November 2024 General Gaming Discussion Thread

[BeardyHat]

Sounds like the 2Tb SSD might be a prerequisite to download Stalker 2 anyway.

Absolutely true, though who knows if Stalker 2 would even run on Deck anyway? But mostly, I'm tired of only being able to have one or two large games on my Deck anyway and really what's driving the ideation of a large disk is Kingdom Come 2. Which again, who knows if that'll work on Deck, but at least I could have Cyberpunk, RDR2 and KC: D all installed at once on Deck.

 

[neogunhero]

Absolutely true, though who knows if Stalker 2 would even run on Deck anyway? But mostly, I'm tired of only being able to have one or two large games on my Deck anyway and really what's driving the ideation of a large disk is Kingdom Come 2. Which again, who knows if that'll work on Deck, but at least I could have Cyberpunk, RDR2 and KC: D all installed at once on Deck.

One review said that on their ROG Ally, lighting will often times be nonexistent because the method used to render the “baked in” ray tracing is incompatible with handheld chips. Very weird, hopefully a patch comes out at some point to verify it for the Steam Deck.

 

[Johnway]

Glad to see stalker 2 is more or less positive reviews and its more of the same. We'll see how things shape up later. my pc can't really run it so maybe 3+ years down the line i might try it then.

Gaming wise, not much to report really. Still playing Path of exile. The build has so far been reasonably solid, but we'll see what its like with end game content. One of the biggest annoyances with POE and ARPG is the RNG. I want to craft fully linked and color correct gear is a real nightmare. Want to get 6 full links? good luck with that . The average apparently is needing 1300 tries with orb of fusings currency. in the 30hrs i've saved up, i got a paltry 100. i used all of them and surprise surprise no 6 link. its BS. to get 5 links the cost is just 70 fusings.

Of course i could buy the gear i want or pray that the gods drop something decent. but alas no one is selling anything remotely affordable.

To top it off, challenge wise, i'm getting no where. 34 challenges? unlikely iikey i'll get 24 at this rate... I have 12 and its more like 20 tops. Might be just worth cutting my losses and move onto another game. As to what, i don't know. Nothing tickles my fancy atm.

 

[Frindis]

I'm going to let Stalker 2 finish downloading overnight. Hopefully, my rig can play it on medium/high. I'm hoping they might have some settings that you can downgrade without losing much visual quality. I was at some point tempted to buy Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but that plan went nowhere with how their servers are acting now.

 

[ZedClampet]

I've decided to buy Stalker 2 to support the devs. Who knows? Maybe some day I'll even play it. Game currently has over 100k concurrents, so they are doing well.

Any big open world shooter like this is going to have an entire army of people who didn't update their graphics drivers and then downvote the game for being broken, so I would take the "Mostly Positive" review scores with a grain of salt.

****

Racing Youtuber: "Only braking in the straights is a myth and really pretty amateurish."

Me: You have ABS braking assist turned on.

Now, braking diagonally across the track to lengthen the distance to the corner is very legit, but braking through the turns is not.

Now, if you just want to dominate multiplayer, turning on braking assist is a great way to get matched with noobs.

 

[BeardyHat]

I've decided to buy Stalker 2 to support the devs. Who knows? Maybe some day I'll even play it. Game currently has over 100k concurrents, so they are doing well.

No sweat if you need to send me copy to support them further

I forgot the new Little Big Adventure just came out on the 14th as well. That I may buy, considering it's only $30 and it's been on my list for decades.

Which I must say, that's such a reasonable price, considering the Dragon Quest 3 remake also just came out and Square is demanding $60 damn dollars for it. Ridiculous.

At any rate, during the little bit of time I had this afternoon I had intended to get Thief Gold working on my Steam Deck. I fired-up Daggerfall Unity on Deck last night and for some reason it gave me a taste for Thief again.

At any rate, I didn't do that. I decided to instead take on a personal challenge to see if I could clone my Steam Deck drive without opening it up and without spending any money, as well as doing it completely on the Deck itself. I managed to figure out how to get a bootable USB working for Clonezilla via Linux (not to hard, all told), but it looks like I might need a dock if I'm actually going to make things work.

Clonezilla, once booted has no Bluetooth support for my keyboard (no surprise) and will also need terminal configuration for the WiFi. It's probably doable to use a keyboard where I need it and then swap it out with the charger once the Clone is rolling, but we'll see. I'm pretty much out of time today, but I'll try booting into Clonezilla again tomorrow and seeing if I can use a USB based keyboard to configure the wlan. If it ends-up being too much of a pain, I'll just get the Dock, use a USB HDD and call it a day. The Docks are only $30 on Amazon and I may get some further use out of it.

