Just because the space Sim crowd knows who Frontier Developments is doesn’t mean the rest of the gaming space knows who they are. Pearl abyss may be known in the niche they were in before but they’ve made a game with mainstream appeal and for many people Pearl Abyss is a name they’re hearing for the first time.

Marketing doesn’t guarantee 5 million sales. Just look at Marathon. Insane marketing push for a game made by a beloved studio sold only 1.2 million units. And the marketing was excellent, clearly better than the game itself. This is a piece of art.

But where’s the marketing? Where’s the established franchise to coast upon? Where’s the developer reputation to guarantee sales? Pearl Abyss is a pretty much unknown developer, Crimson desert is a new IP and the only marketing I’ve seen is essentially word of mouth. For a game to organically sell 5 million units is a pretty big deal.

I got the feeling like that person was playing games to finish them. I can understand not liking gameplay loops when that is your goal. There are a lot of story-based games I won’t play again because I can’t be bothered to go through the gameplay again. Mass Effect trilogy is the first that comes to mind. I’d love to do another playthrough where I play with the renegade options but I really can’t be bothered to go through all that combat just to see how good the renegade options could be. I don’t think the combat adds much to the story of Mass effect but it’s such a big part of those games.

But it doesn’t mean I agree with the author. At the end of the day I don’t play to finish games, I play games until I’m finished with them. I can enjoy a good story but for me the story is mostly secondary. If I’ve had my fill and I don’t care enough to “finish” the game I’ll just put it down. An ideal game would have the gameplay and story working together in ludonarrative resonance, but if I had to pick between story and gameplay I’d pick gameplay every day.

I’d take it a step further, ditch the combat gameplay entirely. Make Witcher 3 in the style of Disco Elysium. Put the emphasis on storytelling and actual RPG stats. Combat will be less common but can be solved through play by play decision trees making each encounter more memorable.

Now apply that same statement to what you said before.

For whatever reason I took “emissions like a horse” as someone who farts like a horse. I have to say horse cum makes way more sense.

In theory sure. In practice nothing was done to prevent fascism between 2020 and 2024. If anything, fascists were given time to regroup and plan a better takeover. I’d even argue the resistance has grown more under fascism than when it was time to prevent fascism. There’s no point in pushing it forward when that time is not actually spent on preparing and the democratic party definitely isn’t spending that time preparing and unless you’re in the process of forming a third party you’re not preparing either, because the only thing that gets America out of the fascist hole is an anti-establishment party that refuses to be fascist nor pave the way for fascism.

If my choices were between fascists and fascism enablers I would also throw my vote away. Because what’s the fucking point of choosing between fascism now or fascism later?

I don’t think Sony is discovering anything. They’ve said the focus this year isn’t on console sales but rather the bigger monetization of the existing userbase. They probably thought that since they’re not planning on selling a lot of units anyway they might as well ask extra from anyone determined to get one.

Well shit, someone should’ve told me that before I was born.

How does one work as a main character?

Oh, and Israel gets to keep bombing Lebanon.

About that. Iran and Pakistan have said, contrarily to what Israel claims, that the ceasefire includes Lebanon and applies to the US and all US allies. Soo, I guess we’re about to see whether Trump will put the ceasefire talks in jeopardy to continue being Israels bitch or is he desperate enough to throw Israel under the bus just to get out of this massive fuckup he himself created.

I’m getting the feeling that he’s looking to be a presidential candidate in 2028 and considering how well he can tap into the zeitgeist of the American people, this being an excellent example, he might easily end up being the next POTUS. Because who is going to oppose him? Shit my pants Trump (assuming he even lives that long)? JD Vance with his absolute zero charisma? Spineless Newsom? Tucker can only be beaten by someone like Zohran Mamdani and the establishment dems fucking hate people like him.

It’s not just a sad day, it’s going to be a sad future.

I remember playing 2 and one point going “wait, that’s it?” and that actually was it. I get that it’s a more casual experience than Project Zomboid but I think it would benefit from a bit more complexity.

An oversimplification doesn’t mean you get to make completely false statements. An oversimplification ignores other significant factors to end up with a simple statement that for the most part is true.

It’s rare because we have higher hygiene standards

This is an acceptable oversimplification.

Basically washing our hands eliminated the black plague.

This is not because this is just factually wrong.

The latter is what is being corrected. Now apply your smartass education and understand when you’re wrong.

Just out of curiosity, who do you think are the big leftist political pundits? Who does you group regularly bring up?

Depends on how accurately you want to stick to Batman. If all the gadgets and batcave are necessary then yes, he need to be rich. If it’s just the physical and mental capabilities then he doesn’t need to be rich because he’ll just be Rorschach.

I might be misremembering the timeline but I think he was brought on board after the market was created because Valve started to see the same economic patterns (and issues) Varoufakis had talked about. He was brought in to make sure the skin economy would have a solid foundation. So he isn’t really responsible for TF2 hats. CS skins however he could be considered responsible.

Well that’s easily disproven by the fact that they boldly put “Nvidia ❤ Palantir ❤ Dell” in the same GTK Keynote. They don’t care about hiding their Palantir partnership because all they see from that partnership are $$$. DLSS5 was showcased because the AI hype is dying down and at this point Nvidia stock lives on the AI hype. Nvidia stock 3 years ago (which was the early stages of the AI hype) was ~$28, now it’s ~$174. We’re about the experience another one of those once in a lifetime economic crashes when the AI hype dies down and Nvidia stock plummets.