Here is a thread to talk about gaming

[Mercutio]

Do the T&C of the software platform indicate the means of communication? I would think that you want something with records for evidence.

This is mostly for voice communications.
Games may or may not be cross platform. Communication services might be cross platform but only in a single game, platform wide but only for a specific console, or rely on a central service. The most common central service these days is just the one that happens to be something I don't like for a bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with voice communication.

 

[LunarMist]

I would examine the "bunch of reasons" to determine the relevance. Are you making the most rational decision that is best for the business?

 

[Handruin]

One of the problems I have with multiplayer electronic gaming is that every related to communication wants to be in a walled garden.

The consoles all have some kind of chat service and so do many baseline multiplayer titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty or Overwatch. On Windows, you have comms through Steam or Discord, which are both services I've opted out from and good luck trying to convince anyone to use anything else, even if everyone and their brother could just as easily get on Skype or Google Chat or Signal or Rocket.Chat. I've even offered to set up conference calls through my business VoIP lines just so we can all equally hate the experience, but apparently the standard everyone else wants is to speak through a headset to Discord on their phone.

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I dont get why you dislike discord. All of the other options you mentioned are far less convenient and less integrated in the experience of enjoying games with friends. I know you well enough that you've already formed your opinion so I doubt there's any amount of convincing I could do to suggest discord is a good option but I'm also not seeing any compelling reasons to use other services that are far more clunky and offer less benefits for gamers.

 

[Mercutio]

I dont get why you dislike discord. All of the other options you mentioned are far less convenient and less integrated in the experience of enjoying games with friends. I know you well enough that you've already formed your opinion so I doubt there's any amount of convincing I could do to suggest discord is a good option but I'm also not seeing any compelling reasons to use other services that are far more clunky and offer less benefits for gamers.

Discord is a way of burying information, full stop.

Things go in the black hole of Discord and they don't come out. It's one thing if it's a social group sharing memes, but even then, that's something that could be done through a more open platform like Signal or a private Teamspeak server, if someone needs more than five users on the same voice channel. I see groups that want to conduct all social contact through Discord and it becomes infuriating because there are times and places to use E-mail or forums or perhaps even proper documentation instead. These same people then get pissed off or exasperated for not producing a FAQ or something when newcomers pop in to ask the same basic questions that make people desperate enough to install and visit their Discord in the first place.

Discord also sells user data. So do a lot of other things, but that's a down side to being free as in beer.

Were there a way to completely ban all formal organizations from using Discord, I might not have a problem with it, but as it is, it's not doing anything more useful than other chat/voice platforms and I'd rather discourage its use and I choose not to engage with it.

 

[sedrosken]

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I'm not the biggest fan of Discord from the perspective of their application being really bloated JS junkware, but the actually decent clients for it break TOS and I'm not risking getting my nearly 10-year-old account that I actually pay for Nitro for banned over it. I met some of my best friends over Discord though, and while they keep making unpopular decisions, they remain popularly used simply because of momentum. I tried to get a couple people over to a Mumble server I used to run and IRC, but I was, quite literally, laughed at. As you said, good luck getting anyone to use literally anything else these days. Even Steam chat itself is rarely, RARELY used in my circles.

You'll find a lot of the "official" communities often do have FAQs and support sections and such outlined. In a smaller friends-only server segmenting channels too much creates clutter, though. I'm not a big fan of official communities conducting everything through Discords, either, but I wouldn't go so far as to ban the use of it.

 

[Handruin]

I see at least two categories for Discord concerns, one being the closed system for corporate communities, support, discussion, etc that are dark web making it difficult to search. Those I can see an argument against their use of discord.

The other which I mainly use is my own private server instance for local friends and gaming. Managing and meeting up for games, discussions, etc are pretty streamlined vs anything else like gchat, email, slack, whatever. The voice works great and we will often use the integrated screen share and streaming during games to help or show things.

Then there's the integration with using their API and hooks that I use for other tasks and even assisting in homelab management. Adds some nice features that don't easily exist in other communication utilities.

