Community MetaSteam | March 2024 - Can we find Moominvalley in the Forbidden West?

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Jadax

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I mean....release a game most people have probably played a bit elsewhere, at full price and then be shocked not many people bought it day 1?

I'm waiting for a sale to get it tbh.
 
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Mivey

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Sep 20, 2018
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Having a good time with Horizon 2, honestly. Game runs pretty well, looking great at 4K and I personally also like the combat a lot. It does a good job of allowing stealth, while giving you the freedom to mix things up when you mess up or get bored of it. The addition of (somewhat) easier quick travel also is pretty neat so far.

What is pretty funny is how dumb the scene lighting looks during dialogue and cutscenes. Even for something from 2 years ago, I would have not been impressed by this. Every scene looks like a cheap film where they film everything in front of a green screen.

You can see it here: we see that the light in the background comes from behind Alloy. She should be in shadow, in fact nearly fully dark since she's deep inside a dense forest. Instead, there's a magical light illuminating her from the front and giving the character that strange "edge glow" that this game wants to draw all the time.

No clue how that made it into production, it looks terrible once you understand what the game is visually doing. The original literally looked better in terms of its character lighting. Horrible choice. Hopefully with PS5 Pro, future Sony games will make some effort to embrace some forms of global illumination and allow characters that feel like they are actually in the environment they are supposed to be in
 

STHX

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Sony fans don't seem that happy that HZD2 didn't do that well and it has a lower player count and are saying that Sony is waisting time and money and porting stuff to PC that is not live service.
Sony fans (PS fanboys) are in fact very happy whenever Sony games do not sell well on PC because they want their precious exclusives to stay available only to them.
 

ezodagrom

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Tried the Synduality CBT for a couple hours, it's not for me, uninstalled.
Pretty much a generic pvpve looter shooter with annoying rubber banding, annoying mechanics and just not very fun overall.
Plus the PC version is pretty lacking (at least the CBT client), the graphics options are pretty much prioritize framerate/prioritize graphics, and a few resolution options, that's it.
 
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yuraya

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40k concurrent peak for Forbidden West is pretty good while going toe to toe with DD2. So I don't get why anyone would be upset.

Zero Dawn peak was 49k so this seems like a fair decrease for a sequel. Even better than fair imo. Actually kind of shows Guerrilla that people still like the ip and Aloy.

Most people on Steam still haven't played Zero Dawn and probably never will unless its heavily discounted. And its probably time for Sony to start putting these older titles in more bundles, etc like hopefully Returnal is the start of that.

But 40k is fine for a 2 year old game at full price. If people want crazy 100k+ numbers like Helldivers then Sony needs to put them out day n date. If they don't do day n date it has to shorter than 2 years. Do some new 3-6 month strategy. That would be long enough to keep the word of mouth going and you will actually see much higher peaks.

Also if people are upset for full priced titles doing only 40k concurrent then these other games like Suicide Squad must be really catastrophic lol :confounded-face:
 

LEANIJA

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Most people on Steam still haven't played Zero Dawn and probably never will unless its heavily discounted. And its probably time for Sony to start putting these older titles in more bundles, etc like hopefully Returnal is the start of that.
Zero Dawn was €12,49 in the last couple of sales
 
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Derrick01

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Sony fans don't seem that happy that HZD2 didn't do that well and it has a lower player count and are saying that Sony is waisting time and money and porting stuff to PC that is not live service.
Sony fans should be more concerned about how god awful horizon 2 was and focus on getting guerrilla to make a better game. Also hire some writers ffs! No one in that game has a single interesting thing to say.
 

fantomena

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Dec 17, 2018
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Reminder that today and tomorrow are potentially the last days to get the Adult Swim games if you were ever interested in any of them.
I only miss Rick and Morty VR and Samurai Jack, but both are still highly priced and no sale either.

WB are bunch of fuckers.
 

Gamall Wednesday Ida

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SECURITY PSA/ Linux. (edit: and potentially Windows too, see addendum)

Not gaming-related, but since I know there are Linux users here: (I think LEANIJA , Mivey , Durante , ...)

__

You might want to pay close attention to the developing situation around the backdooring of the xz package by a long-term malicious actor:


TLDR: If you're running Sid or Fedora, you really want to upgrade ASAP.

Arch-based distros (EOS, Manjaro...) are not affected (though Arch recommends upgrading on general principles) because 1 the attack vector does not exist and 2 the malicious code is not injected for that build target (confirmed through disassembly).

