a lil bee 🐝

I haven’t looked but no way they’re removing perks. They’re too enmeshed into the game design.

Absolutely! There’s always a tradeoff though and some segment of the gaming population will be turned off, which is fair. I personally love the lonely feeling of NMS.

As someone who felt the same for a long time, it’s partially fixed but partially still that loop. They’ve added a lot of variety to that loop also with the last few updates. It definitely adds a bit of life, not so much on the emotion.

Lol that’s a fair take. I’m playing it right now to prep for Erdtree, so it’s likely just stuck in my head.

Weird. Subtle signposting is not exactly a new feature, even if this form kind of is? The path of grace in Elden Ring, yellow paint in every first person game with parkour, and the wind in Ghosts of Tsushima all come to mind.

They never took it from me! Animal Well and Dread Delusion are phenomenal experiences just from the last couple of months. Indies are always generating good games, even when AAA is just following trends.

We’re all trying to be SpongeBob, but we’re all subject to being a Squidward some days.

To be fair to you, I thought they were talking about AWS S3 at first and was very confused until I read the article.

If you are going to take your angst at capitalism and point it at other workers, overpaid or no, you are both shooting yourself in the foot and undermining your own points. Point your anger at the owning class who makes magnitudes more money by doing and producing nothing, who actively works against your political aims, and generally makes the world a worse place.

I work with devs who make 500k plus and most of them are fairly progressive people who just got lucky with their choice of profession. They’re not your enemy.

I agree. I’ve played a few matches of 2142(?) over the time since it’s been released and it’s gotten to an okay state. I know a lot of different people raged at various points of them, but I had tons of fun with the dev cycles of 4/1/V. They were just fun at the core, even when DICE was doing something dumb with the loop messed up a weapon or whatever. This one just falls flat after a few matches.

I would be happy just having a playable battlefield game guys…

The first part is not something I’m going to lay at the feet of this genre. Every category has them and it can be done fairly or poorly by any game, really.

I’m with you on the second part. Can you even design a game that empowers the player while every other player shares an almost identical story and you are seeing that all the time? Again, ludonarrative dissonance in the extreme and that’s not something most players can swallow. That’s that theme park-y feeling.

I think if the right game was made with clever instancing, something to appeal to all the subcategories of MMO players, and a pricing structure that isn’t unfair in today’s landscape, it could work. Who wants to volunteer to make and risk that though when you can make something magnitudes cheaper and more likely to make money?

There are even huge fractures inside that community. You have the intense raiders who want an extremely refined and tuned endgame, the pvp people who just want this refined competitive experience and finely balanced classes, and then you have the more casual story and exploration players like me. Striking a balance between these three is nigh impossible and has killed otherwise fun MMOs with cool new ideas. RIP Wildstar, we hardly knew ye.

It’ll depend on how much influence he has. He consulted on Elden Ring and I think his touch can be felt in the fucked up family dynamics of the story there, but he was limited in involvement. I don’t think GRRM will be the limiting factor here anyway.

I’ll set aside the theme and tackle the format instead. Is there really an audience for MMORPGs anymore? It was a deadly space to enter when WoW was in its prime and it’s only gotten harder. I’m not so sure the MMORPG even “died” as much as slowly diffused into every other genre as live-service capabilities began to spin up. These massive worlds where everyone shares the same story just don’t feel right without a strong ludonarrative dissonance, as opposed to most games that make you the exclusive hero. Sandbox MMOs, on the flip side, rarely have any staying power or purpose. It’s just a really hard design space, in my opinion, when other genres now have all the same benefits of letting you seamlessly play with strangers or friends en masse, without the limitations or side effects of having a single shared world.

Rambling thoughts for discussion. Also I love MMORPGs, to be clear. I just wouldn’t want to be in the business of making one after about 2010.

Awesome! Thanks for entertaining my questions :)

It comes off as a very advanced/fancy “choose your own adventure” book. Is that accurate?

I’ve never played a visual novel, but this one has gotten some hype I haven’t seen for others. It also feels like one of those games that I should be careful not to spoil, because it looks like it has layers under the surface. Could someone help explain why I should or shouldn’t play this game in my position, without scraping away any of those hidden layers?

Krazam completely on point, as usual. Gonna be mouthing “my pipeline is green” to myself even more than usual now.

Oh fwiw, I agree with your parent comment completely. It’s just fairly self-evident that the majority of progressive voters are young, which is a demographic with turnout issues, historically. I think progressives both think that people who think like them are more numerous than they are (which is likely a bias of all citizens, if I had to guess) and that they have fairly unique issues with turnout given their age group. Either way, they have to adjust if they want to actually win or achieve anything on their own. Until then, they’re gonna have to rely on those pesky pragmatic party politicians they hate so much.