I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.

I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.

Less AAA trash fires and better access to actual passion projects because they aren’t being drowned in a sea of mediocrity?

This is an absolute win on all sides

From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.

That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.

I like Lex Luthor as a villain a lot more than I like Superman as a hero for exactly this reason. He’s a villain, sure, but his villainy is all centered around this one highly logical and concerning idea of never giving Superman total power because they’d then never be able to take it away from him.

Dr Doom I straight up don’t even consider a villain tbh. He’s antihero at worst (though he’d be pissed to hear me say so). His subjects love him. A bit megalomaniacal, maybe, but he genuinely wants to rule the world to do what’s best for everyone.

If Fantastic wants to fight you because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, and Doom wants to fight you because he thinks you’re destroying his property, I know which one I’m putting my bet on because I know which one is going to show up to that fight more pissed off. His reasons are weird but Doom does still frequently show up to fight the bad guys, if for no other reason than “this is my fucking planet and I won’t have you breaking the place”. I love that.

I don’t see Alaska facing these problems.

Kids do.

Their problems are smaller than us adults’, but they feel those problems with the same intensity we do. Being ostracized from your social group is a big problem even for adults. It’s worse for kids.

And kids, being kids, will bandwagon the hell out of anything. If somebody clowns on your shoes every day, give it a week and half the school will be doing it. Give it a year and you’re “that guy with the shoes”.

Is your brand of shoes important in the long term? No, not at all. Your social status in high school also, largely, doesn’t matter in the long term. But “the long term” is difficult to keep your eye on when you’re looking at 4-8 years of pointless bullying in your future.

All this to say - yeah I think this is pretty dumb, but it’s important to the people who are living it. And something that’s important to a child should also be important to their parents, in my opinion. I was the kid with the ratty shoes and the hand-me-downs. That stuff can really do some permanent damage to a kid’s psyche.

Does this mean that every middle schooler needs to have a fresh set of Jordan’s and a fitted suit every year? No, of course not. But if I can spend an extra $50 once every two years to make my son happy then why wouldn’t I?

Oh so she’s going to just straight up kill Texas completely. Interesting.

All it takes is for one determined furry to pull up their programming socks and hack into Truth Social and start posting under Trump’s name and we’ll see that dry up real quick, unless he wants to make all his official announcements surrounded by uwu’s and lewd pictures of Pokémon.

Dollars to donuts it’s going to be stupid easy to do as well, because Trump is incapable of hiring competent employees or of paying whoever he does hire.

[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.

They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]

This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.

There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.

Family share is actually great for this now.

It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.

But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.

So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.

Regular enemies fall over like wet tissue, yeah.

Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.

But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.

I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.

Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.

Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.

I’ve played quite a lot of Nightreign.

In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.

In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.

Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.

In the South? Yes, definitely.

1. The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn’t expect them to leave the southern border undefended.

2. It’s extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I’m ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that’s about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you’ll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You’ll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.

3. Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it’s confusing) are not all racist, but uh… you’ll see more who are, than aren’t. If you’re any shade of brown you’re going to have a rough time. If you speak with a “funny” accent you’re going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn’t want to roll those dice, it’s still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don’t like.

Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don’t take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn’t have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I’m not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it’s already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn’t stop them.

Flying in from outside the US during this time to then attempt to drive all the way across the South

Both. It’s both. I hope they stay safe. There are like 4 different major threats to a foreigner on that route.

Steve Bannon, as much of a piece of shit as he is, had a good plan and executed it well. He’s talked about it openly. This has been brewing for decades, at least.

So you have no answer then, cool, thought so.

So please explain then? I’d love to know why a stranger on the internet thinks that financially contributing to industrialized murder is funny. Please do elaborate.

It’s objectively not an opinion, where the fuck do you think that money goes?

And sure, $20 here doesn’t matter. When a million other people also invest $20 “as a gag” or more trying to make a profit, whoops, that’s $20 million plus worth of death. They don’t make anything else. Only death.

For directly and unapologetically funding the death and destruction of human lives?

Yes. Yes you are.

Ding ding ding, winner!