You are likely scanning my profile and history because I said something in a tone that made you feel funny or angry. This is called being reactionary. You can overcome it.
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I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.
I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.
I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.
I really really really want to like this game
Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.
Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.
Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky. There should be a reason you want to get a crew together and hang out in a personalized ship.
No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.
I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game
Are you me?
I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.
I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.
The year is 2064. The world outside is fire and riots.
A new life is brought into the world, the hospital lights flicker. The doctor, dirty and worn out, pushes the new parents a form on a battered clipboard.
“Congratulations to you both, now please sign this release to bring your baby home, but not before you designate which formats of Skyrim your child will inherit, please understand this is not optional, and we no longer take Bitcoin to pay the mandatory $60 Skyrim Fee, so please use cash, credit or ration cards to pay.”
Go buy Vein on Steam.
Yah it’s nothing like CoD Zombies, but it IS a zombie game, and it’s made by just two people trying to make a quality survival game and it’s obviously a work of passion worth supporting.
I haven’t bought a big company release in years at this point. There are so, so many good indie games being made right now, this will be a nostalgia point for kids someday, back when there were was a flood of games and half were huge, bloated AAA wastes of money that nobody liked, and the other half were amazing, weird, experimental concept ideas produced in low fidelity and released for $5 - $20.
these games
If you’re talking about the skyrim/oblivion franchise in particular, it has a wide open feel that many players connect with the first times games gave them real freedom to explore a world and not just throw them on rails to go from place to place. I do think a lot of it is nostalgia. I don’t think the games have aged too well from a standpoint of what we expect games to offer nowadays.
Elden Ring was a much more recent attempt at a sprawling game, and had a style of action/adventure game closer to “adult zelda” but also had that feeling of freedom that players liked, and Witcher 3 was just all of that but with a different style and different focus. Witcher 3 was a product of these kinds of games and evolved from them, so it’s expected that they would have figured out a few extra tricks to get you to connect, I do agree there was a lot more work that went into Witcher 3 in terms of making a world that felt convincing and solid. Not everyone wants that all the time though.
Also, Witcher was about a dude in a grittier world. Skyrim was about your view of sparkling mushroom caves and dragons from behind a bow. They both try different ways to engage you and they both appeal to different types of players.
Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.
It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.
It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.
Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.
But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.
The biggest crime here is that people are actually looking forward to a game that will INEVITABLY be the same GTA slop we’ve been playing since the turn of the goddamn millenium.
Graphics are no longer a selling point, we can make anything look like anything now. Unique gameplay and immersive narratives and interactive mechanics are now the way games stand out. Look how popular far simpler social games are like Repo and the like. look how well a goddamn knockoff of S.T.A.L.K.E.R did (Misery) and it was the most basic survival mechanics and it was made by one person and it looks like it crawled out of a Playstation 2… but it was engaging and addicting because it was trying new ways to do old things.
All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.
For a game that is supposed to encourage exploration to start off saying not to?
It’s an odd point to get hung up on, I can certainly describe a lot of areas the game is lacking by today’s standards and some other open-world type games, but this wasn’t one of them for me. Some people are going to feel challenged by being told “don’t go there” and some people will feel offended and some people won’t think much of it I guess.
I mean… sure, I guess it bears mentioning my first playthrough I did brave the deathclaws and survived by being sneaky and took a wildly different path than most people at the time.
The idea isn’t that there’s an easier path of least resistance you can take, but that it actually let’s you go off the rails if you give it effort or come up with some logical ideas.
In modern gaming, solving problems with logic is almost dead, and NV had a lot of that.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
“Okay team, we need to make this game about the American Civil war, but in a way that doesn’t touch on politics or race or offend anyone in any way, we have do whatever we can to make the Civil War seem like just some kind of completely neutral historical incident that couldn’t have been avoided, we can’t have modern slavery apologists or descendants of slaves feel ANYTHING about ANYTHING!”
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.
“I keep catching myself in this uncanny loop — expecting the so-called ‘AI moment’ to have fizzled out, only to realize the bubble hasn’t just not popped, it’s still inflating. You didn’t just add AI to your business plan, you pivoted your entire narrative to center on it — because in 2025, apparently, no pitch deck is complete without a sprinkle of machine learning magic. Every time I see it, I’m not just surprised, I’m re-surprised — like déjà vu, but powered by buzzwords and venture capital fumes.”
edit: the above is the same comment I replied to, but run through an AI to sound more like an AI wrote it.
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.
All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them.
Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.
The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.
Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.
Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.
And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.
And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.
And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.
I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.
(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)
Wouldn’t it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.
But what if I just pirate and use VPN’s? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.
Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.
Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.
I don’t know which of us you’re replying to, you seem to be replying to both me and the person I replied to?
