Gaming News

Karnath

Well-Known Member
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel on PS4 has received a set release date of March 26th. So how much does it show my age that the part of the Decisive Edition that I'm most excited about is the 52 page physical manual?
 
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The 3 original (I think) Phoenix Wright games are coming to the PlayStation 4 as one bundle April 9. You can pre-order it in the Play Store now for $29.99.

Edit: On North American servers at least.
 
I don't know if anyone but me plays Final Fantasy 14, but the full trailer for Shadowbringers hit the web a couple days ago. Even if you don't play, it's worth checking out because it's damn beautiful.

 

Zetas

Lurking upon the deep
I had to search out an article.

https://kotaku.com/gearbox-announces-borderlands-3-1833646841

Does it look like Handsome Jack is back? Or someone who's bears a resemblance?

-chronodekar
The guy kinda does look like him, although i think its a mask. There's one point in the trailer where he and the chick are seen from the side and his face looks like it has seams and what looks like a bolt, hence my thought its a mask like Jacks face was in 2.
 

da_fox2279

California Crackpot

And it's a six month Epic Games Store Exclusive on PC.
 

chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
I'll likely wait it out. Borderlands 2 was a game I played so much PC multiplayer on.

-chronodekar
 

Shirotsume

Not The Goddamn @dmin
I'll likely just not get it. Not giving epic games my money.
 
Not going to buy it at launch, but will probably get it from Epic so I don't have to wait six months.

There's a few games I'm planning on doing that with.

I don't give a shit about Epic treating Steam the way Steam has treated everyone else for years.

Remember when Steam introduced the concept of PC "exclusives" to begin with? Play Fallout New Vegas on PC on Steam, or don't play at all. Fuck you if you've got a disk, you play on Steam anyway.

I also think using the term "exclusive" is kind of a stretch in this case. What are my choices? Play on PC, or play on PC? What new hardware do I need to buy and how much is the subscription fee?

Wait, what? How is that "exclusive" exactly then?

Steam isn't any better than Epic, just more established and we're accustomed to their shit.

For every "bad" thing Epic has done, I can think of at least one instance where Steam was just as bad if not worse. Perhaps not in the exact same way, but neither has any high ground here.

It took a long ass time for Steam and GoG to develop their launchers too, and they were in a similar state when they were new.

Steam has become bloated, lazy, and complacent. They have flooded the market with shovelware shit and asset flips, much like Atari did when they crashed the games market in the early 80s.

I'd like to see Epic succeed, if only because I think it will lead to a healthier overall market, which is better for all of us long term. It's not like they're going to be able to keep buying exclusives forever, so they'll eventually have to step up and develop a competent service if they are going to survive.

If nothing else they have a better DRM policy than Steam, not as good as GoG, but I still appreciate that it's an option and will support it. It's the only reason I bought Ashen from them, which turned out to be a decent Soulsborne clone, and I regret nothing.
 
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chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
Umm... what is the difference between Epic's DRM policy and Steam's ?

My initial reaction, was that I do not want, yet-another-store on my PC. But I already have Blizzard's one, so that's a hypocritical stance.


-chronodekar
 

mgsaintz

Well-Known Member
Not touching Epic for multiple reasons, one is I don't want another launcher on my system, Epic has had data breaches on their systems with accounts getting jacked and I'm not putting money into that, and their services for their game launcher is rather small and nonexistent. And the biggest reason I'm not touching them is that they pulled the exclusive crap to pull people into their store without competing with their prices or services. I'm iffy what I hear about them being owned by Chinese Tencent but with how China is with data mining it's a turn off.
 

Antimatter

Well-Known Member
Moneyhats are nothing new in the videogame industry though, it's hard to bash Epic for doing what's standard practice in many ways.

The thing is it's not nearly as bad as console exclusivity where you need to shell out hundreds for new hardware, it's just a different store front/launcher. Shiat, i've already got like five and honestly don't care, I just click a desktop icon in the end anyways. The account security issue is compounded by the fact there are dozens of breaches somewhere online a year, and plenty of people use the same login/password for everything. Makes it easy for script kiddies to run lists of users/passwords against epic's launcher and see what works. They do the same with XBL and PSN.

That's why 2FA with a token is so vital these days.
 
