all-knight-party

Mentioning smoking breaks is a big part, I think. At a place I used to work if you smoked you basically got free extra breaks to take care of it that other associates did not, and depending how tough your job is it could be an incentive.

I think when a new post is posted and it hits the front page it bumps all the other posts back by that many, which will make them get bumped from the end of one page into the beginning of the next

That’s sad news about the studio. I suppose some people forgot that the original Mass Effect had quite a few issues and it wasn’t until 2 that it got real good, and having that bar set at a payoff that was only possible through three games of narrative choices and carryover was impossible to hit for Andromeda.

It seems like it was cursed with “how the heck do you follow that up?” Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.

I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those “MMO side quest” style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.

Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don’t understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it’s too early on in your character’s development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don’t have patience or weren’t interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.

I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.

How do you feel about/have you played Andromeda? I love the ME trilogy, and I was a quarter through ME2 doing a trilogy replay as well, but then Starfield released. I’ll get back to it eventually though. I haven’t played Andromeda myself, but I feel like it couldn’t possibly be as terrible as the kickback it got on release.

Removed by mod

I’ve found it a little tricky to find an instance that has a dedicated, transparent instance owner who doesn’t disappear while making sure the instance doesn’t throw 500 errors when you view certain pages. I started on Fedia which had tons of 500 errors when I tried to view my own profile or subscriptions, which seems to have gotten better, but still has intermittent issues.

Then I came to kbin.cafe, but it seems like the instance owner went poof, and I get 500 errors if I try to change my profile picture. I think most of this is because the software is still relatively early in development.

Otherwise it does feel as if Kbin is handling every other facet well, it’s just early on and buggy and hard for instance owners to keep up.

Ohh yeah, this article. I’ve only personally witnessed about a half second stutter on occasion in the cities, I could probably count the occurrences on two hands with about 30 hours in, but that sounds about right because even Oblivion whose own optimization bottlenecks itself gets “traversal stutter” for me on PC.

Memory leaks are possible for sure, especially since Digital Foundry confirmed there’s still save game load time bloat after a long playthrough.

Is that a hardware thing? I haven’t had any real stuttering or freezing, just low FPS in the cities

It’s totally normal, and might be unavoidable. It seems like you’re uploading your art not just to show your creative output, but to feel validation. You want to know that your art is good and well-liked, and that people enjoy that art just as much as they enjoy any other art online.

You could try to do something like only post your art to a website that you use as a portfolio where the numbers dont exist and you’re not really competing with others on the same platform for visibility. That may not work if it’s truly about validation, as you couldn’t just put that away without needing to transplant the validation somewhere else in your life.

Your best option might be to try and more thoroughly engage with whatever community you already have in an effort to make the engagement that you already have feel enough. Maybe something like drawing requests of dumb ideas people have, just for fun, to get them commenting and have you draw something that’s just for the viewers and not for a higher level of art and engagement.

Katana ZERO. The fact that your character can fail and “die” and yet be able to control the flow of time to return and try again is not only contextualized through the game’s lore and your character’s usage of a drug, but becomes basically the entire story by the end of it. Brilliant game.

That’s how you get your kid to never go to the beach with you

I feel you. I just hit 20 hours and I probably didn’t start to fully realize how to find different kinds of content deliberately until about hour 15 after I’d got some of the faction stuff started and explored enough planets to understand how to find certain side quests.

For the first while my natural instinct just had me exploring all of the cities and stations, just talking with people and picking up masses of side quests, then I hit a point where I started actually doing them, because I was burning myself out on walking and talking.

The non-scaling level of systems is interesting, figuring that out helped me to be able to do quests that I was leveled for and weren’t super spongey, I figured out the structure of the random quest board quests so I could partake in FPS shooting, ship shooting, cargo running, or more narrative driven side quests depending on my mood.

Figuring out that the trade authority (only the manned shops, not the kiosks) is your stolen goods fence meant I could really start stealing in earnest, and the decrease in environmental items that are lootable, along with the decrease in lootable homes and apartments means stealing opportunities are harder to come by.

Even still, after being pretty cheap at level 20 I’m at about 120,000 credits, which seems close to enough to fully build my own ship, which I’m about to eagerly do in my next session. Once I’ve got a ship built I’ll want to start and get into landing on less colonized planets and figure out the outposts and such, where I can pivot to hiring people from the taverns and getting into that whole side of the game.

I think because of the amount of things you could do, the amount of them that are basically impossible to do from the outset due to money (ship and outpost building), and the way the game doesn’t guide or explain things well, it was really easy for me to create my own boring rut where I just walked and talked and ran away from tough enemies because I didn’t realize I picked up a quest that was in or lead to a high level system.

For instance, I knew you could board ships, I had no idea that I needed the systems targeting skill to target engines to even do that at all, the skill description didn’t mention it, and the early game mission that forces you to board doesn’t require you to have the skill, you just board when the ship is supposed to “die”. I was also initially upset random items couldn’t be broken down into materials, but then I realized some materials can just be found as lootables, same for some craftable components.

All told, as I play more I’m coming around to it all more, but it’ll probably take another ten or 20 hours before I fully understand all the systems and can make a judgment on if I like it more, less, or the same as Fallout 4, which I also loved.

Earth Defense Force is the shit. It’s not way more fun than it has any right to be, it’s exactly as fun as shooting giant alien insects as an overly patriotic earth sci Fi military SHOULD be.

I think if you show the gameplay to somebody and then the addicting loot system that they’d be down, unless they just don’t like the chaotic shooter-ness. But yeah, those games are fucking great

Its not necessarily a kid’s game, but that is their primary demographic and player base out of some fusion of being easy to run, simple games being easier to create, the art style, the accessibility and short term gratification of easily jumping between experiences.

Advertisers don’t like it, and won’t advertise where there’s porn. Advertisers pay for most of these websites’ existence. They capitulate to the demands.

I assume you’re right on that, I didn’t check OP’s instance, thats just a weird quirk id seen on my end

That was the same for me, but reverse. I tried to play No Man’s Sky to get hyped for Starfield, but they’re just such different games doing different things and one doesn’t appeal to me as much as the other.

Sometimes if you subscribe to a magazine that’s not from your instance it’ll just say that your instance owner is the mod even if that’s not true, especially for Lemmy communities. That’s probably what’s actually going on, but I didn’t check all of those mags to confirm

They have a whole rube Goldberg machine set up that fires a BB gun into their gut every time they get shot