I’m saying it’s actually fine if a privately owned company wants to change whatever content they provide, it happens all the time and nobody bats an eye, but this isn’t that, this is an action by a government to broadly crack down on even what private companies can and cannot do. This is a massive problem that isn’t about porn, it’s about government overreach and government censorship, we have constitutional laws about such things… or had, I am not sure if that’s even a thing anymore.
I mean, they are in the moment that they’re mad that someone made a black female with realistic proportions as a selectable character… but they largely don’t have principles or values at all, they’re a slime-mold that fits into whatever social trend is easy to latch onto right now so they can share emotional connection with their peers.
What happened is we ignored them and people like Steve Bannon and Russians and other agents of regression saw them as a ripe target for exploitation and manipulation. We have a massive rise in things like incels and anti-woke young men, but it’s largely manufactured. These are mostly young people who are unhappy, alone and they’ve been nudged towards easy-to-digest memes and talking points that this is the fault of unattractive feminists who want to take their games away.
This isn’t “conservatism” as much as reactionary attitudes and social isolation. If we were able to get a foot in the door faster and have a concerted effort to show them that their issues are largely socio-economic and mental-health related, we would have made a lot more progress a lot sooner. Source: I used to do just that and mentored/coached lonely young guys for years, they’re staggeringly easy to turn if you make the effort and are social and can listen to people.
No no, I’m sure it’s the fault of the trans kids. And the immigrants. I’m sure prices will go down if the US just cracks down harder on these threats to gaming.
edit: do some of you dipshits have literal brain damage? If I have to add /s tags to something like this, it’s proving that we have NO hope for the future ffs, take your medication and talk to someone.
A conspiracy implies they made an attempt to hide it.
I’ve been showing people this shit on social media and reddit for years now and nobody cared. I was called a fearmonger and hyped up “shrill” leftist, stirring up controversy over unrealistic possibilities, etc. etc.
Fuck all ya’ll, I know some of you are out there reading all this, some of the same head-buried-in-the-sand lazy fuckers who tried to dismiss real warnings about real things because you didn’t want to be bothered to get involved or change your vote.
I’m all in for banning pornographic content
The issue isn’t so much that they’re banning pornographic content, it’s the fact that there is no possible definition of “pornographic” that people can agree on, and every attempt at trying to do this in the past has always been simply an attempt by lawmakers to legislate what you can and can’t enjoy - IE: state approved media that doesn’t go against power. We had many court cases about this in the US, they always have ended siding against those trying to censor what people can and can’t look at.
“Porn” is like physics. You can call almost anything porn from certain vantage points, so an open-ended policy that allows those in control to decide what’s porn or not allows them to control what you think in a very real way.
There’s no way that US politics wouldn’t have a huge effect on this type of censorship.
I’ve been called a fearmonger also for trying to tell apathetic gamers who “hate politics” that if they don’t get involved they’re going to start losing their own goddamn games.
I have linked the “Conservapedia” articles on video games all over reddit until they banned me. I have tried to tell people that voting for Trump or supporting his ideals even distantly isn’t going to “take the woke out of your games” that it will actually crush your gaming entirely, because… and I can’t stress this enough, Conservatives HATE GAMING. Not the online chuds and 4channers who hate women, they’re barely even conservatives… they’re fodder for the online fights. But the old-guard and middle-class conservatives who get marching orders from churches and grifters, the ones who have all the actual money on the right. They want to see an end to “distractions” and fiction and fantasy and everything that isn’t some kind of sanitized, un-nuanced devotion to Dear Leader and his United States of White Jesus.
Fiction has been an enemy of power since writing began, and games are just another kind of fiction that lets people stretch their imagination. This is why it’s dangerous, this is why they want to see it ended.
You summed up why I never engage in media/gaming conversations online, but I had to step into this one because the game was legitimately art and needs to be recognized and preserved before like, the Turmp administration declares it terrorist propaganda or something. (Don’t scroll down where people are saying it was an artistic game as a derogatory slam.)
Oh yes, the voice narration was what made it go from great to fantastic, but it’s still at that point an “audio book” for all the unwashed masses in here, so it’s semantic and pointless to try to convince people who rather delight in the nuance and depth of JRPG’s where you grind killing slimes for 94 hours that it’s not supposed to be that kind of game.
I have high hopes that Light No Fire will learn the lessons from NMS and make a world that is both dynamic and interesting, but grounded enough in a single planet that it’s not such a slog to explore and it’s not just “Oh, neat, a green planet with blue worm aliens and purple trees, this is a color/creature combo I haven’t seen in hours.”
Also, imagine how nice it would be if they just drop it as a huge MMO and you just drop in somewhere and people start randomly finding each other and building communities. That would go so hard, and yet the studios capable of making that kind of experience are soooo scared of the 2% of players who will play that and whinge all over the forums that they’re “bored, lost and can’t find anyone.”