Oh yeah I never accused it of being a good deal. But I also try to avoid microtransactions as much as possible in general. I would say to justify $30 you need to add significant new maps, enemies, maybe even some new systems to justify something that costs almost half the price of a new AAA game. Or if it is just cosmetics, charge in the $1-$5 range for those.
It’s almost as if the economies and balance of single-player games are different from MMO’s.
I have a vague memory of reading an article years ago (can’t find it now) about how pre-industeializarion, the average number of people an individual interacted with and knew wa much smaller.
We used to live in small villages. Houses would contain extended families. You’d probably know your neighbors pretty well. You’d know the people you went to church with. It was not uncommon for someone to be born in a village and live their until their death without ever leaving that village.
Whenever I hear people talk about how humans NEED social connection I’m reminded of that. My college graduating class was perhaps more people than several generations of my ancestors interacted with. There’s a strong argument that we have hyper-optinizsd socialization today. Constantly connected to dozens of people we know and millions that we don’t. Stimulation, novelty, and distraction enough to last more lifetimes than I can imagine.
Perhaps in this modern age, the person most difficult to engage with and the most important, is the self.
Bigotry is bad. Segregation is bad.
In progressive spaces this is USUALLY met with agreement. That’s easy whenever we are talking about equal rights for people who have been historically been oppressed. However, a dark corner of progressive spaces likes to hate. Hate on men, cis people, white people. It’s usually just one or two people, who have probably been personally hurt by people who happen to fall into those groups, and the rest don’t feel like they can say anything.
I strongly believe that things like segregation are fundamentally wrong and make the world a worse place. Not that they were tools that were used for evil and can now be used for good in the right hands. Not just temporarily as balancing measures for society. Equality isn’t just something you can pick and choose when to believe in, when it’s pretty and convenient and makes you feel good.
Subjective opinions are not part of the validation process.
As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.
In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).
So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.
So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.
There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.
Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.
AW2 is going to be a while. Not only because I’m a patientgamer, but because it was published by Epic and I have no interest in setting up an account and dealing with their launcher, plus jumping through all the hoops to be able to play it on my Steam Deck. I’ve already switched a couple of my household’s PCs to Linux, and I’ll probably do the rest eventually. Maybe I’ll pick up the PS5 version some day, but that severely limits the different ways I can play it. I might get FBC Firebreak if it ever goes on sale- I don’t play a whole lot of multiplayer games generally but I’m interested to see if they put any lore in there.
Disco Elysium is great, but at times the “gameplay” so basically just reading a polysci textbook. It’s a very heavy game that deals with a lot of heavy topics. Often I’m tired of processing all of the terrible things happening in the world and look to videogames as an escape, and Disco Elysium is up there as one of the worst games for that lol. Even just seeing the ZA/UM logo starts to get me going from thinking about what happened to the studio and the main creators of the game.
There’s also a lot of friction that just comes from it being a text-heavy game. I had my retina surgically re-attached in one eye a few years ago- it was largely successful compared to going blind in that eye, but that eye is not as good at focusing at screens further away. Action games like Alan Wake and Hellblade are fine on my living room TV, but for Disco Elysium I mostly need to use my Deck or some other screen that can be closer to my face.
Another factor is sobriety. I feel like this doesn’t get talked about in gaming communities a lot- a lot of gamers are children, or adults who are sober for a variety of reasons. I’m adult who does not have any of those reasons, and even a medical marijuana card for my arthritis. I have a full-time job, a house to maintain, and several relationships to maintain. So on the rare occasion that I have an evening to myself to enjoy, I often want to get high (responsibly) and play some videogames. It’s kind of a difficulty customization too: often the difficulty settings in-games are just boring number changes that make enemies bullet sponges. So I’m more entertained by playing on Easy and getting high than playing on Hard sober. Disco Elysium, for as much as it features drug-use in its world and gameplay, is nearly impossible for me to play while high. It’s not a huge deal, but it often means that other games are just more appealing when I’m planning any given evening.
This is a tired old gimmick.
It can work situationally. Different games have different approaches to health and to UI. Mario had different sprites and mechanical implications for health. Spyro the Dragon had Sparks change color, and if you lost Sparks entirely it became a pain to collect things.
But most of the time, often in modern action/horror games, it’s just nonsense. A pretty transparent attempt to make the player “feel” in danger by making the character bloody or putting up an increasingly opaque vignette without actually communicating health well. It makes it all that much more easier to try to give the player the feeling of “surviving that attack on 1HP” without actually having to fudge numbers.
There has been a trend the past several years of thinking UI = bad, and that less UI = more good. I find it incredibly annoying. Just give me the UI. Give me the minimap. These are things that are so useful in real life that humans have been trying to make them for thousands of years. We made smartphones and GPS systems because maps are great. Google and Meta and Apple and tons of other companies have been trying to make AR glasses a thing for years. It honestly breaks my “immersion” to NOT have a minimal in games like Horizon Zero Dawn.
It CAN be interesting to do stuff like this if the game is designed around it, but usually it just feels like the devs are trying to re-invent stuff they don’t need to, or following trends for the sake of being trendy.
