Achievement % stats are so comically skewed by various factors that they mean basically nothing. There’s an achievement in Minecraft for literally just opening your inventory for the first time but only 60% of Xbox players have it.
That achievement is likely to gather more accurate statistics due to the problems you mention. The Amid Evil devs can now confidently say that 12.7% of players who own the game have never started it. Meaning they can subtract that number from other achievement percentages to get a better idea of how many people are progressing certain ways.
The same is likely true for Minecraft’s inventory achievement, though that’s slightly less useful, as some players may make it a little further without opening the inventory and then stop forever.
Leaving the first planet in Stafield takes a little more effort, but not much. It’s safe to say that some of the 25% of players who haven’t done it haven’t ever opened the game. But that number will probably be close to 10%.
Steam does not count games that have never been launched. For 12.7% of the players the game probably quit under a bit different circumstances: game crashed or they lost internet connectivity.
“Luck be a Landlord is a roguelike deckbuilder about using a slot machine to earn rent money and defeat capitalism. This game does not contain any real-world currency gambling or microtransactions.”
For those curious about the game. Game details from Metacritic.
Really, Luck Be A Landlord just needs to call them ‘duty free luck draws’ or something. Or disguise the slots as horse races. Gambling is rampant in places like the UAE, it’s just gamed,(haw). So that’s all LBAL would need to do. I doubt it’s worth the effort for the sales in the countries banning it though.
What about Vampire Survivors, as well as numerous other games, using spinners or other slot-machine-like animations to represent RPG drops? Should all of these games be banned for the same reason? If anything, many of these better re-create the slot machine experience with their flashy effects and more substantial results.
But if their primary gameplay is a slot machine simulator, then yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re also banned.
Although people who play a lot of mobile games would explain the type of replies I’m getting. So it probably wasn’t intentional, but you did help, thanks!
These aren’t mobile games, they’re desktop games, and this isn’t anything new. These same themes and effects have been used for decades. As someone else points out, even the retro Mario games have you use spinners and slot machines. RNG is exciting and helps make a fun and engaging game. I mean, by that same logic, a game like Catan should be banned because one of its primary mechanics is just being rewarded for favorable dice rolls, as you would be when gambling on dice.
There is a metric fuckton of slot machine games on the playstore. This game, which isn’t gambling, is being limited while other slot machine games aren’t.
It would be different if the policy was applied equally to other apps as well.
And a slot machine simulator is not actually gambling. Gambling is the wagering of something of value (“the stakes”) on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. (Wikipedia) . If you are not paying or receiving money you are not gambling. You are just playing a game.
Present evidence that fake gambling causes real gambling. Not evidence that it actives dopamine receptors. Actual gambling.
Fantasy and fiction don’t cause maladaptive behavior. One day society will accept that this is still true for audiovisual media, just as it had to be slowly accepted for music, just as it had to be slowly accepted for books.
Similar to some countries banning games that depict skulls or blood, these countries have banned games that depict gambling. This is different from banning games that contain loot boxes or actual gambling.
The only loot boxes in Borderlands are the actual boxes of loot you find in the game world playing the game like any other box of loot in an RPG. Unless there’s a new one I haven’t heard of that contains MTX loot boxes.
Google “Borderlands Golden Keys”. Been in the game since BL2 and was causing a stink even back then. Sure there is nothing exclusive to the Golden Chests (that I know of), but they are a quintessential Lootbox.
You mean the event exclusive shit you don’t actually have to pay for (outside of attending the events/seeing social media posts/the few that come with a DLC pack)?
Per Gearbox’s official site for the game:
How do I get Golden Keys? Golden Keys can only be unlocked by redeeming SHiFT codes. You can get SHiFT codes from official Gearbox sponsored events and social media accounts.
The only loot boxes in Borderlands are the actual boxes of loot you find in the game world playing the game like any other box of loot in an RPG. Unless there’s a new one I haven’t heard of that contains MTX loot boxes.
It sounds like you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Have you ever actually played any of the Borderlands games? Or are you like @Detheroth and considering the event/pre-order exclusive codes needed to unlock golden keys as a lootbox, despite them not actually selling them for money? FFS, you can cheat to obtain these things by just copying your save file, since they’re stored locally on your profile.
