Good review. PS5 exclusives continue to leave me wanting. So far I’ve successfully avoided 100% of the FOMO for not owning one.

This was also very much on point:

If you’re much like me you might feel this sort of thing is starting to get a bit overdone - especially within PlayStation’s first-party offerings, which, as I’ve written before, have all started to merge into one. Count how many Sony-developed games in the past five years have grapple hooks, climbable ledges, parries, gliders, RPG-lite skill trees, waist-high grass, ultra-simple environmental puzzles, and a form of rage meter that fills up until you can press L3+R3 or L2+R2 for an ultimate of some kind, and the formula doesn’t so much reveal itself as it does write it on your forehead in yellow paint.

This one isn’t necessarily unexpected though - it was made by a bunch of ex-CDPR people. From the clips I’ve seen, it’s pretty much The Witcher 3: 2. Seeing as that game is many people’s all time favourite, the success of Dawnwalker doesn’t surprise me at all.

You’re not entirely wrong, even if a little disingenuous. I think it’s quite clear that indie games provide the best examples of creativity and freedom of expression in gaming currently, but there definitely is also quite an oversaturated jungle to cut through of roguelikes, deckbuilders, roguelike deckbuilders, Metroidvanias, Soulslikes, Soulslike Metroidvanias…

Perfect descriptor. You can somewhat stem the bleeding of low dopamine with medication too, though.

Don’t worry, they just need another 3-4 spinoffs and tie-in mobile games and the story will make perfect sense!

I wasn’t commenting on the DLSS 5 slop filter here, only on the general question “do ‘great’ graphics matter in a game”. I agree that slopifying a game takes you further away from the intended art direction, which I’m not a fan of.

And whatever the mechanical premise of the actual gameplay of Bodycam, the impact of it would be much less with stylized Fortnite cartoon graphics as opposed to the current photorealistic presentation. That’s all.

Are games bad or limited because of poor graphics? No. Are games better if they have great graphics? Not really.

Depends on how you define “great”. I’ve definitely played games before where the art direction and general visual artistry was a huge part of the selling point. But that doesn’t have to be photorealistic - “great graphics” can be something like pixel art majesty (CF: REPLACED).

That being said, some games are certainly elevated by incredible photorealistic visuals. Bodycam has basically built a whole premise on it, and it would certainly be a lesser game without its graphics.

There are ways to get around the auto update, but those are also futzy. I agree that this is one of the few complaints about Steam that I have.

I used Steam Depot to rollback RDR2 in order to make a mod work about 2 years ago. If nothing has changed it should still work, although it is admittedly more fussy than version rollback on GOG.

That’s probably the best one. Otherwise I think of Mites ~ termites, and some stalagmites look vaguely like those classic termite mounds.

Can’t you use Steam Depot to download older versions? It’s been a minute since I futzed with it.

I’m pretty sure you can rollback game versions on Steam too.

I landed on Summit after getting fed up with Sync being abandoned and broken. For me it’s the best app by far.

One of my favourite episodes, both for the outcome and for how into it Jamie got.

If you check out the community here it’s actually surprisingly active. Besides getting spoiled if you can’t watch live, it’s a nice community - way more active than !football@sopuli.xyz surprisingly. Even !formuladank@lemmy.world has some activity.

People have been using Threadiverse to refer to the link-aggregating community based Fediverse platforms with threaded discussion topics for way longer than Threads has existed as a website.

If you can come up with a catchier alternative then go for it. Link-aggregator-verse doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

I too was fooled but, in fairness around the time of the engine upgrade last race Honda were talking about Next Year^TM, and it seems maybe there was a reason for it. This should be Aston’s worst track of the year (although I can’t imagine Baku being happy fun times for them either), but I would not expect miracles this season. Maybe another points finish, if we’re lucky.

I mean, it’s unfortunately both. That was his intention yes, but he’s feeding into the whole thing as he does so, becoming part of the reinforcement of the MAGA cult.

DLSS 5 (slop filter) you mean? Because the regular old upscaling DLSS doesn’t really produce uncanny valley stuff. Only artifacts, and mostly on presets like Performance or Ultra Performance.

And I do also agree about RT. Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2 both had great visually impactful ray tracing and GTA 6 (as much as it pains me to say it) looks like a fantastic showcase of real-time lighting.

They’re doing the double whammy. Mandatory sign-in (even on old.reddit) and any account they can’t estimate as belonging to an adult through their use of invasive spy metrics and AI will be forced to do age verification.