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Whereas in a communist economy where people didn’t have to struggle to survive, game developers could focus on improving their craft and telling whatever the funnest story they can think of is. We can already see this on a small scale with the difference between indie passion projects like Hades, and AAAA cash grabs like suicide squad. Imagine if everyone could afford to chase their passion instead of money.
Mass Effect is one of those sci-fi series with only one fictional technology, and a whole lot of development on that, and on the stories that enables them to tell. And that fictional technology is the mass effect. In Mass Effect there’s a fictional element called element 0, or eezo, that humans found out in space. Eezo can alter the mass of other objects when electrically stimulated. Eezo can give a spaceship negative mass and enable faster than light travel. It can reduce the mass of a bullet to almost zero as it’s fired from the chamber of a gun, and return it to normal going at an extreme speed. It enables artificial gravity. Humans who are exposed to eezo can gain telekinetic powers. There’s a community of aliens out there, and they also use eezo in their technology. There’s a ton of politics, philosophical commentary, and secrets out in the galactic community and its history.
I disagree. The bad reviews and refunds produced, effectively, a single bad week for the company, while getting the publisher to backtrack on a decision that would have slowly but surely killed both the game and the company. Spitz saved Arrowhead. Unfortunately, instead of capitalising on the cooperation between developers and players to win back their reputations and make the game profitable again, Arrowhead decided to throw away Spitz’ hard work by firing him, ruining their reputation just after he saved it for them. Now they’re fucked.
The way I see it, their only chance to return to profitability is for them to explain that Spitz was fired for his earlier comments mocking players for complaining about PSN. If they did that, the players would return to Arrowhead’s side. But if the narrative that he was fired for sticking with the players and saving the company prevails, then Arrowhead is doomed.
Mate, Stephen Hawking was one of the smartest people on the planet, and I bet he preferred turn based over starcraft. Motor skills are not the same as strategic intelligence. Starcraft is a game with a solved meta, which prioritises motor skill over strategy. It’s basically football as far as the intellectual difficulty goes.
And I say this as someone whose favourite strategy game is starcraft. Not because I think it’s a well designed game, but because the Zerg are sexy and I want to fuck a hydralisk.
isn’t optimising the games extra costly?
These days compilers can optimise it for the hardware mostly on their own.
I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.
Yeah, that’s the great thing about PC. You don’t have to upgrade your hardware more than once a decade, and you can give feedback to games publishers that chasing ever increasing graphics trends is alienating their customers. You console gamers have to take whatever slop you’re given, but us PC gamers don’t have to worry about a publisher not supporting backwards compatibility, so we have more market power. We can apply greater pressure on the industry to apply pro-consumer business practices.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games
That’s definitely not true. I wish it was.
The reason that covid would benefit from evolving to be less deadly is that people don’t want a deadly disease and take steps to prevent it. But people don’t care about long covid, and that means there isn’t an evolutionary pressure for long covid to get less severe. I think covid is going to be our generation’s equivalent to lead poisoning until we take it seriously.
Keep in mind the fact that the slow vaccine rollout gave the virus the chance to multiply in poor countries and develop vaccine resistance, which then fucked everyone else too. If everyone in the world had been vaccinated quickly, we could have wiped out covid and we wouldn’t be dealing with long covid brain damage and immune system compromise now. These patents have killed millions of people and will continue to ruin millions of lives. There is blood on the hands of these people on a scale greater than any terrorist attack, and they knew full well the consequences.
I’ve seen plenty of situations where a DM wanted to run a different system but the players thought that sounded too hard and they only want to play what they know. In my experience, it’s usually the players you need to convince. The DM is the member of the friend group who is the most open to putting in effort to begin with. The players are the lazy ones and therefore the most resistant to change.
Terra Nil. It’s an anti city builder. Land in a polluted wasteland, clean the soil, plant seeds, set up ecosystems, make sure they can persist without you, and recycle all your structures before you leave. Appreciate the beauty of the natural ecosystem you restored as you fly away.
I want more games like this.