PC Gaming = World of Suck

[Handruin]

Prison Architect looked good to me and I'm happy to hear positive feedback on it. I've had it on my radar/wishlist for some time now but for whatever reason I just haven't been interested enough for the price they want this early into the game's development.

I've been playing Starbound with a few friends and it's been fun. It's basically Terraria 2 but with more detail.

 

[P5-133XL]

You can now share your Steam library with others (5 steam accounts, 10 computers) so they can play your games, when you are not playing them. http://techreport.com/news/26104/steam-library-sharing-out-of-beta-available-to-all

 

[Mercutio]

Here's a nice HTML5 implementation of Settlers of Catan that requires other humans to play.

 

[sedrosken]

Apparently, Asheron's Call is going F2P later this year, after ~15 years of actually getting Turbine revenue. But don't take my word for it. I've played this game on and off since 2007, so this is pretty big for me. Gonna set up my Optiplex GX270 as the server when they release the software to do so. Here's hoping they include something that can export your characters off of their servers.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd be curious to know if that machine can actually keep up. Yes, it's a 15 year old MMO, but presumably they've made some improvements in their technology over that time.

 

[sedrosken]

The minimum system requirements are a Pentium III @ 700MHz, 256MB RAM, and a 32MB DirectX-compatible graphics card. And bear in mind it's being used as a server. I'm not planning on running the client on this hardware, though I doubt it'd run with any issues.

 

[sedrosken]

On the subject of Steam (mentioned in the first post)...

I did buy the Legendary Edition of Skyrim. When I go to install it, it wants to install Steam. Howaboutno.jpg.

Is it morally right for me to just download a Steam-free version off TPB? I mean, I did buy it, so...

 

[Chewy509]

I did buy the Legendary Edition of Skyrim. When I go to install it, it wants to install Steam. Howaboutno.jpg.

Is it morally right for me to just download a Steam-free version off TPB? I mean, I did buy it, so...

I'm sorry, but you purchased a license for the game that has restrictions, eg must be used with steam... By acquiring a copy from another source without those restrictions is not inline with the original license you purchased, and therefore can be considered morally wrong as you are following the original agreed contract...

And unfortunately morals/ethics have little meaning or value in a court of law...

 

[sedrosken]

Wunderbar. And they won't take the game back as it's been opened. But it hasn't been associated with a Steam account, so...

Ah, screw it. I'll find a way to use the official game files without steam. It's the only way I'll be able to get it running on this laptop, otherwise too much is running in the background and the game slows to a crawl. I already have the console version, but my Xbox died and I'm not getting another one.

How disappointing. PC Gaming = World of Suck indeed.

 

[Chewy509]

So what's so wrong with Steam? Shouldn't it be possible to install w/steam and then just uninstall the Steam component, or at least disable it's service when playing the game? (Didn't realise the steam components took so much CPU/RAM doing nothing)?

 

[sedrosken]

I just *really* don't like Steam. I don't like the idea of DRM in general, and the way it was implemented here just seems invasive to me. I shouldn't have to install a component that I do not want to. And no, you can't just uninstall Steam after it's done installing, I don't think the normal Skyrim launcher was made to be run directly. I don't like being notified of every little sale they have when I have no money to buy their stuff. AFAIK, you can't block their ads. And I neither want them nor do I need them.

 

[Handruin]

For as much as people bitch about steam, I get that DRM isn't desirable and it has its downfalls. In the 10+ years I've used Steam, it has been more helpful than not. Getting a game like Skyrim for $5 is hard to second guess even if you only play through it once. When I have an occasional LAN party once or twice a year, gone are the days of everyone being at different patch levels unable to join games, etc. Playing games remotely has also never been easier when adding one or more friend into a multiplayer game. Steam downloads are some of the fastest I've seen anywhere. Most games come down at 7MB/s or more. Storing saved games in their cloud service also makes it easier to manage between multiple machines.

If games through steam were always $50-$60 then I might be as annoyed like those of you who complain about Steam. Given that most of the games I buy are between $1-$10, I just move on with my life, enjoy those games for what they are, and leave the worrying to some other issue in my life. It's not for everyone but if you buy into inexpensive games vs full-priced titles, I think it offers a better experience. Which for someone like yourself who brings up lack of money frequently, I would think this would be more appealing to you.

You can change the Steam client to open to your library vs the store to avoid seeing games on sale. Go to Steam -> Settings -> Interface -> Favorite Window and set it to your library. You can also disable the game sale popup ads. Go to: Steam -> Settings -> Interface -> Uncheck "Notify me about additions or change...". You won't be bothered there any more.

