darthelmet
@darthelmet@lemmy.world
- Comment on What games are just objective master pieces? 3 hours 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 5 days 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 week 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 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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? 2 weeks 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.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 6 comments
- Comment on Death Stranding 2 preview: how a big dollop of Metal Gear is expanding Kojima's bizarre epic 2 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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!) 5 weeks 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? 1 month 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:
- A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won’t run out of limited charge spells.
- A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
- 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.
- Late game, a healing wand.
- 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? 1 month 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:
-
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.
-
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? 1 month 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? 1 month ago:
Cool. Didn’t know about that site. Thanks.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
Oh I was looking at system requirements on the store page. Is that accurate?
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
There’s a spattering of steam games that don’t list Linux support. Probably the ones I play the most are Deep Rock Galactic and Last Epoch. Outside of Steam I play TFT a lot, which doesn’t work on Linux since they added the anti-cheat software.
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 1 month ago:
I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.
Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?
- Comment on Divided and conquered 2 months ago:
The point isn’t to cede ground and compromise with them. The point is to try to show them that they’ve been duped about who their enemies are. It might still take some time to deprogram them, but if we could at least get them to put that all on hold and focus on the class issue, maybe we can actually get somewhere instead of spinning in circles.
- Comment on Welp. 2 months ago:
I have less hope for two reasons:
-
These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.
-
The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.
-
- Comment on The USA was always broken 3 months ago:
What’s Britain’s excuse then?
- Comment on Pills here! 3 months ago:
There’s a difference between conspiracy theories and having an analysis of incentives and structures.
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for profit seeking corporations to decide not to invest their money into something they think won’t return as much profit.
As for everything else staying shitty, why would corporations spend money on lobbying and campaign contributions if they didn’t expect it to make them a profit? Obviously those corporations want less taxes, less regulations that might cost them money to comply with, and the more of the economy that is privatized, the more opportunities capitalists have for making more profits.
That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a basic understanding of economics and political economy plus some history.
- Comment on Interview: Alex Kurtzman on Section 31 and the "evolution" of Star Trek 3 months ago:
I think what’s interesting about the conflicts that do arise in Star Trek is that while they often mirror issues we have today in some way, it’s being grappled with by people and a system that has purposefully turned away from greed and cruelty. They might not always get things right, but it’s not because of some special interests making it that way, it’s just because even in the future humans are humans and they make mistakes and have blind spots.
For example, I was thinking about that episode of DS9 that dealt with Bashir being genetically modified. Obviously it’s some mix of discussions about GMOs, steroids, and one of those imperfect fantasy/sci-fi racism analogies. You’d kind of hope we have stuff like that sorted by the future, but it’s kind of understandable why they have this quandary. The reasons for keeping genetically modified people out of star fleet isn’t entirely without reason and is clearly not coming from a place of cruelty, but it’s also hard to get around the fact that this is still discrimination based on something someone was born with. But nobody really specifically stands to benefit from the status quo. So you just have the matter at hand with no clearly perfect answer getting discussed honestly by well intentioned people.
Section 31 definitely doesn’t fit that mold. It’s some last vestige of a system that prioritized a self-serving order held up by force. I think to the extent that it has any place in ST, it’s something like how it was handled in DS9 where our characters were actively trying to uncover a rogue organization instead of it just kind of being a part of Starfleet like in Discovery.
- Comment on Wish I could charge $100 a call attempt to these people 4 months ago:
My parents have the longest, most obnoxious ring tones for texts on their phones.
- Comment on Large Language Models in Video Games? 4 months ago:
Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.
That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.
I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.
But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.
Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.
- Comment on How This Billionaire Couple STOLE California's Water Supply | The Class Room ft. @SecondThought [08:08 | DEC 20 2022 | More Perfect Union] 4 months ago:
owned four San Francisco’s worth of farmland.
I’m not from California. Could someone convert this into the standard American measurement: Football fields?
- Comment on Improve your Wi-Fi with this one trick 5 months ago:
Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.
It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.
So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.
- Comment on Performative Perp Walk 5 months ago:
Kafka wrote stories about confusing, impersonal bureaucracies. So people will describe something as Kafkaesque to convey that sense of being lost in a system.
- Comment on What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games? 5 months ago:
Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.
- Comment on What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games? 5 months ago:
Tunic.
The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:
Tap for spoiler
If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!
I also second Outer Wilds.