bethesda taught us a very important lesson a while ago - if your game isn’t good, then the modders won’t bother. Skyrim despite its flaws is a good game, and has mods to show for it, Starfield despite its budget is pretty bad, and after the initial hype most ambitious mod projects were cancelled.

because of that i don’t think there’s any neferious plot behind the game makers celebrating their modding community, and the modding community certainly isn’t getting forced to work without pay - they’re passionate about the game and want to make something of their own within it, and honestly that builds a good portfolio for future use too

try out circles! there’re neat tools that help with drafting pixel art circles. a bit of a pain to build (you’ll definitely need the ruler) but it’s fun to see some spheres and domes in your world :)

yeah that’s the problem, when people (myself included) see a game label itself as “RPG” we kind of expect the world to be living, a world that feels like you could go anywhere and find amazing treasures, friends, enemies, anything and everything on your journey! A world where talking to any character could send you on a quest you’ll never forget

in avowed NPCs are static, there’s like 2 non-hostile animals, if something doesn’t have a healthbar your attacks phase through them, every chest has the same 4 ingredients in it, you can’t interact with the enviornment unless it’s a box, an urn, or specific vines, you can’t tell your companions to fuck off ever, if an NPC has a quest for you they’ll have an exclamation mark above their heads - which completely takes away the reason to talk with anyone else but them and vendors, and just sigh it doesn’t feel like an RPG at all to me

after i got a plot breaking bug (plot dialogue wouldn’t progress) i uninstalled it and downloaded skyrim again, which though flawed, at least it’s an RPG

my current laptop surgery experience is unscrewing all the bits around the fans to give them a good wipe from the dust, and replace thermal paste, that sounds like next level!

:0

i feel oddly unsafe when my entire digital life is running from an external drive. backups sure, but the main thing? makes me nervous

of course there are alternatives, but they are all compromises, here’s a couple of reasons why:

• Adobe aggressively patents every new feature they come up with, so every other software has to reinvent the wheel each time

• adobe has a huge head start with the software they already have & they make bank on the subscription model so the development (though subpar for how much money they make) is constant and steady

• to replace say photoshop you need more than one program. photoshop is a beast, it’s RAM hungry but for a good reason, you can edit photography, draw traditionally, paint with oils, watercolours, do calligraphy, do pixel art, create collages, do photo manipulation, create designs, fill out digital forms, make your file into an editable pdf, sketch, hell you can even animate if you’re feeling masochistic! you can bascially change any image into any other image you can possibly imagine, it’s incredibly versatile and powerful. other software focuses on niches (because they can’t afford to try to compete with adobe), doing one thing but doing it really well, no single program can challange photoshop, even if the main feature it offers is better than what photoshop can do. same goes for After Effects, Illustrator, and i’m sure others but those are the main ones i use (Premiere Pro recently-ish got outmatched by Davinci Resolve which is a huge win)

• if you plan on making money with your art you’re basically required to at least be competent working with Adobe apps, it’s the industry standard, and it’s not looking like that’s going to change any time soon. look up any digital drawing course, 80% are going to use photoshop, 15% procreate, 5% krita, corel, and other software (disclaimer, those numbers are vibes based and do not reflect the actual %s)

so yes, there are alternatives, but there is no photoshop-but-different-brand or after-effects-but-we-rearranged-the-ui. To replace one Adobe app you often need several programs which slows down the workflow significantly

neat! i do hope i’ll have saved up for a proper PC by then so having two drives won’t be much of a hassle (currently i have a laptop)

nope, adobe apps are allergic to VMs too, less so but still. believe me i’m not hyped about having a whole dedicated OS just so i can run 4 programs, but dual boot is my only option

since i’ll set all that up past end of life for win10 i won’t be getting any security updates so i can safely just disable that option altogether, which will hopefully make the two OS coexist peacefully

i’ll upgrade to some baby Linux distro once the end of life hits, i am lazy

(i’d also need to set up a dual boot as i’m cursed to need Adobe apps and those are famously allergic to Linux)

common Valve W

aaaand another asshole blocked. if you want your comments to be read by people don’t be a dickhead

bowtie, he just looks so dapper in it

ayyy! guess we both need to be patient then haha

neat! i’m going to be looking up everyone you mentioned haha, i’m starved of Outer Wilds content

it is on my list yes! i will get to it eventually lol, right now i’m catching up on all the classics i’ve missed over the years

ooooo, going to put that on as soon as i get home! there’s so few playthroughs of Outer Wilds it’s crazy

i also will experience hype2.0 when i get that art of outer wilds, making of, and interviews with devs book (and a model ship!!! gotta wait 6months for that though, danged preorders) god what i’d give to play that game again for the first time. so few things in this world make me want to scream at the top of my lungs MORE even when i know there’s nothing to be added to the story and it’s perfect as it is

outer wilds outer wilds outer wilds outer wilds!!

i’m glad you enjoyed it!

i did finally get my fix of archaeology and linguistics, but separately

Chants of Sennaar & Outer Wilds (best bloody game ever btw, one of those once in a generation marvels that make people beg for amnesia so they can experience it for the first time again. if you want to play it don’t look up anything about it you gotta trust me on that. unfortunately, the release was overshadowed by Outer Worlds that released very soon after and had the Obsidian RPG hype behind it 🙃)

i knew what it was before clicking, and i have to say - as someone who thought that game would be perfect for me i was very disappointed

in the interest of not wanting to influence people’s opinions by being the only and negative comment i’ll spoiler my criticism, i still encourage folks to try it, and you can always refund it

somehow skyrim still reigns far above all my other games in the sheer number of hours i put into it (1200h), teenage escapism really picked Tamriel as my digital safe space huh, second highest is terraria with 520h

i bet if my time spent across the various versions and mod packs of Minecraft was counted it would surpass both, but alas, no counter for that (though just adding all my wynncraft characters’ time together it’s over 150h)

in my defence of new games, couple of the Early Access ones i’ve seen grow beautifully with meaningful quarterly updates and clear dev maps. i’m especially happy with Enshrouded and i feel like with a full release the current price will double as it’s already a massive world and the map is half filled

