• 0 Posts
  • 283 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle


  • Yes because I don’t expect every friend of mine to be a licensed psychiatrist capable of diagnosing and prescribing medication. Heck, even a lot of medications use that exact same qualified language in their advertising because the human body and mind are incredibly complicated and inconsistent things.

    It’s like when I get a cold and my mom tells me to keep my fluids up. It helps and shows she cares even if it’s nowhere near as good as antibiotics. And yes of course I already know to stay hydrated. Just like I know how the weather has been and I remember the story she tells me 4 times a year of that time my older sister broke the neighbor’s window with a basketball.

    Lashing out in anger at those trying to reach out and help you isn’t going to make you feel better even if their advice isn’t perfect.






  • I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

    Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

    Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

    People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

    Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

    There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

    Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

    Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

    Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

    Gonna be weird.



  • Bruh if you’re still giving a shit about what any pre-election polls were saying after they’ve repeatedly failed to predict so many elections I don’t know what to tell you.

    I said it before he stepped down- America is too misogynist and racist to vote in Harris. Even the economic left. Would Biden have done better? I can’t say. But I do think it’s pretty damning that Harris didn’t even win the popular vote like Biden and Hillary did.


  • What the fuck are “modding values”? Women with ridiculous anime proportions and almost non-existent armor? Adding Shrek and Thomas the Tank to Skyrim? Gatekeeping mods to a small community of individuals who play on PC and have the technical skills to do that? Slaving away while the rent and bills like up out of some sense of obligation to a community? Hoping people donate? Putting all the time and effort into creating something and taking on all of the risk? Being. Subject to the whims of Bethesda’s management and hoping management doesn’t change their tune to be more like Nintendo?

    How can you calin that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about modders getting paid, when they pioneered the first real legitimate attempt at paying modders? That’s some serious cognitive dissonance. And perhaps the most important piece of the equation is the financial security it provides. The Creation Club paying modders up-front greatly mitigates the business risks of investing that much time and effort. It is not the best fit for everyone, but that allows a lot of mods to be made that never would have been possible otherwise. And it doesn’t remove any of the mods that already existed or prevent anyone from making free non-CC mods.

    As for donations to modders- those companies like Patreon are taking their own cut as well. And that’s a legal grey area because modders are profitting off of Bethesda’s platform. Then you have the issue where Bethesda updates their game and provides an improvement for literally millions of people while a couple hundred PC players flame them on Twitter for breaking the mod they paid or donated for.

    Personally, I’ve never donated or paid for any mods because I don’t use them. I’ve messed around with mods and the vast, vast majority of them suck. They feel completely out of place and ruin the vibe of the game. It’s not worth all of the hassle of installing a mod manager and working through all of the issues just to add memes to the game. The ones that add more quest lines are usually just way worse versions of the radiant quests that already exist. Maybe if I had a more powerful computer back in like 2012 or 2013 then graphics mods might have made sense, but with the updates in the Special and Anniversary editions there’s not much point. If I wanted to go back to Fallout 3 then maybe there’s an argument there, but I’m not really interested in going back there in general.

    The “best” mods can be created In a variety of ways. I’d argue that the Hearthfire, Dawngard, and Dragonborn DLC’s are better than any free mod I’ve ever seen. The vast, vast majority of free mods are shitposts or school projects that no one cares about.


  • I mean… It’s hard to really find solid numbers because Bethesda hasn’t published them, but we know that Prey’s opening week of sales was 60% less than Dishonored 2’s was. All the estimates and discussion i can find on the Internet either concludes that the game lost money or, at best, broke about even.

    It got great critical reviews. People who identify as “gamers” seemed to love it. But it gets compared to Bioshock a lot- Bioshock Infinite came out 4 years earlier and the market was saturated with similar games by the time Prey came out.

    So I don’t think it’s unreasonable for management to want to move in a different direction. That direction ended up being a terrible one with Redfall, but i can’t automatically assume that the studio would have been any better off making another game like Prey.

    You can find every example you could look for in history. Studios who changed direction successfully, like Insomniac going from FPS to 3D platformer. Gamefreak went from platformers like Pulseman to making JRPG’s and ended up making the most successful media franchise in history, while all of their later attempts to do anything else have failed miserably.

    And it’s not as if it would have made sense to have Arkane make Weird West. You can’t just slash a AAA studio down to an indie overnight.


  • I still don’t understand why people have so much hate for Bethesda for… Paying independent creators to make better mods for their games and charging for those mods.

    I can understand criticizing the execution: the quality and price of each mod, the grey legal area where these weren’t included in Season Passes that were supposed to include all DLC, etc. And I certainly wouldn’t call the results a success.

    But nothing about it ever seemed particularly greedy or “unfair” to me. It solved a lot of problems that the modding community has. It protected the creators from having. Their content stolen and re-used or re-distributed. Mods (especially for-profit) were always kind of a grey area legally because… It’s Bethesda’s platform and IP. Bethesda may not be as great with modders as other companies, but they’re a lot better than the worst offenders like Nintendo. The Creation Club has better quality control. And it’s better for the end users- easier to install, usable on consoles, no need to go to sketchy 3rd party websites or mess with the installation. I know people complain on the Internet anytime Bethesda updates one of their games because it breaks their mods- I could be wrong but I’ve never heard of that happening with CC mods.

    Seems to me like most of the hate for CC comes from people just wanting more content without paying for it.




  • paultimate14@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.worldNostalgia and remake culture
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    18 days ago

    Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

    Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

    As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.



  • There was the whole big lie about Obama’s birth certificate because he was black.

    John McCain was born in Panama but no one seemed to care about him.

    Melania Trump was an illegal immigrant and that didn’t stop her career or prevent Trump from winning the presidency.

    Raphael “Ted” Cruz was born in Alberta yet no one seems to care.

    White and Right is alright. I’ll cede that maybe if some useful idiot with dark skin and murky citizenship rose to power conservatives might decide to look the other way, but you need to be at least one for them to do so.