darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am looking to broaden my youtube channels that I follow. What female channel are you following?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Angela Collier: She’s a physicist who does videos on science or science adjacent topics. Most of her videos are pretty funny and accessible and if you’re more interested in math stuff, she has a few videos or segments of videos that go more into that.

  Girlfriend Reviews: Comedic game reviews.

  Jenny Nicholson: Video essays/rants about various pop culture things.

  Lindsay Ellis: Video essays. Although I think she’s mostly been posting on Nebula now. But her old videos are decent.

  Simone Giertze: Comedic maker. Started out doing shitty robots but has evolved more into a design channel. The videos are still funny, but the projects are more sincere attempts to make something fun or useful.

  Luna Oi!: She’s Vietnamese and does English language videos about modern Vietnamese history and contemporary life/politics from that perspective. Really interesting if your only previous exposure to the country was a brief bit about the Vietnamese war in history class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden ring night reign single player⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it feel like protesting isn't as "extreme" as it used to be?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.

  Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?

  That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To what extent has Smartphones replaced Computers? Has Smartphones replaced Computers for you or people you know? Will Phones and Computers eventually merge into one device?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Some genuinely mind boggling innovations in UX and AI (not to mention battery) would have to happen to make it even close. There is just way too much that is too awkward to do on a smaller screen or without a proper kbm + the posture of sitting at a desk. You never really see anyone actually using those sci fi handheld devices. They always just kind of magically pull up whatever information is needed without us seeing whatever inputs were required to get there.

  Only sort of related: But I always find it funny when I see some older sci fi able to imagine some technology way ahead of it’s time, but fail to think through the implications of how humans will actually interact with it. That’s the part you actually have some info and intuition on even without the technology. If I lived in the 60s I might not have been able to tell you whether we’d ever be able to fit the computers that take up rooms into the palms of our hands, but if you showed me a handheld computer and asked me to suspend my disbelief about the technical wizardry behind it, I could probably tell you whether or not I think someone would actually use something in that way because technology changes, but people don’t. Until we go trans humanist we still have the limits of two hands, 10 fingers, etc.

  One funny example of this for me is the pad from Star Trek TNG. There are actually two relevant pieces of technology here:

  1. A portable computer that can presumably at least display and edit information.
  2. A ship wide computer that can do all sorts of complicated tasks, has artificial intelligence, a voice interface, and can be accessed via terminals, including personal ones around the ship.

  Despite this, they couldn’t put two and two together and imagine that the pads might be connected through the ship’s computer. When crew members want to send information they have on the pads, instead of just sending data through the computer to the other person’s pad/terminal… THEY GIVE THE PHYSICAL PAD TO THE OTHER PERSON LIKE ITS A PIECE OF PAPER!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its Waymo cooler⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we lived in the cars universe the cabs would be low wage workers instead of property, so the media wouldn’t actually care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think the solution to selling progressive politics to young men is ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.

  If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong or uncommon to judge people primarily on their worst moments/acts?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends. Consider the inputs and outputs of this judgement:

  Inputs:

  • How bad was the act itself?
  • What were the intentions behind the act? A mistake? A crime of passion? Or a deliberate act of greed or malice?
  • Was this just a one time thing you don’t think is indicative of their future behavior or is it a part of a pattern of behavior?

  Outputs:

  • What are the stakes of this judgement? Are we trying to punish this person or at least prevent them from doing the thing again? Or is this just for our own moral or social understanding?
  • Can the person be rehabilitated or is it a waste of time trying to give them the benefit of the doubt?

  Just as an example I think about sometimes: Sometimes you will get some older politician running for office. They have done and said some horrific things in the past. You point to that as a reason they shouldn’t be elected again. Someone comes out of the woodwork (I’m sure entirely organically /s) and says something like “can’t people change? Don’t they deserve a second chance?” And sure. People can change. And if that politician wants to go work at a McDonalds or something I’m not going to go out of my way to cancel them, but when we have millions of people who could be elected, most of whom, didn’t, idk, support segregation, why does this guy in particular deserve another chance to be in a position of power when he’s already used it in a bad way? In terms of your example, maybe if the sex offender is remorseful and goes to therapy for the issue, they could go reintegrate into society… just maybe not in a job that involves directly working with children right? That sounds reasonable? We can acknowledge the steps they took to reform themselves but also recognize that they lost the right to be trusted at certain kinds of things?

