Voroxpete

@Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My wife and I played Haven back before we got married, and never got around to finishing it. Really ought to dust that game off again. Playing it as a couple was really fun, and actually helped us to learn things about each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You know what’s wild? The answer that immediately comes to mind is Warframe.

  Genuinely, I’m not remotely joking, Warframe has some of the best video games romance I’ve ever encountered.

  Two things really stand out to me about the conversations in Warframe.

  First, the things they learn about you are often just as important as the things you learn about them. The article talks about the process of two people figuring out how they fit into each other’s lives, and that’s exactly what you get with Warframe. You need to actually show that you can be someone they can love, as well as simply showing interest in them.

  Secondly, and I think maybe more importantly; most of the conversations in Warframe don’t feel “important.” They all are. But most of them are about comparatively trivial things. A lot of it is literally just people sharing shower thoughts, or jokes, or talking about dumb shit, or getting things off their brains.

  Also, the way the characters interact feels distinct and different. Amir, the most obvious case of ADHD in the universe, writes five messages for every one of yours (these conversations all happen through “Not MSN Messenger”), and most of the time what he needs is for you to just listen while he unloads all the chaotic shit in his brain. Eleanor, the journalist, writes long, carefully formed sentences with correct punctuation and grammar. She poses questions, prods and pries, tries to dig secrets out of you. Aoi will sometimes just send you a string of emojis, and will be delighted if you reply the same way. She likes to be silly, but more importantly she needs to just know that you’re there and you cared enough to reply. It’s the written equivalent of squeezing someone’s hand. Some characters will pester you, others are more likely to wait for you to talk first. There’s a unique dynamic with each of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marathon | Launch Gameplay Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This has the makings of another Concord written all over it. Even after the disaster with the stolen art, the reports I’ve heard are that the gameplay just isn’t good. Whatever talent was at Bungie left some time ago by the sounds of things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine if any other kind of media did the same thing. Like, you’re reading a book, and every few pages there’s a footnote telling you what the protagonist’s current Paragon/Renegade score is based on the decisions they recently made. Would be a miserable experience.

  God, I love KOTOR so much, but its consequences have been a fucking disaster for the entire RPG industry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what you’re getting at here might be better expressed as “Moral choices are more interesting than morality systems.”

  Life Is Strange doesn’t have a morality system of any kind, but it has, easily, some of the most interesting moral choices I’ve ever experienced in a video game. One of them doesn’t even affect the ending or later story beats (to my knowledge), and yet I literally had to put the controller down and walk away because I couldn’t make that choice… Both options were so unspeakably horrible, and yet the choice was obviously and urgently necessary.

  Mass Effect actually has some really interesting moral quandaries, but they’re massively undercut by the need to force them into the game’s binary moral code, instead of just allowing them to be the complex problems that they are. Morality systems boil every choice down to an arbitrary position on an arbitrary axis.

  The Witcher works because it simply presents you with situations and allows you to judge them for yourself. It doesn’t present you with a score card afterwards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I fucking detest the way morality systems in games work.

  I don’t think they’re a fundamentally unworkable idea, but very few games have even come close to doing anything good with the concept.

  Most just offer you two equal but different benefits, let you pick between them, and call that morality. See Bioshock. And the Mass Effect / KOTOR system always sucked because it punished you for going down the middle (ie, playing a complex character).

  One of the only good morality systems I’ve ever seen is Metro 2033. For those who don’t know, the game has a secret personality tracker. It gives you points for taking actions that are pro-social. You get a lot of opportunities in the game to refuse benefits or give up resources to help others. You are never directly rewarded for this. It doesn’t do the bullshit where you give someone some food and they go “Here’s an old gun I had lying around.” Being kind costs you. It also measures the time you spend interacting with people, listening in on conversations, that kind of thing. By the end of the game, if you’ve played your character like someone who cares about other people, you get an opportunity to make a better choice, that leads to a better outcome. If you don’t, the choice is never presented to you at all, because the character you portrayed wouldn’t even think there was a choice to be made in that situation. It’s brilliant, and it completely solves the usual Deus Ex / Mass Effect “Three buttons” ending where nothing leading up to it matters. To be able to make the good ending choice you have to have played the kind of character who would be willing to make that choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “looks so bland to me”

  So… It’s a Fable game then?

  Seriously, when has this series ever been anything other than the unseasoned oatmeal of RPGs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Humans are part of the ecosystem.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just a little off the top.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you preorder games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We Do Not Preorder

  Seriously, don’t reward this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.

