Marvel Rivals, because it just came out so it’s fresh in people’s minds, it’s a free to play game with a popular IP and it does a good job as the game it wants to be.

Mostly kidding, that just seems to be the state of games these days lol. Whatever games release at the beginning of the year seem to falter to recency bias of games released later in the year.

Dev = working on game

Dev = game developer

Dev = whatever fits until further clarification is needed based on context

Game development requires writers, artists, coders, so they’re game devs. Could it be more specific? Sure. Does it always need to be? Certainly not.

It just gets a lot of water drops off your hands and the air drying helps

Can’t watch at the moment; is this the guy who says to shake 7 times before you dry?

You may as well have typed this in 2009 or 2015.

It used to be that people argued that it’s worth getting the new game console because “better graphics”. The console wars hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just expanded.

In any case, in regards to just installing a game and playing it, no, not really. When I was playing games in college in 2012 it was still a time when you would open a game and go to the settings menu to adjust settings.

Sometimes it was just turning off motion blur, but there was always settings to change to try to reach a stable 60FPS.

Nothing changed, it just expanded. Now instead of 60FPS it’s a variable 60-240FPS. Instead of just 720p-1080p resolution, unless it’s portable, it’s 1080p minimum otherwise variable up to 4k. Instead of “maxing out” we now have raytracing which pushes software further than our hardware is capable.

These aren’t bad things, they’re just now 1) slightly marketed, 2) more well known in the social sphere. There isn’t anything stopping you from opening up the game and going right away, and there’s nothing stopping other people from wondering about frame timings and other technical details.

Sure, focusing on the little things like that can take away from the wider experience, but people pursue things for different reasons. When I got Cyberpunk 2077 I knew that there were issues under the hood, but my experience with the game at launch was also pretty much perfect because I was focused on different things. I personally don’t think a dip here and there is worth fretting over, but some people it ruins the game for them. Other people just like knowing that they’re taking full advantage of their hardware, hence figuring out the utilization of their components.

There’s one last aspect not mentioned. Architectures. 10 years ago games would just boot up and run… But what about games from 10 years before then? Most players not on consoles were having to do weird CPU timing shenanigans to be able to boot up a game from (now 20) years ago. We’re in the same boat now with emulation, which while emulation is faring better, X360/PS3 generation games that had PC ports are starting to have issues on modern Windows. Even just 5 or 6 years ago games like Sleeping Dogs wouldn’t play nice on modern PC’s, so there’s a whole extra aspect of tinkering on PC that hasn’t even been touched on.

All this to say, we are in the same boat we’ve always been in. The only difference is that social media now has more knowledge about these aspects of gaming so it’s being focused on more.

The one thing I do agree with though is that this is all part of software development. Making users need better hardware, intentional or not, is pretty crazy. The fact that consoles themselves now have Quality vs Performance modes is also crazy. But, I will never say no to more options. I actually think it’s wrong that the console version of games often are missing settings adjustments, when the PC counterpart has full control. I understand when it’s to keep performance at an acceptable level, but it can be annoying.

I can definitely see the benefit in smaller sized portables, but I do wonder at what point we reach diminishing returns. I can’t help but think about the 3DS and PSP and how silly it would be to be trying to play Battlefield and CoD in the Steam Deck style. At the same time, I played Monster Hunter all the time on those, and MH:W on my phone with a controller and steam remote play.

So then I think about the types of games, like Disgaea and other J/RPG’s and how a smaller Steam Deck would fit that well. Idk where I’m going with this, it’s just interesting to think about how gaming is fractured based on the genre and form factor. I use my Steam Deck a lot to play games, but I’m playing games that I stopped playing on PC, because indie 2D side scrollers feel weird there.

Are we just going to get to the point where gamers have their 3DS/PSP sized portable, the Steam Deck sized portable, and the large tablet sized portable, each for specific games? Lol

Can anyone tell me where handhelds are supposed to go from here? Truly. I can’t really see what can be improved from the perspective of the Steam Deck - all the things that come from a next gen device seem a bit antithetical to how the portable device functions. Better specs to make use of the better screen (HZ+resolution) mean a bigger battery and more weight, so…

The OG Deck is about as heavy as any portable should ever be, the OLED is noticeably lighter. So are the console wars shifting to handhelds in the next gen hardware packaging competition? The future of the gaming industry is just making more powerful Nintendo Switches?

Note: I’m not against more handhelds being out there. I just genuinely don’t see where they can really improve from here in any meaningful way after the next screen improvement

Toxic behavior being normalized leads to other people acting similarly.

I mean, “haha screaming so funny, I do same thing cause I want to be funny”

I generally agree, but I will say, it’s damn hard to get back into games like this after time passes.

The most extreme example would be Super Mario Maker, where some custom levels need game knowledge from a wide array of the various games, so if you don’t know that in SM2 you can pickup snowballs, you might get stuck for a while.

A normal example would be like Vanquish, where if you take a break near the end of the game the sheer level of technical necessity the game requires can make it very difficult to get back into it.

But those are extreme examples. Another example would be something like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros., where everyone has their sort of muscle memory with these games. I played Melee competitively and I came back to the game and it was like riding a bike, or a Souls game, while hard, is just one boss at a time and the game itself doesn’t have too much technical growth.

Software jobs, don’t usually have kids, money only spent on games and hobbies, which are limited.

Update: They did.

