cerebralhawks
@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Statement from OneBGS, the Bethesda Games Studios union 2 days ago:
The Elder Scrolls VI has the same issue GTA VI has, getting over the hype. GTA VI likely will. I doubt The Elder Scrolls VI will. I mean, sure, it’ll sell, but will it be good? The last good Fallout game was New Vegas, and Todd Howard had nothing to do with it. They bought the IP, made one good one, licensed it out to Obsidian, then half-arsed the next one and still haven’t fixed game-breaking bugs that make the game impossible to complete (at least on Xbox).
They say Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI are coming, but with the way Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online are printing money, I have little hope for their single-player adventures. Then there’s Skyrim. They ported it to ARM64 for Switch, which is the platform all the phones use. But instead of putting Skyrim on iOS and Android (pro tip: if your phone is made after 2018, it’s most likely more powerful than a Switch; if it’s an iPhone and it came out in 2016 or later, it absolutely is), they made this free-to-play trash riddled with microtransactions. They still haven’t put Skyrim on iOS, Android, or macOS, despite having already ported it to the ARM64 platform they all use. Oh, and when they did put Skyrim on Switch, they didn’t include any of the bug fixes found and published by the community years earlier. They’re porting Fallout 4 to ARM64 for the Switch 2, so yes, your phone can probably run that, too. But they’re not going to do it (or macOS) because it wouldn’t make them enough money. This is Bethesda now. They aren’t focused on experiences, they’re focused on monetisation and microtransactions. And they’ve been this way for 10-15 years, before the Xbox acquisition. Bethesda is trash now, and has been for a long time.
Starfield was kind of their chance to prove that they still had it. The game shipped without a map function and a lot of things were broken. They patched exploits that made the purely single-player game easier, but steadfastly refused to fix bugs, despite running an official Discord community and soliciting bug reports from the community. They then made a ship-building contest with real-world prizes, but they patched out a glitch people were using to make ships look a little cooler, but they let the people they’d already pre-selected to win use those very same glitches. Like the guy in Fallout: New Vegas told you in the beginning, the game was rigged from the start. There were quests most people couldn’t complete and they just didn’t care. They added land vehicles to the game, but they were buggy. People didn’t get out of your way, and if you hit anybody, the whole settlement turned against you. Fair, I suppose, but the NPCs not reacting to the vehicle isn’t. Fine if you deploy on a planet without people, but it was given to you on that main planet where your team is located. And speaking of your team, they would all turn against you if you took out certain enemies. We (the testing community) were able to narrow down the problem, and they still didn’t fix it. That said, despite the game being a rubbish fire, I still beat it 10 times to maximise all the powers, and I enjoyed the hell out of the Vanguard and pirate quest lines (the latter of which gives you the best gun in the game). Some parts of it were really fun. But like anything else Bethesda made, breadth of an ocean, depth of a puddle of lukewarm piss out behind the pub, left by someone who cared more about Starfield than Todd Howard’s team did. (And yet, I still wanna replay a few of those quests.)
- Comment on Statement from OneBGS, the Bethesda Games Studios union 2 days ago:
I was worried about the future of Bethesda games long before they were acquired by Microsoft. Xbox is just an easy scapegoat here.
- Comment on Is anyone else apprehensive to down voting even if you're being down voted? 4 days ago:
I’m not sure, actually
- Comment on Is anyone else apprehensive to down voting even if you're being down voted? 4 days ago:
Not really. I’m (somewhat) apprehensive to downvoting because all votes are public. So, I’m not gonna downvote someone who disagrees with me. I will (sometimes) downvote someone who is being an arsehole. If they keep doing it, I’ll block 'em.
Also, I don’t really get into comment chains to start with. If I say something and someone has something constructive to say, we might have a conversation. That’s fine. But if it’s negative, chances are I just won’t reply to it in the first place. If I feel like maybe I’ve been misunderstood, I might clarify, but I’ll only do that once. If the conversation isn’t going anywhere, I walk. It’s that simple. If you want a punching bag, I think these days you can get ChatGPT to do that.