If you had argued over the season pass shit, you’d have somewhat of a point, though not anything to do with gambling. But you decided to focus on lootboxes.
Anybody who has played the game will know how much of a dumbass take this is. It’s no more a “slot machine simulator” than Doom is a “military training simulator”.
Star Fox has a secret level with a slot machine as a boss and the only way to beat it is to successfully get a jackpot. It’s as much of a gambling sim as this dude’s game is.
His is less gambling. In starfox, it’s purely random. In his game, you strategically select the symbols that can appear on the machine to make combos more or less likely.
My friend told me about this earlier and that’s exactly what I thought. They knew this wouldn’t be popular and would drop the value so they sold before the announcement, that’s got to be insider trading
Now the share price will drop and he will buy his share back at a discount. Then they will revert the policy and share prices will rise. Boom! Free monies!
I think the part where they had a trend of selling over the course of a year makes this not insider trading (or harder to prove if they were playing the long game).
They probably have automated sell of dates or automated sell of prices.
This is part of a consistent pattern over the last year.
He probably hasn’t bought any stocks due to receiving stock as part of his employment contract.
It could be insider trading, but considering how companies have been doing pricing structures and rapid shifts from free to subscription based and then seeing sales/profit increase I imagine it’s worth it for them to simply keep the stock long term, but an initial sell off was put in place at a certain price. Sometimes there’s smoke and there’s fire, and sometimes it’s just simply the fumes of capitalism creating a system that’s uniquely imbalanced for everyone else, but isn’t really insider trading.
I feel like a scheduled sell shouldn’t mean insider trading investigation is off the table.
Does it really matter if they decided to sell just before they devalue their company, or they devalued their company right after a sell? They knew about both before hand, and they can have the same intent either way.
I suppose, but that’s a different crime under a different statute Im guessing. (Tanking the company because gou have a scheduled sell, versus selling because you tanked the company.)
They’ve been consistently selling off stock for the last year as noted in the article. Many of these execs get paid in a combination of cash and shares. To get their full wage they sell shares.
No, as the article says they’ve been doing it all year. Many execs and important employees often get paid a big chunk of their wage in stock. To get cash they need to sell stock.
I’ve worked on older projects such as 2019 and overall they all work very similar, so I’m assuming people will still start projects on 2020/2021 LTS given they’re fairly stable
The only thing I’d be keen on in be versions of unity would be if they came with better versions of FSR / DLSS baked in, instead of having to wait on third party addons
"I'm old, stubborn, don't know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning." - Todd Howard
Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda's decades-old problems.
Edit: I'm looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.
AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what’s going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.
It’s not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You’re moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.
Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don’t think “hurr durr Todd Howard old” is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here
My current management has no idea as well and it has made it impossible to get anything done. We have 3 status meetings per day, with 3 different audiences, led my 3 different people, for 1 project. And we have multiple projects going on being managed like that. We have more managers and PMs than developers working on stuff. They have left 0 time to do any real deep work. If they’d leave everyone alone for even a couple days per week productivity would soar.
I have slowly faded away from those daily meetings and my rate to address issues increased. Working and supporting 2 different projects while doing extra research topics to future proof our tech or migration path. I do still have those weekly meeting though but my work pace have been better without the daily ones.
Even my manager ask me today if I want to do the biweekly checkup or skip, “well, we did the weekly this morning so I see no point of doing the biweekly.” “Sure, let’s skip.”
Now if I can have my own status board and progress bar on a internal page and tag it with my slack profile, maybe I can skip all the meeting?
There is some truth to remote being worse for engineers especially less experienced programmers that can’t talk to more senior programmers face to face.
This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
Sure, the technology is available and it works well (mostly). But people are not machines, and in my experience quite a lot of them are not as comfortable communicating through chat and webcams as they are in person. Older people in particular don’t really get that they can be used for quick, informal conversations, and only use them for preplanned meetings.
So am I :) The “older people” in my comment refer to my former boss and colleagues, and their reluctance to adapt to a remote working environment was a major reason for my departure towards more remote-friendly pastures.
