Carighan

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I’m sorry, but gaming isn’t a religion. To me at least. I don’t out “faith” into developers or games.

I wait for reviews and check some videos and hey, if it looks neat I’ll buy it. If it then turns out to be crap I’ll refund it. And if the same studio or franchise has turned out disappointed or bad stuff before, I need to be more impressed by reviews before considering a purchase.

The only thing I’d buy on faith is a wedding ring for a church wedding, tbh… (And I’m not in any church , so chances are low 😛)

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

So little we know, but just based on her previous stuff I’m tentatively excited. Hope she gets to finish this and doesn’t have it ripped out beneath her.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Damn.

This seems to be down to “do you like Ubisoft games” (the genre)? If yes, you’ll love this. If not, you’ll be bored out of your mind.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Wondering the same thing. From the aesthetics I was originally really excited about it, then it came out to tepid reviews and I was busy player other games at the time anyways so I completely forgot about it.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Embracer has truly advanced to the Extinguisher stage. :<

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Although I will say that by now the goalpost has long moved from 60 FPS and you really want to be aiming at 144 or more. That being said, without raytracing on - which is mostly disappointing anyways - there are some really high framerates achieveable by now.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Pretty good examples for how disappointing it is, tbh aye.

If you told me both sides were different settings of baked lighting, I’d instantly believe it. Sure, the RT looks like it is the higher quality one, but it doesn’t feel like a cyberpunk game with raytracing should “pop”. Good scenes are for it when driving around at night with wet streets. That gives the proper cyberpunk feel. But that’s about the only scenario where I’ve seen it truly work magic.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Ah yeah, definitely.

As someone who personally enjoys a told story more than a lot of directionless freedom (because I get bored after a few dozen hours, so I want the game to get its thing told and then I’m ready for the next game, basically) I of course enjoyed Geralt’s directed character more, but the two are definitely incompatible at a very basic level.

And honestly, none is inherently better, though I wish studios understood more readily just how different the underlying approach is. If someone creates a defined story then give me those fully defined characters. Give me a cool story through which I learn of them. With a few surprises. Make it like a book! On the other hand, if something is freeform, then go hard the opposite way. Make it sandbox-y! Allow me to create narrative myself through what I do, don’t hold my hand and try to guide me back onto rails.

(That is, the main story was just about the part I enjoyed the least in CP2077 next to the bugs, and I really don’t think V’s character fits the gameplay and what we players do in it very well. V is an interesting character, but not for an open world do-whatever-you-want game, and the game they created doesn’t fit a character that is supposed to have a specific design very well.)

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

As long as laws don’t constrain this rampant drive for short-term profit maximisation, and as long as laws permit the only truly valuable customer to be the shareholders and the C-suite’s own bonus programs, this won’t ever change.

Which in turn also already implies what needs to happen: Companies need to be prevented from caring more about the above two groups than the actual workers.

But this is difficult to pull off. The CEO (etc) should ultimately have the responsibility for the overall direction, but directly tieing them to the stability fo the workforce is tricky. It would be a way of doing it, of course. As in, loss of income of individual workers is directly judged against whatever payment/share program the C-suite managers enjoy, making them directly reponsible for not fostering an environment in which regular mass-layoffs are desirable.
Likewise, if shares automatically lost value whenever personel cost is cut (instead of gaining), firing workers would be heavily discouraged as it would decrease short-term profits and (correctly) flag a destabilizing event in the company.

All really tricky though, especially on an international level. But something ought to happen to keep this shit in check.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Master Chief, Conker, Commander Keen and Vault Boy in Heroes of the Storm, got it!

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

It’s FROM, they still loathe PCs on a personal level. Or at least it always feels that way. They get ordered to release on PC, and they do, but they curse them every step of the way and fuck it up as much as they can without getting fired.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

“GamePass Deck you say?” <– MS Exec

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Puuuh, a fair few over the years.

• Same one as you, Rosalina’s backstory made me tear up a little bit. It was really really well done, and so unexpected in a Mario game of all places.
• When first reading through Katawa Shoujo, Shizune’s path (botched as it is) still hit me really hard with Misha being an aside that can’t fit in, then later Rin’s neutral ending also got me really bad.
• Teenage me at the end of disc 1 of FF7, of course.
• The ending of Signalis just recently.

And probably a lot more. FFXIV has a lot of sad and emotional moments, although none of them hit me quite as hard as some other games did.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Cyberpunk’s patching has showed me that ~1-1,5 years after release is a really good time to jump in.

By which time, between patches and mods, the worst stuff is dealt with and the experience can be really nice, if a bit tepid due to bad design decisions that mods cannot fix. Still, enjoyable game after patches and at a discount.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Not sure I’ll be into Ciri based gameplay.

I’d love that. Sure they’d have to really re-do her combat style since it was only a brief intermission before, but it feels natural to progress to her eventually. And honestly, it’s high time Geralt takes a bow after 3 games as big as they are, and as awesome as those were. Exit before they eventually ruin him. 😅

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

That sounds really bad on paper, tbh. The cool parts about the player character all stem from how it’s a defined person with an existing personality and place in the world. If it becomes Skyrim: Witcher Edition, we’d probably also inherit the shallow~inexistent storytelling of that.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah but one of the biggest pitfalls is seeing another company catch lightning in a bottle, then thinking that this can be freely recreated. Just that BG3 could do a user-created character with a good story does not at all imply that any other company can do it. Nevermind will. Or even that Larian can do it again.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Starfield, the epitome of scientifically correcty simulations. Why would I expcet my Starship Travel Simulator 2000 to be a fun-focused game after all, durr.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I tried the demo months ago, and this is one of my big hype games for December.

