kazerniel

kazerniel, 4 days ago

I recall an estimation that about 1/20 players leave a review, but this probably depends a lot on genre and other factors.

kazerniel, 17 days ago

I’m glad for those disclosures (because I’m not touching AI games), but tons of devs don’t disclose their AI usage, even in obvious cases, leaving us to guessing :/

kazerniel, 20 days ago

all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D

They’re essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D

I love the better ones’ environmental art, but I’d be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I’m pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.

EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o

kazerniel, 20 days ago

I guess Genshin also counts. The monetisation is horrible, the character designs are facepalm-worthy, the localisation is so bad it makes me wince, Paimon is the worst, but damn, I love the exploration gameplay, landscapes and music 🤷 (Also it helps that I’m f2p, so at least I’m not supporting Hoyo’s predatory practices…)

kazerniel, 20 days ago

Oh this might be what pushes larger companies to drop kernel level anticheat! That would remove the main reason that keeps my gaming on Windows.

kazerniel, 22 days ago

The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌

kazerniel, 22 days ago

I’ve even come across games, like If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, that is free, but it’s such a great game, that I just had to buy the supporter pack :) (I even waited a bit for it to go off sale :) )

kazerniel, 21 days ago

I read the book’s wiki page, but it doesn’t seem to, besides the title. The game does have a narrative frame of strangers meeting at a masquerade ball on an odd train going through a winter landscape, but most of the game is the self-contained stories of 3 of these travellers, it doesn’t directly talk to the player.

kazerniel, 29 days ago

wow this is really fun!

kazerniel, 1 month ago

The only Ubi game I play is Just Dance Now. Sadly I can’t think of a non-Ubi alternative to that gameplay :/

kazerniel, 1 month ago

Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.

So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c

kazerniel, 1 month ago

And for those who don’t want to play it, but still want to experience its world and themes, HBomberguy made a fascinating 2-hours video essay about the first game: Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why about the first game.

kazerniel, 1 month ago

The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.

Yeah, like I’m glad Linux support is increasing among games, but my main daily driver game (Genshin) still doesn’t support it 🤷 And I don’t think Hoyoverse will be spending work on Linux support when they are raking in so much cash from their millions of players. From what I can see Linux usage hovers around 0.3% in China, and that’s Hoyo’s main market.

kazerniel, 3 months ago

I hope it works out for them!

kazerniel, 3 months ago

I have an example that’s not gay, but trans - one of the two protagonists of Tell Me Why is a trans guy. (The other protagonist is his cisgender twin sister.)

kazerniel, 3 months ago

To me it also kinda rhymes with the way bisexual men vs bisexual women are often regarded in wider society. “Bisexual men are actually gay” while “bisexual women are actually straight”. So only the part of their attraction that relates to men is taken seriously 😐

kazerniel, 5 months ago

I see it as a curved sword handle on top of… idk a set top box 🤣

kazerniel, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Total Count: 999,401. Signatures today: +106,521. Percentage to Goal: 99.94%. Time Left 27d 7h 4m 17s. At yesterday’s rate, the goal will be reached in 1 days (by 04/07/2025). We need at least 23 signatures per day on average!

23 per day atm :D

Edit: and DONE!

kazerniel, 5 months ago

I’m an EU citizen living in the UK, but only signed the UK one because I’m not putting my passport ID into petitions O.o

kazerniel, 5 months ago

Can you link to that other UK petition too pls? :)

kazerniel, 5 months ago

Ah sorry I misunderstood your comment then, I thought there was another one besides that.

kazerniel, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Obsidian backlinks from my daily notes :) Though I use it more often to track my books, as I mostly play endless live service games 😅

I can sort of use my Steam review date stamps too to track what I played, bc I review the vast majority of games I try.

Edit: and in Steam I put the finished/dropped games in their own categories, but my tag setup there is really extensive, so probably not the best example :) (I have at least 5-6 tags on each of my games.)

kazerniel, 6 months ago

In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die

That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it’s still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game’s 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don’t think it will die in our lifetimes.

kazerniel, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Guild Wars 1 - last month celebrated its 20-years anniversary :) I only started it in 2018, but it’s a really solid game!

And both its developer and publisher are committed to keeping it alive as long as they can. It’s been mostly automated in 2013, so apparently it costs very little to keep the servers running.

kazerniel, 7 months ago

had to look it up, 1996, damn that’s an old game xd

kazerniel, 7 months ago

Haha yea I always check out the negative reviews first - either they quickly show that I’d be wasting my time with the game, or the negatives they highlight are actually neutral or positive for me, either way I generally find them better value/time than positive reviews. (Especially when a significant portion of positive reviews are memes, award-begging copypasta, or “best game ever” with no further details.)

