Dunno if you want a serious answer, but 'press start' titlescreens that start up an animation if you leave it unpressed too long are a throwback to when if a screen showed the same image for too long, it would fry the image on to the screen and leave a little ghost image, so screensavers were a screen saver. This allowed one to demo software and just leave it running without worrying about damaging the product hardware.
These days however it is totally unnecessary.
So that if you leave the room to make yourself a tea or something while the game is loading, your won’t miss the cut scene / beginning of the action / lose the game because it started without you present.
I pirated the game. The first part in the actual school was really fun. But once you get out into the world, you quickly realise that it’s just another generic open world game with outposts, collectibles, and general busywork that you’ve seen in every other open world game. It got boring very quickly for me and I never finished it.
I was very interested in mods for this game, people found all kinds of fun cut stuff that would’ve elevated this game so much like companions having commentary for several quests when you used a mod to bring them, and having actual consequences for using the dark arts. But it’s impossible to implement.
I agree. The magical feeling of being a student at Hogwarts soon evaporated as soon as you got a broom and didn’t really need to visit Hogwarts again and instead just fight endless random enemies, which gets pretty easy as you level up.
I was also disappointed by the endless voice acting. There was so much pointless talking and you couldn’t really control the outcome, all options seemed to result in a positive outcome when I just wanted to be a badass Malfoy but you’re not allowed, you jave to be a goody goody Hermione, juat in Slytherin clothes.
Imagine if JK Rowling had even a 1/1000th the artistry and intuitive empathy Pratchett had for the world, there would be millions upon millions of people out there with a life long love of a series who didn’t feel betrayed and forced to make a choice between being part of a community that textually hates them or continuing to love their childhood nostalgia.
<3 trans people <3 granny weatherwax and I really wanna get drunk with nanny og.
I just wish there was more media of the Discworld other than the books, a handful of movies and some games of the 90’s. It is such a big universe that has so much room for stories.
Yeah I don’t think his daughter is that hot on allowing a lot of people to do stuff with it. Last year’s animated Maurice movie was about the only thing in a long time, I think?
Absolutely but I do recommend whispering to yourself “get fucked JK rowling” before reading a book as it is good luck. You can substitute “eat shit” or whatever else feels right to you and it should still work fine.
I think Dwarf Fortress is going to hold the crown for ultimate fantasy world simulator. I don’t think ES6 will allow for systematic breeding and killing of mer-children for their valuable bones.
It’s multi-platform, uses one of the biggest IPs of an entire generation and seems to do it quite well too. Everything else would have been more surprising to me.
Not really, they were often really serious about it which made it all the more ridiculous. Sometimes it’s a fun circlejerk sub, sometimes it’s presenting their slacktivism almost as being some gaming vanguard and fighting a war against the game.
I used to love that sub, but these days they are only focused on the outrage culture. Nothing inherently wrong with that, I like to laugh at people who take their video game waifu too seriously. I initially joined that sub because it seemed like the best place to have level-headed conversations about overhyped games, like the Witcher 3. Everywhere else seems to love that game as if it’s the second coming of Jesus, but if you find some places that didn’t like the game, they swing a bit too hard on the opposite site, so you can’t have a conversation with them either. I found plenty of people in that sub who loved that game, but knew where the shortcomings were.
Whenever a company addresses a something like this, like insisting a thing that is rumoured to be happening isn’t happening, it is almost certainly happening.
To be fair, the rumor isn't that Microsoft is getting rid of consoles. The rumor is that they're making decisions that will, in a handful of years' time, almost certainly result of getting rid of their consoles.
The distinction is that they're making a decision that will likely result in not making consoles anymore. It's like how governments don't decide to increase traffic; they decide to expand freeways to more lanes, but the only thing that can come from that is that they increased traffic. They think they're solving a problem, but they're actually, usually, making it worse by those actions that we have a historical record for how they play out.
Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?
3 months being exactly one financial quarter. They probably weren’t lying, they were committed… for that quarter. When they read the numbers next quarter, well that’s completely unrelated to today’s commitments!
I believe it. There was a steamcommunity post last year detailing all the cut content. I believe some of it has been added back through the patches (I only played through the game once, around launch).
To me the tadpole consequences is the most egregious, as the whole system and decisions connected to it feel so hollow when they end up not mattering at all.
Yeah, stuffing more worms into your brain being purely a beneficial mechanic with no drawbacks is a very weird choice. This whole system was honestly better in early access than it ended up being, having the tadpoles be just a dialogue option with a very easy check but consequences the more you used them. The ring that Omeluum gives you was even supposed to help, only to get changes into a boring Charm resistance ring on release.
I don’t know if it’s been culled by now in patches, but when I played there were still lines by the narrator talking about the consequences and “if you do this, there’s no going back” regarding the brain worms. All lies, it turns out.
I have no clue why they cut it, but having it actually impact your potential choices and your endings would be thematically appropriate and make for fun and difficult gameplay choices, I would have thought.
The lack of consequences for the brain worms - and lack of rewards or even mentions for abstaining! - was part of why Act 3 soured me on the game quite a bit. Come on, not even a silly achievement for not using any Illithid power all playthrough?