Not touching Epic for multiple reasons, one is I don't want another launcher on my system, Epic has had data breaches on their systems with accounts getting jacked and I'm not putting money into that, and their services for their game launcher is rather small and nonexistent. And the biggest reason I'm not touching them is that they pulled the exclusive crap to pull people into their store without competing with their prices or services. I'm iffy what I hear about them being owned by Chinese Tencent but with how China is with data mining it's a turn off.
All of those things are issues to at least some degree on Steam as well.

I had to take back my Steam Account from some asshat in the Ukraine several years ago.

I got lucky and caught it pretty much the moment it happened, but it was still a pain in the ass to deal with.

Regarding the lack of "service" so far, every major launcher started out that way and had to be developed. GoG was shit and had no services, Steam was shit and had no services, Origin, UPlay, etc...

They all sucked for a long while after they launched and had do develop their launchers.

Not seeing why it's a huge problem that Epic has to start from scratch and build up as well.

I wouldn't say I'm a fan of how all this is going down, but I'm just being realistic about how this is probably going to go. We got used to Steam's bullshit, and we'll get used to Epic's bullshit too. I see no reason to not just accept it and move on.

I'm not mad at either side, but I'm especially not seeing this as overtly bad for the market because Steam seems to have learned nothing from what happened with Atari in the 80s.
 
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chronodekar

Obsessively signs his posts
Staff member
Contrabardus - you hit the nail on the head for me, about what bothers me the most with all these 'services'. The fact that it's all tied to some 'account' which could get hacked. Besides the bother of needing to buy new hardware, it's what got me shifted over to console gaming. Outside of demos, the games on my PS4 are all disks. And over the past few years, I've bought fewer and fewer PC games - Factorio, Diablo 3 and Borderlands 2. What makes those game attractive, are their multiplayer.

Multiplayer on a PS4 requires a PSN subscription. I'm still not sold if it's worth the monthly cost.

With BL3, I might take a bite from Epic - if my usual friends play it. Even better if it comes on some sale. Otherwise ... don't think I care to buy PC for single player. Might buy the PS4 version, if it's good enough.

-chronodekar
 
Umm... what is the difference between Epic's DRM policy and Steam's ?

My initial reaction, was that I do not want, yet-another-store on my PC. But I already have Blizzard's one, so that's a hypocritical stance.


-chronodekar
Didn't notice this earlier...

On Epic's Store DRM is entirely up to the developer. There is no forced launcher based DRM.

There are some games that do have DRM, Subnautica is a good example. It needs an online connection to launch, but will run without the Epic Launcher running in the background as well. It has DRM, but does not need the Epic launcher to be active once downloaded and installed.

Fortnite needs the Epic Launcher to be active to run, which makes sense. I believe there are other games that do need the launcher to be active as well, but I'm not sure about any other specific games that do it. In my experience with games from the Epic Store, which is mostly what they've given away free so far, the majority of games don't need the launcher to be running at all even if they have DRM.

Others are entirely DRM free. Ashen is DRM Free from Epic's Store. That's why I bought it from there. It runs without the Epic Launcher or an active internet connection.

So, Epic actually does have a leg up on Steam regarding DRM policy. Developers are able to publish DRM free games through them, and they do not have mandatory launcher based DRM, where as Steam requires you to use their launcher's DRM to publish through their service.
 
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Shirotsume

Not The Goddamn @dmin
Moneyhats are nothing new in the videogame industry though, it's hard to bash Epic for doing what's standard practice in many ways.

The thing is it's not nearly as bad as console exclusivity where you need to shell out hundreds for new hardware, it's just a different store front/launcher. Shiat, i've already got like five and honestly don't care, I just click a desktop icon in the end anyways. The account security issue is compounded by the fact there are dozens of breaches somewhere online a year, and plenty of people use the same login/password for everything. Makes it easy for script kiddies to run lists of users/passwords against epic's launcher and see what works. They do the same with XBL and PSN.

That's why 2FA with a token is so vital these days.
First off, 2FA isn't the end all be all. it can be sidestepped, hilariously easily in epic's case. You don't even need to prove it's you, just request it taken off.

Second of all, this wasn't just 'script kiddies running lists' against epic's launcher, epic fucked up and caused a bug in fortnite that left millions of accounts wide open.

Don't apologize for them, don't try to normalize it. Epic is a shit company that plays fast and loose with all your data, does scummy practices both for the consumer and for the industry, and they're selling everything that don't leak due to their own incompetance.