I ran my own mumble instance for a while but it was buggy and never reasonably reliable. I gave that up in 2015 when everyone was moving to discord.

 

[Santilli]

One of the problems I have with multiplayer electronic gaming is that every related to communication wants to be in a walled garden.

The consoles all have some kind of chat service and so do many baseline multiplayer titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty or Overwatch. On Windows, you have comms through Steam or Discord, which are both services I've opted out from and good luck trying to convince anyone to use anything else, even if everyone and their brother could just as easily get on Skype or Google Chat or Signal or Rocket.Chat. I've even offered to set up conference calls through my business VoIP lines just so we can all equally hate the experience, but apparently the standard everyone else wants is to speak through a headset to Discord on their phone.

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I will not tolerate this junk on my computer. Probably why only games I'm using, and not much,
are Call of Duty single player, Oregon Trail.

 

[Mercutio]

Got 700GB of free disk space just sitting there doing nothing?

 

[Mercutio]

Actually upon further exploration, it's ~650GB for DOS games, ~160GB for extras like complete computer magazine articles and ~300GB for games that ran on 16 bit Windows, plus archives for educational titles, Apple II games and all the SCUMM stuff.

 

[Chewy509]

XCOM 2 currently on sale for 95% off, also available as a DLC bundle for 94% off.

Save 95% on XCOM® 2 on Steam

XCOM 2 is the sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the 2012 award-winning strategy game of the year. Earth has changed and is now under alien rule. Facing impossible odds you must rebuild XCOM, and ignite a global resistance to reclaim our world and save humanity.

store.steampowered.com

 

[sedrosken]

This is probably the first time I've ever seen one of these bundles that I've already had the main component of...

 

[Santilli]

XCOM 2 currently on sale for 95% off, also available as a DLC bundle for 94% off.

Save 95% on XCOM® 2 on Steam

XCOM 2 is the sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the 2012 award-winning strategy game of the year. Earth has changed and is now under alien rule. Facing impossible odds you must rebuild XCOM, and ignite a global resistance to reclaim our world and save humanity.

store.steampowered.com

Let it burn...

 

[Mercutio]

X-Com 2 is one of my favorite games, but it also stresses me the fuck out to play in spite of not being as difficult as the ancient DOS X-Com: UFO Defense. The paper doll aspect of keeping your squad looking cool and unique unfortunately leads to a level of attachment that is definitely counter-productive to a game where your team is never really out of danger until the last Muton is dead. X-Com 2 is also a game that absolutely shines for having mods installed. It's almost infinitely replayable just because of that.

The newer X-Com Chimera Squad on the other hand plays very quickly; I can finish the entire game over the course of a week, mostly because I can play each mission in about 20 minutes instead of the two hours of carefully moving over a single map. I like the game either way, but being a lighter game means that it's less commitment.

The same team at Firaxis made Marvel's Midnight Suns, which was a give-away title from Epic last winter. I liked the tactical game but I hated the cut scenes and story aspect. I'm glad I didn't buy that title.

sed, have you tried Knulli on your Anbernic handheld? Knulli lets your run DOS games via Portmaster and it works really well with the massive collection of DOS stuff I linked to last week.

 

[ddrueding]

I made it part of the way through X-Com 2, but like Merc, I get attached. I would actually prefer to start over rather than go on after someone on my team died.

My Satisfactory 1.0 server has logged 180 hours since it launched 20 days ago? My OCD loves this game.

 

[Mercutio]

My favorite games are mostly turn based strategy. Battletech, X-Com and even Baldur's Gate are the way I like to play.

My partner is for some reason playing Stellaris on Xbox. That is a game that should not ever be played with a gamepad. That game should not exist for consoles. Every third time she presses a button, she starts cursing that she hit the wrong one.

 

[ddrueding]

I love Stellaris, though I only have about 600 hours on it. Just like with Civilization, the one city/planet/smol thing is my jam.

 

[Chewy509]

I had only played the original XCOM back in the day, and had XCOM2 on my Wishlist for a while as I was aware it does come on sale occasionally, So far only 5 missions deep in XCOM2 but really enjoying it.