  There are some crimes though that are so bad that they can never be forgiven. I don’t think the oil execs who deliberately lobbied to effectively cause the end of the world so they could keep profiting off of it for decades should be forgiven. I don’t think there is a punishment severe enough to serve justice for such a crime. No amount of work they could do to try to fix the problem could undo the damage which they have already caused. There is no actual means of redemption.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pitches a new game⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe. But you’d need servers. And that would cost a lot of money for something aiming to be that scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pitches a new game⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

  Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ads when you’re pumping gas⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  True. That is the generalization of this rule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ads when you’re pumping gas⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ads are like a gas (the physics kind). They expand to take up all available space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you keep track of what games you have played over the years?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there’s just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know how I haven’t heard this before. What the hell was that song? lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden Ring Nightreign’s Massive Steam Launch Tarnished by 'Mixed' User Reviews Over Lack of Duos Co-Op, Voice Chat⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wasn’t planning to get the game because of the 3 player thing but I already knew that… why are people buying it then getting mad about it? Is the steam store page just not clear enough about it? In which case, fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games are just objective master pieces?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.

  I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Elden Ring’ Movie in the Works From ’Civil War’ Director Alex Garland, A24⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What… uh… I can’t imagine this movie being weird enough to feel like a movie based on a FROMSOFT game while still being accessible to the wide audience needed for a big budget fantasy movie to make money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it weird to sometimes wonder wether everything you know is wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Why does it happen? Because the world is crazy and if nobody does anything about it then it starts to feel like you’re the crazy one. It also doesn’t help that there’s all this propaganda out there to make you feel that way.

  But what do you do about it? Questioning your beliefs on a factual or analytical level is very useful. I don’t think I could have reached my current beliefs in the first place without that openness to new information and critical eye towards what I knew.

  But I think the important thing is to separate that out from what you VALUE. What are the things which you care about independent of what the facts are? Do you value treating people kindly? Then it shouldn’t matter if it turned out that some other group was actually inferior. That shouldn’t change that core value. Now if you only value people based on how useful they are, then thinking that someone else was inferior would change how you treat them.

  Thinking about my own beliefs and values, my political beliefs have changed a lot over the years, from vaguely American liberalism to some kind of communism, but my values haven’t changed. That’s because the values nominally espoused by the mythological American national identity are good ones. What’s not to like about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? Democracy sounds great!

  But as I learned more about the world, it became more clear how America failed to live up to those values and more precisely, didn’t really hold those values, or at the very least had subtly different meanings of them that created wide gaps in how those values were acted on.

  “Freedom” in America is something you can buy. The more money and power you have, the more free you are. And the freedom to use that power to exploit others consequently means you’re less free if you’re poor.

  “Equality of opportunity” that is blind to historic inequality and power structures creates this illusion that everyone had a fair shot to succeed or fail and therefor “deserve” where they end up where in reality we never started on equal footing and where we end up is largely an accident of birth. Rich people aren’t necessarily better or harder working than poor people. People don’t actually get to keep the value of their work, it’s just not taken through taxes, but by capitalists in the form of profits. (Also, this is another values thing, but even if the assertions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity were true, I still don’t think a society with this level of poverty and inequality is an acceptable outcome even if people somehow ended up where they were through their own failures.)

  Democracy in an unequal society where the rich can put their thumbs on the scale isn’t really democracy. Plus when you learn about the founding of that “democracy”, you learn how explicitly it was set up to favor those powerful few over the many. This is kind of one of the things that makes me feel crazy. I didn’t read about this on some obscure internet blog or commie book, literally everyone in the country learns about the founding in school and more or less learns it’s anti-democratic bend. It’s not hidden, it’s just that everyone kind of forgets it or doesn’t really internalize the way it relates to our experiences. Also, if we like democracy so much, why do we effectively suspend that democracy for half our waking lives when we go into work? Why shouldn’t people have a say in that? “Nobody’s forcing you to work” doesn’t really work when the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

  I still want the ideal, I just recognize the ways I’ve been lied to by people who claim to share that ideal. And that’s where you have to be careful. Not everyone is honest about what they want. ( Sometimes even with themselves) There’s the saying on the left “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” because for some of these people, when you really confront their beliefs with evidence that contradicts it, instead of growing and changing, they just reveal their true colors. Some people who talk about equality while being racist aren’t just misinformed, they actually do believe in hierarchy and the concept of equality is merely a way to rationalize away the that hierarchy. Sometimes you show people how the US fails to be democratic and they reveal that they don’t even think democracy is good. That people are too stupid or evil to rule over themselves.