Yeah, I was very dissapointed by that as well. As far as I’m aware, the only time it matters is when
Act 3 spoilerThe Emperor offers you the Astral tadpole, if you used any worms you have to pass a check that grows harder the more worms you consumed to resist using it, if you abstained you can just say no.
Yeah but even that is pointless because there are literally zero consequences to accepting the Astral Tadpole! Even though you’re half Illithid supposedly it all kinda just goes away in the happy ending. I don’t get it.
As I recall there are two decisions. First you get the choice of the Astral Tadpole, which opens the outer ring of mindflayer powers and gives you black veins in your face and the status “half-Illithid”.
Later - as part of the ending - you can decide to become a full on mindflayer, because for some arbitrary narrative reason the mcguffin can only be operated by one.
Furthermore, there is an option to destroy the special “gift” if you can resist accepting it. However, all you get for doing so is a few brief lines from the Emperor. Your companions don’t seem to notice, and there isn’t even an quest log update.
This is fine, no issues really, but if you’re offended by something in a video game fictional story that was made over 20 years ago you should go touch grass.
eh. i get the ‘need’ for these companies to have the disclaimers and i honestly appreciate that they are not changing anything here. but the mob is fickle and seemingly can’t distinguish real life from the online life where being offended somehow gives them clout.
Yeah the Japan level made my jaw drop… the early 2000’s really were the last time you could be this blatantly racist against the Asian Community in popular media… But I’d rather go “Oooof” than pretend the game was never like this.
Do you see any merit to the pushback against such media?
You sound like you favor rationalism, and I agree with dismissing people who are crazy, but setting crazy people aside, do you see potential harm in promoting negative racial and ethnic stereotypes?
Stereotypes exist for a reason. They aren’t made up, non-existent characteristics. 90% of people that are getting offended by such things are not even part of the group that’s being stereotyped. It’s usually white liberals that are “offended” by any of this. Are they beneficial? probably not, but they sure are not nearly as harmful as people like you make them out to be. As a straight white man, I’m vilified by the mob regardless of my positions on anything, and that in itself is a stereotype. So I don’t put any stock into hypocritical perceived slights against humanity.
sorry my life doesn’t revolve around your internet drama. got real shit to deal with. like work. and life. idgaf what you think about me of what point you think you’re making. have fun with what little “power” you think you have here. i couldn’t care less about this.
how is it hypocritical? idgaf what you think, just like you likely don’t gaf what I think. you’re just out to call people names behind the safety of a keyboard and screen.
Even if I agree some games have gone too far on censorship, I don’t like having this totalitarian attitude to any kind of “offense”.
There are certain weird themes I really like in niche games, but I acknowledge if they were “thrown in” to a game about shooting or adventure, would sour the experience for a lot of common players. I’d point to perverted character designs as a common one - sexualized character designs are obviously appealing to some players, but to others they can actually make it hard to get absorbed in the story of a game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Nier Automata. Even for a series like Persona, there have been players that decided “What weeb shit” and abandon the game because of the way female characters get harassed at times.
It’s easy to call it “political”, but politics comes from personal opinions - and it can genuinely affect how people view the media. These days I have a much more vehement reaction to stereotyped Native-American depictions (“Indians”) over when I was a kid. I doubt it’d make me hate Tomb Raider, but I can see why they’d have a warning.
I absolutely adore this game, but imo it’s a terrible candidate for a remaster. The graphics were already stylized so I doubt a graphics update would make much difference. It’s a puzzle game so the replayability is already low. And I can’t imagine that developer commentary get people excited about buying the game again.
I wish this was successful, but I can see why this went sideways.
Hopefully game developers stick to their guns and start migrating future projects and training to other engines like Godot. They played their hand once I wouldnt trust them to not screw you in the future
Re-Logic (Terraria’s developers) have already gone on record saying, "even if Unity were to recant their policy and statements, the destruction of trust is not so easily repaired.” That’s the stance I think every developer should be taking. Unless you have a Unity game that can be released by the end of the year, all devs need to seriously consider switching engines.
And when the code starts open source if they do a move like that (see Elasticsearch vs Opensearch, or Terraform vs OpenTF) then the community can fork it!
I love the idea of an open source engine becoming the industry standard, even if just for indie titles. Blender is a great success story and shows that FOSS can compete with industry standard creative software.
IIRC Godot’s reduzio mentioned at GDC there was considerable interest from various publishers and developers in building their own engines ontop of Godot.
Psychonauts 2 happened because Microsoft bought Double Fine and said, “How much time/money do you need to finish your game?” And basically gave it to them.
Hell yeah, I’m happy they did! That game was an absolute delight to play, just like the first one. The people at Double Fine really knock it out of the park!
Literally watched an interview with Tim Schafer, they ran out of Kickstarter money and Microsofr saved the day. Look it up before calling me out please.
No one saved the day, they fund raised before, everyone does, many people found publishers if needed after running out of croudfunded money. There is no saviour here.
Was Kickstarted for all consoles, they ran out of money, Microsoft bought them and left everything as-is, just gave more money. Go watch the interview about it.
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