You are likely scanning my profile and history because I said something in a tone that made you feel funny or angry. This is called being reactionary. You can overcome it.
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This whole “why don’t you do it first” reply is no more intelligent than saying “I ain’t reading all that” or “the curtains were just blue” or other dumb thought-stopping exercises vomited out by a generation with no attention spans. I reject it, I block those who dump that like they’re somehow doing some good by trying to find hypocrisy in an idea that makes them uncomfortable.
We are all going to have to start figuring out how to socialize face-to-face again.
Sorry guys, the internet broadly is dying for anything but corporate interests and people with rotten agendas trying to manipulate people. It brings you nothing but stress in your personal lives, why stick to it? Who is using it that you need to spend all day in discord to keep them company? Live for a better tomorrow with actual experiences, dust yourself off and start going out and experiencing the world while you still can.
You’re going to get sick of the fleeting, rare experience of getting lost in a video game, it doesn’t last forever, at some point you will grow idle and feel like something is missing, and you will have a choice at that moment of closing down your PC and doing something you’ve always imagined doing or staying there and drowning that nagging feeling by browsing the algorithmically cultivated feed for some new, equally fleeting dopamine hit.
It does get tiresome going to steam threads and seeing the same copy pasted “don’t ruin the game with woke shit” post up voted to the top.
I don’t think I’ve read a steam forum post in close to a decade, and even then it was a very niche thing I was looking for. I have long since stopped feeling any enjoyment or novelty in seeing completely random people’s thoughts, since in the last few years particularly, people have no intention to communicate and broadly just want attention, which has become monetized so the problem is far worse than it used to be.
Seriously, at some point we’re going to have to accept that the internet is dead or too close to death to be useful for interacting with other humans. I think we all need to stop communicating online on forums and discord and the like, it’s all become weaponized and not enough people are left without agendas and campaigns they’re trying to push. Let’s go back to how we did it for thousands of years and just talk to each other and make real-world friends, leave the assholes and shills and sock-puppets to fight among themselves.
Imagine the power we will have if all the scum and assholes become the inferior population scared to actually do anything or go outside and we become owners of the day and become the ambulatory force towards goals and social progress.
Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.
I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.
I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.
The shot reminded me of Elder Scrolls Online at first, and I had that very real PTSD twinge that made my stomach lurch.
When I was going through the worst part of my life, losing everything, burying my family and pets, closing down my business and having my home foreclosed due to family medical issues, I played Elder Scrolls for a couple years for no other reason than to spend time with other people, including someone I cared about. I hated the game, it was exciting for the first couple hours until I realized how far it deviated from the actual franchise and how limited the gameplay really was, how everything was just a funnel towards premium content and skins.
I drank like a fish and laid in trash watching my life fall apart as I sat in Elder Scrolls listening to people chatter and watching them duel, because I didn’t want to be alone because I didn’t trust myself to be alone.
I did start over and everything is a lot better now, but holy shit, that game ruined Morrowind, Skyrim and the entire game world for me.
I’m sure they’re very sowwy and have learned their lesson and your face and ID and personal, private browsing habits will be perfectly secure, and even the AI bot that will “monitor your habits to decide your implicit age” will be very quiet with all your sensitive personal details and not give it to anyone even if they ask very nicely for it.
“Regular” content and spaces are untouched.
They are also rolling out something like an AI that monitors your chatting and browsing habits that can determine your “implicit age” as well, this isn’t exactly shocking, but it’s gross how it’s being promoted as a handy feature.
The entire thing is a state surveillance project and yes, they are working on desensitizing the population to having no privacy or personal lives.
Sure hope our government doesn’t collapse to a fascist oligarchy or authoritarian surveillance state, sure could bite us all in the ass when the armed deathsquads get ahold of both our identifications, faces and our ideology and the names and faces of all our friends and family members.
Or would be a shame if all the people who use discord to communicate with other marginalized people suddenly had all their personal information revealed to friends, family and schools, including what chat channels and servers they visit, what games they play, who their friends are and so on.
Oh well, I’m sure the company and the government will be completely fair and transparent about all of our online identities.
I am never going to convince my younger family members to change platform, they literally keep discord on 24/7 with their friends and SO’s and keep lobbies open around the clock to wander in and play games and stream and thrive in the social space.
It’s horrifically un-secure and I hate so much about the whole thing from a safety standpoint.
I will likely kill my main account and delete all my personal data and messages, for whatever good that will do, and just make a dummy account to received messages and say hi to family. Same as I did with facebook and other social media.
They will have some kind of nebulously described “thing” that will monitor your browsing and chatting habits on discord and use that to decide your “implicit age” and I wish any of that was a joke or rumor.
