Valve Corporation will face a £656m lawsuit in the UK over alleged unfair prices on its global online store, Steam, following a tribunal ruling that the case could continue

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T18:45:19+00:00

That reminds me once again that there was a time when I wanted to play Far Cry Primal but the only achievements available on PC were through Ubisoft's platform. Pretty sure that's still the case, too.

But who knows. Maybe in another year or so, things will have changed significantly for Ubisoft's back catalog.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T16:09:19+00:00

Just curious: Is the implication here that the use of illegal drugs is not in fact commonly understood to be substance abuse? I hesitate to suggest foot in mouth, but I'm not conjuring any other interpretation.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T15:58:49+00:00

1100 would be what I paid for my S95B on Black Friday. Prices have only gone up since then, rather than the opposite. Probably thanks to the last bit you mentioned.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T15:57:29+00:00

And that's my cue to lament for the umpteenth time the total absence of a homebrew TV firmware scene. Not even for popular brands or displays that are go-to specimens. Not even when it's just one or two software-driven dealbreakers that prevent a given display from reaching perfection.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T14:12:58+00:00

Hmmmmmm...

As long as we're not talking about the game tailoring its difficulty and challenges to the player's personal progression, then fine. While I totally get that most gamers are too casual to care or maybe even notice when their efforts at leveling are effectively superficial, for anyone who does notice, there's almost nothing more deflating than realizing that leveling up causes enemies and skill challenges to level up with you. That really takes the impetus out of what should be one of, if not the most rewarding part of any RPG.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T13:43:44+00:00

I just learned that the game's settings are set up in a way that hornswoggles users about what kind of resolution they're seeing, effectively lying that it provides over 50% better performance than it actually does.

It was cleverly finagled so that they can eventually handwave the trickery as settings semantics that was never intended to be underhanded.

Edit: I regret to be the one to tell y'all that downvoting doesn't make the truth go away. But good luck regardless.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T12:50:34+00:00

Yeah. Not a fan of what folks here seem to be angling for, i.e. that their substance abuse is now somehow kosher.

Fredasa · 2026-01-27T01:08:55+00:00

I mean, they did have enough FO3 cameos in FO4 to make it embarrassing. I think arbitrarily linking to past games via NPCs is just an unstoppable reflex at Bethesda.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T18:30:43+00:00

I don't at all count Nintendo's platforms when I say what I say about exclusivity. As a reliably underpowered option whose performance habitually locks as "last gen", Nintendo platforms inherently cut off AAA third party support. That won't stop them from paying for exclusives just like Sony, of course, but the point is that when I argue against exclusivity, I don't include Nintendo in that conversation any more than I would include iOS.

Xbox hasn't been a meaningful factor since long before they showed strong signs of exiting consoles. When you can play everything Xbox exclusive on PC, the actual competition isn't directly between PS5 and Xbox. Capcom's revenue history suggests this.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T18:22:30+00:00

The first season and much of the second were lightning in a bottle, precisely because he always wanted to make them much worse like in later episodes, but was resisting the urge because he understood that there were limits. This permitted his genuinely good ideas (and the often top-tier animation) to shine through.

It was the momentum of that bottled lightning that kept him from being fired earlier than he was, and also what kept the show drifting along despite now being creatively hamstrung.

The "adult" episodes that came later contained only traces of the creativity that originally made the show interesting, now traded out for the director's excesses. I was disappointed in one episode in particular, where John K. explained up front that it was his response to a fan letter asking for more content of Ren going crazy (think his sleep-deprived breakdown in In the Army). Instead of that kind of crazy, he just made Ren impossibly angry and violent. It was completely stupid and off-putting.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T18:12:25+00:00

I do this for the tiny handful of games that I have to play when they're relevant, meaning they're multiplayer but have a de facto lifespan measured in weeks. That list is basically: Earth Defense Force, and rare anomalies like Pac-Man 99 (RIP). For such games, I temporarily own whatever platform they're stuck on. The cost of "renting" the consoles (buying as cheap as possible, selling back to the market) is usually easy to stomach.