- Comment on Day 718 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 5 days ago:
Furniture can’t spawn in the ground. However, every day, two trees can have furniture shaken out of them. You shake the tree, a green leaf floats down. You pick it up, it’s random furniture. Be warned however. While 10-15 trees also contain one gold coin worth 100 Bells, five trees also carry wasp nests that, when they hit the ground, spawn a wasp that will attack you. It’s one of four creatures that will attack in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The wasp will give you a swollen eye. A villager may give you medicine to cure you. (Also there are mosquitoes that don’t do real damage, they just stop you for a minute and your villager will remark on the bite. And tarantulas and scorpions, which are mutually exclusive to one another by time of year but only appear at night, which will attack you on sight if you have a net out, but will otherwise retreat from you, and those will KO you, which returns you to your house with no loss of any progress.) You can also cure a wasp bite/sting by waiting a day. And you can avoid getting shamed by villagers with lower friendship by wearing any mask or sunglasses (they won’t see the swelling).
Lyman is a cool character, but like any animal villager, it depends on your relationship level with him. You can give already-donated fossils (duplicates) to villagers to vastly increase the friendship. Fossils are worth over 1,000 Bells, so they count as an expensive gift. None of them will be displayed in their home. They are worth a lot to sell, but if you want your villagers to like you, shower them in duplicate fossils. I think once you hit max, it can’t go down (or it can’t go down very far) but I’m not 100% on that. You know you’re at 100% when they gift you a photo of them. They always gift you something when you gift them something, so when they give you their photo for a gift, you’ve hit 100% and you can stop giving them gifts.
As far as regular attendance goes, Animal Crossing is great for older gamers who are weirded out by social networks. If you think about it, it kind of functions the same way as, say, Facebook, just minus all the political BS, and the consequences with people you know IRL for saying the wrong thing. You have friends who say random things and do random things, and you interact with them and show them your appreciation, and they return it to you. I think it’s meant to give that same dopamine hit. Anyway, New Leaf (3DS) is a bit rougher with that. If you don’t talk to a villager in a few days, they’ll whine about having feelings, too. I’m honestly beginning to get a bit tired of it. These games were big during the pandemic when everyone had to stay indoors and isolated. Now that most people aren’t doing that anymore, a game designed to be needy is easier to drop than it is to meet its needs.
- Comment on If it were suddenly revealed that a significant number of questions posted in this comm were ai bots would that bother you? 1 week ago:
On its face, no. Change venue to a writing forum, would a bot posting writing prompts be bad? Maybe, but I think it would be worse if it were bots answering.
For the long term, Lemmy karma doesn’t work like Reddit karma. The up and down votes are tracked, but it’s not like Reddit where you could farm karma and then sell it to a company that would use your karmic rating to boost past commoners to get their ads more prominently displayed. That system had its benefits, but it wasn’t all good. Over here, all you can really hope for is a catchy username that people mentally associate with good posts going to an advertiser, who is then banking off the goodwill established by the original owner.
At the end of the day, bots should be declared as such. I have no problem interacting with a bot as long as I know it’s a bot. But this begs the question — how do you know I’m not a bot? I use em dashes and I use the markdown formatting. I also use good grammar and the King’s English for the most part (I’m with the yanks on “maneuver,” fuck whoever made that word what it is) but I may or may not be one of the King’s own subjects. Maybe I’m a bot and I don’t know it. There are a few movies about that, maybe some games too. Then again, I accidentally cut myself shaving last week, so who knows. I’ve never heard of a bot doing that. Now if bots start acting like Millennials with their slang and their bad grammar and their wanton disregard of the English language, how fucked are we? Because right now a lot of people think I’m a bot because I have a high command of the language. I feel like in a few years, most of your bots will better integrate with how most people communicate online, not necessarily the best writers online.
- Comment on Sony will kill PlayStation games on discs in 2028 and offer digital downloads only 1 week ago:
Wasn’t Sony the one that said you’ll always be able to share games and resell games on PlayStation, after Xbox tried some shady shit?
/s because I know damn well it was them at the Xbox One announcement.
