I know everyone thinks I'm a brittle American, but I'm kind of sick of everyone blaming Americans for choices that are made by people who think poorly of Americans.
My point is your original comment said you were sick of people blaming Americans for something that is literally being done by Americans.
The bland media algorithm designed to maximize profits, the “MCU formula”, comes straight from the top. People who see media simply in terms of investment vehicles for thier quarterly shareholders reports are the ones who lay down this law, and those “people” are overwhelmingly American business interests.
I know what you meant. There is such a thing as self-hatred, or thinking you're the only exceptional member of a group. And there's also such a thing as don't trash the majority with the actions of a small minority, particularly a small minority that thinks they are better than the majority.
My point is that the reason this was dumbed down is that movie execs THINK Americans need that, not that Americans need that. Movie execs just think the average American is dumber than a movie exec.
@masterspace All right, so I was interested in the statistic so I looked it up and 20% of Americans are at Level 1 literacy or below according to Wikipedia... which means that actually a lower number than that is functionally illiterate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Being creepy by stalking my past conversations instead of arguing the point at hand, and ironically furthering my point by mistakenly using a study on Canada from 1989.
Stalking your past convos? No. I saw you were from lemmy.ca and therefore Canadian. Then I did a search for the 20 percent statistic and of course Wikipedia came up.
I don't feel bad. I know our school system sucks because of a lot of systemic problems. I do think your education is not as great as you think it is if you simplify the 20% statistic to full illiteracy and if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
That's before we unpack the idea that literacy=intelligence, which is not always the case.
I do feel a bit bad about the stalking accusation. I didn't realize the ability to see your server in the automatic kbin reply setup combined with the esoteric knowledge of how to use Duck Duck Go would frighten you, Mr Better Educated Than Me. We can stop if this is too much for your heart. This weather can be tough on the body and I know you guys aren't well-versed in heat safety.
if you think a random person on kbin needs to set up a new public school system before she can have an opinion.
You’re allowed to have an opinion, if your opinion is that you feel like America is picked on for being too dumb in this context then I would suggest that you need some strong evidence to persuade people that literacy is not a proxy for education, or more specifically, the ability to hold more complicated medieval fantasy plots together.
And I am well aware of our flaws, our literacy rate is 1.25x the OECD average which is shameful. I’m just not false equivalencing that with America’s 6.33x. In fact if you remove America as the outlier dragging the OECD stats down we look even worse.
@masterspace And there we get to why I'm such a brittle American. See, the immense privilege of the powerful in our country, our military prowess, and the export of the my of American exceptionalism have CONVINCED a lot of people across the world that if they bash Americans it is punching up.
It's not. See, we do HAVE a bad public school system and the richest in our country have spent 40 years sabotaging it in some scheme to fund private schooling. Not only that, school funding is partly by federal and state funding--which is sabotaged by those bastards--but MOSTLY by local taxes so the people in the rich areas get the good schooling with arts, extracurricular activities, foreign language studies and a pool while the people in the poor areas get a whiteboard, an untrained Army veteran as a teacher, and the requirement to buy their own school supplies.
As Americans we have to fight constantly against this sabotage, WHILE working full-time jobs with greater hours and fewer benefits than any other Western country just so we can afford to go to a doctor--as we are called by not just the privileged in our country but the entire WORLD lazy, stupid, complacent and undeserving.
So when you make fun of the average American and call them stupid because their public school system which they need to fix before they complain about people making fun of them? You're punching down.
Meanwhile, you accuse me of punching down but I have spent this thread mocking you for living in a country with a vast abundance of natural resources and wildlife, and living in a country where it's common to ACTUALLY learn a second language rather than learn some grammar rules and tick off boxes, which as I say above, is a privilege in the US afforded to the better schooling that you get by virtue of living in a rich area.
Now, if you'd say Americans are stupid because we invaded the wrong country... Well, then you'd be punching up. But instead you're making fun of something that we are actually at a disadvantage in.
Except that I didn’t make fun of anything, I merely pointed out that it’s plausible that Netflix felt like they had to dumb the Witcher down for American audiences.
As Americans we have to fight constantly against this sabotage, WHILE working full-time jobs with greater hours and fewer benefits than any other Western country just so we can afford to go to a doctor–as we are called by not just the privileged in our country but the entire WORLD lazy, stupid, complacent and undeserving.
And yeah, I recognize that sucks, but you don’t have to do that because of external forces, you have to do that because many people in the group called “Americans” repeatedly vote for politicians who put those systems in place. So when people call Americans stupid, there’s a reason for it. Many are stupid and vote for stupid shit that goes directly against their interest. I’m sorry if you don’t like to hear that or be associated with your fellow countrypeople who do, but it’s the reality of the situation when we’re talking about “Americans” as a whole.
You weren’t just making fun, you were saying you’re sick of us being bothered when people made fun of us.
Except that the context in which I was replying was not one where someone felt picked on because they got made fun of, it was one where someone felt picked on because someone said that it’s plausible they dumbed down the Witcher for Americans.
