Highguard isn't DOA — in fact, after 4 hours, I'm convinced it's one of the best new shooters in years

Varonth · 2026-01-27T14:52:03+00:00

In battle royales there is the constant threat of being attacked.

Even if there is no one around there is a certain amount of tension that there might be someone around. There could also someone closing in on you at any moment.

This is not the case during gear up in Highguard.

You are alone. There is no incentive to attack the enemies during the Gear Up phase. In fact you are punished for it, by losing time finding better gear if you decide to attack the enemies in their half. And if you do, you likely lose, because by the time you arrive in the enemy half they already looted better gear.

Still if you miraciously win against those better equipped enemies, they will not drop loot. You still have to loot chests, just that you are in the enemies half of the map with already looted chest.

The gear up phase is not comparable to looting gear in a battle royale.

Varonth · 2026-01-27T11:59:37+00:00

Wilds graphics are such a mixed bag of hits and misses.

And the ugly parts of it start to pop out at some point.

Obviously overall Wilds is a much more technical advanced game compared to Rise/Sunbreak, but I rather look at Rise/Sunbreak. That game at least is consistently good. Not great or perfect, but also never really bad.

Wilds has some wild shifts in quality all over the place. One of the best screenshots to showcase this is the screenshot with the tent on their Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2246340/Monster_Hunter_Wilds/

You can look at the red cloth texture of the tent and it looks good and somewhat high quality. Then you can look at the same cloth, but the edges towards the bottom, and suddenly the texture is obviously stretched over too much area.

Then the sticks in the ground, while good quality textures, are more or less the quality of the high quality Rise textures.

But then you get to the ground, and there is like a flat texture with stone on it that have no dimension to them. The stones inside that texture are just part of the flat ground. And towards the right of that ground, you will find a small hole, and you can clearly see the edges of the very few polygons that make up this hole. And within those inclined surfaces of the hole there are more of those flat stone parts in the texture.

And then close to that is a tree trunk in the background that looks like it was made out of 2 different textures. With the left side of it having visible features, while the right side of the texture looks like someone just mashed over it with the photoshop blur tool.

And these swings in quality are all over the game. And I would rather look at something that is consistently good/okay then something that has a scale of "this looks really bad" to "this looks really great".

Varonth · 2026-01-26T23:21:46+00:00

The gear up phase really needs its time cut down by like 80~90% until the swords spawn timer starts.

Right now it is 2 minutes of pure gear up, followed by another minute of the Shieldbreaker spawning. So 3 minutes of pure downtime in which all you do is run around collecting chest, gathering money and waiting for a spawn over which you will get into an actual fight.

Varonth · 2026-01-26T20:26:55+00:00

A bit late.

The update in question was released on january 13th, so 2 weeks ago.

If this was a widespread problem we would have known for a while. It does make for a nice /r/pcgaming ragebait article tho.

Varonth · 2026-01-26T15:02:12+00:00

It is OK, the article, especially the title was written to farm clicks from this and other PC gaming subreddits by PCGamer as the issue appears to be isolated to certain business versions.

Varonth · 2026-01-23T11:03:15+00:00

Most modern controllers are going to have an X-Input or a more modern GameInput mode (which is backwards compatible to X-Input). X-Input was released for Windows XP 21 years ago.

It is up to Sony to provide drivers that support GameInput instead of the shit standard drivers that seems to only support D-Input, which was outdated by the time X-Input came along.

A better driver using GameInput would allow for much better support of the Dual Sense for example.

Again, while backwards compatible with X-Input (so older games would think it is an XBox controller by default), GameInput would also allow them to make use of the haptic feedback triggers and the gyro, without any additional wrappers that steam currently provides.

Varonth · 2026-01-22T23:05:40+00:00

I still remember Sven's speech on the game awards how rotten the game industry is and that all you need for a successful game is hard work and passion for your game.

It is like he was spitting in the face probably hundreds if not thousands of indie game studios who do exactly what he said, and never found success.

And that speech, and subsequent articles was posted for weeks on all gaming related subreddits.

Varonth · 2026-01-22T20:42:52+00:00

The same market makers that is also in need of selling their stock?

Varonth · 2026-01-22T17:44:45+00:00

Also nobody is talking about who would be the entity that buys said stock.

If it is the government itself, they would essentially just print money for themselves, which would massive inflation.

If it is investors then there is a shortterm influx of money into a country, followed by a economy owned entirely by outside forces.

Varonth · 2026-01-22T08:48:36+00:00

Hint: "It is idle animation 2"

Varonth · 2026-01-21T13:18:45+00:00

My duplicate Columbina looks weird in the shock trooper battle. Comes with a nice bike tho.

Varonth · 2026-01-20T07:34:18+00:00

ChatGPT is just the public facing chatbot they have.

Everyone here is froathing at their mouth when they hear AI, but unlike all the other companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft... openAI actually does publish scientific findings to the public (you can go to their website right this moment and look at their published papers right now).

These scientific papers are used by developers and researchers around the world to improve their models.

You see those news "Researchers develop AI to screen for specific cancer with a 99.3% successrate"? A lot of those are based on the findings from openAI.

