kazerniel
@kazerniel@lemmy.world
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
There’s a lot of both. No wonder it’s a running joke in the Genshin community how many designs have “coochie flaps”, detached sleeves or thigh straps. Or the ever-present high heels on female characters, no matter if she’s a jungle explorer or a desert warrior.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.
It’s not hard for you. But many people are wired in a way that makes it exceptionally hard for them to resist these kind of psychological dark patterns. These are innate characteristics, with some overlap with ADHD and other neurodiversity, not necessarily something one can “work on”. And there’s a reason why these dark patterns are in the games, because they work in extracting more money from players than they would otherwise give.
Stephanie Sterling made a video a few years ago where they go into detail how modern games prey on vulnerable people: The Addictive Cost Of Predatory Videogame Monetization (The Jimquisition)
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Saaame, I love games with a ton of dialogue, hell one of my favourite games ever is Disco Elysium. And it’s not even that Genshin’s story is that bad, but it is told and localised very badly. It’s basically the trope of r/Im14andthisisdeep - an overall pretty shallow and meandering story (probably due to its gacha nature), often told using such an extremely dry and ornate language (probably due to direct translation from Chinese) with tons of characters and concepts thrown in in the attempt to pretend it’s something epic and profound, that the end result feels really disjointed. Also Paimon’s constant inane intrusions and hogging of the Traveler’s role is just actively bad storytelling.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Eh idk, I play Genshin for the open-world exploration, which I find really enjoyable. Also love the landscapes and music. The combat is alright too, but the story is below mediocre, and the monetisation is predatory af.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
trying to make positive changes in a Sims life, and it only makes me feel worse about trying to improve my own situation.
Haha same, whenever I was working on improving their life, I was always acutely aware that I could be spending that time improving my own :D I guess there was some satisfaction from wish fulfilment (they own a house, wow), but yea I always spent an afternoon setting up mods, another day or 2 playing, then just got bored. Rinse and repeat every couple years. (Though I haven’t touched Sims 3 since the pandemic, and never tried Sims 4 so whatevs xd)
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Guild Wars 2 is 14 years old this year, and you could argue that Guild Wars 1 is having a new renaissance after 21 years :)
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Yeah I hate voxel graphics, so it never worked for me.
Also not into creative sandbox games. Give me a problem to solve or situation to improve, and I’ll have fun. Give me a big sandbox with no goals, and I just get bored 😅 (Same with Sims and other life simulators. I’d much rather play stories other people wrote than come up with my own.)
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Incremental games are that kind of braindead thing I can play for 5-10 mins at a time, when I’m too tired for proper games :)
But only with an autoclicker, otherwise it’s pure torture.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
Yeah, I put 2000+ hours into Genshin over 4 years and have like 75 characters without ever spending any money. But the game is still so full of psychological dark patterns that would squeeze out the last penny from those whose personality or neurodiversity makes them vulnerable against such manipulation.
And yet again, the core of the issue of capitalism. As Stephanie Sterling put it many a time, the companies’ attitude is “Why be satisfied with a lot of money, when we could have all the money.”
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
When I went on the main Genshin subreddit, I was so baffled that people do little pulling rituals, and even do parties with thematic food and decoration for characters to influence their gacha luck 😵💫 Maybe they didn’t take it that seriously, but it still felt like a very unhealthy attitude towards such a predatory game.
- Comment on What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ? 1 week ago:
As someone with 2000+ hours in Genshin, I completely agree 😆 I only play for exploration nowadays because the story actively pushed me away, while the gambling never appealed to me. I wish we could just unlock characters via quests. I get no joy from a lucky draw, so I just treat gacha pulls in batches of guaranteed unlocks, like the price of this character is 160 pulls and that’s it. But the whole monetisation is disgustingly predatory for those who are even a little susceptible to it.
- Comment on Batteries 1 month ago:
nice timing, I heard of it literally today from this Smashing Magazine article :D
- Comment on Game franchises you like, but wish were anothet genre of video game? 1 month ago:
Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don’t like the gameplay — simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.
