Akrid

@bollard: Awesome! Would be happy to see you there.

@MeatsofEvil We could fairly easily move it to 4pm sometimes if that helps at all? Hope you can make it in any case.

Hi! Just letting you guys know that there's an Arma 3 Giant Bomb group that meets every weekend to play on a private server, and that if you'd like to join in we'd love to have you. We usually run them around 3pm EST on Saturdays - a compromise to establish a reasonable time for both EU and NA players. We aren't a super hardcore group, but we do play the game tactically. We like to get the job done but hopefully have a laugh doing it.

Lately we've been having a lot of fun with Zeus. For those who don't know, this is a recent mode added to Arma where up to two people become what is essentially the dungeon master of a session. They create a storyline and scenario and modify it on the fly as the players progress through the mission. Lately myself and @gpbmike have been taking turns running story-based campaigns each week. @thurbleton has streamed our antics a couple times, so you can watch that here if you're interested in getting a rough idea of what we do.

Details on how to join in are always posted in the event each week on our Steam group, So join the group to be notified of what's going on week to week in Arma and whatever else Giant Bomb would like to do on a personal computer.

Suprised to see Sang-Froid, but definitely sounds like a good time the way you put it. Somewhat brave choice to flip your list around, but judging from your enthusiasm for Rogue Legacy, a right one.

Blizzard guy is tired of this debate, and so am I. Go ahead and tell the artist that sculpted Kerrigan's ass that they're upholding the patriarchy in video-games by firstly not realistically modelling cellulite on the female body and secondly having the gall to show their character from the back sometimes, and he/she would give you a quizzical look. They are making what they want to make. There is no agenda to be had. Not every game has to hold a political stance on today's hot-button issues - some are just supposed to be fun, and the characters are made with that in mind.

There are plenty of examples of some form of sexism in video-games, along with all media, but generally the visuals is not where this point should be argued. Spend your energy on complaining about the lack of variety in playable protagonists or the stereotypical actions of both male and female characters in games that lead to genuinely dry and uninteresting experiences. Maybe even spend your energy complaining about something like the superfluousness and odd trend of the Heavy Rain and Beyond shower scenes if you really want to, but coming down on a fucking moba for their character designs for not even being inherently bad, but because you think a character could do with one less cup size, is lunacy.

The only thing wrong with the mentioned "Roller derby Nova" is that the design is absolutely abysmal. And no, that's not sexism at work. It's just ugly and uninspired.

@grottomatic: @helmetbunny: @greigwatt: @tiefighter77: @bitterpants: Got you guys.

Diretide was not unreasonably expected. Dota players watched as every other Valve game got some sort of halloween content, and yet not a single peep came from the Dota team. Whether they had an event or not, they should have had the foresight to see that this was going to be a big deal, and got out in front of it. There would have been fallout, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fierce. As it stands, everyone who was legitimately looking forward to the event spent days just waiting and expecting. As one of those people, I was incredibly disappointed in Valve.

Now, I didn't go and bomb their metacritic or spout awful fucking memes all over the internet, but even so I was baffled at Valve suddenly not giving a fuck about it's players. I've played Dota a lot now, more then any other game ever. It's a bit of a blow to think that the one game that legitimately keeps me interested in games is going to stagnate - which was the only conclusion I could reach from their complete lack of caring. I figured they had nothing to show for the past 4 months, and so they kept quiet. Little did I know that Valve's complete lack of direct community management meant that they simply forgot.

I agree that ideally they shouldn't have given the people who freaked out and did some childish shit what they wanted, but that's just a smaller percentage of a larger whole that was just extremely disappointed in Valve. They had to apologize in some way to those legitimate fans of their game that expressed their disappointment in more reasonable ways. Besides, precedent doesn't matter for the people who flipped their shit. they're going to be idiots regardless, so fuck if I care if they'll probably gain some new sense that what they're doing is worthwhile and affecting change - they're wrong.

@lumberingjackal: @lumberingjackal: @ravelle: I put you guys down on the list.

Should be a lot of fun! Unfortunately my last spare dime will be spent buying the game, but hey, I'll be there to flip the occasional switch for you guys to make sure it keeps running smoothly.

Damn! I haven't checked this thread in like 3 months! Sorry about that.

We're still very active on our mumble server, playing a variety of things, but we cut back on our events during the dry periods. Rest assured we still have plenty of folks ready and willing to put together game nights of whatever flavour that Giant Bomb's craving.

BF4 for instance! We're funding a server, but we need a few more donations to make it solid. If you like the idea of playing BF4 with a server full of nice, friendly people, then you may want to consider donating.

We'll be running plenty of events for the game, just as we did with BF3, so there'll be plenty of opportunities to jump in with fellow duders and have a good time.

Very, very cool. I guess latency is definitely not the issue there, as anything under the 1000ms still looked relatively reasonable to me - and I know for a fact that irradiance caches are usually a matter of kilobytes, so reaching that extreme would probably be very rare.

I would be a bit hesitant in thinking that MS is ready to provide that full rack of GPU's they showed per person on XBL however. I'm doubtful that the quality of irradiance mapping shown there could be fulfilled in the near future while still being affordable for anyone involved - as is often the case with proof of concept tech demos - and anything less would inevitably start to look kind of terrible. Still, very interesting considering that the consoles will be around for a long time while GPU's and CPU's continue to approve alongside, and this could potentially give the Xbox One some scalability that the PS4 doesn't have. Though with their Gaikai buy-out, who knows what Sony is cooking. Hell, the guy in the video straight-up mentioned Gaikai - a hint to it's future perhaps?

Another sticking point with this sort of thing though is developer adoption. I mean, not a whole lot of developers have even adopted pre-baked GI, and that's been available to them for years now. It seems a trend for them to sit comfortably right behind the bleeding edge of technology. As cool as it is, I could see this being a feature only first party games will be forced to utilize. Unless MS provides some stellar support in propagating and promoting the tech, most developers won't want to bother - especially if the PS4 version isn't going to benefit.