 

[Mercutio]

Play vanilla before you try War of the Chosen and don't add mod classes until you've done at least a few games with the base classes.
Four of the same troop class going in on a drop is more or less always OP.

A 99% chance to hit is not a guaranteed hit. A 1% chance to hit is not a guaranteed miss.

Make sure you rotate through all your troops on missions. In practice this usually means having two or three static squad comps, but you'll wind up with injuries and deaths. If you see somebody with a 60 day recovery time, you might as well just fire them and pick up a new guy unless they're a Colonel with a 50% dodge bonus perk or something.

If you're playing a game version where troops get perks in addition to abilities, movement bonuses stack on the same guy and they are absolutely godly on timed missions.

The Avatar project timer is no joke and the ops for stalling its progress are really important.
Optimal base build order is very helpful.
The game goes from gut-churning intensity on the first few missions when your squads have zero upgrades but magnetic weapons really even the odds, so it's a good call to beeline for them in your tech research.

Once you do "The Arctic Mission", make sure your troops have some grenades and ammo with Damage over Time effects, not just the explosive ones.

Gunslingers with Bluescreen Rounds make the impossible possible.

Do not be tempted by the Long War mod and especially not the Long War of the Chosen until you are legitimately comfortable with absolute video game cruelty.

 

[sedrosken]

sed, have you tried Knulli on your Anbernic handheld? Knulli lets your run DOS games via Portmaster and it works really well with the massive collection of DOS stuff I linked to last week.

Nope, and like I predicted the handheld has mostly sit idle for some months now. That's why I bought it instead of something more expensive, I had a feeling it was a momentary hyperfixation and I wasn't truly committed to using it.

That said, I'm also running custom firmware on it anyway, so portmaster ports have nothing to offer me. I think I'm running Batocera?

 

[Mercutio]

I have a dislike of gamepads, so the handhelds aren't for me regardless. There's an Ayn Odin sitting around my place and it does get used quite a bit, but I've been messing with an RG35XX-H recently as well. At ~$50, it's pretty interesting just from the standpoint of what it can do as a computing device.

I love Stellaris, though I only have about 600 hours on it. Just like with Civilization, the one city/planet/smol thing is my jam.

600 hours doesn't seem like it's THAT long for a game to me. If I'm into a game, that's maybe three or four months worth of evenings and weekends. It's rare for me to NOT put that much time into a game I probably paid $50 to have. I realize you're a parent and that's a huge difference but I really do know people who put day job numbers of hours in League or Valorant.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, mine's the H. It's neat, but mine has a hardware defect where the networking doesn't work regardless of the firmware I throw on it, so it's definitely fallen out of use as a lot of what I use emulation for right now is netplay with my brother or with friends online. I'm not thrilled with Batocera but it's at least better than the stock firmware. I'd be more enthusiastic about it if I could reliably run Gamecube or PS2 software on it, but that's more Retroid Pocket 2ish territory, and that's a lot of cash to splash on a paradigm I'm still not sure if I even really like all that much.

Still, for sixtyish bucks (I think it's 58 on AliEx right now, not including taxes and shipping, and that's what I paid for mine) something that can even run some N64 and PSP is very nice, and having functionally perfect PS1 emulation is hard to go wrong with. I'm not in love with the analog sticks though... but I'm aware it needed to make some compromises in the name of size and portability. I'm just still not sure if emulation handhelds in general are really for me.

 

[ddrueding]

Civ V has 5,000+ hours, Rust is 2,000+, Satisfactory, Cities Skylines and Kerbal Space Program are in the 1,000+. Eve Online is 10,000+, but I was logged in with 4 accounts at a time so it counts 4x.

Anything with more than 300 hours for me is a game I enjoy. Generally things with 100-300 are games I only play multiplayer, and less than 100 hours just didn't appeal.

In total I have just over 18,000 hours logged in Steam. Other than Eve Online that is most of my play time in the last 15+ years.

 

[LunarMist]

And you are still married?