It’s so relaxed! And on top of that, it oozes style the same way the other Steamworld games do. And it sounds like they added a whole lot to it.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Unchecked “free market” capitalism, if I had to guess.

Companies should never have been able to run outside of a very tight yoke. Yeah sure, capitalism. But not unchecked and especially not unchecked-across-borders so they can start escaping shit by moving legal entities around. Oh and speaking of that, maybe “corporations as entities” is another really really big one we fucked up, allowing the people who make the truly shitty decisions to shirk responsibility for them.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Damn, I’d get not a single recommendation. That’d be wild. 🤣

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

If 30% we’re too high, surely just by offering a competitor that takes a lot less if a cut (say, 12,%), developers would flock to thst competitor because it saves them so much money, right?

Right, Sweeney?

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Plus, since he’s just testifying, it sucks on a climate level to make him jet around for absolutely no reason, too.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

New idea:

Whenever a company wants to drop X workers, the first Y people of that have to be the C-suites, and they cannot get a parachute. They leave just on the last pay they received regularly, no bonuses or anything.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Oh course, and I’m half joking. But something has to be done about execs stuffing their own arse full with all the bank notes they get from mass layoffs, when that money could easily keep some of those workers employed.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I would argue that a runtime of 3 years is fantastic, and if it isn’t that’s just indicative of an industry that is broken at its very core.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Oh that’s awesome, I have been meaning to get into this. And I still will, though right now Signalis, Tunic and Persona 5 Tactica are first on the list. 😅 Too many games, too many sales.

I tried the free demo on the Switch though, and really liked it. The art style easily carries what would otherwise be a good but not stellar game.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Fantastic news!

I highly recommend this game if you enjoy"work" type games, here you slice up ships in space and chuck them into the correct bins.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah, and there’s a fair few routes they could go with this.

My favorite would probably be dedicated co-op, with variable player counts. That is, from 2 people where it’s two very different multi-role characters up to 4-6 where everyone only has a single role.

It would just be quite difficult to design every ship so it has enough to do for everyone, but it’d allow for much bigger and much more detailed ship layouts if multiple people of varying specialized roles are working on it simultaneously.

Alternatively, and maybe I’d love that even more, super large ships that are separated into “sectors”. You can see other players working next to you, and if you aren’t in a game with someone else, you’ll see random other players there.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah this sounds like modern serials, end everything on a cliffhanger and never commit to anything. Which was basically their problem already.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I really don’t agree with: get stronger must also have world get more difficult. This is how you get scaling difficulty, where you never feel like you’re going anywhere, because every upgrade is made pointless by enemies just becoming more dangerous in turn.

But in the other case - you get stronger but the world doesn’t get stronger around you, say you keep fighting the exact same lame enemies as in the beginning - then why even continue playing?

The greatest challenge was right at the start. Unless the later parts are exceedingly brief, just letting you bow out on a power rush, why have all those later parts that just end up being trivial?
Shouldn’t the former difficult enemies at least become the trash and new, tougher, enemies get introduced to uphold the difficulty as your new abilities and upgrades make the old ones trivial?

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

This is the weird version that’ll not have the portable content at all, right? That’s such a shame, this could have easily been the definitive version if they made a Persona 3 Portable Reload.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I wouldn’t trust shit either of these two companies argues.

This is probably technically correct, but in some really constructed way. And the reply by the Google lawyers will again be technically correct, but again be utter horseshit in some legal manner.

Suffice to say, people spend a lot on mobile apps. A lot.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

No, got it after that - previous - update. Might be a slow rollout thing.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah I noticed the past two days already that it answers with an LLM, and that of course gets stuff wrong quite frequently.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

No i don’t, because my phone doesn’t have an OLED screen. Easy fix.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.

And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

That’s probably because the definition is a personal one. In the very literal sense of the word, a headline baiting you into clicking onto it needlessly is clickbait. It baited you into clicking.

And while the author is free to use a very narrow definition, it’s entirely reasonable - and has as far as I can tell become the norm - to define it as any headline where the article only says something that would have trivially fit into the headline to begin with.

So for example, this very article could be better titled “Clickbait has made video game headlines exhausting to read”, and without being longer it would convey the crucial part of information - why is it exhausting?! - without someone having to first open and scan the article. Which, if the article were well-written, they’d still want to do, assuming the subject matter is of interest to them.
And that’s the thing: clickbait precludes being allowed this choice. By not telling you the crucial piece of information, you are forced to open the article (generating ad impressions!) to find out whether you want to read it or not, often wasting time diagonally scanning said article.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Well calling Starfield impressive but also immediately-boring would be a massive understatement.

It almost feels like a benchmark. With all the gameplay depth and immersion that goes along with running one. It’s not bad at what it does, quite the opposite in fact. It’s stellar. But there’s just so little to it, despite the massive world fulll of blips and bits. It’s Skyrim driven to an insane extreme: Even wider, even grander, even more impressive. And even more shallow. Much more shallow.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah I was confused by that, too.

Isn’t this like the Steam “awards” were beyond maybe some laughing about how silly the whole procedure is, nobody cares?

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah, unless it’s a specific fundraiser (as in, “We match all external donations up to X”), there’s no reason not to donate directly, in particular for cases where it’s easy enough to find a charity to directly support that isn’t someone’s personal tax deduction scheme.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

The accusation is not that the money has not been donated now, however. It is that the money has been sitting around since 2014, while happily paying themselves “expenses” from it.

It’s just a mix of an externally paid expenses account + a tax writeoff for the years 2014-2022, so even iff the money has now been donated, that doesn’t excuse the previous 8 years and in fact, you can’t shirk legal responsibility that way.

Carighan, 11 miesięcy temu

Yeah he had no qualms with 12k-30k annually being taken out for “expenses”.