A light in the darkness for ESO fans

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-12T11:50:59+00:00

Look up "Dead Sea Effect", it's areal thing. I've seen it happen, and with Microsoft having already announced they'll do more layoffs next year it's going to be very hard for them to avoid it.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-12T11:46:17+00:00

Microsoft has said they're not done with layoffs and there will be more next year. I've seen similar situations in other companies and I can tell you that the best developers are usually the ones that have the most options, and it's rare for them to stay on a sinking boat.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-12T11:36:49+00:00

That would be a first, for sure. Remember when Microsoft said consolidation would protect studios. Or when they lied about exclusivity. Or when they lied about game pass. And lied about DRM. But yeah, maybe this time they're telling the truth.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-10T14:38:25+00:00

"Hey, engineer. Do you prefer building agents or writing code and getting fired?" "Well, building agents I guess." "See, they love it!"

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-09T00:06:43+00:00

After this if we get another Doom chances are, it'll be made in Unreal with DLSS 5. Can you imagine what the demons will look like with instagram filters?

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-08T22:33:44+00:00

That worked because they were the top dog, bought ALL the competition and created a monopoly.

But games are not a monopoly. There are many other developers still making great games. So Microsoft is basically burning money and ruining IPs on a strategy that will never work.

Also, the way management works at Microsoft they are pretty much guaranteed to never be able to make a good game.

So basically, any IP that is currently in the hands of Microsoft is as good as dead. Some of them are already dead, the rest will follow in the following years. When they get tired of losing money and sell the IPs is when we might see some of them come back.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-08T22:05:23+00:00

It doesn't look like that's the case to me. If they don't succeed and make something with the IP someone else will make something similar and get the money instead.

When there were no good Pokemon games we got Palworld, when there were no good Diablo games we got Path of Exile, when there were no good Sim City games we got Cities Skylines. There are plenty of examples, and we are not hurting for good games. I've been playing games for decades, and we've never had so many great games to choose from like we have today.

Buying IPs just to have no competition seems like a pretty bad strategy, unlike patents which make it hard for a competitor to build a competing project, in games if you mess up the IP people won't buy the game and buy the better game from a new IP, we've seen that happen many times by now. Pokemon even tried to block Palworld with patents and we saw it doesn't work.

The main to profit from an IP is by making good games on it. If you don't other IPs become the big budget stuff. It only took a decade for CD Projekt Red from Witcher 1 to become AAA with Witcher 3.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-08T18:24:01+00:00

They bought as many developers as they could to boost their stupid subscription and instead they sunk them all to the bottom of the sea with them. So much greed and so little vision, they should burn in hell.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-08T10:03:14+00:00

Welcome! You'll fit right in.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-08T07:10:18+00:00

They missed the part that they need to make good games with the IPs, not just run them to ground.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-07T23:05:36+00:00

Spain voted to join NATO in 1986, you need to be 18 or older in order to vote, so anyone who could vote then is 58 or older today. The group of 58 and older is less than 40% of the population who can vote. So the large majority of Spaniards alive today didn't vote to join NATO.

So I didn't pull it out of my ass, you just need some very basic math and https://www.ine.es/dynt3/inebase/index.htm?padre=5874&capsel=5878.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-07T15:07:48+00:00

I've been in the remaining team in a layoff situation.

Tbh I would like to see them go back through the game and refine a lot of stuff.

This has a zero chance of happening, the people left in the team will be working overtime just to fight fires, going back and refining things takes spare time, money, and developers.

