It has been a while since I played, but afaik ypu can always just self-destruct the ship through one of the side menus or keybinds, and then you can either pay insurace cost to get the same ship repaired, or abandon it for the default ship, which should also respawn you somewhere sensible.

I don’t recall if there’s any story or anything else ypu’d want reset, the tutorial is standalone and since it’s a sandbox I don’t think there’s much else to reset.

For me, I enjoyed Elite Dangerous way more than Freelancer. Freelancer was too much arcadey for me, and I was never able to properly immerse into it.

Elite, on the other way, thanks to it being a MMO where I got a pretty nice semi-RP guild, along with stunning visuals and VR support, was one of the first games I was able to immerse into and just chill, exploring around. Which surprised me, since I usually get bored easily without a fast progress or a goal in mind, due to my short attention span, but this game completely captured me and it was first game that I just simply spent time in.

Of course, it’s just my subjective experience. But there is something Elite must be doing extremely well, because this has not happened to me in any other game to this extent.

To add to other commenters - its also really hard, assuming you play solo, to focus on your own performance and not blame teammates. I’ve never been toxic, and tried to focus on my own gameplay, but I eventually realized its almost impossible. Even though I thought that I don’t care about others, and even though I managed to never be toxic, it only ocurred to me when I switched to StarCraft, where you play 1v1 and there’s no-one else to blame. It was so mentally taxing, queueing for another game when you know that you just suck and will loose again to some easy build. I lasted for two months of ranked StarCraft, before I had to quit due to mental health. I just wasn’t able to play anymore and was dreading the next match.

Which is something that never happened to me in MOBAs, because even though I was sure I’m only focusing on myself, it became clear that wasn’t true - otherwise, I’d have quickly had the same problem as with 1v1 games. I managed to not be toxic because I hate toxicity and am non-confrotational in general, but if you are someone with less self-control, blaming your teammates just come so, so naturally. And accepting your own mistakes is way harder than I thought, which surprised me by how much.

It was more funny when I didn’t know that :(

But thanks! I kind of expected it’s something like that :D

Dovetail sounds like a bird. It’s not a bird, right? Right?

What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.

It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.

And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue IIRC. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.

I really hope that CS will come up with recipes and emails where the board specificly “strongly recommended” that they reduce operation costs or denied internal investments. It probably won’t happen, because such pressure from investors is usually pretty vague, i.e they don’t literally tell you to cut corners, but they strongly suggest that if you won’t somehow increase revenue, you (the management) will have problems. Of course, it’s up to you how you do it, but to meet their often unrealistic demands, just doing a better job while also investing into internal failsafes is often simply not possible. It’s a loss-loss situation for CS, but I really hope they won’t loose this legal battle.

I’m sure there’s a lot of CS employees that would disagree with that, unfortunately there’s probably not much they can do about it.

I was just a few days ago giving my two weeks notice exactly for that reason. I’m getting so fed up with capitalism and companies working for the vultures who give zero fucks about what you do or whether you do it well or not, prioritizing profits over actually doing your job well. I don’t care about money, I worked in cybersec out of principle, to help people with their security. I don’t really care about money, as long as there’s job to be done for someone, I don’t really care if the project I’m working on is super profitable for me, as long as it at least breaks even. But no, we had to cut corners, basically scam our customers by selling products we had no qualified people for who barely scraped by enough results for the customer to not notice it. Non-existent R&D or training, because several milions of anuall profit are not enough. Fuck all of them, if I’m ever going to work again in cybersec, it will be a non-profit.

This OP’s article infuriates me, the nerves they have to demand more money for what’s entirely their failure, which they also directly cause in every company they touch. I’m sure that the fact that the failure was so devastating for most companies is also by large margin fault of their investors, some of which are probably also part of this lawsuit, that blocked investment into disaster recovery plans or backups, because their millions of profit per year felt low.

I feel like I’m getting pretty radicalized recently, ugh.

