PC (Steam) demo as well this time, which I’m looking forward to.

You’re off by about a year, Season 1 came out October 2022. Seasons are also relatively short, around 8 weeks each.

I was like you, the launch (and end of OW1) was garbage, so I had no interest in the game at all. After the new Stadium Mode launched this year, I’ve heard some chatter, that things apparently have been slowly getting better. I gave it a shot myself and have been enjoying the game a lot.

Definitely one of the better startup movies.

My favorite is still the one for Vampire Survivors, because I just love the chest animation in the game.

According to the Wayback Machine the banner looked the same as for all other big game releases (like right now for Where Winds Meet).

Even on my 1600p screen, with the window on full height, the Daily Deal is halfway cut off. You might as well argue every big game that gets featured on the front page is ruining some sale or another. Where are the clickbait articles for those games?

Saying Valve ruined the sale is weird to me. Are the Daily Deals from today ruined, because there’s a banner for Where Winds Meet on the front page right now?

You can also see on SteamDB, that the game got a (relatively) sizable increase in players, following the sale.

Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK)

Unsurprising that they find this, since that’s what their business is about.

MAXIMIZE GLOBAL GAME SALES WITH ROKKY

Expand sales of your PC game beyond Steam. Sell game keys to 200+ global storefronts simultaneously with Rokky. Enjoy revenue increases of up to 100%.

The Finals is rated Playable on Steam Deck and also uses Easy Anti Cheat, just like ARC Raiders.

The latest ProtonDB reports (~3h old) for ARC Raiders also say it works, but I don’t know if that’s for the playtest.

At this point, it would be weird if it doesn’t work on Linux/Steam Deck.

The Copilot part for the Game Bar is a Widget, that you can independently disable.

Even then, from what is written in the thread, it’s not like it actually does anything, unless you specifically use the Copilot feature for the Game Bar.

The only thing that might rub people the wrong way is that the widget is enabled by default.

The source is one single user on ResetEra, that doesn’t post any proof.

Another user refuted the claims and posted logs, that show what gets sent, which seemingly doesn’t include any Copilot data. The AI part only happens, when you actually ask a question to Copilot (duh). So the thread gets closed.

The article omits the second part of course, and everybody in this thread is just foaming at the mouth, because it’s Microsoft, so it has to be true.

I use Arch btw

CPU and GPU still dump heat in the same chamber, so it’s probably not gonna do anything special.

Fatter, dual chamber cases, with the PSU and drive cages behind the motherboard already have proper bottom intake, that’s not blocked by anything like the PSU (shroud), so this case is not doing anything new.

As long as the gap between the two chambers is big enough, so air isn’t hindered, it’s probably gonna be fine, but mostly a gimmick.

Probably not worth it solo for $70/70€ right now. Gameplay is still supposed to be good, and while the story is supposed to be not as cringe as 3, you still get the outdated meme references and “fellow kids” stuff.

If you got some buddies to play coop with, maybe? Chatting on Discord, making fun of the game, usually makes everything a lot better.

Performance can be terrible though, but if you got a top-of-the-line PC you can possibly just brute-force it.

That’s been a thing for a while now. Basically all the big, modern games, that are also on current gen consoles want SSDs (some are just SSD recommended on minimum specs, but required for higher specs). BG3, Cyberpunk, many of the Playstation Studios games, some Xbox studios stuff, etc.

Hardware Unboxed recently did a video, if the drive speed matters (mainly about PCIe SSD speed) and tested with HDDs, SATA SSDs and NVME SDDs. They found that some games will give you a notice if they detect an HDD, but almost all will still run, even if the specs say an SSD is required. Most of the time, the initial load times will be loooooong with an HDD, but otherwise the games still work, although a few had graphical glitches because of slow asset streaming. Once you get to SATA SSDs, it starts to matter a lot less, and with an NVME you just want the biggest drive for your budget (like <10% difference for the initial load times, if at all, between PCIe 3.0 and 5.0).

As we get more and more games that use DirectStorage (or similar technologies), the number of games that truly require SSDs will most likely go up, until then HDDs should still be fine, as long as you’re ok with slow load times and maybe some more texture pop-in.

I gotta come back to this game.

I played this for a bit last year, while it was still in Early Access, and the vibes this game has are just fantastic. The look and music were just right for my tastes, it’s awesome. Gameplay wise, I didn’t find it immediately as addicting as Vampire Survivors, but still good, so I wanted to check back again after the 1.0 release, although I haven’t so far.

And? My comment wasn’t about Blizzard. Them being greedy doesn’t mean other people can’t (supposedly) be greedy as well. As you can read, I was just talking about one specific part of the parent comment.

This was just to give some possible context about part of the first comment, that said this is made by a team that don’t just want your money.

To the devs behind this private server (or maybe just the leadership), this is a business, probably pretty profitable. They’ve been running ads, seemingly made to look like you’re going to play legit WoW. They’ve done this stuff before, (allegedly) exploiting others, stealing donation money, RMT, to make a quick buck themselves, before jumping to the next one.

Dunno about that last part. According to some comments I’ve read, the head of this project has been doing some shady shit for years.

Running their own mount shop in-game, taking other people’s work without permission, selling gold, whatever.

From the article:

While it was never a mere recreation, it expanded significantly over time. Nowadays, Turtle WoW differs from World of Warcraft with features like additional playable races, leveling zones, quests, endgame content, and transmogrification.

I think around the time Blizzard did their Season of Discovery for Classic WoW, I heard a lot of people talk about Turtle WoW and how they want something more like that (Classic+) and not just the old game anymore.

Here it’s apparently done just through a credit card. Does this meet the standards for the German law, I never really looked this stuff up. Dunno if that’s enough for the verification or if there are maybe some stipulations, especially with regard to the GDPR.

It would be great if Valve did something for German users though, so I finally gift my friends shitty porn games again.

There are similar projects for the old Doom releases, Doom: The Way We Remember It (also for Doom 2, TNT:Evilution and Plutonia), if you’re interested in these kinds of mods.