(similarly how i got satisfactory in early access in a cheap af bundle and now the game is like double the price of the bundle it was in)

i don’t get angry at things that don’t affect me lol

i do worry for steam’s future, it’s only this good because “Lord Gaben” has made many great decisions, it may not be a democracy but a good “dictator” is often more effective than a democracy. But what happens if/when Steam goes to shit for whatever reason? the internet will implode

not to mention steam’s:

screenshot manager

community card trading

friends & chat

easy to join small muliplayer (friends can just send you a button that launches the game and joins them instantly)

highly customisable profiles

tools & soundtracks

achievemnts

and so much more that can be simply small little fun

yeah but the thing is, Steam isn’t even trying to be a monopoly, all of Steam’s competitors just seem to have a hobby of shooting their own foot, repeatedly. Steam is trying to make the gaming experience easier and more fun, and excelling at it!

unlike some other platforms, Steam doesn’t do exclusive deals, literally the only Steam exclusives are Valve’s own games, everything else is up to be decided by devs

it lets me customise the tip/charity/bundle organiser ratio and i’m 85% sure I’ve gone under $7 for the tip multiple times

waaaaayyyyy less grindy/waity than graveyard keeper

and how do you know that?

you feel like a victim because society is indeed oppressive towards LGBTQ minorities, but if you see yourself as a victim all the time you’ll just end up depressed and miserable.

no, Steam is not being biased against minorities, intentionally or otherwise, they’re just not. This feature was in beta for a long time and for most of the beta anybody could join any family from any country. The choice to make it more restricted wasn’t to fuck up people who don’t live with their families - it was to prevent the abuse of the feature that must’ve come to light during the beta.

Steam wanted to improve their family share, and the did, greatly in fact. But they had to include limitations to prevent cases where someone gets financially abused online, or someone joins a stranger’s family and then gets kicked out immediately and needs to wait 6 months join any other family, or someone joins a game hoarder’s family and then never buys a game again.

That limitation can still be worked around the good old way - by logging into another person’s machine and joining their family that way, but for that you need to trust the other person to not fuck up your account - and that’s enough to discourage most of the extreme cases. They’re just not going to beam that information to the public as that’d defeat the point of establishing that limitation in the first place, and even encourage people to trust random strangers that could have malicious intent.

look it up

drag, go touch grass. Seeing every minor inconvenience as a personal attack of the heteronormative patriarchy can’t be good for you

and again - I’m telling you this for the third time, you can go around the region lock.

as a trans person, can you not call everything that inconveniences you as a trans person transphobic? You’re devaluing the actual struggles we have to face with “i can’t play video game because of transphobia :(”. Besides, there are ways to go around the region lock, just Google the “transphobia” away

you can still try to go around it by doing the same as before, log into the other person’s machine

i don’t know when or how it happened but once i realised FOMO was being used against players regularly and aggressively i just- stopped caring. Oh a limited time special one week offer especially for me now and never again? Too bad i just launched the game and have no intention of buying your “newbie pack”. Oh my event limited time items? Dang, those look expensive, anyway i’m happy with my normal looking armour and normal looking tools/guns cheers

& i only ever buy cheap cosmetics. If your game is bad and grindy when i play it without throwing money at the screen then your game is bad and grindy & i will tell all my friends about that experience

wow my dyslexia had a field day with that title. I was very curious what “Senior Citizens Develop Could Emporium” meant

because they run on everything and are free

yes sure it could’ve been a bug, but can we really believe them that it was?

companies are on a quest to pollute our lives with ads, it’s not a stretch to think it’s bullshit when another attempt to do that is being denied with “whoopsie the new guy wrote the code wrong nothing to worry about here!”

ahhh, companies copying homework from bigots’ dogwhistling tactics? what a brave new world we live in

says something bigoted

receives backlash

“haha guys can’t you take a joke? everyone’s so sensitive nowadays”

once you stop seeing ESO as an Elder Scrolls game, and instead look at it as an MMO set in the world of the Elder Scrolls - it gets really fun

even for lore fanatics who don’t see ESO as canon it can still be fun to run around areas we haven’t seen since Arena! Sure, it probably won’t look like the real thing once we get TES: Elsweyr or TES: Black Marsh, but it’s the best we’ve got right now, and with the current lighting fast development of TES series a lot of us won’t live to play those games

subscription is mostly useful for infinite resources bag space, and free non-recent dlc access too i guess

and most content is indeed soloable, only time you need to interact with people is in some DLC dungeon and some veteran dungeons, and mostly just to listen to/explain boss rules so you don’t die every 10 seconds

you can permanently prettify it and sell all your stuff at the uh, forgot the name, but the one stand trader that accepts everything and has its own deck to make the booty transfer faster! (though idk if it’s still exclusive to captained ships? i haven’t played in a while)

RIP ship captain’s pockets

(unless you’re long past playing for the gold or you’re sailing an uncaptained one)

not to psychoanalise someone’s accidental journal/art project but perhaps the daily showcase of what they’re doing is pushing them to add more variety to their game choices?

I sure know if I were to decide to post a screenshot a day I probably would have more varied game choices than normal. Even if it’s a funny thing you do online the mere act of showing it to others adds a layer of performance, and it’d be a very boring performance to show myself playing picross touch or sudokucube 7 days in a row