I mean, I dunno. I was sort of okay with the link’s awakening remake using this aesthetic, because it was a one off game, but it does sort of strike me as a very like, default, low rent kind of appearance, and the item and enemy copying ability also strikes me as something that’s not that interesting, and not as interesting as the normal zelda dungeon by dungeon kind of scheme. A good portion of the things you’re gonna copy are probably going to have exceedingly similar behaviors, they’re going to be functionally identical.

It’s obviously a copy, ironically, or maybe an extension, of the design philosophy behind the recent two big zelda games, and this one’s adapted it to a lower budget 2D game. I dunno, I’m still not in love with the idea as a whole, and that’s kind of after two big games. I dunno if it’s really ever gonna be on the level of, say, portal, or something, right? Which is a weird comparison to make, but I do feel the need to make it. I’ve never really found physics puzzles to be that interesting, which is gonna be what a lot of games that try like, universal mechanics, are going to have to cowtow to, because physics systems are theoretically infinite even though they actually do have a relatively small set of constraints, right. I’ve also never really enjoyed stacking boxes on top of one another as a solution to a puzzle, despite that being omnipresent in every good immersive sim, which is weirdly what I would kind of peg the modern zelda design philosophy as belonging to.

I dunno. I feel like the change in style has been kind of hard for me to pin down. It’s very obvious in a difference of feel, right, but in terms of formally locking down the actual difference, I can’t say I’ve really found much that’s all that weird about it. Sure, you can theoretically use whatever ability, anywhere, at any time, to make any vehicle, or scale any platform, stuff like that. But 90% of the time, it’s going to be totally useless as an ability. You’re going to fall into a couple of discrete, routine behaviors, even given an “infinite” ability that you’re just sort of, free to use and abuse like that.

Compare this to a conventional zelda tool, which is not generally usable anywhere, right. You can use the hookshot to stun or damage enemies, right, you can use it to grapple onto a discrete set of platforms, but outside of that it’s not gonna be too useful. I don’t see that as being all that different from like. Ahh, well, with this ability, you can paste together two pallets! It’s effectively the same, they’re gonna come with a pretty similar set of constraints and behaviors.

I feel like, to me, a lot of the fun of emergent mechanics comes from eeking out solutions to puzzles that designers probably haven’t thought about at all. Sometimes you can basically sidestep a challenge that otherwise you would’ve had to do, and in that way, it feels very much like a casual version of a speedrunning trick, or, it’s something that rewards your cleverness, or your understanding and mastery of the mechanics beyond even what the designers might anticipate. I like that much less when it feels like the designer doesn’t have a set, like, idea of a solution to a puzzle. When they’ve just given me all the tools, and then they tell me to go nuts, I don’t feel as though I’m circumventing anything, I just feel as though I’m doing the puzzle as god intended. There’s probably also some amount of, if everyone’s super, then no one is, going on there. If every puzzle is some puzzle I’m able to circumvent with clever rules lawyering or mechanics abuse, then it gets older, faster.

So I dunno. I really like the third banjo kazooie game, it was probably ahead of it’s time, if this is the kind of direction we’re going in now, and obviously I have some level of nostalgia for it, because the 360 was my formative console, because I’m a zoomer. Feel old yet? At the same time, the first two games were probably just straight up better games, if I had to actually be honest with myself. They have wider appeal, and even if you just have an ability that you can only use on a specific pad, with a specific symbol, and 95% of the challenges can only be conquered how the game designer intends, it’s probably still gonna be better and have more broad appeal than having to either come up with a discrete set of vehicles, use the defaults, or else spend like 50% of your game time in the vehicle creation menu constructing increasingly niche vehicles to better perform the specific task.

I dunno. You see what I’m getting at, though?

Bring it back as an HTPC like the peeps are saying, low-ball it on the price like 500 bucks or less, maybe even take a hit on it or just a hit on the profit margins, pre-install all the stuff people might need, and then blam, you’ve guaranteed that most people will be casual users who want a lower-end computer and a smart TV/console replacement, and not higher tier hobbyists who want a more powerful machine. Confining your audience to that specific market share basically guarantees they won’t take advantage of the lower or negative margins on the hardware itself, and will probably buy some amount of steam games. They’re also using a device in your ecosystem now but idk what you do as far as that goes to make a good profit while not being a scumbag

Why is this point so hard to understand?

It’s not, they’re making a separate but contiguous point about how the market naturally incentivizes shittier tactics from it’s participants, and how Steam, Valve, and Gaben are exceptions to the rule.

Highly recommend the Internet Historian video about no man’s sky.

I wouldn’t, that dude’s a nazi

No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them

Why do you think this is, though? This really hasn’t been my experience, people are usually pretty quick to add shit to the FAQ if it actually comes up ime.

You’re also relying a lot, ironically, on Google, when you advocate for using search engines as a repository for forums. Google is not that good anymore, and most forums don’t come up. For a niche software, do you think the specific forum for that software would actually come up 99% of the time, or would the results just be flooded by a bunch of youtube tutorials and posts to random subreddits and other forums about irrelevant shit that you weren’t looking for? If you were even lucky enough to get results in the first place, that is. Partially this is due to things moving to discord, but partially it’s due to Google having an effective monopoly on search engining.

If you’re just going to like, go to a forum and use the forum’s internal search. One, it probably sucks because they always have these stupid idiot rules like no common words and it has to be in a range of 4-40 characters and no symbols, shit like that, which sucks. But also, you can do the same thing with discord and just navigate to the web version and then just look up what you wanted to find on the chat logs and read an old conversation. They seem functionally pretty similar in that respect.

Moderating a forum to protect against random people spamming you with CSAM attacks is also more time-consuming for a small developer, and it’s also time consuming to redirect people to previous threads when they inevitably come in and post shit that’s already been asked about, which is also going to breed probably a more insular culture than discord, as impossible as that might seem. Again, you’re also waiting like 2 days for a response, and this is especially stupid when you’re dealing with a back and forth, because not everyone is going to put in the effort to present their problems as thoroughly as possible and present you with like an actual bug report or screenshots or anything. They might not even know what to search for or ask about, and then they’re completely fucked. It’s easier to manage discord because of it’s more active nature.

Basically, the problem is this: Forums put more responsibility and onus on the users to adequately present their problems in a more easily parsable format, and better search for solutions to their own problems. It’s not a mystery, then, why people might prefer to use discord, in my mind.

Still not the point of a live-chat application. The use case is not the same as a forum. You want an archive where everything is well-organized and most questions have already been answered. Discord and other live chat services are more like live tech support, to fill the gap between the raw technical documentation found in GitHub, and the just getting started guide or FAQ, which are usually lightweight enough that they could be posted anywhere. Discord doesn’t exist to be an archive that holds all the knowledge, discord exists so that when you open an app, you can go in, ask a couple questions, and hopefully someone will get to you in a couple minutes, at most, rather than in a couple days.

the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.

That’s still not really the purpose of discord, and I think you have actually missed the point. It’s not an informational archive, it’s a tech support line, and oftentimes one which can be used to improve the FAQ and documentation, which is usually found on GitHub or independently hosted, and is usually light enough in weight that it can just be copy pasted anywhere or even included in software. For much of these kinds of software, creating an incredibly comprehensive and well-organized FAQ isn’t as large of an up-front priority as mashing bugs. Of that use case, what strikes you as better, the app that everyone already uses, or IRC?

cause it’s cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it’s fun.

Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.