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Cake day: Aug 02, 2023

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Once again, we have lawmakers just making spurious if not outright false statements with no repercussions. When your words decide people’s reality, you should be afraid of what you say. And I don’t see that fear in legislators.

They just say whatever the fuck incorrect bullshit they wish, and walk it back at their leisure when the effect is already resolved in throughout news media. The world’s gotten their soundclip, the base started foaming when they heard their whistles, and then the politican quietly amends “oh, I obviously didn’t mean that.” If more politicans shut the fuck up because they were scared of the repercussions of walking their statements back, then maybe there’d be more reporting on what they’ve done then the inflammatorily idiotic shit they spew every other day.


The title reads like pure SEO nonsense. They announced it last year didn’t they? No one reasonable is claiming vapourware because a game has gone silent for a year.



Yeah, it’s not trendy but I don’t think we can do trendy unless we do like I said and derive from standout games with identifiable suites of mechanics. You just have to be descriptive or accept heavy overlap.

“Auto shooter” is not very descriptive. In 10 years, someone would be having this same conversation about that term. Asteroids is basically an auto shooter because there’s no reason to not always be shooting, it’s effectively a QOL change. Some bullet hells too.


Video game genres are one of the few fields in which I’m not a prescriptivist. But survivorlikes only aren’t called RPGs because Vampire Survivor is embossed on the whole subgenre. The suite of mechanics rose to high prominence on the back of one game (or franchise, in the case of Soulslikes) rather than refined through years of experimentation.

We aren’t going to get more, simple names unless they’re similarly derived from a single, famous ancestor like your “Soulslike”. But you can always just be descriptive. Diablo/PoE are “top-down gear-grind RPGs”; it’s jargony but all subgenres are.


I’ve never seen Horizon Zero Dawn called an ARPG but that does seem to be the consensus. I’ve always considered games like that or new God of War to be “adventure games”.



That’s the kind of competition I want. Not a plucky newcomer with fresh ideas, but an industry titan able to burn more money than some companies ever see in an attempt to undercut the competition. They surely aren’t factoring this as a deficit to recoup when they pull a massive reversal after securing market dominance. That’s never happened in the history of capitalism.

Epic can huff my huffables.




People with jobs that aren’t playing video games.


Even taking hyperbole into account, this is not a great metric and has not been bourne out in my experience.

What’s a suspiciously high and low score?


I don’t like losing but I’ve been doing it my whole life, so I’m pretty good at it now



Have you considered that everything you like is just some level of sci-fantasy (an existing genre[-fusion])?

They are both under the umbrella of “speculative fiction” but they go in different directions.



What’s the problem with staying in early access? It’s not like the games are squatting on welfare. Do they get anything from Steam beyond a placard that says “my game ain’t finished”?

The only thing is people deflecting criticism because of the “early access” tag. But if you want to introduce arbitrary term limits so you can win internet arguments about video game developer malfeasance, then you’ve lost me.


I don’t understand why we let Civ get away with amputating gameplay from the end-of-lifecycle previous game to repackage as new DLC again? If they hit upon great ideas in an expansion, why is that not folded into the core product like most decent games do with sequels?

They started with a triangle for 6, slowly carved it down to a semi-smooth, functional circle, then turned around for 7 and said “how about a cube this time?” Stop reinventing the wheel and finish refining it.

Honestly, the development mirrors my playthroughs of 4Xs: start with something funky and a lil different, struggle to make it work, and then restart when I’m close to done.


The only concern is how much the cost of training the model changes if it got a significant kickstart from previous, very-expensive training. I was interested because it was said to be comparable for a fraction of the cost. "Open"AI can suck sand.



The discussion was of a common trope in video games, the person I replied to referenced an unspecific element in video game storytelling, and you expect the primary understanding of the subsequent label to be talking to a sub-section of a sub-section of all gamers?

