Do you just want to saturate your upload bandwidth for poops and giggles? Then consider just being That Guy who is constantly in one of the live channels on a community discord streaming everything to like 0.1 people per day.
Do you want to make a hustle out of this? Then your only real options are youtube or twitch and… discoverability is near zero for both of those. Even if you are one of the biggest streamers on the planet, convincing people to try a new platform is nigh impossible. Let alone for someone just starting out.
As a hustle, you should stream on Kick(10x the payout of Twitch) and then edit the vods into algorithm clips for YouTube and tiktok that would funnel to the Kick. You could multistream everywhere for maximum exposure, but that can get troublesome depending on how active chat is because you need to keep up and Twitch doesn’t allow you to display other chats on screen.
These days it is really hard to get going in streaming and youtube, so you really just need to cast a wide net and really work on refining your content. It takes years to get a decent second income, unless a big streamer reacts to you and then you have to try and keep the new subs without turning away the OGs.
Twitch doesn’t allow you to display other chats on screen
I’ve always wondered, couldn’t you work around this by having a feed with only the twitch chat for Twitch, and a feed with all the chats for every other platform?
I think you can comfortably encode 2 streams on basically any modern-ish card no?
I’m no expert on the higher capabilities of multistream plugins and whatnot. I don’t think you could include twitch chat with the others if you are doing that sort of thing unless filtering chats to a given platform is an option with one instance. All the same, if you are handling the multistream locally you would want to do a dual PC setup if you are a game streamer. A lot of multistreamers use a relay service to reduce processing power while gaming.
You can multistream everything to everywhere with combined chat, but you have to sanitize the chat so it isn’t apparent that other platforms are combined or which chat is which if they are displayed separately.
This isn’t unique to Rockstar. If the email you created an account with is dead, you’re screwed no matter who it is. I had this problem with Dropbox once. Luckily the email in question still existed, I just didn’t know it. However since it was on a friend’s server he was able to hook me back up.
While their process is often lengthy, EA reps will go really far to help you prove you own an account to recover it and change the login info, over the phone at least. I’ve had to work with them recovering accounts several times because I never learn from a mistake the first time.
If nothing else you’re putting them on blast with the government, and that contributes to the paper trail for eventual action. In the meantime it might get your complaint resolved. Did you try tweeting at their official account too? Sometimes that can help get things moving.
Thank you! I didn’t think an ombudsman would be at all helpful against a game company, I should reconsider aha. No Twitter account but that’s good advice!
But they are also required to make sure noone else gets access to the account, and so it's OPs job to prove ownership of the account - which he can't, or else the situation would have been resolved after Rockstar supports questions.
You’re right, this is more of an issue with your purchase not being complete. I think your legal remedies would either be through your card provider (probably too late) or civil action directly to Rockstar.
How much are you willing to dig for it? I’m playing through hollow knight atm and have been shocked at the emotional depth that hides in the margins of the world. If you plow through the game and only touch the required content then all you get is the overall somber vibe. But if you turn every stone, talk to every npc, complete every side quest, you might be surprised at how much love and loss and joy and pain there is in the story.
Overall it is about picking through the ruins of a dead kingdom. You can engage with that as much or as little as you want. IMO they do an outstanding job of rewarding you for the effort.
Japanese developers tend to excel at this because Eastern culture/media is much more willing to acknowledge emotion and moral ambiguity. The West likes misty eyed men whereas East Asians are all about that former boyband member sobbing. And The West only allows a Bruce Willies level character to beat on an abuser. It’s why Hank Hill humorously kicking Jimmy in the ass after… almost getting Bobby run over by a dozen Nascar Cars sticks with us. Or Dan Conner making sure his sister-in-law is okay before wordlessly grabbing his jacket to beat her abuser half to death.
A couple days back Aftermath posted an excellent blog on Kamen Rider that kind of exemplifies it aftermath.site/kamen-rider-kuuga-tokusatsu. But the quick summary: There is a meme clip going around of a sentai character beating the ever loving hell out of a monster. And the context is that the hero of that series is a super happy man who loves children who was faced with a villain who murders children in a way that maximizes suffering for everyone around them. So he just completely snaps and crosses every imaginable line while unleashing all of his powers with no wind up or ceremony. And, most importantly, there is no moral hand wringing about how “Yes, he deserved it but what is this doing to you?”. Mother fucker was unquestionably evil and got what was coming to him. And while it does tie into the overall themes of Yusuke being worn down and broken by the weight of the suit, it also acknowledges that… somebody needs to be. Which is a theme common in the Gundams and so forth.
Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.
As for games that pull this off? I’ll contribute Dust: An Elysian Tale. Most of it is happy go lucky as the amnesiac protagonist and his cute and cuddly and obnoxious companion fight against the evil military with some good laughs. But it also touches on the theme of “you can do everything right and still people get hurt” which works REALLY well in the video game space where you are conditioned to believe the golden ending will always be happy and perfect.
I will never understand people that are against obliterating the absolute most vile people… Against the death penalty? Sure, that’s about not empowering an imperfect (and sometimes outright corrupt) system. Though not blowing away unquestionably evil shitstains?!
Contrast that with The West where The Hero is contractually required (formerly legally required…) to stop short and insist that killing the man who slaughtered dozens of children would make him no better… before being given an out when said monster grabs a gun out of nowhere.
As opposed to eastern culture/media, where the average shonen protagonist will punch the villain enough to convince them to join the good team? Like, you are oversimplifying so much, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m also a bit confused by your point because you lament western characters only beating evil guys to a pulp, then contrast them to an eastern character doing the same.
If your point is that characters in western media don’t display emotions, there are tons of western movies that do exactly that. You won’t find them in generic action movies, but that’s true for pretty much any media around the globe, including eastern ones.
Rambo (the first one, the only good one) has Stallone crying his heart out at the end of the movie. Stand by me has the characters face their insecurities and inner demons throughout the entire movie. Lord of the Rings, Interstellar, Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, Silence (western movie based on Japanese book, maybe this is cheating?). Automata’s entire point is to challenge toxic masculinity.
I could also mention animated films such as How to train your dragon, Tarzan, Puss in Boots Last Wish, Wall-E, Treasure Planet, Finding Nemo, Wild Robot or Emperor’s new Groove, which all have either human male individuals, or male-coded characters that happen to be animals/robots/aliens (IF your point was that male characters are often too macho and emotionless; if you were complaining about characters of any gender doing it, then the list expands).
If your point is that there’s no moral ambiguity in western media, half the above examples still stand. Rambo beat countless (evil) cops, but he’s not seen as a hero for doing so, and he’s a broken man by the end of the movie. Lord of the Rings is choke full of morally ambiguous or conflicted characters, although the most prominent and a fan favourite is Boromir of Gondor. Interstellar has the main character abandon his family to save humanity, and the movie doesn’t explicitly condemn nor praise him for his actions. Saving Private Ryan has the characters conflicted on what to do with a captured german soldier within enemy territory, and the consequences of their choice. There’s the entirety of the Goodfather series following an explicitly evil, but charismatic set of characters.
As for videogames, moral ambiguity was the entire point of TLOU2, although many people disliked that one for various reasons. Styx 1 (haven’t played the second one yet) has you play a character which does good for the wrong reasons, and bad for the good ones. Life is Strange 1 and 2 (haven’t played the rest of the series yet) has lots of morally ambiguous characters, often including the main cast. A Plague Tale, especially the second one, weights on how violence can ruin a person, even if they are forced to commit it for their loved ones.
I’m just mentioning titles off the top of my head, and I’m probably forgetting a lot which could further my point. Point is, I wholeheartedly refuse this idea of eastern media being the only ones capable of displaying emotions or moral ambiguity.
I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
But you’ll also note that the example I brought to the table was Dust: An Elysian Tale. Which is an American (I thought Canadian but wikipedia suggests no) studio. And OP mentions The Walking Dead and Borderlands which are similarly Western. Nobody was implying exclusivity outside of you.
But let’s look at two of the more interesting examples you brought up.
The Last Of Us 2… kind of is emblematic of video games’ (West and East) problem with masculinity. TLOU1 has two particularly strong emotional beats and both involve a Man losing his daughter. TLOU2 is MUCH better in that it actually allowed people to be characters other than “Sad Dad” but it is incredibly telling how much of the game revolves around the second of the strong emotional beats from 1. Ellie is driven by her conflicted feelings over Joel taking away her agency to protect her and Abby is driven by… Joel taking away her entire family. And… I think it speaks a lot to Druckmann and Naughty Dog that the character who has the strongest parental narrative is the very masculine woman who angered the internet for obvious reasons. And that is kind of supported by the mess that is the Uncharted series as well.
