I’ve lately finished my first playthrough of Katana Zero. Wondering about whether I should leave well enough alone or try for another ending. I might not have time honestly.
Recycling my comment from the other day. I am close to finishing The Outer Worlds. The game has a somewhat mixed reception when it comes up in discussions online and I think it’s mostly because the developer Obsidian made New Vegas and Outer Worlds apparently is the worse game. So, I never played New Vegas and therefore can’t compare the two. I do enjoy my time with Outer Worlds very much!
it’s basically the same formula as Fallout 4 but in a humorous space setting with better gunplay. Or, alternatively Borderlands with a ton more talking and decisions and worse gunplay. In any case a lot of shooting and looting.
different builds are possible but not as significant different as in Borderlands. But since it’s not a massively big game it didn’t matter that much to me. After a couple of changes I kinda kept investing mostly in my handgun, my companions and personality skills to pass more skillchecks.
what I like: the stories the game tells! Be it the main quest line or quests for factions or your companions. All have a nice sense of humor to them without getting too silly. For example there is a dude in a wurst factory and you get sent there to end whatever he is doing there (hint: it’s more than producing wurst from spacepigs). And there are a number of ways you can approach this: guns blazing, trying to sabotage the factory or sneak in and just kill the guy.
also: great soundtrack and overall sound design! The jingle that plays when you level up is just great!
also: while not a massive big game there are a lot of different places to go and explore. From abandoned settlements in some sort of desert to a big city where only rich people live and everything in between.
meh: so many drinks, lotions and food items that give you different boosts. Problem is that there are so many different items it’s hard to keep track which one does what. I abandoned pretty much all of them and only kept Adreno (restores energy).
meh: fast travel can be annoying because most of the time you have to fast travel back to your ship and then from there select another planet/spacestation and then land your ship and then again fast travel to wherever you need to go to. So it’s potentially three (not very long, though) loading screens if you need to go someplace different.
decisions do matter in quests but the general direction of the story is set.
Played Outer Worlds earlier this year, and I agree with your assessment. I did play Fallout New Vegas later on, and while New Vegas felt bigger, I think I enjoyed Outer Worlds a bit more. Mainly I think the humor hit more consistently FOR ME in OW, and I really think the humor kind of makes the game. But of course humor is very subjective, so I understand why a lot of people prefer FNV (not to mention it has a certain built-in cachet from all the other Fallout games).
Anyway, I enjoyed it, I’m glad I played it through to the end, but I wouldn’t play it again (e.g. to try different playstyles or run through with different companions). Glad you are also enjoying it!
Ac Odyssey. Hopefully finish it soon. Been good but a bit of a long slog. How would I know which quest is just a standard fetch or which one is worth it.
AC Odyssey was the first one in the entire series I couldn't push myself to finish. I used to love just bumping around eliminating every single map icon, but Odyssey was way, way too big, and having my zen ruined by bounty hunters all the time was exhausting.
I heard Valhalla was even worse. It was the first one I skipped after playing each one since the original (even some of the 2D ones).
Yeah. I beat Odyssey completely. Absolutely loved it. I’m a huge fan or Norse mythology so I thought Valhalla would just totally captivate me but… I got bored! It was just too much. Started to feel incredibly repetitive.
You can just pay off your bounties instantly at any time from the map screen, and I've always had so much money in that game that I've never had to deal with a bounty hunter unless I wanted to, and I don't even sell any gear, I dismantle it all.
If you're a compulsionary completionist then the game is probably too big, but they make it as friendly as they can to not have to complete the world. Unique gear drops only seem to come from unique Cultist leaders or checking vendors, and there's no achievements for completing all map markers, it's just supplemental content for XP and some gear or if you just really want to do it, there's no huge cost to just moving on to actual quest content if you want.
They don't tell you when you've completed a whole region for a reason, to disincentivize completing it all unless you're a madman. I'm doing world completion just because I like grinding the game, but it's been two years in the making with big breaks in between, and if you ever feel like your gear or levels are behind the curve and you have to grind, the difficulty settings can be changed and can be set as forgiving as you like, they actually alter the level scaling and RPG aspects.
