I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.

If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.

It’s not really about defending the bad stuff. It’s about trying to get some more nuance on perhaps the most propagandized topic of the 20th century.

There are all sorts of interesting discussions to have about the various failings of these countries amongst other leftists who have the relevant context as a starting point for a reasonable discussion.

But when talking to libs/conservatives, they’re coming into the conversation with an already extremely warped, un-nuanced perspective. “These are all evil dictatorships that were also super incompetent and that shows why communism is bad.”

Some of the stuff they base this on is either exaggerated or just straight up wrong. Some of it is completely valid criticism, but without the context to understand the issue or provide a useful critique.

How do you have any meaningful conversation about these countries without acknowledging things like:

• All of these countries were previously agrarian, un-democratic societies.
• Most of them were formerly exploited colonies who had to fight fairly brutal wars for their independence.
• Even after leaving, the imperialists kept messing with them through economic and diplomatic isolation and espionage including supporting right wing coups.

We don’t have the counterfactual where we see what these countries would have turned out like without these challenges, but it’s an incomplete analysis to not at least consider the ways which they impacted both their economic success and their political developments. Maybe you could argue there were better ways to respond to all of this, but hindsight is 20-20.

No actual leftists want to have to argue “authoritarianism was good actually.” But it’s hard for the conversation not to appear that way when we’re arguing with people who’ve been conditioned to think they’re somehow as bad or worse than Nazis and ending the thought there.

I suppose part of the conversation is about a concept I call “difficulty pressure.” (Maybe there’s another term for it?) Essentially, how does the game’s difficulty affect players’ approach to optimizing builds in a game with them.

When a game is on the really difficult end of things, (and this goes for competitive multiplayer as well where the “difficulty” is that all other players are optimizing and you need to be better than them to win) the game pressures you to optimize your playstyle in order to just survive and overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. In this extreme environment, there sub-optimal builds get pushed out even if they seem fun because you will very likely fail with them. Thus limiting build diversity.

At the lower end of difficulty, the game might be so trivial that ANYTHING works, but it won’t feel satisfying because nothing you do really matters. You probably don’t even need a real build at that point, so that feeling of making something crazy that trivializes otherwise challenging content isn’t there. There’s just no reference point to appreciate how good your build is. If every enemy had 1 HP, without damage numbers, how would you even know how much damage you were doing? A build that did one damage would be the same as a build that did a trillion damage.

Like you said, ideally there’s some good balance state where things are challenging enough to serve as a yard stick, but there are still a lot of builds that can reach that point. There’s a boring way to achieve this easily: No builds. Or at least no difference between builds. Everything does the same thing but maybe the colors are swapped around. Obviously that’s not really what we want out of an ARPG, otherwise we’d just play a pure action game. So builds have to be different enough to allow for very different experiences, but not so much so that some are essentially invalid. But that’s a much more complicated problem. With so many pieces and combinations, it’s virtually impossible to balance faster than the internet hive mind can optimize.

There’s another boring way to achieve this: Not on the player side, but on the encounter side. Because a very wide variety of playstyles need to be able to complete the content in a roughly equivalent way, the challenges need to be relatively interchangeable because you don’t know exactly what tools the player will have access to. So you flatten the content so there aren’t sharp edges that will make some builds unable to beat it. Alternatively you can require the players to have a specific set of tools no matter the build so that they can deal with all these scenarios. For example, in Noita, you pretty much always need:

1. A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won’t run out of limited charge spells.
2. A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
3. A mobility wand to be able to get around the more sprawling and dangerous levels as well as get up to places you otherwise couldn’t.
4. Late game, a healing wand.
5. There are some enemies that are straight up just immune to some damage types.

You have 4 wand slots and you will usually need at least one empty wand slot to be able pick up new wands in a level unless you can meet some other specific conditions. So all the slots you can use to make your build are spoken for. This limits what you can build a lot. Late game you can combine some of these effects into a single wand, but until then you have that restriction.

