A best of is something I’ve thought about for one year. Either that or I’d show off some of the rejects bin of screenshots (I always end up taking a lot of photos most of which don’t make it). Both would take a lot of time though so I’m still debating. I should probably decide soon though because I’m reaching a month and don’t want to run out of time
I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.
Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.
To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.
And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.
I think that might be part of it. For a lot of people, it was that the formula was old and tired. I know Odyssey did fairly well, but it’s still just an AC game
Odyssey was the second entry in the new batch of games in the series, where they completely reinvented what that series is. There are a lot of us who find it to be a poor substitution for what came before.
I was waiting for this post, thank you! Since I discovered this “series” I’ve been hooked. It’s nice to read some long content in a non clickbaity way (that seems to be the norm in the industry nowadays).
I’m really sorry about your nerve damage and hope you recover as soon as possible!
As for what I’ve been playing, right now I’m going through Blasphemous 2 (i loved the first one too) and a nice surprise: Pippistrello and the cursed yo-yo. A zelda-like adventure in which you play as a bat with a yo-yo fighting industry magnates to help your aunt recover the monopoly on energy she built to keep a grip on the city (I know! The setting is original, to say the least).
The gameplay makes you think of 2d zelda games, but the yo-yo makes combat (and even movement) a completely different thing of other games, I suggest you to try the demo!!
Oh that’s so kind of you to say! I have to say, I’ve been pretty down about it all, but writing this up made me so very happy. I really love Lemmy for how easy it is to share these long-form posts :)
Pippistrello and the cursed yo-yo
Sounds wonderful, I’m looking this up now! It sure sounds weird, but the longer the gaming industry runs and ruins great things, these odd little different ones just make me happy!
Oh that’s so kind of you to say! I have to say, I’ve been pretty down about it all, but writing this up made me so very happy. I really love Lemmy for how easy it is to share these long-form posts :)
Happy to read this (the part about writing this making you happy I mean!!).
Lemmy is great for sharing long posts, much like reddit was before the enshitification. It’s good to see long elaborated posts here among all the memes and other low effort content. And in the case of your posts, they are also a nice read in my mornings because of all the possitivity and joy you can feel when reading them. You really pour a lot of that in your posts and it feels!
Sounds wonderful, I’m looking this up now! It sure sounds weird, but the longer the gaming industry runs and ruins great things, these odd little different ones just make me happy!
I love “'weird” or unconventional games. And right now, it’s the indie world that provides these gems. In an industry that looks for the short-term profit like the “mainstream” videogame one, they rarely innovate anymore. They just pick a formula that works and copy it until they find a more profitable one, so innovation now happens mostly in the indie world, giving birth to games as odd as this one, a yo-yo player bat that goes around a city beating corpo suits to recover a monopoly! You won’t see EA making this kind of game, ever.
Do people really get hours of fun out of losing races due to catch-up mechanics?
I regularly get blue shelled and I still smoke people. There’s still lots of strategy in the game and randomization is something that keeps games fresh. At the end of the day it’s an arcade racer, not everything has to be Gran Turismo
Here is excerpt from the tos, shared by user in steam reviews of the game.
important Info in Terms of Service:• Mods are a bannable offense • Display of Cheats/Exploits is bannable • Forced arbitration clause and a waiver of class action and jury trial rights for all users residing in the United States and any other territory other than Australia, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, or The Territories of The European Economic Area • You can be banned for using a VPN while connecting to online servers • Cannot access game content on a Virtual PC Collected Data Types: • Identifiers / Contact Information: Name, user name, gamertag, postal and email address, phone number, unique IDs, mobile device ID, platform ID, gaming service ID, advertising ID (IDFA, Android ID) and IP address • Protected Characteristics: Age and gender • Commercial Information: Purchase and usage history and preferences, including gameplay information • Billing Information: Payment information (credit / debit card information) and shipping address • Internet / Electronic Activity: Web / app browsing and gameplay information related to the Services; information about your online interaction(s) with the Services or our advertising; and details about the games and platforms you use and other information related to installed applications • Device and Usage Data: Device type, software and hardware details, language settings, browser type and version, operating system, and information about how users use and interact with the Services (e.g., content viewed, pages visited, clicks, scrolls) • Profile Inferences: Inferences made from your information and web activity to help create a personalized profile so we can identify goods and services that may be of interest • Audio / Visual Information: Account photos, images, and avatars, audio information via chat features and functionality, and gameplay recordings and video footage (such as when you participate in playtesting) • Sensitive Information: Precise location information (if you allow the Services to collect your location), account credentials (user name and password), and contents of communications via chat features and functionality.