The real abomination of a game client is Origin. I grabbed a license of battlefield 3 from EA because it was being offered for free even though I knew it requires Origin. I decided to give it a try and what I found was far worse than what Steam offers you. In order to play Battlefield 3, the origin client requires a web browser plugin in order to play the game in addition to Origin?!? The Origin client launches my web browser which then makes you try to install their proprietary plugin in order to log in. From there it then launches the game. That is an abomination of a game management system. I gave up because I was too bothered to install the browser plugin and couldn't find a way around it.

 

[snowhiker]

I just downloaded 350 MB from Steam at 10.6 MB/s according to their download manager. Not really a big enough file to verify sustained speeds but damn quick nonetheless.

With the low cost of some games, I'm not worried about losing them 5 years from now because of some DRM bullshit, but I am would worry about losing acct in other ways.

If you have all your games are on one Steam acct and you get some virus/malware/crapware/etc and VAC thinks you are cheating, are all the games on that account banned of just the one game VAC thinks you are cheating on?

With potentially dozens of games on one acct I do worry about losing them through acct thief or VAC banning. I wish their was some way to tie my acct to the real me and not just an email address?

Thoughts?

 

[Handruin]

You have a good point of too many eggs in a single basket when you have lots of games under Steam. The best I can recommend is to enable their Steam Guard feature and then use something like gmail with 2-form authentication to reduce the possibilities of someone taking over your Steam account. A person would somehow have to hack their way past your password in gmail and the authentication code on your mobile device. As for the virus/malware/etc, I don't really know what's the best way to protect against that other than to be smart on your computer and put some faith in an A/V tool if you choose to go that route. For you it's not likely an issue but I get that other people who may not be as savvy as you and could run the risk of getting banned for the reasons you mentioned.

 

[snowhiker]

Thanks for the info. As an FYI, I downloaded Planetside2 from Steam. A bit over 15,000 MB in size and got 12.5 MB/s on download. So Steam is definitely the place to test your sustained internet download speed.

 

[Mercutio]

I see nothing wrong with paying for a game using whatever legal means are needed to do so and shifting the format to a pirated copy that does not include DRM misfeatures that I do not agree to have. Do I trust the pirates more than the developers and publishers? Absolutely. No question.

 

[Handruin]

I don't know if anyone would find this remotely interesting but I'm playing around with the Shadow Play feature of my card which broadcasts to Twitch. I wouldn't normally find this interesting but thought I'd give it a try to see what all the cool people do on Saturday nights.

I think you can watch my broadcast without signing up or signing in. If you're remotely curious, I'm playing through Boarderlands 2 in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. I tried to set the quality for 720P @ 60 FPS 2.5Mb/s streaming rate.

 

[Stereodude]

I don't know if anyone would find this remotely interesting but I'm playing around with the Shadow Play feature of my card which broadcasts to Twitch. I wouldn't normally find this interesting but thought I'd give it a try to see what all the cool people do on Saturday nights.

I think you can watch my broadcast without signing up or signing in. If you're remotely curious, I'm playing through Boarderlands 2 in Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. I tried to set the quality for 720P @ 60 FPS 2.5Mb/s streaming rate.

Interesting... I checked it out for a few minutes on my tablet. The graphics stream was smooth. A little blocky at times, but decent.

PC games certainly have improved their graphics since I was playing them in college 15 years ago.

 

[Handruin]

Interesting... I checked it out for a few minutes on my tablet. The graphics stream was smooth. A little blocky at times, but decent.

PC games certainly have improved their graphics since I was playing them in college 15 years ago.

It could be I set the frame rate to 60 fps but there were several times during battle I saw it drop into the low 30s. Either the game is that demanding on the cpu or my video card isn't strong enough to handle this game. Borderlands 2 is a lot of fun.

 

[sedrosken]

I use Steam for some F2P games (Wakfu recently got a Steam release, I'm going to see about figuring it out soon). I have Quake Live. It's obvious that it's based on the ioquake3 engine. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing: it makes it comfortable to run on an Intel HD chipset, after all. A surprising amount of games support the Intel HD - I run Fallout 3 and New Vegas at my native res, and although I have everything else set to low, it all runs at a playable frame rate. Surprising when I can barely get Skyrim playable at 640x480. I tried the "Ultra-low graphics mod", and while it helped significantly my framerate at 1366x768 was unplayable.