They won’t just ask for your face and ID, they are also admitting that AI or something is going to be literally watching you at all times to “determine your age.”
Tell me again how we’re protecting kids? Where them Epstein prosecutions at? We save any kids yet? How about now?
I am also leaving discord, I hated it and the people who use it a lot, but used it to connect to family members. I will find other ways.
This is the same exact cycle I went through with social media, which I also left entirely. I stopped browsing a lot of sites I used to, I took most of my personal info off the internet, and ended a lot of subscriptions.
The internet lately is feeling more and more like making end-of-life plans.
Firing up the new Starcraft shooter, the female voice in your coms says: “Run down this hallway, you’re going to need to prove you know how to crouch and jump over obstacles before you can learn how to switch weapon modes!”
yeah, I am gonna need something really special to get excited about another FPS shooter no matter what the wallpaper looks like.
I think for a good game, by a good company worth supporting, $30 is very fair and reasonable, especially if you get more than a few hours of play out of it.
We seem to spend $60 on movie tickets and snacks for two and leave the theaters after 90 minutes disappointed and never complain as a society beyond saying the movie sucked, but then going to watch the sequel because everyone else is watching it.
The only reason I wouldn’t personally spend more than $30 or so on a game is because generally everything more expensive is published by a major studio, and thus sucks ASS.
I have not spent more than $30 for a video game in over a decade and a half. I have no idea who’s affording all these “AAA” titles that go for $50+, or who’s keeping that market alive.
There are some miserable, well-off parents out there in liberal America who just throw money at their kids and ignore what they do with it I guess.
Were… were you under the impression that companies who sell products of any kind have some kind of deep formula for making sure their pricing is only the razor-edge of what they need to price it at to keep a business running?
Are you insane? Have you ever sold anything? Have you ever run a business?
Also $8 is “greedy assholes” to you? Are you a bot or a tankie or something?
I skipped 1, I adored 2 and played it to a harmful degree, I tried 3 and got bored after three attempts to get into it. There was a fourth??
I mean, the second game was basically setting the thing up for a MMO open-world, group-mission-running/loot extraction type game across a huge, cel-shaded world with open PvP areas and wild custom characters… and they dropped the ball on that?
I guarantee private equity is circling them like a flock of buzzards smelling death. This is why they’re preemptively making the same actions that a private equity company would do after acquisition, layoffs, restructuring “bold new plans” and a bunch of lip-service to inflate value before divvying up any resources of value like licenses and senior programmers to form a new brand, and throwing the rest away.
I have high hopes that Light No Fire will learn the lessons from NMS and make a world that is both dynamic and interesting, but grounded enough in a single planet that it’s not such a slog to explore and it’s not just “Oh, neat, a green planet with blue worm aliens and purple trees, this is a color/creature combo I haven’t seen in hours.”
Also, imagine how nice it would be if they just drop it as a huge MMO and you just drop in somewhere and people start randomly finding each other and building communities. That would go so hard, and yet the studios capable of making that kind of experience are soooo scared of the 2% of players who will play that and whinge all over the forums that they’re “bored, lost and can’t find anyone.”
I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.
I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.
I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.
I really really really want to like this game
Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.
Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.
Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky. There should be a reason you want to get a crew together and hang out in a personalized ship.
No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.
I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game
Are you me?
I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.
I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.
The year is 2064. The world outside is fire and riots.
A new life is brought into the world, the hospital lights flicker. The doctor, dirty and worn out, pushes the new parents a form on a battered clipboard.
“Congratulations to you both, now please sign this release to bring your baby home, but not before you designate which formats of Skyrim your child will inherit, please understand this is not optional, and we no longer take Bitcoin to pay the mandatory $60 Skyrim Fee, so please use cash, credit or ration cards to pay.”
Go buy Vein on Steam.
Yah it’s nothing like CoD Zombies, but it IS a zombie game, and it’s made by just two people trying to make a quality survival game and it’s obviously a work of passion worth supporting.
I haven’t bought a big company release in years at this point. There are so, so many good indie games being made right now, this will be a nostalgia point for kids someday, back when there were was a flood of games and half were huge, bloated AAA wastes of money that nobody liked, and the other half were amazing, weird, experimental concept ideas produced in low fidelity and released for $5 - $20.
these games
If you’re talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don’t think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.
Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to “adult zelda” but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it’s expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.
Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.
Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.
It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.
It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.
Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.
But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.
Translation: they’re going to make everything else more expensive, like they already do to offset hardware prices, but like turbo edition price hikes.
“Oops! All price hikes!” edition shit.