If the game didn’t have this variety of challenges, you’d be more free to choose what you want out of your build, but then the actual content would be way less interesting.

This is the core tension. Content asks things of you and your build is the answer to that. The more difficult or specific the challenge, the less freedom you have to make different builds. The more generic or easy the challenge, the less your build matters, meaning you have more freedom but it’s less satisfying to act on that freedom.

EDIT: I forgot to discuss the action/skill axis: Some games, despite having builds and being mechanically difficulty, can be entirely overcome with skill. People do challenge runs of Dark Souls at SL1 with a broken straight sword and no armor because fundamentally, nothing in the game requires you to take damage or kill things at a certain speed. So you technically don’t need a build. Skill is essentially all that matters. If you just avoid things forever it doesn’t matter how little health you have or how long it takes you to kill something. Any build stuff you do on top of that is just for the fantasy and to make things go faster. (Although fantasy wise I think the souls games kind of do a terrible job. All the flashiest weapon skills and spells are way too slow and impractical to be useful. They’re not just suboptimal, some of them will actively make the game harder than if you were using nothing at all.

I guess my point isn’t that it’s impossible to make a game that has elements of both. It’s that they are inherently antagonistic, not synergistic concepts. The more builds matter, the less content does and visa versa.

I think the secret sauce there is that they’re roguelikes. They have meaningful combat and they have the potential for wild builds that completely trivialize that combat. So why does this work for them? Because you can’t guarentee a specific broken build every run. They’re short and random, so the likelihood that you will put together all the pieces needed for a specific build before the end of a run is fairly low. By contrast, while ARPGs are “random”, they’re played over such a long term that it’s expected that you will be able to acquire exactly the things you need for your build eventually. (Outside of chase items, but those usually aren’t build defining for that exact reason.) PLus a lot of your build is defined by entirely deterministic mechanics. You get to choose your skills and passives. And with trading you can take nearly all the uncertainty out of whether or not you’ll be able to put together the remaining pieces.

So because it’s expected that you’ll for sure be able to build what you want given enough effort, if you optimize your build to trivialize the game, you’ll always be able to do that. When you get a a broken build in a roguelike, it’s because you high rolled that run and you get to have fun experiencing the high point relative to the baseline. You know how tough the combat usually is, so the fact that you can now breeze through it without thinking about it is fun in and of itself. But if it was always like that, it would just be a boring game. Incidentally, this is why I tend to not like roguelites that allow you to define a lot about your build before you enter the run itself. They make it a lot more likely that you break the experience in a very predictable way.

In ARPGs the high point is the baseline. Either the game is able to be trivialized with a good build, in which case it always will unless you go out of your way to nerf yourself, or you can never really make the game easier no matter how good your build is, in which case the build making isn’t super relevant. There’s a reason people joke about Fashion Souls. The gear you can equip is often so pointless that you might as well just pick armor for how it looks.

An interesting case study for a sort of in the middle experience that kind of illustrates some of this is Noita. For those unfamiliar it’s a roguelike where you play as a mage/alchemist descending into the depths of the world in search of mysteries. Your builds consist of wands that you can put an assembly of spells and modifiers in to craft very different spell setups. You also get some perks occasionally that do the usual kinds of things you’d expect from a roguelike passive item system. The game is brutally difficult to a degree that’s deliberately unfair to the player. Enemies are chaotic. The environment is volatile and filled with things that can kill you in an instant if you’re not careful, or even if you are careful because some enemy triggers some flying thing on another screen that flies into you out of nowhere. Many spells in the game can hurt you too and even the ones that can’t directly can sometimes have a firing pattern that will make it hard to avoid hitting explosives and stuff that will kill you. Healing is extremely limited. Early on the game is certainly very skill based in the sense that you aren’t going to immediately break the game in the first level or so, so you need to be able to avoid things while you slowly kill them. If you really enjoy build crafting, the early game is fairly boring in that respect. But ultimately as you progress it’s more knowledge based. Your will be hard pressed to outskill later enemies if you’re still running a dinky no damage wand. So you kind of have to find ways to break the game if you want to succeed.

