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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • That’s the neat part about it not being the only way to access a game, people can choose, if they want to buy other things, they can buy other things, but if they still like certain titles available from MS, they can still get those even outside the service. Or they can just get the subscription if it costs them less for stuff they’d support anyway. If they don’t want to support MS for decisions they’ve made with studios, they can choose to not buy anything too, but I’m not sure how that’s going to help other studios they care about within MS. And let’s not pretend the studio issue is exclusively a problem with MS or game pass, it’s a capitalism symptom across the industry.

    As for third party contracts for making things available on game pass, those developers get to choose if the deal is good enough for them or not, they have a stake and more information than outsiders trying to play armchair executives.

    Nobody’s calling it a default here, the options aren’t “have only game pass forever” and “game pass doesn’t exist”, there’s plenty of room for nuance in-between. So long as game pass continues to be a value proposition for enough consumers, it’ll be around, if they raise the price too much or lower the quality or offerings so that it isn’t seen as a good deal, people will stop paying. Adding it to the deck would increase the value proposition.

    I find it odd that an argument about giving people the power of choice is used to advocate against a choice existing.






  • There are a few sections restricted to solo only, but it’s not the default, the matchmaking is pretty quick for a random group and there’s a variety of people always looking to form groups for different tasks. One word of warning, people move fast, until you get parkour down, you might just end up running from the start to end of a level if you join groups, they’ll have completed the objectives and be waiting for you to extract.

    Clans exist, and each have their own space station called a dojo that’s customized by them (cost is based on size of the clan, as a solo I was able to build up and level a clan on my own).








  • ZERO SIEVERT (Steam)

    I’m bending rule 4, because the official 1.0 release is announced for less than 1 month from now.

    ZERO Sievert is a tense top-down extraction shooter that challenges you to scavenge a procedurally-generated wasteland, loot gear, and explore what’s left of a devastated world. When the odds are stacked against you, you’ll need to do more than just survive.

    I’ve played through it a 2nd time recently, it’s a fun solo experience, the difficulty is largely customizable, the different zones feel unique, lots to explore, even just a little morality testing on some quests. Decent enemy variety, the guns generally feel different, and different ammo types do matter. Skill will take you far, and carelessness, even in the easy areas, will be punished.


  • For public ones, depending on what people started getting, it’d really strain the AIs. You could go in like 1 or two ways, probably different people getting both.

    Something very uniform but still unique, like a QR code kind of deal, AIs would hallucinate the crap out of that. Or abstractions, like people do to change the way the shape of their face to combat facial recognition.

    For private ones, just don’t ever get it photographed, any image showing that area without it would be probably fake.




  • For something I’m paying for, I want no ads, recommended or otherwise.

    For something I get for free, if it’s easily skippable/ignorable, I don’t really care, I’ll skip it or mute the tab or whatever. If I can’t, I’d rather have a like sniper level targeted ad (use all the data!), really try to show me something I’ll care about (there was some like 10 minutes ad about the science behing glass by one of the guys from MythBusters, I watched the whole ad, it was great). The demographic level targeted ads are my 2nd least favorite, mostly because it feels like I usually need to suffer through what is a targeted ad but if they bothered to exclude some of the audience based on some data points (looking at you luxury car ads, it’s just never going to happen), they’d know I’m a bad target, I’d rather some generic add over those. My least favorite ad though, when I get an ad in a language I don’t even understand, like at least match my primary language, wasting everyone’s time…