Carighan

Carighan, 8 days ago

I would have said I can’t be any more disappointed with this company, wow.

Carighan, 8 days ago

… And still could bit fix that some keys are hardcoded. But I agree, with expansion the game was quite enjoyable.

Carighan, 12 days ago

Chariot archers > horse archers

Carighan, 12 days ago

I love how this continues to crank out articles with 0 information and everyone speculating what it might be about.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo are dickheads, but you can clearly see how everyone greedily clicks on these articles considering how often they get rehashed.

Carighan, 12 days ago

Aye, let’s agree to respect each other’s opinion. No matter how wrong yours might be.

(joking of course, I actually like 2 a lot despite how clearly unfinished and rushed it was, although I really really disliked 3 except for the romances and the character interactions)

Carighan, 12 days ago

because the creators using it to hide their bad games

How does this work in particular? The hiding bit? Doesn’t it actually draw attention, considering how many people then spam “OMG SO WOKE!11!!angry!!” and so on threads everywhere?

Carighan, 12 days ago

Aye, it has become another dogwhistle of the weirdo alt right crowd. It’s kinda helpful because whenever you see someone use it unironically, you can just safely block/ban them at no loss of conversation.

Carighan, 12 days ago

I have one problem with this:

slams

… siiiiigh

Carighan, 12 days ago

When they have no good material, they start to promote unrelated things to gameplay. This is just one of those things.

Didn’t YOU just say that people focus on the visuals of characters? As in, something unrelated to gameplay?

Carighan, 12 days ago

Visuals are part of the experience, it’s not unrelated.

Why? Or rather, why this, but apparently not your character or their back story?

There are a lot of good games that can be considered as “woke” and no one talk about them like this.

[citation needed]

Carighan, 12 days ago

It’s a very overused and absolutely terrible use of a word.

For two reasons:

1. It has a predefined meaning, and if you read what the DA creators say, they’re not actually “slamming” it. While they’re pretty openly hostile - and for good reason - that’s a far cry from what someone “slamming” someone else or a quote would be.
2. It’s inclusion in the headline is for sensationalism, which would not be needed as the “You’re an idiot!”-quote already does that. Or maybe it’s just surprising how desensitivized people on the net are nowadays.

To think it further, consider the whole headline had been slam-ified:

Dragon Age GOATs slam “woke” lollerz: “Cry moar!”

Carighan, 12 days ago

So “woke” means all of the following together, trying to summarize:

• A game includes anything related to LGBTQ+ or political left-leaning ideology.
• The above is presented via non-gameplay elements. It’s fine if its in the gameplay.
• The game was a commercial flop or critically panned.

Did I sum that up correctly?

Carighan, 12 days ago

So this then begs the question, why are people decrying games as “woke” trying so hard to push their political agenda into gaming discussions? After all, as per point 1 + point 3, the game was already criticized/panned anyways, then someone came in and tries to push the critique onto a political level instead of a game one.

Carighan, 12 days ago

So after immediately getting it and going through a few settlements, wow did this patch break my muscle memory hard.

I was panicked-looking for my Geyser Pumps and my Rain Collectors. (they’re under gathering now)
The new stuff seems all awesome. Fishing Huts are an interesting change of pace since you can haul in the nets early but that instantly depletes the node. Frogs are fascinating and a giant headache, being unable to be housed in non-specialized homes. The change on Foxes to no longer be rainwater-specialized makes the races feel more balanced. The new recipe combinations are weird as hell (again, all muscle memory gone) but seem balanced so far.

All very nice. Am impressed.

Carighan, 12 days ago

Why would firing DEI consultants improve the work?

And if you want to have lgbtq characters, then do it like borderlands 2, that game got it right in 2012.

In what particular way do they differ?

Carighan, 12 days ago

Because things like black protagonists with hip-hop music in the background make no sense in a feudal japanese setting and people are sick of games being abused as vehicles for morality preaching.

