The Video/PC Game Discussion Thread

I've been playing some FTL recently and man, this game's freaking hard. Awesome but hard as hell. I've promised myself I wouldn't play it anymore but I most certainly will some time soon. And I'll cry over my ship falling apart somewhere in a galaxy, far far away. Fuck this game!

The amount of luck you need to even stand a chance against the ships in later sectors is a bit of an overkill to me. I mean, the game certainly requires lots of planning and strategy but if you're unlucky, nothing's gonna help you. In the last playthrough (4th of 5th so far) I've been about to make it to the last sector but I thought "one last system, nothing stood up a chance against me until now, so why not!" suddenly a ship at least twice as powerful attacks me and destroys my ship before I can even charge up the engines and get the fuck out of there ;d I would need at least 300 more scrap to pimp my ship and face that guy and it would still be tough. 

Yeah, learning the mechanics solidly helps a lot.  Best system upgrades, best ways to use crewmembers, how to deal with boarders effectively, best guns, etc

I highly recommend learning to board enemy ships properly, for the scrap bonus you get.

Been mostly playing Medal of Honor on the PS1 as of late. Finally got past the level I was stuck on, and now at 50%. 

I tried it last year on PS3. Ironically enough, I was just fine with the batting (not special or anything, but I could usually get at least 3-5 runs per game,) but I was so bad at the pitching, I ended up giving up on it. Like, every time I had a decent game going, I'd somehow screw it up and either walk a bunch of guys (I really had no idea had to control the location of my pitches at all,) or give up a bunch of home runs.

I find a lot of mods to be better quality and add more to the game than official DLC's ever have.

A few choice quotes from Gabe Newell on the issue:

"The pay-outs are set by the owner of the game that is being modded."

"Our view of Steam is that it's a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers.  With the Steam workshop, we've already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step.  The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that."

"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."

"Skyrim is a great example of a game that has benefitted enormously from the MODs. The option for paid MODs is supposed to increase the investment in quality modding, not hurt it."

"In general we are pretty reluctant to tell any developer that they have to do something or they can't do something. It just goes against our philosophy to be dictatorial."

"We would be reluctant to force a game developer to do "x" for the same reason we would be reluctant to force a mod developer to do "x." It's just not a good idea. For example we get a lot of pressure to police the content on Steam. Shouldn't there be a rule? How can any decent person approve of naked trees/stabbing defenseless shrubberies? It turns out that everything outrages somebody, and there is no set of possible rules that satisfies everyone. Those conversations always turn into enumerated lists of outrageous things. It's a lot more tractable, and customer/creator friendly to focus on building systems that connect customers to the right content for them personally (and, unfortunately, a lot more work).

So, yes, we want to provide tools for mod authors while avoiding coercing other creators/gamers as much as possible."

Edited by Triceratopsoil - 26 Apr 2015 at 2:01am

I don't know much about the modding community, so I can't really add much to this (though my brother is heavily into Skyrim mods and he is quite upset about the changes) but I just wanted to mention this hilarious response from an obviously angry player on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=431426494&searchtext= 

Triceratopsoil wrote: I think one of the biggest reasons there is as much reaction as there is, is that certain modders are pulling all their files off Nexus and other free sites to sell them on Steam.  Again, not Valve's fault.

Another way to look at it:  what would the reaction have been if Bethesda took 0% of mod sales, and the modder got 70%? Not a single thing from Valve would have changed.