Nie mam porównania, bo miałem aż jeden blender w życiu, ale w 2019 roku kupiłem ten, marki lidl i nie miałem z nim żadnych problemów. nie wiem jak radzi sobie z kruszeniem lodu bo tego nie robię
I think of it like this: my own personal boycotts do nothing individually, but I am doing a very small something by refusing to be a bridge to grossly evil companies into my communities, and raising the ethical concerns with egregiously bad corporate cultures and business models. And for my own personal comfort, I just can’t engage with products that fill me with disgust due to the taint of who will ultimately profit from my purchase.
On that, when my personal attachment to a creator, studio, or individual game supercedes my disgust or frustration with a publisher’s business models or revenue streams, I try and keep that in the conversation. I play a lot of Warframe, which has some mildly manipulative monetisation like algorithmic discounts and crippleware elements; and PSO2 which is published by a corporation with a large gambling revenue stream, and the game itself has gambling elements in it, albeit surprisingly low on the evil anti-player scale.
And that’s the thing, sometimes I love something enough that I can’t bear to part with it. I find Yoshi-P’s transphobia and support of NFTs to be sufficiently revolting that I can’t play FFXIV anymore, nor will I ever buy anything or even positively talk about anything associated with him ever again; but I’m still subscribed to FFXI. I still plan to buy new mainline Dragon Quest games despite the fact that Square-Enix treats its customers with absolute contempt and has committed to a path of ecological violence against the Pacific.
That said, I think it is a good mental exercise to get in the habit of thinking about who you’re giving your patronage to. Do they have good working conditions? Where do they make their money? Are the leaders shitheads? These things become part of a disposition, and you become part of a cultural conversation, one that’s clearly starting to engage more and more people. Start talking about good developers and especially workers’ coops like KO_OP (handily named) and Motion Twin; or studios with excellent working conditions like Supergiant, Hello Games, or Monolith Soft.
That said, this is all still part of the infamously ineffectual practice of lifestylism. At the end of the day I believe it’s about cultivating a particular set of values and trying to broach them to as many people as possible, and learning to effectively and respectfully communicate them. If you ever do get in the industry or can support people in the industry, that’s when you can actually do something material.
I agree with most of what you said. I think it’s important to be conscious of where our money is going and to be comfortable discussing that with others.
About FF14 and Yoshi-P, however, I’ve actually heard the opposite about his opinion on trans people and NFTs. I heard from my friends (and upon a quick Google search I just did) that he expressed sympathy towards trans community members and that he was trying to keep NFTs out of the game? If you’ve heard otherwise, can you please share the information? I was going to resubscribe to play with my friends, but if you know something, I’d love for you to share it.
I will also check out those companies you mentioned near the end, such as KO_OP and Supergiant!
Yoshi-P is a very talented speaker, I’ll give him that. But you have to look at what he’s actually saying. There’s a very pretty preamble about “I’m sad that society, is this way, so my hands are tied…” which is a technique known as impersonation. Whether or not Yoshi-P himself is a transphobe, I guess I can’t say, but the entire speech itself is just straight up transphobia. He then provides a single sad vignette as if to say that can somehow be generalised across all of society, and not just a particular minority view. The ultimate thrust of things is that the small amount of transphobes in the audience are more important than making trans people feel comfortable or welcome.
After I stopped playing XIV, it got much more obvious in context. If I contrast the freedom of presentation in PSO2, which lets you have control over how masculine or feminine your bone structure is, what sex characteristics your character has, and whether you have a masculine or feminine face and to what extent. Beyond that, there’s also a diverse wardrobe for both “Type 1” and “Type 2” in the game’s parlance (which in itself is super cool) to facilitate how you want to present, even if you don’t want to change your body type.
