HolyDuckTurtle

I had to learn more about it after that short clip and found an overview page which is fun to read if your browser can translate it: https://www.dentsubo.net/circle/spe256.html

Keeping details minimal because I can’t for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:

In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.

I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.

Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking “Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial” then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.

I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.

I’d go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It’s where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.

Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There’s a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.

It’s not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the “omg it gets so DARK” hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise “oh, right, that’s not the kind of story and experience they want to tell”.

I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)

Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:

If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio’s writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don’t enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it’s a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.

To quote the 2+n paragraph article:

It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.

I imagine LTT did that for meme purposes more than anything else. Threadrippers are not built for games. They’re built for production workloads which don’t translate to gaming performance.

That said, the point still stands. This game needs the most powerful gaming hardware (e.g. Ryzen X3D series and RTX 4090) on “recommended” settings and 1080p to get averages above 60fps, which is wild. There’s a rather dedicated fellow on reddit who does detailed performance tests after each patch.

I liked it in general, especially after the first seasn. However, I still get frustrated at how Michael-centric it is (it feels like every time a character has an opportunity to do something cool on their own, they always need help from Michael somehow) and tend to dislike the galaxy being at stake every damn time.

Strange New Worlds delivers on that for me though, so it’s good to have different options!

I worked with a startup once where we had individual company emails and had a good giggle at how different the spam is compared to personal stuff! Mostly in our case it was dubious offers of office space, furniture and other such services.

Jedi Survivor’s performance issues are annoying but I wouldn’t call it “unplayable” by any stretch. It depends on how you define it. My definition of that would be either “literally doesn’t launch / hard crashes consistently” or “massively fluctuating frametime on appropriate hardware and settings that makes the intended gameplay too difficult to enjoy”.

In my experience, it’s mostly traversal stutter and TAA ghosting at low frames in the giant hub level which you don’t really get during actual combat. I also partially inflicted that on myself by choosing to play on max settings with RT and no FSR. I use a R5 3600, RX 7900XT and 32GB Ram.

Obviously, your mileage and personal tolerances will vary. Definitely consider the refund window and use the big city vistas of the first area to judge if you’ll enjoy it at that performance / quality level you choose. The art direction is really good so I think it will hold up on lower settings.

It’s a good, but flawed game. I got really into it for a month and developed a love/hate relationship with it, but overall enjoyed that time.

That’s as somebody who loves sci-fi and got really into building my ship. I was pretty much the target audience so I may have been more willing to immerse myself in it than others would care for.

Also, it was super refreshing to me playing a game where my companions are all in their 30s with a lot of history. It feels quite mature in that sense. Which I guess is why the main story really disappointed me when you get an antagonist who feels like a 12-year old who just discovered the Wikipedia page for Nihilism, but hey ho.

For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.

The moment I saw HDRP mentioned I thought “Yup, that’d do it”

There is no system in the world, religeous or otherwise, safe from the dangers of radicalization.

You are supporting the rape and murder of ordinary people. Nothing justifies this behaviour. Especially not with the pathetic “but what if any of these people could go on to become the new Hitler? Checkmate!” line.

I don’t know if you’re a troll who thinks this is funny, or something worse. Either way, it needs to stop.

I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.

The whole “pledge” store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It’s just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It’s actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they’ve had recently was a “new starter bundle” of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.

They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It’s been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they’ll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.

That’s not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it’s been scrapped and re-done more than once.

Their last big chance to show they’ve pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they’ll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company’s spending practices, claimed they’d taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we’d see some results of that towards the end of this year.

I’m not holding my breath though. They’ve been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.

As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn’t been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.

That’s about his theory of Radiant Energy, not lightning strikes.

Even though it was developed by a different team, they did capture the general charm IMO. The story and characters aren’t terrible, some of it I really loved. Like Inquisition and Anthem, it was primarily let down by a lot of management and studio culture issues which have been made very public.

In my view, Dreadwolf is their opportunity to show if they’ve managed to overcome those callenges or has sucumbed to them forever. I am made hopeful by what appears to have been a well-scoped and managed project in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

The point is that even a second hand high-end card will cost as much as a PS5. For a single component.

PC gaming has grown a lot, but its peak was the PS3/PS4 era when it could be noticably superior to average people. I’d say it’s going back to being a platform for entheusiasts who care about those things you mentioned, which most people don’t. At least, not enough to spend twice as much or more for a console equivilent.

This sounds very useful, I wonder to what extent federated platforms like ours can make use of it? It sounds as if apps will need to specially deisgned around it, given it presents challenges to traditional moderation of things like DMs between users.

I hope so. My fear is after seeing what the fossil fuel industries did to stop alternatives from arising, that they will embark on a new campaign to undermine this for as long as possible.

There’s also the simple social factor which gets underestimated. I used to get worked up at work when people would ask questions about stuff I had written documentation about, until I understood that some folk just want that little social connection. They want a person to communicate something to them, whether they’re concsiously aware of it or not.

It’s also fairly common for people to just not be that good at searching for things. You have to word things in specific ways and learn what kind of sources to avoid and ones to trust. So asking people who do can be a huge timesaver.