Nals

You are asking why a predominantly enthusiast community ( because let's be real here, "average" gamers aren't dropping $1k+, or learning enough to build at $800 ) is angry they are being forced to do something they don't want to?

Like I realize this is against the rules, so I'm speaking in hypothetical here, but most PC gamers know piracy intimately. We had to use it growing up to play games. Noone understands what it's like to get hyped up on a PC game that's a new release, only to never be able to find it anywhere because nobody physical carried it. Times 2-3 if you lived outside of the US.

Epic isn't feature complete and never will be. Sweeney has said he has no interest in sales or forums. It's up to devs if they want to post sales, Epic won't host them. How does this help the PC gaming community in the future?

Epic doesn't offer regional pricing. More then a few people are pointing out that Epic "regional" pricing is just $60 but in their currency. Not how Steam does it, which is checking regional physical sales and adjusting accordingly, making a lot of games $15 or so USD. When you average $200 USD a month from paychecks, $60 USD but in your currency isn't exactly "regional pricing.".

Epic isn't available still in large chunks of the world. China is a big one, and people are saying the Russian client is missing games.

Like right off the bat, huge chunks of the PC gaming community simply cannot use this launcher, and will never be able to. So saying it's "just a launcher" is an incredibly US centric view of things.

This isn't even getting into security issues. I made an account to fuck around with it a bit, but my email was one of the ones that already had an account attached to it. So I retook my account back over with the help of Epic Support ( which took far longer then it should have to boot ), then proceeded to wait. Exactly a week after I got my account back it taken back over by the person who made it, and Epic refused to assist me further. They had proof they were the original owner of the Account I didn't have. Thankfully I didn't buy any games on it, because it seems to have been booby trapped.

Or the current password scandal, where people using stuff like 1pass or keypass to gen new passwords and use a different password per site are mentioning their info got put into pastebins somehow. How'd that happen? It is a mystery.

Or how people are reporting that their 2FA'd accounts are being hacked somehow without their consent, because Epic holds 2FA keys for ???? long and it's basically a nonexistent thing.

People on PC are angry and bitching because they are being forced to use something that feels like college students first attempt at a platform. And uh, most aren't using it! Metro Exodus was the most pirated game since GTAV, and hit those numbers in a month compared to GTAV's multiple years. And that's a far bigger problem.

Like "it's just a launcher, jesus you babys god." is incredibly pedantic. It's not usable by huge chunks of the community due to them living in the wrong country, and those that can use it are going to be predominantly more enthusiast, and more willing to look up issues with it. And if your response to that is that you don't care because another launcher doesn't bother you, then more power to you.

Personally I stopped caring awhile back. I have more then enough to play this year, and losing 2-3 big games to Epic just gives me more time to spend on indies and other stuff. I have zero qualms with just waiting a year to pick stuff up for $15 or whatever once it goes on sale. But I'm also American and have a disposable income and can pick and choose. I can understand how angry I'd be if I was Russian, or Brazilian, or Chinese, or the other 40-50% of PC gaming space according to Steam who are basically either being told I can't play these games unless they pirate them, or have to drop 1/3rd of my paycheck to get them.

The thing that's always helped me is going back to the classics. The games that really "got" me into gaming. So in my case it's Deus Ex og, Morrowind, Baldurs Gate 2, or AoE2. Playing any of those is usually enough to reignite my love of gaming and get me playing again.

She's just not a good fit.

Like the thing for me is, take a step back from the racism angle.

Tali is a natural Engineer, and incredibly adept at fixing things/robots. She's a great fit for the crew, especially as they face off against the Geth.

Garrus? Infiltrator, leader, team player, strong soldier, etc. He's got ego problems/growing pains, but he's a solid ally.

Liara? Master of Mass Effect fields, prothean research, and archeology. Great fit.

Wrex? He's a fucking tank.

Kaiden? He is described multiple times as THE BEST BIOTIC in the Alliance outside of potentially Shepard. A decorated war hero who has seen action and has commanded other troops. He's bland and one note, but he also gets along well with every single one of the other companions.

Ashley? She's a soldier. Who.....failed at soldiering. Who got kicked back to Eden Prime because her family requested she stay out of active duty/she fucked up at Academy.

The problem is both Kaiden and Ashley are one note and boring. Neither have much of a personality, Kaiden has his professionalism, and Ashley has her racism. If you "take away the racism" you get left with a blank slate character that might as well not exist.

So of the two, Kaiden is actually useful to the Alliance past Virmire. He's their top biotic, a former squad leader, and knows how to handle himself properly. Ashley is just bad muscle, which you always have plenty of.

Then you get to ME3 and Kaiden gets a personality, gets a ton more to him, and does a ton for the Alliance. Ashley stops being racist and loses all personality she has, instead becoming a party girl and getting trashed constantly, when she's not standing next to her incredibly low poly "sister.".

Fallout 3 and Oblivion.