This was what I came to suggest for you

I’ve had this happen on other instances, I believe it’s just how Lemmy is

I agree with the other user who said it’s a writing problem e.g. choosing the immediacy of end of the world plot device. Unless it’s done with very specific circumstances, like Overcooked 1 where the first level is the Spaghetti Monster Apocalypse and then you jump back in time through a portal. I think Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good example of this exact problem the article raises though. It’s a relatively short game, but there is no end of the world. There are 2 major events, your destiny as the Arisen to fight the dragon that killed you, and the in-world politics of a government and some corrupt individuals working to prevent this event for their own plan.

I mention this game primarily because it uses a mechanic that many completionists tend to dislike - there are “timed” quests. Not all of them, usually ones that make sense to run out of time on (but again, not all of them.) So for example, at one point there is a quest to attend a masquerade ball, which is a permanent main story quest until you choose to attend. This is the exact issue the premise of the article brings up, where time is infinite until you decide to continue.

And yet, at the same time, there are a few quests where you may encounter a random NPC who is asking for help for someone who goes missing, and if too many in game days pass by, well… They die.

Ultimately I had other pacing issues with the story, but I did really enjoy how it goes about “solving” urgency when an in-game world timer exists. I’ve never been the biggest fan of time-managed items, (for example, raw potato, ripened potato, rotten potato over the course of 1-3 days), but Dragon’s Dogma 1 and 2 both did it fairly well since the items that do expire 1) make sense, it’s food, and 2) are in fair abundance. It helps solve the hoarding of your items, gives you a little extra money if you sell it as the right phase, and allows for varied item combinations as well (raw+item = curative, ripe+item = stamina, rotten+rotten = oil for lantern or status effect combinations).

I think really the issue just comes down to what is fun gameplay mechanics? Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu for PS2/Gamecube had timed levels, a mechanic that makes sense for a game centered around saving people before they kill hostages. Star Ocean had an in game timer matched to clocks, so the only way to stop the timer was to turn off the game. After (24?) hours, it’s game over. Quite frankly… timed mechanics are usually seen as gimmicky and are not very popular - they may have moments of appreciation, but I’m not sure if it’s a beloved mechanic.

Which in turn results in, “I have you now Spider-Man! In just 8 hours my bomb will blow New York to high heavens!” And then the player goes to help every child get their balloon back before the main story progresses.

Oh yeah I totally forgot about the wider security protections like turning off JavaScript

TOR itself isn’t shady, but it is used by a lot of people wanting to obfuscate various things. I would say that despite its ability to visit .onion website (which are the tip of the iceberg for finding the dark side of the Internet), TOR itself is a positive thing because it allows for that obfuscation.

I think the most important one is for political journalists and domestic violence victims, both of whom may have reason to keep something private. The way TOR functions, sort of reminds me of the early telephone operators.

Anyway, my last interesting bit about why I like TOR is that it is used on the Amnesiac Operating System called Tails which can be installed and ran from just a USB drive, and the drive itself plugged into any regular computer is just seen as a standard USB. Since it’s amnesiac, the only data on the computer is in RAM and if you pull the USB out the OS shuts down. It can be set up to store data though, for example files or websites. So between this OS and TOR, one could theoretically avoid tracking software set up on a computer from an abuser.

Also there’s just a lot of people that like weird niche things. Over 2 million people in Germany use it and it’s got a bit over half a million in the U.S… I imagine a fair portion of that is people selling darknet services of some variety, but I would be surprised if it was even 50/50

I know what you mean, like Twitch emoji Pepe’s.

I think because of the time that has passed, there’s a demographic that uses him without knowing and I think the stickers definitely are part of that. However I don’t think that removes culpability, it’s just how different generations interact with different words, or in this case meme.

And really I think what it comes down to is when meme becomes tied to identity. Sad Pepe is relatable, feel a connection to the character, see what other memes he can do, before you know it your discord emoji Pepe is a pipeline to normalizing political extremism.

Like how some subcultures create a pipeline to fascism, like cottagecore and tradlife. It’s not necessarily that all Pepe, all tradlife, brings you into the path towards fascist ideology, but that many of those with fascist ideology are drawn towards Pepe and tradlife, which then make engaging with content surrounding those subjects suspicious.

Pepe in abundance is just something to be wary of. I don’t think it’s wrong to use him on discord or twitch chat, but I am more suspicious of people who identify with him heavily and I keep an eye out for the type of memes and rhetoric that they use. Chances are high that it’s innocuous, but given his history I’d say it’s better to be aware than to think nothing of it.

Last thing, for me it’s mostly just odd because when I look up Pepe memes, so many of them are terrible. Not just bad memes I mean, like hateful and awful. Sad Pepe is pretty much the exception here, as in normal meme I still see him and it’s used pretty in-line with what you would expect from normal memes.

Tl;Dr - sad Pepe or Pepe emojis on twitch/discord = probably okay. Identifying with Pepe or making Pepe memes = maybe I’ll be keeping a closer eye on what exactly you’re trying to say

It’s funny that Futurama had an episode about this recently.

Fox Entertainment “News” should never be allowed to air political content.

Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).

The only thing I worry about this is then the de-legitimization of the cultural ones. All this would do would get fascists to start putting their profiles from the country’s where it’s deemed acceptable. I have no numbers for this but I feel like the number of people who have a cultural swastika are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the number of people who use it as a symbol of hate.