m76

Yes it is currently. But it wasn't always so. 10 years ago gaming was at the periphery for me, I was barely playing anything at all. My primary form of entertainment were TV series between 2005-2013. Gaming slowly started to pick back up after that.

Imagine a job where you have to pretend to be in a good mood all the time, and you can't really take any time off, because the algorithm will punish you. And in the time when you are not streaming, you are preparing for your next stream.

Games without commitment. That you can quit at any time without loosing any progress. Best if there is no progression in the game at all. When I had limited time that I needed to waste my goto game was rigs of rods, nowadays I just watch a youtube video roughly the length of time I need to waste.

I'm rushing through games that I like too much, and games that I don't like enough. I'll explain: If I'm invested in the story of a game I tend to rush a bit in anticipation of the next big story event. For example TLOU2. And I tend to rush games where I find the mechanics weak, and I don't particularly enjoy playing the game. But not as bad to make me quit: Currently this is FarCry6, but FarCry5 was in a similar place also.

The game needs to have a worthwhile story to tell, otherwise I'm not even interested in playing it. But that doesn't mean you can't forge your own narrative by way of your actions. The same goal should be achievable by many different tactics and means. So the story should be set, the exact narrative of how you go through the story should be up to the player.

I often feel disconnected from games, but not for the reason described there. It is kind of a given that you have to choose to do the main objective of the game, otherwise what else is there? The disconnect I feel is when the game doesn't have a clearly defined narrative to follow and serve as an incentive to continue the struggle. The opposite of which the article seems to be advocating for. I find the suggestion for games not to have a specific story to tell, but offering many potentialities of stories to be experienced by the player, not just undesirable, but completely infeasible. That would mean the need to make 5 games or 10 games to make just one. The narrative of a game either works for the player and they end up liking it, or it doesn't and they end up not liking it. And that's alright. As for the disconnect between the game mechanics and the narrative, I always think of that as a technical limitation. Sure it would be great if you could smash all rocks in the game environment and they would stay smashed, but I understand that it is not feasible. You don't experience games as you do real life, and your inputs and reactions are limited. So there needs to be an established set of mechanics and rules on how the player interacts with the game. These mechanics need to be clearly defined and should never suddenly change. Just because there are choices in the story, doesn't mean the game mechanics also need to be a'la carte.

If you read my full post that's exactly what I'm saying, this is not the way to fix things for them. In isolation it is not a big deal, but the trend is already noticeable. Making female characters less and less attracive, and if someone like me raises their voice against the emerging trend they are labelled all kinds of bad words, and how dare I limit their creative freedom. Do I limit the creative freedom of an artist if I don't buy their painting because I think it is ugly? I don't think so. I'm just letting them know if this is how they choose to depict women I'll not be buying their paintings in the future.

Calling people who dare to notice "man-babies" is a metaphore? But that's the exact point, in order for that to make sense we must conclude that the picture was mysogyny in the first place. That's what I'm disputing. How does removing these make the game more inclusive? Inclusion by exclusion? You don't care that's your choice, but you seem to want everyone to ignore the trend. Removing already included content is technically the same as a book burning, you'll have a very hard time arguing that burning books is part of creative freedom too. You must be a genious because I don't follow. So if censoring content is political, then making the content is also political? WHAT? You are drawing a false equivalence. What would be the same is if at the same time they changed another image or character to be more revealing snd sexy than it was before, but that didn't happen. This is a oneway street.

Why is it so hard for you to address the topic instead of the messenger? If you don't want to address the topic then don't, nobody is forcing you, but attacking me personally yet again is still uncool. I refer you with that to the first paragraph of my second post.

If there was widespread outcry about it I'd understand changing something, but it is a slippery slope. There is always one person who doesn't like something. If the goal is to not offend anyone, we might as well kiss goodbye to all videogames, because I'm sure even pong annoys someone, somewhere.

