In the sense that you’re going to overpay for editions and minis that they’re constantly updating to squeeze more money out of you while having a genuinely good but expensive paint catalogue ruined by paint pots designed to waste paint, yes.
In the sense that it’s pure entertainment and no one and nothing is making you buy them despite all that, no.
Now, if we want to talk about how they’re essentially monetizing fascist rhetoric and the “satire” died decades ago that’s a whole new ballgame.
In 40k, everyone is fascist. The Imperium worships a corpse who is gonna wake up from life support and save humanity any day now guys. Their creed is “suffer not the xenos, mutant, nor heretic to live”.
Their main enemies are Chaos: nightmare demons and cultists worshipping evil gods spawned from the Imperium’s own fascism.
The biggest threats on the horizon are the Tyranids, a ravenous swarm of bugs who want to eat the galaxy, and Necrons, a feudal empire who sold their souls for immortality while destroying the galaxy.
There are also the Drukhari, murder rape pirates who had such a big cocaine orgy they tore a hole in the galaxy, and Orks, fungal football hooligans whose only purpose in life is to get into a good fight.
The only “good guys” are the Eldar of the Craftworlds, who are arrogant communists with a birth rate issue, and the Tau: a Marxist-Leninist Federation of Planets who are secretly all being mind controlled.
The setting is supposed to be a satire of fascist ideology, but at some point Games Workshop started believing the pro-Imperium propaganda they spend all day writing.
Some of that I already knew, but why do you say games workshop is believing their own propaganda? Aren’t they just telling a story and creating a universe? What are they, the company, doing that is fascist?
That’s a lot more effort to explain than I’m willing to do for a Lemmy post but basically they’ve not only confirmed the Big Magic Strong Man does at least try to work in humanity’s favor and was right about most everything, but there’s a lot of “the Imperium might be fucked but it’s the only hope” going on in general.
All of the Imperium’s propaganda is justified, all their little fascist warrior cults are all that stands between life and Chaos, the Inquisitor Puritans are right because the Radicals always go Chaos etc etc etc.
I thought some of that was them trying to wash away the original fascist roots of OG 40K. Haven’t they been trying to slowly retool and rebrand the imperium more as the “good guys” so they can sell more merch?
Original 40k was Rogue Trader, written largely by British anarchists, and the actual motivations of the Heresy Era figures like the Primarchs and Emperor were left vague, so you could figure out for yourself they were genocidal megalomaniacs.
Rebranding the outright fascists as the unironic good guys is exactly why it’s now fascist propaganda.
They used to give out their IP to shitty mobile games for pennies. Then they went after actual creators who made something amazing and gated them behind a subscription service.
"Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is described as a “virtual exhibition” of the new hardware. Per Nintendo: “through tech demos, minigames and other interactions, players will get to know the new system inside and out in ways they may never have known about otherwise.”
So its basically just something that goes on about how great and wonderful switch is? And they want you to pay for it? This is so stupid I’m not sure if its even anti consumer anymore but somehow managed to go beyond to new and exiting levels of awfulness.
Not sure how an animated series would work with Soma (the OG game has a clear beginning, middle and end), but I will agree with the subject of the article that Soma is a top 5 / top 10 best game of all time type experience.
You mean the live action web series? Yea I don’t understand how that series had better visuals than many blockbuster scifi movies rofl. It was extremely well done.
I have a confession to make, in the early parts of the game (before things got all psychedelic) I was almost a little bit disappointed due to my expectations from the web series, just a bit, the intro is also great.
There was something really unnerving about the web series. Even though there was nothing explicitly, it created a sense of dread, like something really wrong was going to happen.
Yea. It was really well done. I think it could totally be a TV show or a game. Idk if you feel this way but literally no game or movie or anything has ever made me feel as fucked up (in a good way) as SOMA did the first time I played it. I mean horror, philosophy, anger, sadness, denial. It had it all. I even made the same mistake that Simon makes where I totally didn’t want to believe that he would never really make it to the Ark (because copy paste, not cut paste.) It was just so good. Omg also the part where the guy is talking about killing yourself right after getting the scan…to obtain “continuity.” Absolutely crazy, even if the theory doesn’t make sense lol. I can see how in a moment of desperation that it could make sense to you.
