GoW as a live game isn’t the most out there thing. Tens of people liked the multiplayer mode in Ascension (?) and the reception to the roguelite mode was generally very favorable. And the core game already had gear based progression that could map to something like what Ghost of Tsushima has (that has hundreds of people who like it…).

But having frigging Bluepoint spend cycles on this? I am sure that the studio asked for something more than just remakes but… what?

I don’t think it at all matches “Never ask me about my past” Dad Kratos and nobody likes Atreus enough, but one could easily imagine an “open world” live service game where new gods and factions are added every few months and you do quests for or against them.

Nah. That would actually accomplish something.

This? I am not even going to bother to read it. Because if ANYTHING in there has any teeth whatsoever, it is getting repealed next week.

Honestly? That very much feels like a “fuck around and find out” situation and a GREAT way to piss off rich people in the event someone else gets blue shelled.

Also: Free speech doesn’t apply to social media. You can and will be banned for no reason other than someone with the power was bored.

I think it is a picture worth painting.

In the golden age of modding? People were buying games like UT2k4 and NWN and Oblivion for the mods. It was a huge shock when (after the Make Something Unreal contest made it clear that it was just as hard to make your own game as to make a major TC) UT3 had next to no mod support from the community.

And people still (kind of rightfully…) refuse to play a Bethesda game without the “community patch” and so forth.

For the games that support them (and even some that don’t), mods are a major part of the marketing and support of games. And yet the studio/publisher makes bank whereas the people fixing those bugs just get abuse.

And that ignores stuff like the recent Bethesda games where experiments were made for paid mods. People immediately lost their shit because fuck that person who made the really cool crafting mod I can’t play without, I already gave Microsoft 5 bucks ten years ago!

So yeah. I think there is a lot of reason to start looking at things like they are. Mods, especially “unofficial patches”, are work done by unpaid engineers. People can still decide they don’t deserve any money but they should at least have to “say” “unpaid labor doesn’t deserve anything”.

You apparently have a hateful right wing chud perform “secret” acts that will result in them getting a big push on a new platform.

Also: Friendly reminder that the Vice of today is not the Vice of olde and that “Waypoint” is a brand that is run by one rando (who likely uses a LOT of AI to generate content…) and has none of the social or political values the old Waypoint had. For the old Waypoint, you are looking at Remap Radio (the three founder/owners are Ricardo Contrarez, Rob Zacny, and Patrick Klepek and they semi-regularly collaborate with Austin Walker and, when she is available, BAFTA Award Winner Natalie Watson. And Janet Garcia is a “newbie” but is fucking awesome).

Aww, the chuds must be angry that I am not giving their shit goblin his due credit for asking musk for a streaming deal.

Sekiro has a very heavy emphasis on every boss having a “rhythm” to their attacks. Would probably need some post processing (playing the same string on a guitar endlessly will never work but swapping out the “instrument” every so often would) but I could see that actually making a nice melody.

Just as a bit of a counter to all the Isaac love (and, don’t get me wrong, I love Isaac):

BoI is probably the best roguelite… from the early 2010s. The gameplay is ridiculously solid but the upgrade design and drop system has too much in common with the roguelikes of old where you would often lose a run because the purple potion was instant death on this run.

There are just so many upgrades and synergies that you might become completely unkillable on floor 2 of one run and then have your entire build ruined on floor 5 of a different run. I STRONGLY encourage playing with the wiki or https://tboi.com/ open on a second device/display to avoid these run ruining pickups because you happened to forget what THAT weird egg looking thing did with a different weird looking egg thing.

On PC there are mods that integrate this into the game (and I think you can use it with achievements after your first matricide?). And I think Edmund has said he wants to add that to the base game sooner than later?

But contrast that with games like Hades where basically every single upgrade is a pure upgrade and you have good item descriptions before you pick anything up (so it is mostly a case of deciding what damage types you want to spec for). Or Dead Cells where you can easily swap out a weapon if you decide you didn’t like it. But in Isaac? You are basically chugging mystery potions on every floor.

And I am sure a company that is now openly training their LLMs on copyrighted materials is going to totally comply with all of that…

One of these days people are going to learn “But it is against the law” doesn’t apply to the rich and powerful, law enforcement, or megacorporations.

Yes. Like I said. Do what you gotta do to make it less appealing to other users.

But if, for example, you are an LGBTQIA+ person who thinks this will provide any form of protection…

Friendly reminder: Deleting your account won’t accomplish what you think it will.

Facebook will still keep all data that is associated with other users as per their own disclaimer. They also still keep logs that are "disassociated with personal identifiers. "

So all training can still occur. And understand what while Jane Smith may have deleted her account, they still have all the data it takes to indicate that User 12345 was tagged in photos with John Smith at the Burger King on 404 Fake St. And, because of that, the data that User 12345 had previously provided is ALSO John Smith’s data. And Fred Wilkerson since he was at that Burger King once. And so forth.

And ALL that data is still there for training.

So do what you gotta do to make it less appealing to other users. But understand your data is already out there and is never going away. Same with reddit and all other social media (which includes Lemmy).

