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UnderpantsWeevil

@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world

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UnderpantsWeevil,
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most people who aren’t into technology probably don’t know what the steam deck is

Idk about that. Steam is a wildly popular platform and regularly markets the SteamDeck to its user base.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Plenty of people use Steam

UnderpantsWeevil,
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How can that be the Invisible Woman’s ass if I can’t stop staring?

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.

And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I can’t be bothered to visit any mainstream news site anymore. They’ve made the process of accessing the content so adversarial that there’s no point.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Unfortunately, RSS doesn’t do anything for the links to the NYT in my Lemmy feed.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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It only really makes sense when the remaster is trash

I gotta disagree. Even when the remaster is (arguably) better than the original, there’s a lot of value in the original art assets and the more rudimentary gameplay as a historical guidestone. For the same reason you wouldn’t tear up the original Mona Lisa because we’ve got a high resolution digital copy, you don’t just scrub copies of the original version of Pong from the internet because we have Wii Tennis.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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That’s like saying “A hamburger is good, but I just can’t into bacon double cheeseburgers.”

I mean, I would say this unironically.

I’ll add that WC1 had fewer variances between factions. Orcs and Humans were almost identical. That made the game more akin to a real time digital chess than WC2, which made Orcs marginally more aggressive and Humans more defensive. I think WC2 is more fun because of the asymmetry, but that’s purely a question of taste. I’m not going to begrudge someone who has a fondness for the original.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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WC3 was the pinnacle of the PC RTS gaming era imo

I’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions on the WC3 Leaders mechanic, as it focuses gameplay around farming and single points of failure (losing a leader at the wrong moment often meant losing the game)

In that light, Starcraft was the pinnacle of PC RTS gaming and WC3 was an experimental variation that branched off into an RTS variant that would eventually congeal into DOTA, the pinnacle of PC MOBA gaming.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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When I first got WC2, I discovered that my 1x CD couldn’t read from the disc fast enough for me to play it. The game would run for about five or ten minutes, then crash. I made it about half way through first campaign - 5 to 10 minutes at a time - before I was able to afford a 4x CD and play it normally.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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He joked on his feed that he has a dead rat on his windowsill and when the heat of the sun hits it the smell is what wakes him up in the morning.

This is the guy accusing some folks on the opposite side of the world of having an inferior horrible culture.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I just like calling it “the kill shot”, as though GOG is about to take all of Steam’s market share some time next week.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I wish. Crypto has been depressingly buoyant.

Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread

As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...

UnderpantsWeevil,
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It’s the same formula in damned near every game now. Pay2Win has made even the most chill JRPG a wall of ads and notifications to spend more money.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Curious to see what that would do to the industry as a whole. But this is not entirely our of line with what countries like Korea, China, and Japan have already been fiddling with.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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It sucks, but in a world we’ve chosen to litter with landmines, it’s a relatively harmless experience.

I would be more worried about the kid winning and internalizing the feeling of instant gratification.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.

The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.

There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?

Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha.

The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.

That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.

But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Even if you don’t like the BG3 campaign…

That’s crazy. The campaign was one of the best computerized D&D adventures I’ve seen published to date.

Neverwinter 1 & 2 lived on for a long time because of this.

I enjoyed the Neverwinter toolkit, but the graphics were still so blocky and clunky. There’s a polish to BG3 that, I think, will draw in a bigger audience.

Also, a big beautiful modding toolkit can have so many knock-on effects. Half-Life gave us a rich basket of spin-offs, from Team Fortress to Counterstrike. Starcraft and Warcraft popularized us a slew of new game styles, like Tower Defense and DOTA. Fingers crossed that we get something similar from BG3.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Its proof-of-concept. They’re trying to get a movie out that’s entirely tied to the brand, without spending a meaningful amount of money on scripting, art direction, location scouting, or talent. This is the future of AI Movies in a nutshell.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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They also deserve better games than Minecraft IMO

One of the more pure-to-form sandbox games of the last generation? I’ll spot you all the shitty DLC and cosmetics have soured it considerably. But the baseline game is genuinely good. Same with classics like Fortnight.

They were quality products that got deluged with marketing gimmicks. But there are plenty of people running “Vanilla” Minecraft servers who are having a ton of fun.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids.

It was mid, until Jack Black’s Bowser hit the screen, and then it was top notch. He absolutely carried that film.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Same way they did it for the Mario live action movie 30 years ago, I imagine. Get Tim Burton on it and I’m sure he’ll give you some advice.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Not just the costumes. They green screened the fuck out of that scene. Wonder if they shot the whole thing on a sound stage and tried to AI in the entirety of the background? This has all the earmarks of a “Are you piggies willing to pay $20 a ticket for entrance to the slop show?”