For sure, there were other issues, which were amplified by the distance and the lack of communication. Point is you can come up with the best technical solution to a problem, but at the end of the day if the people aren’t able or willing to adapt, there’s not much you can do except fire them (which I couldn’t) or move on (which I did).
I strongly disagree, I am a software engineer, have worked on the field for over a decade, while I understand that’s not enough to be one of the extremely senior developers but nevertheless I’m a senior software engineer that can answer any and all questions posed from a beginner or even a mid leven engineer. The company I work for pairs developers when they first join so you have someone who’s expected to be there to answer anything, this creates a positive climate and makes new joiners feel safe to come and ask questions, which in the long run makes them feel comfortable with doing the same.
When you send a message to someone on slack he can finish what he’s doing then respond, on an office setting the question will cut your thought line and cause you to lose track of what you were doing. Back when I worked at the office there were days I couldn’t get any work done because after 30min of investigation someone asked me something, then I had to redo the full backtrack of what I was doing only to be interrupted again for something stupid like shown a meme or be asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. The company I worked before my current one got so efficient during COVID that there wasn’t any work left to do, the managers had planned a year worth of projects and we finished them in a few months and they had to rush to try to find things for us to do. However working from home makes micromanaging harder, so managers who want to micromanage make everyone’s life harder (including their own), and then complain that the engineers are producing less.
100% is way too subjective to claim, if I ask someone something and I can review the semantics of how they worded it as many times as I need, I’ll definitely understand it better than if told me it in person and my ADHD brain just missed it
It’s not a standard xbox controller. There’s a gyro with several ways to handle it, including flick, which does take a little time to get used to, but works really well as a mouse substitution for such an environment. Some people are just that good with a thumbstick as well and can easily enjoy casual gamemodes.
Steam Deck is a capable beast, even for a game like Counter-Strike.
The same was said about the steam controller, but in the end it was still shit compared to a mouse. It's just not feasible in a game as competitive as csgo.
It’s not for everyone, but calling it shit just because it doesn’t work easily for your liking is
a bit much since it’s still usable to some. I beat plethora of shooters on gyro and it wasn’t that much harder than playing on mouse once I got used to it.
Eh, people always say this yet data shows it’s not true. Many competitive games have had controller vs m+k and found no discernible advantage. Halo for one, gears of war is another I remember.
I play with an elite controller and I have had zero problem winning and going mvp against m+k players in any game I’ve played. I play PUBG where m+k use is rampant and I still maintain a 30-40% win rate in squads, often in 2 man squads.
CS:GO is dead, though, and neither of the popular and beloved entries to the series was ever solely focused on the competitive scene - the community and the casual fun also matter in the world of Counter-Strike, and that’s one of its parts that can be enjoyed on a controller just fine. Of course I don’t expect to be able to perform just as well or better than the M+K players when playing on a controller, regardless of its gyro capabilities, especially in the competitive modes. Counter-Strike is just much more than just a competitive game.
At its core, CS is a competitive shooter. Having casual maps and modes is fun but the game should not cater to this play mode. If valve tries to make it casual friendly they will disappoint the competitive players and will not be able to compete with other casual shooters.
Basically I don’t want then to cater too much to the casual scene
CSGO was made entirely for the purpose of being a console game, no body played it on console so they abandoned it
You are perfectly capable of setting on the couch at any time. The computer does not stop this. You are actively making the decision to not sit on a couch, as an adult you’re allowed to do this.
Of course, I don’t doubt that. But someone with say 500 hours in csgo playing with keyboard mouse will absolutely destroy someone with 500 hours playing with sticks/gyro. But honestly I can’t think of a single streamer or pro that doesn’t use keyboard mouse
Small adjustments from rotating a controller will never be nearly as precise as moving a mouse.
Fast flicking wide turns is going to be far too slow even at the fastest joystick speed, which would screw up aiming in other ways as well
Strafing would be very limited even if you somehow overcame all those issues and were magically a human robot. Your controller can only rotate so much to track the player over a distance.
Joystick movement is simply never as precise as mouse, including with gyro that has a separate slow speed to try and be accurate as possible. Which doing that then means you can’t strafe or quick turn.