Yeah. That is, and was, some “All lives matter” bullshit that then proceeds to insist that people who had received documented threats in the past and were seeing the exact same attacks occuring were 'inserting themselves" and then insisting the real problem is people is… people who are angry they are being doxxed and threatened constantly?

say, we cannot talk about ethics because you won’t stop talking about us allegedly harassing people. What is the first law of the internet? DON’T FEED THE TROLLS. By pushing this harassment narrative, you are giving these awful people victory and marginalizing the moderate majority who do want a serious conversation to happen about journalistic ethics.

Also: This was not a video on his channel or even his podcast. This was a comment in a relatively low impact video that basically only content creators watched

Yeah. Fuck that bullshit. If Bain hadn’t died he would be right there with the asmongolds of the world right now.

And while I won’t talk about the personal experiences of my friends who were formerly in games media and dev (because nobody believed them back then and sure as hell won’t now…), I will point out that a few outlets, when talking about the current “DEI is the real problem in the world” stupidity have alluded to Bain being the reason they initially stayed quiet until it was too late. Because when you have someone with that audience insisting that all old media is fundamentally evil and lying to you? You don’t pick a fight that will just lead to you getting fired.

You mean the prick who was one of the biggest voices legitimizing the Gamergate crowd who couldn’t even be bothered to speak against the harassment toward devs and games media? The guy whose entire claim to fame was screaming about “lazy devs” in an era where it was still kind of a miracle to even get a PC port of most games?

Regardless of him being a piece of shit, his content creation style was still very much “yell into a camera” similar to Sterling but with a lot fewer skits. That is still a popular style but plenty of youtubers outright build up scripts because they want to tell a narrative about the game they are playing or reviewing. Mandalore is a great example of that.

Which is similar to the old single camera sitcoms. There is a lot of charm to it but there is a reason the vast majority switched to multi-cam setups. And a lot of that is a mix of budget and just being able to do cooler stuff.

Because it takes time and money to make Content.

I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.

And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.

And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.

And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?

Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.

“Gaming Youtube” is the same as any other form of media.

If you only watch trash reality TV then “Television is dead”. Whereas, if you only watch prestige TV on FX and AMC you’ll complain that “the sitcom is dead”. And if you only watch NBC or whatever the fuck… you’ll wonder why tim allen hasn’t had his legs broken by the dealers he narced on. Err, where was I?

Anyway. It is the same here. If you just watch whoever has the most views you are going to get the bottom of the barrel trash entertainment because it is specifically designed to cater to people who are browsing, watch for five minutes, then leave it on while it is still going.

Whereas you can also put a bit of work in. Find creators you do like. Yes, there is a massive discoverability problem (that gets worse with every major update…) but watching a VOD that appeals to you and maybe googling to find out if they were “cancelled” yet goes a long way. And, in that regard, people like Mortismal and Iron Pineapple are WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.

Which is no different than TV. Nobody expected the TV show about the dad from Malcolm in the Middle becoming a drug dealer to be one of the greatest shows ever made (in that it gave us Better Call Saul but…). But people watched an episode or two and then listened when everyone else on the planet said “the first season is weird but it gets REALLY good by like episode five or six”.

Or… we can just do clickbait “Everything new sucks except for me” content.

All shit like this does is indicate how little the creators think of their viewerbase… And the fact that people think this is “true” means said creators are right to assume the worst.

Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.

They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.

So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?

Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.

For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).

For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.

So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.

Having an AMD or nVidia or even Intel GPU/APU at this point “suggests AI image upscaling tech”

Especially in the case of an underpowered mobile adjacent device.

You’re doing it again.

As a publisher: Yes, Epic stopped the Rocket League devs from continuing to build Linux binaries. To my knowledge, they have not disabled “support” for Proton in any of the anti-cheat solutions.

Similarly, the development branch of CD Projekt (the parent company of GoG), apparently had Linux binaries for The Witcher 2. They do not for The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.

Both companies decided it was not worth internally supporting Linux and instead rely on Proton/Wine to do it for them. Whether that is good for gaming is debatable, but both are “actively hostile towards Linux” in that regard.

If you do want to criticize the handling of Linux then I would suggest looking into the Unreal Engine marketplace (or whatever they call it now) being a complete shitshow for Linux developers. Which is ironic since the UE documentation is actually great for Linux devs. I cannot speak to the CDPR efforts with their modding SDKs since I haven’t opened one since The Witcher 1 (when it was either a hacked version of the NWN toolkit or an officially hacked version of the NWN toolkit).

But that is Epic and CDP not EGS and GoG.

For a very limited subset of games, they provide linux binaries. For the rest? You are up a creek and in the realm of “Figure it out”. Which… is generally the Heroic Launcher (or Lutris for a subset) which puts you in the same boat as Epic.

If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.

But for the vast majority of games? Epic and GoG are in the same category as basically everything but Steam. And both are in the exact same category regarding launchers and download services since they both heavily rely on the Heroic Launcher (which is awesome).

And, to be clear, neither should be applauded for Linux support.

Well, to be clearer. The folk behind the Heroic Launcher (and Lutris) SHOULD be applauded. And I think there is actually a very strong argument that store fronts should not be expected to build out entire social media ecosystems with attached updaters (what launchers basically are). But both Epic and GoG have decided to half ass that so they should be called out for not doing it “right”.

Yes yes, bitch eating crackers and all that.

But can we maybe focus on what they actually are shit at (which is a lot) rather than manufacturing virtue for other companies?