ApathyTree

ApathyTree, 6 dni temu

Does anyone else find it really difficult to play evil in games, like emotionally and morally?

I loved fable and got my angel wings and halo easy-pie; I never managed the horns and huge black wings. I tried, I really did, but I just can’t do it properly… I feel bad for it.

Edit: Or wait is that what this is about, rather than just a specific game…?

ApathyTree, 6 dni temu

I think this makes sense.

Motivations make you evil, not actions. Actions can make you evil if the motivation is there, or if you lack any motivation other than self-service, but if you are just a fuckup, are you actually bad? Sure if enough of your actions are bad even if the goal is good, it makes you a bad person, but does it make you evil? (I’ve played enough morally ambiguous virtue games to know the answer is no; they always forgive the antagonist if he repents and tries to do better)

Killing people is often, in games, portrayed as a good thing… but not helping people doesn’t make you a morally reprehensible person… helping them the wrong way does. And that’s hard to encode.

“My husband had to go to xyz to deal with the kobold problem, but he hasn’t come back yet”. Your options are help or ignore, and ignoring it isn’t inherently evil, it’s just not compassionate or caring. Helping the kobolds would be the evil act in this scenario and it’s never an actual option in most games.

ApathyTree, 3 miesiące temu

Is it just me or does your average rpg today seem just… easier overall than they used to be? I feel that’s where a lot of this problem comes from for me, because I’m always expecting it to get hard and it doesn’t. (😏)

There’s a few games here and there where dying happens a lot and consumables and constant gear upgrades are very needed, but the majority of them you don’t need most of the consumables or gear you get anyway. They feel like dopamine hit filler content.

Like I’m playing biomutant right now, and there’s a lot of consumables (and so so so much mostly junk gear) to loot throughout the game… but there’s also a heal ability that you can unlock and use on a timer, plus health refills outside of combat, so now that my weapons and armor are a lot stronger, even tho the enemies scale with you, it’s been dozens of hours of active play since I’ve used a consumable of any variety, and there’s at least half the game to go. And this has been a fairly consistent experience in games this decade or so, maybe longer even. I’m not a great gamer; I’m too lazy to learn to block or parry in any game, ever, and dodging is a maybe skill, only if it’s easy to perform… so it’s not at all that I’ve gotten better or anything…

ApathyTree, 8 miesięcy temu

I would absolutely do this but I have health problems that would make me an unqualified subject :(

ApathyTree, 10 miesięcy temu

Does Microsoft not have the ability to block recording specific scenes like PlayStation does?

Can’t they just block recording that and call it a day instead of “surprise you broke some asinine rule you didn’t know about!”

ApathyTree, rok temu

It depends on the game.

Typically I prefer normal, but there are some games where inverted camera just makes it easier, like games with full 3D exploration (flying/swimming). I do sometimes only invert the vertical for these, so I’m that maniac.

If you are an older gamer, you’re probably right that you picked it up in the early camera control games (ps1/2 for me), because changing camera function wasn’t an option and a -lot- of games inverted by default back then. I believe the logic was to treat your view camera like a real video camera, where you push the back to the left to point the camera lens to the right, but most people don’t have that type of experience so it’s less intuitive, which is why it’s less common now. I blame mostly Spyro flying challenges for my limited inversion use.

And like you, I struggle with games that don’t allow me to pick, which is most of the older games, even remastered 😭 it’s so hard to re-learn.

ApathyTree, rok temu

Likewise, as one ages, different components of games become more or less important.

Example - used to hate sitting through cutscenes and dialogue (it was just reading back then, but I was a big reader so that wasn’t the issue), would skip whatever I could and get frustrated when I couldn’t. But these days I actually like a good story-focused game (botw, horizon), and don’t skip through it in any game unless the story is garbage… although I love largely story-free games as well (dysmantle is the current passion - there’s very minimal story that you have to piece together, and most of it is obtained through exploration rather than quests or interaction)

I also haven’t played online in years - since my wow days (vanilla and first expansion, then gave it up, so like 2008). Other people ducking around tends to detract from the game for me, and I strongly dislike PvP because I’m terrible against humans who don’t follow specific patterns… now I get frustrated when I accidentally buy a game that doesn’t have offline/single player content. If I could host my own servers for them though……

ApathyTree, rok temu (edited rok temu)

When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles… that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.

I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.

I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.

ApathyTree, rok temu

If I made enough that I didn’t have to worry about money while working full time, I’d be much more inclined to spend money on arts and entertainment. As it stands, my entertainment budget is almost entirely going to get food I don’t have to make myself.

But until society shifts focus to living wages (and not just enough to live, but enough to thrive)…… welp. Maybe those ceos should think on that, and start paying better.

ApathyTree, rok temu

I lost all my games when I swapped to Linux.

But that’s because it was a decade ago, and I was way too lazy to figure out why wine wouldn’t work, tho I don’t really pc game anyway and these were mostly older games, even then. Small loss.

I know there’s a lot of stuff either native dev or ported/cracked for Linux, just never really spent the time to look into it.

The only thing that’s going to cause problems for me now is idk how Linux handles vr. I assume not terribly well, since none (almost none?) of it is native dev. I’m looking to move away from consoles now that they are moving away from physical media (no point collecting if there’s nothing to collect), so Linux being more robust is great! But vr maybe my stick point. Depends how well developed it gets I guess.

ApathyTree, rok temu

Yeah that’s kinda what I was expecting.

I don’t really have a vr setup right now (have a psvr, the tracking sucks but I want to like it) but I was thinking maybe an index at some point…

Tho tbh if I need to keep a windows pc for that to work… I can… I won’t be thrilled for it, but my laptop is touchscreen and running 11… idk how Linux does with touchscreen so I haven’t changed it out yet, probs could upgrade the hardware to game off it.

ApathyTree, rok temu

Not yet, but I looked into it before I bought it and I’ve seen that it can be done as sort of a viewing unit? If I understand correctly that’s all it would be, which is still probably a powerful tool, but I just got the vr like a month ago and then immediately got two surprise kittens so I have not had time to play at all, much less do anything fancy with it.

However if you want to tell me all about it, I am more than happy to learn from a person rather than an impersonal article. Really.

ApathyTree, rok temu

No worries.

It’s a thing I’ll probably do at some point. Just for kicks. I’m a big fan of playing around with hardware to save money 😁 but it’ll probably be a while before I get to it. I have some self hosting and automation to learn to do first (not super knowledgeable presently, but omfg is the fediverse helpful with tech stuff 💜)

ApathyTree, rok temu

I was also messing with hardware/software starting in teens. Grew up during the brief period in which home computers were fairly common though still quite expensive, but pc repair shops weren’t really around.

I will try to remember, but it might not be for a while. :)

ApathyTree, rok temu

Ruining everyone’s experience to solve a non-issue. Cool, cool.