In FFXIV, I was largely stuck using mods to make sure the clothes I wanted were possible. When the game started official porting previously male clothes to female models, they did so with the caveat that your character absolutely must have prominent breasts. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all the previously-female gear was really revealing and I think meant to be more funny than serious. Bad luck if you wanted to present femme and not just dress up in obvious drag. This might be better now though, I haven’t played in a year and a half.
re: NFTs
I can’t find where he’s spoken against NFTs in general. “NFTs won’t be in FFXIV” is not a general statement of opposition to them. The most I’ve seen is “making a fun game around cryptocurrency would be difficult”, but no actual firm statement of opposition. If Square Enix is as democratic as they say they are, and given Yoshida is on the board of directors, I don’t think the Square Enix push to NFTs is just unilaterally Matsuda.
Yes! I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I didn’t like the way the NPC AI worked. That specific aspect felt less like a “horror” experience and more like a “will the jank fuck me this time?” fest. Everything else was excellent, though.
Main game was a 10/10 without question DLC was a 9.5/10 and would have been a 10 if not for that.
I still got a lot of “Outer Wilds moments” in the DLC. Very few games have given me that kind of “oh, you’re kidding, that’s awesome” feeling when you figure something out.
All companies do bad things. The only question is whether or not you know about them. I personally am of the opinion that not buying particular products is only useful as part of a coordinated boycott. Otherwise, it’s just empty virtue signalling.
Perhaps we should have some sort of a gamers consumer organization that coordinates boycotts over specific issues. I would be willing to participate. And it’s not like you can’t allow the company’s reputation figure in to your decision to buy. But no form of absolute morality, divorced from reality, is either helpful, or even particularly healthy.
Vampire Survivors seems to fit the bill: no story, a bit of tactics, you level up to get new items, and enjoy killing hordes of enemies at once. After every run you can unlock power-ups for the next run… It’s one of my most played games in the last few months. It’s one of the classic “just one more run” type of games
I dunno, I normally use my bash script + ffmpeg to convert batch flacs to mp3s
<span style="color:#323232;">#!/bin/bash
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cd "${1}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">for subdir in *; do
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> cd "${subdir}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> for input in *.flac; do
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> echo ${input%.*}
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> ffmpeg -i "${input}" -ab 320k -map_metadata 0 -id3v2_version 3 "${input%.*}.mp3" && rm "${input}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> cd ..
</span><span style="color:#323232;">done
</span>
Then i’d just run my script.sh [directory that contains flac]you might want to remove && rm “${input}” if you don’t want it to delete your flac files automatically.
Planning on playing through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 for the first time this week. Know almost nothing about the game, nothing about DnD rulesets, just diving directly in because a partner very highly recommended them.
Edit: Ended up buying Baldur’s Gate 3 and getting into it instead, looks like I’m gonna be playing it in 3 > 1 > 2 order. As a side note, performance was way better on Vulkan than Directx11 for me, despite common advice being to use Directx11 on Linux for the game.
They are absolutely lovely, though undeniably very old school. BG1 is more action-adventurey with a bigger emphasis on exploration, BG2 is very story-heavy. They have aged remarkably well, considering they’re over 20 years old. The handpainted backgrounds still look pretty.
With potential increased interest due to BG3, I wonder if it would be an idea to create a community for the classic Baldur’s Gates 🤔
I’d like that, or a classic CRPG community with a certain timeframe. Two of my favourite games now are the original Fallouts after playing them for the first time only a few years ago. I’d love to see more of the games from that era.
I have actually pondered a “classic gaming” or “old school games” type community for these types of (primarily) PC games from the era up to maybe 2010.
Retro Gaming communities typically focus more on old console and/or arcade type stuff.
Haha yeah same here. I guess we sit back and hope someone else takes up the mantle.
As for names, I’m not sure. There’s already some retro/vintage PC communities on SDF but they are more hardware focused. Old PC Games? Retro PC Games? The Beforetime? No idea.
Also, what would be the appropriate cutoff for the timeframe? I just threw 2010 out there, but maybe even slightly later? What is a good milestone to cut off at? I was thinking starting at 1993 with the release of Doom.