I'm down for Steam having compettion, but not from epic. Epic can go choke to death on tencent's dick.
 
First off, 2FA isn't the end all be all. it can be sidestepped, hilariously easily in epic's case. You don't even need to prove it's you, just request it taken off.

Second of all, this wasn't just 'script kiddies running lists' against epic's launcher, epic fucked up and caused a bug in fortnite that left millions of accounts wide open.

Don't apologize for them, don't try to normalize it. Epic is a shit company that plays fast and loose with all your data, does scummy practices both for the consumer and for the industry, and they're selling everything that don't leak due to their own incompetance.

I'm down for Steam having compettion, but not from epic. Epic can go choke to death on tencent's dick.
I've not actually seen much evidence for most of this, just a lot of accusations.

It pretty much boils down to "because CHINA!!!"

The data breach thing was a fuckup, bit it's a surprisingly common type of fuckup. Bethesda did something similar with Fallout 76 not long ago. Steam also had a similar data breach in 2015. It wasn't a hack, they just fucked up and exposed a huge number of people's accounts one day.

I'm not really seeing how Epic is worse than Steam is regarding their business practices, policies, or data collection.

Valve didn't really start protecting much of the data it collected until after Zuckerberg got dragged in front of congress. Then all of a sudden they were very interested in taking more control of the data they were collecting. Funny that.

Again, neither company is your friend or gives a shit about your privacy beyond what they are required by law to give a shit about. This isn't about Epic being awesome and Steam being shitty, or vice versa, but rather that both are lawful evil corporate entities that don't care about you beyond the bare minimum they are legally required to care.

Neither is a lesser evil or particularly more competent than the other as far as I can tell.
 

Shirotsume

Not The Goddamn @dmin
Yeaaaah, no.

First off, the VAVLe breach was 34,000 people and due to the nature of it, nobody was ever actually hacked, nor could it have been 'more' than 34k, and it was because a CDN fucked up caching for VAVLe while trying to stop a DDoS. It wasn't even VALVe's fault, and what was exposed was game lists (who cares), emails (who cares, if you've ever sent an email your email address is probably known anyway), profile info (who cares, none of that is private and most of it was public anyway), and very rarely addresses (yeah, that's bad).

Fortnite was 5 million accounts, and exposed everything about the account, full details, effectively gave the attacker full control of the account- CCs, addresses, it let them buy things and send them to other accounts, change and view emails, see security questions, EVERYTHING. And Epic has constantly been having security problems, including their android installer being so poorly made you could get people to install whatever the hacker wishes with the official installer. About the only security sin Epic hasn't committed has been keeping plaintext passwords.... that we know of.

This is all really fuckin' bad, but their attitude is what makes it so I'll never buy their shit again. Anti-competitive practices, their smug anti-consumer attitude, and the way they are openly boastful about abusing other platforms to advertise their own despite VALVe being a class act about the whole thing, the fact that their response to one of the largest breaches of the year was complete radio silence, and finally and most damningly, instructing customer support to deny that anyone was being hacked at all during the month they knew about it and were thinking about fixing it. (It was a XSS attack, it takes literally 20 minutes to fix for something that's giving out free access tokens)

Trying to pretend I don't like Epic out of basic fucking racism is beneath you, contrabardus, and frankly you can go fuck yourself for saying it was.
 
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Yeaaaah, no.

First off, the VAVLe breach was 34,000 people and due to the nature of it, nobody was ever actually hacked, nor could it have been 'more' than 34k, and it was because a CDN fucked up caching for VAVLe while trying to stop a DDoS. It wasn't even VALVe's fault, and what was exposed was game lists (who cares), emails (who cares, if you've ever sent an email your email address is probably known anyway), profile info (who cares, none of that is private and most of it was public anyway), and very rarely addresses (yeah, that's bad).

Fortnite was 5 million accounts, and exposed everything about the account, full details, effectively gave the attacker full control of the account- CCs, addresses, it let them buy things and send them to other accounts, change and view emails, see security questions, EVERYTHING. And Epic has constantly been having security problems, including their android installer being so poorly made you could get people to install whatever the hacker wishes with the official installer. About the only security sin Epic hasn't committed has been keeping plaintext passwords.... that we know of.

This is all really fuckin' bad, but their attitude is what makes it so I'll never buy their shit again. Anti-competitive practices, their smug anti-consumer attitude, and the way they are openly boastful about abusing other platforms to advertise their own despite VALVe being a class act about the whole thing, the fact that their response to one of the largest breaches of the year was complete radio silence, and finally and most damningly, instructing customer support to deny that anyone was being hacked at all during the month they knew about it and were thinking about fixing it. (It was a XSS attack, it takes literally 20 minutes to fix for something that's giving out free access tokens)

Trying to pretend I don't like Epic out of basic fucking racism is beneath you, contrabardus, and frankly you can go fuck yourself for saying it was.
Regarding the whole "racism" nonsense...

I'm pretty sure you know better than that. You've shown that you are aware enough of the topic to be aware of the accusations flying around regarding Epic and Tencent and the context of them.

My comment was referencing global politics and the modern "red scare". It's about the numerous accusations of espionage regarding Tencent being an actor and data gathering for the Chinese government, and accusations that Epic is complicit and enabling it. Accusations that thus far have no real evidence and seem to be little more than attempts to prey on people's political biases, and the new chilled pre-post-war slap fight.

That has nothing to do with anyone's ethnicity. Accusing the Russians of espionage by way of election tampering doesn't make someone racist against Russians, and that's true regardless of how much truth there is to the allegations. This is no different.

It's not "*Gasp* CHINESE PEOPLE!"

It's "*Gasp* COMMUNISTS!"

You can go fuck yourself for falsely trying to tie it to racism.

Moving on to everything else...

Valve got lucky that it wasn't worse than it was, that's all. The point is they are not immune to the same kinds of issues that every other online service might experience for various reasons.

There have been several large data breaches at Valve over the past several years, often involving financial information, usually by way of hacking. Valve itself said back in 2015 that around 77,000 accounts are hacked every month, and at the time said that number was growing. That means probably at least around a million accounts are hacked per year. That can be defined as "secure" exactly why?

It took ten years for them to patch a known bug in the client that allowed remote access to user's PCs.

You are not "safer" on Steam than you are on any other service.

Also, "class act"? You're seriously remembering that with rose colored glasses.

Funnily, people said the same things about Steam's "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer" practices when Fallout NV launched, followed by numerous other games that required Steam to run on PC. Look how that turned out.

I've seen and heard all this before, directed at Valve. This is the same shit, on a different day. I see no reason that the end result will not be the same.

My issue isn't the idea that Epic sucks, because they absolutely do. My problem is the double standard falsehood that Steam doesn't and is somehow better or safer. They absolutely are not.

There is no "good guy" in this scenario, it is two huge lawful evil entities competing that don't give a fuck about anything but their own bottom lines. The only real difference is that one is more established than the other and we've grown accustomed to their bullshit and have had time to get over it.

The only reason I'm even slightly for the situation at all is because of the effective monopoly Steam has, and the problems it is creating. Despite what some might argue, GoG, Uplay, and Origin aren't enough to say that isn't true. Just because they don't have a literal monopoly, does not mean that they do not basically have complete control of the market just due to how much of it they control.

Epic is a shitty company too, but the two of them being in direct and serious competition may actually force them both to be slightly less shitty as they vie for the attention of consumers and be better for the overall industry.

I don't want Epic to "win", because that would mean they would take over Steam's effective monopoly and they'd be just as bad if not worse once they had that position. What I want is a stalemate, which would be better for the market overall and could lead to others having a better chance to grow and compete as well.

I still maintain that if Steam is left in the position it has unchallenged, we're heading for another games collapse just like the one that happened in '83, for the exact same reasons, because Valve apparently has no concept of hindsight.

Would I prefer to see someone besides Epic do it?

Sure, but Epic is pretty much the only one bothering with even attempting it at all and I think we need that second big storefront to be there and wrest the near total control of the digital distribution market Valve has away from them for the sake of a healthy market long term more than I dislike Epic as a company. Epic is pretty much the only one to ever even really threaten to be a contender, Origin and Uplay never even came close.

If simply being a good service was enough, GoG would already be in that position. We've seen how that has worked out.

Epic isn't even really the worst option. Better them than EA, Activision/Blizzard, or god forbid, the fucking Yakuza money laundering scheme, otherwise known as "Konami".

At any rate, at the end of the day, if someone is really that worried about their personal information and security, they need to just stop buying things online period.

 
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