Non bleeding-edge distros (Debian Stable, Red Hat, Ubuntu...) are not affected, it was caught before it could make it there.

Regardless of the applicability of this specific attack, the malicious contributor has been hard at work on several projects for several years, so other attacks may be found in the next few days as many eyes turn towards each commit.

Obligatory XKCD:


edit:
____

Addendum:

Some suspicious code from Jia Tan also made it into Window$, so I guess everybody should pay attention :lol

https://gist.github.com/thesamesam/223949d5a074ebc3dce9ee78baad9e27?permalink_comment_id=5006612#gistcomment-5006612
Added error text to warning when untaring with bsdtar by JiaT75 · Pull Request #1609 · libarchive/libarchive
 
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Li Kao

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Jan 28, 2019
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As usual, I'm fighting my OCD to skip Octopath Traveler 1, which in my experience is at best mid as fuck, to directly play Octopath Traveler II.
But I'm struggling, and I don't know what it is with OT1, but damn at those prices.
 
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einstellung

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Dec 31, 2018
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I have an exclusive news blast for you here today. Exclusive because it's so obscure that I may be one of only 20 people in the entire world who have noticed it happened. Heavy Burger, a top-down shooter, 4-player multiplayer tug of war game done in the screen-pushing style of Nidhogg has been delisted from Steam and Switch. If you're one of those dudes who are bad enough to collect delisted games, you can still grab a key from the grey market (for Steam).

I fired it up the other day, and noticed it had been delisted. I have no idea when this happened. It's probably because it was an indie dev who licensed Data East's arcade IP, and the license expired. The game bombed, so they just let it quietly disappear. A sad story, as the dev seemed quite passionate about their game on the Steam discussion board.

As for the game itself, I find it very difficult to follow my character's position. I die all the time to things I never saw. It's fun if you don't mind being a leaf on the winds of pure chaos. If you're easily frustrated I would not play it, as it takes a quiet, focused mind to learn how the game works given how much visual spam there is. There is a lite physics system: you can propel yourself forward with your gun's fire. The base gun's fire is too RNG for my taste, but maybe the spread pattern is predictable, I can't tell. It feels like one of those games that's a very cool idea, but the dev came up with the idea first and tried to find the fun afterwards.

It is cool to figure out the nuances of how all the levels work (presented as arcade cabinets you fight "through". The game has potential for screwing around, such as staying on one arcade screen to see how long you can last. At times the levels feel like a micro immersive sim level from a multi-dimensional arcade world. Very cool things about the game, but it's so hard to parse what's going on.

Might be worth trying out once with your multiplayer group, it supports Steam Remote Play Together.
 

PC-tan

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Tried the Stellar Blade demo on PS5. It's okay fun. Is it timed PS5 exclusive?
Is it really just okay? And how would you compare it to say at least Nier Automata, in terms of how "fun" the combat is.


Since it seems some people are willing to die on a front for that game and I'm wondering if it's really even worth the trouble or if the game is really just okay at best. Or maybe I'm wrong and it's an amazing game that everyone should play and will even be the GOTY type stuff and within its first month sells over 3 million copies type of thing. Since that one WoW guy has been pushing for that game.
 

fantomena

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Is it really just okay? And how would you compare it to say at least Nier Automata, in terms of how "fun" the combat is.


Since it seems some people are willing to die on a front for that game and I'm wondering if it's really even worth the trouble or if the game is really just okay at best. Or maybe I'm wrong and it's an amazing game that everyone should play and will even be the GOTY type stuff and within its first month sells over 3 million copies type of thing. Since that one WoW guy has been pushing for that game.
I like Nier Automata better, but Stellar Blade has the graphics on it's side. However, it's only a demo and I didn't play much so it could be better than Nier A too.
 
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gabbo

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It'll go about as far as the time he declared that Russia needed it's own homegrown OS - absolutely nowhere. Between brain drain in the tech sector and corruption, he can make public statements all he wants, it's jut not gonna happen. Then again, this is likely more for domestic consumption than us.
I'm all for getting Russian (and other lesser-served regions') games onto western stores, but this ain't it.
 
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NarohDethan

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Played Stellar Blade demo. It definitely is ‘the Nier we have at home’ but it looks pretty and plays well.
 