But games about dudes in medieval-looking sci-fo power armor stomping around WW1-styled soldiers do?

And that doesn’t preach any morals? But a black guy in a samurai setting does? How come one does, but the other does not?

Also…

An example from borderlanfs two could be Sir Hammerlock, who was introduced as a normal (for borderlands) character early on and later in a side quest was revealed to be gay in passing.

Maybe don’t make it as readily apparent how much you internalized gayness being abnormal. Telling. You wouldn’t write sentences like this if that wasn’t a normal thought process for you, since you did probably not have to actively consider your wording.

Carighan, 12 days ago

But like you say, if you want to normalize it, shouldn’t it be front and center then? Since that’s part of being normal, also being front and center?

Carighan, 12 days ago

It cannot be front and center and normal at the same time.

Why not? If it’s normal, any possible identity and any possible element will be front and center every so often, no? That’s what normality means after all? Something has to be front and center, and if everything is normal, everything will appear there repeatedly?

Carighan, 10 days ago

Ah yes, I hate being butchered that way, too. It sucks hard to be paid to leave before you get paid extra to start your next job elsewhere.

And don’t get me wrong, if the C-suites actually ever had to take actual responsibility for their fuck-ups, I’d be all for those board investigations. But they don’t. They get paid enough to not care about interims between jobs - just look at the CEO who said people can just spend a year on the beach or so if they’ve been laid off - plus they get paid extra both on the leaving and on the re-hiring.

If they had to pay all non-salary money back on fucking up, even retroactively, no matter how many Porsches they’d have to liquidate to get the money from X years of fucking up the company back, sure. Do it. But that’s just sadly not the case. For a C-suite, this just means changing what name is written under your name, and moving on to the next place you can grift.

Carighan, 14 days ago

I mean, “cozy games” isn’t really a genre.

What are we talking about? Stardew Valley like farming sims? Zero-gameplay diorama builders? VNs with happy contexts? These are all so wildly divergent.

Carighan, 15 days ago

They said to get her own game. Not her own interactive nightmare.

Carighan, 15 days ago

Sounds positive. Not quite a BotW/TotK-banger, but I didn’t expect such a quirky concept to score big on the first outing. Only spotted one truly critical review in there, and even that was more “It’s a neat idea, but doesn’t truly pan out all that well”.

Definitely getting this. Exciting!

Carighan, 16 days ago

If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.

Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.

This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.

Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.

Carighan, 18 days ago

I would say that if you non-jokingly talk like that, you got bigger issues than any specific gaming sites or which consultants are brought in to work on which game.

Carighan, 19 days ago

It’s a fair bit dated low, but also by far the best of the three IMO.

The second was quite good in a lot of ways but also very obviously super rushed and partially unfinished.

And then the third was just a sad grindathon with a Dragon Age mask pulled over it. Some good ideas again but covered in the worst gameplay of the three.

Carighan, 21 days ago

That’s genuinely not as simple as you think it is. You realize there was a time before modern patent law, yes?

Carighan, 21 days ago

Yeah but again, not a copyright lawsuit.

Carighan, 21 days ago

Sure, but how do you solve the problems that patents in turn solved (and brought new problems with them of course)? That as kinda my point, if we just ban patents we can just look back to know which problems we need to solve in another way.

Carighan, 22 days ago

There’s already a fan-made fix to add things such as FoV and ultrawide and framegen support.

Carighan, 24 days ago

It’s 2024, and we still assign significance to streamers and stream viewers. No wonder the world is going to shit as fast as it is…

Carighan, 25 days ago

Ah sad, it’s just a teaser. Looks nice, but was hoping there’d be an actual introduction.

Carighan, 26 days ago

Fascinating. Would have never guessed this was worth fifty million.

Carighan, 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

Yeah but why would you want to finish a game as a dev nowadays? You get paid for your early beta releases (= “early access”), not for finishing it from there.

Carighan, 28 days ago

SLAMMED!