While I’m all for holding CS accountable for what happened, thisis not the way how to do it and to whom they should be accountable. If there’s any lawsuit, it should come from the customers who have been affected by the outage, not some fucking investors and shareholders that probably kept pressuring CS for the last several years to reduce costs and increase revenue, that are now scrambling to avoid consequences of their endless greed ruining companies they don’t care about by forcing endless growth at all costs and doing as much as they can to prevent internal investments, because that’s not what makes the line go up.

Fuck them. I hope they loose and have to eat their losses + expensive lawsuit. If CS would be able to actually invest their revenue internally, instead of it feeding pockets of greedy investors who give literaly zero fucks about the product or the service, this may not have happened.

I saw that happen at the cybersecurity company I was working at, when we got acquired by investors. Several milion of profit after costs suddenly wasn’t enough, and we had to reduce already non-existent internal projects or investments, that we have already been lacking to be able to do our job properly.

This has to be illegal, right? It’s blatant manipulation.

It’d say that exactly what most of the haters are not getting. This is not supposed to be a Pokemon game. It’s a survival crafting and basebuilding game, that uses Pokemon for a great effect and neatly integrates some of the aspects of Pokemon games to fit into the genre.

Exactly! The game is pretty great case study on how to combine different genres together and make them work, while also being a prime example of how really important theming is.

I haven’t actually played their previous game, Craftopia, but it looks like that both the “using animals in bases” and “catching animals into spheres” was there too, to the point where Palworlds are getting really close to just being mostly a reskin.

But that illustrates really well how much does different theming works wonders for game feel. The mechanic while in Craftopia, with normal animals, wasn’t really much of note. But just by simply reskinning them to a colorful monster collecting game, instead of regular animals, the game feel entirely different, the mechanic is way much more fun to interact with, and it completely changes the game.

Sure, they did build some changes on top of how it worked in Craftopia, and switched the game around to be mostly build around it, but a lot of the elements remain the same, only in a different skin.

And that’s a really good case study in game and themic design, and I really love it.

For that, I really like what they have done, and the game has been so far really fun, even while being only EA. Sure, they still have a long way to go, but I’m really interrested in what direction will they take the game, and I’m really glad they choose the mix of genres they did, and that they mixed and matched elements from other games in a clever fashion, where nothing feels like it was just slapped into the game just because it’s popular. It’s taking the best ideas from other games, and uses them to a great effect together.

I also don’t mind them choosing the traditional Pokemon visual style, because it’s just the best fit for this kind of game. There is a reason why almost every Souls-like game looks like Dark Souls, because the atmosphere just fits into the mood and gameplay the genre is going for. The same can be said about monster collection games.

However, I’m a little bit worried about some red flags raised about the studio - namely that their history with supporting and finishing EA projects is a little bit wonky (although, it can be explained by them coming up with Palworlds concept, and liking it so much that they just immediately switched over to obviously way, way better concept for a game), and also the fact that one of the developers was tweeting about how AI can be used to circumvent copyright by just letting it generate designs similar to other existing products, while making an example on Pokemon. That’s not really a good look, when you’re working on a game that is also a monster collecting game and you don’t want to be accused of stealing design without making it yourself. And that, especially combined with the fact that Palwords is mostly just a re-skin of Craftopia that has been polished a little bit, may be a red flag that indicates that this may have indeed be just a quick attempt at low-effort cash-grab, where they threw Pokemons to AI to change them a little bit without taking any effort at designing original monsters.

But none of that is a concrete proof, and I still believe and hope that instead of a cheap cash-grab, they really do love the game idea and are excited to work and iterate on it, and will not abandon the game for next project once the hype dies down. Time will tell, but I really hope that it’s the latter.

Thats why I’m so conflicted about it, because its pretty difficult to find out whether its the level of Ubisoft corporate greed, asset flipping based on whats currently cool, and then just abandoning it for other new thing, or just an indie studio that’s trying to do their best, but discovered mid-development an amazing idea that’s way better than what they have been working on so far.

There’s a lot of red flags, which I’m concerned about, but I also really like what they came up with and hope that it’s not just a cash grab based solely on current grey zone in copyright infringement, that’s abusing generative AI for that effect. I don’t blame them for benign excited about generative AI, but in this situation and given their history, its unfortunately definitely a red flag.

