I’m happy I don’t take part in gaming “communities.”

Have a few people you know in real life you can game with. Stop reading forums and youtube shorts and streamer takes on gaming. Seriously, just fucking stop. We have to let this attention-baiting, rage-inducing industry of influencers die already. Fuck that $1000 to charity, Jesus christ you could go outside and donate socks and canned food to a community pantry and literally change a family’s life for a week. No need to involve gaming at all.

Play games you like, read reviews if you must, but buy fewer games, play games less, make more friends, socialize, get the fuck out of your gaming chair, you’ll never be a famous twitch streamer. Your life is flying by while you’re lost in Helldivers 2 drama.

I keep going back to it to try it again and again because I recognize the potential is great, but every time I get in there it’s the same feeling of being in a weird technicolor circus, a universe that has a weird scale and no real sense of vastness because the systems are cramped together cartoon solar systems and there’s no real feeling of consequence, no feeling of “going too far, I need to come back later when I’m stronger” or conversely no feeling of “I need to get to that place over there” and it seems the only real challenge is some dangerous robots and animals so you leave that place and go get your fuel somewhere else.

I think it would have connected a lot better if it was less easy to get around, less teleporters to identical space stations, less fast-travel and less ships flying in the sky, less aliens hopping all over the place on planets, less stuff everywhere. Maybe more of a survival feeling where you really do have to climb down in caves to search for a part to get your life support going, even basic, tired old hunger/thirst type mechanics would have really spiced up the experience and would have made finally being able to fly and explore feel awesome.

Also, the crafting isn’t fun, they lean into a lot of weird space minerals and space chemicals and such that you have no intuitive idea what you need to keep. To say nothing of how boggling the inventory/upgrade system can be, I don’t know why they reinvented the inventory/skill/upgrade system so much.

The Outer Wilds - I get recommended this over and over, I know it’s a huge hit, a cult classic, and beloved to many people. I finally got it and gave it a real solid attempt, several times so far. I understand the gameplay loop I guess, the repeating, the weird ship flying. I mean, I appreciate it and love that people are experimenting with new ways to make games that break old molds. I really like the atmosphere and maybe if I were a lot younger it would feel fresh and interesting.

But I never really started having fun, never really connected with the characters or the world, I never got hooked. Everything felt like a janky obstacle instead of progression and reward.

Maybe I’ll try it again sometime, but maybe it’s possible some games just don’t rub me right.

Also, ITT: lots of people arguing with other people why their feelings are wrong.

Well, to be more correct, if they see a venture or tactic of theirs isn’t paying off as their delusional AI’s told them it would, we can at least get them to scrap that direction and try something else. We’ll never actually “stop” them, but we can use the thing we have, that they want, to at least direct them away from the places that they are causing harm to things we want to preserve.

I am under no expectation of this happening at all, we have hundreds of millions of families who will throw whatever new, shiny, mainstream tech-toys and “blockbuster” releases at their kids as a babysitter, those are the breadbasket of the tech and entertainment companies.

This is just the needle pushing more towards subscription models for all the things.

In a few years you won’t own games or game systems, you will have a controller to the side of your monitor and all your PC functions will be outsourced to a microsoft server and your games will be streamed to you according to whatever subscription tier you’re on.

If you all want to stop this, STOP BUYING NEW GAMES. Just put the stupid fucking companies out of business, we can “acquire” plenty of PC games for our PC’s and there are vast numbers of used games out there, alongside whatever is kicking around in our steam libraries that we didn’t have the attention span to even try. Let’s go on a spending diet and enjoy the lives we have for a little while until the oligarchs all starve.

Its got to be deliberate.

It is, they want to do what every gaming company wants to do, have a huge and popular streaming platform with games hosted on their servers so that people don’t own games or hardware, they just pay an ever-increasing monthly subscription fee. (plus many, many extra surcharges, in-game upgrades and cosmetics and virtual collectables, etc.)

“You will own nothing and be happy” is going to be the motto of every electronic media company for the next several decades. Hope you didn’t like peer-to-peer gaming and having good ping in competitive gaming.

They’re going to go all-in on paid streaming gaming services, like every major company for the next thousand years.

You will own nothing and be happy.

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.

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.

Like I said, they don’t actually need to. You’re going to have your own silent buddy watching everything you do!

go step on a partially melted ice cube in your socks.

Why not. If we’re stuck with sketchy, lawless apps for chatting we might as well go back to the OG sketchy, lawless chat app.

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.

One of many massive security leaks!

Dark Tom needs to rise to kick the internet’s ass and create a new, old internet that has no algorithms or bots.

I guess we would need some way to confirm the users aren’t AI or bad actors so we would need to use kind of face reco- oh, I see. We’re trapped in hell.

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.

There are lots and lots of companies that use discord the same way they use facebook, just a place to promote and gather “feedback” and such. They likely mean they ran the official company server, not that they use discord to chat between teams.

Although I’ve done that before too.

it was useful when it was new and there were no alternatives as easy to use.

Now it feels like commercialized app slop that wishes it was actual 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.

Pay to buy, pay to play, pay to get upgrades, pay to get the best ending, pay to not play. (You will have to use premium currency to set the game down for more than a day or lose all progress.)

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 love it even more when they force their employees to return to office work, nothing makes me happier as a gamer than knowing the people making the games I love are miserable and the company has a much narrower hiring pool.

implementing cost-cutting, project cancellations, and a return-to-office mandate.

Yes, as a gamer, I cannot count the number of times I’ve thrown the controller down and screamed “WHY WON’T THESE EMPLOYEES RETURN TO THE OFFICE?!”

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.

That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.

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.”