As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta. Homie destroyed at least one entire planet (its cool, it was filler and he obviously never did that when he was rolling with Nappa), allowed Nappa to destroy an entire city, murdered Nappa, probably murdered a bunch of Namekians (too lazy to check), definitely murdered a lot more people when he went Majin, and is Goku’s best friend because Krillin is too busy tapping dat ass. Except… not really. Because if you actually go back to DB, the vast majority of The Z Fighters are kind of just rivals that Goku respected and occasionally teamed up with. Outside of Krillin and MAYBE Yamcha, they weren’t his friends. And that is where Vegeta was too up until he went Majin. It was only after that when he acknowledged that he cared about something more than power (Bulma and Trunks) and that, even after his eyes were opened by Frieza, he was a monster. And while Super brushes over a lot of that because it is meant to be a direct sequel to DB, that characterization is still there.
Which is similarly something that a lot of people clown on Yakuza/LAD for. Yeah, Kiryu and Ichiban and even Yagami end up teaming up with a lot of people they beat on a few dozen times. But, by and large, it is not a 'you are my best friend" and more “I respect you and now understand why you did those evil things… but things aren’t over between us”. And then you have the inverse with Ryuji who is pretty unrepentantly “evil” to the end… but it is also impossible to view him and Kiryu as anything other than friends as they fight to the death because that is the only way they know how to communicate.
Slip of the tongue. I likewise reject the idea of eastern writers being “usually” better at writing emotions and/or moral ambiguity, or doing it more frequently. There are countless good and bad stories on both sides.
I felt it went without saying that this was referring to mainstream media because… video games. With an emphasis on action because… video games.
Most of the examples I mentioned were mainstream movies and videogames that sold millions of tickets/copies. Or at least as much mainstream as Kamen Rider and Yakuza. There are tons of examples of well-written human drama.
I also fail to understand why action = video games. There are tons of successful games where action is not the main focus, or sometimes it’s not even present at all. I enjoyed the cozy vibes of Life is Strange, for example.
Which, to use one of your examples, let’s look at (ugh) Rambo. The first one IS a pretty interesting character study into a man with extreme PTSD who can’t stop fighting his war (which is plenty of tropes). Which is why it is so telling that once they shifted fully into the action side, almost all of that went away outside of cheap drama over the naive pseudo-daughter… getting sold into slavery and raped to death.
As for your critique of (generally shonen) anime? Let’s look at the ur example of Dragon Ball Z (also DB but it is less fun). Vegeta.
Brushing off the first Rambo movie because of subpar sequels, and then using Dragonball (a series that had nowhere to go after Frieza and yet still gets milked with subpar sequels to this day) as a talking point is just nonsensical.
Mentioning Vegeta as a good example of moral ambiguity is hilarious because he is probably one of the worst written characters of all time, who single-handedly ruins the characterization of the entirety of the main cast.
The dude committed genocide or attempted one at least once per narrative arc and everybody was okay with spending their time with him for literally no reason. If I had two bullets and was standing in a room with Vegeta and Hitler, the safest option for Earth as a whole would be to shoot Vegeta twice. There is “respecting” another person, and there is “brushing off crimes against humanity because that character is cool”.
By the way, I don’t want to imply that eastern (Japanese? I don’t think you mentioned other media outside of Japan) writers are worse than western ones. I loved the first Yakuza game (the second one was very dumb and killed my interest in the series; maybe I’m missing out). Metal Gear Solid and Xenogears are, to this day, two of my favourite games ever. I went to the cinema twice in a row to watch Godzilla Minus One. I could also mention Oldboy for something outside of Japan, or Red Cliff, and those are both very much mainstream as well, and action too.
The only real lesson here might be that both Western media as a whole, and the Eastern anime industry, have regressed a lot. Rambo in particular is marked by tragedy with the way sequels warped him into a false image of raw masculinity. Many anime authors have even said as much. But the Eastern gaming scene appears to still have some very dedicated auteurs.
It’s even sort of harmed the feminist movement for Western media to be so simple - often showing women as unemotional, infallible badasses to try to “equal the score”, ultimately just causing people to hate them and even misconstrue women as being the issue with those movies.
But I’m also glad to get more examples of poignant Western media; I felt upset that I could only think of Eastern examples, when I know there are some great ones made more locally.
I think you're just having a blind spot for western shows. Breaking Bad, The Expanse, Game of Thrones, Barry, Mad Men and probably a bunch of others that I can't remember off the top of my head where characters act like people with their own personal motivations and moral compasses. Without spoiling anything in one of the before/mentioned shows one of the main characters literally kills their close friend to protect the fact that they're a shitty human being.
There are also western games that nail the moral gray area. For example New Vegas and Baldurs Gate 3.