Mouse can do it all with significantly less effort, and with a much higher skill ceiling. Which that is what matters if you’re in competitive play. If you’re not trying to be competitive, then fuck it, use whatever is fun.
MS is in the subscription selling business now. Their entire gaming future hinges on GamePass, and while I like the idea of games on tap (I’ve basically bought BG3 for my PS5 and nothing else in the year since I bought it, enough on PS+ to keep me going and I can barely catch up let alone keep up), I suspect the big devs that spend hundreds of millions on making AAA games are less than enthralled with the idea and if GamePass and day one “free” games win, the outcome will be more games that I’m not really interested in.
PS+ is not as good a product as GamePass, but I believe it’s healthier overall for the gaming industry.
When you say PS Plus, do you mean the Essentials tier which is (was) equivalent to Gold or the other tiers?
For the record, I think PS Plus Premium and Extra are great (until the price hike). The vast majority of time when I want to play a game day-1, it’s not something that’s even on GamePass. So their day-1 stuff means nothing to me.
But also, Essentials has given me enough to play I could just never run out of games.
The higher tiers. Not sure about the top one (Premium) any more. I got it because I thought I might want to play the older games, but it turns out there’s plenty of PS4 and PS5 games to keep me going, and frankly not enough choice of PS1 and 2 games to tempt me. A more complete library would have made sense, but I’ve literally got more on my shelf than they’ve got on PS Plus Premium.
And my internet is too rubbish for me to want to stream the handful of PS3 games either. It hasn’t even got MGS4 which would be the one interesting thing that hasn’t been anywhere else.
The reason it’s not working out is because they had no exclusives, now they do and the people on the platform that always had exclusives are suddenly upset.
It's outselling is what caused Microsoft to not deny it. It originally denied it because they had a rule that games needed feature parity with both Series X and S. BG3 split screen couldn't be done on S. The massive success is what led them to relax the rule. And virtually no one saw this level of success coming from within the gaming industry, including the developers themselves.
Edit: I just realized this is being upset about Starfield.
That is totally the fault of gamers. The biggest reason given for buying a PS5 over Xbox was exclusives. What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Sony started the exclusives battle and continually came out ahead. Obviously MS is going to fight. Making exclusives such an important decision in console purchases drove exclusives to be important overall. There's no sense in being upset that the industrynis literally responded to gamer's actions and stated motivations.
Microsoft would develop their existing first party studios and improve the quality of their first party titles, invest in third parties that they already had exclusive relationships with, or invest in up and coming studios?
Had Bethesda published a Microsoft exclusive since Morrowind?
You don't expect that from Sony so why expect it elsewhere? Sony started this game, gamers lauded them and rewarded them for doing it. Microsoft tried to not do that, and got beat down further than they had when they tried playing that game against Sony. Gamers wanted exclusives. Microsoft is providing that. You voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party and now are surprised leopards are eating your face.
This was a forgone conclusion for awhile now. Folks are just upset because Microsoft has an exclusive that Sony gamers want to play. Boo fucking hoo. I'm pissed it came to this, but gamers did this. I'm angry about it, but I don't feel sorry for gamers as a whole about it.
Did they, though? I think exclusives predate Sony and even the PS1. They’ve been a part of the console space since basically the inception of the medium. Xbox itself launched with an exclusive “killer app” in Halo. Timed third party exclusivity and exclusive Map Packs were very popular with the 360 when it was on top in the seventh generation as well.
I don’t think Sony has ever made an acquisition of the same scope as Zenimax either in price or in how much of the market was fenced off from a studio they previously had access to. That’s not even going into the Activision deal.
Maybe we can now point to Bungie, but that was still half the price. Most of Sony’s acquisitions over its time were studios that were already de facto developing exclusively for their consoles. Even Insomniac. If you look at their history, Sunset Overdrive is a lone anomaly.
Exclusives suck, but I don’t see them going away as long as consoles and capitalism exist. You’re basically throwing shade at Sony for daring to fund the development of critically and commercially acclaimed games that gave them the reputation of having a quality first party library. Starfield on the other hand was developed as cross platform title until Microsoft paid 7.5 billion to acquire a major publisher. Wasn’t this confirmed this week by the document leaks?
