enough time to annoy me.  Instead, the battlepass tentacles clutching at me and whispering "oh no if you stop playing now you'll miss the weekly achievement" triggered the "hey, I'm not getting paid enough for this" reflex and I just uninstalled.

[schild]

Battlepass isn't even on the list of things that would be problematic with me for Diablo, so no it doesn't enrage me.

[Rendakor]

You're going to play so much Diablo IV that you'll max out the Battlepass on day 1, so obviously it is not a concern to you.

[Soulflame]

If OW2 is any indication, then the primary way of progressing through the battle pass will be accomplishing daily and weekly objectives that reward a chunk of battle pass XP.  It will most likely take weeks to complete, and that will require daily login, complete 3 objectives, plus grit your teeth and do a few things you're not particularly interested in doing to progress your weekly objectives.

Of course, if the battle pass is strictly cosmetics and other non-game affecting nonsense, then it's not relevant.  Can't say I trust Activision to stick to that.

[Samwise]

New users playing OW2 had to grind out some of the characters IIRC, so I'd expect that in Diablo they'll have a couple of classes that are gated that way.  But I'd also expect that the "whales" who are willing to drop $500 on day one will be able to just get the Premium Battlepass that makes the whole thing moot.

[schild]

New users playing OW2 had to grind out some of the characters IIRC, so I'd expect that in Diablo they'll have a couple of classes that are gated that way.  But I'd also expect that the "whales" who are willing to drop $500 on day one will be able to just get the Premium Battlepass that makes the whole thing moot.

the whales get the battlepass with the CE for $100, noob

[Velorath]

New users playing OW2 had to grind out some of the characters IIRC, so I'd expect that in Diablo they'll have a couple of classes that are gated that way.  But I'd also expect that the "whales" who are willing to drop $500 on day one will be able to just get the Premium Battlepass that makes the whole thing moot.

Considering that in D3 they sold the Necromancer class along with a couple other perks for $14.99, a chance to get the class through a battle pass instead would be a step up.

[Falconeer]

I don't like Battle Passes, I find them annoying even when they are relatively harmless.
In Overwatch 2 though it's really not that big of a deal. I play a lot of Overwatch 2 so the Battle Pass can be totally ignored. Eventually I reached level 80, which is the maximum, and then the other cap which I think is 160, without ever paying attention to it. If you play the game (a game) because the game is good, then the Battle Pass with is irrelevant and overall fine. That should be the same with Diablo. But it bothers me more in Diablo 4 because it'll take away visual customization options from the looted gear to funnel it into paid skins (coming from the store AND the Battle Pass). In Overwatch I don't care, in Diablo I definitely do.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Interesting you say that Falc. These days avatar appearance is pretty high on my list in most games, but I really don't care about it at all in D3, because your character is so small and so often completely obscured by rainbow vomit combat effects all over the screen that you can't even tell what class you are, much less if your helm matches your boots.

[Falconeer]

You are not wrong, I don't even notice it once I'm actually fighting. But I am stuck on "paper dolls" since UO and to be honest since childhood (actual paper dolls). I have always had strong feelings for looting something, and see that change my character appearance, even if only in the character selection screen.
Nothing turns me off more than looting a new and powerful piece of gear... that has the same appearance of the one before. In any game.

[Sky]

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/01/marvels-midnight-suns-update-helps-steam-deck-linux/

Let's hope this fix is a good one! Been wanting to play a synced game on Deck, but not wanting to jump through hoops to do so.

I was already directly running the exe to dodge the 2k launcher 

In the latest update they noted this:

General

General performance improvements
General stability fixes
Steam Deck:

Steam Deck Virtual Keyboard fixes
Steam/Deck/Link save fixes, including cloud syncing
Steam Deck stability fixes

[Hawkbit]

Nintendo Direct today.

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom - $70 - 5/12/2023
Metroid Prime remaster - $40 - out today (surprise!)
Dead Cells Castlevania DLC - $10 - 3/6/2023

Other stuff here: https://kotaku.com/nintendo-direct-metroid-prime-pikmin-zelda-totk-trailer-1850090239

Also side note, there are now 8 Picross S games by Jupiter on the eShop, with two more themed Picross games by Jupiter there too. I'm a Picross addict.

[Soulflame]

First three Etrian Odysseys updated for the Switch:   
With automapping: 

[schild]

Picross is the killer app for switch. Otherwise just get a steam deck.

[Rendakor]

The Etrian Odyssey series is probably the best set of Wizardry clones out there. I'm skeptical of how they're handling the mapping, but the games are fantastic.

