loobkoob

Is the fully casted radio version not the best version to listen to anyway?

Guys, don’t fall for this propaganda video about the game, it’s actually much better than he’s making it look - Skeleton Bones Ghoulie just has a bone to pick with Will Smith.

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

There are definitely technical reasons why saving mid-run is a lot more complicated. With Pacific Drive, right now when you save, it’ll save:

• the state of your car - this will likely be done by looking each individual “equipment slot” the car has, assigning them a number, assigning each possible upgrade for that “slot” a number/letter, and storing its damage state (which is probably just a scale of 1-5 or whatever). So the game will store everything about your car in the format off “slot x, upgrade type y, damage z”, which can just be three values.
• your quest state. The game won’t remember what quests you’ve done or how you’ve done them in the way that you remember it - it’ll just store that you’ve completed quest step 14a and that 14b is your active objective.

It makes for a fairly simple, small save file. Being able to save mid-run would add a lot of complexity because it’d need to save a complete map state, including:

• the map layout
• your position in the map
• the enemies and hazards in the map - their positions, states, etc.
• what’s happened already in the map
• the loot in the map, and whether you’ve collected it or not

And so on. Not only does it massively increase the complexity, it would also increase the size of save files a lot and make saving and loading a lot more cumbersome. And that’s just a simplified breakdown; there are definitely other factors that can make it much, much more complicated.

There are definitely some games where “easy mode” save systems could be implemented without much changing on a technical level, but I don’t think Pacific Drive is one of them.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

I’m not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it’s probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don’t need an entire second company’s worth of those departments.

These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it’s good to be realistic about why they happened.

My keyboard (Swiftkey) gets very excited about the possibilities when I start to hyphenate words to create compounds. It accepts that they exist, but it starts trying to throw all sorts of random suggestions in for what the second word could be (and it rarely gets the right word).

“Access your data for all websites” is important because otherwise it doesn’t know what domain you’re on in the first place.

So a few things:

• sorry that’s been happening to you, it must suck
• the Reddit admin’s response doesn’t seem great
• this isn’t a relevant place to be posting this
• your tone in the DMs with the admin and in the comments comes off as overly panicked and alarmist. It’s going to be hard to win anyone over like that. Take some time, write it up with a more calm and informative tone, add proper context, etc.
• you’re not going to get your story out there by spamming it in random, inappropriate fediverse communities. If you’ve got solid evidence, email a journalist at a place like The Verge or Ars Technica about it. Just don’t expect them to care if you don’t have evidence - right now, it just mostly reads as “user upset that Reddit admin didn’t ban other user”. Yes, it sucks, but it largely just reads as a social media drama piece at the moment, and not anything with any real substance to it.
• or just report it directly to law enforcement

At least public transit is an ongoing service. I’m far less opposed to subscriptions when I’m actually being provided with something for them.

Car manufacturers trying to charge subscriptions for features in the car you own feels like racketeering. They’re not providing an ongoing service, they’re asking me to keep paying them to not remove a feature.

Communism does work on a communal level - it’s no coincidence they’re rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they’re responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an “everyone knows everyone” kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.

My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one’s going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn’t an issue. Plus it’s more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it’s just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn’t scale up at all.

I can only assume from this comment that you’re American. In countries with nationalised healthcare, our medical professionals don’t profit at all from selling medication; they prescribe medication because it is what their patients need. America might have a profit-driven healthcare system but don’t assume that every country does.

The factory must grow!

Like I said, I’ve been actively boycotting Blizzard for years now; I’m not sure why you think I’d want to “slop on their dick”. But yes, if a game is fine on a technical level and mediocre in every other sense, why wouldn’t it be a 5/10? A game that runs properly and is otherwise unnoteworthy is probably already better than the average game out there. There’s a lot of shovelware.

There’s a reason review outlets like IGN rarely give scores below 5/10 - it’s that almost any AA or AAA studio is going to be competent enough to get their game to run and have something to it. Even Redfall is a 5/10 on Metacritic. 5/10 games aren’t generally worth your time, but that’s only because there are so many 7+/10 games competing for your time/attention.

Even though I have no love for Blizzard as a company, and have never played Overwatch 2, I refuse to believe it’s in the bottom half of all games ever. A lot of the grievances I’ve seen about it seem completely justified, but it’s not a game that’s truly awful. It’s good on a technical level. It has good art direction. The characters are unique and identifiable, even to people who’ve never played Overwatch. I get that people don’t like the balance, they don’t like Blizzard’s money-grabbing, they don’t like the change to 5v5(?), and they don’t like whatever else people are complaining about. But that doesn’t make it the worst game on Steam, and it doesn’t make every single aspect of it bad.

This is stupid. I have no love for Overwatch or Blizzard - I’ve been boycotting them for years, in fact. But there are far, far worse games on Steam than OW2. The fact that, to my knowledge, it runs properly, doesn’t have crypto miners built into it, and isn’t just made from stolen assets already puts it at like a 5/10 at minimum.

I’m all for consumers standing up for themselves and being critical or poor products, but I really wish people wouldn’t get caught up in these hate bandwagons.

Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!

Also they’re not tweeting anymore, they’re . . .

Spewing xcrement

It’d make for a good anti-spam measure if there was a limit to the number of DMs users could send to other people who don’t follow them back. It’d mean people can still use Twitter DMs like a normal messaging service (which isn’t something I care for, but I know some people use it like that).

As it is, it just feels similar to the whole “rate limiting the number of tweets people can view per day” thing, where they’re taking the most obvious route to reducing bandwidth usage by restricting users.

I’m finding Kbin’s PWA perfectly fine for now, honestly! I’ll likely switch to an app once there’s a good one available, but I don’t feel like my experience is bad right now.

I definitely shared that opinion a few years ago. I found Fallout 4 disappointing, Fallout 76 was a disaster (I’ve heard people say it’s better now, but I still feel like a lot of the design decisions are at odds with Fallout as an IP) and they were making a lot of poor decisions.

But I can’t help but be optimistic for Starfield. It’s not just the recent presentation that gives me hope; everything I’ve seen about their approach to it and their design philosophies seems promising to me. I’m sure it’ll still have some of that traditional Bethesda jank to it, but I’m more than happy to accept some jank if I get a proper RPG with some good player agency.