That’s disgusting. I would argue two things need to happen across the board:
Companies need to collect IRL data if you want to have access to text/voice chat, verify them, and in situations such as these, hand them to the authorities. Yeah it’s a tricky data protection problem, but these would be legally actionable threats IRL, they should not be let off the hook just because it was done online.
More importantly, companies themselves should be on the hook for failing to act. That is, if you want to provice text or voice chat or something, but also do not want to invest enough money to moderate these spaces, then you should be legally liable under the same logic as why the cases should be given to the police in the first place, you’re aiding and abetting such threats. I suspect we’ll very very quickly either see way stricter moderation (good) or the end of text/voice chat in many games (not ideal, but if they cannot be moderated, then so be it).
I totally missed the clip you were shocked by at first (I guess the Twitter embed didn’t load the first time). Just went back to watch it and I don’t understand how someone can be ok with saying that. Yeah I’ve heard sexist things and weird sexual harassment comments in games like valorant, overwatch, etc but that was absolutely disgusting. His casual tone says so much about him too. He’s not even laughing where you could at least say “that’s a stupid shitty joke”. He has such a real tone to it that it’s truly disturbing.
I agree with all of your points. It’s unfortunate but I think we’ve gotten to the point that people need to be properly held accountable. Don’t just ban them from the game, ban them from the entire platform and report them to local authorities for that. Hell, when someone is this nasty someone on the community team should send it to their employer. It’s clearly a threat even if he has no way to see it through. This isn’t just calling someone trash, or telling a woman to “go back to the kitchen”. These people need to learn what real consequences are. It’s truly disgusting behavior.
Yeahhhhh, I don’t want a company which itself previously settled for a hundred million dollars in a gender discrimination suit to have every persons intimate personal data.
Yeah fair enough. Good point. Legal consequences for online activity are always a tricky subject because of privacy issues. Can’t trust the very companies I would like to be on the hook for not taking safety serious to in turn take safety of data serious.
(And of course too many people think “it’s like the high seas”, ignoring that those have more laws than many countries and hence why you need marine lawyers if you do shipping 😅)
Just a heads up, there’s a good review on the steam page that breaks it down a bit and it seems this is less a free game and very much a F2P game with a battle pass and expensive currency.
Play it. You never have to spend a dime. Its a great relaxing game to just fly around with your kids or something. The season passes net you like cosmetics that do nothing. You can get 3 for 15 bucks. What they get you on is the candle currency. Some of the items are like 150 candles and you aren’t collecting that in a month without a serious grind. I still recommend it especially if you liked their other game, Journey.
I only had time for 15 min, but I sure hope there’s more to it then walking and watching short clips. There’s more once I get past the “opening”, right?
The main story is basically Journey with friends and cosmetics. It expands a bit as you complete each area, easing you into more difficult/spookier content, but it never gets too complex.
There’s also a bunch of secret stuff to find and all of the older seasonal stuff that remains after they ended.
Higher stakes were really rough and RNG-heavy. I’m hoping the changes for free joker tags and new joker stickers make it possible to beat some of the harder stakes with more skill and less RNG.
Agreed, I gave up on beating gold stake when I would lose most of the runs on the first couple antes. I think it’s good to have a brutally difficult mode, I hope they didn’t go overboard on easing it up, but it was good to ease up a bit.
I wonder how many of those critically acclaimed reviews are going to be Rewritten. Certainly you’d have to be a completely lacking Integrity not to realize you were Bamboozled when you’re giving a different product than the public is to review.
Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC's that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
Reminder that even if AMD’s ray tracing isn’t as advanced, alternative, cross-platform solutions such as RTGL1 do could work very well on both Nvidia and AMD cards.
Edit: Clarified, these things do work well, but only where they work. Point meant to be, if anyone but NVidia was doing this, it wouldn’t have to fracture PC gaming so badly.
Searching for that the only thing that comes up is a repo with half life / doom / quake branches. There’s no documentation on how to use the library for other games and most github issues seem to be about those games instead of the library. Am I looking at the right thing?
Yeah, that’s it. Unfortunately, AMD isn’t being well developed for. It’s just that, Nvidia doesn’t have to be the only viable option for RT, but because they have the funding and initiative, it’s been allowed to become so. RTGL1 is just an example for how it can work for AMD as well, assuming the renderer supports AMD-equivalent functions.
Worse, the release of an Nvidia-only toolkit like this is gonna cause a lot of pain with this in the future.
“AMD’s cards have faster and better ray tracing than Nvidia now? Man, that’s cool, but I’ve got, like, ten games running on RTX Remix, and they don’t support things like FSR.”
Shame. I remembered the name from Banner Saga, but I was surprised to find out that they also published Pillars of Eternity 2. They had an interesting catalog of games. Still, telling everyone they're being let go right before they leave for Christmas is just twisting the knife isn't it? Then again I guess there isn't really a good time to tell someone they're fired.
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