Right, so if making the plot and lore obvious in a book is fine, it’s also fine in a game. Using pejoratives like “spoonfeeding” criticises this without giving any reason.

From games are particularly bad because most of the lore is on item descriptions that are often themselves locked behind random drops and easily missed questlines. This is not good world building, this is purposefully obscure world building. People mistake “hard to put together” for quality, but it’s the opposite - making this stuff harder to get makes it worse, because players are less likely to get it! If you feel too communicate the lore to most players, that’s not good!

k?

Do you consider it being “spoonfed” to you when you read a book and the plot and everything is just written down?

Do you consider it positive that you have to “work for it” if every fifth word is written in Chinese and you have to translate them?

Making it hard to understand does not make it good. Making it easy does not make it bad. Is there an aspect of it you like that isn’t just that it’s hard to understand? Because that’s all you mentioned.

Zanzibart forgive me

Eh? It has almost none, and what there is is rendered completely inconsistent.

Yeah. And Skyrim really needed better VAs. That one guy who voiced Farengar just did not properly understand some of his lines and consequently butchered them.

Yeah, that is a great classic example. There’s a lot of environmental storytelling so you can get an idea of what’s going on, and what it is is very interesting, but it doesn’t get in the way of the game or its story.

“Zanzibart, forgive me”.

Nah, Fromsoft has great vibes. But the worldbuilding and story is all deliberately obscured because of Miyazaki’s love of sci-fi he couldn’t properly read. That makes it a trove for obsessives but it can’t really be called good.

I’m not sure what world population has to do with anything. It’s a city builder - players are building cities, not people.

Intriguing. I wonder after what length of time the world will “fill up” and it’ll be hard to find anywhere to start fresh? I guess this is something that the dev tries to tune consciously. In a similar vein, I wonder whether it will be best as a single player to start near someone else (to trade with them) or far away from others (to avoid bumping into each other)

This is a specific genre of text adventure - have you been on text adventure sites to try and find more? Because they’re low cost to make you can find loads for free or little money.

Pc gaming can achieve 1080p@120 or more without much effort…

Sexualisation is not the same as sexual content. Widowmaker in Overwatch is a sexualised character, because she is portrayed as sexually attractive, seductive and generally in such a way as to have her viewed as a sexual being. There are other characters who are not sexualised.

Well, some opinions are more valid than others, even when there is subjectivity… of course, I would say that.

“Design intent” is not an excuse for unfun mechanics. Design intent matters - for example if you’re complaining that it took you 50 attempts to do a boss and you’re frustrated, but other people are completing the same bosses in fewer attempts and enjoying it, the intent of the designers and the spectrum of opinions is absolutely critical. But this isn’t that.

Someone else in the thread made a great example: would you be so “design intent is all important” if the designers put a 1-minute unskippable cutscene before the boss? To me, and I think to almost everybody, that would be fuckin awful. Everyone hates unskippable cutscenes you have to sit through repeatedly. How does that differ, really, from a typical 1-minute runback?

I think we have the language and you just proved it, but often people are just not reading or thinking enough about other perspectives before talking, and so do talk past each other like this.

I like your comparison to an unskippable cutscene; these are, I think, universally reviled at the start of boss fights. For some reason I don’t think long runbacks are reviled in nearly the same way, yet repeatedly running through the same area with no challenges (jumping off the staircase for the shortcut to Ornstein & Smough in DS1 does not count ffs!) is not really any less boring.

The ideal runback to me has a few enemies that you can soon work out how to run around. You actually get a feeling of having accomplished something, but don’t have to get perfect at defeating those enemies, nor waste time doing so (running will always be faster than fighting, pretty much).

I think “git gud” is just a knee-jerk meme though - there is no reason to believe that someone saying it has engaged in the slightest with what has been said to that point; they’re just trolling.

A lot of DS1 runbacks were true runbacks where you could just run past everything. Once you’d worked out the running, they weren’t too irritating, but some were a bit long. In DS3 a number of runbacks had unavoidable enemies on the way where you could mess up and eat a hit and then be down an Estus charge.

The main two problems are:

1. boredom. Punishing you for failure by forcing you to walk through a section of level again for a couple of minutes isn’t fun for anyone. It’s not “stakes”; it’s boring. Repeatedly dying to the challenging boss is not boring because you are constantly trying to improve, learn its moves, and beat it. Running through the same path is boring. Anything boring is bad game design.
2. Risk of unrelated mistakes. This is more subjective, but for me there should be some separation between different challenges; there should be a feeling that after you have convincingly solved one challenge, you shouldn’t have prove yourself against it again too much. Doing so is, yes, boring again, but also frustrating. Things that are frustrating (to some) can be good game design, but I don’t want to be frustrated. Whiffing a roll you’ve done successfully many times and being set back on an unrelated challenge is, to me, annoying.

Yeah I’m probably gonna try this at some point. At the moment I only have 802.11ac 5GHz though, so not as much bandwidth as WiFi 6+.

A couple of days ago I started it using Steam remote play to the deck, just assuming that it would suck on Deck itself. Apparently it gets 40fps on low settings on Deck which is better than I expected but still kinda sucky.

I would never have thought to try to play Elden Ring on a handheld console, never mind a Switch (2).

Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess in light of that what I would say is that, if you are going to have a state-run payment processor, you need to build in a) pluralism (enable and encourage multiple processors) and b) legal protections (legally guarantee that the payment processor has a limited remit in terms of allowing all payments unless instructed to block them by a court order) which would help mitigate or slow down anti-democratic backsliding.

Why would a campaign group have any influence over that?

It’s a good point, but a payment processor run by the government would also be under pressure (from voters) to wield its power to suppress marginal content.

Imagine a US-government-run payment processor right now - it would be blocking anyone that sells anything “woke” or “DEI”.

Disabling JS worked

Steam already has an FPS monitor, right? I think that’s enough for 95% of everything (and it’s very unobtrusive).

<3

Do you mean “blueprint”?

Investors may well be interested in how well sequels are going to do. They may well take high player numbers as positive sentiment that is indicative that even new, unrelated titles will sell well.

XD

I mean you see most of the women in it naked already so I’m not sure what the modders are going to be doing 🤔