I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.
I remember the days when laptops used to have infrared ports, so that you could connect to the infrared port on your mobile phone for tethered internet. And it was atrocious - always dropping out, even when you’d moved either item. Bluetooth tethering / USB cable tethering is just so much more robust.
I realise that our tech has moved on a lot in the last twenty-or-so years, but I’m struggling to see the use cases that this ‘new tech’ (as described by PC Gamer) would enable. Mobile data and wifi are both fast and reliable, and wired connections are very fast and much more reliable. A 224 GB/s link speed is absurdly faster than most consumer hardware can read or write to disk; if you were hoping to reduce ‘gaming latency’ by holding your phone or laptop at just the right angle, then the benefit would be overshadowed by other delays in the general internet. Providing a ‘secure link’ at this speed (‘quicker and safer than wifi’) would only make sense if you’ve two mainframes in the same room, but for some reason you don’t want to make your data centre look untidy by running fibre optic connections between them.
Depends on what kind of post it is.
General discussion threads, sure - ‘up’ = ‘good content’, ‘down’ = ‘irrelevant’. Irrelevant could be because it’s not to do with the matter at hand, it could be hateful, trollish, whatever.
Post asking for a specific fact, like in ye olde askahistorian? Up = correct, down = incorrect. Doesn’t matter how well written or how good the intent is, downvoting for disinformation.
One of the things that Slashdot got right was being able to upvote / downvote with a reason. (Perhaps only being able to upvote / downvote occasionally too, which stops brigading.) Made it possible to filter on why things were good, save ruining your fake internet points when you were mistaken about something as opposed to being an arsehole.
Well, has the fully Youtube Poop-compliant animations, I suppose. The actual ‘game’ part of the games, if they weren’t so absurdly sluggish to respond to inputs and take such a very long time to load each new screen, would have been indistinguishable from any other completely uninspired, middle of the road platformer of the early 90s. From the gameplay segments of that video, that looks like all they’re aspiring to here, as well.
To be fair, Spore was overhyped - it was fun enough, but not the total gamechanger that it was forecast to be. Will Wright had two amazing strikes with Sim City and then the Sims, and then a whole pile of very middle-of-the-road simulation games, so it wasn’t that hard to foresee.
And EEE PCs occupied the uncomfortable niche where they didn’t do a lot that your phone couldn’t, while being extremely limited compared to a £300 ‘proper’ cheapo laptop. That’s not really a business model.
So yeah, that’s two things that anyone could have seen coming, versus eight where they’re so massively completely wrong they couldn’t have failed harder if they tried. Would have been better to call this list ‘things which are not massively overhyped’, they’d have done better.
I decided about three years ago to give “100% Linux” gaming a go for a few months, since I was fed up with Windows shitting itself on a dual-boot system, see how I got on. Never went back. It does help that I’m not in to MMOs or things which require anti-cheat, since that’s a stumbling block, but it’s rare that I even check protondb before purchases now, nearly everything just works and it keeps getting better.
I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.
Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.