As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.

Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.

The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.

Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.

The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.

I won’t argue there aren’t some use cases for it, but it was massively oversold for what it actually is. It’s essentially just shared spreadsheets, but almost always described in a way that make it seem inscrutable to most people (further sinking any propect of mass-adoption) and cool to people who want to feel like they’re intelligent and in-the-know about tech. And it was pushed primarily for things it was unsuited for, like replacing regulated banks with FDIC insurance.

I think it has potential niche uses, though. Not every technology has to be widespread or applied to a wide variety of different things.

Tbh I think the same overselling/over-applying is happening to large language models/LLM “AI” now, though at least LLMs legitimately do have a lot of potential use cases. Just not as many as the everything people are trying to apply it to, and not as overpoweringly as many assume.

I want an alternative to youtube as much as anyone, but I just don’t see how peertube can be viable in a world where child abuse materials and nazi propaganda exist and can be posted there.

I mean, at least as of when I last looked at peertube, it works sort of like torrenting does, yeah? But it doesn’t require you to whitelist the channels or instances you seed. Therefore: random people are going to end up seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, hate screed videos, and so on, unknowingly and without intending to.

Lemmy already has had issues with child abuse materials because of federation and poor moderation tools. An image will get posted on one instance, then it automatically gets copied to other instances, and even if the original instances delete the image that doesn’t automatically delete it off other instances. Admins have to manually contact other admins, who then each have go in and painstakingly delete it manually, and that’s if all those different admins see and respond to the message. This is a problem that has been growing as lemmy gets bigger and more popular. And this is just with instance hosts - with peertube, you have individuals seeding/contributing to the hosting.

So it seems to me that peertube as it is involves a degree of moral and legal (since people can and have been deemed legally responsible for seeding torrents before) risk that is just not worth it a compared to the privacy-invading but blessedly safe option of youtube.

And even if individuals decided that risk was fine, advertisers absolutely won’t, which makes the platform a no-go for channels that depend on ads rather than patreon or merch for their livelihoods.

I’ll be happy if there’s a reliable way around this problem that doesn’t completely break the mechanism whereby peertube is supposed to work, but as of now I can’t see one.

Privacy isn’t normally my primary concern but with VR I find it to be a bigger deal than I usually would, particularly because the headsets can hypothetically gather data about what you’re looking at exactly (especially once eye tracking becomes more of a thing - then it’ll be exact, and that’s kinda terrifying at that point).

And this is Meta/facebook, so. They’ll 100% do it and say they aren’t.

I wonder if he’s actually just becoming a career scapegoat, taking the fall + a nice severance package(?) for decisions that were made by groups.

I do like let’s plays like that too sometimes - I’ll give those channels a try. Thanks! Though I may have to wait til I finish with BG3 myself, which could be a while :p

I mentioned single player games specifically partly because I personally tend to like those games best, and I like to watch let’s plays after playing the game through myself first, then seeing how different people interact with the game differently. I love watching people discover a game I enjoyed (which for me means mostly single player titles) in kind of the same way I might enjoy showing the game to a friend.

And anecdotally, I tend to feel like groups playing a single player game together tend to talk more about the game in a deep-read kind of way, or to talk about their lives, whereas groups playing multiplayer games seem more likely to talk about whatever is currently happening in the game in that instant, or it becomes mostly them joking and trolling each other. This is just my personal experience though, so it could be a function of the particular let’s players and streamers I’m familiar with. I’m sure there are exceptions to this.

Sounds good! Thank you. I’ll give them a try

Will do! Thank you for the suggestion :) I hadn’t heard of them before.

Any size group is good! Thanks for the suggestion - sounds good. I’ll give them a try :)

Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I’m curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.

I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren’t already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren’t really tutorialized well, etc.

A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.

Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.

Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.

Oh no, someone is having a thought you’ve already had before. The world ends. 🙄

It’s like they looked at Wizards of the Coast’s fuck-up with the D&D license and decided to copy it. What the hell?

Maybe the Costume Quest games? They’re not scary at all, but Halloween themed.

If he’s a precocious reader, Sunless Sea is a horror game with a similar sort of theme. The content is much weirder and more horrifying than Dredge, but it’s 99.9% delivered via text, so the impact may feel more tolerable regardless.

But again it’s very text-heavy, possibly too much so depending on the kid. Probably too difficult, too.

Great game though.

Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can’t use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it’s the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don’t/can’t taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the “real” problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.

Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can’t, like how there’s a whole group of “cilantro tastes like soap” people and everyone else is like ???

You’re close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).

Earth’s axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn’t have seasons in a comparable way.

Earth’s axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth’s North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.

I’d imagine Venus’s axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven’t actually looked into this at all.

Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight… so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there’s just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.

From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you’d experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you’d have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you’d see night again. And then it’d be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.

Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don’t know. But dayum. Planets are cool.

You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.

Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.

Exactly this. 50/100 looks like an F, because that’s what it would be on a school paper. Often we’d even be given points out of a hundred just like that. So giving a 50 to a middling/okay game feels really harsh, vs 70 (aka a C) or 80 (B).