I am right with you, Soma is easily a top 10 if not a top 5 gaming experience for me. And my top also includes games that I enjoy from a pure gameplay perspective (e.g. SimCity 4) which IMO aren’t comparable to Soma.
It was really well done, in the late game once I started figuring out what was going on I was like " Oh no, no, no! This can’t be happening!". A real sense of existential dread.
The ending was great too, a measure of positivity and hope, but very very far from a happy ending. A depressing ending with a possible ray of hope, depending on how one looks at it.
I just wish more people who aren’t into video games could experience Soma.
And the cool thing is that what Soma delivers cannot be done through a different medium. It has to be a video game, a book or even a movie wouldn’t really work in the same way. You have to be in control of your character.
Idk how much you dove into the lore, but have you ever read about the Carthage theory? There were some hints that Cathage Industries (who owned Pathos 2) were still around (they had other underwater facilities) and responsible for creating Simon and were monitoring the situation, sort of like Resident Evil Umbrella Corp style. Personally I’m not a huge fan of that theory as it takes away from the mood of the game, but it’s interesting and has a lot of merit.
Lemme know your thoughts. I see how it has merit and is possible but yeah, it totally kills the vibe. Maybe it was something the devs put in but ultimately abandoned, but kinda didn’t scrub it all out prior to release.
There’s audio logs in theta of someone trying to reach carthage for instructions. It’s obvious. What’s unclear is if she’s doing it out psychosis or actually knows they’re still around.
Unless they switch to one of the current Gen engines available, they will keep using the one they have, they just updated it’s now the creation engine 2… and that was for starfield and ES6. And it seemed like the same engine for starfield.
Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.
I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.
Gotcha. Yeah, I’d expect minimum mod support for this one, but if the next Bethesda game switches to Unreal along with this one, I’d expect normal support for modding that they usually provide.
yea, we moved Stephen Spielberg and some other senior leaders to different rolls. He just seems he’s a better fit for the “Cliffhanger” project. We just don’t envision that Amblan Entertainment needs our full attention now and they have all our confidence going forward with their “Schindler” property.
EDIT: I forgot: what’s the difference? Unions probably.
Now that I think about it, this idea was probably a good one for standard release, not live service. People get enticed by IP rights even if they don’t necessarily devote hundreds of hours to a game like this.
It works for things like Injustice. They see a Batman/Superman fighting game even if they aren’t going to hit Gold rank in competitive. Even if they only hit 10 hours, they paid the entry price.
it doesn’t matter what these corporations ‘think’, anything they remake or whatever the hot term is, they will turn it into some trash with a store. That’s NOT why people are seeking games from an era where this cancer didn’t exist.
Companies get pissy because fans are having fun and not paying again or constantly via subscriptions
Company ‘remakes’ game to justify IP, does piss poor job, changes things that never needed to be changed and adds in-game store or subscription model because ‘new market conditions’ and ‘inset other buzz words’
Gamers detest all changes and move onto the next old school gem.
But that’s not the cycle chronicled in this article. These are old games released onto subscription services in their original versions, more or less, give or take some resolution.
This guy "As a black man"ed the whole disabled gaming community what the fuck.
He lives up to his name, Craven, for deleting all his social media in response to this.
Anyone who gave this guy a fucking dime needs to sue the living shit out of him for fraudulently misrepresenting himself as getting money to these disabled women that never fucking existed and this fucking chode just pocketed all the fucking money.
What a giant piece of shit. I hope someone knocks him the fuck out and people just leave him out cold in the street because fuck him.
I also enjoyed watching Mr. Bercow’s antics. It is also interesting to note that he was found guilty in 2022 of quite serious bullying charges against House of Commons staff. It is unfortunate that he did not reserve his acid, if entertaining, tongue for deserving politicians alone, but rather used his sharp wit to belittle staff as well. Not cool.
You hear that PCMR? They’re not coming to us because it’s the obvious and right things to do. They’re using us as a fallback! Do you wanna be the side piece? Buy games from real developers who aren’t licking publisher boots!
So, uhhh… Buy Stardew Valley like 4 more times I guess.
I haven’t played in years. Hopped on again when they brought wow classic in just to try it bcz I started around the time of the cataclysm expansion. But once they banned that Hong Kong player from a tournament back in 2019 over the protest crap, I haven’t been back.
I can’t believe the game is still going. The expansions just got worse as time went on. How they’re still churning out content people want to play is beyond me.
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