video games and music sure are neat… i am currently “moving” this account to kbin.run

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • You didn’t, I’m just saying that since there are many great switch games that run just fine it’s not quite a hard pro and con situation where the switch experience is always so poor that it’d make the Deck a sheer upgrade worth the money.

    Just depends on how much you value that performance, I’m able to get used to 30 FPS pretty decently, so the Switch is much better for me at the price point and ease of use, but I know there’s definitely a contingent of players who really value performance and your comment comes into play for them.



  • My best guess is that it’s a debris effect from your ship taking damage, and it’s supposed to fly away and expire, but somehow got stuck instead of disappearing, so now it’s an “effect” on your character that doesn’t know its supposed to have timed out already.

    Other Bethesda games, especially Skyrim, had bugs like this of status effects that would get stuck on your character longer than they were supposed to and you’d only realize hours later when your character has some weird blue fog following them





  • It seems like it was cursed with “how the heck do you follow that up?” Syndrome. And sadly the facial animations seemed at the time to be the critical anchor that all the general issues surrounded and were exemplified by.

    I hope in the future Bioware steps back from adding those “MMO side quest” style side content they began including for Inquisition, it did really change the feel of the whole game having those there.

    Interesting to hear about the first act dragging, I actually think this is a problem echoed by Starfield, whose first 12 hours are confusing as you don’t understand where and how to access the different types of gameplay at will, and it’s too early on in your character’s development to be able to really fully engage and figure out the ship and outpost construction. By then the people who don’t have patience or weren’t interested in the game to begin with have likely already had their opinions begin to solidify.

    I wonder if Bioware will try an Andromeda 2 down the line, I think that universe deserves another shot.





  • Absolutely. There are a few studios I love so much that I know what they produce I’ll enjoy well enough to find it worth it, and so I’ll watch a gameplay trailer or two to get a baseline understanding of the type of game I should expect, and as soon as I’m satisfied by the premise, that’s it.

    I wait for release and explore around the possibilities myself and wonder things, and test things, and get mad that I didn’t realize I could do a thing the whole time, but it’s really just an awesome way to experience a game.

    Of course, this only works if I trust that the studio will put out a baseline of quality and expected type of gameplay. If a game is of questionable quality money becomes a larger issue than ideal experience.


  • Absolutely. A huge reason why soulslikes are so beloved. Through a huge combination of deliberate decisions touching nearly every facet of the game, an ethos is crafted all for the sake of intriguing the player, challenging the player’s mind and physical execution, and then triumphing, with discovery of several forms peppered throughout the way.

    The lack of a map, enabled by a well designed and memorable world is one of the best examples for me. Nothing else I’ve played quite matches navigating Dark Souls without a map. You’re in one spot of this large, interconnected, seamless world. You just finished grinding an item in Darkroot Garden, and you want to return to Firelink.

    Mentally, a collage of images appears in my mind, laying a pathway, a map of the world, the different paths and elevators I must take to get to where I need to go, and I begin walking, and I follow my own directions. That experience is all over the place in that game, and for all the obtuseness that’s in there, it was still so worth it to commit to that design so hard.




  • I can understand that having pronouns or nonbinary or trans characters in games can be a bit of a culture shock. As a culture we’re beginning to grow more overall accepting of these people that have been here all along, but never felt comfortable to “be a seen part of society” out of fear. The same sort of thing happened, or is still happening, with homosexuality, though that’s further along the acceptance curve than trans/nonbinary.

    Eventually it won’t be so obviously “woke garbage” that sticks out to you as something noticeable and startling, and it’ll be just another feature of the game like anything else, just another NPC like any other, but that one gets called “they” instead of him or her. It takes time for it all to become normalized and not be something you raise eyebrows at and feel upset by. You may always wonder sometimes what gender someone is identifying as when it may not be obvious, but it will become easier to simply ask them, or be okay with not knowing, it’s okay to not know.

    I’m not going to pretend that mentally working through these things isn’t a part of this whole process, but trying to somehow fight back against it by calling it all garbage and refusing to extend the hand to understand where it’s all coming from is… inappropriate, we all need to get along, we all live on this planet together and the only way to make it the best it can be is to try and understand each other.

    Sure, you may have a point in there about desiring a platform where people can upload any mod they like, and that could totally be a thing, Nexus Mods doesn’t want that to be their thing, specifically, and whether you’re okay with that or not is your perspective, and I’m okay with that, but you should try and understand why Nexus is taking that stance. Nonbinary and trans people are on the back foot, culturally, so it’s clear that many places will take a stand to hard defend their representation because they’re so far behind the “biological genders” and could use a helping hand.






  • Some games are so borked from a technical perspective they’d need a remake to work right, like Oblivion. That game is so technically bottlenecked by itself that even on modern hardware I fucking stutter, and I’ve trawled so many performance mods with fellow players in the comments just having to come to terms with the fact that no mod can fix the inherently poor optimization on an engine level.

    Remakes can definitely be warranted in certain cases. Sometimes it’s easier to just start over clean than try to untangle an existing mess and Frankenstein it back together. Sometimes making vast changes can produce an alternative reality of a game to be enjoyed by more or a different audience, like the Resident Evil Remakes, which are fucking excellent, or the FF7 remake, which, while contentious, is mostly only so because of purists, who do still have the original they can play (and I do believe companies should always keep the original around)