  So yeah. Test your beliefs about the world, but the only way you have a metric to test them against is if you know what your values are in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to fix discord connection while streaming a game?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the detailed answer! It did turn out to be Lenovo’s software. Also I haven’t checked for killer Wi-Fi on this, but the gaming laptop I had 2 PCs ago did have that and we ended up having tons of Wi-Fi problems we were never able to fix. I guess that might be why.

  I didn’t know windows doesn’t actually fully shut down. That’s confusing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to fix discord connection while streaming a game?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks. I just tested this myself with another device and it seems to be working. I guess we’ll see if it’s fine with others later, but looks promising.

• How to fix discord connection while streaming a game?
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩ | ⁨6⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Death Stranding 2 preview: how a big dollop of Metal Gear is expanding Kojima's bizarre epic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I couldn’t get through much of it either, but not because of the weird stuff, I like weird, the gameplay is just too… involved? Stressful? Exhausting? Like I’m ok with challenging games sometimes, but needing to spend a ton of time slowly trekking across fields and mountains while manually trying to keep your footing, managing a bunch of consumables, and occasionally needing to play walk through the ghost minefield with your baby detector while dealing with the rest of that is just not something I could keep up for as long as the game was going to go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  True to some extent, but I think there are limits to how enjoyable it can be to not even be able to find the puzzles in the first place. It also makes coming back to it super confusing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.

  It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.

  If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose part of the conversation is about a concept I call “difficulty pressure.” (Maybe there’s another term for it?) Essentially, how does the game’s difficulty affect players’ approach to optimizing builds in a game with them.

  When a game is on the really difficult end of things, (and this goes for competitive multiplayer as well where the “difficulty” is that all other players are optimizing and you need to be better than them to win) the game pressures you to optimize your playstyle in order to just survive and overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. In this extreme environment, there sub-optimal builds get pushed out even if they seem fun because you will very likely fail with them. Thus limiting build diversity.

  At the lower end of difficulty, the game might be so trivial that ANYTHING works, but it won’t feel satisfying because nothing you do really matters. You probably don’t even need a real build at that point, so that feeling of making something crazy that trivializes otherwise challenging content isn’t there. There’s just no reference point to appreciate how good your build is. If every enemy had 1 HP, without damage numbers, how would you even know how much damage you were doing? A build that did one damage would be the same as a build that did a trillion damage.

  Like you said, ideally there’s some good balance state where things are challenging enough to serve as a yard stick, but there are still a lot of builds that can reach that point. There’s a boring way to achieve this easily: No builds. Or at least no difference between builds. Everything does the same thing but maybe the colors are swapped around. Obviously that’s not really what we want out of an ARPG, otherwise we’d just play a pure action game. So builds have to be different enough to allow for very different experiences, but not so much so that some are essentially invalid. But that’s a much more complicated problem. With so many pieces and combinations, it’s virtually impossible to balance faster than the internet hive mind can optimize.

  There’s another boring way to achieve this: Not on the player side, but on the encounter side. Because a very wide variety of playstyles need to be able to complete the content in a roughly equivalent way, the challenges need to be relatively interchangeable because you don’t know exactly what tools the player will have access to. So you flatten the content so there aren’t sharp edges that will make some builds unable to beat it. Alternatively you can require the players to have a specific set of tools no matter the build so that they can deal with all these scenarios. For example, in Noita, you pretty much always need:

  1. A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won’t run out of limited charge spells.
  2. A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
  3. A mobility wand to be able to get around the more sprawling and dangerous levels as well as get up to places you otherwise couldn’t.
  4. Late game, a healing wand.
  5. There are some enemies that are straight up just immune to some damage types.

  You have 4 wand slots and you will usually need at least one empty wand slot to be able pick up new wands in a level unless you can meet some other specific conditions. So all the slots you can use to make your build are spoken for. This limits what you can build a lot. Late game you can combine some of these effects into a single wand, but until then you have that restriction.

  If the game didn’t have this variety of challenges, you’d be more free to choose what you want out of your build, but then the actual content would be way less interesting.

  This is the core tension. Content asks things of you and your build is the answer to that. The more difficult or specific the challenge, the less freedom you have to make different builds. The more generic or easy the challenge, the less your build matters, meaning you have more freedom but it’s less satisfying to act on that freedom.

