chameleon

@chameleon@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a week dominated by Silksong and Borderlands, co-op roguelike Shape of Dreams still managed to launch on Steam as an instant top-seller⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I've also been playing this, even though it's well out of what I normally play. I'd describe it as being closer to an ARPG than a MOBA, and for both better and for worse, it feels like a roguelike version of mid-seasonal gameplay in ARPGs. Couple of buttons on relatively short cooldowns backed up by buildcrafting meant to make those buttons utterly broken with lots of good opportunities available. There's okay variance between runs. Buildcrafting is super flexible in general, you can move all of your ability upgrades around to other abilities at any time with no cost, you can even give almost everything to friends in co-op.

  Not all is good. The game was review-bombed at launch due to the metaprogression and cooldown changes from the demo, and honestly, that was probably correct. The balancing work and the per-character XP requirements ruined some of the fun that the demo had. The worst was hotfixed within a day, even adding a compensation system for demo players, and progress is like 3X faster now, but it still feels like it's too slow and not fluid enough. I sorta settled on having a "main" in a genre that's more fun if you swap between characters to keep things fresh. The devs will probably find a solution sooner than later.

  There's some other problems like the performance absolutely tanking in lategame regardless of what you're playing on (my trusty RX 580 performs about as well as my friend's RTX 4080, and that's a pretty universal complaint), there's some multiplayer bugs like a boss attack that only the host can survive, some questionable balancing here and there, one of the 8 characters feels unfinished (Shell), but overall it's been pretty good, fills a pretty unique role and the problems don't really detract from what I'm getting out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DDR4 costs soar as manufacturers pull the plug — panic buying and stockpiling impact DDR4 spot pricing as supply dwindles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I've seen the claim around but I'm highly skeptical of it. DDR5 is far too slow for anything where memory bandwidth really matters, any newly produced chip that's gonna be used for AI is on HBM3 or HBM3e, or possibly GDDR6/GDDR7 if it's a GPU pulled from the consumer segment. HBM5 is still a very, very early research project and is certainly not being produced yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bandcamp Clubs [new Bandcamp feature]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea is interesting, but $13/month for one 'mystery' album from an artist you (most likely) don't know feels rather up there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam: Updates to User Review Scores Based on Language⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with the current thumbs up/down people get it wrong. Give it a thumbs up but write a scathing review.

  I've done that and it's a result of not having more options than good/bad. Always the same cause: I really wanted to write a 3* review for a game that has a lot to praise but its core is fundamentally flawed, but Steam doesn't let me give a 3*, so I try to correct for the review score bracket I think the game should be in.