UnderpantsWeevil,
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In March, Vincke announced the studio’s plans to end its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning Larian won’t be making DLC or a sequel to their critical success. Several months after this announcement, Vincke says the folks at Larian have no regrets about the decision.

Genuinely sad to hear, as WotC has a ton of rich properties that a studio like Larian could have brought to vivid life. Would love to have a Larian treatment of the MtG Multiverse or a rendition of the Dragonlance series or setting.

Excited to see what they do next, but its a shame to see these companies part ways.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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everyone from WotC they worked with has now been laid off despite the huge success of BG3

Yesh. That’s ugly.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Sliders peaked in 1998

Wasn’t the same after John Rhys-Davies left.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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First they came for Pluto’s planethood.

Next they’re coming for Australia’s continenthood.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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It’s actually 4π*(0.5*(length-of-australia))^2 bigger than that.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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This streamlined mode will greatly reduce system overhead and be controller-centric

This doesn’t sound like anything Microsoft has done before.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I swear gamers have the memory of a gnat

It’s more a “sucker born every minute” thing.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.

Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.

They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.

The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Some of it is pure hubris. But some of it is American IP law, which will punish you if you don’t zealously prosecute people in defense of your patents. Its sort of like laws on squatting. If someone is openly and notoriously using your IP and you don’t try to sue them for a long enough time, they can claim the property as functionally abandoned.

For Nintendo, which hasn’t had a particularly good new idea in 20 years, the idea of losing Mario or Link or Pikachu to a legal loophole like this would be devastating.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community

What IP does Sony hang its hat on? I’m hard pressed to name a uniquely Sony-esque title or franchise. They partner with Square Enix on the reg, but Square is also horrifyingly litigious.

Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this.

No. There are proven effective ways to monetizing the modding community and exploit them for their free labor. And that’s not part of the Nintendo business strategy, possibly because their creative directors’ egos can’t handle it or possibly because some bean counter thinks it’ll hurt profits long term or maybe possibly even because Nintendo has a better-than-average work culture and the staff doesn’t like the idea of being undercut at their jobs by hobbyists.

Idk. But I also just don’t get the desire to bang your heads against this wall over and over again, on the modder side of the equation. There are other franchises and platforms to mod on. At this point, it feels more like a battle of wills than a rational strategy on either end.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.

They’ve all got their own boutique developers and were simply published by Sony at one point or another (not even exclusively). Insomniac Games seems to be the real owner of the IP for a bunch of them. Hell, most of these are just knock offs of other franchises. Sackboy is a very obvious Mario/Sonic analog that simply never got popular in the same way.

If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly

There are definitely some publishers more open to modding than others. Early on, you could accuse Nintendo of being a sleeping giant who failed to give modders warning or opportunity to compromise. But now modders are just trying to hug a very large hedgehog with it’s spikes out.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.

You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play “Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston’s Urban Planning Team?” Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.

Now with a bug patch that’s labeled as DLC!

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Hell, maybe they’ll get rid of dialogue entirely.

100% they’re going to try to do AI NPCs and you’re going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring

All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.

Bethesda execs don’t want any of that shit. They want a big button that says “MAKE NEW GAME” that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.

The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Amazed it took them this long. Seems like a no-brainer concept in hindesight, especially with all those little animations just sitting around.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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What? Like a Metal Slug Tactics digital deck builder game? Or more of a Hades, but Metal Slug style? Both could definitely work.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I’ve never tried that one, but now I’m curious enough to give it a shot.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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The Guardian: “Should we hold gamers accountable”

Also The Guardian: “Anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times

Real “We Demand To Be Taken Seriously” out of the UK paper of record.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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they’re taking about IN THE GAME

Calling in an airstrike to win a round of Call of Duty and immediately transitioning to a JAG themed game of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I’ve heard some philosophical musings on the dominant species of life on Earth being wheat, based on how much time and energy the global ecosystem spends cultivating and spreading it.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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Sliding the “war crimes” difficulty bar between African Colonel and IDF Prime Minister.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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This is a great idea in so far as its never going to happen so we can just stop thinking about it.

UnderpantsWeevil,
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I don’t know if I’m excited about the idea of gamifying atrocities.

On the one hand, you’re going to have the inevitable “What’s the most/worst number of crimes I can commit in the game?” reactionary freak streamer.

On the other, you’re going to have the Model UN Liberal insisting that NATO couldn’t be committing any war crimes, because he already played the Liberation of Rafa mission on War Crimes Simulator 4 using the same tactics outlined in the press briefing and got a perfect score.

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