 

[sedrosken]

My longest-played game on Steam is Pulsar: Lost Colony at over 800 hours logged, and that's only because it kept ticking the clock after the game crashed one day and I left the computer on. I'd say I have no more than 50 hours in it actually. The highest figure I have that's actually real is probably Skyrim SE at 225, but that's also probably inaccurate in the opposite direction as I'm sure I've seen it not log sessions where I've used SKSE64 before. My most played game is probably Asheron's Call -- shocker, I know -- but I spent entire summers playing it for hours on end every day, so I'd not be shocked to hear I dumped 10k+ hours into it. Morrowind is probably sitting at 300ish, Skyrim at around 400, Minecraft at something like 1000. Remember, I was 11 when Minecraft entered beta, so try not to judge me too harshly.

 

[ddrueding]

And you are still married?

How do you know it didn't help?

Honestly, we're having our 18th anniversary in a couple weeks, so seems ok?

 

[Handruin]

I'm curious about the new Rust update coming out today with the world change. I think it'll be nice to have a new environment to change things up a bit.

 

[LunarMist]

Does it affect Win 10 or only Win 11?

 

[jtr1962]

I've certainly put thousands of hours into train simulators but that's about it. I did play SimCity years ago. I'm sure the new versions are even nicer.

I have well over 5,000 hours cycling since I started keeping records in 1980, and 77,854 miles total as of yesterday, if you want to consider this a game. Not a computer game of course unless we're all living in a sim, but still a game of sorts.

 

[sedrosken]

Does it affect Win 10 or only Win 11?

He's talking about a game update, not a Windows update, Lunar

 

[Handruin]

This is the reference I was making

World update time! — Rustafied

12:00am EST - It’s update day, and boy, this is a huge one! On top of that, Charitable Rust is next week! Below is a summary of what you can expect to go live with the patch today. The update and forced wipe is expected at normal time, 2pm EST (7pm BST). Our update stream goes live at 1pm EST. Fo

www.rustafied.com

 

[Handruin]

I'm getting excited for the upcoming Factorio Space Age expansion. It arrives October 21st. I've enjoyed lots of hours of gaming in the original and this looks like a huge release with the base game also being upgraded to 2.0 as part of the expansion.

Factorio: Space Age on Steam

Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Mercutio]

The highest figure I have that's actually real is probably Skyrim SE at 225

My partner shares her gaming accounts with her dad, basically because she's had them since she was little. Still, she's the fan of Shitty Todd Howard Games (TM), and having added up the numbers from Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, she's put something like 7% of all the hours she's been awake in her entire life in the mix of Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4 and 76 and Skyrim. She's never played any of the other Elder Scrolls games and she refuses to turn on mods. She's also never actually bothered to do the end game fight in Skyrim. As far as I can tell, she just restarts the games, makes the same character and then builds that character the same way. She says it's fun. I say she needs some kind of medication.

I mention that she shares her accounts because it is possible that her dad has played those games as well, but I think he mostly plays racing games and bro-grade FPS shooters like Call of Duty and Halo.

 

[sedrosken]

My partner shares her gaming accounts with her dad, basically because she's had them since she was little. Still, she's the fan of Shitty Todd Howard Games (TM), and having added up the numbers from Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, she's put something like 7% of all the hours she's been awake in her entire life in the mix of Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4 and 76 and Skyrim. She's never played any of the other Elder Scrolls games and she refuses to turn on mods. She's also never actually bothered to do the end game fight in Skyrim. As far as I can tell, she just restarts the games, makes the same character and then builds that character the same way. She says it's fun. I say she needs some kind of medication.

I mention that she shares her accounts because it is possible that her dad has played those games as well, but I think he mostly plays racing games and bro-grade FPS shooters like Call of Duty and Halo.

