• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot about people’s acknowledgement of faults or shortcomings and choosing to ignore them, whether it’s because they agree, don’t care, or think it doesn’t matter. Or don’t agree and there’s no better alternative, or it’s the least bad alternative. I dunno.

    In the public internet spaces like Facebook, discord, the others, I’ve been seeing a lot of this happening recently with Linkin Park’s new singer. Some are happy and ignorant, some know and don’t care, some know and are saddened. There is a lot of vitrol between the people who know and are saddened and the people who don’t know/don’t care. This is just one example from this week, but it happens every week to every story. It can be, probably, literally applied to anything. People’s level of information heavily biases them from their predisposed beliefs (as in, if they already have an opinion, chances are that the opinion will not change when presented with new information).

    In our spaces I see it with Brave. I see it with Kagi. We all saw it with Unity en masse and something actually happened about that, but even so people are still using Unity today, albeit I would guess out of necessity, or now ignorance since time has passed (not saying ignorance here is a fault). Before then we saw it with Audacity. Can’t forget Reddit, where a significant chunk of users are now participating here instead. And… yet… Reddit still exists, nearly in full.

    It’s such a crazy phenomena with how opinions are formed from emotional judgements based on the level of information they have, and due to our current state of informational sharing there are microcosms of willful ignorance. And some aren’t ignorant, it just doesn’t matter to them.









  • Consoles need to be more powerful because of the perceived importance that marketing has created for gamers desperate need for graphical fidelity over all else.

    The gameplay of COD and FIFA doesn’t matter so long as it’s sharper/more crisp/more real. Granted, this mindset has somewhat faded, however it is still present and as a result corporations are still pushing it because while 60hz may be an old standard, Sony now has 120hz TV’s to sell you.

    In addition to that, COD and FIFA don’t have to be nearly as well optimized if the consoles can just brute force through it. Also, without newer consoles that are more powerful, there then won’t be games that are too powerful to run on older consoles, meaning they won’t get to sell you new consoles because of the old games you want to play. Instead they can sell you the new games that only work on the new consoles.

    I’m sure there are more reasons, but those seem to be the 3 core facets that make up the purpose of console gaming; sell the lie of the best graphical fidelity, make a game that requires a high powered console to play it, market it as “needing the best of the best” to be able to play it, and suddenly you have a brand loyal set of consumers who keep returning to the fishhook.


  • In my friend group one is really into both ME and AC, he really didn’t like Andromeda but he did like Odyssey.

    The other felt that Andromeda was okay/mid but that Odyssey was also a lot of fun.

    I never got into ME and the last AC game I played was Black Flag, and that may have legitimately been after Odyssey was long released. So while I can’t speak on these games, from what I gather online and from my friends is that Andromeda was kind of a buggy mediocre game that didn’t do as good of a job for the ME universe as it could have, whereas Odyssey was a bit of a deviation, which the people who don’t like it tend to criticize and everybody else seems to enjoy the game for what it is, if not maybe a little Ubisoft standard fetch quest grindy.

    In the case of Odyssey, I think it’s a good potential that is limited by the restraints of Ubisoft, in the same way that has just happened to Star Wars Outlaws. Because for all of the obvious faults we can give Ubisoft, I think it’s fair to give merit to the developers and designers who, for example, completely recreated France for AC: Unity. For all the faults that game had at launch, apparently they did eventually clean it up and my friend really enjoys it.

    It sounds like Outlaws has a great world but just didn’t get the polish, like Ubisoft tends to do.

    Also some unrelated design choices, I’ve seen in gameplay videos like the repetitive mini-games (which can be turned off - but why design something that players turn off because it gets tedious and annoying?) and the AI during non-stealth combat encounters being completely inept, firing in the complete wrong direction. The little things become cumulative and can easily turn a perfectly fine game into a mish-mash of features that we’re put together with any cohesion. The last thing that I remember in terms of criticisms are that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of impact on the system for reputation. Someone who hates you after an interaction can be completely on your side just by doing a few side missions for that character. Not sure if this continues on into the late game, but if it does it seems to be another instance of just not quite fleshed out design.

    The minigame looks fun, but not 4 doors and 3 item crates in a row fun. The reputation system is typically a really engaging and fun thing, but forcing yourself under constraints by choosing to not do missions with someone isn’t as engaging as being put into a situation where you choose one merchant over another, and then that merchant is just done with you forever and may even send goons after you. From what it sounds like, in present state if an event like that happens, just do some odd jobs for the guy and it’s all forgotten?

    I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the game - I tend to like games and movies that people are criticizing, since at least lately most of the criticisms have been… severely biased… but sometimes there’s also truly legitimately terrible stuff, like Rebel Moon. There’s always a line of subjectivity of course, there are people out there who enjoyed it, but the other people see the nearly 21 minutes of the movie, legitimately nearly 30% of it, being in slowmo and say, “Hey, that’s pretty awful, why would you do that?” on top of having another mish-mash of ideas that are presented and subsequently dropped to never be heard from again. I don’t think Outlaws is comparable to Rebel Moon, I have a feeling it’s probably better than its reception but still worse than it should be.


  • Oh it does :) it’s a passion project that gives me some opportunities to make music and sound effects (something I like to do but don’t always record and save my work), and similarly I love making art but having a strong vision for what I want to make can get difficult.

    But I have a really strong vision for the game in its entirety, which helps with the direction for my art and music :) I just need to build the pieces (obviously, easier said than done!) and so far it’s been enjoyable. Difficult, but understandable.

    Basically, I save so many notes and other junk, but I rarely save my creative endeavors. This will be a good way for me to not only reach that goal, but to also create a game that is somewhat unique and that would be really fun to play :D