Few complain when Halo is released exclusively because no one is being surprised that those games are now exclusive titles. That isn’t the case with the new Bethesda deal.
Sony and Microsoft used to pay for exclusives without buying the studios. So there's no real meat to the argument that "oh, the games were always exclusive because first party" or whatever. The consoles didn't really buy that many game studios until relatively recently in gaming history. They would pay a studio to not release on other platforms. This whole buying studios thing was just cheaper in the long run. So there's no real argument to be made about Sony just making better first party games. That's what they do now given that they own the studios. Both companies are guilty of buying out studios.
Exclusives pre-dating the PS1 was more out of lack of technology. No cross platform tech really existed. There wasn't a lot of crossover. Many platforms didn't last more than a generation or two. There wasn't even much cross over in the kind of games. If you liked fighting games, you bought a Sega over Nintendo for example. With the PlayStation, they competed against Sega first, Nintendo as more an afterthought. Xbox came in later to compete against PlayStation 2. The Nintendo 64 was just a different class, and even later, the GameCube. With Xbox and PlayStation, they had similar amounts of power and restraints (an N64 cartridge could not compete from a technical perspective against the storage of discs, plus multi-disc games could exist, not really feasible with cartridges) plus abstraction technology was more advanced and one could more easily write cross platform code. Now, you either had to pay for an exclusive or simply hope they only had the intent to target one platform (whether through preference or resource limitations). So the console wars really started to heat up after the death of Dreamcast and mainly between Sony and MS. Exclusivity wasn't via first party existed, but not to s great extent beyond their flagship games.
So, tldr, exclusivity has always been acquired via money and buying them. It's easy to say it's about developing better first party once those studios were bought outright to begin with. That's how most first party titles exist now.
No, but Oblivion came to PS3 later and Skyrim was outright broken on PS3, then Sony scuppered their console mod plans by not allowing deep enough system access. Safe to say they probably didn’t have the best relationship.
Sony doesn’t buy IP and deny it to other platforms. Their IP starts on Sony. If Microsoft never wanted to release Halo to Sony, it’s their decision to do so, but buying something that don’t had access to, then denying it is a shit move.
Gaming isn’t bedroom coders knocking out games in basic for microcomputers any more, it’s a huge entertainment industry and that’s how those industries work.
This is no different from Disney pulling Fox properties of other steaming platforms to put them on Disney+ since they brought them out.
Yes they do. They used to buy exclusive rights back during PS2 days but eventually both MS and Sony realized it's cheaper to just buy the studios. Sony has only a small number fewer acquisitions than Microsoft. Both companies have always bought exclusivity.
My reason for buying a PS5 is my Xbone bit the dust, and my Xbox 360 also had issues when I traded it in. My ps2 and ps1 still work. There was also the fact that the only available options were PS5 or Series S. I didn’t buy the console for exclusives, I bought it because it was the better available console and my previous one was dead.
No I didn’t. The announcement of their intentions to fully absorb Bethesda didn’t even come out until around the PS5’s release, and wasn’t completed until like 6 months after. Not everyone pays close attention to gaming news. And if you bought the console early on, there is a chance you never would have even heard about it, let alone completely understood the implications of the purchase.
Ok? But your experience doesn't change what the number one reason given is though? Sure, I don't get Pixel phone anymore either because two in a row failed on me, but I don't go around telling everyone "no one buys pixel phones because they die easily"
Yeah, but MS games aren’t console exclusive. They come out on PC day one two which is a bigger audience than both consoles combined. Given the player numbers Starfield really hasn’t suffered due to not being on PS. In some countries it’s doing exactly what a console exclusive should and getting people to pick up an Xbox.
If you don’t think a company as big as MS did a cost/benefit analysis before they made the decision I don’t know what to tell you. Of course any product available to more people sells better, but MS are playing a longer game. If previous Bethesda games are anything to go on, people will be talking about, modding, posting clips, etc of this game for a while and that’s tons of free advertising for XB and Gamepass.
