Was it worse than last year? I haven’t played this year’s edition but F1 Manager 2023 was a pretty fun game, albeit lacking the depth of something like Football Manager or Motorsport Manager.

It breaks my heart to read about all the bugs and performance issues. Not that they were entirely unexpected - especially since it’s a STALKER game - but I was hoping for a miracle. I really, really want this game to succeed and the game itself sounds like they hit it out the park. I just hope launching in this state doesn’t ruin the game’s reputation and sales.

That makes me hopeful, I’ve had some truly awful games lately and had a pretty bad loss streak where I felt completely powerless as my teammates were losing every lane. And on the flip side the games I won last week were similar stomps where the poorly matched players were on the other side and we won in 20-25 minutes with like a 50k soul lead.

Feels bad since the even matches where everyone is on comms and talking to each other are so fun. But I’m struggling to break into that MMR range, I had matches like that in early ranked but I’ve been slipping since then and now I’m back to 50% of people not using their mic.

It’s often worth it to go pretty hard on them and sell one or two, even three later just to make your early game better. Think of stuff like Monster Rounds as a 250 soul early game consumable.

That’s fair, it was completely unacceptable. And the game itself was so shallow and lacking that the hype for '23 never really got going, despite it actually being a significant improvement.

I believe the generally accepted scientific term for the English language is “clusterfuck”.

That actually kinda sucks. F1 Manager 2023 had its flaws, but I still enjoyed my time with it and was planning on picking up 2024 at some point (so yes I suppose I am part of the problem). The game felt like it had potential and I was hoping it would be come genuinely good after a few more iterations.

They redistributed the ranks today so that they confirm to a normal distribution bell curve now (they didn’t before and both the top and bottom ends were too populated). I was prepared for a demotion this week, so was confused when I actually got a small promotion - but it turns out after considering the redistribution I did indeed still lose MMR this week.

That being said, we know that the algorithm does look at more than just wins and losses. Valve themselves confirmed it looks at the players you’ve played with and against during the week and how well they did in subsequent matches. Some form of individual performance metrics does also seem to be in play (getting post-match medals seem to be good for example). Consistency is also more rewarding than single standout games. Finally - albeit anectodally - it looks like win and loss streaks matter a lot. This was true in unranked too: big winstreaks could really catapult you. I know for the weeks where I lost rank I’ve had loss streaks, for instance, even though my overall win rate wasn’t that much worse.

Sorry, I thought you were blaming Remedy and not Epic.

It might have been inspired by the Barometer question, which frequently gets attributed to Niels Bohr in a similar fashion.

No, they decided that Epic was the best bet to get the game done at all as they were willing to finance it, and this is the unfortunate outcome.

Still at a halfway point between the old calendar and the regional groupings, but the schedule looks much better than this year right? No multiple month-long breaks this time unless I’m missing something. Though a bit of an awkward stretch around the summer break.

I can’t believe the old cold war fears of a Russian invasion of Sweden are actually coming true. Thanks, America. Fucking hell.

It’s such a shame STALKER 2 is releasing too late to get a nomination. Well, assuming it lives up to the hype (knock on wood).

That being said, what are people’s guesses for which game takes it? I don’t think I’ve actually played any of the nominated games this year personally.

Could be, could be. I think your suggestion would make for a better game with less conflict between what the main story is saying and what the game is presenting in the open world. Having the story emphasize how fast V is dying, only for the player to then fuck around with car races and random merc contracts and whatnot really doesn’t work all that well as far as immersion goes.

Jackie’s death would have also been much more impactful if we’d have spent all that time with him playing through those six months.

I mean… maybe? Those are nice things of course, but if I wanted to start using an alternative to TikTok I would never consider something without an algorithm. The whole point - for me at least - is to waste time eating digital slop served to you by an algorithm so that you don’t have to know what you want to watch when you sit down and open it up. If I already knew what I wanted to watch I wouldn’t be on an app like this, I’d be searching up the video or subject on another platform.

I always felt like the game was originally never meant to be an open-world game, it’s as if they were going for a mission-to-mission corridor kind of game and wrapped up a world around it to walk around in at a later phase.

That’s my take on it too. The story they wanted to tell does not mesh well with an open world game, but since the people loudly wanted something like “RDR 2 but Cyberpunk” they felt obliged to attempt to shoehorn it in.

The whole cutscene thing with Jackie after the intro feels like it was supposed to be actual gameplay, but was just cut out and changed to a cutscene to skip time.

Completely agree. I think having you play through that part would have made a huge impact on how you connect with Jackie. Maybe they felt it would have pushed the Keanu introduction too deep into the game?

I’ve been trying to get back in the game a couple of times, but it often just feels so lifeless and lacks any depth.

They’ve added some touches to the open world, but I think it was too fundamentally broken to be easily patched. The new skill tree from 2.0 is actually good though and I think the combat is pretty fun in its current state, even without going to mods.

This was awesome, the audio restoration was absolutely top notch and despite including both presentations and the audience reactions it all felt completely seamless.

It’s also just incredible watching the footage and thinking about what an insane leap HL2 was in its day. Hell, many current games struggle to produce as expressive facial animations as it did 20 years ago! And that’s not even getting into the interactivity of the engine and level design combining.

Not really for what I was envisioning I think: I want an actual remake where the second half of the game would be rewritten, along with new scripting and voice acting and cutscenes etc etc.

For stuff like upgrading assets and adding ray traced lighting etc the Nvidia RTX Remix stuff is great, though. So you could use it for more of a remaster, like they are doing with Half-Life 2.

At least that’s how I understand it.

Track opinions are a lot like driver opinions where a lot of times they’re “as good as their last race” in the public eye.

There is some of that, to be sure. There is also a fair bit of outright bias towards classic European circuits. Hence the Imola example, as that is often talked of as one of those great tracks but it hasn’t produced a great race to watch in ages. It’s possible how fun and/or challenging a track is to drive factors in for some people, too. Everyone loves Spa but it’s mostly been boring races there in recent years.

Changing external factors like the track surface play tricks too - Interlagos has always been reliable for amazing action, but the new tarmac seemed to ruin the possibility of taking alternate lines which made the sprint much less exciting than I thought it would be (the race was wet so let’s put that aside).