Yeah for me, it’s the variety of tales that you author. Every game feels a bit like a new adventure, after a while similar to ones you’ve been on before, but still new.

ARC has those elements, but something feels off so far for me…

Also typically the progression is in terms of variety (Roguelike) instead of straight power (Roguelite). That keeps things fair because even a new player, if they trade the aim, can pose a real threat to a seasoned player of similar FPS skill. ARC seems like it’s decided to go for a sort of Roguelite experience and that seems risky.

I haven’t played Marathon, but I did get into the ARC test. This will mostly be some ramblings…

I’m still waiting to play ARC with some friends. I only did some solo stuff.

I’m coming from this as a big Hunt Showdown player (1,200+ hours) and someone that’s played a bit of Forever Winter (~20). I still like Hunt better; I think it’s the only extraction shooter that didn’t take a ton of influence from Tarkov.

I wasn’t crazy about the marathon art style, but I’m not ready to pass judgement on it until I’ve been in the world.

ARC’s art style I found beautiful but also perhaps too sparse. There were so many wide open spaces … I just don’t see that being a good thing for an extraction shooter. The world felt vast and empty … I prefer Hunt’s more cluttered and dense design.

ARC does seem to have a lot of potential in like how it’s designed its AI, Hunt’s is very primitive in a lot of ways and kind of secondary. I think the AI is going to be a bigger deal in ARC.

Third person also feels worse to me than first person. I hope they add a first person mode to ARC, but I kind of doubt they will.

I definitely agree that ARC felt like it was being set up to tell a story and felt very cinematic at times.

The UI also felt like the best extraction shooter UI I’ve ever encountered.

I’m concerned about the long term health of ARC. The progression system seems like it will certainly lead to established players dominating newer players. The lack of a primary objective that’s shared by all the teams on the map … I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, it may lead to a more relaxed experience, on the other hand, it doesn’t curate players towards each other like Hunt does; it seems looting and crafting are the primary motivators instead.

The fights that I did get into, they lacked the complex environment and buildings in Hunt so I didn’t find them nearly as engaging, they were much more straight forward gunfights than leveraging the map to use it to my advantage. I think that aspect will ultimately hurt the game as it makes it feel like a bit of a generic shooter.

Overall ARC felt very middle of the road from what I’ve played of it so far. I had a similar feeling about The Finals. Embark seems like a talented studio and I wish them the best as they go up against Bungie and Crytek.

Presumably they had to to redo all the models and textures; though their may have been an automatic conversation they developed to help them save time on some of the things they didn’t want changed.

Then they had to bolt on unreal engine’s rendering loop on top of the original engine’s logic and replace all the UI code as well.

It’s not a particularly easy job. Easily a few years worth of work for a decent sized team.

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Story is relatively cheap to develop. A lion share of the cost of making a game is the coding (which with this being moved to another engine, there almost certainly was a lot of that) and art (which it seems they redid like all of that and there’s a good chance a lot of the animations had to be tweaked).

Basically the only thing wouldn’t have to pay for was the story writers and some level designers (people still had to touch up the maps even if there was some automated conversion that pulled most of the map into Unreal Engine 5).

https://youtu.be/1jZXzv1-CmA – like this isn’t just a texture upscale and some minor tweaks to the animations, it’s a large scale remaster.

I mean … not really, they all but rebuilt it. New assets on a new engine.

Intel … why are you still shooting yourself in the foot…?

🤦‍♂️

I honestly suspect antitrust is the reason Google hasn’t laid more fiber (not that antitrust is bad). They’re dangerously close to being broken up for so many other things adding this would be a very high risk gambit. Especially because ISPs are known for their shitty business practices and leveraging lawyers to maximum pain on any legitimate competition that threatens them.

Both can be bad.

It’s about content delivery, i.e. the CCP having direct control over what content (i.e. propaganda) is sent to Americans on the platform via their proprietary algorithm (with all the source code heavily guarded in mainland China).

Anything with a server software you can host can be played on LAN (okay probably not some things because they’re being weird but in general this is true).

That means counter strike, Minecraft, supertuxkart, xonotic, enshrouded, pal world, etc

More like MBA conduct … number must go up now!!! Not later, now!!!

Maybe just maybe Intel… You should consider sticking to the same socket for a longer period and generally increasing the long term value proposition. Especially considering the amount of stagnation that came from your company in the desktop space.

On some level yes, but reading the article nothing persist between boots. This seems like a vulnerability that’s really only that serious A if you don’t apply AMDs patched micro code and B there’s another vulnerability on your system that lets this persist between operating system reinstall/in the BIOS.

Yeah, I was really confused when the game Brighter Shores first entered early access with its initial aggressive chat moderation system (because it’s out of the UK law and the liability on their part is insane I guess) and a bunch of people were like “seriously? I got banned for this.”

Nobody was getting banned, they were getting temporarily muted and calling it a ban.

I feel like “ban” is a term that used to have a really clear meaning: you can no longer use this service. Now, it seems like that word is increasingly being abused to just mean: the service stopped me from doing something I wanted to do.

But I have such a soft spot for how beautiful the console is from a design and hardware standpoint. That boxy gray box is such beauty.

Agree to disagree lol

What will be really great is when this gets to a point where game developers no longer have to do so much work to get realistic lightning.

Like, “just place your objects into your scene and done” seems like it would be a real productivity and quality boost.

But they are not the default option. And your new job may not use them.

Who cares if it’s the default? If it’s the best tool, use it.

It’s silly to have a reason for “going Rust” be the build system, especially in the context of something as new as a WASM context where basically any project is going to be green field or green field adjacent.

Exceptions is a non standard exit point. And by “non standard” I’m not talking about the language but about its surprise appearance not specified in the prototype. Calling double foo(); you don’t know if you should try/catch it, against which exceptions, is it an internal function that may throw 10 level deep ?

And that’s a feature not a bug; it gets incredibly tedious to unwrap or forward manually at every level.

By contrast fn foo() -> Result<f64, Error> in rRst tell you the function may fail. You can inspect the error type if you want to handle it. But the true power of Result in Rust (and Option) is that you have a lot of ergonomic ways to handle the bad case and you are forced to plan for it so you cannot use a bad value thinking it’s good:

You can do this in C++ https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/expected (and as I said, if you feel so inclined, turn off exceptions entirely); it’s just not the “usual” way of doing things.

I use Kopia to B2, then on a monthly basis I copy the current Kopia repo to an external drive that’s otherwise kept offline in my house.