ROFL… if you don’t think a company as big as Microsoft can’t make mistakes, I don’t know what to tell you.
And talking about a game isn’t selling copies. Nor is modding. People are pirating it and for good reason. It’s not worth the cash spent to donate to a company that thrives based on free labor to fix the bug ladened disasters they release.
How do you think marketing works? Someone posts a cool thing they’ve done in Starfield, and someone else gets some FOMO and decides to buy the game, sub to Gamepass, get an Xbox to play it, etc.
No not everyone is pirating the game, a lot of people on Lemmy may be as this is an echo chamber of techie types, but the general audience don’t even know how to, and if they prefer to play on console, can’t.
Clearly you have beef with Bethesda, and are letting it cloud your judgement here, but the fact of the matter is lots of people are playing and enjoying the game as is, out the box before any mods are officially available.
Over one game? I thought Fallout 4 was a disappointing step back from New Vegas and 76 was a misjudged project that turned up messy and broken and I’ve never even looked at playing. The last game of theirs I truly enjoyed pre Starfield was Skyrim, over a decade ago. I’m not white knighting them, you clearly have an irrational hatred of them and are unable to admit when they do something positive, a common issue today when people turn hating something into their identity and are unable to ever move from the stance. Like most Devs, they’ve had their ups and downs and the ups should be praised and the downs criticised.
Well there’s the fact that you omitted Sony and Nintendo from your criticism entirly, despite the fact that both companies have bought numerous studios and paid other studios to make games exclusively for their respective platforms for decades, thereby reducing their potential revenue for some benefit that’s clearly obvious to those companies.
And yet, when Microsoft does it…they are just limiting their potential market for no reason and it’s obviously a stupid business move. Sure. Seems a little sus, is all.
Either the entire fucking industry is guilty of this “bad business practice” or maybe there’s a calculated reason for it. Pick one.
You don’t see me complaining about Halo, do you? Do you wonder why? It’s because Microsoft did it with an IP that was already widely popular across all platforms, and then pulled it. And if I remember correctly, told everyone they wouldn’t pull it.
Sony hasn’t don’t that. Again, as I’ve said, they begin with their own IP. And that IP from creation is Sony exclusives.
Um…Sony was in talks to pay for Starfield to be a PS exclusive - which would have taken it from PC for a year and from xbox permenantly - until MS bought Beth.
Also, Starfield is a new IP, not an “already existing and widely popular” one…
I’ll also mention that Phil Spencer publically admonished and fought against exclusivity agreements for years. He has said in interviews both private and public that he prefers a world where there are no exclusives. Until the market spoke and declared “exclusives” to be the measuring stick of a platform’s health, thus forcing his hand. And now here we are.
And here we finally have the primary motivation for this comment.
Well we won’t know for sure on those for a few years. All we have are old FTC docs and no public statements. Regardless, existing games aren’t going anywhere. But even if it happens for future games, well, Sony’s been sowing this harvest for some time.
I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I’m more convinced it’s projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided…or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
It’s only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I’ve always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts and status. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it’s a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens next. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We’ve seen this happen for ages.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
I don’t think your idea precludes the idea conservatives are bitter about their own self-repression. The social cost of exploration being too high is flip side of the strict adherence to hierarchy for world view. If there wasn’t some emotion to tap into the narrative wouldn’t land nearly as well as it has
I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.
The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.
It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.
The thing is it’s only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they’re making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it’s not that they’re angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They’re angry that Bethesda didn’t put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they’re just generally triggered over the word “pronoun.” Triggered by words that describe words. There’s something very wrong with these people.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
People will eventually stop giving a fuck. This same shit happened in 1954 w/gay people. Gay people started suing and winning, and society moved forward.
We’ll likely see the same thing. Generally, it has to get worse before things get better. Back then, it started when scientists got fed up with getting their buttholes inspected by “security” to make sure they weren’t gay today (embellishing a bit here, but the gist is that they got fed up with the constant fear mongering and told the security teams to fuck off).
I’m sure we’ll reach a fever pitch and then someone will tell them to fuck off, as is usual. Then everyone will forget about it, save for some older folks.
