I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.
There's some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.
option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage
Yeah I was there when BATTLETECH (still dunno why its name has to be so LOUD :P ) launched. Every hatefool was raging about it, apropos of anything or nothing. Try to talk about any part of it and it's "OH YOU MEAN FUCKING PRONOUNWARRIOR?!?!" and a bunch of incoherent senseless bile. There's a sizeable group of people who deeply love being offended, and it's not us (queerfolk/LGBTQIA+/QUILTBAG/GSM/whatever). Like, I'm neck-deep in queer over here and every time I play a game with a pronoun selector at the beginning I promptly forget about it but oohhhh nooo, not these bellends. They somehow think a button at the beginning of the game that matters like three times ever has entirely DESTROYED videogames with LIES and FALLACIES 🙄
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else (say, going to MWLL/other games, ranting about "pronounwarrior," pretty sure some critters got teamkilled over it...) for no good reason.
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else
My opinion exactly.
In ways, I actually feel sorry for them. In the first place, it has to suck just to be that angry and spiteful, but underneath that, it must really suck to feel so powerless and desperate and insecure that something as trivial and irrelevant as pronouns can send you into a compensatory rage.
My pity is greatly diminished by the fact that they're toxic assholes who try to force the world to accommodate their own failures though.
Meanwhile, my canonically enby commander is rocking a fabulous magenta mohawk and having fun headshotting all the King Crabs so they can sell them to afford catperson surgery.
I’m not hunting them specifically, their cockpits just happen to be magnets for my Marauder’s laser and autocannon rounds. :P
The first one I saw, in an early “titan” mission, got taken out by a single alpha strike from long range and dropped three salvage. (I renamed it Queen Crab when I noticed that some parts of the mech were white after applying my blue/pink paint scheme.)
That’s amusing. I played that a couple months ago. I don’t recall ever selecting a pronoun, but I’m sure I did and then just moved on like a normal person.
Yeah, that's the one. There was so much outrage because it had the word "pronoun" in it at all 🤣It's just a little thing on the side during character creation and its effect is absolutely trivial. Actually I think the other MechWarriors 'have pronouns' too if you deliberately open the character editor for them. It's really the bare minimum, like I'm trying to come up with something sarcastic but those people were freaking out over nnnnooothing like the one word in one game is gonna ruin videogames for them forever, or some crap.
Which, like... if we could somehow trans so hard they'd go away don't they think we'd do it instead of just getting yelled at?
I’ve seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can’t imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.
As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a “fix”? I think that number is pretty small.
But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.
This article coming out on the same day as another wave of layoffs, this time from Bungie, is an excellent view on the state of gaming criticism. Even if it were the best year for the products (there are several titles in the article that are curious), it’s definitely one of the worst years for the people who work on them.
I hope the current wave of unionizing keeps manifesting and spreads to the gaming industry, because this situation is dire and it’s only getting worse.
Even if it were the best year for the products (there are several titles in the article that are curious), it’s definitely one of the worst years for the people who work on them.
For sure. As an armchair analyst, it seems to be the result of getting out of the era of cheap credit and VC money. I don't expect it to get worse, but I do think live services and enormous open world games ran out of money spreading their customers across too many games.
I’m not sure the worst year is specific to game developers though, the whole world is under economic squeeze, take a look at the layoffs in the tech industry.
People who don’t like Palworld, maybe give a real reason? The AI stuff was made up by a salty troll who admitted later he made it up. It being “legally distinct from pokémon” isn’t a good enough reason. It having the ability to
Spoilerbutcher your Pals for resources
may be a reason to be upset about the gameplay, but then again, many, many, many RPGs have you culling the local wildlife and depopulating a nation for quests too. Neither is the Genshin Impact art style a reason to hate it. That’s just JRPG asthetics.
The butchering thing always bugged me. Where tf do you think your chicken nuggies come from? The only difference is that we don’t let real animals have friends before we kill em
I guess I should have said we don’t make friends with them. I could have also drawn attention to the awful living conditions, but getting all Dominion-y wouldn’t have the pizzazzy oomph that I was going for
Really buggy at launch (not sure if it still is). “Pokemon with guns” is the least creative direction to take the concept. Devs reportedly don’t know how to use any sort of SCM, a basic development tool
People say “Pokemon with guns” as if that was some kind of core gameplay. You can play through the game without ever using them. It’s a small feature, that absolutely is there, but reducing the game to that is missing the forest for the trees.
It’s an open world crafting base building game to enjoy with co-op, that has catchable creatures like Pokemon. There is no Pokemon game that fits this niche. The guns are not important to what the game is.
