The only game devs i know who hate steam are shovelware or low effort devs. Or i guess contrarians that just want attention.
I get it, steam takes a big cut. But you make more releasing on steam alone than every other site combined, by a lot. You get more audience, word of mouth, advertising, you get more api features, etc.
And i say this as a fan of GMG and GOG. I want them to be the top dogs, and i like posts that give them more attention.
Ray tracing is not a fad though, and reducing it to just reflections is ignorant. Reflections, shadows, bounce lighting/global illumination, etc. all get noticeable bumps in quality. They are definitely more subtle than previous bumps from new techniques because those old techniques have gotten so damn good. But at the same time, those previous techniques have reached their limits and have unfixable problems. Whether that is occlusion artifacts in reflections, light leaking from global illumination, non-interactive baked lighting, shadows with uncanny resolution and no penumbra, hacky ambient occlusion, etc. etc… the problems are all minor, sure, but they are there, noticable, and devs want to keep pushing.
And this is ignoring the benefits on the dev side as well. No more annoying rasterized light placement. And pulling your hair out trying to hack the engine to get the look youre after. “It just works” is an unfortunate comment but holds a lot of truth. Even non realistic looking games will use more and more ray tracing as time goes on because of that. And eventually every device and card will have performance for a full suite of effects. Its an inevitability, not a fad.
Only in single player though.
Multiplayer reload speed is a knob for balance.
Depth to movement mechanics is one of the differences between mediocre and great first person games. Look at counter strike movement over the years. Players have extracted everything from the quirks of that engine, the game is better for it, and the skill ceiling for movement alone is enormous. That skill ceiling is important. Crouch jumps in particular have been in pretty much every game i can think of since i learned halo on the og xbox. even if they aren’t explicitly used by the game designers, there is often tricks you can do to exploit campaigns in fun ways, or maneuver the multiplayer with a higher level of expertise than others. Thats fun. Competitive but fun.
Compared to games where every mechanic is dead simple and everyone can do it, its more just rock paper scissors at that point. The designer gave a specific movement ability, you counter it with some other ability they designed. Its boring to me.
It shouldn’t be ignored full stop. It depends entirely on the game. A purely arcade shooter should probably ignore it and most do (halo, overwatch), but a sim certainly shouldn’t (tarkov, arma). And a mixed game can decide for themselves (battlefield, cod).
Some do this, tarkov is a popular example.
No it didn’t, because ive not heard of anyone else with that issue. Even just trying very low settings your system still struggles?
The one theyve acknowledged working on is related to garbage. Your cargo port/terminal will import a lot of various resources for your city to use, including garbage. Which means no matter how much garbage handling to build, your imports will flood it.
Workaround is to district everything and make sure your garbage handling facilities excludes the districts with the poets/terminals.
Some other economic bugs are not as bad. Like services not using resources correctly or zoned buildings having too much of a safety net for bankruptcy. Theres a lot the community is tracking down and the devs are working on.
I wouldn’t say it makes the game unplayable. The complexity that does work is great. Its still so much better than CS1. Im not in the camp of anyone not buying “out of principal”. Its a fairly small team who had a deadline to meet. They made a great game in that time despite the glaring issues. They provided 10 years of CS1 support (even excluding dlcs), CS2 will be no different.
They already mentioned delaying the first dlc from the planned Q4 2023 release to Q1 2024.
What, how? Are you just leaving the settings at default and giving up? They basically have said what is broken. If you turn those settings off it works alright.
Doesn’t mean we call them heros and erect monuments to them. if anything we place these objects in a museum dedicated to the group. We acknowledge their troubled past, difficult decisions, horrible actions, good actions, and learn from all of it. A sense of shame and humility doesnt make current Ukrainians bad in any way.
Art style, fidelity, and realism are all somewhat separate. Yeah a good art style can make a game timeless. There are countless examples of that. But it doesnt mean that realistic looking games cant have a great art style. I think cohesion is a huge part of what people mean by “art style”. Realistic looking games that focus on having a cohesive look can also be fairly timeless. They may not compete with today’s fidelity (resolution, technology, etc), but Assassin’s Creed, various Battlefield games, Crysis 1, and plenty more all look great if you look at them today.
Theres also the concept of somwthing not realistic, but high fidelity. Minecraft RTX is simply amazing. Taking that already timeless art style and increasing the fidelity doesn’t suddenly remove the timeless factor, and i love that. I want more of that. Even if it means i need a fairly beefy gpu for such simple graphics otherwise.
Theyre adding every single little thing that they can to reach that value. 401k matching, employer’s health insurance, vision, dental, paid time off, those are all big easy ones. But they probably have idiotic values for all the fine print benefits too. Think of free legal advice, financial advice, personal counseling, reimbursements for education opportunities, travel, uniform cleaning, etc etc.
Should it all add up to 100k and be boasted about? No… But of course they will anyway.
But where are the actual good reasons for the hate?
“Ugh i have to use this genuinely good storefront if i want to be successful” is not a logical reason. Its not a monopoly. Consoles and mobile are still a thing afterall, even if we ignore all the pc stores and the fact that plenty of games do fine without steam, including indie.