One of the last Web 1.0 bastions in gaming. Really hate to see this, especially when Discord is around the peak of its popularity right now. Here's hoping a more future-proof alternative than that arises.
Much of this isn't unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we've recently crawled out of it, thankfully.
What bugs me the most right now (and doesn't quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone's pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It's starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.
One new, big positive I'm not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn't happened in over thirty years. I'm including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix's recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.
One regime's political-dissident-by-speech is another's dissident-by-drug-addiction. America's "War on Drugs" was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it's a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.
By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.
Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.
Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.
There's no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don't see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm perfectly happy with seeing a creatively bankrupt game if it also eventually means genuine competition in a genre that's been thin for decades.
Grave of the Fireflies, a Ghibli film. Stopped it a couple times. Ended up finishing it eventually, wish I never had.
Casual xenophobia/racism. Much like the whole MSG thing here.
So if you're in the Underdark, you're not actually in Act 2 yet. If you need the main story to drive you forward, you have a little further to go. The Underdark doesn't advance any personal quests, at least not in a major way, even though there's plenty to do.
The difference between this and D:OS2 is that while Reaper's Coast felt open, the level scaling still had the zone on rails, more or less. Here, you have a couple different ways to go. If you want to move on (I suggest level 5 if you aren't already first), there is a way forward to find. If you want a more straightforward road, try the path on the surface.
Well, a bunch more talent just hit the job market with The Escapist melting down, too.
I encourage anyone that hasn't yet to try any subscription-based journalism for a month just to see how different the writing is when it's not beholden to advertising and SEO.
I don't like 3D platforming. I haven't liked it since it really kicked off in 1996. Even all these years later with Super Mario Odyssey, I feel like I'm constantly fiddling with the camera, and something in my brain struggles with judging distances in 3D space at times. I used to love platforming. Yoshi's Island is one of my all-time favorite games.
If I were in a bubble, I'd say the camera and the floaty controls that are in a lot of these games need an overhaul, but Mario's as popular as ever. Between that and Mario games still being at the top of metascores, it's probably only me and five other people grumpy about it.
Well, they wouldn't, because not all of the nine thought the game was perfect. A 100 on Metacritic only means the game placed in the top score for a given publication (4 out of 4 stars in WaPo's case, for example).
In games criticism, a top score doesn't always mean a perfect game. It can mean the game met or surpassed the current benchmark in its genre, or it simply was good enough to be in a top tier.
Don't know how old your father is, but at least among Gen X women, creepy men absolutely have been part of the discussion. It just wasn't a public discussion until much more recently. Hell, the fake phone number thing goes back to landlines.
We're still at a point of significant cultural change in gender relations, and until an equilibrium point is reached, there's going to be apprehension about approaching others. To that end, it's important that we keep small gaffes made in good faith as social misdemeanors (to allow for opportunities to correct behavior) and not career-ending incidents. It only takes a quick browse of social media discussing one of these incidents to see why said apprehension exists.
That said, I still don't think we're having enough conversations about consent around positions of authority and social hierarchy in general. Too many people don't understand that being nice to someone when you're on the clock isn't implied consent for continued interaction with that person off the clock. That's the light stuff; it can go all the way to gross stories about cops and women. It all stems back to authority and power imbalance. This might be more of an issue in the US than elsewhere; I think ideals of "equality" and "social mobility" are so ingrained in our culture that some Americans don't have the social intelligence around the very real stratification that exists at the workplace and elsewhere.
Fear of rejection is a whole other problem that likely stems from everyone having more anxiety now. I was around a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20's a lot more than usual the past couple years and holy crap. I thought my social anxiety was bad. I don't know how these kids are going to function.