I'm guessing you all know about the Doom sourceports, like GZDoom, Doomsday, jDoom, etc.

How does a good old deathmatch sound? I'd love to get brutally murdered by you guys in a pseudo-3D map. I use Doomsday, and I'll see about details of configuration later.

If you have the Doom wad it can play it. It also plays Doom 2, Heretic, and Hexen.

Let me know when you're free, and I'll see about clearing that block of my schedule. My time zone is EST, but if I'm really quiet my parents don't care (or know, really) that I'm up into the wee hours if that's what it takes. Sleep? I don't need sleep. I run on pure spite.

 

[Handruin]

I haven't touched a Doom game or port in a very long time. I have so many other games I haven't played yet that those would be low on my list to go back and revisit. If you wanted to organize a deathmatch, I'll surely give it a try. I'm not familiar with Doomsday but I can look into it. If it needs to be hosted I have some spare equipment and bandwidth to run it on.

 

[sedrosken]

If you want to use GZDoom or jDoom instead, by all means. Just let me know. Much obliged for the hosting offer - if it turns out to need it, I'll take you up on it. I don't think that HughesNet would appreciate me having more than one connection open at once. Just let me know when you have time and I'll clear my schedule.

If anyone needs a Doom wad to play, PM me and I'll drop it in my Dropbox. I honestly think id doesn't care all that much anymore, I mean, the game is hosted on Emuparadise in the Abandonware section. If they really cared they probably would have sent a cease-and-desist to them.

 

[ddrueding]

How is playing games over HughesNet? Last time I tried there service the ping times were amazing.

 

[sedrosken]

Not terrible, I'll admit, and lag isn't too much of an issue. But when lag does strike, without fail I lag out of the game. Mom keeps telling me that my playing games online is whats driving our limit up. I went the entirety of last month without gaming online at all, just to prove a point. We still went far over our limit.

On an unrelated subject, while I think we can all agree that while Duke Nukem Forever was lackluster in terms of gameplay, its title music is here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and it's all out of gum. I haven't played it yet, but from the reviews I probably don't want to, lest my respect for Duke be tarnished forever.

 

[Mercutio]

Online FPS games that aren't requesting map textures in every new game aren't going to contribute to bandwidth utilization in any kind of meaningful way. The mid and late 90s games in particular were designed to be playable over dialup speed connections. Five minutes of Pandora probably creates more traffic than a week of Q3A.

I was always more of an Unreal Tournament fan than anything else. I loved the original Quake when it was new. I made a few mods for it back in the day, since that was also about the time I was learning C. I always thought Doom was better as a single player game, since a big part of the fun was the atmosphere, something that went right out the window the moment you started playing Deathmatches.

One of the best parts of the Unreal Tournament games was that the level designers weren't afraid to tackle Earth-like environments, something you just never saw in the id games.

 

[Chewy509]

Hi Guys,

Since building my new system, I've started playing some games, notably Warzone 2100, TORCS, SuperTuxKart (the kids love this one), Pingus and Astromenace. About to buy Doom3 BFG as well... (I haven't played Doom3 yet, as never had a system that could play it well, until now).

The kids love Astromenace and would like to play together in co-op mode. (Something that TORCS and SuperTuxKart allow via split screen). But unfortunately Astromenace doesn't support co-op play. Does anyone know of an arcade shoot-em-up similar to Astromenace that offers co-op play that works on Linux and has support for gamepads?

PS. Anyone after a hyper-realistic driving sim, can't go past TORCS...

 

[ddrueding]

The screen shots of TORCS make the graphics look very....open source.

I've been playing Sid Meier's Beyond Earth since it came out Friday. It is just different enough from CivV that I haven't mastered it yet (I logged nearly 5,000 hours on CivV according to Steam). Fun, pretty, and challenging. Clearly designed to be played for a really long time.

 

[Mercutio]

The thing I heard about Beyond Earth is that it's relatively lacking in the distinct voices among the faction leaders and the atmospheric touches that were present in Alpha Centauri. I had been hoping to see SMAC2 and it sounds like we got yet another Civilization game with some upgraded art assets.

Chewy, Gog.com has some low cost/high quality commercial Linux titles, if you'd like to get a little more diversity in your gaming selections.

I'm trying to decide what I want to do about the next Dragon Age game. I love the series, but apparently it's an Origin-only title. I haven't encountered one of those before and apparently it's "Like Steam, but without all the reasonableness and usability." Goddammitsomuch.