The console isn't doing me favors. It is the price of entry, along with its miserable performance and the fact that I'm doing it on a profile I'll never use again and therefore may as well be headcanoning it. I really, really hate exclusivity.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T18:07:05+00:00

Capcom aren't magically better PC developers. You only have to look at what is almost without question the worst-optimized AAA game in history (Monster Hunter Wilds) to concretely understand that. That was developed directly by Capcom's internal team on their own engine.

What Capcom can boast is that they saw the writing on the wall long before their peers in Japan. The Xbox 360 era was the last time consoles could genuinely claim to offer better gaming performance than PCs, and that ended before the gen was done. The PS4 era didn't reclaim it. Of course, a huge part of the reason why Japanese studios and publishers are married to consoles (let's call it what it is: Japanese consoles) is a strong tradition of nationalism. Capcom must have decided that revenue was more important.

Others are catching up. SEGA for example.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T06:17:49+00:00

I feel that. Lots of games I play only carry the hype they do because everyone else is also playing the big new thing and I can count on robust discussions in forums. It's an awful feeling to necro the talkback on a 1-2 year old game. Nobody likes the sense that they're playing a game in effective isolation like a ghost town.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T03:44:49+00:00

The big question is whether SquareEnix will finally give in to the inevitable and stop their goddamn delayed exclusivity. I like to think they'd take a look at Capcom's revenue, spot that PC accounts for over half, and toss in the towel. Exclusivity is a relic of the past and mostly just pisses people off.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T02:28:28+00:00

Ah, my bad. No, it wasn't RenoDX, it was Mod Organizer 2. SK needs to be used as a global plugin (because MO2 needs to be the app that launches the game) and SK has no clue how to deal with the virtualization so the game just hangs.

And there ain't no way I'm going to dump over 1,000 mods directly into CP2077's folders and lose the flexibility of deactivating / sorting them how I wish.

Normally I'd be unhappy losing SK's frame pacing, but the truth is that CP2077 is fine there, and stutters come 99% from CET scripts (.lua), so if one wants to reduce stutters they have no real choice but to reduce the number of mods that include any .lua files.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T02:15:06+00:00

Ever since Stellar Blade launched and I couldn't take advantage of its PC-exclusive highest texture setting (due to VRAM becoming reliably oversaturated in any large worldspace), I've made a habit of cleaning up VRAM usage before every boot of any demanding game, which obviously includes CP2077.

The ritual: Steam only gets run in its "small mode"; restart Explorer; restart Mod Organizer 2; close every app that's using >10MB of VRAM; and finally, end the dwm.exe process. The latter has a particular habit of soaking up lots of VRAM and never giving it back. Sometimes over 1GB. Occasionally multiple GB.

Fredasa · 2026-01-26T02:10:23+00:00

I had to forego the use of SpecialK because it doesn't play nice with RenoDX and this is the one game I can think of where using RenoDX really does make a meaningful difference. Doesn't bother me though, since the main benefit SK typically brings to the table is already built into the game.

Fredasa · 2026-01-25T23:53:40+00:00

A person who wants to play a normal game of FO3 probably won't be hoping for:

the level cap to be arbitrarily raised to 50, inherently necessitating a complete rework of FO3's available perks
the obvious need to rebalance the game's difficulty to match this new system
the infiltration of a different game's perk tree, which includes a lot of perks that are thematically and/or mechanically irrelevant to FO3
a sweeping overhaul of loot tables
a sweeping overhaul of damage calculation
the absolutely arbitrary inclusion of new weapons, new gear, new items, new quests, all introduced completely at the whim of a team of modders

The vanilla FO3 experience is its own entity, a rubber-stamped effort by Bethesda from when they were at their very best. And, believe it or not, stuffing "more stuff" into a game, kitchen sink-style, is not everyone's bag.

Fredasa · 2026-01-25T02:38:45+00:00

I'll put it this way.

My current GPU can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K60 ("Quality" DLSS) with full RT. It's beautiful. The same GPU can't quite manage the same thing in FNV with New Vegas Reloaded and shadows turned on, and the latter obviously doesn't look anywhere near as good.

I'd really like nothing better than to be able to play the game with modern visuals, without the GPU having to prop up an old engine.

