McDonald’s is the most clear cut example, although that’s ongoing

There’s been countless little companies that sent themselves into death spirals with a price hike, but when they’re big their remains are pounced on, or they experience a slow decline before collapsing to a failed pivot

What do you mean? How dare they release Hades 2 without a clear roadmap to the next game

Ok, but like… You could be having the experience you want if you plugged your current controller into a computer (not even a particularly high powered one for this game), spent an hour or two messing around with it, and if you struggle with the modding process people would help you? I’ve found a mod that does exactly what you want on nexus mods, it changes the game speed on the fly

Link if you’re interested

I’m not being elitist when I say you can’t make a game for everyone… You literally cannot. You can’t be the same handful of people who spent 7 years polishing every aspect of a game to tune it just right, then also keep track of a granular set of difficulty sliders throughout the process. These are incompatible design philosophies, you can’t make a game like Silksong like that

No, you should have a button through the workshop where you can add mods to slow down the game, take less damage, or whatever else you want or need. Let people rebalance the whole damn game if they want, if that makes you enjoy the game I’m happy for you

It should made easier then it is right now with proper workshop integration so it can be done in just a couple clicks. I’d support calling for that

What I don’t want is for team cherry to be pressured to change the game. It’s amazing as is, it’s extremely well thought out in how it challenges you even as the difficulty people complain about prepares you for future challenges. But people who will never enjoy it for what it is instantly demand it be watered down

You think a speed slider is going to make this game accessible? That’s not how this game works. This game is impossible at every challenge until it isn’t. That is the game. It’s rhythm and reaction, if you can do it slow you can do it normally

If I didn’t have a friend who played smash with three fingers and his hip on a heavily modded controller, I wouldn’t have the instincts to be able to play this game. He kicked my ass every time, despite nerve palsy that left him with half of one working hand

This game is not for everyone. And I don’t mean because of abilities… I’m not that good of a gamer. This game is for people who don’t accept their limits

If you make every game for everyone, you make slop

I don’t care if you can enjoy it without putting the effort I put in. I just don’t want a way for myself to make it easier. That’s it.

Fuck off, this is a masterpiece and I love it so much I’ve developed a new callous on my thumb and had to take a day off. I’ve overcome every challenge, I’ve dealt with the frustration, and victory was all the sweeter for that.

I don’t care what you do or don’t enjoy, don’t fuck with my game. I don’t care if you watch a playthrough or mod the game so you can enjoy the story.

I’m not being elitist, I’m pissed because people are trying to ruin the masterfully crafted artistic vision of the best game I’ve played in years

This game isn’t made for them, it’s made for me. It’s the full package, it’s amazingly well balanced, and truly a lovingly crafted work of art

If you want to mod the game to make it easier, I have no problem with you, or people who use it

But I don’t want a win button in my wonderfully challenging game. I don’t want this to be ruined with temptation. That’s what would cheapen the experience

It will! That one took me a while too, but it opens up a lot

Let me fill up the negative space in that comment…I want Silksong to be hard. I want to do things dozens of times before succeeding, I want to struggle then overcome

It’s all skill based. You get better, your character gives you more breathing room, but ultimately you have to learn and overcome each new challenge

And that feels amazing, it’s not for everyone but I don’t want a way to make it easier… It would cheapen the experience to even have the option

Is cup head comparable? It looks really floaty

The point is I get frustrated, then I get better. There’s stakes, and every time I get a little better. I see the next phase of the boss, then it takes me multiple tries to get to that stage again. Then suddenly, nearly every time I’m getting to that phase in seconds

This game isn’t hard for the sake of being hard, it’s hard because it repeatedly gives you a new challenge that seems impossible, and if you have the will to keep pushing you can overcome it. Not through luck, you just learn the patterns, and you adapt your combat style

And once you surpass a challenge, it feels like an accomplishment. The world opens up, you’re rewarded with new exploration and abilities

Nice!