  The only acceptable justification I can see is if it’s an indie dev who has really, truly earned the trust of their players and proven that they will work tirelessly to deliver the product people want. And even then I’d be very, very unlikely to. I’m crazy excited for both of Owlcats upcoming games and I still haven’t pre-ordered them, for example.

  Pre-orders encourage bad, buggy, incomplete or deceptively marketed releases by juicing day one numbers without any need for the dev / publisher to actually release a worthy product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gravity!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m aware. That’s not what I meant by “This is not a joke.”

  Also the hint is that OP said they meant it as a joke. But, yeah, evening you said too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gravity!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is not a joke. This is genuinely what a significant number of flat earthers believe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I dunno⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They didn’t say it’s not defined, they said it’s not a valid name. Most languages don’t allow function names to start with a number, so 5 literally cannot be a function if that’s the case…

  But that’s assuming this isn’t some really obscure language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d be happy with either option. If you’re going to punish the player for not doing perfect (eg, no kill) stealth, don’t tease them with a bunch of really exciting combat mechanics. If you’re going to include all the exciting combat mechanics, don’t punish people for using them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.

  Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.

  Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.

  The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.

  Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We could have lived in a world where Hideo Kojima made a Matrix game, if only someone had told him he was offered to make one⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Usually. Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped. The gameplay was crazy fun; it took all the slow-mo coolness of Max Payne and added wall-running, super jumps and martial arts. The combat was lots of fun, and the story was all written by the Wachowski’s to tie in with the second and third movie, including actual scenes that they filmed as part of the process. They took it really seriously, to them it was an essential part of the story.

  Obviously the whole Matrix 2 & 3 saga has some problems, it’s not the Wachowski’s best work (how could it have been, they had a plot for one movie that they were told to expand into two), but the game is still a really fun entry in their ouvre.

  BTW, another excellent licensed game was Chronicles of Riddick Escape From Butcher Bay, a genuinely fantastic game tying in with a genuinely terrible movie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does he do it???⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My brain went to exactly the same place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, parrying needs serious work. I don’t think I’ve been able to make it happen even once.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Next Fest is back for October 2025. What good demos have you found?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everwind is fantastic. Fixes just about every complaint I have about Minecraft, and I say that as someone who bought Minecraft back in alpha. There are things that could be improved, but even where I think there’s room for improvement the baseline always seems to be “It’s already better than Minecraft”. For example I really feel like the combat could do with a dodge mechanic and harsher stamina management, but that’s based on comparing it to stuff like Dark Souls. Even in its current state it absolutely clowns on Minecraft’s combat.

  The artstyle is lovely, the building and crafting feels really good, the range of furniture and decorations you can build is massive, and you get to build and fly an airship. And that’s not an afterthought, it’s a core part of the game and feels really, really good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  +1 for Burnout 3. That’s a series that desparately needs a new entry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Zone of the Enders was phenomenal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, single player open world Helldivers.

  Absolutely amazing game. Just Cause kind of captured some of the same energy, but never quite there. There’s nothing quite like being able to deploy cluster bomb strikes at will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “I mean, they can’t get any worse, right?”

  Spoiler alert: They can.

  Don’t buy anything from EA, ever again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Embracer is leveraging AI "in ethical and sustainable ways", says new CEO, insisting "human authorship is final"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Embracer have never done anything ethical in their entire existence. I really don’t think they’re going to start now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it's just science, i guess⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, they could just as easily pivot to “Well, sure, autism was around before that, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.” Kind of like cancer and modern carcinogens. It’s just a foolish line of argument that makes us look stupid.

  And it’s completely unnecessary. The evidence that autism is genetic is overwhelming. Anyone who is going to listen to facts already has the facts right there, and anyone else isn’t worth trying to convince.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it's just science, i guess⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, milk just tastes different depending on the cows, and how they’re raised and fed. Most likely what you’re noticing there is the difference between grass-fed and corn-fed. Cows aren’t naturally adapted to eat corn; they grow better and healthier on grass, which is how they’re raised in the UK. Corn-feeding is a primarily North American practice because corn can be sold at below the cost of production in the US thanks to government subsidies in place since the Great Depression.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it's just science, i guess⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tylenol is a brand name for paracetomol (AKA acetominophen). It was first created in either 1878 or 1852 depending on which claims you believe about its discovery.

  The claim that autism was differentiated from schizophrenia in 1911 is unsourced, and seems suspect given that Leo Kanner first described autism in 1943, but even if we accept it as true, it still puts the discovery of autism after the discovery of paracetomol.

  RFK Jr is full of crap, and it doesn’t matter when autism was discovered, because it’s genetic and has probably been around as long as humans have, but trying to pull a gotcha like this is just going to make you look stupid.