Sony has pretty much always been bad for gaming. I had a PS1 and PS2 when they were new. Got a PS3 after the PS4 was out, and I like it, but it does some dumb shit. Like how you sign into the console, and then you have to sign into PSN. Or how save games still use “blocks” or whatever. It’s just stupid for stupidity’s sake. That said, I like the PS3 more than the XB1 (for reference, PS3 is contemporary to the 360; XB1 is contemporary to the PS4 — so yes, I like the PS3 more than the one-generation-newer XB1. I do like the PS3. I wanted a PS4 and never got one. I resented the XB1, but the 360 was okay. I only have an XSX because they let me get it for $35 a month for 2 years, no interest. If you’re thinking that’s more than $500, you’d be right. Only $480 went to the console — I got it for $20 off. The rest went to 2 years of GamePass Ultimate at the $15/month price. And tax on the whole thing. Xbox All Access. They really should bring it back as high as they’re jacking the price of the XSX (and PS5). It was a good deal, and locks you into their service for 2 years. Always wished Sony had something similar — I wanted a PS5, and settled for the XSX.
- Comment on PlayStation sales just had its worst May in 25 years, and Xbox's was the worst ever—Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch 2 just became the second-fastest-selling console in US history; and other insights 1 week ago:
I don’t know and I don’t care. I kept waiting to hear if Microsoft was going to let you mail in your discs to convert them to digital purchases. Without a programme like that, the Series S is a non-starter. Because otherwise how do you play your games on it? It has no disc drive. So do they really expect you to subsidise the lower price by buying games a second time? And even then, it’s weaker hardware. So, what’s the point of it?
- Comment on Is it true that airport customs can legally demand access to your unlocked phone? 1 week ago:
On an iPhone, press the side button five times. Then cancel. You’ll need the pin.
- Comment on What's gunna to happen when the American Federal Government starts prosecuting people for owning powerful computer hardware and software? 1 week ago:
So, Macs? Bonus: they don’t come with Microsoft software or Google software
- Comment on How do I deal with children following me around in video games? 1 week ago:
I play single-player games, so I mostly can’t relate.
However, yesterday while playing The Witcher 3, a child who was skipping stones at the pond got up and charged right into Geralt. I had passed her and her brother on the way into town, and I think I set the controller down to look at something on the phone, when a tiny NPC comes charging up and rams me. Twice. Then goes back to the pond. I don’t know if it was a bug or what.
It’s very early on in the game. I had to go talk to a witch, Keira or something like that. Striking blonde young woman. It was adjacent to or part of the Bloody Baron’s quest, I think. Or Ciri’s. I’m still kinda trying to get my bearings. Anyway, it told me to go to the pond, then look for a stone, then a cart, then the shack. Anyway, the pond in question was where the child was skipping stones, so I went to speak to her, and she didn’t say anything special.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if the child had a scripted daily action (e.g. run home and get a picnic basket of lunch for her and her brother) and I just put Geralt in her path. Still, it was weird. She rammed into me twice and then returned to her spot.
If it’s a boy named Louis Pan and we’re playing Deus Ex, we usually do something else (everyone kills him, since the first two Deus Ex games let you kill kids).
- Comment on PlayStation sales just had its worst May in 25 years, and Xbox's was the worst ever—Meanwhile, the Nintendo Switch 2 just became the second-fastest-selling console in US history; and other insights 1 week ago:
Nintendo may be immune to criticism from certain people, but their console is also under $500 (doesn’t help that it’s like almost a generation behind).
Still, Nintendo says you can game for under $500. Xbox, PlayStation, and Valve say “no way.”
- Comment on Microsoft Announces Significant Price Rises for Xbox Series X and S, 2TB Model Discontinued 2 weeks ago:
And people keep paying.
Someday people will say enough is enough.
That day is not today. Tomorrow doesn’t look good, either.
- Comment on GTA 6 will cost £70 - and physical edition will not contain a disc 2 weeks ago:
Does anyone remember when they said digital games would reduce prices?
For them… never seen them go down for us.