Doom seems like a solid start, it was revolutionary. You could also push it to 1990. As for an end date I’d have to think about that. 2000 or 2003 gives a 10 year range with a lot of influential releases, but might be a bit limited. If you did 2013 that’s a 20 year range, but it could also be a shifting time frame where it is for games of a certain age. If it was 10 years or older games then it would start with an end date of 2013 and the range would expand every year. The issue with that is it would lose focus on older games eventually.
I was thinking Doom as a sort of watershed moment in gaming, and going earlier than that and you could argue those titles belong on the already-existing retro gaming communities.1993 actually had both Doom and the first FIFA, it’s got a lot going for it as a start year.
Looking at releases for 2013 though we have things like GTA V, BioShock: Infinite and The Last of Us. I definitely would hesitate to call those “old school games”. 2011 has Skyrim. Does that qualify? Otherwise I’m starting to feel more drawn to the 1990-2010 timeframe; nice round numbers and should sort of capture the era of classic gaming. 2010 has Red Dead Redemption 1, Mass Effect 2 and Civilization 5. Is it fair to say those are some of the last old school games or do we need to go older? A two decade window seems good.
I agree that an open ended timeframe would lead to lost focus over time. If it’s 10+ years old as the criteria, it would mean we’re just 2 years away from The Witcher 3 qualifying for a community meant for stuff like Fallout 1&2. That just feels… wrong.
Yeah good points on open ended timeframe and the 2013 end date. 2010 seems pretty good, the only odd one out for that list would be civ 5 because it’s so widely played.
I’m in my 30s now so I have to remember that someone who was 5 in 2010 would be 18 now, and red dead redemption 1 would definitely be considered old. I think that’s a solid timeframe, 1990 to 2010. If Lemmy ever gets big enough to warrant it there could eventually be games by decades communities as well.
If you don’t care about round numbers and it being exactly two decades you could also do 1993-2009, starting with Doom and ending with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There is a different kind of symmetry to that, and I honestly kind of like it.
The only issue I would have with a 93 start date is it excludes games like Dune, Wolfenstein 3D, and the original Civilisation, which were earlier in the 90s.
Having said that, every cut off point has its flaws, and a more focused range could lead to a more focused and spirited community. Very weird that COD:MW2 is 14 years old btw.
Very fair points as well about those games. I think maybe a looser guideline would be more appropriate than strict dates. I really like the Doom - CoD: MW2 bookending to encapsulate that golden era of gaming, but I wouldn’t delete any post about Civ 1, if I was actually running the community.
And yeah, time flies. It was equally scary earlier when I realized Witcher 3 is almost ten years old.
I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
THAC0 is… yeah. I guess the systems take some getting used to. And it gets a little more complicated at higher levels with different layers of protective spells and counter-spells.
I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur's Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I'm fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it's being run by an asshole DM who's out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.
Imagine you're at the table with your friends, and the DM says, "Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges...6 Kobolds!" You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, "As you press further on across the bridge, you come across...7 more Kobolds!" I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I've seen of BG3 footage, I'm expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.
And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.
Yeah, these old games were kind of a wild west when it comes to design. I also love Fallout 2 to bits for example, but god damn can it feel cheap and frustrating at times. On the other hand there are loads of ways to cheese encounters, too, if you’re interested in making things easier. Backstabs, Snares, Cloudkill (and similar effects), abusing Fog of War. Almost all of BG1 can be cheesed with Skull Trap. And almost all of BG2 can be cheesed with Set Snare.
I’ve only started playing BG3, but so far it’s been a lot easier and simpler than both the old games and Divinity, which maybe is to be expected with it being based on D&D 5E rules. Compared to D:OS 2 combat has been a lot less complex and challenging. Granted I’m playing on medium difficulty. I didn’t want to start off on Tactician after the Divinity games, but maybe I need to here.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy BG2. It’s one of my all-time favorite games still, and I replay it every now and again. There are so many ways to set up fun parties with loads of interactions, especially if you use the Tweak that prevents companions from killing each other even if they hate each other. Some of the best interactions are from mixed-alignment parties.
narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle
I must confess that these days I always play with DebugMode=1 and one of the primary reasons is to be able to use Ctrl+J to teleport the whole squad when pathfinding acts up.
