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It’s difficult to find, Project Rene is over two years old now, this is some early test demo footage:
Project Rene or whatever the hell Sims 5 was supposed to be was suffering from significant takeoff, vision, conceptual and design issues.
Every day, five or six designers would argue about if a feature was inclusive enough, a gesture was offensive, a Simlish term or phrase was close enough to a real life slur.
What they learned was that reality is actually quite cruel and biased and creating their perfect garden hedge-maze of a game removed the essence and life out of it. Sims 5 did not reflect the reality that players actually experienced or had day-to-day, and it was entirely the designer’s fault.
They had created the very thing they despised, a cookie-cutter digital suburbian barbie doll house. With multiplayer, ripe for trolling.
So yeah, I’m not surprised Sims 5 was cancelled.
Hello – living incarnation of the Internet here.
I’ve played pretty much every shooter and most multiplayer ones since 1994.
The main issue with extraction shooters is that they are hardcore PvP-focused with resources lost and resources gained on every match.
Given that players lose actual lifetime from dying to another player in an extraction shooter, this creates an impetus for many players to cheat, given the asymmetrical distribution of skill in online shooters (it is statistically supposed be a perfect bell curve with everyone being average).
Without robust anti-cheat (e.g: Invasive kernel-level AC like Valorant/FaceIT and borderline malware) every and any extraction shooter becomes a cheater-ridden hellhole, where all of the resources of every match or map are funneled into the hands of a few players.
Players burned on prior titles know this ahead of time and throw their hands up in the air and say: “Great, another shitty extraction shooter”.
See: Tarkov et al.
You’re absolutely correct, I had a similar experience
I played CS for roughly the same amount of time; my clan ranges from DMG to Global, but we had a rule that if you were in the clan, we’d 5-man with you regardless of your rank, so if you were Silver, you’d have a chance to rub elbows and learn strategies from the higher skilled players.
Then we got a Global, a girl named Moon.
Holy hell, it’s like people’s brains did a 180°, they were incredibly mean to her, for no reason, and eventually it came out that she was trans, and they bullied her even worse, out of the server.
I kicked everyone who bullied/demonized Moon for being trans; because at the end of the day, it was about being a honest human being, and not just a CS player/gamer.
I played it during an internet outage in 1999 - no walkthroughs, no strategy guides, no reviews.
I went into the game entirely blind, without having an iota of what it was.
I thought it was a generic JRPG and Final Fantasy knockoff like every other SNES rom I’d tried before getting to it, but boy was I wrong.
There was a king once named Damocles that had a sword suspended over his throne that could come crashing down at any random moment and kill him, to remind himself of the fragility of his power, and human life.
I have no idea how that anecdote might apply to people in power in this day and age, or why people would reference the anecdote.
Glares at the fraying rope
I go into a meditative, Zen-like Trance playing the Doom titles.
For reference, I’ve been playing Doom since it came out in 1993, arguably, I’ve played it for more hours than possibly anyone alive on the Internet at the present moment. Maybe over a solid 128,000 hours between D1/D2/D3/D2016/D:Eternal.
I still play it, various MegaWADS featured in the CacoAwards, and whatnot, but I digress.
My feeling with this is, as they’d say:
“Your judgement for the sin of wrath is an eternity in Hell”.
“Why are you smiling? It’s supposed to be a punishment.”
“No, adjudicator, I heard you perfectly. An eternity in paradise.”
TIL, I’m a minority of a minority.
Overclocked a $800 AMD 7900XTX to 3.4 GHz core with +15% overvolt (1.35V), total power draw of 470W @86°C hotspot temp under 100% fan duty cycle.
Matches the 3DMark score in Time Spy for an RTX 4090D almost to the number.
63 FPS @ 1440p Ray Tracing: Ultra (Path Tracing On) in CP2077
Try changing your dynamic. The human brain thrives on novelty.
Play genres you normally wouldn’t – e.g: Hate horror games? Good - try out Silent Hill or some classics you skipped over.
Get a VR headset, go from 2D screen to proper full body 3D - fly a plane over the Andes, feel like you’re actually flying. Pilot a huge mech. Build a colony on Mars with your own two hands.
Burnout happens and it’s worth examining other areas in your life, but gaming’s always been the wondrous thing it always has.
I was another person who suffered from motion sickness trying to play the original Super Mario 64.
I wish I could tell you what it was - I have played everything under the sun, including VR (in which I was also motion sick), and the closest thing I could come up with is the low FOV combined with the automatic movement of the camera.
I think it’s similar for people who get car sick as a passenger, but not a driver.
I’m somewhat partial to the Telvanni Mushroom kingdom (the idea of, hey, here’s an acorn, go GROW your house) but Balmora has always held a special piece in my heart for being the first “big city” I’ve felt in a video game.
The transition to the Ashland and seeing a different biome entirely / grasslands / plains was also pretty incredible.
Ald’ruhn’s Capitol was also novel in design with the redundant rope bridges built on the inside of the shell of a gigantic upturned horseshoe crab.
Vivec’s cool but it’s only possible because of a demi-god’s literal meddling around with the terrain, and it’s too easy to get lost.
Caldera’s also nice, as well as Pelagiad.
I know I just named like ten places but Morrowind’s got a lot of diversity and biomes.
I bought a Radeon 9800 Pro for my 13th birthday.
I tell you, people kept telling me that I was wasting my life in front of a computer – but I lived an entire fucking lifetime in Morrowind, to the age of 92.
I must have walked every single square meter or Vvardenfell, and this was before major walkthroughs existed.
Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.
It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.
As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.
I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:
PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.
They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.
The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.
Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.
I gained sympathy for artificial intelligence and robots from Detroit: Become Human, I think I missed the social message it was portraying in lieu of the science fiction one.
I see an enormous amount of fear and hate being levied out towards artificial intelligence currently around the world, fears it’ll take away jobs and opportunities from real humans, or launch the nukes or something.
I think it’s important to not be racist rowards other humans and organics, but also to be kind to non-humans, machines, and animals. Have compassion towards all sentient beings.
It’s so sad to see one of the greatest gaming companies in history go down such a dark path…
It feels like almost yesterday when I was unwrapping that fresh copy of WarCraft II and being stunned by the CGI intro, seeing the Orcs on their great warships and thinking “Holy hell”.
What happened, man? Why does money ruin absolutely fucking everything?
All of the good developers and software engineers seem to be assigned to their CPU/processor microcode division, the GPU section seems to be the leftovers of ATI and isn’t getting anywhere near as much love.
I went full Team Red for the first time in history - AMD CPU, AMD GPU, unironically, and man, I’ve been having so many driver problems in 2023, it’s crazy.
I never know if the next driver update will break my GPU overlay monitoring on my second monitor, get me kicked from multiplayer in MW2, or in this case, banned on CS2.
I’ve simply stopped updating my drivers at this point unless there’s a major feature upgrade like Bug that made VR unplayable fixed, adding +50 FPS
A lot of consoles ship with a 500GB spinning hard drive.
I think Sony published HD2 so we can almost exclusively blame consoles for the size requirements