Chozo

Chozo, rok temu

I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.

Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.

Chozo, rok temu (edited rok temu)

All he claims to be is "a[n] FPS fanatic, social media guru, and a father."

Chozo, rok temu

Now define "claim" (verb).

Chozo, rok temu (edited rok temu)

This is some pretty trash reporting, which is odd considering that Eurogamer usually isn't this bad. But their source for this is a Twitter thread from Luckyy10P? The dude is widely known as the biggest clown in the Destiny community, and every piece of "news" he covers is greatly exaggerated drama that only like three players ever complained about, but he presents as some massive community-wide issue.

Nobody's buying and then cancelling their $100 preorders just to keep one of the most mid guns that Bungie has ever released. Tessellation is not that good of a gun. Maybe it will be good when the catalyst is released in The Final Shape (though you won't be able to even get the catalyst without owning the expansion), but right now pretty much every trusted Destiny community member is confirming that the gun serves little to no real purpose in the current sandbox.

If Eurogamer wants to cover nonsense from Luckyy, they should be inquiring about his child support payments.

Chozo, rok temu

Bungie 100% can remove the gun from people's inventories, but they won't. They're usually pretty hands-off on stuff like this, because your inventory is accessible cross-platform, but your purchased expansions are not. So they'll leave the gun in your inventory because they know that the possibility exists that some people may change their minds on their original purchase and re-buy the expansion for a different platform.

Chozo, rok temu

A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.

Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they're technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won't be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven't already invested time and money into.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn't finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn't available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.

Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it's expected for there to be some overlap. But it's not supposed to go to the point where you literally can't understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced "The Veil" in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.

There's also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever "poison" subclass it was originally going to be, and there's a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called "Deepsight", which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it's clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).

To Bungie's credit, they've made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.

Chozo, rok temu

Yeah, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I'm still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game's flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.

But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They've made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall's downfalls so far, so it's evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they've definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.

Chozo, rok temu

Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was?

Well... sort of. There's still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it's another cosmic entity that's somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there's some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I'm not too sure that they're really the same thing.

They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness's origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0CKckjryVI

Chozo, rok temu

I misread the title and thought you were asking for the best music for piracy. I was gonna suggest Alestorm.

Chozo, rok temu

If you wanna go really casual, there's sites like https://movie-web.app which will let you stream most movies in decent quality.

Chozo, rok temu

You're allowed to do that.

Chozo, rok temu

Valve only cares if you're setting your VPN to a different region to take advantage of differences in currency exchange rates. It used to be really popular to buy the version of a game released for random eastern European countries with poorer economies for a lot less than you'd spend in USD, until Valve started cracking down on that.

As long as any purchases you make from your account are done from the correct country for the content you're buying (and as long as the billing address on your credit card also matches the correct country), the VPN shouldn't set off any red flags or result in any bans.

Chozo, rok temu

Yup, as long as all your Steam Store and payment method settings match the country you're buying from, you should be good. My roommate games on Steam from a VPN all the time and has had no issues in the several years that he's done that (though I don't believe he's using the VPN to change his location, just to hide his IP).

Chozo, rok temu

I think this is in response to the IGN story about developers being afraid of the new standard BG3 is setting.

Chozo, rok temu

It's pretty common for online games that have player-to-player trading systems. The developers are usually very protective of their in-game economies, because while they don't officially support grey markets, they know that the existence of grey markets is the sole reason a huge chunk of players (often whales) play their game in the first place. It's in Blizzard's best interest to ensure that there isn't in-game inflation.

Chozo, rok temu

I think by "some developers", they're referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.

Chozo, rok temu

He's not wrong, though. Game development is a business, like any other, and larger-scale games require exponentially more resources to produce than smaller indie titles.