Does this change the game significantly? No. Do I give a crap about how it affects the game? No. I never even played WOW for more than 10 minutes in my life. But to go by your slur, anyone with a mental age higher than 13 can see the hypocritical nature of this action, and the cultural implications. Well you should be able to connect the dots then that this change is directly related to the exposed laundry. They try to pretend to be pure of heart and soul, by changing things that were never a problem to begin with. Oh it makes perfect sense does it? Only if you assume that hustler magazines and bikini posters should be burnt. Which is ludicrous. Calling people names for caring about the entertainment value of entertainment products is still no argument though. Whether you care to admit it or not, sexy is more entertaining. Of course it is political, you preemptively try to dismiss that argument before it was even made because even you know it is true. And what of the creative freedoms of the creators of the original, whose works are to be removed? The only creative freedom that matters is the one that aligns with your world view, where sexy women are to be shunned and eradicated from mainstream entertainment? Of course they are free to exercise their creative freedom to cover up, uglify or even completely exclude women in every future game they make. However I'll also exercise my freedom of speech to call them a sexist puritan ideologs for it every step of the way. There is no logic in this: OOPSIE we did bad things to our women in the company, therefore we need to remove any references to sexiness from our games and make any remaining female characters the least attractive possible to make up for that. On what planet does that make sense?

Recently Blizzard has made a few stealthy changes to some assets in World of Warcraft. Most notable of these changes of course was the one where they removed a painting on a wall depicting a woman donning what seems like a harem attire. The image was really small and low resolution so it was hard to make out. which makes their decision to specifically target this asset for self censorship all the more interesting. But what really got the ire of the gaming community is that they done and replaced the painting with one depicting a bowl of fruit. But this is old news by now, so why am I bringing it up? Because Blizzard has released a statement regarding the changes, and of course they are citing inclusion as the reason. It is strange to me how inclusion always ends up excluding things, and banning certain depictions. You'd think that inclusion means everyone is welcome, but apparently even low resolution blurry images of sexy women are problematic now. But let's dive in to the statement. I wonder what exactly about that picture was inconsistent with their values, was it women in entirety? Going by how they treat them among their workforce if some of the allegations that come out are true, then I'd say yeah, Blizzard is inconsistent with women. But seriously if not the woman part was the issue, then what was? The harem attire? Last I checked sex was still legal and not an issue. So dear Blizzard why on earth would you remove this asset unless you are trying to tell us something about yourself? And indeed they do: So it's not about the game at all. You are improving the Team by changing the game. That makes sense, oh no it doesn't actually. You improve the team by firing problem figures especially those responsible to the egregious things that supposedly went on there. And not by removing any reference to sexiness no matter how minuscule and obscure from a game. Then they go on a tirade about how these changes are worthwhile, ending up repeating themselves over and over again, like it's them who needs convincing that that they are doing "good work". Hey, that almost sounds like "God's work". Yeah, i fully expect the people thinking that these are worthwhile changes to be as pretentious as religious fundamentalists. But there is one more telling line in the statement that I wanted to highlight: I might be overreaching here but when reading between the lines this sounds like "We wish we were able to remove certain cosmetics and character customization options, but we know we couldn't get away with it" And if you think this is an isolated case just look at the character redesigns that were done in diablo 2 resurrected.

Horizon Zero Dawn is designed poorly in this regard imo, because the gap between easy medium and hard is barely noticeable. But between story and easy it is impossibly huge.

I have a lot of weird dreams, but usually completely forget them by noon. I don't read any significance into dreams. They are just a echos of your brain misfiring. But I did notice that if I'm very preoccupied with a subject I tend to dream around that theme. The only thing I can recall now about my dreams is that there was a recurring theme for the past few years, where I'm the owner or proprietor of a huge mansion in the countryside. It is the same building and surroundings each time, regardless of the actual events taking place, that's probably why I can still remember the place because I've seen it so many times now. It appeared in a dream just today, but I already forgot what was the actual dream about. What I also noticed is that you are only able to recall dreams that happened just before you woke up, so maybe the last 15-20 minutes of sleep or even less.

Making an exclusivity deal with the epic store sacrificing reach for short term monetary gain, meaning they don't care how many people actually play their game as long as they get paid Sacrificing artistic vision for a lucrative deal Remedy entertainment selling Alan Wake and significantly scaling back the scope and technology behind the game to make it an XBOX360 exclusive Belittling, or insulting the fans or the gaming community at large for example Adrian Chimleraz, Cliff Blezinsky, and various others. Using games as a political platform, by promoting political groups or ideologies through the game with no context, for example NFS Payback advertising politics in its in game news feed. Distancing themselves from their previous works, suggesting that they were somehow inappropriate or toxic, which implies that the people liking those games are also toxic.