… I would genuinely love to know what the Barry of video games is. Maybe Spec Ops The Line but that never actually is anything BUT melodramatic and dark which wasn’t the prompt. The Expanse might be a better fit but that was generally a book/show about plot progression over character studies outside of (minimizing spoilers) Everything Around Rescuing Peaches. Which, again, was almost entirely melodrama.
That said, I do think Barry is a spectacular example of the kind of story that can make you laugh… maybe not cry but something approaching that. But if we are going into the kinds of stories that games will never touch then… I give you “literature”.
I’ll disagree with those CRPGs because there are so many gameplay mechanics tied to alignment that it largely undermines things. I would MAYBE suggest Tyranny as a better fit although that has many of the same problems. But I will fully agree that CRPGs are much more willing to explore nuance but, similarly, tend to focus much more on a single emotion. You tend to have an Eder style character who will crack a joke to ease the tension before giving a haunting line like “It’s a good thing you weren’t braver”, but there is a pretty hard shoeing out the clowns moment when it is time to get real.
That’s honestly exactly what’s kept me away from CRPGs. The premise often seems to be based around something like ruined worlds or corrupt empires (both, in Wasteland’s case), with little hope for massive change. The old poster child, Fallout, runs its whole train off of treating endless grim fighting as an absurd thing to not even care about, with its tagline “War never changes”. Fun sometimes, but never meaningful.
These are PC games (either co-op adventure or party games) than can be played locally and that I have enjoyed myself (in no particular order). Bold ones are my fav.
I’ve gotten easily $200 worth of value out of it, and if mine broke I’d buy another one. Sometimes niche things deserve the extra price. It’s more of a problem of the world draining everyone’s disposable income for niche things like these.
For me, it looks like a good game. But doesn’t look like Silent Hill. Because of this it comes off as a game that was made and had the SH name slapped on it for street cred. That never works well in any case I’ve seen. Usually ends up the worst rated in a series.
Genuinely curious, why does it not look like SH? Is it because of the japanese setting? Because other than that it looks heavily focused on proper psychological chaos. I think we’ve got to give developers some form of freedom if we want to see this series advance!
IMO, hit stop in the combat. Also, the camera perspective puts too much emphasis on combat.
At its core, the peak way to play Silent Hill was to engage in combat as little as possible. This makes sense both in lore and for the player of the game:
In the game lore, protagonists in Silent Hill are “Everymen.” Just an average person. Average people do not generally have combat experience or training, and thus an average person put into a Silent Hill scenario, will more likely want to run away than engage in combat with a weapon they are not familiar with. They may be so unaccustomed to combat with a weapon they may injure themselves or waste all the bullets or break the weapon due to lack of training in combat.
For the player, combat felt bad, and generally posed more risk than reward (trade potentially losing a lot of health in a fight just to not have to walk around the enemy) as in Silent Hill, killing enemies doesn’t reward the player with anything other than having one less enemy to avoid. They don’t drop health or items.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game. The 3rd game’s original plot apparently did give the protagonist a dark past, but Konami felt it would have been too much and thus changed the plot significantly. Some elements of the original plot still remain, but are reworked into the new, different plot in the game currently.
SH2 remake, and in fact Homecoming and Downpour fall victim to this overemphasis on combat, and it is primarily the fault of the over the shoulder camera. The combat feels good and fun, and thus it makes the player want to do it more. This resulted in more sales because the mainstream audience seems to only like playing one kind of game. Unfortunately, it also resulted in the IP losing its identity.
The story looks fine, but calling it a Silent Hill game when it gives no indication of connecting to the town of Silent Hill is concerning. Every Silent Hill game previously connected to the actual town in some way. If f doesn’t do this, then nothing separates it from being a generic horror game with the Silent Hill name slapped on top.
I’ll try to reply to points highlighted by the both of you, to try and play devil’s advocate for a bit:
I really don’t think the combat looks like anything we’ve seen from Resident Evil. Honestly, I don’t even know if there’s gonna be a gun in the game, judging from the trailers.
The main character clearly looks like an inept at handling weapons too, like the old games. We don’t really know how much damage we take or how easy the combat is, but it’s obvious they couldn’t come out in 2025 with a combat system as stiff, clunky and annoying as the one featured in the first trilogy. Many games in the last decade have shown that you can have a combat system that feels fluid but also have it so that you may want to not fight, for one reason or another (If I recall correctly, weapons do break in the game after a certain amount of use - that’s surely a deterrent from using them).
There’s a difficulty setting at the start of the game, so I’m sure you can just crank it up to hard if you want to have a though survival horror experience.
