Don’t give your money to a nazi organization.

I really hate the chrome and blue cyber lights they replaced the forerunner architecture with in this and the 343 Halo games.

The weird brushed metal / almost stone like appearance of the original material gave the impression of something monolithic and ancient. Yeah, there were some holograms hovering in front of walls, but these were always hidden inside structures, becoming more numerous as you went deeper underground, as if to imply that you’re entering some sacred space or getting closer to something secret. In either case I think the structures had a quiet dignity that contrasted strongly with the Covenant’s very loud bright blue and green aesthetic (even the aforementioned holograms were pale and less saturated compared to the Covenant stuff).

Instead we get something that looks like it belongs in a fucking gamer PC or some pimp’s car.

That sounds pretty entertaining, reminds me of when DOOM Eternal and Animal Crossing New Horizons came out near each other and people made memes and fanart with both of them.

(art by third_cookie)

There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation).

Do you remember when CEOs would make announcements at conferences they’d be trying to convince consumers about how good their product is? Pretty frequently they were lying, but now they’re not even talking to us, when they speak they’re addressing stock holders and other companies.

They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s.

I want an apology letter from all the “stop hating on Microsoft, its not 1999 anymore and they have a new CEO :) :) :)” people.

I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.

With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.

In more concrete terms, if I can buy Diablo 2 (pay fixed cost), get a really good item drop (random chance value outcome), and sell my Steam account to someone who wants that item (money in, money out), why would that be different than that same flow with a loot box?

One potential difference is that you can play Diablo 2 as many times as you want.

So, its a lot less like inserting a coin to buy a chance at a capsule machine and a lot more like buying the whole machine. With every copy of the machine having the same capsules inside it. In your analogy you can say the previous owner already got a few capsules out, but you can also open the machine if you want and put them back inside, or change the machine’s contents.

I’m really sad that it’s not a STALKER-like.

I really want to wander around the abandoned colony looking at things and reading logs without being in a time limited multiplayer match.

But in one run I didn’t at all become engaged with the world itself (which is very reasonable). Certainly not enough to give a fuck about trying to go out and learn about it for its own sake.

TBH, it sounds to me like you’re just not a very curious person.

I fell out of love with Team Fortress 2 after they murdered the art style with the cosmetics and extra weapons.

I didn’t realize it at the time but later on I fell further out of love with it for its role in normalizing lootboxes. In retrospect we should have shut that shit down as hard as horse armor was. Tribes: Ascend and TF2 were patient 0 and 1 in the pandemic. It was seen as acceptable at the time since the games were free, but we didn’t anticipate the broader effects it would have.

It happened to the Playstation, though not for use as workstations usually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Although Valve apparently already takes anti-scalping measures with the Steam Deck, so maybe it could work out in that way (as in, each steam account gets a limited number of purchases, TOS against trying to bypass that limit, etc).

it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that

If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay-effecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.

Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.

At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?

Initial cost of the read device will be about $6,000

That’s not bad at all. It’s something that basically every library could have. Imagine that level of distributed redundancy for hundreds of terrabytes worth of information, in a medium that essentially lasts forever.

Assuming it really is coming out at that price of course.

IMO the combat mechanics shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the developers were terrified of making a player-character that wasn’t a demigod that can slaughter an entire army.

I still think Dishonored 1 & 2 are both really good games, but its like they made Portal but just let you break the walls of the test chambers and walk right through if you felt like it.

The person that came up with that phrase is in charge of a game series with dialogue that makes your skull physically reform into a fedora.

Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?

I’ve played Gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.

EDIT: also, I’m not a Nintendo lover, actually pretty much hate them for issuing takedowns of fan games and let’s plays.

The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In Gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them to fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike Source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.

In addition to that, TotK takes Gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.

And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for Gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.

I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.

Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).

It’s not AI, it’s neural network models

These used to be called AI before people decided that only LLMs and Diffusion models were AI. Both of which are types of neural networks.

Wow, I’ve seen plenty of games launch unfinished but ‘unlaunching’ is a new one for me.

I mean I’m bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they’re too corpo.

I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.