Check out the Lavender Scare: the prosecution of gays and lesbians in the federal goverment by David K Johnson. It’s an uplifting book on how social movements get going and how it provides a sea change for society at large, even straight folks, in this case.
To be clear, there’s 50 years from 1954 to when gay marriage was first legalized. And 40 years ago, we even thought we were done with the whole abortion debate. Don’t even need to get into how long it took for people with Brown skin were legally treated anywhere near equal. BLM was how many years after the Emancipation? And still opposed by people who “want to leave it all well alone”. It’s a big deal that it takes that long to enact minimal change (considering we have a seated SCOTUS Justice who said we need to reconsider the constitutionality of gay marriage)
The real problem, perhaps, is everyone coming to the defense of the modder, even here. People saying “just let people do what they do” (see highly upvoted comment here). If the intolerant side “do what they do” and the rest of us get bored or sick of the human rights side, then it takes 50 years, or 100 years, or more to make meaningful change.
Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy.
Making a game mod that only effects people who choose to install it seems like a poor strategy for achieving that.
Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂
I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.
The original vanilla Skyrim was pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong it was playable but it was a very forgettable and unimpressive game. The low quality assets, the bugs, the half-assed talent trees, the uninspired and unfinished quest lines, the dumb AI, the barren ugly towns and landscapes etc. Just think about all the things you have to fix nowadays with mods to play it properly, nevermind adding new stuff.
But it is facts In talking about. Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made, or that the AI was good etc.
All you’re saying is that you liked the game in spite of all that — either that or you can’t even remember how bad it was before the mods.
Skyrim’s greatest virtue will always be how moddable it is. But that still doesn’t mean that Bethesda put out a great game in 2011.
Nobody’s said the game was flawless, but I, at least, never experienced any bugs or design issues that detracted from the overall incredible experience.
Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made
You’re conflating facts with opinion. I thought the quests and perk trees were, for the most part, very well made.
Someone yesterday said they don’t buy Bethesda games because they’re good at launch, instead they buy them because the modding community is so prolific.
Paying $60-70 for a game that requires teams of unpaid volunteers to make it playable after launch.
Mods exist now and have since day one. They’ve already made the game much better, but you are right they arent great yet cause they dont have the GECK. I do like to have a sort of “vanilla” playthrough before super mods. I didn’t clarify that.
Yeah kinda. I bought it to play the stock game with a few tweaks. But when creation kit comes out I’ll be back. And then again. And again.
People have thousands of hours into skyrim. You think that game has more than 100 hours of content? It’s years of going back and enjoying mods and the community surrounding them.
Yeah Bethesda profits off it. But you’d be surprised how many people pirated the game, eventually just buying the “goty” edition on sale.
Tbf vanilla Skyrim had more than 100 hours of content, just not story driven. Back when it came out I played well over that on PS3 in a single save with no mods. I explored every dragon shrine and collected all the priest masks in that playthrough. I did loot every damm vase though and inventory mgmt was slow. I got crafting up to 100 naturally, etc. Then made new characters eventually. Im sure I spent more than 300 hours over the years before I went to PC and installed mods
Modders generally only make mods for games that they are enthausiastic for. Its not a given that Starfield will have a modding scene on par with Skyrim.
No, not a given you are right. But regardless whether its on par with skyrim I’m interested in what they do the same way I was with fallout 4 despite not thinking that game was particularly good myself.
How did you get around how empty the game is? I played a few hours but it is just so empty. Being in a city just means either quick travelling or walking through 100s of meters without any interesting npc or anything at all. I felt skyrim did it much better.
Most people have talked about how empty things are by talking about the planets. I feel like that part feels too full if anything. They aren’t empty enough to give it character. The same goes for almost every other locations. They’re so full of junk that they’re empty of character.
I am waiting for official mod support to make it into a real game. There are so many awesome mods and I’ve tried a few but I’m too lazy to manually install them. Also I’m so not going to go through the storyline amount 9 times…
Factorio has a mod manager built in. It can browse, download, install mods all right there. It even syncs mods to save files and checks for updates. Factorio mods have better support than most games do. I really wish some other developers would put that kind of effort into mods. Just think of what, say, Minecraft could be if it had that.