kazerniel, 7 months ago

I think Valve severely escalated the problem when they introduced the award system. Now people are extra motivated to cash in a quick laugh, or provoke outrage for the Clown awards. What boggles my mind the most is that hundreds of people give awards to the same copypaste comments that appear under every major game. I sometimes try to report the reviews of the spammiest accounts, but Valve is really hands-off with their moderation. At the end of the day they profit from the points system, and as always, user experience takes a firm second seat to profits :/

kazerniel, 7 months ago

I’m like this with Genshin. I’ve played it for almost 2k hours, love the exploration gameplay, environment graphics and music, but the monetisation system is extremely predatory, and the character designs and writing are bullshit, so overall I still wouldn’t recommend it to others, or only with heavy caveats. But it really scratches my exploration itch, so I’ll keep playing it myself 🤷

kazerniel, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

or as I see in the case of GW2, the game has always been “woke”, but a handful of players manage to not run into any of the LGBT NPCs for hundreds of hours, then freak out when they do 😅

kazerniel, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

hah I ran into this with a tactical RPG. I even got a comment along the lines that I should change my review “because the game is great, I just can’t appreciate it”. I admit this was the first (and probably last) tactical RPG I’ve tried, but still my experiences were valid impressions as a newcomer of the genre 🤷

kazerniel, 7 months ago

sorry to say, but by awarding them, you’re part of the problem by rewarding bad behaviour :|

(I hate the award system, it made the troll reviews problem so much worse)

kazerniel, 7 months ago

My annoyance with the Oblivion remaster is more that, from what I’ve read, this “body type A/B” change does not make a material difference inside the game, as NPCs still refer to your character as male/female. As a trans person my opinion is, either meaningfully rework how gender is handled in the game or just leave it alone, players know what to expect when playing an older game. This UI-level change actually just muddles player expectations.

kazerniel, 8 months ago

Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming?

Consumer boycotts very very rarely work. I’ve never heard of a single successful video game boycott.

How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

Lobby for appropriate legislation with your government representatives. We could have legislation that forces companies to transparently show the chance of specific rewards, and even show the money you have to spend on average to get XY specific item. (I think there is already a law like this in the works in the EU?)

One of the major psychological tricks gambling games (including lootbox and gacha) employ is to obscure the true costs behind premium currencies. Once they are forced to remove this, and you are shown that yes, guaranteed acquisition of a single Genshin character will cost you ~300 USD, it might make you do a double-take before you pull out your bank card. (There are many more psychological dark patterns these developers employ, so it wouldn’t be a single miracle solution, unless of course legislation altogether bans random chance rewards buyable with cash.)

kazerniel, 8 months ago

Yeah the problem with boycotts and “vote with your wallet” is that one whale can offset the boycott of thousands of low-spending players 😐

kazerniel, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I’ll upgrade to 11 Enterprise via massgrave.

Sadly with Adobe and some of my online games not supporting Linux, I have to stick with Windows :/ I’ll just try to disable all the telemetry and AI crap via O&O and group policies.

kazerniel, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

My Steam profile is apparently 30% platinum, 21% gold, 10% varying levels of broken, 39% unrated.

But Genshin Impact, one of my main games, doesn’t even appear on ProtonDB, and as far as I heard you need a custom Linux launcher for it, that results in occasional banwaves, which I will not risk :/ (Edit: if ProtonDB only lists Steam games, that would explain why Genshin is missing.)

kazerniel, 8 months ago

Not OP, but for another data point: recently I did quite a bit of Linux-related research on the three Adobe apps I use (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, in this order of prominence), and they are all reported as some level of broken via Wine and their Linux alternatives are missing important features and/or a pain in the arse to use :/

kazerniel, 8 months ago

Thanks for this link, neat to see that Uncharted Waters Online apparently runs on Linux despite it’s ridiculously strict anti-cheat. (To this day it’s the only game I’ve played that had an issue with Process Explorer running in the background 🤦‍♂️)

kazerniel, 8 months ago

“bought” is an interesting word choice when they used massgrave :D

kazerniel, 8 months ago

O&O Shutup10++ (theoretically works on 11 too)

Not sure what it can do on Home/Pro editions, I’ve only ever tried it on Enterprise.

kazerniel, 8 months ago

No, all the current versions are reported various levels of broken :/ Generally they can’t install, so you have to copy an installation from Windows, then there are some that don’t load at all, some only load to splash screen, some do work after you patch their broken UI and manually copy some Windows DLL-s. So idk, you might get lucky with the specific program/version/feature combo you need, but it just sounds like a pain to me.

kazerniel, 8 months ago

Turned off the aggro on the patrolling demons in Murdered: Soul Suspect, because an otherwise peaceful detective adventure - where you play as a ghost investigating your own murder - really didn’t need the random stressful action sequences 🤷‍♂️ (Sadly you can’t turn off the floor traps, but at least those are stationary.)

kazerniel, 8 months ago

no, but it’s oh my wishlist :)

kazerniel, 10 months ago

It happens every few years when a publisher gets petty:

• steamcommunity.com/groups/…/4157463936692986362
• steamcommunity.com/groups/…/2495505669486891393
• steamcommunity.com/groups/…/2239921952554905285
• steamcommunity.com/groups/…/2736357490467304767

kazerniel, 10 months ago

Yea, but the whole notion that Steam just lets developers do this, sometimes repeatedly…

kazerniel, 1 year ago

that implies that men are witch-er than a female witch? :D

kazerniel, 1 year ago

I “love” how they very carefully avoid making any apology whatsoever.

kazerniel, 1 year ago

There is a difference between passively allowing bad stuff to happen, and actively doing bad stuff.

I don’t see that much difference. They are half-arsed about store and community moderation to such a degree that it feels like deliberate neglect. They chose the responsibility of running a platform, so need to do the job properly. If they need to hire more staff to do it, perhaps they could afford it from their billions of USD revenue.