Either you are reading a far too charitable (and unrealistic) interpretation of the previous comment, or the original comment needs signficant revision.

Even if we take your reading as valid, how would the attention span of a minor fraction of all gamers move the needle, in terms of game design, enough to bring about the tropes previously discussed?


Feels unnecessarily hyperbolic to call the average gamer an “adrenaline junkie”. Games need gameplay and fixing things that aren’t working, be it a dying flashlight or an erupting reactor, is easy and extensible gameplay.




Not superhuman, just very simple. I pick what I want most at the moment, especially in a game where I can refund points if my decision wasn’t great.


I had to take another look to see if they’ve shat the tree up worse somehow. But, no, it’s the same. The tree isn’t complicated to read or even that hard to understand. It’s a tree: you start at the base and make decisions at the branches.

Perhaps it’s an extension of people getting paralyzed by decisions, which I don’t experience, but it’s only difficult if you are in the strange position of “knowing enough about the passive tree to know a build/specific passive exists” but also don’t know the tree enough to figure out how to get there.


Because it sounds like they’d be ditching everything previous fans love about the universe and lore to hit a bunch of buzzwords. There is insane shit from older games that I’m sure will never see the light of day (unless a modder gets inspired) because Bethesda wants to sanitize and mass-marketize the world.

Will Elsweyr explore at all the fact there are effectively different species of Khajiit tied to under what combination of the phases of the dual moons the baby is born? Or will Bethesda just throw some big, gruff, talking tigers and some small, funny, talking house cats around and call it a day after putting in exactly one (1) version of each of those that inverts that mold?

Will the Mane be like this: https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Mane ? Or will he just be a Khajiit in LaCroix-level flavorings of Middle-Eastern adjacent clothing?


Yeah, I’m not mad that they chomped Humankind’s flavor. I see it as an admission that the game had good ideas (if less-than-stellar execution). I’ve just seem rando comments trying to tamp down on claims that there are similarities like their stock portfolio is riding on it.

I’m sure it’s management’s fault but they should be shouting out fellow devs in their breakdowns: “oh, we saw Humankind and thought it’s mechanic was fascinating. But we wanted to adapt it closer to our style and refine some pain points we noticed in our execution.”


What?

I only remember the wave-based, tower defense main mod. What playground mode was there?


There have been a number of voxel shooter that have shipped lowkey since Minecraft that attempted to add block placement to the team v team ticket shooter, e.g. Ace of Spades.



Oh boy, can’t wait for modders to dress it up as various star wars speeders. I’m looking forward to play all the star wars mods but i refuse to pay full price for that thing


No agrument there. I’m just saying that can’t be labeled as ‘bad game design’ like the examples the TO listed can. I believe a game isn’t required to aim for as many players as possible. An MMO only needs enough players to sell the illusion that there are other people with agency shaking up the world, and I believe you can achieve that with a couple thousand players. You can easily find tens of thousands of people that would play a melee only MMORPG, especially if it were full dive.

(This is, of course, handwaving the economics of funding an MMO)


I don’t think this, in particular, makes the game bad as long as the game is designed around the lack of support.


Yeah but Twitter is a alt-right breeding pit now owned by an idiot, Republican sponsor. Steam is were kids and antifa go to get games about their sick fantasies, like “self-sufficiency”, “joy”, and “measurable progress earned from reasonable effort”.


Have you considered just…not uninstalling it?


What do you mean “same combat”, like Amalur made some novel innovation? They’re both just 3D, third-person action combat; it’s a mechanic. This is like knocking Fallout New Vegas because it still had you shooting guns, and we already shot guns in Fallout 3.

The game looks disappointing for plenty of legitimate reasons, so let’s stick to those.


But…that’s not specifically about video games?

E3 cultivated an “insider” appeal that not many large cons tried to match. You could look forward to game reveals that you’d mark on your calendars.

PAX has a more indie feel and Gamescom feels much more like an actual trade show.



I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.

Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?