Yeah the dash strike took a bit for me to get used to, although I’ve found it to be one of the key attacks, you can dash-strike and usually get out of the hotbox of most attacks between enemy attacks. I really only use normal attacks when I know where the enemy will land and when I have time to get in a few hits… Hornet just doesn’t like straight lines much

I’m not sure how I feel about the quests…I think I agree, it’s less immersive, but at the same time there’s a lot more characters to keep track of. I also do like that you have to go out hunting for parts, it annoyed me at first, but it’s a good way to retread areas and look for secrets

As far as beads… In the early game they’re rare, and if you don’t recover your cocoon it can really set you back, but as you progress they start to become fairly plentiful. I’ve started turning them into rosaries, it feels expensive, but it really is the intended strategy

But yeah, I’m enjoying the hell out of it too. I’m at 25% of the achievements and in act 2, I don’t know how far this game goes, but it seems like there’s a ways to go

Hard agree… So how you feeling now? I’m ok act 2, but I feel like I’m missing a lot. I’m still enjoying it though, I’ve had two bosses now that needed a night’s sleep to get past

Fair enough, we can’t all know everything after all. I pride myself on turning on a dime when I learn things in my blind spot, and I respect you for it too

I mean it wasn’t frequent, but it was candid. They periodically gave updates, demos at events, etc. They definitely were not radio silent

They just never confirmed a release date, they just said it’d be done when it’s done. Until this year, then they said fall, then 2 weeks ago they gave a solid date

Ah yeah they finished up a couple weeks ago and gave a hard date, but it’s been listed as fall 2025 since around whenever Nintendo announced the switch 2

Cool. There’s an estimated 324k blood transfusions per day. This beat that

It’s essentially an objective measurement

Shadow dropped?? I’ve been looking forward to it since like… February?, when we got real confirmation. We’ve been tracking this for years

But I do appreciate you appreciating our day. It doesn’t have to be your thing, but it’s very cool of you to cheer us on. Today has been a big win for a lot of people, and I invite you to celebrate this as a win for gaming in general

That’s how it always was. In fact, you can run away from a lot of boss battles this timeIf you want “I have a family” mode?

Grind though it a few minutes at a time and build your skills. Otherwise, this game just isn’t for you, watch a playthrough

Yeah… It won’t help you. You’re Hornet, not the Hollow Knight. The controls might be the same, but the skills don’t transfer

I replayed the original too, it was enjoyable, but easy after completing the path of pain years ago.

I’m getting my ass kicked in Silksong, and it’s great

Right? You get it. It really feels like something special

I feel like I’m learning to play Hollow Knight all over again. I suck, but I know when I wake up tomorrow I’ll be better. And that’s a beautiful feeling

And I just have to say, it’s incredible that team cherry could release this game, with such intense expectations, and not disappoint. I just hope the game doesn’t end too soon

I will be tomorrow… A night of sleep and I think I’ll have it. It’s starting to click

I did think about streaming it, probably would’ve been a good way to start. But on the other hand, I want to enjoy this game for what it is

Been there, done that. I never would have if I hadn’t experienced Hollow Knight first through…I didn’t like hard games before that, now I am undaunted

Lol… Wait until you play Silksong. Hollow Knight is about straight lines and timing, if you want to be Hornet you have to learn to dance in the air

You need positioning, timing, and angles. You have to dance into their guard and hit with precision, you can hit them while dodging their strike, you have to dance in between them and the hotbox of their attack

Sleeping and stepping away helps.

It genuinely does. I never thought I was the kind of person who could complete the path of pain. It was very painful. It took days. But I did it, and I realized I could be that kind of person if I just refuse to give up. I could be any type of person if I want it enough

Yeah, the fandom never died. There’s just no other platformer like it, the controls are so tight and the game itself is extremely well polished

People still do speed runs of Mario 64 and ocarina of time, Hollow Knight is like… Objectively the best 2D platformer of all time. It is singular, the games that inspired it and the games that copy it don’t compare

Although so far, Silksong has not disappointed, it took forever but it’s actually living up to expectations so far

I’ve been replaying Hollow Knight this week, and despite it being years since I played, I still had the muscle memory. So I was just blazing through, I mean once you do the crazy parcore in the castle the other challenges are pretty easy

The skills do not transfer over, I’m almost as bad as I was going into the first game

So far, this game is exactly what was promised… You’re Hornet from the last game, in a new place, with a new story

It’s like playing Hollow Knight for the first time again

The problem is, there’s a lot of compartmentalization

The people working on the Israel projects are probably going to be on board with what they’re doing, so I guess you could sabotage Windows a little?