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Mivey

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Played Stellar Blade demo. It definitely is ‘the Nier we have at home’ but it looks pretty and plays well.
The depiction of its female cast is just beyond ridiculous. Not enough to take the likeness of a Korean model, people whose entire job is based on living up to rather draconian beauty standards, they have to give her inhuman lower body with overly wide hips and thighs (to the point where it looks physically off when the character sits down) and of course boob physics that look like they depict water balloons.

This game makes Nier look prudish and restrained, and from what I can tell, it's more of a DMC style action game than an RPG anyway, so there really is no "Nier" comparison here. Maybe "Nier Automata" due to the robot bit, but Nier is so much more than that.
 

Censored

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I hope the game sells a ton just to piss off everyone who criticizes the character's look. It's a lot of fun to take a look into resetera forums these days xD.
 
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fantomena

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I hope the game sells a ton just to piss off everyone who criticizes the character's look. It's a lot of fun to take a look into resetera forums these days xD.
I don't understand the problem with the horniness and the jiggle boob physics.

Sex sells. It's been like that since the dawn of time.
 

Li Kao

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Jan 28, 2019
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God i wish stellar blade was on PC
I know it doesn’t answer your issue, after all I am the one that is constantly fighting a small war inside to not buy a PS5 for Ronin, but it will. Without any knowledge in the matter, I have little doubt about it.
The age of exclusivities is, for better or worse, a thing of the past.

I was musing over how I liked different hardware having different libraries. And better, but it’s even more ancient, having different capabilities and different games that exploited those capabilities. But right now, consoles are barely different and the budget of dev is so high that Stellar Blade, like every other games, will come to PC.
 

Gintaro

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I don't understand the problem with the horniness and the jiggle boob physics.

Sex sells. It's been like that since the dawn of time.
Yea same, People are free to choose whatever they want to play. I'll just ignore the game if it's not something that I'm interested in.
 

STHX

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I'm not currently interested in Stellar Blade because I don't care anymore about console exclusives with all the games I can currently play on PC but I'll say one thing
The videogame industry is ultimately a business and the point is to make money. If someone makes a game with sexy women in it and it sells it means the developer hit their mark. If someone makes a game without sexy women and the game is succesful those devs also hit their mark. Customers and devs together should decide what they want and what they don't not the platform nor some random person on the internet (and this is also true for things outside of sexy women. Not every game has to cater to everyone just like books and movies)
Besides even if games like Stellar Blade end up selling 20 million copies (and it's absolutely not happening) I simply don't think every other dev will suddenly sexualize women at every chance to get a piece of the pie. In the gacha industry we saw multiple very succesful games with very sexualized design for at least 10 years but that didn't turn into a "race to the biggest titties", just as how even on consoles you still have AAA games that don't try to be like hollywood movies or have quippy protagonists

And yes, BG3 being succesful doesn't mean we will see bear sex in every other rpg going forward
 
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PC-tan

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I will likely ask a similar question about the game later on once the dust settles.

Mainly because by that point in time people will have beaten the game and we will also hear about how well it has sold and stuff and what people really think about the game once they have finished playing the game. Maybe the first part of the game is okay but as it drags on, it gets even better or maybe it gets even worse? Or stays about the same as the demo?


Like what Mivey said there is a lot more to Nier Automata once you play the game. There was stuff about religion and other stuff in the game that I didn't really pay to much attention to, that was not the intro where 2B says "I wish that I can meet the god that created us and kill him" or something like that and then what I saw at the Nier Concert expanded upon that more and the whole Weight of the World song started to make a lot more sense.


It is true about the whole beauty standards in Korea and just how crazy they are. And how because of it, stuff like plastic surgery is seen as very normal there, make sure to get plastic surgery just don't make it to obvious though. Gungnum having a lot of places like that. I do feel like that once aspect of Korean culture that stand out and I'm not sure if people really notice that. Even if you are a male you are also expected to be attractive, it's not just enough to have money, if you are not attractive to an extent then you will not be respected. Korea is also one of the only countries where your looks give you an edge. When you apply for a job it's basically required for you to include a photo of what you look like. If you and another candidate have the exact same job skill and are equal in pretty much everything else, your looks will be the deciding factor, since it's believed that the person with better looks will be more successful and therefore also help the company be more successful (something along those lines). In other countries like the US stuff like that could very likely lead to a lawsuit.
 
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Derrick01

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Sounds to me like gamepass wasn't sustainable all along and it's on it's way out
I wonder if it ever actually was sustainable. People like to quote phil saying it's profitable but we don't know the behind the scenes of Xbox and how they do their accounting. Big companies are very good at moving things around and making it look like things are better or worse than they are depending on what they want it to be (hollywood accounting basically).