Anyway, I wrote this post entirely on my Deck.

https://imgur.com/a/d6hqUFO

 

[Colif]

Ubisoft patched the Frontiers of Pandora game to a version that requires you to own the new DLC to play it, you cannot just play base game.

One simple answer to this... make DLC free... but that wouldn't make them any money would it. No, lets force everyone to buy it if they just want to play their saves they had already.

@ZedClampet Brian was spotted here earlier, we just haven't talked to him yet.

 

[ZedClampet]

Ubisoft patched the Frontiers of Pandora game to a version that requires you to own the new DLC to play it, you cannot just play base game.

One simple answer to this... make DLC free... but that wouldn't make them any money would it. No, lets force everyone to buy it if they just want to play their saves they had already.

That smells like a class action lawsuit.

 

[ZedClampet]

@ZedClampet Brian was spotted here earlier, we just haven't talked to him yet.

I'll be very pleasantly surprised if he posts.

 

[ZedClampet]

No sweat if you need to send me copy to support them further

I seriously almost asked if anyone wanted a copy, but caught the hype from watching the latest trailer and decided I wanted to keep it. That basically puts me near the end of my November game budget

 

[Colif]

I'll be very pleasantly surprised if he posts.

He should unless you been calling him bad names again (just joking)

Not sure why you would just stop randomly, he might have something more important to do... or he binge playing some game.

 

[neogunhero]

Was only able to play Stalker 2 for little over an hour last night. My heart is broken. The game barely holds onto 30FPS on all Low settings It’s a very demanding game, but it almost seems like it doesn’t need to be that way. I think it has to do with the ray tracing being built into the game with no option to turn it off. I wonder if they were to release a patch allowing you to toggle it off if it would make the game run better, but who knows if they will do that. I may wait a bit for updates to come out before playing more, hopefully they improve performance over time. At least on Low settings the game looks just like the older ones!

 

[Frindis]

I have a different experience with Stalker 2. I'm pleasantly surprised my rig could handle it like it does. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 16GB RAM, RTX 3070 8GB, and after getting to the first small town after the prologue I had FPS between 35-60. I have set the FPS limit to 60, toned down details like pre-processing, fog, reflection, depth of field/object distance, shadows, hair and removed blur to a minimum and DLSS on balance. The rest I have on Epic and it seems I have hit a sweet spot for what my rig can handle.

 

[BeardyHat]

I seriously almost asked if anyone wanted a copy, but caught the hype from watching the latest trailer and decided I wanted to keep it. That basically puts me near the end of my November game budget

Based on @Frindis & @neogunhero , I'm not sure I could run it to an acceptable level anyway! My machine seems to be slightly slower than Frindis, so I'll play my Brian card and wait until it's been fixed up a bit. But I really shouldn't be spending any money either, we need to get our grocery budget under control; I have no idea how we eat so much food.

I installed The Black Parade for Thief on my Deck last night. Much as I wanted to replay the original Thief, the thought of the weird weird, fantastical levels was kind of offputting; then I was reminded of this mod that came out about a year ago now and figured I'd might as well try that one out.

I did experiment slightly with Clonezilla and my Deck this morning and it looks like Clonezilla doesn't have a driver at all for the Deck's network card, so that option seems to be out completely. Tried to switch between my keyboard and the HDD I want to back-up to, but that's not working either, so my next try will be to see if I can connect my Deck to my powered USB hub and use all the peripherals at the same time and hopefully have a little trickle charge as to not interrupt the back-up.

That said, the Dock I want just went on sale today. So I either need to convince my wife to do an early Amazon order or hopefully it'll still be available tomorrow.

 

[ZedClampet]

Was only able to play Stalker 2 for little over an hour last night. My heart is broken. The game barely holds onto 30FPS on all Low settings It’s a very demanding game, but it almost seems like it doesn’t need to be that way. I think it has to do with the ray tracing being built into the game with no option to turn it off. I wonder if they were to release a patch allowing you to toggle it off if it would make the game run better, but who knows if they will do that. I may wait a bit for updates to come out before playing more, hopefully they improve performance over time. At least on Low settings the game looks just like the older ones!

What's that Nvidia service where you can stream games that you own from their servers?