Oh I forgot about Sunless Sea. I played the hell out of Fallen London, but the switch to real-time gameplay was stressful enough that not even the worldbuilding and writing could make up for it.
- Comment on Game franchises you like, but wish were anothet genre of video game? 1 month ago:
BioShock and any other narrative-heavy games with a shooter/action gameplay. I love lore and worldbuilding, but I really hate shooter gameplay, even more so in first person. If they were, say, turn-based RPGs, I would absolutely play them.
- Comment on Space weather fans be like 1 month ago:
Anyone else here from Scotland? 😅🌫️
- Comment on Owlcat is using generative AI for The Expanse Osiris Reborn, but the final game will be "100% human made" 2 months ago:
I went through my curator list just now; these are the largest/most active ones:
- Game uses Ai - 961 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
- Is it AI? - 774 reviews - last update: 2026-03-26
- AI_games_flag - 1,998 reviews - last update: 2026-03-17
- AI Check - 2,000 reviews - last update: 2025-12-23
- The Curator Page I Made to Flag AI Slop - 383 reviews - last update: 2026-02-13
- Ai? No buy! - 343 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23
- Does This Game Use GenAI? - 193 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
- NO AI #HumanArtists - 119 reviews - last update: 2026-03-25
- AI Check 2 - 86 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23
- Comment on Owlcat is using generative AI for The Expanse Osiris Reborn, but the final game will be "100% human made" 2 months ago:
Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I’m now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers “forget” to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I’ve restyled to be red and on the top of the page)
- Comment on What was the first game you ever bought ? 2 months ago:
Sid Meier’s Civ 5, and I was 24 😆 (growing up, my family was piracy-only, so this was the first game I actually bought)
and was absolutely worth it :) I paid ~15 GBP for the base game + some expansions and DLC, and so far put 500+ hours into the game. I still reinstall it every few years.
- Comment on Owlcat is using generative AI for The Expanse Osiris Reborn, but the final game will be "100% human made" 2 months ago:
Every other commenter under this seems to forget that stock assets exist and worked fine for decades without involving AI slop.
- Comment on is black myth wokong a good game? 2 months ago:
not sure if this is the reason, but around its release there was some controversy (link 1, link 2) related to the studio founder’s sexist remarks and some bizarre streaming restrictions (don’t mention violence, “feminist propaganda” or covid), so some people might still reflexively downvote anything related to the game
- Comment on The Untold Story of Classic Games: Inside ZOOM with CEO Jordan Freeman 2 months ago:
the guy’s face looks so airbrushed on that photo
- Comment on Just one more square bro 2 months ago:
thanks, that’s reassuring to know :D maple syrup is good, but imho nutella is better :9
- Comment on Just one more square bro 2 months ago:
Unrelated, but as a Hungarian, this association of waffles with syrup is so odd to see. Syrup is basically just sugar and water, isn’t it? Sounds pretty boring. As a kid we always put nutella on waffles 🤷
- Comment on ‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront 3 months ago:
The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.
There was even some intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK
- Comment on ‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront 3 months ago:
Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.
In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry
- Comment on ‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront 3 months ago:
mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed
as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer
- Comment on ‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront 3 months ago:
This is why I always look at negative reviews. I often come across “downsides” that aren’t downsides to me, or outright appealing.
- Comment on Games you fell out of love with. 3 months ago:
Maybe Reus? I enjoyed the basic premise and the first few hours, but then the game’s flaws started to become more apparent (e.g. repetitiveness, upgrade chains becoming unmemorisably complex) and put it down around 12% of full completion.
- Comment on Games you really want to play, but can't or won't? 3 months ago:
I understand their reasoning, but still, it soured me on the game. GenAI models being built from non-consensually mass-scraped art was known from the very start, and yet the devs thought it was ok to put it into their game… They could have just used stock textures as placeholders like developers have been doing for decades.
But anyway, we are free to just not agree, and draw the line in different places on what we consider ethical conduct 🤷
- Comment on Games you really want to play, but can't or won't? 3 months ago:
Clair Obscur for me too, but because of the AI art controversy. I can’t stand AI, even if temporary, even if just store banners, I just can’t trust the company from then on not to sneak it into other areas.