Love how terrible writing has become. 😂

Carighan, 28 days ago

24 years ago, I decided that instead of going into video game development like I had always dreamt of in school, I’ll go into business software because at the time there was only one nearby game studio (Blue Byte), they weren’t looking to hire in the next few years and I wasn’t really willing to move very far at the time.

Looking back, that decision was one of the best branching-path decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

Thanks, Blue Byte! Indirectly you got me an amazing job! 🥂

Carighan, 1 month ago

Note that since you claim the DLC permanently on GamePass, it’s cheaper to get it via that especially if you still got a free or €1 GamePass month or three about.

Carighan, 1 month ago

It’s… okay?

It’s a bit hard to describe. Overwatch 1 was a bit magical when it came out. It was the WoW of team FPS. Everyone (and their mother) played it. This made it this fascinating thing where your default way of hanging out with friends would be to be on voicechat and chat away while playing OW.
It’s unbalanced and ridiculous cadre of character loadouts also enabled just about everyone to play the game. Do they have amazing reflexes? Give them Genji or Hanzo. Do they have damn awesome aim? Hanzi, Widow, Cassidy (McCree at the time). Do they not have aim worth speaking of? Symmetra, Mercy, Bastion, Reinhardt, lots of options in fact. So you could always talk friends into buying it, and they’d enjoy it!

Now, of course, as such as game ages, players get better and better at exploiting the imbalances, so naturally there’s a bigger pressure on balancing.

But the crucial breaking point IMO came not with OW2, but a long time before that. When this need for more balancing arose, instead of embracing the ridiculous nature of many character loadouts, Blizzard worked against it. In their desire to become the biggest esport, they saw a need to make every character as skill-based as possible, to focus on individual player contributions and individual aim and reflexes. Lots and lots and lots and lots of balance changes slowly pushed the overall core of the game from first being about finding out who you as a player are, then picking a character fitting you, to having to mold yourself into “an FPS player”, because even Torbjörn, Symmetra, Bastion and Pharah need to aim quite a bit now.

And as this progressed, I could see my friends drifting away from the game. The game became effort to play. Not something you can have in the background while spending an evening chatting along on Discord, catching up. And Overwatch was at its core this social thing, so once some drifted off, so did more and more. And eventually, so did I.

Overwatch 2 was merely… how do I say… the end of this chrysalis stage of Overwatch’s life? What emerged from it was the final form of a more esports and twitch-aim-centric game. Gone were the double tanks leading to extremely slow kill times (which in turn meant players who lacked the reflexes to engage in twitch-gunning no longer had the time needed to react to anything), with it gone were the days of cohesive teams where everyone had a singular role, instead you needed to first and foremost be able to fend for and defend yourself, only then would you integrate with the team. Because otherwise you were long dead already.
But this was merely the result of finalizing the change that began all the way back with early post-release OW1 balancing.

IMO, OW1 could have been an absolutely fantastic social lightweight team FPS, if they had embraces the chaos and non-FPS-y nature of much of it. Instead they abolished it. OW2 is but a shadow of this former glory. It’s a decent enough team FPS, but eh, it’s also nothing special any more.

Carighan, 1 month ago

I mean, yeah? ATI was great as a budget alternative, less performance but more value. Please go back to that!

Carighan, 1 month ago

That’s mostly down to a legal thing if I remember? And last time I read about it, related to a non-english language and in that case I have fuck all Idea how to judge whether splitting rape into two words for it makes sense or not. Sounds wrong to me, but I’m not someone to judge that.

But yeah other than that, agreed.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Live service, as in: you better watch it live or you’ll have missed it! 😅

Carighan, 1 month ago

Yeah. I love my 8bitdo Ultimate for PC use (and it just so happens to be extremely close to the Switch Pro in layout and sizing) but the actual thing is still works better in raw quality. Except no hall effect joysticks but eh, could always mod it yourself if you’re so inclined.