I don't get motion sick from narrow fov but I absolutely hate it, especially in games with tight corridors. In those games I often do Y turns in corners or stairwells so my view is not just a wall.

Usually these are games that I'm hesitant about, when I'm not sure that they are good enough to waste my time on. Currently Aliens Fireteam Elite falls into this category. I want to try it, but I'm waiting for a lower price point.

When the main quest and all significant side quests are finished. I don't care about repetitive quests and other time wasters that don't have a worthwhile narrative attached to them.

Smash all keys simultaneously and hope that I accidentally hit the right one. If that fails go into the controls menu and look at the key mapping. But I consider it bad design in games when there are functions used so rarely that yo can forget the mapping for them.

Currently Jagged Alliance Back in Action. I know it is a fairly old game (2012) but I Only got around to properly playing it recently. And now I'm really liking it. Previously I always gave up very early in the game, but now I've taken it more seriously and it was worth it.

In third person view you are more aware of your own body and surroundings that's what makes it more immersive for me. In traditional FPS games I feel more like a ghost than a real person, what can boost immersion is if you can see your own body in first person perspective. But generally for me there are other things that are far more important for immersion than just the perspective. I'll play both FPS and TPS view games if they are good.

Unfortunately for the consumer a monopoly and the fragmentation of the market are both bad. The same fragmentation is going on with streaming services, netflix seemed great value when it launched, but now with everyone launching their own service left and right, you have to get a dozen different streaming services if you want to watch your favorite shows. But I digress. Epic's campaign of giving away free games is not as big of a success as they'd have liked. There was a leak some months ago that suggested that most of the people who register for the free games aren't actually becoming paying customers for epic. So basically the only benefit they have is that they can say "look we have this many millions of users" when making deals with publishers. I expect that the EGS is bleeding money, not making it still. I genuinely think it would've been more succesful if they tried to appeal to the consumers instead of developers. I'd have gladly switched over to Epic if they offered better prices than steam, but "you buy it from us or nowhere" doesn't win them any favors with me. Right out of the gate when it was first launched their first action was to take a giant dump on us Eu customers. When they made the Metro Exudos deal they offered the game for $50 in the US, to appease people for their bait and switch. But in the EU, we actually ended up paying more for the game than we used to paying for games because the EGS deal meant there were no alternative stores selling games, so if you wanted the game in the EU you ended up paying $70 or close to it. I'll never forget that. So I obviously have a very bad taste in my mouth about epic, and have not purchased a single game from them. I avoided even those games I was very interested in, and I'm reluctant to buy them even after the exlusivity period ended, because I don't want to reward their behavior.

When steam launched a launcher was a completely new concept for people (although it wasn't really as many games had launchers before), so the hate was more aimed at the fact that they couldn't play the game without an internet connection. And it was basically the end of reselling games on PC. Steam was mostly hated for being new, and people always have fears about new things, epic is nothing new, it is simply hated because they are being awful, basically treating users as the commodity and publishers as the consumer.

What is anti-consumer about epic's behavior is that they specifically offer monetary incentives to developers / publishers if they don't sell their games on any other platform. I'm unaware of steam doing anything similar, but if they did, it would be equally contemptible. As far as I'm aware steam "exclusives" For indie developers is a matter of convenience and a lack of the ability to distribute their game the traditional way. Although I wouldn't be surprised if steam started making such deals in reaction to what epic was doing. But if that is the case they are doing a good job of keeping them quiet.

Because the term simulation is often used for games that have nothing to do with realism. I to this day have zero idea why games like civilization and the total war series are called simulations. Heck, sims is even named that way and how much realism does that have? To me immersive sim suggests that the game is governed by real world rules, instead of arbitrary ones. For example in an immersive sim you expect a bullet to the head to be fatal for enemies. While in other games damage is calculated by a host of arbitrary parameters, that may not be based on anything remotely real. For example world of tanks is a simulation game as well, but it is not governed by real world rules, but by various pay to win and skill/experience based bs. I wish every game was an immersive sim instead.