interolivary

interolivary, 11 miesięcy temu (edited 11 miesięcy temu)

Yeah I remember the “waaaa it went woke, Abby is trans” insanity

Edit: no brain, it wasn’t Ellie

interolivary, 11 miesięcy temu

Oh yes doi of course, that was just a brain fart. But yes exactly this, it was such a spectacularly gAmEr moment.

interolivary, 11 miesięcy temu

They take any presence of minorities as part of an agenda to, uh, I don’t know what exactly. They always screech about an agenda but I don’t think even they know what the agenda is supposed to be about.

interolivary, 11 miesięcy temu

The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it’s such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it’s fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it

interolivary, rok temu

Cloudpunk is nice, although it’s more of a “walking simulator” than a fully-fledged RPG. It’s a cyberpunk-ish indie game in which you’re a delivery driver, although with a flying car and a sentient dog.

interolivary, rok temu

The thing is that Fallout: New Vegas used the same engine, and it proved that you can do a much more interesting and engaging story and quests with Creation Engine compared to what Bethesda is capable of. Sure, Creation is still a bit of a piece of shit when it comes to engines, but it can be used for creating complex storylines etc. and not just “go there and push a button” or “go there and kill a person”

interolivary, rok temu

Well, think of it so that you spent $150 on a class on media literacy and a crash course on the dangers of unethical business practices.

interolivary, rok temu

Well, it’s not like that’s exactly an outlandishly improbable guess though?

interolivary, rok temu

It’s sort of how I try to view my past fuckups: I can’t change the past by feeling like an idiot for making some mistake, but I can try to learn to not make the same mistakes again (and instead make new and exciting mistakes) and learn to “forgive myself” in a sense.

Fuckups are inevitable parts of life, and beating myself up over mistakes won’t stop me from making new ones. I do need to learn from them when I make them, so I might as well do it in a way that’s less unpleasant and doesn’t require carrying around an ever-growing pile of memories labeled “I’m an idiot for doing […]”

interolivary, rok temu

Haven’t they made close to a billion dollars when counting the Kickstarter, starter packs sold via the website, and the “microtransactions” for things like ships (which are more macro than micro with the prices often being way over 100€)? I doubt they’ll run out of money any time soon, although hookers and blow definitely aren’t free

interolivary, rok temu

I wouldn’t put too much stock in pre-release gameplay videos. Remember what the pre-release hype videos for Cyberpunk or No Man’s Sky looked like, and what the end results actually looked like?

interolivary, rok temu

The what now? 😆

I’m not a native speaker so some jokes / analogies just totally fly over my head

interolivary, rok temu

Ahh doi, I understood the terms separately but for some reason “whale fracking” just made my brain go “whaaaaa”. Thanks for the patience 😅

interolivary, rok temu

Oh yeah I took it to just be wordplay, interpreting wordplay is still sometimes stupid hard for me, even despite the fact that I speak English at a near-native level and can understand each word individually.

It’s a good question how “whale” ended up having this particular meaning. I was in the games industry for way too long and first saw it used in the context of big spenders in freemium mobile games, but I have a vague memory that it’s used in the same way in the gambling / casino world. Your guess for the history sounds pretty believable, and it seems like the ginormous size of whales could play a part? Big spenders stand out from the “small fish”

interolivary, rok temu

Ha, that’s fucking awesome. Also probably the only way to make E:D actually fun to play 😅 I put in about 100h before I got tired of how shallow it ultimately is

interolivary, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Yeah Frontier really dropped the ball with game design for E:D, the ratio of grind to content is just ridiculous.

I mean it’s definitely a fun game for a while and it gives space a sense of scale like nothing else, but everybody I personally know who’s tried it has ended up exactly where you and I did. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep, and sooner or later folks realize they’re just doing the same mission, seeing the same planets, visiting the same Guardian ruins, seeing the same spaceports, again and again.

