I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.

Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.

This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.

I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.

Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.

If there’s going to be fantasies about murder, can his whole posse go out?

Yeah like at some point it’s justified to respond to danger with violence. The supreme court is dangerous for most people.

I think most people have no understanding of taxes.

I remember a coworker some years ago fully believed we had a flat tax rate. That they just take 20% of your money. I had to explain progressive taxation to him.

We should be investing a lot more in public education.

We could lower taxes on the lower brackets, maybe, but we should be raising taxes that target the wealthy. Fix the “buy borrow die” strategy, too.

Where would you lay the blame?

And how is that hypothetical response “intellectually dishonest”?

I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.

On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don’t think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.

I WANT SHORTER GAMES

Can I have my cake and eat it too? I want games with a short critical path, but satisfying ways to spend more time with it if it’s fun.

So like interesting NG+ stuff, boss rush modes, different builds, whatever.

I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.

I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.

But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.

They can be killed in their homes, too.

I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there’d probably be less Return to Office.

People are sometimes like “oh but violence is bad!” but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.

I’m an outlier in that I buy music on Bandcamp. Renting music feels like a bad deal to me, but for some people it might work out.

I think I repeat listen to albums a lot more than I repeat watch stuff.

Still, I’d consider a service that was like “pay $10 for this movie and it’s yours, drm free, forever”. A quick search shows WandaVision on DVD is like $50, and you’d have to like rip and self host yourself to stream it.

I think the subscription model is often user hostile, but it’s very lucrative

People just want all their shit in one place for a reasonable fee.

One problem with this is that monopolies are bad.

I’m not sure what the ideal solution is. It’s not “12 different services each charging $12/month” though.

I don’t think regular capitalism can really solve this.

I agree with the sentiment but this is an extremely monkey’s paw phrasing.

Not yet. All it takes is one hero

Removed by mod

Guild Wars2 is very good.

It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.

There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?

There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.