My partners RX6600 holds 80 FPS on mid settings without framegen. Maybe the gap between med and high is larger than I realize, or there’s an ultra setting I hadn’t noticed, but the author’s experiences still seem out of whack.

I feel like this has been a trend lately. New, high-fidelity game releases, and the wave of “UNOPTIMIZED GARBAGE!” “dev, fix ur game!” starts rolling, only for myself, and the majority of people I speak to personally, to have no real issues. Feels rude to play this card, but I am starting to lean towards most people having no idea how to care for their machine, in a lot of cases, and rarely facing some weirdly specific drive/card compatibility stuff.

I have a multiple friends who, whenever they find success, almost immediately feel guilty and apologize to anyone else involved. In every case, those friends come from backgrounds where they were surrounded by narcissists. The guilt and apologies are a programmed response because “friends” and family would always frame their success as someone else’s, usually their own, loss. This is now the lens they see every success through.

Win at a game? Apologize to the people you beat. Interview well and be offered a new job? Feel guilty about the other applicants. Hell, go out for a meal with friends and your food comes first? “I’m so sorry, guys.”

Narcissists have programmed these friends to believe that they are undeserving of success, or even good luck, and that they should apologize for existing. I do my best to reassure them when I can, “you earned this,” or “you had nothing to do with this happening,” but ultimately it’s something they have to grapple with until they can figure out for themselves how to grow past that programming.

I have no idea if this applies to your situation, but it is a lens to consider.

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It’s an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Okay, for a VR indie title? Gorn did incredible.

“No Stupid Questions” isn’t meant to be a challenge.

Mhmm. Everyone is shitting on Nintendo, but the reality is their games are literally keeping up with inflation. The problem is that our wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and the cost of living has, at least, kept up. In some cases (rent), it’s grown faster than the inflation of everything else.

Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo is tone deaf for making this decision now, and I suspect they’d still make billions with a $15 price increase rather than a $30 one. I’m not defending them. But the picture is a lot larger than them.

It can be both.

There’s no “sanity” system in Look Outside. The closest thing is a hidden “stress” stat which, last I checked, is literally just combat problems when it gets low.

That said, Look Outside is a fantastic game, and the Dev is super down to earth and active with his players. Highly recommend.

Bless.

“No stupid questions” should only apply to questions, not thinly veiled attempts at polarizing conversations.

I fucking hate the rise of the alt-right more than most, but one of the reasons for that hate is the bad faith bullshit they get up to in pushing their agenda. I have no interest in combating them with bad faith bullshit of our own.

Interest, I can understand. Trust and faith? Yeah, I’ll pass, thanks.

I mean, this just isn’t true, though. You’re not wrong in pointing out that the scope of sales has changed, but so has the scope of development, as well as consumer expectation. I suspect if you compare the number of man hours spent on a title today vs an NES game, it’s not even a comparable discussion. And then there’s the matter of post-release support.

To be clear, I don’t think a $30 price hike for physical copies is at all sensible, but the arguments being presented both for and against it are incredibly poorly thought out. Everyone presents a single facet of videogame development today compared to years ago and then acts like it’s a “gotcha” that proves their point. The entire ecosystem of game development and consumption has changed so drastically, that any discussion comparing the adjusted for inflation price of games then vs now is just pointless. Art and entertainment are art and entertainment, and it’s impossible to create a de-facto value statement for them, because consumer subjectivity, bias, and valuation is too wide to make objective statements about.

Imo, the real criticism of the matter is that +50% cost during a time of economic upheaval, when the buying power of the middle class is approaching the weakest it’s been in a long time, is going to be received poorly, and probably result in a loss of Western sales. It’s a massive leap, in a single generation, at the worst possible time, regardless of what inflation adjustments tell us.

Oh I don’t have any performance issues. My 3070ti has no issue holding 120 fps (with frame Gen on, mind you). Game plays perfectly.

