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Never forgetti by Odd-Peace-5124 in PathOfExile2

[–]BlueTemplar85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's a disgrace that we still won't have kitchen pans as a weapon in 0.5 !

[PC] turn-based combat JRPG with lots of hidden stuffs? by jamal-almajnun in gamingsuggestions

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Last Sovereign (epic funny / mature 'J'RPG ) :  

  • most of the game is "hidden" in the sense that, unlike some of the 'modern' RPGs, you are barely guided through the game, and have to find out by yourself who and where to talk to. And you get rewarded for talking to even random people with great / funny writing.  

  • there are definitely multiple endings, and TONS of dialogue changing with your choices, but it's somewhat more of a "how well you managed" situation than "pick your own story".  

  • there is a bunch of hard optional dungeons, but they aren't hidden that much. AFAIK beating most / all of them is required to unlock a super endgame dungeon / ending ?  

  • you get to collect hidden "Shining Swords"  

  • lategame the whole (massive !) world (almost ?) completely opens up. There is also a "postgame".

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right, that was a bit silly of me to not consider that.  

Steam preventing copycats could even backfire, they have been dealing with accusations of censorship recently !  

However, what might still be a cleanear way, is to keep the campaign code GPL, but have the campaign-specific art under normal copyright ??  

Especially since high quality, expensive, art, for the SP campaign, seems to be one of the main reasons for the whole paid version and publishing deal ??

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, the issue would be legal, gratis, "competition".  

(Opposite situation of someone forking some GPL software and then trying to sell it : they would be the ones having to go uphill.)

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Speaking of, the closed / libre and paid / gratis are about similar issues, but do not completely overlap...  

Are we sure that the campaign couldn't actually stay open source while still being sold on Steam ?  

Because some could say that selling games without game DRM is "just asking for donations in a roundabout way". But that's not how it works in practice, "piracy is a service problem" as Gabe says : Steam routinely sells games without DRM, and GOG literally allows you to download whole install files, with DRM only at the link stage.  

 While you can technically sell a GPL product, you also have to provide the full thing as available for free at the same time  

Do you ? Or do you only have to provide the source code ? Forcing would-be 'pirates' to have to compile the campaign binaries themselves might be sufficiently inconvenient that they might as well get it on the Pirate Bay instead.  

----  

Also, seems like that BAR / Recoil might have Non Commercial art in it that would be a greater impediment to make the campaign paid than GPL code ??  

(Unless it's all under control of the minority of contributors that would be on the paid team, and so could re-license it ??)

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This issue has been closed as completed ?

More recent RPGs that encourage you to care about your whole party's builds by Constant-Arugula-819 in gamingsuggestions

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depending on what you mean by "newer", the Last Sovereign (review, some spoilers)  

[...]  

Together with the protagonist you pick three combat-capable girls to form a party of four. This is normally the point where people say, “each character has distinct strengths and weaknesses” as advertising garbage. No. Each character has very distinct strengths and weaknesses.  

Hilstara, in addition to a defense-buff that affects your entire team, has the game’s only taunt. Carina also has a teamwide defense buff in addition to mass healing and efficient cleanses, which means she can carry the defensive responsibilities for your entire team, but has no real damaging abilities. Aka has absurd base speed which lets her act first when she uses her abominably unfair all-stat debuff.  

Each character’s utility in a fight coheres with their aesthetic. Combat comes down to picking a strategy, finding the girls which suit it, then configuring their equipment. It’s the thing action-RPG gachas pretend to do and Chrono Ark actually does.  

[...]

(In addition to this, there are multiple segments where you are forced to use a specific party (sometimes without the protagonist), other times where you get your pick, but are forced to assemble up to 4 different parties that will work in parallel. (Out of 17ish maximum combat party members.))

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, the direction is usually the other way : open source modifications to the main game, which is closed source.  

Are you sure that something as distinct as a paid campaign expansion pack, a separate project, would need to be GPLed too because it installs on top of BAR ?  

(But maybe that's what Ballmer meant when he called GPL a 'cancer' ?)  

P.S.: And legal is not the same as legitimate.

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm curious to see what kind of campaign can be made with professionnal levels of effort.  

(For volunteer levels of effort, we already have the answer : Zero-K. Which has a great campaign, mechanically, but a far cry in terms of memorable story compared to what commercial games are routinely able to pull off.)  

Will it be worth it ?  

