Got a list of the mods used or does the client automatically download the required mods when connecting? Like others here I dropped it shortly after the 1.0 release and finishing the game rather quickly.

Never forget what they’ve taken from us.

Megabonk, my beloved…

One of the few game developers trying to write for the medium of gaming instead of trying to write a book/movie and slap it into a game. One of the few who eschews the three-act arc so prevalent in plays and films.

He really understands that as a different medium you should play to the mediums strengths and how the medium functions for storytelling like his attempts synthesize meaning between gameplay and story. Writing for games shouldn’t be like writing for books or films because while analogous they are nowhere near the same kind of mediums.

The medium is the message.

-Marshall McLuhan

I’m not saying it was a majority issue, I’m saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.

It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”

Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.

Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.

If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.

It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.

However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.

People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.

Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.

I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.

Not just that, but this is free home-made ice cream.

so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.

I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.

In 2013, EA won the Consumerist poll for “Worst Company in America.” While mostly people pointed to arguably rational reasons for these votes (DRM, microtransactions, badly made and released games), the COO of EA had some other thoughts as to why they got hammered so hard as the worst company:

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.

When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?

I hear pocket pool is a lot of fun.

Underrated because the game itself was often kind of lacking in terms of solid foundational RPG systems…

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Pretty good attempt at putting a Middle Earth type world ahead a few hundred years in the midst of an Industrial Revolution.

Really thoughtful stuff like the labor exploitation of certain races like orcs, with quests like a half-orc you can help start a labor union or help the shop boss shut down the nascent union.

Twice now I have tried to make a top level comment and accidentally responded to a thread instead… Anyway…

Instead of leaving this deleted I will agree wholeheartedly that while I personally am not the biggest fan of the TES series they have some of the most deep, complex and (somewhat) organized lore there is.

I just wish they would hire better script writers and weren’t so afraid of locking content behind player choices. Always having every option available just feels a little silly.

Wait Raft has lore and world building?? I love that game but I never even paid that close attention. Guess I need to go look now.

Probably a somewhat popular opinion in the Linux crowd already, but I think we should be pressing companies to find better ways to manage anti-cheats than kernel-level anti-cheat anyway. I’m glad I don’t play games like that because I don’t like how it works at all.

If the SD865 is the undisputed champ does that mean that the Lite version is actually the best for Switch Emulation since that’s the one that ships with SD865?

Damn it can play Mario Odyssey?? I am a little surprised it can emulate Switch games, but damn that’s cool.

I understand why it’s Android but that also feels so limiting in a way…

I mean… I would too, which is why it was on my mind.

I’m just waiting for the release of Bubsy’s Wild & Woolie Racers

Super hot.

Assassin’s Creed: Django Unchained

What?

In the US at least, AT&T shut down 2G in 2017, Verizon in 2019, and T-Mobile started shutdown of 2G in 2022 but has it still hanging on but on it’s final way out by the end of this year likely.

Even for Europe, a lot of 2G shutdowns started in 2022, and most places in Europe will have 2G phased out by the end of this year.

Civvie11 and Warlockracy are about the only YouTube channels I consistently watch. Good old men times.

Yeah but it’s hard for me to pass up my meangirl frog wife.

Baldur’s Gate 3: I can fix them all I swear!

The thing about this shit is…

Microsoft, like Google, is now a user-data driven company and they have already made loss/profit ratio analysis on this long before they released the price increase. They’re absolutely banking on people cancelling but making up the difference and then some from the people who stay.

For a thought experiment let’s consider how many subscribers they were reported to have in Feburary: 34 million. Let’s assume that everyone is paying for the highest tier to make the math easier. So current income would be 34 million user x $20 a month and thats $680 million a month. New income of 34 million users x $30 a month is $1.02 billion. The difference is $340 million a month. Let’s divide that by $30 a month. That gets us about 11,333,333 users. So they can hemorrhage over 11 million users and still break even. To make sure, let’s subtract 11 million users. That gives us 23 million users. 23 million users x $30 a month is $690 million a month, a cool $10 million a month above current profits.

For final context, 11 million users is roughly 32% of their entire subscriber count. They can afford to lose a third of the people subscribing and still make money.

The math doesn’t bode well for us who vote with our wallets.

You had me at “pet the cat.”

Sometimes its over an hour of spoilers.

Most of the time though he seems to be reviewing stuff like Fallout 2 restoration of previously cut content.

I mean I understand why it’s more of an issue with a game that just came out but a game that came out in 1998 I think is fair game for spoiling.

Civvie? No, I’m the other guy!

Well played. Especially since these two are about the only youtubers I even bother to watch.

lol.

lmao even.

You get what you pay for.

I actually quite enjoyed Dread for what it was, imperfect as it may be.

I’m skeptical as well but they already restarted the game once when the original development team wasn’t producing a quality game. I suspect at worst it won’t be the worst game ever but it would be subpar for a Metroid game. Nintendo is usually pretty good at taking chances and making it work. Hell, I never thought Metroid could work in 3D and they proved me wrong. I guess my main issue is that Metroid traditionally is a cramped corridor style game, the opposite of an open world.

I, for one, fucking hated Jack yapping in my ear for half of Borderlands 2. I still don’t understand the love for that chode.