We have no way of knowing how they’ll connect the whole situation to the town of Silent Hill, that’s true. I’m honestly not disturbed by this as I never felt the physicalness of buildings and road to be the important factor. For all we know, Silent Hill is a catalyst that connects people living through particular distressing emotions to a horrorific underworld - who says it cannot happen in another part of the globe?
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Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game.
I… I don’t think this counts as a very strong argument if you read the sentence a couple of times. The 3rd entry is, in its actual form, beloved by many fans of the original trilogy.
I don’t know peeps, I understand the sentiment of wanting a good game but we should genuinely just wait and try out the game if we’re interested. They can’t simply make the same game over and over, because that’d be even worse. It’s like with music artists, you know? Bob Dylan was shunned by many for “going electric”, yet those albums are now considered absolute classics. I’m not trying to say Konami has the same artistic foresight of Dylan, but we should at least try to cut them some slack and hold our opinions until after the game has come out and we’ve been able to try it out :)
Respectfully, as a Silent Hill fan, I have been “cutting Konami some slack” for 20 years. And I have been getting burned for 20 years. So please excuse me for being cynical.
I didnt even mention The Short Message or Ascension because I didn’t feel like I even needed to bring either of them up, but just mentioning them now should be enough to illustrate my point in mentioning them at all.
Silent Hill f was the project I was most interested in from Konami when they announced it. I am not disinterested in the game, and I will likely still play it. However, I have a lot of major reservations because of my history with Konami. I didn’t appreciate the changes made to SH2 Remake, so while the mainstream audience at it up, I didn’t even finish the game. I will see how it goes, but the more I keep seeing about the game, I keep seeing some stuff I don’t like.
Everytime a hit lands on an enemy in the trailers, the game stops for a few frames. This better be removed or an effect that is only in the trailers. If that’s in the game and I can’t turn that off then I probably won’t keep playing it. That might seem nitpicky, but I play Silent Hill for a specific experience. I don’t play Silent Hill to get an experience I can get from Resident Evil or some other game. I am totally fine with Konami “making the same game repeatedly,” so long as story elements, levels, items, etc are different, I would be glad to have games in a series have identical gameplay between each entry. Metroid Prime 1 and 2, for example, or Half-Life and Opposing Force. Although the story, weapons, and visual assets are different, the core gameplay is identical. You are still getting the same gameplay experience in the sequel as your did in the original.
To each their own! I’m a long time fan of the original trilogy too, but I’d be very bored if they kept spinning around the same formulas. I do agree with the fact that SH2’s remake added unecessary things - but to be fair, I think the remake was just unnecessary overall, they could’ve simply spent their resources trying to reverse-engineer the original in order to bring it to modern hardware.
Have you tried to take a look at recent horror indie games? Titles such as Tormented Souls might scratch the particular itch, if Konami fails to deliver.
Silent Hill is more than just psychological chaos, most any modern horror game does that much. The Japanese setting doesn’t really help, it would make it harder to adapt to the IP, but it could have been done in a way that it wouldn’t have been an issue.
I’ll have to rewatch the trailer to give you more specific points, but it seems combat might be more prevalent than it should, veering more to the Resident Evil brand. The shifted world didn’t make much of an appearance in the trailer, but from the glimpses it seemed tame and not really all that horror-esque. It doesn’t even appear to be in or connected to the town of Silent Hill.
Being a bigger fan of the first two games than any of the rest, i see them as the standard, the fog and mist, not being able to see everything clearly so that odd shapes and shadows mess with you is also something I am missing in the new game.
It may be a great game. I just don’t see it as a SH game.
Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.
The modern “video game essay” format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and “it is dark so it is deep” level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.
And… basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.
Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master’s thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm… trigger warnings but
spoilerBloober at least used to really like the trope of “The only way to stop this great evil infecting you is to kill yourself and it with you” and “They were a victim of abuse and should be pitied even as they perpetuated the cycle”. That are both, fairly unarguably, shitty mindsets but are also horror tropes going back literally centuries
So it was the mix of “This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it” combined with “Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car”.
And then… Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.
But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also… Fatal Frame fucked hard?
Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.
Nah. Modern day gooners are all based on how Arsenal fans just can’t stop touching themselves. Like, if you ever go to a game there is an entire section dedicated towards group edging.
In all seriousness, I have no idea what the actual origins of “gooning==masturbation” is. But the word “goon” mostly just is a synonym for thug or henchman. So a lot of groups used it because they are the bogeymen and blah blah blah.
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