Look at GTA 5 sales. Just wait for a deep discount. The initial price is just for the whales. Paying full price does not get you a perpetual discount on the shark cards or whatever they’re called. You still gotta pay full price for those. The purpose of the game is to sell those online currency cards. The initial price is just for those who want in sooner. I’m willing to wait a year or two, get it at deep discount (or buy it used), play the single player campaign, and then never touch it again.
- Comment on If you work with food, how can you control yourself so you don’t eat it? 2 weeks ago:
If you cook, you taste. If you don’t taste, you’re probably not a very good cook. You have to be able to balance the flavour.
I wouldn’t eat someone else’s table scraps though. That’s more hygiene than anything.
You should be able to take leftovers home, though. What you cook but no one orders. What’s left in the pan. That should go without saying. People who make the food should be entitled to eat some of it. That isn’t stealing, that’s guaranteeing the food is good, the people who made it are willing to eat it. One of my first “real” jobs was Taco Bell, and for years I was willing to eat it after I left. Following policy, they don’t really do anything wrong. The meat comes cooked and frozen, and they boil it in a deep fryer with water to heat it up. The beans come dehydrated in a bag, they pour them into a metal bin and fill with boiling water, stir, and let set. All fine. I just don’t have the taste for their brand of “Tex-Mex” anymore. I still think the bean burrito and soft taco are good. Keep it simple. The fajita wraps were good, but they haven’t had those in 30 years. And the gordita — the flatbread taco. That’s been gone a while, too. IIRC it was never profitable, the flatbread cost too much. It was good stuff though. Probably the best bread in fast food back then.
- Comment on When did the Internet come to reflect society? Or has society shaped the internet? Were we always distrusting mean and vindictive before the net? Are we really that bad? 2 weeks ago:
I think people were always mean online. But not everyone.
At one point, I was too. It didn’t last long because I had compassion and empathy and it just wasn’t that fun.
Then I easily reacted to vitriol and was easy to manipulate.
These days, I get mean replies or DMs and I just go “huh, okay” and then continue about my day. Stoicism. It may not do anything, but hey, I feel less bad about hate mail.
- Comment on Doctor Who and Star Trek showrunners discussed possible crossover 2 weeks ago:
I’d rather they just do a cameo. Doesn’t matter which Trek show, but have the away team walk by a TARDIS. That’s all you need to do to show that the crossover could happen, but get people talking about it, and most will soon realise why it shouldn’t.
- Comment on Steam Machine is DOA... Valve Lost. ($1048 / $1428 Price) 2 weeks ago:
Always said it would be around $1000. If I wanted to be petty, I’d have saved the comments of people who said no way it would be over $700-800, but I don’t.
A lot of people said it wouldn’t be DOA at $1000 though.
- Comment on Yay, sponsored emojis! 2 weeks ago:
Couldn’t be me… but some people don’t care that Meta can read their messages. Or they still don’t know but I doubt it.
Mark Zuckerberg has a term for these people…
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, but at least on PC you can block the updates until all your mods update. And IIRC it just breaks scripting stuff like F4SE… for the most part… but a lot of stuff relies on that.
I like how GOG just flat out refused to push the “next gen update” until they fixed their shit or something. Thing is, they never did. Modders told them how to fix it, but apparently it had to be fixed on their end. They never do. Because they don’t care.
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 3 weeks ago:
Fallout 4 is good until it just stops working. It’s fine on PC but they never got it fully working on Xbox. They still sell it though.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I started Remember Me and Tell Me Why. Got bored real quick with them both. Remember Me, I spent less time with. I should really try it again, see where it goes.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO says "YouTube monetizes Xbox better than we do", ahead of expected layoffs | Satya Nadella bemoans performance of Xbox 3 weeks ago:
Because unless you’re dropping $1500+ for a gaming rig, you can’t play them. If you have a gaming PC, it wouldn’t be a good deal for you. If you don’t have a gaming rig, but you have an Xbox, you could, with my idea, take advantage of Steam’s deeper sales and giveaways, and be able to play them on the Xbox.