Ok, look. I'll give you Oblivion. It's got some neat shit to it. And it's a product of it's time. A lot of it's problems can be directly tied to the console it was made for. I think over time I went from really disliking Oblivion to moderately respecting it, even if it is in my mind the worst TES game. It's still a good game, just not as good as it should be. Doesn't stop me from loading it up from time to time. Honestly the more I think about it now, the more I appreciate that it did, and I think I may actually really like Oblivion in hindsight. Huh. Still the worst TES game though.

But fucking Fallout 3. The fuck is anybody saying when they say it's their favorite, or it's a "great". Like I LIKE Fallout 3, and you people are MADMEN.

- It has exactly 3 tilesets, barely randomized. You've played the game for 4-5 hours? You've seen every room you'll ever see in the game, bar a few specific buildings in Downtown.

- No gun variety. There are maybe 6 guns, and maybe 4 melee weapons. Hope you enjoy the Hunting Rifle.

- Enemy variety is also nonexistent. You will fight the same 4-5 enemies the whole game, but they get a red variant later that makes them tougher. Whee.

- Bulletspongey enemies. Congratulations you've gotten to the "endgame". Congratulations every enemy now takes 2-3 full reloads worth of ammo to kill.

- There are exactly 7 side quests in the entire game. There are 13 main quest missions. There are 4 repeatable/very minor side quests you can complete near instantly. I am including the quests like the Armory. It takes less then 15 hours to fully clear all core content in the game. AND I'M INCLUDING BROKEN STEEL IN THAT 15. Reminder, the intro takes an hour itself! Completing the Pitt and Anchorage on top of it takes maybe 20 hours. I should know because I did a full clear of Fallout 3 one weekend and my save file after the Pitt was 19 hours played with all quests complete/a solid 80% of the map explored.

And I enjoy Fallout 3! I've played it multiple times because I like wandering ruined DC shooting dudes with my BB gun. It's fun! But to take that and compare it to an RPG great like New Vegas, or even an expanded/complete experience like Fallout 4 and say it's better? You are mad. You are stark raving mad. You only like Fallout 3 more because it's the first one you played. You are a literal madman. I have serious issues with Fallout 4, but at least Fallout 4 offers 60-80 hours worth of content, quest chains, factions, dozens of weapons, dozens of environments, multiple endings, etc etc. Fallout 3 offers none of that. It has a single "choice" in the entire game, and it's the choice they advertised constantly as proof that it has choice based gameplay.

You are all MAD.

For the game I love that everyone hates, Deus Ex Invisible War.

Like it's got huge problems. Loading screens everywhere. A dopey looking protag. The story somewhat veers a little too heavily into major world swings compared to the more undertoned Deus Ex og.

But it's got even more combat options. Even more ways to get around. Even more ways to do things. Hack robots from a distance and make them your friends. Shoot out spiderbots, take them over, then go on an adventure. Shoot through walls and kill targets as you enter the map. Did you know you can do the Watch Dogs thing where you take control of a robot, then take control of another robot through your robot? You can go through entire levels as a robot. It's great.

I play it alongside Deus Ex every single year. And every single year I continue to love it. I wish more people gave it a real chance.

This was originally supposed to be a part 1/part 2/part 3 thing.

It got so big they merged part 1/part 2. But it's still a part 1/part 2 missing part 3 type thing, so the ending is a bit not there. To the point it might as well say "To be continued in 2024.".

I actually am loving it. As someone who has watched HEMA in the past the HEMA model is quite frankly very smooth, and feels exceptionally good in motion. It looks janky as hell in videos, but plays very well. I also love the focus on architecture, many of the side quests, and even parts of the story. I also don't particularly believe anyone on the dev team is racist, or had ill intent. It makes some sense for this particular region to be devoid of minority representation, you'd expect to see more of it in the larger cities, such as Prague. Vavra has said as much, and has apologized for his behavior/words in the past in a way that seems genuine.

My core worry, and the reason I wrote my post is so people realize the Middle Ages are far more vast then they might think. And to get people thinking about those things, because learning about our past can't hurt anybody. We build notions off of the media we interact with, and years of Hollywood/gaming showing us an all white Europe has built that up to many people as the true Europe. Having this game be another drop into that hat isn't a positive thing. People should challenge their media, and learn from it.

Even within the confines of "it's just a game", we learn from our games. How many here aced History class because of all those nights we spent playing Age of Empires. How many of us got higher marks in English because we played Age of Mythology and could at least piece together a few of the epic poems. How many of us went into WW2 tests ready to go, because we had already fought the Germans back in Call of Duty.

Ideally, encouraging people to learn more about the period the game is set in would be a positive force.

Then again, apparently most people just put porn in the background on full blast and skip all cutscenes in games. So who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Maurice

That's the patron Saint of the region this game takes place in. There is a giant statue of him in Sasau.

We have dozens of art frescoes of Prague at this time period, and guess what. Black people are everywhere. As nobility, as servants, as merchants, as religious icons.

And why wouldn't there be. Alexander conquered the Middle East, Rome conquered the world. Neither cared about race. Service Guarantees Citizenship, and thousands of "Aethiopians" served in the Legions, then came back to Italy to further serve Rome. We have evidence of black Senators, black political figures, and black nobility all throughout the Middle Ages across many different countries.

