Post by Bill in the rain on Aug 16, 2024 6:56:22 GMT
If they brought back that epic coupon thing they used to do, I'd buy something in their sales.
They've improved the epic launcher to the point were it's not annoying anymore, and I have almost as many games on there as on Steam at this point, so I'm quite often playing games on there.
Their initial plan to be a 'curated list' of great games has gone totally out the window though, the store front page is often full of dodgy looking shovelware.
I find the Epic launcher less annoying than steam, which *always* spams my screen with janky nonsense adverts (even some times a separate from the main app) and "everything and the kitchen sink" approach to functionality design. I just want something that allows me to own and play games ffs. Steam also triggers an "updating steam" dialogue box every time windows starts, while everything else can manage the mysterious black art of updating itself silently in the background.
I swear that if steam launched new today as it exists now, people would have a fucking fit about it. People have just got used it, and it *is* better than it was.
Epic launcher is fine. The only thing I dislike about it is that if you reinstall it, you can't just point it towards the old games you had installed, it seems to need to re-download them.
Gog is the gold standard. Allow me to download the game and install them. I already have a launcher. It's called windows.
I don't know, I find the Epic launcher pretty sluggish. Opening your library can take a good few seconds to load. Same goes for the store and it often only half loads. I don't have those issues with Steam, which is snappy to use.
Other niggles I have with Epic are likely more related to individual games rather than the launcher itself. Playing Cyberpunk at the moment and the cloud sync takes forever unless I delete all the saves bar the most recent couple. Literally have to wait 5+ minutes for the process to complete. Also have Battlefield 2042 on Epic and the integration with the EA app is painful and often will take multiple attempts to open the game. Again though, I expect the issue is not with the Epic launcher but with the EA one (which is a much worse app).
Not to say I think Steam is fantastic. I don't really care about the community stuff and it is pretty bloated for a system that I would rather be much more invisible, but it works fine for me.
Post by Bill in the rain on Aug 16, 2024 9:13:15 GMT
The reasonably recent Steam refresh made it look a bit nicer, but it also made it slower and seems to always want to be running in the background, and it pops up fullscreen when I exit it.
One nice thing about the Epic one is it hides itself when you start playing, and doesn't unhide when you close it. Not found it any slower or more sluggish then Steam tbh.
It doesn't do anything special, but it stays out the way, and now they've added basic things like search and a shopping basket it is at least functional.
I'm not even a Steam fanboy, but navigating the games library is far better than whatever it is that Epic does. Epic has puzzling load times everywhere, far fewer entries visible in the list at any one time (despite taking up much more screen space!), more limited and slower accessible filtering options, and so on. It's just badly designed, sluggish and annoying to use.
Never had any trouble with Steam, it doesn't show me ads. It just starts, updates itself quickly if it needs to and then sits in the system tray.
Ubisoft's Uplay "thing" though is bloody horrendous. I've had to disable it and only launch it when I need it, because every time I booted up it would fire off three User Account Control alerts from Windows. I've tried everything even given it Admin privileges , but still the damn thing fires off 3 UACs
I have various games on epic, steam and gog. I mostly don't navigate through any of them, and use something called playnite to aggregate then all and show my games in a sensible way and allow me to play them. They all annoy me equally in various ways. Even editing the start menu in windows is more of a pain than it used to be.
Ah, I used Playnite for a while. Not sure why I stopped using. Should probably set it up again. Think it was a little ropey at times, losing account info mainly, but mostly worked well. Was a few years ago, so probably better than it was.
I've found Playnite to be fantastic for putting stuff from all the services (Game Pass, Steam, Epic) in one place. Haven't had any problems at all TBH. Whenever I use Moonlight I launch it straight into Playnite to get easy access to all that stuff.
Post by Bill in the rain on Aug 16, 2024 14:56:31 GMT
I also use playnite, though I'm not a big fan tbh. For something free that people have worked on in their free time I'm not gonna complain, but i can't seem to find any skins that actually show useful information.
I should probably make my own, but in all honesty in never gonna have time and energy for that.
Gog galaxy was much nicer, until all the plugins for other services stopped working.
Post by Bill in the rain on Aug 27, 2024 1:29:37 GMT
I feel like GOG have given away Tropico games 100s of times over the years, it seems to be their default freebie, and yet somehow I didn't already have this.
Fallout "Trilogy" - Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout: Tactics
are now free on Epic.
F2 was my favourite game growing up. more than Settlers 2, HL1, Sim Cities. It is the reason why I love RPGs to these days.
F:T i beat recently. I loved the experience but the game has a lot of shortomings. GOG version works out of the box in hig res (but high resolution makes everything so small so standard 1440p was the max i run it.) but needed a 'burst' fix applied to fix burst fire being super deadly if it misses the target. it targets peeps around the main target with 100% hit chance. Not a great game, but was really fun!
also there is Wild Card Football. whatever that is.
Resident Knievel: How do I stop eating Jaffa Cakes
Sept 20, 2024 10:29:13 GMT
Aunty Treats: Finish the packet
Sept 20, 2024 11:13:56 GMT
Gruf: Truth hurts, I will just have the one (packet)
Sept 23, 2024 7:54:30 GMT
Bill in the rain: If you eat the whole packet in one go then it only counts as the calories for one biscuit because it's too fast for your body to process.
Sept 24, 2024 1:15:22 GMT
Aunty Treats: And you can work them off on the way to the shop for more
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X201: I think Trilby is having a bit of technical trouble with Pixel Puzzles 2
Sept 24, 2024 15:10:51 GMT