Obviously one could make the argument "Well they shouldn't be making every single game into a huge, multi-billion dollar blockbuster title that costs the player an arm and a leg to gain access to, then they wouldn't need that amount of resources to begin with", and that would be a fair argument. But ultimately, people keep buying those games, anyway. And not by force, they buy them of their own volition. So those games continue to be profitable. There's no incentive for big studios to change their ways when consumers keep giving them money, so they're going to keep making huge games that require huge resources and huge payments from the players.

Chozo, rok temu

I'm not sure what you mean. Were you offering some sort of insight into what I or the other person was actually saying, or just whining? Some of us are having a conversation here.

Chozo, rok temu

Okay, thanks for sharing that. Much appreciated. Have a nice day, then.

Chozo, rok temu

It might be, but what would that change about the story? Unless Larian is paying other studios to say that they're panicking (which I doubt, for a million reasons), then I'm not so sure there's any difference to the situation.

Chozo, rok temu

I really hate that cross-play is still so hit-or-miss these days. I feel like the only developers who put any effort into it are ones who focus on live service games, and I'd honestly like to see a push away from that model, in general.

Chozo, rok temu

Yeah, and I feel like that's only going to get worse as time goes on as more and more big studios get bought up by console manufacturers. Seeing Bungie and Bethesda and Activision/Blizzard all getting bought up has me worried about exclusivity contracts fracturing what was fairly recently a thriving console market.

Chozo, rok temu

What fire hazard? All bedding made in most parts of the world made in the last 50 years or so are made of very fire-retardant materials. It's actually really hard to set a bed on fire these days.

Chozo, rok temu

Sounds like the app is just poorly optimized, because sleep tracking with the screen off has been doable on Android for years now, and I assume it's the same for iOS sleep trackers, as well.

Chozo, rok temu

Nah, you can take a blowtorch to a modern mattress and you'll burn a hole through it, but it won't catch fire and spread at all.

In fact, that's literally how they test the flame retardant abilities of a mattress; it has to withstand at least 70 seconds of a blowtorch from a foot away. If the fire spreads, it's a fail. That's how most mattresses are tested under the 16 CFR 1640 standard.

Chozo, rok temu

Nope, all bedding materials have to undergo the same testing for flame resistance. This includes sheets, blankets, pillow cases, etc. Without the aid of any sort of accelerant, the most that'll happen is you'll get some smoke and charred bits.

Now granted, more people these days are buying bedding materials from Amazon sellers that may not be complying with US laws on these fire standards, so the risk is a bit higher if you're buying online from sellers you don't know. Which is why I always encourage people to NOT buy their bedding materials on Amazon, and instead but directly from a retailer in the US.

Chozo, rok temu

I agree, this is such a dangerously stupid move by Ubisoft.

I can only hope that this is just a mistake with an intern on their social account misinterpreting the ToS and that this isn't something Ubi plans to enforce. But damn, is it a bad look for them. Which is a shame, because they've been doing some decent work at improving their image as of late, too.

Chozo, rok temu

I wouldn’t be surprised if they can even let it expire by simple deciding to no longer support it.

That's one thing, and that's an acceptable risk everyone takes when buying from an online storefront, IMO. Eventually, they're going to stop supporting that, and we all kind of accept and agree to that. But this is them cutting off your access because you haven't played recently. They're not dropping support for the games in question, so this feels a bit unwarranted. What does it actually cost them to store your game license and save file? Is that cost really offset by the price of the games, themselves?

And what do you think will happen if their license servers ever go offline?

If Google Stadia is to be considered precedent, they refunded every purchased game and DLC when they shut down their service earlier this year. I should hope that a similar offering is made from other storefronts should they ever decide to cease operations.

Chozo, rok temu

This is one of the opinions of all time.

Chozo, rok temu

Oh man, last one that made me do that was probably Zork III. I was hand-drawing my own maps to navigate that game. I miss those days.

Chozo, rok temu

Maybe you actually were a misthios in a past life. You don't happen to have any estranged siblings, by chance?

Chozo, rok temu

The fact that I can open up ChatGPT right now and say "Write a Kotaku article about why Tetris is racist" and get a 100% believable result out of it should be a sign that they've been replaceable for a while now.