That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.

Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.

Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.

Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.

I’ll always have a soft spot for the original Xbox due to XBMC, the homebrewed Xbox Media Center.

Though most would probably know it better by its current name, Kodi.

The DS with a flashcart was nearly perfect. It was incredibly portable due to the rectangular shape, the screen was protected from scratches while folded so you didn’t need a case, and it could emulate every console up to the N64 as well as every Nintendo handheld (obviously). I was upset when my cart finally died - no other handheld emulator I’ve found is as convenient.

As much as I believe PayPal would do this (they have closed accounts without warning and stolen all pending funds many times in the past, which is why it’s commonly recommended to avoid them if you’re making decent money), the only source for this article is a Reddit thread that doesn’t name the game or company.

There’s a decent chance this is just someone’s creative writing exercise using the current scandal to get attention.

Still working on Conan: Exiles, which got an update yesterday. My thoughts remain the same: good game, excellent base-building, but there’s not really much that I haven’t already seen a hundred times in other survival games. I’ll probably drop it soon.

I finished a co-op campaign of Abiotic Factor. We started our playthrough early in its Early Access period and had been returning to it every few months as new chapters were added. The game is every bit as great as everyone says, though the ending is incredibly abrupt. I’m wondering if they had to cut a bunch of content to make the release date. I hope they expand on things in a later update or future DLC, because it’s the only major flaw in an otherwise nearly perfect game.

Also played a bit of Gloomwood, a lo-fi immersive sim which comes very close to scratching that classic Thief itch. The stealth is great, the levels are well laid out and heavily intertwined so you always have multiple routes to achieve an objective, and the AI is the perfect balance between smart and dumb for shenanigans. There’s also an incredibly satisfying backstab with the canesword, though certain enemies wear armor that makes them immune so you sadly can’t clear out entire levels while ghosting.

I do have some minor complaints. As a packrat I’m not a fan of the Resident Evil-style grid inventory with limited space, especially since the game has a research mechanic where you need to chop up mutated corpses and bring one of every single body part to a specific point on the map to unlock crafting recipes and permanent character bonuses.

A single body’s various parts are enough to take up the entire inventory, necessitating either some very fiddly inventory juggling (items switch from grid-based paper dolls to physics-enabled models as you drag them to and from the world, causing all sorts of messes) or multiple trips across the entire open world map and back. The Goatman alone took nearly half an hour of combat-less hauling to research, and its boss arena isn’t even that far from the lab.

Enemies are also persistent. Once you kill someone they stay dead for the rest of the playthrough, which on one hand speeds up the backtracking, but on the other also makes it a boring chore if you’ve been thorough. There are a few points in the story where new enemies will spawn in old areas, at least.

All that said it’s an excellent game, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good immersive sim. It’s still in Early Access, but what’s there is already incredibly satisfying despite my various gripes.

Please post your thoughts on Abiotic Factor when you get to it. It’s tied with Grounded as my favorite game of the past few years.

I’ve played Lunacid! It was good, but the limited equipment slots (just your weapon and two rings) meant it didn’t have the same feeling of gradual progression that Kings Field had. Haven’t played Tears of the Moon yet.

If they ever announce a new Kings Field game, people’s heads (mine included) will explode from sheer shock and excitement.

In addition, the company […] wants to be awarded all rights, title and interest in any intellectual property developed by Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill during their employment at Unknown Worlds, including “all movie scripts, movie footage, game design, game code, play tests, or other software development.”

Ugh.

Ah, right. I thought you meant a comment under the awards themselves.

Is there any video of his whose comment section isn’t a complete cesspool? His edgy 4chan-lite schtick draws in the worst sorts of people to become fans.

Sseth also destroys the culture around the indie games he covers. Whenever he does a video on a niche game, the flood of viewers overwhelms the existing community with toxicity and many of them never fully recover.

I’m still mad he turned the wider community of the game Starsector from mostly left-leaning fans of classic sci-fi into a bunch of stereotypical Redditors who constantly joke about committing rape and genocide - his fans even spearheading development of a mod to add those into the game. Fucking disgusting.

Damn, single-player only. My brother-in-law is obsessed with Risk of Rain 2 and this seems like a good alternative, but the lack of co-op means he probably wouldn’t play it.

I’m pretty sure Steam has sharing of precompiled shaders for regular PCs too, you’re just SOL unless someone else has the feature enabled and has launched the game with the exact same card+driver revision in the past. It’s much easier and more consistent on the Deck where everyone’s using the same hardware.

Nah, they clearly meant in liquid form.

What video are you referring to? All I could find searching on YouTube was a single stream with comments disabled followed by pages of videos complaining about how “woke” the awards are.

Yeah, “survival” is about as watered down a term as “roguelike”, especially when it’s “survival-crafting” (a meaningless distinction - crafting mechanics were popularized by survival games in the first place). I play and enjoy both casual and hardcore survival games, though I have to shut my brain off not to get annoyed at some of the former.

There’s a recent trend in the genre where eating isn’t required for survival, food just gives temporary stat bonuses. At least Subnautica has proper hunger and thirst mechanics, even if you’re set for life for both within the first hour.

I can count the games that get the survival gameplay loop right on one hand. Hardcore survival is a sadly neglected niche.

I’ve had my eye on Vintage Story for a long time. Have you ever played UnReal World? That game has the most detailed and brutally realistic survival mechanics I’ve ever seen. I’m wondering how VS ranks in comparison.

I think placing base foundations still flattens nearby terrain? But yeah, the devs admitted that the destructible terrain was a huge mistake that caused massive pop-in and performance losses, even now after they dialed it down to nearly zero.

They couldn’t just remove voxel terrain entirely because the world is a mishmash of voxel and classic geometry. The voxel destruction/deformation only applied to the sand and soil on the ocean floor, which let players dig several feet down before hitting solid terrain. Most other terrain features are static props.

They’d have had to redo nearly the entire terrain to remake it as a traditional polygonal mesh, so instead they simply removed the player’s dig prompt and the terraformer item. I think there’s even a console command to re-enable everything? There was at some point during Early Access, at least.

I don’t recall them ever saying anything about randomly generated worlds though. It’s been bespoke since the very first alpha, though a lot of first-time players thought it was procgen due to the random spawn locations.

Just to be clear, “watching” is a bit of a misnomer. In Project Zomboid TVs play programs to dispense lore/world-build, show what’s happening outside the Exclusion Zone, teach recipes and skills to players, improve their mood (mental health is an important part of gameplay), potentially draw in nearby zombies with the light and noise, and give survivors something to do while resting during downtime.

However, it’s all just text - the TV will light up, and if it’s tuned to a live channel or playing a VHS, a new line of text will pop up above it every few seconds. As the apocalypse advances more and more channels will go dark or switch to automated reruns (the attention to detail in this game is just *chef’s kiss*), eventually leaving looted VHS tapes as the only way to watch most programs.

That said, if the modders used a program to extract subtitles and kept the timings, you could theoretically play the episode at the same time and watch it in sync alongside your character. Here’s hoping someone makes a mod that lets you launch VLC to a second monitor from within the game with the proper timing offsets!

The patch was worth it for the load time reduction alone.

They’ve also bought up a ton of quality studios. I’m half expecting Krafton to go bankrupt due to incompetence and end up pulling an Embracer and take everyone else down with them.

If they end up torpedoing Hi-Fi Rush 2, I may start a riot.