One thing that really soured my taste with Andromeda was the very clunky, but for some odd reason still necessary platforming. It always ground things to a halt for me and reminded me I was playing a video game, which is not a fun feeling. Like recognizing that actors are on a set in the middle of the movie.
They also did not really explore what different species could look like. It just felt like any group I could’ve seen in the Milky Way when they had given themselves an excuse to do literally whatever they wanted. Like halo 4 choosing to have me fight the not-covenant again after 3 rounded the story out and gave them a mechanism for dropping the chief literally anywhere at any time.
I also found most of the squadmates to not be very memorable. It felt like they were going out of their way to make sure they didn’t resemble any of the previous ensembles.
That being said, I think the game did an incredible job of not falling into the usual paradigm of “this is the good option, this is the bad option.” There was a lot more nuance to some of the decisions and it really had me stopping and thinking about how I wanted to proceed.
Still, I never finished the game. Got several dozen hours and it was enjoyable enough, but a lot of dropped balls.
Much as I am loath to admit it, Diablo IV did amazing beyond its niche. Anecdotally I saw soooo many people who’d never played Diablo or any game like it get onboard.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
Fine tuning a gameplay loop so people keep playing (and maybe spending money) isn’t as far from designing something to be addicting as most people would like to think. Hence why gaming and gambling addiction dovetail so well.
I think you’ve got some valid points but you’re completely ignoring how countless corporations have invested collectively probably trillions of dollars over decades into how to best reach and sink their talons into us.
Minecraft may be an “accidentally addicting” product (though I’d somewhat dispute it), but iPads sure aren’t just addictive by accident. No tablet is. They’re designed to be from the ground up, like every major social media app and then some.
Parents need to parent, but to act like any of us are on an equal footing with the Facebooks of the world is to completely misunderstand the imbalance of power here.
It is utterly bizarre to me out of all the misnomers and ridiculous (sometimes offensive) terms out there in the media/hobby world, I see “boomer shooter” complained about so much more than any other. This is like the third rant I’ve seen about it in a week.
I thought Twitter and such were making a mountain out of a mole hill with how people responded to the term “Boomer“ in past years but clearly it ruffles peoples feathers way more than it should. Half the time I go through the comment histories and these are the same people that use ableist slurs regularly. I am not suggesting that OP does, I have not looked at their comments. Just a general observation.
I have worked with loobkoob as a moderator on Reddit, discord, etc. and I just want to say they have the temperament and reliability anyone would want in a moderator.
I stumbled across this comment while browsing and felt the need to endorse haha
It's the same thing that happened in tech. People got used to the near-decade of essentially free money. Interest rates were low for a long time, so easy loans, and demands to endlessly/rapidly grow. Now the free money's gone and none of them know how to exercise discretion, so they "trim the fat" of their rapid growth.