I think it's a great game worth playing, but you do need to be ready to tell yourself when enough is enough because they give you too much for weirdos like me that just wanna experience it all over a really long... Odyssey.
I'm glad you had fun with it. Do accept that my inability to have fun with it doesn't negate any of the enjoyment you got out of it. Respectfully, something this long instructing me of all the ways I must have played it wrong if I didn't enjoy it as much as you comes off as a little condescending. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but like... I know I have the option to put it down or skip things. I know I can pay off bounties. I was there, these systems and ideas are not hard to find. But for me, the fact that I'm allowed to skip engaging with a system or put it down before I see all the devs put there for me to see is the opposite of a selling point.
For me, it's like I ordered a meal at a favorite restaurant, the plate came out with portions three times larger than expected and gorgeously plated but with so little seasoning I couldn't stomach it. Saying "you don't have to eat it all" and "there's salt on the table" doesn't make it a good meal.
We find different things fun, and that's okay. May we both have a good time with Mirage.
Sorry, my intent was not to sound condescending, I was erring on the side that you weren't aware of the ways you could get around those issues in order to enjoy the parts you wanted to. Your criticisms are definitely valid, I would agree that even needing to know about the workarounds sort of proves that what was included wasn't an entirely cohesive and tight product to begin with, the way I played is not necessarily right or wrong, and neither is yours, it's just how I was able to mine the most enjoyment out of what was there.
My main idea is to not let someone see your comment and assume that that's how the game is and there's not another way to enjoy it or any clear ways to identify where content you'd want to play begins and ends, I was able to figure out and selective play the parts I enjoy, but even still there is content in that game that I skip because it's, definitively, not fun. Even still, it's become one of my favorite games of all time, but no one game is for everyone, thanks for the mature discussion, sincerely!
Yeah I haven’t needed to grind at all. Only time I dropped the difficulty level was with the poison boar. My gear stresses me out. I want the perks but then I hold onto it for like 10 levels.
Money has only been an issue as I wanted to upgrade ship and legendary tier is stupidly expensive. I’m sure by the time I finish the main quest I’ll have enough cash
Once you get the perks you want you totally can hold onto it. Every ten levels all of your perk and major attack stat bonuses on gear get more powerful, (but there's no stat bonus to upgrading before the 10 level threshold at all) even when you upgrade the same old gear you had, but it happens at the "first" level of each ten, so not at level 20, instead it's 21, 31, 41, etc.
Basically I've had the "same" gear for like 30 or 40 levels, now, just every time I hit the new stat range I go and upgrade all of it. It costs a shitload of gold, but aside from ship upgrades I don't have another major gold sink, so it's worth it to me, my perk loadout is extremely optimized for assassin damage, which is important for me since I'm basically playing it as an open world stealth game where I only fight if I get caught, I can one shot anyone I want, no exaggeration (using critical assassination when necessary).
The final ship upgrades are very expensive, yeah, just seems like they give you something to grind for if you get that far
It's not always the best option, like if you wanna save your gold for the ship upgrades it'll eat a big chunk out of that, but you could totally keep your gear perks that way if you really like them, you can upgrade at 61, don't have to wait for 62
I really enjoyed it. Beautiful scenery to explore but it is annoying with bounty hunters. There’s just too many quests. I think Valhalla was actually better in this regard. Honestly all games are repetitive. Most RPGs have a lot of fetch quests or something similar.
It’s not too bad of the game is 40 hours or so. It really grinds you down if it’s so big with millions of exactly the same quests. Each island each city.
The quests you get from the quest boards, especially the ones with the hourglass icons can be pretty much blanket ignored. Otherwise you can tell when talking to the quest giver if Alexios/Kassandra accepts the quest generically and doesn't respond to anything the giver says very specifically other than "I'll take care of it" or things like that.
I love the shit out of that game, have been world exploring and only doing the unique side quests.