The planetary procedural generation is somehow especially disappointing. While, yes, they’re all unique in a mathematical sense and the fact that it’s a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy based on real astrophysics is extremely cool, once you’ve seen one icy lump you’ve seen them all; the variety of planets you can actually land on is very small, they’re all barren and have no weather, no oceans or anything like that, just rock or ice. And if you’re playing as an explorer the “alien life” you can scan is limited to a handful of plants that all look identical except for some minor color variation. So the fact that the topography of this particular icy lump is different from that other icy lump is lost when that’s the only thing that distinguishes them

interolivary, rok temu

Unfortunately I have no friends because I’m a bit of a twat, and while I get your point about the journey – it’s pretty much what I enjoyed for that 100h – it didn’t manage to carry me too far.

Notably for the vast majority of that 100h (probably closer to 200–300h tbh, since I also played on PS4 when that was a thing) I explored; I absolutely loved the “magnificent desolation” of being out in the Black, and the slowness of explorer gameplay compared to the pew pew “careers.” I just wished there’d been more variation to the planets and the life you could find on them, more variation to Guardian ruins, and so on, and so it started feeling like I’m just seeing the same half-dozen planets and plants over and over, and it started feeling like a grind in itself. Tried my hand at some of the other career options but nothing really did it for me as much as exploration had, and I eventually sort of drifted away from the game. Never did much engineering to speak either beyond some easy to get FSD things and grind discoveries for a while so I could get a better ship (a lot of this was before the huge bump in exploration payouts so it really was a grind 😅).

SC – or more likely their single player game, Squadron whatever – seems like I’d enjoy it, at least conceptually. Lessee if they manage to release Squadron, I might give it a whirl if it’ll run even passably on a Steam Deck (my only gaming device for the foreseeable future, although that might not be a relevant horizon when it comes to that game getting released).

interolivary, rok temu

This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don’t bother innovating anymore, it’s easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.

Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the “economy”), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?

“But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!”, the market liberal says. “Oh, a competitor! We can’t have that, let’s buy them and make sure they can’t affect our bottom line” says the megacorp, and before you know it the “superior option” will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.

interolivary, rok temu

But it’s slim! Slim!

interolivary, rok temu

There was also a bunch of sexual harrassment that was swept under the rug. He’s an incredible scumbag and a shitty CEO, which is why the psychopaths that inhabit corporate boards seem to love him

interolivary, rok temu

IMO we shouldn’t force companies to keep their servers online forever.

That’s not what the person you’re replying to suggested though. They suggested that companies should release self-hostable server software when they discontinue providing the service themselves. In the age of containerized software this wouldn’t even be all that difficult in many cases

interolivary, rok temu

This but unironically. A game like SC would absolutely be My Thing™, although maybe without the MMO part (so I guess Squadron whatever-it-was from the SC team?) – generally people are twats and I want nothing to do with them.

interolivary, rok temu

Seems like someone involved in contractual obligations at Epic dropped the ball on at least this game.

Implying this is accidental

interolivary, rok temu (edited rok temu)

“Not a bad idea” if you’re the one making the money, that is.

Would you think it’s a good idea if expanded to other things? How about your hammer coming with a license that if you build anything with it, you owe royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer? Or your car manufacturer saying that since they make your commute so much easier than other cars, they’re entitled to 10% of your salary – but you’re welcome to use another car if you don’t like it (spoiler: all new cars come with similar licenses, but you’re welcome to take the bus.) Do any business on your computer? Microsoft now wants 10% of your salary because time is money, but if you don’t like it you’re welcome to use something else. And how about your cell phone?

interolivary, rok temu

Wait 2.0’s coming out separately and before PL? I haven’t kept up with the news at all

interolivary, rok temu

It’s like the gamer equivalent of hatefucking. I don’t get it either.