And I’d be more forgiving of the “15 hour long free game,” but it ate a part of the game I enjoy, made playing that part of the game with friends challenging to the point of feeling not worth it, and it’s required before I am allowed to enjoy the game I actually paid for. Those 15 hours - well, 12 for me - were more valuable to me than the price I paid for the game. 15 hours of work is well into the several hundreds of dollars space. But I already paid over $100 CAD once taxes were in. Why do I also have to give it my time?

Again, great game, but worst on-boot Monster Hunter to date. And that’s saying something, considering World doesn’t let you hold a weapon for the first hour.

Genuinely couldn’t stand how on-rails it is. Why advertise this wide open world and then constantly restrict and limit my options to interact with it?

There’s lots of positive things to say about it. The combat is, yes, perhaps more satisfying than ever. They really nailed the Monster/weapons/armor designs this time around. I feel like there’s value in gathering again, something that recent titles have lost.

But it’s all stained by the low-rank experience. Spending 10-12 hours behing hand-held through a series of walk and talks where I am constantly prompted to stare at the beautiful landscape piece, or the way small monsters interact, as though the game is afraid I’ll miss it if I am left to my own devices, was both boring and insulting. There was a lot of decisions made to put cinematography ahead of gameplay experience here, and these decisions have genuinely made Wilds my least favorite release Monster Hunter title to date.

Yes.

This is literally my “message received” emote.

If people thought it was rude, I’d be fired by now.

Based list. Outer Wilds in particular chef’s kiss.

I’m a teacher, and as soon as students figure out I play games, they inevitably ask me this question, but I largely think it’s an unfair question to ask someone who games as a genuine hobby rather than just a kill time.

I like to tell them that’s a really impossible question to answer and instead offer them my favorite franchise of games: Monster Hunter. I feel like I can more reliably say that I am a massive fan of the franchise, with it reliably being my favorite videogame franchise, without that seeming weirdly inaccurate considering the wide variety of genres and sub-genres that make up video game interests.

To say that Monster Hunter Rise is my favorite game would be a massive disservice to the captivating, genre-breaking storytelling power of Hades, my deeply rooted love of the flight mechanics in Elite Dangerous, my history as a brief world record holder for a Mario title, the thousands of hours of Team Fortress 2 I’ve shared with friends, or my experiences grinding World of Warcraft arenas to the top 0.5% of players. And I’ve somehow listed 5 formative titles from the top of my head without even representing my deep passion for rhythm games, with Hi-Fi Rush being a genuine contender for that “favorite game” slot that I am arguing doesn’t exist. So I don’t answer with any of these games, because not only would my answer be fundamentally untrue, but it’s not really the question my student means to ask, either. They want to know what I am into, and giving them a standout franchise that automatically gets my money when a title is released gives them a much better answer than any one title could ever do.

Amazing.

Yes? Should I not? “insta” as in instanteous, and “gram” as in a telegram. This is a name rooted in already understood language to give me an understanding of what it is at first encounter. Bard, same, something that tells a story, I’d assume. But I’ve never seen it before so /shrug.

“Lemmy” means nothing to me.

Fediverse is good. “Verse” to the end of anything suggests it’s own ecosystem, or “universe,” and Fedi for federation. Makes sense.

There are a lot of genuine answers to this, but the simplest one is perhaps the best: because who decides which authority is correct?

Authoritarianism is bad because it gives justification to our bias’.

The “good” authorities you think of when you ask this question are authorities not because they are authorities, but because they have the knowledge/training/practice/experiences that give them a greater expertise on a given subject. Authoritarianism supposes that, those things aside, there’s something inherently good about someone in a position of authority. This is factually incorrect.

We (are supposed to) grant authority to those that earn it, and use it responsibility. Likewise we (are supposed to) strip it away from those that abuse it, or fail to maintain strong standards of ethics and practice. Authoritarianism, as a school of thought, discards that process, instead suggesting that the authority is the authority because people need that in their lives. Fuck that.