The ones that aren't timed (don't have the hourglass icons) are worth picking up because they're all just like "kill 20 Athenians", "sink 5 ships", basically shit you're already doing, so you just swing by, pick them up, and keep playing like you already were and randomly one will pop and you'll get fat XP for doing what you were doing already anyway, but that's only if you want the extra XP, it's totally unnecessary
Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I’ve seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we’re talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that’s actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can’t legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there’s millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it’s open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there’s all these great resources they could use, but we won’t let them.
It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.
Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.
That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
And in addition to that sentiment, compression from moving or sending a copy of a copy is known to very slowly degrade digital media, so physical is almost always preferred.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely. A properly kept laserdisc compared to, for example, a YouTube Video isn’t even a competition. Physical media not exposed to radiation or impact can last decades if not centuries. Don’t even get me started on Vynil.
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
If you use most digital formats for media and compress them with something like .7z or Winrar, then it might take years or decades to noticeable degrade, but it is still a matter of when not if.
Holy crap. File compression is not the same thing as lossy media compression.
File compression uses mathematical algorithms to create definable outcomes. Meaning it doesn’t matter how much you compress/uncompress a file, it will always be exactly the same.
5 X 2 will always give you 10 and 10 ÷ 2 will always give you 5.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
And when you download the processed video and reupload it, it’s a 1 to 1 conversion of the same video codec, and every generation it gets worse. That example is a low hanging fruit, but the concept applies to everything.
Literally every file distribution method compresses the media first. A better argument was that YouTube re-encodes the video during the re-upload with a particularly lossy method to save on bandwidth and server space.
That 1:1 conversion through the same codec is very likely lossy. However that’s not a straight file copy which is what you originally said causes degradation.
Imo, an easy way to remove YouTube’s postprocessing from the equation would be to copy a video file to and from a nas or other computer several times and compare it with the untouched file.
experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades
That just means Youtube’s software uses lossy compression, that is a Youtube problem, not a digital media problem. Are you familiar with the concept of file hashing? A short string can be derived from a file, such that if any bit of the file is altered, it will produce a different hash. This can be used in combination with other methods to ensure perfect data consistency; for example a file torrent that remains well seeded won’t degrade, because the hash is checked by the software, so if anyone’s copy changes at all due to physical degradation of a harddrive or whatever other reason, the error will be recognized and routed around. If you don’t want to rely on other people to preserve something, there is always RAID, a 50 year old technology that also avoids data changing or being lost assuming that you maintain your hardware and replace disks as they break.
Here’s the fundamental reason you’re wrong about this: computers are capable of accounting for every bit, conclusively determining if even one of them has changed, and restoring from redundant backup. If someone wants to perfectly preserve a digital file and has the necessary resources and knowledge, they can easily do so. No offense but what you are saying is ignorant of a basic property of how computers work and what they are capable of.
It’s the most obvious example of a digital media problem. Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks, but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer, and even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks
Yes, and this can be done through mostly automatic or distributed processes.
even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer
It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
All of these problems boil down to intent. Do people intend to preserve a file, do they not care, do they actively favor degradation? In the case of the OP game, it seems that the latter must be the case. Same with Youtube, same with all those media companies removing shows and movies entirely from all public availability, same with a lot of companies. If someone wants to preserve something, they choose the correct algorithms, simple as that. There isn’t necessarily much of a tradeoff for efficiency and ease of use in doing so, disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, the technology is mature and not complicated to use. Long term physical storage can be a part of that, but it isn’t a replacement for intent or process.
I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
I think you didn’t read correctly on the statement about the most complex system failing. I’m not saying that is the most complex system, I am saying the most complex system will fail.
It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
LMAO at the idea of comparing every bit of every portion of every seeder’s copy with each other simultaneously and then cross referencing every parity file to be doubly safe, and then failing to see the chance of loss of parity during transmission of said files even after that. I will admit it would take a lot longer for a torrented file to degrade than some other forms of file distribution, but it’s not going to last for a thousand years, mate.
