MudMan

Well, I don’t know that Larian is the problem. They don’t own the D&D or the BG license and they´re moving on from both, apparently. That said, I don’t know how willing they are to license their engine. I’m guessing not particularly, since they haven’t done it so far, to my knowledge.

Sure.

Again, people seem to be reading this as saying “don’t mod, develop full games”. Not what it says. I’m saying “if your mod is bloating so much you have a full team of developers working at speed it may be worth considering making a standalone game instead”.

In some cases you only get there a long while into working on a mod and it’s worth releasing that, getting some visibility and then moving on to standalone stuff instead, but mods that could have been a full-on release are relatively frequent, and I don’t like it when artists get paid in exposure by speculatively making games for someone else.

“One or few programmers” is the key part of that, though. I’m not saying every modder should get into game development out of the gate. Modding is a great way to dip your toes into gamedev without having to do all the teambuilding and groundwork of putting together every piece of a game.

But some mods get so big they do have a full-on dev team. Nothing wrong with spending some time getting proof of concept that the team can do the job, but if you’re spending years with a full team completely overhauling a game… I mean, get paid, man. You’re doing a whole ass job at that point.

It didn’t, technically, but it WAS originally build on the Neverwinter Nights toolset/engine. A licenced version, then modified. Which is sort of my point. Why mod if you have a big group of devs and you’re working at speed? Just pay to license the toolset you’re using and ship a game.

I like these, but they’ve been superseded by Windows handhelds for me. Granted, that’s because I have so many devices I use for retro stuff that being able to easily mount a shared folder instead of keeping a million SD cards with the same games is a big bonus and there is just no convenient way to do that on Android (and it strongly depends on your definition of “convenient” on Linux). If you just need the one thing to play a single bundle of old games I’d take the convenience, lower price, small size and long battery life of the 'droid devices.

Yeah, well, that’s why game engines are a thing. I didn’t pick The Witcher at random, that was built on top of Neverwinter Nights tech.

Maybe I’m too stuck in the 90s, but I never quite got the point of doing all those total conversions for Quake games when you could just as well use the exact same tools by licensing the engine and just ship the thing as a game.

Well, no, I’m lying. The point of those total conversions was very often that people wanted to use a bunch of licensed characters they didn’t own, which I guess is the point here as well, so maybe I’ve answered my own question.

I don’t get ballooning mod teams. I mean, at that point why not ship a standalone game? Last time this happened it was called The Witcher and I hear that did alright.

My PC is made from scraps and some of the hardware isn’t that standard. At the same time it’s not new, so I’m not giving Fedora a pass, either. It was not waking up from sleep, getting stuck on some power settings, not taking modifications through the GUI and other stuff. I think I have it working now, we’ll see.

That was on my third attempt, too. I really don’t like distro hopping.

And yet the anger is new. Again, it’s about perception, not reality.

Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.

That doesn’t mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.

Not gonna lie, that one led to some introspection and I thank you for the opportunity.

Be honest, you were ready to do some hounding, saw that tackled preemptively and decided to pivot. I can see the hounding intent from here. Those ears are so droopy you’re becoming a better boy as we speak.

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with clickbaity coverage and headlines. Credit to Polygon for being just as obviously opinionated as Gamesradar but titling and writing their piece way more professionally.

I mean, yeah, Ubisoft’s lawyers are arguing that the arguments of a lawsuit against them are wrong, that’s hardly surprising. Given that they’re being sued for taking down an online game they would certainly argue that they had no obligation to keep the game online indefinitely.

It’s an interesting case and there are… creative arguments on both sides, but being mad that Ubisoft would argue that the text of their EULA applies seems so weird.

For the record, and because I’ll be hounded for this, I’ve signed all relevant petitions to request regulation about digital ownership that creates an obligation to provide offline versions or access to server code. I’m all for making it illegal to build planned obsolescence into software. That doesn’t mean I’m not bothered with bad journalism that I happen to agree with.

That’s nice. Gamecube replicas are a bit of a niche case, but there are plenty of expensive fight sticks that would be great to use if compatible. I guess we’ll know for sure once it’s out.

This is true.

It’s also true of the partial download carts for Switch 1 that don’t include a full playable version of the game in the cart.

Presumably the digital back-compat on the Switch 2 means the Switch will live a lot longer usual for Nintendo platforms, and we don’t know if there will be a backwards compatible Switch 3.

But in practice, this is just an iteration of the Switch 1 version of the same thing. It’s not great. I avoided both the mandatory download carts and will likely avoid these ones, but it’s not a bigger deal than it has been for the past five years or so.

They said it about the DS at the time. It was meant to run in parallel with the GBA as a “premium” thing for adults. They said it about the SNES, too, actually.