 

[Chewy509]

The screen shots of TORCS make the graphics look very....open source.

True, Stunt Rally is more visually appealing...

The appeal of TORCS is the refinement made in the physics engine, being very true to real life.

PS. Stunt Rally also has the Batman Rumbler and the Battlestar Galatica Viper as drivable vehicles, for those so inclined.

 

[Chewy509]

Chewy, Gog.com has some low cost/high quality commercial Linux titles, if you'd like to get a little more diversity in your gaming selections.

Thanks for reminding me. Knew of Gog.com but hadn't checked them out yet.

 

[ddrueding]

The thing I heard about Beyond Earth is that it's relatively lacking in the distinct voices among the faction leaders and the atmospheric touches that were present in Alpha Centauri. I had been hoping to see SMAC2 and it sounds like we got yet another Civilization game with some upgraded art assets.

That just about nails it. I still would be playing CivV, but appreciate the slight variations to keep it fresh. The graphics aren't that much better (Ultra@4k@29Hz)

I'm trying to decide what I want to do about the next Dragon Age game. I love the series, but apparently it's an Origin-only title. I haven't encountered one of those before and apparently it's "Like Steam, but without all the reasonableness and usability." Goddammitsomuch.

I have Origin for SimCity, Battlefield, and FIFA. It isn't awful, just limited. Mainly annoying because it is *another thing*.

 

[Mercutio]

Is Origin indivisible from games like Steam or is it just some kind of download service?

 

[ddrueding]

Is Origin indivisible from games like Steam or is it just some kind of download service?

I haven't tried to run one outside the other. I just use the Origin client to launch the games (same for Steam). I can try to close out the Origin program and see if a game will load? Or would you like me to try to uninstall Origin and see what happens to the games?

 

[Mercutio]

From what I've read, it's the same BS of being mandatory online rights management, just like Steam: "Origin-enabled games are those games which have Origin as a mandatory requirement regardless of where the game is purchased from. These games are listed as follows:..."

And of course Dragon Age: Inquisition is on that list.

 

[Handruin]

My first and last experience with Origin was when they offered free licenses of Battlefield 3. In order to play the game, you have to launch it from the Origin client which is not unlike Steam. The download took more than a day because of very slow download speeds. Once I had it downloaded and installed, it then requires a specialized web browser plugin in order to even play the game. It will not launch the title unless you install their browser plugin first. Apparently you then have to sign in from the browser plugin or some other bullshit before you can launch and play the game. Steam is no where near that bad and I consistently get 10Mb/s download speeds through their service. I uninstalled BF3 and origin after that.

 

[sedrosken]

EA has just been terrible all around. Simcity (the new one) sucks and from what I've heard is still difficult to get into at times. There are areas where "always online" can be almost tolerable, but a city simulator of all things is not one of them. I wouldn't know personally, if I had the money to blow on games I'd just use Steam. Like it or not, it seems to be here to stay. 99% of all new releases for PC are found there. Even with boxed games it bundles a mandatory Steam client. Thankfully for those games that don't specifically require you to be online to play them, like Skyrim, you can run Steam in offline mode. I like the idea of the forced auto update, to a certain extent. But what if you're using an older patch to retain compatibility with a specific mod? You should at least be able to turn it off.

 

[ddrueding]

Kerbal Space Program is my new all-time favorite. Accessible, easy to start, tons to learn, totally creative and open-ended. Available on Steam if you like.

 

[Handruin]

I had fun with the demo of that game. I can't remember if I picked it up during one of the holiday sales. I may have to go back and revisit it. They did a good job with the mechanics in that game.

 

[Mercutio]

Nitsirk tells me that Dragon Age: Inquisition is extremely crashy, needed hours of updates despite being distributed on physical media, requires sign-on to TWO online services and uses a control scheme and UI entirely for the convenience of gamepad rather than keyboard users. I'd say that's disappointing, but I suppose it's just the future of PC gaming.

 

[Striker]

I didn't buy a physical copy, so I can't say about the updates. I only had to sign on to Origin, I'm not sure what the other service could be unless Nitsirk is using Steam as well for it. I'd have to agree about the control scheme, it does appear to be designed for gamepads, but I don't think it's that bad for keyboard and mouse users. There's still wasd and numbers and F keys that I think keyboard gamers are used to.
As far as crashes, I've played around 25 hours so far and it's crashed 3 times on me.
It's a beautiful game, and I'm finding it very enjoyable. I think it's worth a play if you liked Skyrim or Dragon Age:Origin.