Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

If the press is giving me the “sanewashed” version, they’re genuinely wasting their time, because motherfuckwr still seems batshit crazy.

I’d never pay money for a porn game, but I feel if it was gifted to me, I’d play it to completion. At least for the experience to say I did. And hey, if it turns me on and I learn something about myself, win/win.

Fantastic watch that highlights the issue I am talking about. Thanks for sharing that.

The problem is we’re linking it to appearances instead of maturity.

The problem with sexual relationships between adults and minors is two fold. First, the minor in question hasn’t had time to fully develop the emotional intelligence to healthily and safely engage in a sexual relationship. Second, there is an innate power differential between a minor and an adult: usually the adult has means of supporting themselves, something akin to solidified social supports and experience, education and knowledge necessary to live without the day-to-day support of others. You put these together, and you have a relationship that, even with the absolute best of intentions, becomes inherently abusive. The adult holds all the power in the relationship, and the minor is left with no choice but to worship the ground they walk on, and worse, they have not developed the emotional intelligence to identify it.

The problem with these 2000 year old loli’s is not their body; the problem is that they’re often child-coded. They act like children. They do things that highlights their lack of knowledge and inexperience. What is often played off as a cute girl anime trope is in reality an indication that this is someone who you can conquer, dominate, and hold power over in a sexual relationship, and you can feel “good” about doing so, because you’re, with the best of intentions, just helping them learn through your loving relationship. So what if you’re fucking her while you do so. (/s on that last sentence just in case)

There is nothing wrong with finding petite women attractive. 30 year olds who look like teenagers are not a problem. Hell, as long as we’re on the topic, I’ll shock most people by arguing that admitting that a 16 year old has developed into an attractive and desirable person isn’t even a problem, as long as you’re doing so from a position of respect rather than intent. The issue is neglecting to recognize the power differential between you and that 16 year old, and convincing yourself that it’s okay to engage in romantic and sexual acts with them while uttering deranged statements like “they’re very mature for their age” or “I’m helping them learn and grow so it’s okay”.

Child coded characters are a problem, and hiding the magic number that supposidly discerns whether or not they’re fuckable doesn’t suddenly make things okay.

Not because of the content, but because of groups of men all reinforcing this behavior.

I genuinely know more women than men that act like this. I can’t say you’re entirely wrong about the problems with normalizing behaviour and the like, but simplifying it to “men are disgusting and know nothing of 'real, actual women” when real, actual women are sometimes equally disgusting is, well concerning.

This particular brand of behaviour is usually about rejection of social norms far more than it is ever about the objectification of women. People who have been rejected by society like to take back the power by rejecting the norms of that society.

What exactly are you trying to communicate? My best guess is that you’re suggesting if he were a part of the pro-woke movement, he’d be suggesting that some children simply need to be sexually assaulted? I hope I’m misinterpreting something here, as there’s a number of things ignorant, backwards and idiotic about that statement.

who has defended his position online by insisting that Hitler sought peace and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem”

His final solution, perhaps?

Straight from the horses mouth. He thinks genocide is an acceptable solution to “the Jewish problem”.

Right?! Watching it get worldwide acclaim was this strange experience, because Act 3 was nearly unplayable. Meanwhile, Acts 1 and 2 were such masterpieces that it’s hard to call the game anything other than amazing. Criticizism felt misplaced, but the widespread acclaim it received was toom

I am glad it is a much more polished, finished feeling game now, and we can look back at it as the standard games should be held to, moving forward, but I’ll still be disappointed in the way we failed to get what was initially planned.

Maybe if the game was anymore more than an uninspired mess, it would have sold some copies.

He can do his job while failing to understand or accept what a transgender student of his is going through, as long as he, you know, does his job, in which the act of respecting and protecting the rights of his students is a core requirement. Creating an environment where the student feels safe and accepted is base level requirement for being a teacher. Choosing to actively disrespect a student when they’re only asking for a completely reasonable, socially accepted courtesy is strictly not doing his job.

It is no one’s “religious right” to create a hostile environment for another, and to do so targeting a minor is abuse. It’s no wonder he was barred from the school.

Fucking Amen. Again, I am disappointed, but it is a great game in its current form and, particularly because WotC is involved, I do not blame them at all for their decisions regarding BG3.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

I had some really, really poor experiences with Act 3, and it was only later that I learned 90% of my issues were direct results of the Upper City being scrapped.

Karlach, Gortash, Wyll’s father and Cazador are perhaps the biggest cases of this, with their stories feeling incomplete, buggy (at launch), and painfully linear relative to almost every other plot point in the game. In almost every case it’s because a series of their events, triggers and event flags were placed in or tied to the upper city, and the events needed to be replaced, rewritten, and reflagged in something of a hurry.

Larian is a great studio, and they’ve made some of my favorite modern games, but they do this with every release. I’m a little disappointed that this is the one time they’re not going back and “finishing” the final act a year later, the way they did with Original Sin 1 and 2. I won’t quite say I’ve been burnt by the purchase, or that the game is currently unfinished or doesn’t deserve the praise it gets, but seeing what the game could and should have been is a bad aftertaste after an otherwise mostly satisfying meal.

The Steam thread breaking down the cut content, for reference: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1086940/discussions/0/3812913565885064204/

So, AI that is strictly incapabale of generating new ideas is going to be fed decades of police reports as it’s database, and use that data to discern that makes a good police report?

Surely this won’t replicate decade old systematic problems with racial profiling. I mean, all these police reports are certainly objective, with no hint of bias to be found in the officers writing.

Simplify the situation to lol defending the EULA all you want, but “I’m not bound by your NDA because I pressed ESC instead of clicking okay” is the kind of thing I expect a spoiled 14 year old to say while wearing a shit eating grin.

Act unprofessionally in a professional industry and you get dragged by professionals. And rightly so.

While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.

I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.

Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.

Imagine being born in a position of privledge, and never being told “no” in your entire life. Why would you ever make a plan when you make the subconscious assumption that everyone operates around what you want?

On a related note, this is why “Woke” is so offensive to people like JD Vance. “We were doing just fine before you people started complaining!” is an easy thought to have from the lap of luxuryn

I got really excited, right up to the moment when I remembered that this will require uPlay.

A couple titles that deserve mention and I don’t see in any other lists:

Children of Mora - Narrative driven action RPG with some light Roguelite-ish elements. Amazing world building and story telling, good character choice/building and gameplay.

Cassette Beasts - Pokemon, if it were good. Much more mature story, tons of quality of life systems that makes building things fun, a weakness system that matters a lot more than “number big” and the entire game is double battles. I’ve played the game start-to-finish in couch co-op and it was incredible. They’ve recently added online multiplayer, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that the online allows you to engage with the story together. Couch co-op has one player play as the companion character in an otherwise unchanged experience whereas online has one player character hop into another player characters world.

Weird enough, the Monster Hunter franchise - I’m not sure how this isn’t anywhere else in this thread. Use large weapon to hunt large monster. Build bigger weapon to hunt bigger monster. World and Rise are both on sale on Steam right now. World is dumb to move through the story together though, despite the fact that most fans who aren’t me are likely to call it the better game.