I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you're likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you'll have.
Summons are a really powerful way to deplete enemy spells, just send them in one by one. Summon Skeletons is good for this.
As you move onto BG2, using spells to counter enemy protections becomes more important, like using Breach to deal with Stoneskin etc. Though as a caveat, I’ve been using Sword Coast Stratagems so long I barely remember what combat is like without it.
I’m playing through Baldur’s gate 1 atm as well. I tried it and didn’t enjoy it back in the early 2000s but now I’m digging it. I still don’t like real time with pauses combat, but I can forgive it with the party size. I do wish there were other ways around things than combat most of the time though, but early DnD was primarily a dungeon crawler so that’s fine.
Curious to hear what your thoughts are of the “punishing death penalty”. For Demon’s Souls, sure, if you’re not great at the game it can be rather intimidating. Dark Souls has an equivalent system to Elden Ring where you can become human to enable multi-player, where dying just means you can’t co-op (or even be invaded). For all the others, it’s just a bit of health that you lose if at all(you can avoid it with items for tough spots).
But if it’s souls being on the ground that’s the issue, that’s also in Elden Ring so I’m confused.
I consider losing all the money and XP you’ve accumulated since the last save to be extremely punishing. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t begin to express how much I hate losing progress. Everything I just did for the last X minutes since the last save was completely undone. Nothing to show for it, no XP, no money, no progress toward my next goal. Just a complete fucking waste of time and X minutes of stress I’ll have to repeat. It’s like I lost power and corrupted my save file. It’s the worst feeling in gaming for me.
Yes, I realize you can get that XP/money back but it adds a level of stress that makes my stomach roil even thinking about it right now. No amount of suggestions on how to think of it differently has changed my perception of it significantly. I dealt with it in Elden Ring for a while but it’s probably the main reason I stopped playing that game.
Playing a game with similar mechanics but without the death penalty makes me realize how much more fun Elden Ring would have been without it. IMHO of course. YMMV
Your mistake is thinking dying is failure in those games when it’s literally just learning. It’s why Dark Souls is called “Prepare to Die”, it’sjust part of the game and it’s why there are checkpoints every 15m. When you die to some enemy hiding in a corner, you then know exactly where that enemy is next time.
It’s hard for me to grasp how new players approach the game at this point because it’s just ingrained, but it seems like you had the wrong idea about the mechanics and kinda entrenched yourself in that belief. Hope you come around.
Well I just picked up Last Epoch last night / Monday! It’s an Action RPG so follows the same format as PoE / Diablo. Haven’t been super impressed with the post-campaign experience of D4, and immediately after jumping into Last Epoch I already feel like it has exactly what I was looking for from D4 in terms of power fantasy and buildcrafting potential.
Its still Early Access which I generally don’t pickup, but someone here on Lemmy recommended it and I have to say, so far I regret nothing!
First, you won’t spend that money, you can spend that on other things instead.
Second, you can spend the money you have saved this way on products of better companies. For games this may be good indie developers and smaller studios (is that a thing?), but generally for software there is usually a wider range of options, and I mean even actual alternatives.
You could argue that me not paying for youtube premium won’t change a thing. That may sound true, but it isn’t necessarily: if you instead support your creators trough Liberapay or Patreon, then not only Google will get less, but the crearor and toss other platform will get more money, so they can improve their services and keep the lights up. Or like choosing to pay for Cryptpad instead of Google Drive will again besides having Google and their investors getting less, Cryptpad devs (who are very resource constrained, just as mostly any users-first software project because of not being known) will get more.
