it’s a complex issue, and it will probably end up dirty, since it’s business in the end.
I could understand why people would avoid buying Hogwarts Legacy, because how much the IP is tied to transphobic JK Rowling. But the devs on the other hand, they mostly don’t get the say on which IP to work on. I personally avoid games like that, because the same person has enough followers to keep spouting hate which could and have translated to real world bigotry and violence. And the game serves as marketing for people to follow JK Rowling.
Then there are companies with sexual harassments incidents. In that case, spreading the words and making enough noise so that some legal investigations or actions are taken, should be the way. Then there’s crunch and overwork issues, helping them to spread the word about union, not to cross the picket lines, etc.
There are many of those issues, because we didn’t address them earlier in the past few decades. But shedding the light on them and you feeling frustrated are good things, it means that we’re progressing, we’re identifying, feeling guilty, and trying to address them.
I’d say, be more conscious when purchasing games, maybe if you really really want to play Baldur’s Gate 3, then only buy it when there’s a steep discount? Nowadays I play a lot more indies and retro games, and probably would only buy a full price games once or twice a year. There’s large number of other good games out there, don’t be pressured to be FOMO, wait until there’s steep discount. And after waiting for awhile, sometimes you realize that you could just ignore the problematic game altogether.
Thank you for your response. I also think it’s good that people are becoming more aware of these issues and doing what they can to address them.
I also think your point about FOMO is a good one; it becomes much less frustrating when I look at my backlog of games I’ve already purchased and have thousands of hours left to play. There will always be new games, and they won’t always be made by people that make me feel uncomfortable.
As others have stated, you make a good point about indie game devs. Jonathan Blow is one that my partner brings up regularly. I didn’t know about Ion Fury or Kovarex but that’s disappointing. It’s hard to keep track of it all, but when I find out about things like this, I’ll do my best to consider it when making future purchases.
It is also helpful to know that if you make any mistakes in you character build, you can respec your class and ability scores very early in the game for a fairly low price. The things that you cannot change are your origin, race or appearance, but these don't have such a great impact (unless you take the Dark Urge origin and find a bit too bloody for your tastes - in which case you have to start over)
Personally, I never played DND but I did play a bunch of RPGs before (such as the Pathfinder games on PC) and I love checking out character build guides. The learning curve of BG3 was pretty smooth for me.
I feel like someone generally familiar with RPGs will be fine with the basic mechanics of BG3. It’s my first exposure to the 5e rules - bonus moves, reactions, feats, etc - but they mostly make sense. I may not have combat as optimized as someone with tons of practice, but it works most of the time.
Long term character building, though? When I was presented with class specializations at L3, with nothing to tell me about what they get at L4, 5, 6…those choices seemed completely arbitrary. Being able to respec on the cheap if you feel like you’ve made a mistake is nice reassurance.
OTOH, making choices of specialization and feats without a long term plan, but entirely on the immediate circumstances and whim, feels a lot more like how I planned my IRL degree, job, home… So, immersion?
As somebody with no knowledge of 5e but some knowledge of 3.5e, it’s been pretty user-friendly. The game goes out of its way to make mechanics pretty easy to grasp. Tooltips can be brought up to and you can go further with any highlighted words in the spell/ability tooltip, so you can look up what “Prone” is when you’re look at the “Trip Attack” tooltip, as an example.
The only knock I have so far is that it doesn’t outline class progression at all, especially since the game apparently does deviate from tabletop rules at times, but that’s more of a QoL thing than anything else.
When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.
The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.
Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.
All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it
I once heard "when you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes", and that really helped me internalize how unlikely it is to expect occasional boycott to beat executives investing millions in marketing to lure entire audiences of well-off customers might not even be informed of the issues going behind the scenes. You can boycott for your moral satisfaction, but to enact actual change, it isn't enough.
I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.
I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.
I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.
I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.
He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care.
The development team got paid regardless of how well the game sold, and unless the company operates a system of employee profit-sharing, they’re not going to see any of the benefits of the game doing well. So the “buy it to support the devs” argument doesn’t really hold any weight, save in the hypothetical scenario that they’ll get a payrise for working on the studio’s next title.
