hisao
@hisao@ani.social
- Comment on What is this called? 2 days ago:
That looks like the perfect outfit for a stroll to the Totem of Earth!
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
Like I mentioned before, “tutorial pulls” are part of that hyper-generosity that gachas will commonly have for new players
I don’t feel it’s “hyper”, it’s only 8 crystals instead of 10 for guaranteed Noelle. Other pull categories have something guaranteed for 10 crystals, what exactly they guarantee changes depending on current events and such. Classic pulls category is 10 crystals for guaranteed 4+ star something, which can be character or weapon.
to give them enough of a dopamine rush to hang around and be more likely to spend more later
“Dopamine rush” sounds like a bit of a stretch, because normal gameplay here with tons of randomized minibosses, minigames and puzzles, all of which reward you fancy chests with random loot in open-world, gives way more dopamine every few minutes, and the whole gacha thing feels quite underwhelming compared to that in terms of neurochemistry.
Give it another week and you will find that the supposed good luck runs out, as well as the free currency offered for things like logging in, and then it will start requiring a ton of grinding or real world money to acquire the necessary currency to get to the “pity” in order to ensure you get a top-rarity item. That’s how gacha systems work.
Sure, I will be looking carefully at this dynamics as I progress. I find it quite surprising what you’re describing is still not there.
and can’t last or elee the game will not make nearly as much money
Who knows, maybe it makes enough money even without being that pushy? For me it’s too early to say.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone
Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.
Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.
Agree, this is a great idea.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 4 days ago:
The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make
I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
brain
RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
Honestly it was pretty good
Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it’s pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P “Breath of the Wild” tier games with 100x more content.
- Comment on Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST 5 days ago:
Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I’m AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I’m lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.
- Comment on Skyblivion fan project lead reacts to Oblivion remake news with "all love and no hate" 6 days ago:
Good response. A bit offtopic but:
Earlier this month our Jim called upon Bethesda to remake Morrowind rather than Oblivion. “You cowards,” Jim wrote, calling Morrowind a “special game, where a beautifully unique fantasy setting is locked away behind technology and interface design that has aged particularly badly”.
I prefer Morrowind’s UI to Skyrim’s, even with SkyUI mod:
- It’s more fun to have individual item icons than just text or generic icon just for item type
- Those classic brass borders are beautiful
- Choosing one of multiple reply options work more reliable in Morrowind, in Skyrim when playing on PC you often click one option and it still picks the wrong one because you didn’t scroll enough
Overall, this whole system was obviously designed for consoles and it doesn’t really work well on PC even with mods. I don’t really remember Oblivion’s interface, but the one in Morrowind’s is something that I think definitely needs less “fixing” than Skyrim’s for example. And I don’t think it aged bad at all. Also hotkey system was great, I really miss it in Skyrim, potions are way less fun when you need to go through a bunch of menus every time you want to drink one.
- Comment on Silent Hill f has been banned in Australia, and no one knows why 4 weeks ago:
Japanese schoolgirls is a big NO-NO in Australia 😅 Jokes aside, this is the first time I hear about this game, watching trailer I immediately thought about “When They Cry”, and then I read this from article: “Silent Hill f is being developed by Neobards Entertainment (which has previously served as a support studio for Capcom’s Resident Evil games), with creature and character design by Kera, and a script by When They Cry writer Ryukishi07.” So now I’m hyped!
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 5 weeks ago:
Any recs for person who enjoyed HL Alyx + community mapsets and Ancient Dungeon VR?
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 5 weeks ago:
Currently 100% of my time is spent on games that are “six or more years old”, and a lot of that is spent on games that are more than 30 years old. But! I’m playing newly-made community content for 30 y/o games. This kind of retrogaming is something that evades Steam statistics entirely because it usually means playing custom sourceports of old games which rarely are on Steam. One old game I play on Steam to contribute to this statistics is Skyrim.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
I had this feeling half a year ago, that’s when I moved to Lemmy. Still have accounts everywhere, just trying to keep them read-only.
- Comment on What could cause one to randomly twitch? 1 month ago:
From what I know this is called dyskinesia and wiki article has some possible causes listed: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskinesia
I’ve seen some medication list this as possible side-effect. Don’t know anything else about it.
- Comment on How would a stateless society handle serious threats such as mass murder and terrorism? 1 month ago:
There could be alternative to state with its own police. If alternative to state is some kind of unions/syndicates, it could mean, there are, for example, Team Space (Union of Spaceship Institutions + some relevant Universities and Industry Manufacturers) and Team Earth (Union of Agricultural Manufacturers + Farmers + Union of Solar Energy Organisations) represented in the same city. Each of those have their own police funded by their own taxpayers. There could be many such “teams” in the same city, and they together manage infrastructure and security in the city. I think it’s important that those teams are kind of “omnipresent”, meaning the same team is present in many locations throughout the planet. For example there could be multiple dozens of such teams, and each city on the planet is run by some combination of those teams, which depends on variety of cultural and economic concerns and interests of such teams.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Hmm, you’re right! I definitely remember this picture posted somewhere maybe like 3-4 days ago?
- Comment on Why the Epic Games Store was hated during it's early existence? 2 months ago:
I personally never hated it, I just prefer Steam, because it has stuff like dedicated game workshop, forums, screenshots, achievements, cards, etc. Even when I got something for free in Epic Games Store I would later proceed to buy it in Steam and play there to have all those features.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Sorry, I don’t have one I can share.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
You can use mobile internet or wifi in McDonald’s then. I’m personally using VPN mainly to protect myself from my ISP and local MITM.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
PS: try to register an account without VPN, then log in, then turn on VPN and see how it goes.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I’m using Proton VPN all the time with Reddit, servers from all over the world: Europe, Asia, Africa. I have 365 day streak achievement on day 320 today, so at least those past 320 days I’ve been using Reddit with Proton VPN every day (I also have killswitch permanently enabled). Also used two other lesser known providers years ago with no issues. Keep in mind though, I’m only ever using paid servers. Wouldn’t surprise me if those few free ones are banned everywhere. It takes one user to misbehave from IP to get that IP banned.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
I’ve been using Reddit with VPN for years. Not sure about registering, but using existing accounts with VPN works just fine.
lemmy.worldallows to register but doesn’t allow to post with VPNs, this is also one of big reasons I don’t use that instance. - Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Even though Lemmy is made by communists, there is nothing stopping anybody from creating a total nazi instance and have their own circlejerk there. That’s just a funny example, applicable to anything else too.
- Comment on Report: Unity continues mass layoffs with 'abrupt' communications and 5am emails 2 months ago:
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
- Comment on Report: Unity continues mass layoffs with 'abrupt' communications and 5am emails 2 months ago:
Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅
If a slow startup of the editor the first time
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.
It is a philosophical difference.
It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.
- Comment on Report: Unity continues mass layoffs with 'abrupt' communications and 5am emails 2 months ago:
one time cost
Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.
an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.
I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.