EA's portfolio has been so thoroughly undiversified that they're looking for a buyer, just like Square Enix, Zenimax, and Activision have been. In that time that EA became enormous, smaller publishers like Embracer, Paradox, Anna Purna, and Devolver have grown as they reached that neglected customer base that EA left behind. Larian has grown by making really good games in a style neglected by EA. EA owns BioWare and got further and further away from making the Baldur's Gate 3 that Larian just made. So yes, it makes a difference.
I really admire your response here as you put my thoughts and feeling about this more eloquently than I could. I really want to incentivize the good work people are doing, and while my dollar going somewhere else might not mean much to EA or Blizzard, it means a lot more to smaller groups who are trying to do the right thing with less resources. It also just feels nice to spend money on something good :)
I can understand your frustration. Right now it feels that we small people can’t do anything to do good in the world. There are greedy capitalist everywhere. It is nearly impossible to understand what damage ones desicion could make. If our desicions even could make a difference.
But the thing is, you can’t overlook everything. It’s a gouverments job to keep an eye over Corporations.
But that doesn’t mean, that you can’t do anything. You can search for Informations and make yourself aware of those topics. You can support workers and strikes. You could limit yourself on what stuff you are comsuming.
You don’t have to boycott every major company and every Product. You just could make a list about everything you really need and what you are really looking forward to. So you can balance your need for morality and fun.
I really appreciate this response. It balances the want to do good and make ethical choices with the reality that I can’t do everything perfectly. It’s important to do the best we can and also leave room to enjoy ourselves :)
I was playing red dead 2 a few weeks ago and picked it up with my steam deck. Now I’m playing uncharted 4 and realizing how rockstar and naughtydog built very similar games between the two. Rockstar is far more slow and frankly full of themselves. Not respecting the players time. Meandering through the story with no real semblance of player respect. I put 26 hours into red dead 2 and I feel like I’ve literally done nothing and feel very under accomplished. I’ve put 8 hours into uncharted 4 and feel extremely accomplished and invested in the characters.
Even though I’m pissed at Nathan. He’s such an idiot, I hate him and can’t wait to play him more. Author Morgan is just a bland cowboy that tries so much to just get by. Red dead 2 introduced more main characters than uncharted 4 has in side and main characters. Yet in red dead 2 they’ve developed none of them part the point of the basics. I’m uncharted they’ve developed all of their characters. Even the side ones that barely show up.
Likewise in red dead 2, they kill one character I only liked because their accent allowed me to actually tell them apart from the rest of them. The other character the big baddies kidnapped and I’ve played like 2 hours waiting to go get him back. It’s like wtf, let me go rescue the damn character already. Yet the game keeps saying we’ll do it as far as possible. We gotta track down all this shit. It’s clearly like this filler content because during it another random main character gets kidnapped, they find her right away and it’s rescued in one mission. Like what universe is this?
In conclusion, red dead 2 is trying hard to do what uncharted 4 did extremely well. The open world system does not help it one bit and it’s turned me off of open world games altogether for a while.
Hmm I had the opposite feeling about Red Dead Redemption 2. I felt the slower pace was nice, and respected the player by not having a false urgency for most of it like so many other games do. I really enjoy slow burn movies and novels though, and I can understand they aren’t for everyone.
Love the Uncharted series. Naughty Dog makes some good shit. I also loved both Last of Us games, but they might be more on the slow side again.
I don’t feel like Uncharted ever had a false sense of urgency. A lot of the time I would go at my own pace. Where Rockstar specifically slows you down and prevents you from going as fast as you’d like. Uncharted does this but far less often and it is far less noticeable because Uncharted doesn’t have a sprint button. So I am not explicitly telling the game my intent and having the game directly ignore it. The game is giving me feedback directly of “this is the pace we are going”. Rather than “this is the pace I want to go.” and the game telling me “no.”
Sorry I didn’t mean that Uncharted has a false sense of urgency, those games are perfectly paced. I meant other open world games sometimes do. Oblivion and Skyrim are good examples, where the main quest seems to want you to rush through it since it sounds so urgent, but there is no need to.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne