Yes, that is the quality of the original presentation. If anything it looks worse because it has been converted from film to a digital signal, as well as being stretched to be a bit larger than normal. Lmk if you young whippersnappers have any questions about this, I grew up watching this on VHS back in the dark times 👴
Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can’t purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.
The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it’s been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.
The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn’t any skin gambling, though.
These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that’s it.
A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.
That and the other launchers are a product of Steam’s dominance, not a cause of it.
Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.
Valve has done a lot of great things, I’m not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn’t become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.
Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.
Also, GOG exists.
Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.
Neither offer something which didn’t already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)
I really liked enter the gungeon. It was one of the first roguelites I played. It’s fairly basic in terms of mechanics compared to some newer entries in the genre. But it’s just good arcadey fun. Bonus is that it runs on a lot of systems. It’s still one of my go to’s for plane trips or other offline scenarios
You guys do know that outside the US you can’t generally advertise permanent positions and then just decide it’s temporarily more convenient not to have people on payroll, right?
Y’all need employment reform
I use Shotcut for more or less any video operations that require re-encoding. It’s great for basic editing but also simple transcoding jobs too
They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.
They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.
They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.
In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.
The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).
The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.
There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.
Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.
There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.
For what it’s worth, Mozilla did release a Firefox nightly test build a couple of months ago which included a proof of concept vertical tabs feature: https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/02/mozilla-released-a-firefox-nightly-test-build-with-vertical-tabs/
Still not clear whether they’re gonna implement it properly though
Losslesscut is what you want for this. It’s basic and concatenates without re-encoding. And it’s open source (as is handbrake)
The resulting song would be useless to everyone, including you. In the hypothetical eventuality where what you’re asking for is implemented, only a tiny minority of the tabs you’ve collected will be of the slightest usefulness to you, ever. Fundamentally, why did you ever open a given tab in the first place? In the case where you ever need to recall it, it will be trivial to open it again in a fresh browser session. You acknowledge googling is easier than managing bookmarks in these volumes, and you’re right. That’s what you should do. Your current approach is simply hoarding.
I run it as a pwa using an extension. The only extensions I have running in the pwa container are ublock & sponsorblock. No custom user-agent or anything else. Never had an issue
Your overall point seems to be that despite the wide acclaim on launch & yourself / your peer group’s historic enthusiasm for blizzard games, you came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth engaging with the game via word-of-mouth. What is there to argue about that? The reasons you shared generally don’t ring true to me, but I’m not the arbiter of your collective impressions. At the start of this comment chain I tried to elucidate genuine reasons to dislike it - either reasons that haven’t been already addressed for a significant part of the game’s lifecycle, and aren’t ones where D4 is simply guilty by association with blizzard or another of their games. I think the reasons you’ve given generally fall into these categories.
on initial dev/community response, I agree specifically vulnerable damage didn’t take long to be revealed as overpowered & that cheapened the launch meta. The first dev stream primarily served to address that issue. I’d agree it was significant enough an issue to warrant addressing quickly, but I’d disagree that the response was outside the scope of general expectation for post-launch corrections to the meta of an ARPG. Here I think you’re mistaking the acknowledgement of any fault with the game as going into “damage control” mode, likely due to the issue being played up by commentators. I acknowledge they went into that mode later - following the S1 mid-season patch.
on sticking with bad design, or the intention behind it, it’s hard to respond about the examples you’ve given because the fact both minions & dungeons have been reworked exemplifies that isn’t true. Minions received small updates in S2, buffs & further reworks in S4. Many of the more annoying dungeon affixes were removed for S2 - lightning storm affix was also removed for S4. You could certainly argue that they were intentional parts of the design during the development stage, but that dev time was straight up sacrificed to improve it, so it’s clear to me they aren’t staunch about really any part of the design. Indeed following the codex reworks, running a normal dungeon is no longer necessary at any stage of the game (except for the sorc lvl15 quest). You can still get aspects that way if you want, but you can also get them all from salvaging gear over time. It’s optional content, and additionally there are many small tweaks over the seasons I’d describe as “surprises” - minor things like new animations for normal mobs in particular locations, spider elites creeping down from the roof of a cave, and other small touches that cumulatively make dungeons more interesting / less repetitive. These are mostly not mentioned in patch notes and as such have been almost completely ignored by commentators.
on monetisation, as someone that has had multiple battle passes, they aren’t worth it. There’s simply very little motivation to buy them or any of the individual paid cosmetics in the game, because they aren’t meaningfully better than the free cosmetics. My toons don’t wear my paid cosmetics - it’s literally more interesting to go without transmog. The free cosmetics are good enough & that way there’s at least variety in what’s displayed on the loading screens. When you refer to monetisation as a problem with this game, my question in response is - acknowledging the state of live service game monetisation is generally predatory - how could it be less so in D4? Isn’t an entirely optional system that doesn’t involve fomo about as good a place as you could expect the monetisation to be in?
There are 2 exceptions in my mind regarding generally anti-consumer stuff (the isolated incidents I referred to earlier). That is 1. additional DRM that was in place during the early access period for purchasers of the collector’s edition, and 2. the dark pattern implementation causing unintentional activation of S1 battle pass tokens for that same group. These are both things I disagree strongly with on principle, and if anyone dropped the game because of them - I’d agree with them. Indeed when my buddy ran into DRM roadblocks during early access, I promptly refunded my collector’s edition and purchased the standard one upon launch instead.
Now in regards to yours/your friends initial impressions, I think it’s worth considering the impact of external factors such as Blizzard’s reputation, and the general launch state of the litany of games released post-covid delays during 2022-23, both of which I think served to negatively impact interest at launch. IIRC it was their first major non-WoW release following the revelation of issues that culminated in the DFEH lawsuit, and the resulting major changes in company structure. I actually think D4’s launch state is pretty admirable overall in light of those issues, but could certainly understand if Blizzard fans were trepidatious about continuing to support them at the time. Against a backdrop of failed major launches, it’d at least make a lot of sense to wait for post-launch independent feedback.
And likewise if they had held off until that S1 midseason patch where everything was nerfed to shit and people logged in to find their builds suddenly needed extensive reworking, I’d agree with anyone dropping interest in the aftermath of that. I did too, temporarily.
Lastly, keep in mind that they had Megan Fox advertising the game in Superbowl ads. I don’t think it’s the case that D4’s launch state was bad and caused a noteworthy player exodus. I think that ARPG’s simply aren’t that mass-marketable, and that advertising reached a lot of people that otherwise wouldn’t pay D4 any mind, and that group just aren’t generally interested in that kind of game. And so once they reconciled how it was advertised vs what it is, they stopped playing. From my perspective, that isn’t meaningful in terms of analysing whether it’s a good game.
I wrote out a longer reply but my phone died partway through. Suffice to say, fair enough, I can’t argue with your lived experience. I still disagree about several of your points - minion AI was reworked in S4 - outside a couple of isolated incidents, monetisation is relatively fair - timeline/urgency of dev/community response re: post-launch corrections (“damage control” mode specifically followed a horrible S1 mid-season patch). But ultimately your opinion is valid and I’m happy to agree to disagree.
I think you’re playing into a content creator-driven narrative that doesn’t quite exist for the reasons you think. It isn’t quite as simple as D4 bad, followed by D4 saved (or the delicate nuance of ‘D4 mid’). Indeed masses already flipped their use of these polar opposite terms several times since its release. This is more of a treadmill you’re on to drive engagement, views. If you’re bored with a game, that doesn’t necessarily have to be because the game is bad. It could just be that the available content has run its natural course for you. This explanation just doesn’t compel people to watch videos about it, though. It can be more satisfying to have it explained to you that there is a problem with the game, that some external factor is inhibiting your enjoyment of it.
I just don’t think that is an accurate representation of reality in this case. I think the latent majority audience isn’t terminally online, doesn’t form their opinions based on what a content creator said, doesn’t watch a line on the steam charts page and cheer when its direction validates them. They just play the game until they’re done, and enjoy their time with it. And that by no means is the same thing as being a ‘casual’.
Ya, that’s a subreddit for an online game tho - being a circlejerk of negativity is like its primary function, even for breakout hits like Helldivers or The Finals. It’s part of why I left reddit completely, and why “someone online said it’s bad” doesn’t pass the sniff test for legitimate criticism for me. As an ARPG enthusiast, I went in with the expectation that it was neither POE nor Diablo Immortal; that I’d play it alongside other ARPG’s cyclically; that it’d be made or broken by the quality of the seasonal content & meta.
I understand it fell short of others’ expectations, but I think that’s primarily an issue with the expectations. That I’d rather play D4 right now over PoE or Last Epoch doesn’t mean that those aren’t great games, they just don’t have that fresh content right now and that’s ok, despite that you can easily find equivalent negative discourse about it. And if D4 S5 sucks, the inverse will also be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_IV#Reception
There wasn’t really any discontent online about the base game mechanics until there was discontent about the live service content for S1 a couple of months later.
I might be ignoring nonsense complaints like about barb nerfs despite barb being consistently the most powerful class by a significant margin to this day, simply due to having more slots for more affixes & legendary powers
After seeing this post, I tried streaming the newest episode of Silo and found it wasn’t working in my addon (which uses a4kscrapers).
My mother tried streaming Slow Horses (using same addon) after I told her and she said it worked fine. I guess it had already been cached and was therefore unaffected since the file I streamed was only released today.
Anyway I luckily only had 8 days left of RD, so I subscribed to Premiumize and it only took a minute to reconfigure the addon to use that instead.