I mean honestly, with how many bugs are coming up in all the windows products, maybe this is happening. I figured it was just years of layoffs, but maybe some of it is intentional

Abstraction is a trade off. You don’t want to build interface layers between everything… It’s a pain in the ass, and if there’s a 1-1 relationship between parts of a system then you’re basically putting in a minimum cost to modify that area in any way. So if you do it, it’ll probably be once you’ve locked down the design pretty well

Game development is pretty different than normal development too. You have a lot of one off and lose ends based on creative decisions… You aren’t building up on top of your system, you’re building out

And frankly, it leads to a mix of mind blowingly good code and a lot of terrible code

So no, I don’t think it’s that easy. I think it’s also a bullshit argument, and they should release the “proprietary” code when they finish supporting the game, or put in the time to make the interfaces

Can’t you just get a new launcher? That’s day one of getting a new phone for me

I mean…

Do you want to live in a world where there’s brain chips, or one where one of the companies making brain chips is owned by Gabe?

I do find it interesting…I don’t think it addresses the problem, but it sounds like a great idea

Realistically, how much are companies going to pay out in royalties? As little as they can get away with

Let’s say it’s 2% of a game that made $100M - you’re looking at tens of thousands each when it’s all split up. Which is great, maybe even life changing for some of them, but it’s not financial security kind of money

And then let’s say the game flops or gets cancelled… Well that’s not going to help much, so you can’t really rely on it

So I think the idea is great, but it’s still just fiddling with the knobs of capitalism

You say what project they’ll be transitioning to as less and less bug fixes are necessary. Could even be dlc

It’ll be a bit late then.

I know how compliance works, and this is setting off all my alarm bells, and the EFF and privacy community agrees… This has truly horrifying implications

If you’re going to let human rights be further erroded because it came in a pretty explanation, not much I can do. But when the next patriot act comes back to bite us, remember one thing… When they say it’s about the children, it never is

That’s what they say it does. What it really does is make sites responsible for “harmful content” shown to minors

It’s all completely vague. You say it just affects the kids mode accounts… The bill doesn’t say anything about that. It doesn’t provide any guidance on how to properly comply, just like the porn id laws.

You can’t assume the government is going to use this for what they say they will. You have to look at what this would let them do as written

Ultimately, this gives the government censorship powers over what is allowed in the “open” Internet, and to IDs users in the “adult” Internet

Because that’s not what this is. It’s just like the porn site laws

How does a site comply? Maybe they use AI to look at your face, maybe they have you send in your license. The law isn’t clear what’s enough to prove it.

How long until third parties step up? Nice convenient orgs that can sell the collected data that can guarantee compliance, because they sell the data to the government directly. Or even first parties… Facebook and Google are happy to sell this kind of info on their users

This isn’t about protecting kids, it’s about identifying users. What they say this is for is good, what the laws actually do is far removed from that

Not really… Think networking, not gameplay

The easiest to get past all the NAT (or weirder networking) is to just have everyone connect to a server and pass the data through the right connection. It’s quick and dirty, but you can do your routing on the application layer

I’m not sure that’s what they are doing, but it makes sense based on the details I’ve seen

Because ultimately, digital goods are infinite.

They would make more money on a Mario game that costs $30 with no drm then a $90 game impossible to pirate

You’re also missing a big piece… You can’t fucking trust the reviews any more. Steam reviews are great, and game reviewers have been trying to insist “no, this trash game is actually great, don’t trust your fellow gamers” for years now

At this point, it’s blatantly obvious you can pay for good critic reviews, and there’s no walking that back… Especially since there’s better, more honest, options

I found it super cool. It’s dreamlike… There’s no enemies so it didn’t feel like a nightmare, just like playing a game in a dream

My top pick right now is fedora silverblue, I’m running it on my test bed/server and I’ve been impressed

I’m running bazzite on my main one, which is related but geared towards steam and maximizing game support, it’s pretty good and closer to “just works” for any kind of gaming device, it’s less polished but it’s still pretty good