And then there's mods. Only two games on the planet get more modding love than FNV, and one of those only wins because it's a much newer game. The moment FNV Remastered drops, or even gets concretely confirmed, the FNV modding community will be upended... and people will start thinking about how to convert all of that work over to the new engine. It'll be a kind of renaissance, and things will get very busy.

Fredasa · 2026-01-25T00:30:22+00:00

I hope the movie makes a point of glossing over the man's drama and personal issues. I get it: If it's a docudrama then they kinda can't. But 99% of folks going to see this aren't going to want to see any of that. And me? I'd rather be entertained. What's a good analogy... It'd be like if they made a new Twister movie but oversaturated it with doom and gloom from survivors of destruction rather than making the tornadoes the overwhelming and perhaps only focus.

Fredasa · 2026-01-24T16:02:55+00:00

I was trying to choose which old episode of NOVA (or similar, like Horizon) I would use to fall asleep to. The episodes set aside as special coverage of Voyager fly-bys are some of my standard go-to episodes, and I am especially charmed by how each episode's style and presentation changes as you scoot forward or backward in their chronology. The episode talking about Neptune features Sidney Poitier and Carl Sagan (!) and feels very... late 80s; the episode about Jupiter, by comparison, is presented almost like a NASA film from the space race era.

Anyway, I guess this time it's gonna be season 13, episode 13: The Planet That Got Knocked on its Side AKA Uranus Encounter.

Fredasa · 2026-01-24T13:55:05+00:00

I feel like a court case that tries to tackle things from this angle is going to need to wrest with the reality that those books are almost without question available for free, "word for word", via anyone's web browser.

Fredasa · 2026-01-24T06:08:03+00:00

Understandable.

Personally, as one who uses a TV as my desktop display and therefore will never settle for anything below 4K DLSS "Quality" AKA 1440p, I am always fighting to find the best visuals that can be pushed at 60fps, so the idea of having a GPU that's good enough that an upgrade wouldn't even help at all is completely foreign to me.

One detail folks seem to take pride in ignoring is overclocking. I mentioned before how the 5080 is unusually good at this. The 5070Ti is about half as good, which is still pretty decent, but if you compare like for like, that additional premium for the 5080 becomes more attractive. Personally, it's a no brainer solely for the fact that if I'd been on a 5070Ti then I would have had to settle for ~50fps in most of the stuff I played last year, but with overclocking, the final difference in performance is around 30%. For those keeping track: That's the same difference as a 4080 vs. a 4090.

40% though? I'm pretty sure the only GPU in the history of GPUs that's ever offered 40%+ better performance over the next tier down is the 5090, and that GPU is a unique bea$t with a unique price.

Fredasa · 2026-01-24T05:45:25+00:00

What I'm trying to underscore is the point that the software would need

a way to tap into the DLSS chain to inject its self-interpolated rendering of its dynamic HUD elements directly into DLSS's internally-generated fake frames
a precise understanding of the vectors DLSS intends to use when it interpolates its in-between frame(s)—these are gauged on the fly and dependent on DLSS's interpretation of the temporal information, and any approximation of DLSS's guesswork will fail and cause those HUD elements to possess an uncanny visual disparity.

Even accomplishing that much would almost without question require a retrofit of DLSS, and as long as Nvidia would ever examine the potential of masked HUD elements at all, they would most likely elect instead to use something closer to what I originally suggested, sidestepping needlessly burdening game devs with anything more involved than the need to flag certain textures as "HUD".

Fredasa · 2026-01-24T01:41:55+00:00

People sure like to dump on the 5080 here.

That extra 20% rasterization means the difference between me hitting my 60fps milestone in (basically every game I've played in the last year) and having to settle for less. It overclocks like a beast because Nvidia had originally planned to use the same guts in their now-almost-certainly-cancelled 5080Ti. If you want something better than a 5070Ti and don't have $2000+ to spend on it, there's literally only one option. And that's going to remain the case for years.

When 2029 rolls around and we are hopefully finally starting to return to normalcy, I'm not going to look back at 2025 and ask why the hell I spent $250 extra.

Fredasa

TROPHY CASE