darthelmet

Unfortunately this is the movie. So it's longer and we have to pay for it.

Man now I can’t watch Seinfeld anymore? Why people got to do this?

I played BG3 twice but I bounced off of E33. But I’m not as much of a fan of JRPGs so /shrug. I might go back to it at some point though.

Personally I think they’re still playing catchup from their launch commitments, but what’s been added so far has been pretty good. Season 2 expanded out the endgame content and crafting loop by a lot. This season looks a bit tamer in the grand scheme of things. A relatively smaller endgame content system with some new loot. Some class reworks. A new chapter in a still unfinished campaign.

Tech-wise I haven’t really had problems with it after the first few days of s2’s launch, but new patches always come with new bugs, so I’d expect some instability at s3 launch.

Also like others said, they got bought out so………………. Yeah… we’ll see what happens with that.

I tried it out when the testing started. It's... fine. I'm not much of a shooter/action game player, so the higher skill elements of it are a bit of a barrier on top of re-learning a lot of DoTA-type stuff. I can imagine getting into it more if it came out years ago. But now it's hard to find the time and motivation I'd need to dedicate to even get back to the level of incompetence I had with DoTA.

It's really hard for me to separate my nostalgia for older games with what I'd think about them now. There are some games I've played a LOT but haven't touched in years for one reason or another.

Some pre-Steam games would be things like Halo 3, World of Warcraft, Runescape, and few Pokemon games.

On Steam my most played game BY FAR is DoTA 2 at ~2100 hours. I loved that game and I still think it's really well designed... I just haven't played it in years because it makes me too mad to play with randos and it's impossible to get 5 friends who play DoTA online at the same time anymore.

If I was going to pick a top 3 outside of those nostalgic outliers, maybe:

• Slay The Spire
• Dark Souls
• Deep Rock Galactic

Quite frankly I had such a high Inland Empire on my playthrough that the only things I’m sure are real are the things Kim or my good friend Horrific Necktie backed me up on.

Gotta love it when companies put something in their legal agreements that just says “we can do whatever the fuck we want.” Is the rest of the wall of text just there to hide that somewhere someone won’t read?

If you ever feel like your job is meaningless, remember that there are people who are paid to be marketers.

Wall that sucks. On the bright side, the game has a full offline mode, so as long as I can stop or revert updates, there’s only so much they can ruin it for me.

You have to understand the backing behind these parties and how that informs how they operate. They both are largely funded by capitalists, often the same capitalists. So there are a core set of interests which they both protect. There are issues that don't fall within that space where they can be different, some issues that affect different donors differently, and they have different strategies for managing to achieve those shared interests, but when push comes to shove they are still going to do what will be good for the capitalists and the power of the state to represent those interests.

For a narrow example from this meme: Most US presidents have presided over truly awful crimes, some actually illegal, some merely morally criminal, or perhaps criminal on the world stage but not for the US. A just society based on rule of law, as the US claims to be, would prosecute these people for their crimes, whether that be for war crimes, abuses of power, corruption, etc. Ideally while they are in power in order to stop them, but at the very least you'd think that after they leave power there ought to be more political will to go after them, if not for legal or moral reasons, at least for cynical political ones.

But they basically never do this? Why not? Because those crimes help uphold the interests of capitalists and/or the state. They are mostly part of the set of things that the parties agree on. The next president would like to be able to continue to get away with those or similar crimes, so holding the previous president accountable for their actions risks setting a precedent that would come back to bite them.

There were criminal proceedings against Trump, but they were for things that are small in the grand scheme of things. Obama didn't go after Bush for lying to get us to go into an illegal war, or for using torture, or violating civil liberties, etc. because he was doing the same things. Trump didn't go after Obama for any of this because... he kept doing the same things. Going back to the most famous example of this, Nixon literally did what Trump did in terms of trying to subvert the "democratic process" and Ford pardoned him.

Basically if you're president, you can get away with whatever the hell you want as long as it's for rich people and/or the next guy wants to be able to do the same thing.

A few angles on this:

You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.

Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.

Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.