Like, if you know you’re not going to enjoy something why the hell force yourself to do it, if it’s just going to end up with you complaining about it on the internet?

interolivary, rok temu

That’s not a very high bar, though. ED is light-years wide and an inch deep

interolivary, rok temu

Ah yes, it must be the dirty normies playing Bethesda games, no True Gamer would ever buy them

interolivary, rok temu

Ah, I see you’re an optimist

interolivary, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Some publishers have been known to threaten publications that give “bad” (ie. even average) scores, mainly with not giving them preview copies anymore in the future.

interolivary, rok temu

Knowing the sort of person JR is, I absolutely wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a shit human

interolivary, rok temu

I know him because reasons and he’s an absolute twat too. Classic overinflated CEO ego, with the sexual harassment to go along with it

interolivary, rok temu

I’ve only finished eg. Skyrim or Fallout 4 both once, but I’ve got gods know how many zillions of hours in them, especially after installing Sim Settlers 2 for FO4. I like the worlds, I just don’t care much about the story and the games don’t make me care about the story

interolivary, rok temu

Ah, an optimist

interolivary, rok temu

Cyberpunk 2077 is purely an escapist game for me. The game itself sort of sucks, the side missions are mostly “go and kill this dude” or “go and steal this thing”, nothing you do has an effect on anything and it’s generally pretty uninspired and blah, but I bought it because I got it for under 20€ so I figured why the hell not.

It looks damn purdy though, and Night City is intricately built and has lots of small fun details. I love just wandering around the city, stopping at hole-in-the-wall noodle places (even though they might just be “window dressing”, and even if they’re not the restaurants in the game are totally pointless), or browsing the stuff at some market, etc. etc. etc. So even though I don’t like it as a game, I like the environment it provides (although honestly the constant in-your-face sexism gets pretty old…)

interolivary, rok temu

I have not! I was actually just eyeballing it in Steam the other day thinking about whether I’d want to buy it, so I think I’ll take this as a recommendation

interolivary, rok temu

It’s absolutely got a lot of good things about it. While I don’t necessarily like it as such, I don’t dislike it either 😁 mainly the things that bug me are that the mechanics are a pretty generic sneak’n’hack clone and it’s very linear: nothing you do actually influences anything very big in the world except for some fairly inconsequential things, and you have no real choice in the larger picture of how things turn out.

I’m hoping the DLC, whatchamacallit, delivers on its promises of remaking some of the game to deliver more of what they originally promised.

interolivary, rok temu

Oddly enough I like walking simulators, even though Cyberpunk’s linearity irked me. I think it’s because I like my RPGs more nonlinear and with more freedom to decide how things go, but I’m fine with linear stories in games that don’t try to sell themselves as something else

interolivary, rok temu

I just want a Blade Runner sim so badly…

Right‽ I just started playing Cloudpunk and I’ve really liked it so far, and I had this exact thought. Cloudpunk is close and it’s great fun, but I would commit light treason if it meant getting a (good…) 1st person Blade Runner game on the market

edit: oh and thank you for the tip, it’s exactly what I was looking for

interolivary, rok temu

Huh I always thought “hard drive” was the umbrella category, and SSDs and spinny disk drives are subcategories.

interolivary, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I definitely support the hypothesis that calling all storage drives hard drives is an old curmudgeon thing 😅 I’ve been doing computer nerdery for way over 30 years, and a hard drive is a hard drive even if it doesn’t have spinny disks in it

interolivary, rok temu

I think we all swear to ourselves that we won’t grow up to be like those old people who seem to cling to the past.

Then one day you find yourself going “well it’s a hard drive to me, I don’t care what it should be called”

interolivary, rok temu

Yeah it’s a shame demos died out. Now studios (or publishers, more likely) just expect everyone to pay for a game they don’t even know they’ll like, and tough shit if you don’t like it.

interolivary, rok temu

Huh, I haven’t run into an indie with a demo recently, but it’s definitely great to hear that demos are still a thing in the wider indie scene.

interolivary, rok temu

Heh, there’s still soooo many physics bugs in Subnautica, which is honestly a bit baffling considering how long it’s been out. Still a fantastic game though, no doubt about that

interolivary, rok temu

Ha, was just about to come recommend Zachtronics games. They’re more, uh, programm-y than the others being mentioned, but they definitely do center around process management

interolivary, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Ah the classic “if you haven’t done X yourself you have no right to criticize X.” I trust you never criticize books, movies, paintings, games etc of you’re not in those fields?

And, funnily enough, I spent almost 15 years in the games industry as a developer, but I suppose I’m still not allowed to say anything bad about GDPR’s quality because, uh, reasons

interolivary, rok temu

Yeah that’s fair. I guess I’m taking my own problems out on everybody else