If you buy a lot of games, you save a lot of money by buying from Steam/GOG, so it would be worth it. Especially for those of us who don’t have gaming rigs.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO says "YouTube monetizes Xbox better than we do", ahead of expected layoffs | Satya Nadella bemoans performance of Xbox 3 weeks ago:
This belongs in a “Leopards Ate My Face” comm. They jacked up the price of the Xbox. They doubled the price of GamePass Ultimate, and most games added to it are just shovelware trash.
Here’s a solution: Add Steam to GamePass Ultimate. What I’m saying is, for $23 a month or whatever it’s down to now, you can use Steam and play all your Steam games that will run on XSX (which should be most of them since it’s an x86-64 platform running a bastardised version of Windows). So you can get a game dirt cheap and play it on Xbox, but you have to pay Xbox monthly. You will still save money! Especially if you have a large Steam library. And not just Steam — add GOG and maybe Epic as well. So basically the platforms that have free games all the time. That would massively boost the value of GamePass, and since an XSX is still cheaper than a gaming PC, would offset the rising price of the console.
But who knows, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Let the Steam Machine come out and eat their lunch.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I truly hope you’re doing better. I love Max and Chloe too, but maaan, they went through some shit. I didn’t get the secret outcome from one of the chapters… I later found out there’s a guide to pulling it off, but while I did do some of the things, I didn’t do all of them, so… one chapter turned out worse than it could have.
I also couldn’t save both the Geth and the Quarians in Mass Effect 3. I mostly played paragon, but I missed a couple little things. That choice is based on choices set up in the first and second games. So long story short, in the third game you’re trying to build an army to defend Earth. The Quarians wear biosuits because they have basically no immune system. The Geth are robots they made that were repurposed to kill people, so they were initially thought of as evil. If you make a bunch of right choices and do a bunch of random stuff, it is actually possible to save both races in the third game; however, most players, for not following a guide carefully across three whole games, must choose between one race or the other. Kind of similar to Life is Strange but on a much grander scale, and over a longer period of time.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I truly hope you’re doing better. I love Max and Chloe too, but maaan, they went through some shit. I didn’t get the secret outcome from one of the chapters… I later found out there’s a guide to pulling it off, but while I did do some of the things, I didn’t do all of them, so… one chapter turned out worse than it could have.
I also couldn’t save both the Geth and the Quarians in Mass Effect 3. I mostly played paragon, but I missed a couple little things. That choice is based on choices set up in the first and second games. So long story short, in the third game you’re trying to build an army to defend Earth. The Quarians wear biosuits because they have basically no immune system. The Geth are robots they made that were repurposed to kill people, so they were initially thought of as evil. If you make a bunch of right choices and do a bunch of random stuff, it is actually possible to save both races in the third game; however, most players, for not following a guide carefully across three whole games, must choose between one race or the other. Kind of similar to Life is Strange but on a much grander scale, and over a longer period of time.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Unfortunately outside of Life is Strange, they didn’t really do anything interesting.
While Life is Strange (the original) is probably the best story, the second game was technologically the best. While the first, and many other “choices matter” adventure games let you make choices that steer the story in meaningful ways (and show you how your choices stacked up against your friends and other gamers), Life is Strange 2 didn’t. The choices you made contributed to choices made by an NPC (your character’s brother), and you could not always predict how he would react. Your choices manipulated a couple of hidden scores. How much he respected you and how much he liked you. But there was a random element as well. There was never a sure fire way to control the little brother. You still make choices that affect the story, but it’s really his story, and some of his choices mattered more. Pricefield is still one of my favourite ships, and that’s from the first game (and, I guess, the new one, but I haven’t played the last two, just the first three).
- Comment on Looking for recommendations — Pride playlist 5 weeks ago:
Yep, I have the Cher song, and a few songs by each of Madonna and George Michael.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to music@lemmy.sdf.org | 4 comments
- Comment on Is there any free game like net hack ? 5 weeks ago:
I use macOS, so I was curious. The official build is up to 5.0.0 but nobody’s managed to get it running on Mac past 3.6.0 or 3.6.6. Which is kinda weird. But I’m not in that big of a hurry to play it.