 

[ZedClampet]

Based on @Frindis & @neogunhero , I'm not sure I could run it to an acceptable level anyway! My machine seems to be slightly slower than Frindis, so I'll play my Brian card and wait until it's been fixed up a bit. But I really shouldn't be spending any money either, we need to get our grocery budget under control; I have no idea how we eat so much food.

I installed The Black Parade for Thief on my Deck last night. Much as I wanted to replay the original Thief, the thought of the weird weird, fantastical levels was kind of offputting; then I was reminded of this mod that came out about a year ago now and figured I'd might as well try that one out.

I did experiment slightly with Clonezilla and my Deck this morning and it looks like Clonezilla doesn't have a driver at all for the Deck's network card, so that option seems to be out completely. Tried to switch between my keyboard and the HDD I want to back-up to, but that's not working either, so my next try will be to see if I can connect my Deck to my powered USB hub and use all the peripherals at the same time and hopefully have a little trickle charge as to not interrupt the back-up.

That said, the Dock I want just went on sale today. So I either need to convince my wife to do an early Amazon order or hopefully it'll still be available tomorrow.

I've never played any of the Thief games, but somehow I have Thief Gold, which you need for The Black Parade. I'm no good at stealth, but I might give this a try. Should probably do Thief Gold before TBP since they recommend it.

 

[neogunhero]

What's that Nvidia service where you can stream games that you own from their servers?

GeForce Now. I don’t own the game, but Game Pass lets you cloud stream games if you have the Ultimate tier. Unfortunately it’s the console version so I would have to use a controller, which isn’t a complete dealbreaker if that means I can play the game at a solid frame rate.

 

[BeardyHat]

I've never played any of the Thief games, but somehow I have Thief Gold, which you need for The Black Parade. I'm no good at stealth, but I might give this a try. Should probably do Thief Gold before TBP since they recommend it.

Might be best to play a couple of levels to get a feel for it and then maybe watch the rest of the game if you're so inclined.

There's some very weird sections in the game itself that just feel out of place. Fighting zombies and beasts, just not really what the game was built for, not really sure why it's there. I think Thief 2 was probably a better game, much more refined and focused.

 

[ZedClampet]

You know you've been creating too much AI art when you catch yourself counting your wife's fingers.

 

[ZedClampet]

Hey, Epic Games has a new feature. It's for developers to put their games up for sale before they are finished. There's no way to give feedback, so it is what it is, but it's an interesting concept. They are calling it "Early Access".

 

[Zloth]

That smells like a class action lawsuit.

Yeah, unless it's just a stupid bug that they will fix quickly. I wonder if that's the kind of game you can roll back with the "beta testing" feature.

Not sure why you would just stop randomly, he might have something more important to do...

More important than US??

or he binge playing some game.

Oh, yeah, that would qualify. Maybe he finally got through the opening hospital in Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain.

 

[Colif]

A lot of the reasons why he wasn't he for a week were crossed off when he showed up yesterday but we are still unaware of why he isn't here now.

Maybe he just decided he here too much and wanted a break? Snap decisions can happen...
I am just speculating, as I don't know anymore than you do.

 

[ZedClampet]

A lot of the reasons why he wasn't he for a week were crossed off when he showed up yesterday.

Actually, they weren't. Maybe he didn't show up yesterday. For all we know, someone else brought his PC out of sleep mode, and the forums just happened to be on the screen. All I'm saying is that the system logging him as being here doesn't mean anything without him interacting with the site. He could be out of town, for instance, and his girlfriend decided to shut down his PC, but first she had to bring it out of hibernation, and when she did, she briefly found herself here.

He could have had an epiphany that he was spending too much of his life on a computer. He could have had a family emergency. The list of possibilities is near endless. If no one has his contact information, all we can do is hope for his well-being and hope that he returns to the site.

When Mainer left, I could watch his system on Steam, and after he stopped binging BG3, after a time of inactivity, someone briefly logged into his account one more time, and there hasn't been any activity on his Steam account since then.

 

[Colif]

Anyone know Brian's Steam ID?

I was going to see what happened next Wednesday now.

 

[Colif]

oh cool, Black Friday... lets see what specials are on Google shopping place

Wow, so much choice...
Try on Chrome, still blank
Look on a browser I am not logged into Google on., it works. Sure, only two are right and I wouldn't buy from Ali Express if you paid me

Chrome and FF show nothing at all.

So its possible Google running an experiment on my account but thanks for choosing today you .....(fill in blanks) !!@!

Admittedly I am actually trying to figure out if there is anything I want to buy but this still doesn't help.
It was working yesterday.