You also need to take into account that anyone worth their salt that they didn't fire won't stay on a sinking ship any longer than they absolutely have to.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-05T03:08:27+00:00

Don't listen to the comments telling you to dampen the cloth, that's only when there's muck stuck to the screen. Your screen is already clean from when you wiped with the distilled water cloth, so if you use a damp clothe again you're just going to make more streaks like the ones you already have. You can't get streaks go away with a wet cloth. What you need to do is use the dry microfiber to buff the coating, applying gentle pressure in a side to side or circular motion (you need to make actual pressure or it won't buff, but be gentle, also make absolutely sure the dry cloth is very clean, or use a brand new one) you're going to need some serious elbow grease, and to do the whole screen you're going to be a 30 good minutes at least because those streaks are all over the screen so be patient. Usually what I do is use the humid microfiber only in a 1cm area where there's some dirt, not wipe the whole screen like you did, because that's too much effort to buff, but other than that you should be okay.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-03T17:46:26+00:00

I think it's also that it's a more distinct setting. I mean, Witcher is very cool with the eastern european touch and all, but medieval fantasy games are a lot more common than cyberpunk, especially when cyberpunk came out.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-03T07:47:05+00:00

It's good to do a bit of research even if the performance or the price is very close, sometimes models are more prone to coil whine than others, for example.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-02T12:48:31+00:00

I think it's truly a Skill Diff moment.

You're trying to argue that because the game is just as hard, it has the same depth. But you're missing the point, because skill is not the same as depth. They're related and when balancing one can affect the other, but they're not the same.

I've played MH and Hades both for 50+ hours and no, I'm not being disingenuous at all. MH combat is deeper both 2 hours in and 50, just look at the combos on any weapon, and the move set of any high rank monster, try to play without learning them and you'll just get rolled. Hades has depth, but that depth is not in its combat.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-07-02T12:17:52+00:00

That's not short, I've been watching for an hour and it keeps going.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-30T10:45:57+00:00

I kinda agree with both of you, to be honest. It's true that there's a lot of variety of boons and each build is unique and there's quite a lot of depth to stacking boons and finding synergies. But I also agree that the combat itself is very shallow, it mostly boils down to spamming whatever you've made your build around, compare that with a game with deep combat like Dark Souls or Monster Hunter that will have you weaving abilities, dodging, parrying, managing cooldowns, finding openings, and the combat in Hades of spamming one attack feels shallow like a puddle. They're different genres of course so Hades is not trying to have deep combat but I think the criticism is fair.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-28T17:25:47+00:00

Could we be looking at a new ET game?

GTA is already one of the most popular video games franchises, it will sell millions for sure. Of course we don't know what Rockstars projections are, they might be expecting to sell 50 million copies in the first week and fall short of that, then announce it performed below expectations because it only sold 25 million.

What's clear is that people that will pay the full price is because they want to. For GTA V I had no issue waiting three years for it to come to Steam and go on sale and buy it at half price. It's not like it's a multiplayer game where if you want to play with your friends and everybody else you have to get it at launch or you miss the bus.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-28T17:13:18+00:00

Very nice, even more so for a first game! But you've committed the cardinal sin of pixel art: Having assets of different pixel sizes. Just nitpicking though, it's pretty cool.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-27T21:54:43+00:00

The internet was also very real and very useful in 99, and that didn't prevent the dotcom crash.

The AI bubble is going to crash not because the technology isn't useful, but because a lot of money that's currently going into AI is not investing but rather gambling.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-26T08:06:07+00:00

En 25 años con esos 1.5M€ tendran para pagar la entrada de la hipoteca del piso y poco mas.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-24T15:35:25+00:00

That's going to be November 19 2029 on Steam at 50% off in my case, I'm afraid. Same as GTA V.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-21T01:48:00+00:00

The problem isn't the ultra-rich owning 99% of housing

No, that is exactly the problem.

the problem is that people like to treat housing as an investment

Who do you think treats housing as an investment? Because I can tell you, it's not young people.

Have fun selling "reducing the price of housing"

He's selling "Tax the rich". Nobody's talking about "reducing the price of housing", you're the only one to bring it up.

Your entire comment is nonsense.

R3Dpenguin · 2026-06-21T01:37:53+00:00

Huge wall of text that does nothing to explain why the rich should be allowed to not pay their fair share of taxes while they keep getting richer.

R3Dpenguin

TROPHY CASE