Definitely check out the soundtrack of this game. It is really good - weird but good.

What interests me more:

• Will a mostly single player game again be online only?
• Will there be elsusive targets or similar parts of the game, where I pay for something that I might not be able to access, because If I don’t have time or want to play in a specific week I won’t be able to access it?
• Are you going to sell us the game in parts and over and over again until I end up like I do now on EPIC where I have no way of actually knowing what content I own and which I don’t own and having to buy the elusive targets twice (once when they were timed and now that they are not anymore)?

IO Interactive makes good games, but they got away with a lot of shite every other developer would get crucified over. I am just waiting for the day Hitman gets unplyable because they shut off the servers.

No matter how good their next IP will be, if they go on with these practices, then I am not buying. It is unnecessary and anti consumer and there are more good games than I can play in a life time that allow offline play and where I don’t need a spread sheet to find out what content I want/need.

Wishing them all the best and that they take the time to make everything around legal stuff and ownership secure so that bad stuff can’t happen again. It is a shame that Kurviz and Rostov aren’t part of this, but DE had a lot of talent behind it and I trust everyone else too to be able to make something interesting. I also hope Kurvitz and Rostov will keep creating and sharing their creations in one way or the other with the world. It would be a shame if they retreated fully from making their art, because of what happened.

In a perfect world, things like FOMO and group pressure would not exist. People would understand that skins are just useless pixels. We do not live in that world. Yes there are a handful of people who are not affected by the psychological effects of this and if you are one of them lucky you. The truth is, most people are affected, most people feel bad to be the only one with no knife skin, with default armor ( “Default” being an insult in online games with a very young audience) and most people do love the “look” and feel a real need to buy cosmetics.

There is a reason game developers hire psychologists. That’s why all lootboxes have sparkles and sound effects and even look like slot machines although what is in your box is long decided. It is because it works for most people’s brains as stimulating. That’s why some people make a living out of videos where they open loot boxes because even watching someone else open them makes our brain chemistry go WROOOOOM.

It is way less of a choice for most people than you think it is. I remember one FPS game has a quest where you need to open a loot box ingame and others can watch you do it, to animate them to buy loot boxes. These businesses have no shame to invent constantly new ways of making you enter the shop. Like making food rot ingame so you will have to buy a fridge from the shop (Fallout 76).

MTX and loot boxes are part of the core of many games. When they finally got rid of loot boxes in Mordor: Shadow of War , they had to redo the whole economy of the game, because it was to the core made in a way to encourage you to buy war chests for better Orcs.

You CAN live without ever eating cake, but if everyone eats cake, all other food looks bland and boring and you constatnly are shown ads for cake, shiny cake, tasty cake, colorful cake, cake that you can only buy until <date> and cake that only 100 people can buy and all your friends are having cake right now and telling you how good it is… there is a point where it doesn’t matter that the cake is a lie scam, you will want cake too.

… and they could put an end to the black market for skins and the gambling at anytime, but refuse to do so. This would get rid of the account stealing mostly too.

Not to mention that Valve had to be forced to follow consumer laws in some countries by expensive lawsuits.

It was also Valve who started the “you do not own your games” shite, by forcing the connection of licences to an account and a gaming client, which got rid of the ability to resell your games or to have at least the game’s installer offline available.

I’ll never get why Valve always gets a pass. Would it be worse if Steam was owned by Epic / Tencent / Activision …, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it great.

If someone want to give praise I would point to GOG. Not perfect but at least I own my licence to the point that I can install my games from an installer I have archived on my HDD (no deleting the game, no forced updates, no adding MTX at a later time, no taking away licenced music), I can go to earlier versions of Early Access games if they change it for the worse and more.

This is my winner!

I also love Ryukishi07’s VNs, “When They Cry” series. The art is admittedly ugly, but the stories are very intricate and convoluted in the best sense of the word.

The first of the “When They Cry” series are the only VNs I have ever played clicked through and it was surprisingly good, even for someone like me who isn’t into anime and kept me hooked through all the episodes. I highly recommend it.

Also, most all US small to mid sized business transactions are by check.

Why? It is a bank transfer with extra steps. A check can get unreadable, get lost… No one in Germany would write a check for a permit fee or to pay a business partner. You pay online. Fast, safe, can’t get lost, easy to proof what, when to whom you have paid for years to come. And the transfer won’t get through if you do not have money on your account or are allowed to overdraw, while you can write whatever you want on a check and then run.

It is not cash or check it is bank transfer or check and the bank transfer is the safer, faster option. All they do at a bank is to scan the check and to turn it into the exact same bank transfer it could have been in the first place. All you do is adding a layer of risk by writing on a piece of paper.

I find that really funny, because many Germans still refuse to buy their groceries without cash, many like me do not own a credit card only debit cards, but no one younger than 90 uses a check. I am 58 years old and have never owned checks.

What a shit guy who cares more about people who live in thousands of years than people who live today:

https://netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermism-an-odd-and-peculiar-ideology/

https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75 per cent for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip – the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two.

Bostrom’s argument is that ‘a non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilisation is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback.’ It might be ‘a giant massacre for man’, he adds, but so long as humanity bounces back to fulfil its potential, it will ultimately register as little more than ‘a small misstep for mankind’. Elsewhere, he writes that the worst natural disasters and devastating atrocities in history become almost imperceptible trivialities when seen from this grand perspective. Referring to the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he declares that ‘tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things … even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.’

This way of seeing the world, of assessing the badness of AIDS and the Holocaust, implies that future disasters of the same (non-existential) scope and intensity should also be categorised as ‘mere ripples’. If they don’t pose a direct existential risk, then we ought not to worry much about them, however tragic they might be to individuals. As Bostrom wrote in 2003, ‘priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.’ He reiterated this several years later in arguing that we mustn’t ‘fritter … away’ our finite resources on ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our longterm potential, and our longterm potential is what really matters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism

He does not care about us, why should anyone care about him? Unfortunately other rich people are also into this, because it helps them to ignore the worlds problems and to do whatever they want to the people living now.