This bit of random outrage is fun to me because it’s something that has been Nintendo’s official stance since the early 90s, but it’s swung back around due to Don Mattrick being such a charisma black hole that what used to be the natural, go-to response to “how come the new, more advanced version is more expensive” has now become a genuine snafu.

PR is not about reality, it’s about perception.

I genuinely can’t tell if milking outrage is more prominent in gaming than elsewhere. I guess not, because… I mean, look at the planet in general, but it does feel like gamers got to that state of mind first and do it best, at least.

So it seems this may just refer to “official support” and the piece of news is at least misinformation-adjacent, but it does make me wonder if there is any forwards compatibility with the Pro Controller. There are plenty of solid alternatives for Switch 1 and that wasn’t particularly picky about taking in third party devices.

Not sure if anybody has brought it up in the news deluge.

I’m confused. The article you linked seems to very clearly agree with me:

In terms of performance, the Switch 2 is clearly more powerful than the Steam Deck before we even start talking about cooperation with NVIDIA, DLSS upscaling, and tighter game optimizations possible when developing for a fixed console hardware platform.

I mean, yeah, that tracks and is verifiable. It’s a more power hungry APU (although admittedly on a larger node), it has more cores on both the CPU and GPU side, a higher resolution and framerate screen. Storage seems to fall somewhere between the cheaper and more expensive Deck models and, while it has less memory it’s also… you know, a console, so there’s presumably less overhead and the RAM itself is a bit faster, which is very relevant to APUs. The Switch 2 is built on Ampere, while the Deck is on RDNA 2. Both launched in 2020, but I think it’s not controversial to say that Nvidia had the edge on both features and performance for that gen.

It is absolutely true that Nintendo traditionally latched on to older, less performant components paired with hardware investment elsewhere, but the Switch was a huge outlier there. If you consider it against handhelds it stood alone as the single most powerful one. Granted, the Vita was the closest comparison and that was a whole generation behind, but I can’t stress enough how outclassed it is against the original Switch. The need to push a TV display from a mobile chipset ended up making the Switch a genuinely beefy handheld.

The Switch 2 is interesting because besides iterating on that requirement it also seems like a very deliberate response to the Deck and PC handhelds. It seems intentionally designed to be competitive against the current set of those. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Nintendo pushed the price and performance up a bit specifically for that reason, frankly. It seems egnineered specifically to not feel outdated at launch, even if it will presumably be outclassed again in a couple of years.

And for the record, I’m not “white knighting” Nintendo. They’re famously ruthless, litigious and quirky bordering on unreasonableness. Not white knighting (or grinding an axe against) Valve, either. They’re also ruthless and quirky bordering on unreasonableness, although clearly much, much better at PR with core gamers. I am actively hostile towards Nintendo’s approach to a number of things (primarily emulation) and to Valve’s approach to a number of things (primarily their gig economy approach to game development and their monopolistic tendencies). Not rooting for one of them doesn’t mean I’m rooting against either of them, or that I don’t acknowledge the things they do well or poorly.

I legitimately thought you were talking about Nintendo hardware there for a while.

As far as we can tell the Switch 2 seems like it’s a bit ahead of the Deck, which is on the low end of the current batch of PC handhelds anyway. I don’t think the quality of hardware is the differentiating factor here, one way or the other. I also don’t think “anemic” was what the Switch felt like at launch. It was somewhere between the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, which was only slightly inadequate for a home console and incredibly bulky for a handheld in 2017. “Not pushing any interesting boundary” is somewhere between extremely opinionated and outright incorrect, quite frankly.

I have to say, it’s a bit surprising to see all the hostility from… I don’t know who this is. PC master race bros? Steam fanboys? You’d think that last group at least would have some fondness for the Switch, given it effectively invented the entire segment of modern hybrid handhelds. Not that I have a horse in that race, there are pros and cons of both, I own both and I think both are pretty great. The Deck effectively replaced the Switch on my rotation, then it got replaced by a Windows handheld and I assume the mix will lean slightly more towards the console end when then Switch 2 comes out, then swing back when newer PC handhelds come out. I am fine with that.

I find the last point interesting, though. What IS a “cultivated garden” platform? I don’t know that I think of Steam in those terms at all. Steam is a software platform that just happens to be tied to someone else’s hardware and OS and seems very unhappy about it. From the perspective of a PC user I think Steam’s dominance is a problem. For one thing because my storefront of choice is GOG (screw DRM, thanks) and for another because the entire point of an open platform is competition. From the perspective of a console user Steam is… well, not that. It’s a PC gaming thing, so I don’t see it as direct competition in the fist place. Which I guess is why I’m more weirded out than anything else to see people taking sides this aggressively.