Just finished up the Alan Wake 1 DLC, and the American Nightmare spinoff game. I really loved Control and had decided to go back and play the Alan Wake games. The base Alan Wake game had some good ideas, but the controls and balancing were clunky and the combat was tedious. The DLC’s got better, using the dark/light mechanics in much more interesting ways. American Nightmare had controls that felt much better and a neat structure of more open, less linear levels. Still nowhere near as great as Control was imo.
So now I’m playing Disco Elysium. I had tried to start it a few times and bounced off- it’s great, but a TON of heavy text and political theory. I managed to make some headway a couple months ago when I was traveling with my Steam Deck. Figured now is as good for a time as any to try to beat it at least once. It is truly great, and I think needs to be in the conversations for best game of all time. But it also takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play.
Another game I tried to go back to was Hellblade. I’m, idk, about a third of the way through I guess? First started over a year ago. I love the initial concept of the character’s psychosis manifesting in-game, but it seems like 90% of the gimmick was done in the opening sequence and the game got incredibly repetitive after that. It’s so slow it’s hard to play. My hands hurt after a bit because I find myself pushing on the joysticks harder, pushing on the “jog” button harder, trying to make Senua move. It’s really frustrating to have a puzzle mentally solved but needing to spend 5 minutes moving her slow ass around to execute the solution. It’s a good thing exploration is pretty useless because it also takes forever. The combat is also boring and repetitive: the enemies take way too many hits and there are way too many of them. Even just starting the game, sitting through all the stupid splash screens and the same trigger warning is tedious and dumb. I feel like I’ve put dozens of hours banging my head against this game, but when I look at steam I’ve only put in a little over 5. I think I might retire the game and just watch a lore video of it instead.
People just like to complain.
I complain about speed traps because ACAB. I don’t blame drivers for speeding- I blame bad civil engineering for roads that always seem to optimize high-speed vehicle traffic first and then slap a much lower “speed limit” sign on the side of that road.
If having safer roads was truly the goal, the government responsible would use proper traffic-calming designs. Narrower streets, tighter turns, raised pedestrian walkways. Trees and other barriers at the roadside to make drivers uncomfortable speeding.
This is one of the most shower-related shower thoughts of all time. Kudos!
A lot of people clean their bathrooms regularly. CLR or generic knock-offs are great for mineral buildup on faucets, drains, handles, etc.
My local water company regularly takes the main treatment system offline for maintenance and switches to the backup system. I don’t know all the details but every time they do it the water is heavily chlorinated for a week or so, and this happens roughly every 6 months. So until I can afford to get a full-home filtration system installed, I bought a shower filter that goes between the water pipe and shower head. It needs changed every 6 months so I might as well clean everything while I’m at it.
It might be that Krafton has a weaker relationship with Denuvo than Microsoft did.
From what I can tell, it looks like their only other games that have used it were the Callisto Protocol (which also had it removed eventually) and inZoi (which used it during beta but removed it before the full release).
I hope Krafton clarifies. I’m fine with offline anti-tampering measures.
I can build a better PC for less money
Maybe we should wait until we know the price before making memes about this?
Especially with how RAM and SSD prices are increasing. A huge part of the Steam Deck’s success was because they partnered with AMD to get a great price-to-performance APU in a market where GPU prices were inflated by crypto, and now AI.
Of course if RAM and SSD prices get too high these machines might get bought up and scrapped for parts anyways, but let’s at least see if that happens first.
Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.
The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.
Something along the lines of “well I actually don’t like anime!”. And started talking about how people expect him to be an anime fan, and how he lived in Japan for a while and liked manga a lot but not so much anime.
It was a a party with a lot of “alternative” people, most of whom probably would just say “yeah I like anime”. I think the guy was expecting me to say that so that he could that he could then subvert expectations, but my more neutral response kind of derailed things.
“I feel better, so I don’t need the meds anymore”
Bigotry and prejudice is always bad, even if it’s not against a “protected class”. Hating on white people, straight people, cis people, men, or anyone else for the way they were born, what their ancestors did makes the world a worse place. Heck, “white” itself is a nebulous concept that changes over time and is different depending on which racist you’re talking to. Just because someone resembles your oppressor does not make them your enemy.
Kind of related, but I don’t broadly judge categories of things. I was at a party recently and someone asked me if I liked anime, and I responded that I like some anime. Most of it I don’t like, but that’s not specific to anime. In my experience, roughly 80-90% of all media is somewhere between “garbage” and “mediocre”, and it’s the 10-20% at the top that I look for. A lot of my favorite bands happen to be metal, but I’m not going to like every band that uses distorted guitars.
Perhaps another way of phrasing it is that I usually find that the parameters which define genre are often separate from the parameters that determine my personal enjoyment.
My theory is that most people are more concerned with the social groups around media than the media itself.
Traffic signals and traffic cameras are two entirely different things.
It’s really gross to me how people misrepresent taxes so often.
And especially people who I KNOW aren’t complaining about OASDI and Medicare, other than perhaps they need MORE funding. Yet they include those when they toss out random numbers like “25%”.
The tax rates are defined and published. These aren’t fuzzy numbers we can play with, like survey results or experimental measurements or estimates. It’s literally just math and yet people refuse to do it.