I’m really conflicted about this game. I really love the idea from game design standpoint, it’s a perfect mix of genres, while also serves as an amazing case study in how theming is really important for games. Craftopia apparently had exactly the same capture mechanics, but with real animals instead of monsters, and you could also use the animals to work on your base. No one really cared about it too much.

But reskinning it from animals to fantasy monsters/pokemon, suddenly entirely changed the feel of the mechanic and made it much better. And that is a really simple change, but with such a great impact, and a really important lesson in game and theme design.

I also kind of understand that they have given up on Craftopia and started pursuing this project instead - while it sucks for people who enjoyed Craftopia, the idea of mixing monster collecting game with a survival game is genius, and works really, really well. It makes so many simple mechanics much more fun to interact with, once you’re doing it with your Pokemon instead of by yourself (or through an automation machine). But implementing it into Craftopia would not be feasible, and I don’t really fault them that much for deciding to start mostly from scratch.

I also don’t really mind that they’ve decided to use the Pokemon aesthetics - it’s a look that fits this genre well, and it’s kind of OK to just go with it - I mean, almost every souls-like game tries to look like Dark Souls and give the same vibe, because it just fits so well with the overall theme. So, IMO going for the same look that has been proven is fine. But, and this is why I’m conflicted about it, it’s really really not good when you have members of your team tweeting how you’ve figured out a way how to bypass copyrights using AI, giving example on pictures of Pokemon, boasting how they look different yet you probably won’t be able to tell which ones are original, and which are generated.

And now that I’ve seen this video, it’s way worse than I thought. I literally couldn’t tell the difference between the game I’ve spent playing last two days, and the Pokemon mod. The monsters look almost exactly the same, making it seem like they really did just go with “lets feed Pokemon into AI”. And that sucks.

On the other hand, I think the developers are getting too much flak for liking AI in games. I’ve seen them being criticized for their other game, that is a party game where you give prompts to AI to generate pictures, and then vote which of the players didn’t know what theme the pictures should be about. That’s a pretty funny and great idea, and I don’t see why it’s shown around as a proof that this developer is evil.

Are they? I don’t know. The game designer in me hopes that they got excited for the Palworld idea, cut some corners (which is suspicious and pretty sad), but abandoned Craftophia just so they can work on a project that’s amazing idea that wasn’t done before, and that they will focus on it in the future. Unfortunately, it’s starting to look more and more that it’s really just a quick cash-grab, where they just asset-flipped their game to make a quick buck, and will forget about it once the hype dies down.

I hope that’s not the case, and that they really do enjoy working for the game, and are as excited as I am about the potential of the concept. I guess we’ll see in the follwing months and years.

I’d recommend Tyranny. Its a CRPG, where you play as an envoy of basically villains that are sweeping through the world, conquering almost everything. Most of the choices are pretty difficult, because from what I remember its usually “bad or different bad”, without it being clear what’s going to be worse. Because you’re an envoy for a dictator with the power to literally wipe an entire continent with a single sentence, you can’t just go " fuck this, I’m gonna ignore the orders and do good", and balancing the long term and short term consequences makes every decision pretty difficult.

For example, if you get an order to “capture this fortress within few days or I’ll wipe the entire island”, any small war-crime now may be the long term good option, if it helps you capture it in time, and helping the soldier asking you to help find his wife nearby may be lost time you can’t be sure you can afford.

I agree, Nexus isn’t oblidged to host your files. I wasn’t aware of the authors other mods and goal to purge diversity from the game - which makes it absolutely OK to not want him on your platform, and I agree with removing it.

But when I took the mod at a face value, without this context, I really don’t see any problem with it, especially compared to all other gender changing mods on Nexus. Which made their reason not to include it seem like pandering because someone took an issue with it. Now I know that was not the case, and that there was malicious and pretty awfull intent and message behind the mod. But without that, I still think the mod would be OK, and taking it down would be unfair, just because some vocal people took issue with it - which is how the situation looked like from the article. But that’s not the case, and I was mistaken, so it’s solved.

Yeah, I wasn’t aware of the context of the author working on other mods like that, that are purging every diverse character from the game. I totally agree that then it shouldn’t be there, I was just taking the mod at a face value and comparing it to other gender-changing mods, which still were there. Given the author’s intent and rhetorics, he shouldn’t be given a platform to speak.