That’s a good point, I never really considered that. The argument does hold some weight for the live-service model, but to my knowledge that’s not really how that game operates.
But there’s plenty of support besides financial too. I’d agree that as a developer I do care most about being paid for my work, especially if I’m going to work on a AAA game. But for my own projects, I mostly care that people play my games and enjoy them, even if that means piracy or streaming.
I dunno, sometimes “supporting the devs” these days just means not sending them death threats. But I also think that if we look at financial support as the only way to support a game then we risk dehumanizing the people who work on our toys.
I’ve tried the original Life Is Strange twice, and both times I >!failed to save Kate!< because I don’t have an infallible memory and quit out of anger.
Admittedly, it’s not ideal for inline spoilers, but if you really want to hide for the benefit of others, that’s they way you’re supposed to do it on Lemmy, I guess.
Looks like sync doesn’t implement lemmy spoilers correctly, and still uses reddit spoilers. But the lemmy web-ui doesn’t honour those spoilers and does them the way I showed in my comment. That’s unfortunate, because people using Sync won’t be able to effectively hide spoilers, and will potentially be spoiled on things when Lemmy users use spoilers the way the web-ui tells them to in the editor.
Dave the diver. This is such a fun game, it’s hard to explain. Simple concept dive for fish and run a sushi joint. Somehow it’s managed to become all games in one and every angle of play is well thought out. The diving part is part shooter/adventure/exploration/rpg. The Sushi joint aspect is collector/rts/management simulator. The animations are top notch as well. I can’t recommend it enough.
Oh yeah To the Moon is an absolute masterpiece. I’ve had the sequel in my steam backlog for ages. Should really replay TTM and then finally get around to playing the sequel…
its def not stupid, legit sources are super inconvenient, like i forget account passwords all the time, and steam makes sharing yr games for multiplayer really hard. way easier to just go download a cracked copy
Destiny did this. I have no idea why people love that game, btw. The guns and the environment are well designed, and the story (if you call it that) teases of science fiction. But that’s all the positives about it.
The secrets are so bad that you need to follow a Youtube guide and would probably never discover them in a lifetime. The raids are a huge chore of completely arbitrary series of mechanics that are never explained. You grind for weapons and they get nerfed. You keep doing the same missions again and again and again. Your trophies that you firmed for in year can just go away without notice. The damned thing does not even run on Linux. The list of ways it is unfun goes on.
mateusz has some on his website that you can buy for $25 in the form of the “complete collection.” He is also currently working on “submachine legacy” which combines all games into one and will be released on steam and I’m assuming will be paid.
If you're looking for the Quake brand of arena shooters, I feel like you're getting a lot of those these days. If you're looking for the era just after that, which Halo would fall in, I'm also looking for that type of game, so the nostalgia that fuels indie game design is probably only a few years away from delivering us that sort of game again. Maybe that new TimeSplitters or Perfect Dark game will be good.
There's been a huge resurgence of boomer shooters and arena shooters in the last 5 or so years. Off the top of my head I can think of Dusk, Ultrakill, Gunfire Reborn, Nightmare Reaper, Roboquest, Warhammer Boltgun, and new Doom (2016/Eternal), all of which get at least an 8/10 from me. There are many more of various quality.
Ah, yeah, PvP shooters. Gotcha. Those aren't really my domain, unfortunately, I don't have a ton of recommendations there. Overwatch was pretty good for a while, but wasn't really an arena shooter, and now can't be recommended.
Anybody else remember the game Sauerbraten? Or was that all just a fever dream I was having round 2012?
I would also like some class based hero shooters that aren’t Blizzard or Paladins TBH. I enjoy being the healer/support more than getting kills (though shooting stuff is also fun) and Valorant or Apex don’t quite scratch that itch
you can actually still find like 4-5 people playing sauer at most times lol, but its only insta ctf. still a great time to load into every now and then if there are enough people on of course
Since you haven’t mentioned Ion Fury, I’m going to add it to that list. Not interesting for PC since they wanted PvP but it’s a great Build engine shooter.
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