I play heavily modded Skyrim and have almost since it came out, I only played it vanilla on an Xbox 360. I loathe vanilla Skyrim with a passion as it's a mile wide and inch deep experience that has no respect for the player or their intelligence. By the time I'm done with it, it's usually a completely different game, mechanics-wise. And even then I don't play it nearly as much as I did as a teenager. I do like that people are starting to see Todd Howard as a figure akin to Peter Molyneux, but I also think it's far too little far too late and between the Microsoft buyout of Zenimax and the amount of people that do still adore him and his work, Bethesda as it was before is dead.

I enjoy New Vegas very much but I do still need mods to make it not crash. That's it -- that, and adding the sprint and quick-loot systems from Fallout 4, which I believe were the only worthy additions that release made. Other than that, nothing but bugfixes. Nothing to alter the story, the mechanics, the items or the characters. Obsidian made a very good game with Bethesda's toolkit; surprising, considering that iteration also made the dumpster fires that were Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

I love Morrowind, and I don't use mods for anything but adding content, like the Tamriel Rebuilt project and Skyrim: Home of the Nords. Morrowind is the last game in the series by default that wasn't dumbed down for the average couch potato -- if you couldn't grok the systems, you just weren't going to have a good time. And that's okay. I think more games should be like that. If I don't have to think to play a game, it's not something I play often.

 

[jtr1962]

...she's put something like 7% of all the hours she's been awake in her entire life in the mix of Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4 and 76 and Skyrim.

I don't even know what to think of that. I've never had much interest in anything beyond sims because you need to invest a not insignificant amount of time just learning all the rules in these games before you can even start to play. Then if it doesn't resonate with you all that time is down the drain.

That said, all the creativity that goes into the 3D models these games use is nothing short of amazing. For a long time I've been considering buying a 3D printer, and by extension learning 3D software so I can create my own models. I guess that's one way I might find some of these games useful. 3D print some of the more interesting stuff I see in the game, assuming someone made the 3D model available.

I'm guessing game playing has replaced TV watching for much of the younger crowd. Some people, like my late father, probably spent more hours in front of the TV set than most people do playing games. In his case it may well have been a lot over 7% of his waking hours.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm guessing game playing has replaced TV watching for much of the younger crowd.

Kinda. The GenZs live in some combination of Twitch and Youtube. Twitch in particular drives me nuts because a lot of it revolves around its god-awful chat interface. I did finally convince my partner to use SOundTV instead, which is an adblocking Twitch client that more or less only displays the main video window and not the garbage chat UI.

My partner doesn't stream very often, but she also habitually addresses "Chat" as if it were always present. It's a vocal tic I guess, but she kind of acts like her life is under observation by a streaming audience. Functionally, we now have fourth person plural modes of address and that breaks my brain a little bit.

by extension learning 3D software so I can create my own models

When I show people how to work a 3D printer, I also tell people that there's a reason 3D drafting is functionally a bachelor's degree at this point. It's amazing for people who are comfortable in a CAD application, but my CAD experience stops with 25 year old copies of AutoCAD and Microstation. Adding to that, Blender had a pretty massive UI overhaul and even though it does have a huge amount of online support, so, so much of it is obsolete for the current program version. Not to say someone couldn't learn. It's just that it's a serious undertaking.

I do like that people are starting to see Todd Howard as a figure akin to Peter Molyneux

Did Todd Howard ever make anything as successful and original as Populace, Syndicate or Fable? He just keeps making the same terrible game with the same terrible engine, right? I really have to wonder how this particular example of the Peter Principle rose to his present level of regard at all.

 

[jtr1962]

Kinda. The GenZs live in some combination of Twitch and Youtube. Twitch in particular drives me nuts because a lot of it revolves around its god-awful chat interface. I did finally convince my partner to use SOundTV instead, which is an adblocking Twitch client that more or less only displays the main video window and not the garbage chat UI.

My partner doesn't stream very often, but she also habitually addresses "Chat" as if it were always present. It's a vocal tic I guess, but she kind of acts like her life is under observation by a streaming audience. Functionally, we now have fourth person plural modes of address and that breaks my brain a little bit.

Yeah, it seems like almost everyone under 30 has a Youtube channel these days which they put half their life on. It makes sense given this that you might act like you're always in front of the camera.