You are right, I wasn’t aware of the context - the authors goal to just eradicate diversity from the game, and that makes it perfectly ok of not wanting to have someone like that on your platform. But taking the mod at a face value, I didn’t see what’s the fuss about, now I get it.

I was just surprised why did people find the mod that much offensive. I wasn’t aware that the authors intent wasn’t to just change one character into different gender, but to effectively purge all diversity from the game, including the racial one.

That changes my point of view, because then it makes absolute sense why you wouldn’t allow someone like that on your platform. That was the context I was missing. But if I took the mod at face value, without the rest of the anti-diversity modpack this mod was made for, I still don’t see an issue with wanting to change one characters gender for your own playthough, or a reason why to remove such mod from your platform, especially compared to all other “change this character to female” mods that Nexusmods is full of. But given the context, Nexusmods are in the right here, of not wanting to support someone with so blatant propaganda.

It’s just a PR stunt by Nexus mods. And I really hate companies doing PR stunts like these, because you can be sure that they are insincere and most of the time only exploit the diversity and inclusivity as a part of their marketing campaign. It’s just like companies waving rainbow flags on their logo for Pride, while donating millions of dollars to anit-gay politicans. .

I don’t have any issues with diversity and inclusivity, and support it however I can.

But I don’t really see the problem with this mod? It’s a honest question, I’ve just read the article, and the Nexus mod answer doesn’t make much sense to me. I mean there are literally mods that change every character in Skyrim to females, how is that different? (I didn’t log in to see the if the mod is active, but I’m sure there’s a lot of “we change this character to female” mods for any game).

And more importantly, why not let anyone do whatever they want with their game, and enjoy it however they want? Or was it similar to the Starfield pronouns mod, where the creator went on a hateful rant in the mod description, and acted like a total dick, spewing their bullshit intorelant propaganda? Then, the removal would be understandable. Otherwise, it’s just counter-productive and only serves to even more divide people and turn them against eachother, and feels like an unnecessary witch-hunt and a PR stunt.

But please correct me if I’m wrong or missing something, there’s probably some context that I don’t have.

I work part-time as a game developer, and part time as a pentester, so I do search for technical questions quite a lot.

Hmm, now I wonder whether I’m just used to it. I haven’t used any other search engine in more than a year. I’ll have to compare the results more, but as far as I remember every time I couldn’t find what I needed on DDG and resorted to !g, the Google results were even worse.

I’ve just switched to it literally yesterday, and while you will probably not avoid Play Services, being able to install it into a different profile that’s only limited to the few apps that need it is nice.

Also, just the fact that on Graphene Play Services do not have the special privileges as on any android phone, and are subjected to the same limitations as any other app (which are even stricter on Graphene) helps a lot. It also means that even if you end up just running the play services at all times, they can’t do as much as they can on other android phones, and the data they can access without your explicit permission is really limited. So, even that helps by a lot.

While I don’t believe you can degoogle that quickly, because some of their services take quite some time to properly switch, such as email, in the end it’s not too hard, but just takes time and some work.

Changing email is easy, if you don’t mind it being a slow process. Just forward your google email, and start slowly replacing any service you notice in the following months/years to your new address.

Google Drive is harder to replace, I went for just running a NAS with Nextcloud, which takes care of most of Google Drive/Docs/Calendar stuff. If self-hosting isn’t your cup of tea, Proton is slowly setting up usable google alternatives - they have Drive and Calendar IIRC.

Now for phone, that’s the hardest task. You wouldn’t help yourself by getting an IPhone. While it would de-google you, there’s basically no point in switching google for apple. Getting android to be usable for stuff like banking, MFA and other bullshit you need your phone for while being degoogled is hard, due to the bullshit Google Services. The only solution I found is to either just go with dumb phone with an obscure OS, or just get a Google Pixel and run GrapheneOS.

Maps are another issue, but thankfully we have a local https://mapy.cz/ , which is a pretty OK alternative to Google maps for our country, and I guess they even work worldwide. I don’t drive a car, so I don’t really need it that often.