Likewise the Paradox launcher has pretty good mod support. I think you have to add mods externally, but you can create profiles and things where one profile could be for The World of Darkness games and another could be for Game of Thrones, or whatever. You can easily swap between them without any trouble.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
Unity well and truly thought everyone would just roll over on this, and oh boy, were they wrong. They didn’t at all learn from the Wizards of the Coast debacle at the beginning of the year.
WoTC, Reddit, Twitter, now unity. All made changes that their user base said they wouldn’t like, made the changes anyway, then lost a bunch of users. There must be some new business Guru telling everybody to piss off their customers
Unfortunately, they all seem to be working from the techno-feudalism playbook. It started when tech companies realized they could make more by making us rent software instead of selling it to us, and it’s spread.
Fucking Adobe was the first one to rent their suit of applications. It has been downhill from there, even smartphone apps want to rent access these days.
Pretty sure Elon was first to the key, and the rest have followed suit.
In seriousness, though, the primary driver is the VC tap slowing down significantly and forcing long term business strategy to lean much harder into its existing opportunities vs. planning for periodic cash infusion from investors. A lot of these businesses never had to set themselves up for success in the absence of that capital, and it’s led to bad practices and product strategies.
They might experiment with ads and subscription tiers, but the real focus is always on getting users. Look at YouTube, AFAIK, it’s still not profitable (or if it is, it’s barely profitable), and not for lack of trying over the past few years. Yeah, sites like Reddit and Twitter are cheaper to run, but there’s still a ton of overhead and ads aren’t as profitable there.
Now investors want to see a return, and it’s just not happening.
Those sites are still dead, given how low the population is. MySpace still exists, but it doesn’t really have an audience. And you can’t sell ads without an audience.
I mean it should and they didn’t set a new standard, they just brought back a old standard of having a developer and publisher actually giving a fuck about making a good, complete game.
This is the perspective that is totally forgotten and missed by most engaging in the discussion. Not to diminish Larian’s achievement, but they literally busted out the old playbook. Credit where it’s due, but BG3 shouldn’t be controversial - it should be the standard because that’s what the standard used to be.
That’s what the standard used to be, because it used to be much cheaper to satisfy. For indies, if you try to do a quarter of what Larian achieved there in production value, and your game doesn’t sell, your studio is dead. For AAA, you’ll have to fight execs/management endlessly trying to shoehorn microtransactions and/or dlc to “justify” the costs.
I’d love it to be the new standard, but this only happened because Larian is basically a huge indie imo. Which unfortunately is an anomaly.
Considering their policy doesn't allow for other stuff like this, yeah I am not surprised.
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Reminds me of the time when a Spiderman mod removed the VERY few instances of a pride flag in a recreation of NEW YORK CITY and a Skyrim mod that removed any potential gay romances that only occur when wearing a very specific amulet (including a single dead skeleton couple off the beaten path.)
Those got booted as well cause.....come on now. Its blatantly targeting a group of people about their sexuality and gender who have BARELY any presence to begin with in these games.
Starfield is even more egregious as its LITERALLY just a menu option and the rare use in dialogue....
Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform.
Considering how much stuff people dump on there that probably doesn’t even deserve to be released it’s not super surprising right? I’m more surprised that 8.9% of games, that’s almost 1 in 10, made over $200k.
Also clearly visual novels are not the way to go if you want to make a lot of money
With VN makers and Midjourney, you can pump out a half way decent VN in no time. I’ve honestly thought of doing a cheesy one for my DnD players as their story recap each session, but I already spend so much time on the rest of the game…
Yeah exactly. Because to me it implies that less than 90% is shovelware crap, and I cannot quite believe this. It doesn’t feel that way, even with all the filtering Steam offers nowadays.
Compare the Nintendo eShop, which doesn’t filter and where Nintendo doesn’t care, and the endless pages and pages and pages of shovelware you need to scroll through (and 15 iterations of AAA Clock for 2€, 80% off! 😅) to find each single proper game.
There is probably some bias because games that make money stick around a lot longer. I doubt most games released in the last three years (which seems to be the time they looked at) that made no money are still on there.
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