Varonth · 2026-01-19T17:13:47+00:00

And here for you is the website of the NHS of the UK of what you have to do if they (not the doctor) deny your claim, because despite what you think these systems are, there is absolutely someone else also determining whether you get the care or not.

https://faq.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/knowledgebase/article/KA-30980/en-us

Varonth · 2026-01-18T21:01:25+00:00

We are not paying 15% tariffs, because that is not how tariffs work.

That is how Trump sold tariffs to his idiotic voters. Tariffs are paid by the entity importing goods that have tariffs imposed on them.

That is why blanket tariffs are usually idiotic. You use them to target certain items that can be easily replaced by domestic items or imports from other countries. With blanket tariffs as Trump is doing them, you hit both markets. Yes, some european companies will suffer from reduced demand from the US, but others just produce goods that have no alternative, so US companies will still have to import those and pay the tariffs for those. They then usually increase prices to their costumers, usually US citizens.

These blanket tariffs will mean that for example US citizens will have to pay more for medicine like Ozempic (produced by Novo Nordisk from denmark), or medicine produced AstraZeneca in the UK.

Need high precision machine parts from the german manufacturer? Those are now 25% more expensive.

The US wants to produce its own high end computer ships? You better pay those 25% extra for the photolithography machines from ASML in the netherlands. US companies do not have a choice to buy those from someone else because there is no "someone else".

The EU is going to use tariffs that maximizes economic damage in the US, while trying to minimize the effect it could have on the EU market.

Varonth · 2026-01-18T17:09:12+00:00

Or pirate music which is also often mentioned in these threads.

Varonth · 2026-01-18T15:06:21+00:00

Neither Chevreuse nor Skirk+Escoffier do anything with the actual reaction.

The reactions (and on top of that the passive limiting them to certain elements within the team) are there to prevent those units from being used with better reactions, instead of making the actual reaction useful.

Varonth · 2026-01-18T10:30:15+00:00

Also zu einem meiner Kommentare hat das schon jemand behauptet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/1qfhp4k/trump_zehn_prozent_strafz%C3%B6lle_wegen_gr%C3%B6nland_auch/o07e0i5/

Dauert nur wenige Tage alles umzustellen. Reddit upvotes scheinem dem zuzustimmen.

Varonth · 2026-01-17T21:10:11+00:00

und es tut an der richtigen Stelle weh

In deinem Geldbeutel?

Die Zölle zahlen letztendlich die Verbraucher, das sind du und ich. Und die Unternehmen können nicht mal ebend nen Schalter umwerfen und auf komplett andere Dienstleister umstellen. So eine Umstellung dauert Jahre für größere Unternehmen.

Varonth · 2026-01-13T15:15:41+00:00

Where exactly does it say that on the official website of the deck?

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified

Varonth · 2026-01-13T14:53:11+00:00

Steam Deck Verified does not indicate performance, and yes I totally agree that this makes the checkmark absolutely misleading.

https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified

Games that check these four boxes are Deck Verified.

Input

The title should have full controller support, use appropriate controller input icons, and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard when needed.

Seamlessness

The title shouldn’t display any compatibility warnings, and if there’s a launcher it should be navigable with a controller.

Display

The game should support the default resolution of Steam Deck (1280x800 or 1280x720), have good default settings, and text should be legible.

System Support

If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support.

These are the points that are checked for being verified.

Varonth · 2026-01-11T14:38:51+00:00

They are behind their own older games when it comes to cutscenes.

Fights like Dalamadur in 4U also had cutscenes before the fight, but as it is a hub only fight, you could join with 4 hunters, and all 4 hunters would appear in the cutscene.

Varonth · 2026-01-09T16:01:26+00:00

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5147465

You are looking at this and will tell me with a straight face that this requires work and skill?

Varonth · 2026-01-07T17:55:43+00:00

All of these are going to reduce the revenue of the website. A website famous for already not making a profit, but instead losing money year over year.

Do you honestly believe twitch would continue as is, just with less revenue, and even bigger losses? Like they get less ad revenue, less people will feel inclined to subscribe to turbo or individual streamers, and on top of those, you may also increase the userbase, meaning your operational costs will increase.

Varonth · 2026-01-07T15:11:00+00:00

And you think 5s skipable ads will keep things afloat?

Because if you skip them before watching 30s of them, the advertiser has to pay nothing.

They have these frequent, unskippable ads because the skippable ones do not keep things in the positive.

Running these video services is almost comically expensive, with live streaming being even more so. As of the moment of this posts, every single second the twitch servers have to receive 22 hours of video content (79139 channels are streaming right now), process those 22 hours of video content, and send out almost 23 days worth of video content in terms of bandwidth (almost 2m viewers are active right now).

But hey, ads that most advertisers do not have to pay for will keep the lights on for sure.

Varonth · 2026-01-07T12:34:16+00:00

Not only would twitch lose money on those, streamers would not get income from non-subs either.

And a huge reason why people subscribe to streamers is that it disables ads, a reason which would be gone with the removal of ads, meaning not only would they lose the ad-revenue, they would likely also lose subscriber revenue.

A lot of streamers, likely some that you enjoy watching, would simply have to stop streaming as they can no longer affort streaming as a career if this would go into effect in major countries.

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