The only remaining Google service I use is GCloud VPS, because I have some websites running there on the free instances that I’m too lazy to move. But I’m slowly migrating it to Amazon. Not that it would help much, anyway. And also Youtube, but I’m trying to go through the alternative front-ends as much as possible.

And for browser, I’m using https://mullvad.net/en/browser. Fuck chromium.

If you have a Pixel, why not go all in with https://grapheneos.org/?

I’ve switched to DDG almost a year ago, and I never had issues with my search results. Quite the contrary, every time I tried using !g because I simply wasn’t finding an answer, the Google was ad-ridden bullshit full of promoted pages without relevance to what I was looking for.

I guess I’m just used to DDG quality of results, but I never felt like it’s as bad as you say.

This is how I did it. Set up a Protonmail account with my own domain, and set all my Gmail emails to forward there. I set up a special folder for all forwarded mail, to remind myslef that I should change my email on that service, and every time I logged somwhere or received an email from an important service I use, I made sure to change my address there.

It has already been several years, but I think I’ve managed to replace it everywhere within a few months. I haven’t seen a forwarded email in months, so I think I’m finally done.

This finally explains it. I was about to write something similar as the comment you are replying to, because it did felt like a totally unnecessary PR stunt of another corporation that only exploits the issue for publicity, and I really hate that.

But if the mod description was as bad as you say, then removing it was the right move.

eat batteries like something that eats a fuckton of batteries

I really like that metaphor.

This is such a cool idea, I definitely have to try it sometime. I hope the game is not dead, it sounds like something you’d need an active playerbase for. The reviews on Steam sound amazing.

I guarantee you will never find a game like the Return of the Obra Dinn. Never.

Have you heard about The Case of the Golden Idol? I haven§t played it yet, but from what I§ve heard it’s really good (it was most innovative game of last year on Independent Games Festival IIRC), and should be really similar to Return to Obra Dinn.

Thank you! That is an amazing list, most of the games you are recommending I haven’t heard about, and it sounds awesome. I will add it to my backlog for sure!

Melody’s Escape, Beat Hazard (1/2/3), Symphony

Rythm/music-based games are my favourite! If you haven’t already, I recommend giving Sayonara Wild Hearts a try - while it doesn’t use your own music, it’s still more of an interactive music album than a video game. From your list I haven’t played Melody’s Escape, so I will check it out. Also games like Metal: Hellsinger or BPM: Bullets Per Minute.

I still didn’t have time to check Soundfall, but it also sounds like a game that can be fun. It doesn’t look like it can use your own music, but I think that’s not that much of a problem - I preffer hand-crafted experiences as far as rythm games go.

Outer Wilds is definitely in my top 3 games of all time. I’m currently waiting for a few years to forget as much of the game as I can, so I can replay it with the DLC and in VR.

I needed to play the game before watching the video

I recommend watching the video anyway - the theory about the game being made just to mess with players is actually from that video. Also - even if you didn’t manage to finish The Witness, I highly recommend playing The Looker. It’s free, it’s short (i think you can finish it in an hour or so), it has the best ending and if you’ve played The Witness, you will definitely appreciate the game. It has one of the best endings I’ve ever saw in a video game.

Hmm, I feel like I’ve already played YOU and ME and HER, but I’m not really sure. Gonna check it out, but the names and characters feel familiar.

It’s a leading theory, but I don’t think it was ever officially confirmed.

I do realize that it’s a popularity contest, but I still find it kind of saddening. But it’s not an issue of only Steam Awards - IIRC, even awards that do have a panel of judges usually have the same problem - such as Game Awards. But you are right that it’s just made for a different audience, and you get the same issue with movies or books - experimental game design simply isn’t mainstream, and it’s not a target audience of such award shows. Which is OK.

I’ve played Doki Doki Literature Club, and I really love how did they approach the horror genre. IIRC Undertale is doing something similar at it’s ending, but you are right that from the top of my head I don’t remember many games experimenting in this direction.

Ooh, thanks for mentioning that. Someone was recommending the Viewfinder, and I thought that I’ve already played it - but I actually mistook it for Superliminal!