I get the feeling that the level of popularity was a bit of a surprise, and that its warranted expanding some features beyond what was initially planned. I can see a lot of features becoming massive time sinks with diminishing returns otherwise.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
I agree it’s not particularly impactful, and most would have made an exception, but it only takes one person to argue that it’ doesn’t matter, or to defend it as something deliberate on the news to upset a lot of people.
Id say the biggest problem with this reasoning is that these protests do not save millions of people, and that that number would be easy to reduce, that the only reason that those occur is that nobody fancies doing anything about it.
In the same way, my employer going out of business would be a big deal to me, my colleagues and a few others, but it’s ultimately unimportant compared to climate change. But if that happened due to these protests, it wouldn’t actually fix anything.
I don’t dislike these protests because I don’t agree with the core message, I dislike them because I genuinely see them as counter productive. Talking to people about climate issues at the moment feels like I’ve jumped back in time 20 years, and mainstream beliefs 5 years ago now get you put in the “tree hugging hippie” catagory, as people think about “those protestors”.
This can’t change overnight, as I’ve said, there no ‘just’ anything when it comes to the fuel and infrastructure that powers our world. The faster we change, the more impact there will be on quality of life, these are sacrifices that everyone will have to bear, and so the main battle is the political will, it’s about people across the world choosing to make sacrifices. This is why poisoning the otherwise positive image of environmentalism and pissing lots of people off for intangible ‘gains’ genuinely concerns me.
I really disagree with this premise.
For example, where I’ve worked, I’ve generally found it easy to make improvements that solely benefit the environment, even though they are virtually always more expensive and carry no other advantages, and often additional disadvantages.
Since the more recent protests, though, and especially after we all nearly lost our jobs due to the antics of a handful of protestors, that support has just gone. Being greener is no longer and end unto itself, and people don’t want to either be seen as supporting their cause or ‘helping’ the people who cause real problems for everyday people.
It may not be logical, but even I am quieter about my environmentism because I don’t really want to be associated with people who proudly block ambulances and cause pain for thousands of regular people.
Because ultimately, nobody’s going to ‘just stop’. We’re not here due to the scheming of a few people, there are a lot of reasons oil is currently so ubiquitous, and fixing it is going to be a fairly gradual process. Fortunately, oil isn’t the only way we can fix emissions, and so progress over spans of a decade or two, when that progress is going in parallel, can yield dramatic results.
My concern is that antics like these are going to slow or even reverse some of the political will to suffer the short term pain required to make these changes as quickly as we need.
It’s a failed state that ‘elects’ terrorists who have destroyed any actual opportunity for economic independence or peace.
There’s no way forward with Hamas in charge IMO. But what can be done. Any kind of ‘go in and fix it’ from Israel is going to be terrible in terms of optics even if done with complete benevolence, which it won’t, even if they’re not as bad.
They could just annex it and move forward with a highly inclusive approach, give Palestine the quality of life they deserve. But that wouldn’t sit right with many, for quite fair reasons. Leave a power vacuum? Unlikely to go well.
I think Palestine needs external support and guidence to stand on its own and be a functional state. I’d say that Egypt or Jordan would ‘look’ best to do that. But it raises a huge number of problems.
At the moment it’s basically festering, and things will never improve under the current leadership. What they demand is not reasonable or acceptable, and what they will do until they (Hamas) get what they want is also unacceptable.
So really, it’s a question of whether Palestine will ever deal with Hamas themselves, and if not, who else can/should.
CA will do literally anything to avoid making Medieval 3.
Man am I tired of being shafted for not having kids, the when it comes to holidays, covering for other staff and things, employees with kids always take priority and employees without don’t have an ‘excuse’. Extending that to layoffs is extremely toxic and punitive to younger workers.
Huh? They don’t have a monopoly in any space, and have significant competitors. And I don’t really see how they are slowing down innovation. I think it’s fair to say that Nvidia are investing significanly in R&D, and is driving innovation more than anyone else in the industry for the moment.
In their defense, not seeing ads probably was the best thing about living in the USSR.
Because useful tools that generate income are more valuable than things that make games look more better.
AI is what’s justifying pumping over $7bn into R&D per year, which drives improvements to gaming cards too.
Every card they sell makes a CEO richer, among a huge swathe of other effects.
I’m just going to launch missiles in this direction, if you get hit, that’s your fault!
Lol like Ukraine did with their nukes?
So who’s going to disarm first? If the Russians disarm and fuck off home then yeah, war’s over. But what you’ve actually got are genocidal murderers and rapists trying to destroy a nation of people, and you in your armchair saying that we should allow it to continue. These are actual, real people. But feel free to head over there and spread the good word.
The aggressors can stop whenever they want to. Suggesting that Ukraine shouldn’t have the means to protect itself is utterly ignorant.
What the fuck has this got to do with right or left wing?
Then I’d argue that reviews don’t give a complete picture, if that’s the case. Because it’s hard to argue that Overwatch is really the worst game on Steam.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
I agree entirely with your point, although I’m not sure ‘taxation without representation’ should be the takeaway. I think expert knowledge can be weighted heavier than random voters, but ultimately, there does need to be general consent, otherwise ‘achieveing strategic goals’ can be used to justify some heinous shit!
But it’s pretty realistic and happens all the time. I don’t see what’s ‘bootlicky’ about not trusting ‘promises’ by corporations years before release that are not protected under laws like the Trades Description Act.
I don’t know what was supposedly promised, because I didn’t follow interviews and stuff leading up to it, I just bought the game based on what was actually delivered in the end, which is how all purchases should really be made.
Stuff mentioned during development should never be taken as a promise, no matter how trustworthy or honest the developer is. This is just the simple reality of long projects.
It’s also why we don’t hear from devs as much these days, instead it’s mostly PR people, as too much weight is put on off-hand quotes.
Studios like CDPR have nothing to gain, and lots to lose, by deliberately over-promising.
What was promised where? Because yeah, get capable technical team together who are excited to share a project they’re working on, and they are bound to be optimistic about what could be realistically implemented over a long timeframe. Nothing but the official release product information should be considered a promise, and nothing but unsponsored, unaffiliated reviews should be taken as proof.
I highly doubt that any pre-launch ‘promises’ were made with an intention to decieve.
Modular auxiliary thruster.