@masterspace Yeah, but YOU are the one who brought public school into it and you did it in a clever little jokey way.
If you had said "Well, that's what you get for attacking the wrong country", it would be one thing. But you went and made fun of the public school system. You punched down. And now, for your sins, you are stuck in this conversation.
Yeah, but YOU are the one who brought public school into it and you did it in a clever little jokey way.
Because the quality of education affects intelligence, or more specifically, the ability to hold more/less complex witcher plotlines together in your head, so it is a rationale thing to bring up when discussing whether or not Americans are actually capable of holding more/less complex witcher plotlines together in their heads.
You punched down
No, I merely held up a mirror and caused you to have a temper tantrum
I'd hate to see how you'd react to an actual temper tantrum.
No, man. You're mocking people who don't have access to a high standard of learning. You're trying to rationalize that away so that you don't have to feel bad about it.
They should pause when showing item description and after the end credits, they should link to youtubers explaining what happened actually in the anime.
Conversely, lack of proper management is also an issue on a lot of videogames projects. Probably has never happened at Ubisoft but I’ve seen it firsthand in small studios
EA lost its reputation but objectively they’ve been trying to undo that. Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, while stuttery, had no micro transactions or online requirements, Dead Space remake was as simple as possible, Dragon Age ditched live service plan and was released in a very polished state, NFS Unbound just got a new update and has been well supported. The games may not be 10/10 or exactly what gamers wanted, but they’ve been trying to put their head down and do the work.
I agree with the other user who said it’s a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it’s done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It’s a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.
I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are “timed” quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.
And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well… They die.
Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about “solving” urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I’ve never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it’s food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).
I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it’s game over. Quite frankly… timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I’m not sure if it’s a beloved mechanic.
Which in turn results in, “I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!” And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.
“Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional,” Hulst continued, “but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options [and] after much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.”
But why? Did they actually think it was going to cost more money to keep the servers running than it would bring in? What’s the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?
Matchmaking took upwards of 10 minutes. Maybe they could capture a core audience but all that waiting would alienate even more people. Increasing the wait time even more. They could have invested more money and re-release it, but how much money would it take to overhaul the game. And there is no guarantee, that a 2.0 would be played more. So giving it up is probably the best solution, not burning even more money. Keep in mind, it costed about 400 million $ to make.
These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you’re financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.
People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn’t be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.
That’s kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It’s just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don’t lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.
Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.
How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don’t exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there’s a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.
If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won’t make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn’t carry a cost to the company.
If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they’re not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can’t happen if it doesn’t exist though.
Oh shit, I’m sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.
I was keeping in mind that they put that much money in, surely all that money has made something playable that would make some money, whereas throwing it all away makes nothing at all, right?
Headline is misleading. There is no canon timeline and never has been, regardless of what officially-licensed book it was published in.
The game designers have said many times that they don’t take any sort of timeline into account when designing a new Zelda game. They nail down the mechanics, and the story comes next, and if it happens to match up thematically in relation to another game, that’s just a bonus.
I mean that’s one way to look at it I suppose. However I don’t think the story being secondary to gameplay means we have to discount what is there available to us. Like if you want to ignore it that’s fine but I don’t think you can say it’s wholesale not canon.
Edit: also want to say I am not taking this link as gospel, but just showing how the words can be interpreted many ways.
Also the newest timeline is on display at the official Nintendo live event in Sydney, which I would argue is more legit than a licensed book
Regardless it’s not really that important, so if people like the timeline, who cares? Nintendo clearly acknowledges it, and the devs don’t use it when making new games. Both can be true
Nah, I saw that piece of shit in theaters and still wish I would have walked out. I know what he was going for, but like every other roth movie I’ve seen (doubly for anything he’s written), it’s just not well done outside of the cinematography. And frankly, well shot porno and gore scenes don’t make for a compelling movie on their own.
Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.
Very reasonable, I hope the dev sticks to his guns and keeps a manageable pace. I feel that it’s right to expect content updates coming in if the game is marked early access, but so long as you don’t pull a Valheim, people shouldn’t be mad at you
I think it’s going to be like 7 Days to Die and just never be completed. I’m hoping they’ll eventually do one big announcement or final release that will get my friends to log back in
Nothing that bad, but the updates are insanely slow and the roadmap of things they promised in 2021 took 3-4 years instead of one. At this rate the game could spend a decade in early access.
I had a lot of good times and even more bad times with DotA over the years, until I finally freed myself from it years ago.
IceFrog being behind this backed by Valve bodes well, and I think the premise of an FPS/MOBA hybrid has promise, despite the market being insanely oversaturated already.
I’m not really interested in competitive games these days, but I hope it’ll be good to watch at least. Following The International was fun even after I quit DotA.
Was gonna say. How is the hero shooter market over-saturated? There’s like 3 games that people actually know about, and like 2 of those are good/decent.
I could be mistaken, as I don’t really play competitive games anymore. I thought between Overwatch, Valorant, Apex, The Finals and what have you there was lots of stiff competition.
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