I would absolutely classify it as “core gameplay” given that it’s the primary ranged weapon of both the playable character and most of the NPCs, past the crossbow. Saying “oh just ignore the stuff you don’t like” is pretty dismissive of critique.
And don’t get me wrong - mons with base building is a good idea, which is why I played it. But IMO palworld doesn’t do much with it but put the two concepts together.
I’m not saying ignore it, it’s a valid reason to not like the game, like any other subjective reason.
I’m saying calling the game “Pokemon with guns” is dismissive of what the game is. It’s like calling Minecraft “Rust with animal husbandry”, which completely misses what the game is about.
It definitely only got popular because of the hype re: “Pokemon with guns,” but it’s legitimately better than the game it actually copied, which is Ark. You know what’s cool about Palworld? Me and my coplayer were able to stop playing without losing everything we’ve built
Anyone who thinks Palworld is actually a Pokemon ripoff either hasn’t played Palworld or hasn’t played Pokemon
Gameplay wise palworld has nothing to do with Pokémon, it was simply a marketing tool for em.
As for the ark comparison I can’t comment, the one time I played it was on the early access launch day during which I refunded it within 45 minutes because it performed horribly, that was almost 10 years ago though so not sure how the current game compares
Butchering your pals is less of a problem than enslaving other human beings.
More to the point it’s just bad. It’s incredibly grindy, has an incongruous tech tree, and the A.I. (both enemy and ally) is trash. It’s also mostly a copy of their previous game, Craftopia, which was also bad and has been in Early Access for 4 years now with no signs of ever leaving it.
I don’t hate Palworld because it’s a low effort Pokemon knockoff, I hate Palworld because it’s a low effort Ark knockoff following the same business plan of not finishing their previous game before abandoning it for their new game. At least with Ark you got to ride dinosaurs rather than store-brand Rapidash.
Corpos are incapable of learning the right lessons. I wouldn’t be surprised if the take away from this at Sony was to eliminate internal voices that were against the decision so it’s easier to pull off next time.
I think they came to the wrong conclusion. Yes those games were cheaper, but really they were just good, and mostly finished at launch. Didn’t feel like we were nickle and dimed for more DLC or season passes or mtxs, we got whole games that were fun.
All the big “AAA blockbuster” games anymore are reskinned, half finished versions of the last version, and the only thing they’ve put a ton of time into is analyzing how to get addicts hooked and spending the maximum amount on micro transactions.
I’m not sure how anybody can look at the way GTA 5 online was monetized to hell and not seriously question how far they’re going to try to go with GTA 6. I’m fully expecting it to leak into GTA 6’s single player with an intense focus on getting more and more out of mtx.
If GTA 5 came out today it wouldn’t be worth $60. The “big open sandbox” experience isn’t as big a pull as it used to be.
I bought 5 because it was “the next GTA” and I remembered having a good time with 4. Today it’s a little harder to remember the last time i even played a GTA game. 5 released a decade ago, 4 is going on 16 years old, fucken San Andreas turns 20 this year.
The next release is just gonna be GTA Online 2, we all know it already.
I have no real opinion about the topic here, but I’m getting really tired of seeing headlines containing the word “slams” or “blasts.” It guarantees I won’t read the article
It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.
All Rockstar Games ever have been pushed back by months or years. They have all had monolithic levels of crunch. People not working in the office is definitely not to blame. Particularly if they were hired as offside, which the article claims.
Big corporation: Whoops, we lost this game so we can’t re-release it. Sorry. Even if we found it, it’s not worth our time/money porting it.
Meanwhile, random person on the internet: I’ve updated this emulator so you can play old games at 4k 60fps for free. The weird bug that was never fixed at launch is now gone too.
it’s not necessarily the architecture that’s the problem it’s just optimizations as you only have set hardware to optimize for on console as compared to pc
In the past first party exclusives were the incentive for me to get a console regardless of Rockstar titles, and they just don’t have the draw they used to with them getting ported to the PC so I’m passing on console this Gen. So can’t even double dip like they want me too because I wouldn’t drop hundreds to play one game.
They’ve been owned by Fandom for a little while now, and they even made some good changes lately, but then someone a few rungs up the corporate ladder was replaced with someone who decided to make a pretty huge change to the company that basically compromises the entire point of Giant Bomb, if not also Gamespot.
See my other comment below, but the gist of it is that they were told to pause streaming for a while as everyone tries to figure out a path forward. They put out one Bombcast that rebelled against the new Fandom “values”, and you can find a link to it if you look through Bluesky or the Giant Bomb reddit. They’re still paused, and it’s been about a week now. It might be the end of Giant Bomb, in which case, Grubb, Mike, and Dan have sworn to keep doing Blight Club, and the others are probably preparing their parachutes too. It also might not be the end of Giant Bomb; nothing’s been decided yet, and everyone currently still has their jobs.