SPOILERS beyond this point:

That’s the initial experience. Two things become true once you learn more about the game:

1. There are a handful of very powerful combos that are way better than most of what you can do in the game. Once you know about them, either through discovery or from reading about it online, you will kind of ruin the build potential of future runs. You can somewhat reliably find at least one of these most runs so long as you make it past a certain point. There’s not nothing cool to discover after that, but they’re all way less practical and only something you will be able to do once you’ve already reached a point where there’s no challenge they’re needed to overcome.

2. Upon freeing yourself from the initial core run to go see the rest of the world(s), you gain access to essentially unlimited perks. You can gain absurd amounts of health, damage reduction and healing, immunity to a lot of hazards, enough movespeed to avoid most things, and the ability to basically get anywhere you want on the map, etc. You basically become a god of death and destruction, untethered from mere mortal concerns… until you randomly get turned into a sheep and die instantly. So similar to a broken ARPG character, you reach a point in the game where the only things that the game can possibly do to threaten you is to strip you of everything that makes your build and just instantly kill you. And similar to an ARPG, this only really happens because you can play a run for many hours after the initial, more roguelike length run.

There’s probably something to learn from all of that if you want to try to thread that needle, but I think it at least shows the challenges of reconciling the tension between mechanical skill and cool build making.

I’ve been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don’t seem compatible.

Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you’re going out of your way to cheese things, you’re probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.

Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you’ve made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don’t get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you’re presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.

There’s no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that’s fundamentally different from PoE 1… they need to make THAT game. But that’s really far away from the game they’ve actually made and I don’t think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.

Cool. Didn’t know about that site. Thanks.

People want war criminals who talk good. That’s the bar for the average American.

Oh I was looking at system requirements on the store page. Is that accurate?

There’s a spattering of steam games that don’t list Linux support. Probably the ones I play the most are Deep Rock Galactic and Last Epoch. Outside of Steam I play TFT a lot, which doesn’t work on Linux since they added the anti-cheat software.

I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.

Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?

I’m not talking about personal actions. I personally believe in equality and I wish I could do more about that even if there are all sorts of personal reasons that’s difficult for me.

Corporations don’t believe anything. They’re just profit optimizing machines. They were doing rainbow capitalism when they thought it would be more profitable and now that they think the opposite is more profitable, they’ll do that. It’s as simple as that and hoping corporations would be allies in a fight for equality was always based on a misunderstanding about power.

It’s not like corporations don’t have power that can resist government action. Look at how effectively they’ve evaded taxes and regulations. The big international ones can threaten to take their ball and leave if they don’t like a country’s policies. And that’s when they don’t just bribe politicians to change them.

The workers at those companies are people though. Labor organizing was always going to be necessary to build up power for change. Not saying it’s easy and I can’t fault someone for worrying about losing their job, but if resistance was going to happen anywhere that’s where it would be. Not in boardrooms or alone in a booth.

But there’s the difference. It’s one thing to have convictions but not the means or courage to act on them. It’s another thing to have power, but lack convictions beyond whatever is currently convenient. The former could overcome those obstacles given the right circumstances. The latter never will.

It’s almost like their support for these issues was never genuine to begin with.

Yeah I’ve yet to get this with Ublock. It warms my heart to know that the professional coders at a multi-billion dollar company can’t outfox some open source devs who are just really determined to not have to look at ads. lol

Trump, may I remind you, installed a number of those judges.

Right, after a lot of opportunities by Democrats to do things to stop him. The Republicans were willing to fight dirty and the Democrats kind of just rolled over and let it happen. That’s not even considering the world where they didn’t choose to run 2 deeply unpopular presidents on nothing platforms in multiple critical elections.