And I am saying complexity has little to do with it and also that a system can exist that will not fail.
it’s not going to last for a thousand years
Specifically why not? What is unrealistic about this scenario, assuming enough people care to continue with the preservation effort? All nodes must fail simultaneously for any data to be lost. The probability of any given node failing at any given time is a finite probability, independent event. The probability of N nodes failing simultaneously is P^N. That is exponential scaling. Very quickly you reach astronomically low probabilities, 1000 years is nothing and could be safely accomplished with a relatively low number of peers. Maybe there are external factors that would make that less realistic, like whether new generations will even care about preserving the data, but considering only the system itself it is entirely realistic.
The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
No I won’t be, because I’ve done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn’t just theory. It’s provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I’m starting to think you’re a troll. There’s no way someone believes what you’re saying.
Then you’re not a troll, just completely deluded and frankly stupid. You’ve been getting so many genuine responses trying to help you learn, but you keep digging in your heels and doubling down on being confidently wrong.
Believe whatever you want, just keep it to yourself.
They want to “help me learn” that a form of media storage invented and refined within a couple of decades will outlast all other forms, because they’ve deluded themselves that the things they rely on are perfect and that failure is impossible.
What you’re talking about is 100% unrelated to what the discussion is about. The media the files are stored on are irrelevant. USB flash drives are known to die within just a couple of years in some cases. But when the storage media itself fails, then the data on it is more is less lost. And that includes degradation of the medium itself. That’s why both spinning hard drives and solid state drives need to be powered on and “refreshed” every so often (about a year for solid state and roughly a few years for magnetic). And degradation in this context means beyond the point where each bit can be reliably and accurately read from the medium. Once you go past that point you end up with corrupted data. And that includes pictures and videos. A raw picture probably won’t be affected too much with a single bit flipping, but a jpg for example, will visibly look corrupted. This is what a corrupted jpg looks like. And it can occure with just a single bite or byte being incorrectly changed/saved jpg1jpg2
All it takes is a single corrupted byte in either the b-frame or i-frame in a video and it will cause that momentary glitch. That’s what happens when data “degrades”. Digitally copying a file absolutely does not “degrade” data each time it is copied. The idea is just laughable. We aren’t talking about copying a VHS tape.
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
The updates are still annoying but yeah it’s better than nothing. Of course there are some releases with the complete games all patched but those are rare and usually special/limited editions.
Partner found out about the unity crap when a bunch of steam library games published updates about changes in development, at least one of which stated they’re transitioning from free to paid
Ugh, CAD. I thought that webcomic died a decade ago.
I’m surprised you can write a 14-year-old’s name on your crotch and send her a dick pic on your own forum, yet years later people still find your comics and share them.
This is the first I’ve heard of that, and after searching the most I found was “This was alleged on 4chan but that’s it,” without even a link to the archived 4chan conversation. It’s kinda hard to take a complaint seriously when 4chan is the primary source. Can you share anything more substantive?
Basically every complaint about him that I’ve read is summarized at …shoutwiki.com/…/Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel, or on (choose your reddit mirror): r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3v3uau/what_exactly_did_tim_buckley_do_besides_make_a/ and tbh that should be enough on its own for most people to stop reading his webcomics
Aside from the alleged child abuse, which if true is horrid, I don’t really get people’s problems with content they don’t like. That wiki page is so overboard, it’s absurd. What exactly is it about the content that they can’t simply ignore it? Did Tim Buckley go to their home personally and Clockwork Orange every issue into their brain? Just let people make what they want (within reason), and if you (the figurative you) don’t like it, just ignore it and go find something you do. No need to add so much negativity into the world.
I agree with you, generally - so many people need to internalize “It’s okay to not like things, but don’t be a jerk about the things you don’t like.”
With Buckley in particular, much of the criticism is like that, but I think that due to particular things he’s allegedly done - the above sexual assault of a child, for one; the more verifiable (not that I’ve verified them, but I’m sure other people have) claims about him banning people from his own forums for various reasons, like providing (allegedly) constructive criticism of his comics; his generally being rude to many of his fans and critics, etc. - that almost everyone is less likely to defend someone from criticism they’d otherwise speak up about when that person has already earned their ire in some other way. As a result it kinda snowballs and you get pages like that one with almost nobody willing to speak in his defense.