Aww geez. Thanks for the summary duder. Been at a conference in the bay so kinda detached from it all. Gonna be wild if Fandom is the shitdicks that kill GB.
If Episode 888 is the last Bombcast, it will leave the world with the integrity that created it in the first place. Give it a listen, when you get around to it.
Dan removed GB from his BSky bio, and Grubb posted that he’s no longer with GB.
To add more context, last night Dan was streaming on Twitch and said he expects episode 888 to be the last Bombcast. He said things that, if he stays employed, would make Fandom the most understanding employer ever. To use words he used: he’ll keep taking their money as long as they’ll give it to him, but he expects that won’t keep happening for very long. He’s very annoyed with working for giant corporations and wants to bet on himself.
Here we are, 17 years after a bunch of clueless suits fucked with GameSpot and led to the creation of Giant Bomb. Now it’s a whole new set of clueless suits fucking with Giant Bomb. It’s the circle of capitalism.
I was in deep for GB until the Nextlander split and slowly trailed off since then. I still have mad respect for that group and follow most of them in one way or another. This is a new level of dire for them.
It’s looking like GB is now dead. At the very least, I’m confident I’ll continue to get Blight Club and Jeff’s news show, even though they won’t be at a site called Giant Bomb. Hopefully everyone else found a place where they can land on their feet. Their personal brands are stronger than Fandom’s.
I left with Jeff, Vinny Brad n Alex, tried to come back a few times, but it just never hit the same.
Lucy & Tamoor were great since their Gamespot days, Dan came back and Bakalar/Grubb are solid. I’m sure there are others that joined after the fact, but it just didn’t feel like GB without the core group. (Sidenote: hope jason is doing well with all the health stuff).
At one point I think Jan was downplaying Jeffs importance, and that may have been the last time I gave them my time.
I feel like the writing was on the wall since the last acquisition. Respect for them, trying to keep it alive, for as long as they did.
Edit: side shout-out to PackBenPack, Abby 'from ‘Brooklyn’ & Not That Will Smith. Ben has showed up on The Gerstmann Podcast, Abby & Will are regulars on Nextlander. Also miss Drew n Alexis. Rest in power Ryan Davis, China Truly Don’t Care.
I have no ill will toward Gerstmann, but there came a point where he became very unentertaining, so when I heard he was gone, it was a good signal for me to give them another try, and Grubb fit into that old Gerstmann interviewer role very well while also being a more positive guy and someone who might break some news. They had a really good group, and Blight Club was an all-timer Giant Bomb show.
Yeah, he did seem to get more negative near the end, most likely due to everything happening behind the scenes. And after Ben left, he didn’t really connect with anyone left over. Him & Ben played off each-other quite well, was reminiscent of Ryan, in a way.
Is anyone else bothered (but not surprised) by the fact that Amazon/Twitch agreed to cover it up for him? Seems pretty wild that they should be off the hook for working to protect his image after doing predatory shit like this.
They paid him to go away and to shut up. Twitch letting one of their most popular creators message sexual content to a minor over their platform for years is a PR nightmare. Shows the lack of oversight social media has. Why would they even allow a 12 year old the ability to private message a 30 year old to begin with?!
Edit: and I’m sure twitch found more dirt going through all his communications. This pedo was even planning a meet up with this minor before the minors parent put a stop to it and notified twitch.
Beware that points like this suggest that messaging platforms should be monitoring all communications sent between users. If that’s the world you want to live in, ok, fine… But in this case the guy that committed the crime is the one who has been punished. Isn’t that the correct result?
I’m just saying that, maybe if you are a creator making content primarily watched by children, the trade off for making money (millions in this case.) off of our platform, is we get to monitor your communications with said audience on our platform? It’s like saying a banker who uses their work email to coordinate a crime. My work has email monitoring that looks for financial crimes because surprisingly people are dumb enough to use work email for elicit activities. Yes his messages to individuals are “private” but should they be when in a position of power? He messaged a minor through twitches chat (twitch is essentially his whole job) and twitch has NO safeguards to prevent abuse?!
I think they kept it on the low because they don’t want people realizing that they’re viewing the contents of their whispers, even if you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
I am so glad that Irongate is being much smarter with Valheim. You can opt into the beta and also choose older versions of the game to downgrade to, all within Steam. Very helpful for an early-access game with tons of mods and sporadic updates.
I don’t understand why people put up with this with a freaking game. I will never pay money to companies that do this stuff. There are literally tens of thousands of games available right now that are perfectly enjoyable.
I get that. For me modding is part of that experience and maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome but Skyrim itself is kinda fun with mods just with how many there are
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