[Sky]

Rading a thing about a thing that led to another thing, in which was buried this tidbit about ending development on Marvel's Avengers:

When the game’s final patch is released on 31 March 2023, all of the game’s cosmetic content will be made free for all players. Previously, these items had to be purchased with real-world and/or in-game currency, as well as through a battle-pass-style progression system.

I enjoyed the game as a fun little beat-em-up, but hated the locked suits (more fashion = better imo). So...looks like I'll come back to that game at some point, after all.

[Sky]

Oops wrong thread 

[Sky]

To make up for that, here's some possibly awesome news: Starfield gets a launch date, Sep 6 2023. I'm sure plenty of nerds are crying about the slip (again) but I'm all about extending dev time as needed (except for Chris Roberts ofc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raWbElTCea8

Sure hope it doesn't suck! Really looking forward to this one.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I'm excited to see what they do with it.  I hope they don't neglect the modding environment, so others can fix and improve on it for years to come. And I hope it feels like a bigger world than Skyrim without the sameness of being filled with procedurally generated content (exactly like Skyrim and the Fallouts didn't do) that looks good in screenshots and is fun for a few hours but gets samey and boring really fast.  And I hope they fill that larger world with NPCs who aren't cookie cutter copies of each other.  But I worry about which one of those they have to cut corners on to get the game out before Star Citizen.

[Khaldun]

Getting the game out before Star Citizen feels like a pretty easy challenge even without cutting a single corner.

[Count Nerfedalot]

yeah, that was possibly a bit of hyperbole 

[carnifex27]

I hope it feels like a bigger world than Skyrim without the sameness of being filled with procedurally generated content (exactly like Skyrim and the Fallouts didn't do) that looks good in screenshots and is fun for a few hours but gets samey and boring really fast.  And I hope they fill that larger world with NPCs who aren't cookie cutter copies of each other.  But I worry about which one of those they have to cut corners on to get the game out before Star Citizen.

This has been a big concern of mine since they keep marketing with "over a thousand worlds". I'm guessing almost all of them are procedurally generated dungeon worlds, but would be absolutely thrilled to be proven wrong.

[Sky]

I believe I heard it's just limited static maps for each planet, not anything like NMS. Which is probably fine, given how procedurally bland NMS is, in general.

[Count Nerfedalot]

NMS has an impressively wide variety of terrain, sadly almost completely wasted by having only one per planet.

[Sky]

NMS has an impressively wide variety of terrain, sadly almost completely wasted by having only one per planet.

Also very little worth exploring. Procedural generation is great for quantity, not quality. I like NMS and jump in from time to time, but the lack of compelling discovery makes exploration boring and unrewarding.

There may be a middle way, with a massive, biome-based variegated generated planet that contains handcrafted regions (cities/dungeons) worth exploring. But even then, eventually folks would just stop exploring the parts without the handcrafted design, so I come back to the way it seems Starfield is going to handle it.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Maybe. Minecraft is interesting to explore.

[Sky]

Vanilla MC in particular also suffers from lack of unique stuff due to procedural generation. There can be some cool formations on some world gen parameters, but it's just happenstance and there is never anything supporting them (villages or quests or itemization etc). Even modded MC hits the barrier pretty quickly, it just has more elements to distract from the genericness. That's why peak MC for me is the story-based handcraft maps like Blightfall.

It's not a knock, I like big procedural worlds, too. But give me a well-crafted map stuffed with lore and interesting secrets to find, any day.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I'm not arguing against handcrafted being better than procedural, I agree.  Just saying that some procedural stuff can maintain interest longer than others, like Minecraft > NMS.  Also, there are some limited specific cases where procedural content can actually extend the lifespan of a game, such as the dungeons in original Diablo, Rogue, and the like.

[Soulflame]

To the surprise of literally no one, Blizzard unceremoniously announced that they were canceling the PvE coop mode.

[Trippy]

GJ destroying the formerly thriving eSports scene for the feature you couldn't deliver.

[Count Nerfedalot]

To the surprise of literally no one, Blizzard unceremoniously announced that they were canceling the PvE coop mode.

um, what game are you talking about? Starfield has never claimed to have multiplayer and Diablo most definitely has it.

[Trippy]

Overwatch 2. The whole point of releasing a "new" game was for the PvE as the PvP in OW2 is almost identical to 1 (PvP is basically "1.5").

[Soulflame]

Overwatch 2. The whole point of releasing a "new" game was for the PvE as the PvP in OW2 is almost identical to 1 (PvP is basically "1.5").

As Trippy said, OW2.

Don't forget they added predatory monetization in the form of a battlepass and a mostly functional store for skins!

[Trippy]

OW2 is F2P, though, so they do need some sort of monetization scheme.