Were they large populations? Of course not. At best you'd be seeing a 5% black population in Italy, and a maybe 3% showing in the HRE. But that's still not "everyone is pasty white and has never seen a black man before.".

Like if this was a game set in Medieval England, I could see the argument. Yeah, Braveheart has little to no reason to show any minority characters, because it's set in the true bumfuck nowhere of the setting. But the region KC:D takes place in is a major trading hub during the time period, and a path to Prague for traders coming from the Middle East. This is 200 years after the Crusades, and the HRE ( and Bohemia in particular ) is trying to trade with everyone it can.

There's also other major historical inaccuracies. France and England were nations that built themselves on the ideals of traditional sword and shield, longbows, and cavalry. The HRE and particularly Bohemia was very much not. We have plenty of historical record of the Hussite Wars, which were fought only 20 years after the events of the game, and the Bohemians barely even used basic infantry. They used heavy pike supported by pavise walls and crossbowmen. They also used heavy cannonade across the field. We also have plenty of evidence of them using similar tactics before the era of the game, mind you the cannon was in regular military use 20 years before the start date of the game.

Like there's a time and place for historical mistakes. I get it. We grew up on the idea of white Europe thanks to Hollywood, and it's hard to shake that idea. It's the place the white people come from, so it obviously wasn't very diverse. And if a game comes out set in the Medieval Era with a predominantly white Europe, then fine it's probably not trying to be historically accurate, it's a game, they probably didn't do any research and are just aping those old Hollywood movies.

But when you very specifically say you are making a game that will be fully historically accurate, and then decide to not even include the most prominent Saint of the region who happens to be black? And really push the nationalism angle, and really push some strange alt history angles that try and prop up the ideas of white dominance? It's really, really awkward to say the least. There will be people out there that play this game and view this as the true sequence of events, embrace the nationalism the author is trying to push, and use this to further cement that there was no minorities in Europe. And that's a bad outcome which pushes us past "it's just a game."

What's the parameter for best?

The old WW2 games are fun enough, but kind of dry/outscaled these days.

MW1 is the most remembered, and does have a few good missions. Bit uh, bit shallow these days.

MW2 is absurd in some really great ways.

MW3 isn't that great honestly.

BLOPS 1/2/3 are all fun, but also all really low rent in a lot of ways. Same with Advanced Warfare honestly.

Ghosts, lol.

Like if we are going for "best CoD type CoD game" probably MW2. People will get into a fit over MW1, but it's not that interesting, it was just crazy for the time. If we are going for best game in the franchise probably Infinite Warfare, really good story with a lot of neat options to dick around with. I'm also always a huge fan of WaW, lots of cool fire tech/stuff to mess with, and still the best WW2 shooter of the bunch.

This poll reads as people saying which game they like best.

Demon Souls has neat bosses, but rarely good bosses. Most are trivial to beat, or just require you to know a specific thing. All are done better in later entries.

Dark Souls 1 has some good bosses. But also some REALLY BAD bosses. The entire second half of that game was rushed and it shows.

Dark Souls 3 has generally good bosses, with some great bosses. Overall very good. My second or third.

Bloodbourne is generally good bosses, with a few stinkers. But also a few really boring bosses. I'd honestly place it behind Dark Souls 3.

Dark Souls 2 is nothing but good/great bosses. The game itself has some issues, but the boss design is not one of them. Very few bosses in DS2 fall down to just "good", almost all are on par with or better then the greats of the rest of the series. It's the most technically minded game, and because of that the boss design shines. You rarely get showy bosses like the other games, but I find the showy bosses tend to be the worst designed anyways so it works out well. I get the feeling a lot of people are just using their baggage of not liking DS2/the internet talk up of not liking DS2 to hate on it's bosses.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that DS2 is in fact the best DS game as well, so I'm probably biased.

People don't realize that GoG is uh, weird.

More then a few oldschool devs have come out and said they'd love to have their games on Steam/other services, but that GoG went to the lawyers/firm that owned the rights and paid them for exclusivity on whatever game it was. There was a whole piece awhile back by Beamdog about how GoG has a 10-20 year exclusivity deal they signed for the old DnD games with Atari they are only getting around through the Enhanced Editions. This is also why NWN2 got taken off Steam.

They've also put out deals where they went behind developers backs to talk to publishers/rights holders and pushed for exclusive DLC for the GoG version, or even stuff like exclusive versions of the game. Occasionally against the devs explicit wishes.

They also exist in a weird vacuum of title releases. Most of the stuff they launch worked flawlessly out of the box/wasn't touched up at all yet people constantly talk about how GoG fixes the titles they get. Many of the titles they have "fixed up" don't work anymore in Win10, or don't work for a complete playthrough. You also have stuff that slipped through the cracks like NWNOG, which cannot be beaten through the GoG version and has a mountain plus worth of bugs.

GoG is a weird service. They used to be all about bringing back the oldies, and now they are weirdly trying to constantly jab at Steam/others and blowing their cash on weird exclusivity deals.