I wouldnt touch anything this company has produced.
Here is another person, 7 years ago trying the exact same outrage-based engagement farming strategy of linking a TOS update and implying a nefarious intent: www.reddit.com/…/take_two_a_spyware_apocalypse/ It’s exactly the same “Take two is spying on you!!!” content and yet, none of the Borderlands games have added spyware and none have added kernel anti-cheat.
Also, if you read the 2018 and 2025 TOS you will notice notice that the information that they collect in the 2025 TOS ( www.take2games.com/legal/en-US/ ) is exactly the same as it was in 2018.
TL;DR - Just because you read it on the Internet, doesn’t mean it is true.
I sometimes wonder what I casually believe because I read it while scrolling for something interesting. I don’t have the time or inclination to fact check every single detail I come across.
I’m sure I believe a lot of nonsense from reading the Internet.
That’s okay, we’re just human. The problem is when people try to ‘inform’ people of things that they ‘know’ from reading social media. That’s how these situations are created, so many people believe this because so many other people believe it and then repeat it as fact without themselves ever checking.
It’s like a feedback loop of ignorance, caused entirely by people who care more about getting social credit for talking and less about saying things that are true.
Interesting. So the terms of service have not changed, and yet people are saying that they did. I wonder if there are criticisms that are still valid. For example, the terms of service that you linked:
do not let me use a VPN (¶6.4)
do not let me use glitches (¶6.4)
do not let me own the copy of the game that I bought, but instead give me a limited license to it (¶2.1-2.2)
do not inform me about future updates to their terms of service (¶10.2)
force me to enter arbitration and do not let me be part of a class action lawsuit or have a trial by jury (¶17.5)
link to their privacy policy, which:
does not let me opt out of having my data bought, merged, and sold through ad networks or data brokers (§ Categories of Information Collected, § How We Use Information and Our Legal Grounds, § Sources of Information We Collect, and § When We Share Information ¶ 5— all sources combined)
does not attempt to deliberately minimize data collection to protect my data. With the only exception of children’s data, their purposes are extremely vague (§ How We Use Information and Our Legal Grounds, as well as the entire document, because they do not attempt to do this in their privacy policy)
does not attempt to anonymize my data (I cannot provide a citation because there is no attempt to do this in their privacy policy)
does not specify the purposes of gathering and using information about any installed application on my device (§ Categories of Information Collected— this is especially worrying)
does not let me opt-out of data collection categories for specific purposes (cannot give a direct citation because they simply do not do it; instead, they wrote vague types of information they collect —such as “details about… other information related to installed applications” in § Categories of Information Collected, as well as vague purposes in § How We Use Information)
So, coming back to the original claim you were debunking:
They added spyware to it.
Your response was
No, they didn’t.
And I agree with you, now that I have read their terms of service and their privacy policy. Of course, we’re assuming that they haven’t changed their terms of service. If we assume that, then their spyware clauses weren’t added. No. They were always there. They have always said that they gather “details about… other information related to installed applications” on my device for purposes that can include merging and selling my data to data brokers and ad networks.
The language about collecting and using data have been in TOSs for basically every online service since the early '00s.
I’m not saying that this is okay. The data that these services collect, which we’ve given them unlimited rights to, has only become more valuable and the incentives for these companies are always for them to gather more data about you.
You can use archive.org if you want to look at older policies from the same company. But, if you pull up any other game with an online component you will see that they all are essentially “Don’t cheat our services or hide your identity, We’re going to collect your data and use it how we want, and you have to enter into binding arbitration” with various levels of detail and verbosity.
I'm assuming the post is actually about DRM operating at ring 0. That's not really root level though. That's kernel level. Root is still operating in user-mode and politely asking the kernel to interact with hardware.
I did some more reading on this, and it apparently isn't due to DRM, its about an update to ToS that occurred in April. The update expands data collection for advertising and forced-arbitration. Arguably that's worse than kernel-level DRM. DRM can be ripped, legal shenanigans can't.
Sure, but it also seems like it’s data that you offer up via a 2K account, which I don’t have. I have a user name tied to my Steam ID, and that’s about it.
If you really liked BG3 you might also like Neverwinter Nights 2 and DA:O. I heard there was a remaster of Neverwinter Nights 2 in the works, maybe give it a try when it comes out.
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