Those things have nothing to do with the subject at hand however. Let’s keep it in between the lines.

Is the subject at hand not “Why have we gotten into this situation?” The comic certainly seems to be about that in the most reductive way possible. All of this is relevant in trying to explain how we both have the president we have and why he’s able to do the bad things that are hurting people.

So you believe they should be allowed to install a sock puppet? I believe that was what we were talking about about, was it not?

I just don’t think that a country that hasn’t be relevant in 30 years can have more influence over our politics than the richest people in the world regularly pouring their money into the system. Trying to pin our problems on some external enemy is just missing the point. The Republicans don’t need foreign encouragement to strip the country for parts and sell it to the rich.

Sorry I figured someone familiar with our system could interpret that as checks and balances. Something trump is currently trying to break. In what language should I provide your native translation?

You wrote a sentence that didn’t have the information you were talking about in a comment that didn’t talk about what you say the “it” was referring to in a thread with several points of discussion. No reasonable person could just divine what you meant there. It’s just not worth having this conversation if you’re going to be this aggressive about pointless stuff.

It’s not about this being the same. It’s about what has contributed to allow this moment. Regular failures of institutions and vast wealth inequality that has been left undressed by the political system has made for a lot of angry people. Concentration of ownership in media has guided that frustration away from its true causes for the benefit of the rich and powerful. The electoral system is set up to favor conservative results and to squarely shut out left leaning candidates. The various expansions of presidential power and the tools needed to exercise that power has made it easier for someone like Trump to get away with things he theoretically shouldn’t. The courts being slowly corrupted. Etc.

What Russia is doing is besides the point. The US has plenty of it’s own oligarchs to mess with our elections already and we’re definitely messing around in other countries. If they weren’t touching anything, do you think we’d suddenly get some great elections that represent the people?

however; it is a feature of our system that has allowed us to retain some semblance of humanity and good will - despite the rot.

What is a feature of our system? You didn’t specify. As to us maintaining our humanity: We do terrible things regularly, but most people are so disconnected from those actions that they can’t really conceptualize the horror of it enough to care and do something about it. There’s always some excuse that helps them rationalize it. I don’t think most people WANT all the bad stuff. But in the absence of better education and media, it’s really easy to trick people into thinking all of this is actually good or at least not bad enough to do something about it.

Legally the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally go to war, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it for the last 70+ years.

Basically ever modern president has grabbed more power for the executive branch without being properly checked by congress or the courts. Combine that with an ever expanding military and surveillance apparatus and it turns out you can do some pretty bad stuff, regardless of the legality.

As for the rest of it, idk man. Clearly you have your rosy view of history where the US was a super great place before the scary Russians came in to corrupt democracy. All I can say is you have more reading to do.

idk. If western governments had any ability to learn or care, WWII surely would have been that moment. But after beating the endpoint of imperialism, they without irony or self awareness, just kept doing imperialism. I’m not holding my breath.

Oh I must have been confused. I forgot that history doesn’t exist. Everything started with whatever was last on TV. Donald Trump is just randomly the president for no reason. There must not be any reason he has the power to do the things he’s doing. Nope. It’s a mystery. Carry on.

I mean, over half a century of neolibs gutting the small semblance of social democracy we had did this. And Biden was certainly one of those people. It’d just be more accurate to say Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Regan…

Even if it would, how would it ever get passed when the people who would need to pass it are the ones who are only in office because the system works the way it currently does?

This is just a recurring theme I’ve found when talking with liberals. They like to think about and suggest all sorts of policy ideas as though all we’re missing are some smart ideas nobody has thought of. It’s one thing to say we should have this, but it’s another to have any idea of how it’d be possible to do. Since they have no actual analysis of the system, they’ll just turn around and tell you to vote or call your representative. “We should get money out of politics!” “Yeah, well we checked with the people giving us money and they said no. So…”