BTW, is playing games as popular with girls as guys these days? I always thought it was mostly a guy thing but maybe that's changed.

When I show people how to work a 3D printer, I also tell people that there's a reason 3D drafting is functionally a bachelor's degree at this point. It's amazing for people who are comfortable in a CAD application, but my CAD experience stops with 25 year old copies of AutoCAD and Microstation. Adding to that, Blender had a pretty massive UI overhaul and even though it does have a huge amount of online support, so, so much of it is obsolete for the current program version. Not to say someone couldn't learn. It's just that it's a serious undertaking.

I kind of know that already but then again I'm the person who taught myself microcontroller programming. Being that most of what I'd want to 3D model would be stuff without lots of complex curves, like buildings or trains or cases for projects, I might be able to teach myself enough to at least do those sorts of things. Plus there's a huge amount of 3D models available for download for stuff I can't figure out. For me I'd probably want software where I could do something like a series of mechanical drawings from several different views, then the program can create the 3D model from that.

I've been doing PCB layouts using CAD for decades, so there's that at least.

 

[Mercutio]

BTW, is playing games as popular with girls as guys these days? I always thought it was mostly a guy thing but maybe that's changed.

I don't know anyone under 30 who doesn't do at least some electronic gaming.
Another funny aspect of this is that PC gaming is often aspirational. The GenZs mostly grew up wanting to play PC games but not having a computer with a real GPU, so a gaming PC is an affordable luxury purchase.

 

[sedrosken]

Kinda. The GenZs live in some combination of Twitch and Youtube. Twitch in particular drives me nuts because a lot of it revolves around its god-awful chat interface. I did finally convince my partner to use SOundTV instead, which is an adblocking Twitch client that more or less only displays the main video window and not the garbage chat UI.

YouTube has become my television, but I refuse to use or work with Twitch at all. Or any livestreaming thing. I don't have the kind of time to just dump watching 3 hours of nothing happening.

Did Todd Howard ever make anything as successful and original as Populace, Syndicate or Fable? He just keeps making the same terrible game with the same terrible engine, right? I really have to wonder how this particular example of the Peter Principle rose to his present level of regard at all.

When I said that, I meant more along the lines of Peter being regarded mostly as a fraud, a disgrace these days. But I suppose your analogy also works, considering for the general populace, Oblivion, Skyrim and whatever shambling ghoul-corpse Fallout's turned into are masterpieces in their own rights... Howard was the director for Morrowind, too, but Kirkbride did a lot of the writing there, and the only faction Howard seems to have been directly involved in was the Imperial Legion (and it shows, it's the worst faction in the game). My thinking trends along the lines that Morrowind is great in spite of Howard rather than because of him. It's something in between Daggerfall's deliberate-feeling obtuseness and Oblivion's brain-dead quest-marker fest.

 

[Mercutio]

Todd Howard the Fallout Ruiner, to me, has a career unmarred by success, but Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game I tried for any length of time. I've certainly seen enough unmodded Skyrim. No one ever talks about the other Elder Scrolls games. EVER. Dude functionally inherited the wealth of other people's goodwill. His only original project is Starfield, a title gamers can barely muster the strength to describe with a "meh."

At least Molyneux made some really solid games before EA seemingly sucked all the talent out of him and left the husk he is now.

Partner wants a new Skyrim. I want Fallout taken away from Todd. I'm hopeful that Microsoft can make both of these things happen; it's not like they don't have the resources to put an army of devs on both projects at once.

 

[LunarMist]

I don't know anyone under 30 who doesn't do at least some electronic gaming.
Another funny aspect of this is that PC gaming is often aspirational. The GenZs mostly grew up wanting to play PC games but not having a computer with a real GPU, so a gaming PC is an affordable luxury purchase.

Everyone I know under 30 have plenty of stuff. Nearly every new iPhone, nice new cars at 16, every gizmo under the sun, plenty of clothing, jewelry, etc. Even the guys are way overblown with stuff. Of course most of them don't know much about a GPU function, but they want the best ones, which means most expensive.