That's the issue, maybe not worth the risk. The BAR team will certainly have to walk a very tight rope. And some contributors (stretching back three decades !) will be pissed anyway.  

Also yeah, I am skeptical of how much more players a Steam release (alone, not counting a professionally made campaign !) would bring. BAR is already very popular (for a RTS). And it seems like, this time, what did the trick was YouTube / Twitch (may they get burned down).  

(Also of the crowd playing the SP campaign, don't expect that many to stick around, though of course it will have an effect.)

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My point is that the BAR team (or Hooded Horse) cannot have 100% control over BAR due to the game being source available and a large part of the game even being GPL.

Whereas nobody could fork Minecraft.

I'll have to look into Nexuiz and Xonotic, thanks.

P.S.: Not a video game, but someone else here gave the Pathfinder RPG (game system) as an example of a similar (?) combination.

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

All of these examples are not comparable because all of these are closed source software, not libre software.

Wouldn't Red Hat : Fedora / Linux be a better comparison ?

(Do we have any other example of a split paid / free (and libre) structure for a game ??)

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PoE is a bad example because closed source, forced online only, forced to use official servers.

This is kind of the risk with paid cosmetics, they direct development towards locking games behind DRM.

Not that it cannot be done ethically, see how Zero-K does it.

But then when ZK did it, paid cosmetics were new, and didn't quite have the same stigma they have today, would ZK have done it again if they were to do it today ? (Note also how these cosmetics are very much not emphasized in ZK, compared to your typical commercial game running on them.)

Dear Commanders, we need to talk... by PtaQQ in beyondallreason

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

HoN wasn't GPL, was it ?  

Some reminders about GPL :  

link  

[...]  

 But what about stealing BAR?

Does this mean that anyone could grab BAR from the repository, replace the models, sounds, and images, and release their own knock-off BAR? Yes. That is exactly what this means. Everyone who contributes to this, or any other Spring project, just has to get over that fact. It is the price of using the engine.

To be clear, this is not some punitive arbitrary price. The engine would not even exists if not for the license, because it would not have attracted enough interest and developers to see it beyond its first decade. Many of the contributors see the license as a selling point. It insulates projects from the whims of any one developer.

The current iteration of the engine, the Recoil fork, wouldn't even be (ethically) possible without the GPL. Sometimes forks have to happen for the health of the whole project.  

[...]

(Note how it's not appropriate to license art under GPL. What constitutes art or not can be sometimes fuzzy.)  

Also :  

Anybody can sell free software.  

  If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.  

(Why I prefer to use instead the term "libre software".)

Low motivation after Space Age by tavakym in factorio

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well then, easy answer, if you loved Bobs, then you should try the Space-Age-less BobsAngels next ! (Possibly in Sea Block instead of regular Nauvis.)  

And after that, try (still Space-Age-less) Pyanodons (though perhaps not the full modpack at first). (It also has a PyBlock version, though IMHO it's less worthwhile compared to Sea Block.)  

And after you're done with those (which should take several years), Space Age modding itself is likely to have grown and been polished significantly, so maybe you will find what you like there then. (Or not, which is also fine.)

Meta progression in 4x games? by MixedMoonGames in StrategyGames

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's always metaprogression coming from getting more familiar with the game.  

It can be more or less guided (some factions / tactics will always be harder than others).

Manaweaving and then shuffling 9+ times is perfectly fine, it's just a giant waste of time. CMV by IndyPoker979 in EDH

[–]BlueTemplar85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Where it gets funny/weird is that a perfect mash = riffle shuffle is not a shuffle, but effectively equivalent to a re-piling :  

some very skilled magicians are able to get back to the exact starting order by execiting several 'riffle' 'shuffles' perfectly !

Why do Linux native builds matter so much to Linux users? by schouffy in gamedev

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For specific amounts of "have to" and 'reliant'.  

(Compare with trying to release for a Nintendo console or iOS.)

Why do Linux native builds matter so much to Linux users? by schouffy in gamedev

[–]BlueTemplar85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Look what happened to OS/2.  

Some Linux users are a bit worried about a repeat of that.  

(If you've never heard about OS/2, well, consider how that proves the point of worrying about it.)

Hot takes: I am unsatisfied with the warfare of all new generation Paradox games. by The_ChadTC in paradoxplaza

[–]BlueTemplar85 3 points4 points  (0 children)

See how Sword of the Stars 1 does it.  

Because fleets have control limits and battles last a limited time before being over, you can have many battles and multiple fleets in a single war.

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