To be clear, I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve criticism. I have no love for Buckley. He probably deserves most of it. But spending so much effort on wiki pages like that and on thinking about content you simply don’t like is so pointless. And it’s not just CAD hate. This kind of mentality permeates the internet and seems to latch onto everything. It’s so tiring to see.
90% of the badwebcomics wiki exists for no reason but to shit on someone for daring to put themselves out in public where others can see them. I completely agree. There’s the odd creator on there that fully deserves criticism for genuine assholery and abuse, but mostly it’s like “this guy makes a very cringy comic, jump him!” bullshit.
Yeah, I gathered it was edgy bs by the goatse logo. It’s just so dumb and disheartening to consider that nonsense like this could discourage someone from following their passion, just because sadsacks feel compelled to drag everyone down to their level.
Google is shit nowadays, sadly - it used to be you could Google “Tim Buckley Jackie” and see the picture yourself. A girl’s name written on his junk near his pubes.
It got out on his forum and he banned anyone who mentioned it. He wound up doing a complete purge of the CAD forums and got rid of half his mod staff. It’s not just a 4chan thing; it was all over the internet like… 15 years ago. (Maybe longer?)
I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of having seen it one time, so I can vouch that it exists. I can’t find it nowadays, but I can find people referencing it:
If you do the search now you can see that Google removed some results “for legal reasons”, which is likely the EU “right to be forgotten” law being used to scrub it. But it used to exist and was well-known for anyone who was on the internet in the long long ago times…
I believe the founder and first queen of Carthage said that if we don’t learn to circumvent that, we deserve nothing more than we get. She went on to claim that nothing we have is truly ours.
Is it just me or was that Phoenician quite a bit ahead of her time?
I appreciate the sentiment around preservation, but there’s an argument to be made that if you make something, you should get to decide if you want to destroy it. Banksy did something like this recently by destroying one of his pieces of art when it went up for auction.
@Kushan so you're saying they should be able to take your money and then destroy what you bought with out any sort of warning or compensation right? I strongly disagree with you if that's what you're saying.
No no, not at all - I agree with you, if you sell something to someone you shouldn’t be able to just take it back arbitrarily.
However, OP is talking about forcing companies to open source something they created - and while I love open source and am a big supporter of it, I don’t think that’s necessarily right either.
The Banksy example is also bad because they didn’t take anything away from anyone, just sold something that would change form after sale. And they knew that this stunt would only increase the art’s value going in.
I agree with your sentiment that a creator should have control over their work. However. I do feel that an art piece which can only exist in one form is different from commercial mass media. Mainly because you start getting in to an “original vs a copy” territory. While I believe an owner of something should have control over copyrights…once someone legally owns a “copy” of something that copy should be theirs since the owner made the mass media thing for the public to consume I believe the public should, at some point, have a say in the future trajectory of the product, after all it is still the public who “decide” if a product is good and will be remembered, and they even “decide” the value of the product as well.
Art is usually only made for a select few to own…it is “artisanal”…meanwhile video games are made for a much larger group…
I don’t believe in that at all, human lives and the feelings associated with them are finite, the appreciation of art lasts as long as the canvas does which can be hundreds to thousands of years depending on what it is. The feelings they feel as the artist aren’t significant on that time-frame and whatever respect I have for them is irrelevant in that context. I believe in preservation even against the will of creators because it benefits future generations, for the same reason historical knowledge does and their feelings today do not.
People have told me I’d feel different if it was my art but not really (I find that argument incredibly presumptuous and condescending which is why I’m acknowledging them here before anyone has the chance to make them as some kind of comeback), I recognize the value of art and the fact that just like these other artists I won’t be around forever either.
Moshi moshi, mr publisher? That book I released a year ago? Yeah, I want all copies destroyed. Yes, I mean ALL of them, including copies currently in possession of people who bought it legally.
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