For example if you were to figure out gamepass' profitability it's easy. How much money did they pay out to 3rd parties to secure games versus how much they bring in through their millions of subs a year. But where things can get tricky is with 1st party games. When a game like halo infinite gets dumped on to gamepass, a game that reportedly cost upwards of $500m, and then no one buys it because it's on gamepass does that get factored into gamepass' accounting or does that just get pushed to the side and looked at as its own separate project and they can say this one game failed/underperformed?

That's something only xbox knows but people should keep these questions in mind when phil goes on his PR tour and says these things. Ideally we would have a better media who would grill these execs to try to get them to answer questions like this.
I don't understand the problem with the horniness and the jiggle boob physics.

Sex sells. It's been like that since the dawn of time.
The really weird thing is it's pretty tame too. The only thing I've seen is it has jiggle physics and people are acting like Sony's publishing a AAA porn game or something lol.
 

Cacher

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I agree that every successful business understand and cater to its customer well. Many people will pay for Stellar Blade but I seriously doubt that it will be influential or gain mainstream appeal. The whole series of Bayonetta only sell a few millions in total and Stellar Blade will be no exception.

Anyway, the proportions of these female characters in Stellar Blade or Nikke, the other Shift Up's title, are just ridiculous to my eyes and I very much prefer designs that have relatively normal body figures. I do have interest in playing a character action game (that is not soulsborne) so I may play it on PC down the road.

Edit: Oh, the music tracks are really good. They actually make me crave for the game.


 
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dex3108

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Thing i don't understand is

Butts and boobs on Twitch = Fine.
Butts and boobs in games = Not Fine.
 

Li Kao

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Wasn't the dev last mobile game before Nikke the gacha with the demon teen working a regular job ? If so, do not show that one to ERA. Pretty sure it would make you a mass murderer.

Thing i don't understand is

Butts and boobs on Twitch = Fine.
Butts and boobs in games = Not Fine.
I mean, I don't care about all this shit, but pretty sure it's an agency thing. The butts and boobs on Twitch are the one of the person streaming, while the butts and boobs in the game are probably made by a male in order to make more money.
 
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Jadax

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I really don't care if there's nudity/non-nude jiggly physics with skimpily dressed characters in a game, as long as it's fun. But I do understand why some (many) people are offended by it.

It also doesn't take much to offend people in this day and age so not surprising.
 
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yuraya

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The game is rated M anyways so young kids won't be playing it. And grown adults shouldn't be losing their shit over some mild nudity/themes.

The girl just seems very fit and slim. There is really not much else there from what I seen.

Also the game is not really the fast Platinum like action game that I thought it was going to be. Looks a bit slower and leans more towards Souls/DMC in design.
 
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PC-tan

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Wasn't the dev last mobile game before Nikke the gacha with the demon teen working a regular job ? If so, do not show that one to ERA. Pretty sure it would make you a mass murderer.


I mean, I don't care about all this shit, but pretty sure it's an agency thing. The butts and boobs on Twitch are the one of the person streaming, while the butts and boobs in the game are probably made by a male in order to make more money.
It looks like the name of that game is Destiny Child.
 
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NarohDethan

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The depiction of its female cast is just beyond ridiculous. Not enough to take the likeness of a Korean model, people whose entire job is based on living up to rather draconian beauty standards, they have to give her inhuman lower body with overly wide hips and thighs (to the point where it looks physically off when the character sits down) and of course boob physics that look like they depict water balloons.

This game makes Nier look prudish and restrained, and from what I can tell, it's more of a DMC style action game than an RPG anyway, so there really is no "Nier" comparison here. Maybe "Nier Automata" due to the robot bit, but Nier is so much more than that.
Yeah. Personally I’m not bothered but it does make my eyes roll. Maybe because the technology is not there yet but I find it hilarious that the game protagonist is very much a doll designed to be ogled at but then they give her boob jiggle straight out of a PS2 game.

They also did the model dirty. Such a beautiful woman but they replaced her face with that of a sex dolls.

But that’s what most of the target audience wants, I guess.
 

Li Kao

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It looks like the name of that game is Destiny Child.
Yeah, I still have to try Nikke but I would be surprised if it topped DC as a 'porn game without porn'.
Destiny Child: The Thirst is Real could have been its title.

Unfortunate that it was also god awfully boring, plot-wise.
 
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