  I guess my point isn’t that it’s impossible to make a game that has elements of both. It’s that they are inherently antagonistic, not synergistic concepts. The more builds matter, the less content does and visa versa.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the secret sauce there is that they’re roguelikes. They have meaningful combat and they have the potential for wild builds that completely trivialize that combat. So why does this work for them? Because you can’t guarentee a specific broken build every run. They’re short and random, so the likelihood that you will put together all the pieces needed for a specific build before the end of a run is fairly low. By contrast, while ARPGs are “random”, they’re played over such a long term that it’s expected that you will be able to acquire exactly the things you need for your build eventually. (Outside of chase items, but those usually aren’t build defining for that exact reason.) PLus a lot of your build is defined by entirely deterministic mechanics. You get to choose your skills and passives. And with trading you can take nearly all the uncertainty out of whether or not you’ll be able to put together the remaining pieces.

  So because it’s expected that you’ll for sure be able to build what you want given enough effort, if you optimize your build to trivialize the game, you’ll always be able to do that. When you get a a broken build in a roguelike, it’s because you high rolled that run and you get to have fun experiencing the high point relative to the baseline. You know how tough the combat usually is, so the fact that you can now breeze through it without thinking about it is fun in and of itself. But if it was always like that, it would just be a boring game. Incidentally, this is why I tend to not like roguelites that allow you to define a lot about your build before you enter the run itself. They make it a lot more likely that you break the experience in a very predictable way.

  In ARPGs the high point is the baseline. Either the game is able to be trivialized with a good build, in which case it always will unless you go out of your way to nerf yourself, or you can never really make the game easier no matter how good your build is, in which case the build making isn’t super relevant. There’s a reason people joke about Fashion Souls. The gear you can equip is often so pointless that you might as well just pick armor for how it looks.

  An interesting case study for a sort of in the middle experience that kind of illustrates some of this is Noita. For those unfamiliar it’s a roguelike where you play as a mage/alchemist descending into the depths of the world in search of mysteries. Your builds consist of wands that you can put an assembly of spells and modifiers in to craft very different spell setups. You also get some perks occasionally that do the usual kinds of things you’d expect from a roguelike passive item system. The game is brutally difficult to a degree that’s deliberately unfair to the player. Enemies are chaotic. The environment is volatile and filled with things that can kill you in an instant if you’re not careful, or even if you are careful because some enemy triggers some flying thing on another screen that flies into you out of nowhere. Many spells in the game can hurt you too and even the ones that can’t directly can sometimes have a firing pattern that will make it hard to avoid hitting explosives and stuff that will kill you. Healing is extremely limited. Early on the game is certainly very skill based in the sense that you aren’t going to immediately break the game in the first level or so, so you need to be able to avoid things while you slowly kill them. If you really enjoy build crafting, the early game is fairly boring in that respect. But ultimately as you progress it’s more knowledge based. Your will be hard pressed to outskill later enemies if you’re still running a dinky no damage wand. So you kind of have to find ways to break the game if you want to succeed.

  SPOILERS beyond this point:

  That’s the initial experience. Two things become true once you learn more about the game:

  1. There are a handful of very powerful combos that are way better than most of what you can do in the game. Once you know about them, either through discovery or from reading about it online, you will kind of ruin the build potential of future runs. You can somewhat reliably find at least one of these most runs so long as you make it past a certain point. There’s not nothing cool to discover after that, but they’re all way less practical and only something you will be able to do once you’ve already reached a point where there’s no challenge they’re needed to overcome.

  2. Upon freeing yourself from the initial core run to go see the rest of the world(s), you gain access to essentially unlimited perks. You can gain absurd amounts of health, damage reduction and healing, immunity to a lot of hazards, enough movespeed to avoid most things, and the ability to basically get anywhere you want on the map, etc. You basically become a god of death and destruction, untethered from mere mortal concerns… until you randomly get turned into a sheep and die instantly. So similar to a broken ARPG character, you reach a point in the game where the only things that the game can possibly do to threaten you is to strip you of everything that makes your build and just instantly kill you. And similar to an ARPG, this only really happens because you can play a run for many hours after the initial, more roguelike length run.

  There’s probably something to learn from all of that if you want to try to thread that needle, but I think it at least shows the challenges of reconciling the tension between mechanical skill and cool build making.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don’t seem compatible.

  Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you’re going out of your way to cheese things, you’re probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.

  Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you’ve made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don’t get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you’re presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.

  There’s no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that’s fundamentally different from PoE 1… they need to make THAT game. But that’s really far away from the game they’ve actually made and I don’t think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool. Didn’t know about that site. Thanks.