Khrux

Honestly I think their higher upvote / post ratio is a better formula. Most of Lemmy has too little engagement on it’s posts for my tastes.

I’m so lucky to be born in '98 and just dodged the great aging.

I’ve been told by literal Brewdog barstaff that if they know he’s coming, they need to encourage their female staff to either dress moderately or not come in, to minimise his sexual harassment.

I don’t know how true that is, but the city I’m based in, which is pretty happy to boycott assholes is filled with people who boycott Brewdog.

I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.

Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.

It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.

Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.

I’ve never understood what twitter style websites are actually for. They seem to have a tiny niche of celebrities and known personalities making a statement with no reasonable conversation stemming from it.

I don’t understand how that structure was once one of the largest social media platforms in the first place.

If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.

When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that’s not really what it’s designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I’ve only ever heard great things about them.

The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it’s founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it’s prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.

Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I’ve ever discovered. I’ve played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. If you’re Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I’d bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world’s that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it’s just got good prompts. Despite that it’s got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

This is Call of Duty 22.

I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.

There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.

This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.

To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.

Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.

I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.

Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.

In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.

Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.

A pop star that has had an enormous rise to popularity this last year. By all accounts, she seems to be a very good person who’s main controversies have been burn out and stress from becoming a household name overnight.

You’d probably recognise a fair few if her songs from just hearing them in public. A lot of songs from her album were very well received.

The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.

In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.

I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.

I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.