skulblaka

Yeah I’m not too upset with Paradox’s strategy here. I am of mixed feelings about it though.

It makes it next to impossible to get into as a new player, because you go to the store page and see that the game costs $250 for all content. But each of those content drops were spaced out, well executed, and usually come with major changes to the base game formula to accommodate them. For someone who has been playing the game for 10 years, each DLC is exciting and fresh, and costs about $20 for another 8 months of new enjoyment in your favorite game.

But anyone looking at it as a new player is going to see the bulk cost of the game and, rightfully so I think, decide “nah, fuck that”.

Rimworld also comes to mind here. Rimworld has like 8 DLC packs that collectively add more content to the game than the game even started with. I don’t own most of them because I don’t play Rimworld all that often. But for someone who does play it often, they’re genuinely good expansions.

I’d love to see more games like Terraria, which gets sold for $5 on the regular and has had over a decade of love-labor free updates that fundamentally change the way the game works, but I understand how that may not be financially responsible for larger studios. For bigger projects I’m not that mad at paying $20 twice a year for quality expansions, so long as they are in fact quality.

This would be a valid argument if X itself weren’t the ones generating the images.

Suddenly it’s 4am and I just finished the book. The sequel is on a 4 week wait list. I’m due at work in three hours.

Somebody else already posted Andy Weir’s “The Egg” in this comment section so I’ll just pull this excerpt from it instead of linking the whole thing again.

“Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

Learned about this for the first time earlier today watching Mortismal’s Divinity recap videos lol

I did know about Divine Divinity (which, fun fact, canonically features Lucian the Divine as your player character) but Dragon Commander completely missed my radar.

About once a year or so I go replay Morrowind, the chaddest of the Elder Scrolls series.

This past year I replayed Morrowind with Tamriel Rebuilt tacked onto it, which has been extremely cool and fresh. TR really feels like official content a lot of the time, it’s quite good and the love that’s been put into it is very apparent.

Currently playing FFVI myself. It’s a treat.

Bit easier than other Final Fantasy games, I’m finding… at least in the early game, Edgar and Sabin are ass-blasting everything in the game with very little resistance, those boys probably don’t even need the rest of the Returners squad. I know that will probably change later but the duo are definitely the MVPs of act 1.

I’m also of mixed opinion about the ability to teach every party remember every spell in the game. It’s obviously not the best idea, that I can’t stop myself from doing. Does Edgar or Gau need to know how to cast Bio or Slow or Rasp? No, not at all, and they’re probably better served leveling up with magicite that gives them useful stats. Will they learn those spells? You betcha.

On our left hand we have a party who, while generally spineless in the face of opposition, at least understands the general principles of governance and has an interest in continuing the lifespan of the country.

On our right hand we have a party aggressively campaigning that they should be allowed to shoot you in the face. Yes, you, personally.

I hope you have the day you vote for.

Potato potato, they’re both land boats built like a three legged rhinoceros with the worst front sight lines I’ve ever seen.

Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I’m just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.

I’ve tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I’ve been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I’m very quickly even more broke than I started.

Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That’s just shameful.

If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.

Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.

Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily

Man, I’ll fuckin’ take it over what we’ve got going on. I’d say at this point we deserve to be bulldozed for a galactic bypass.

They have never been affected by conditions that lead to poverty and it shows.

But if you go somewhere like Idaho or Mississippi… They’re all fucking poor!! Everyone is poor! Everyone lives hand to mouth and depends on social safety nets like this. But if you’re proper homeless then fuck you, no you don’t deserve any help?

Blows my mind how entire self contained societies can all equally experience this kind of hardship and then instead of “I don’t want anyone else to suffer like we had to”, they instead conclude “I had to suffer like this, therefore everyone must suffer like this”.

Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.

They also have the highest incidence of fire based death of any car of all time, including the Ford Pinto, which was best known for catching fire.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/fiery-death-trap-most-dangerous-car-killing-its-passengers/news-story/ab364eb2e1ad2b569e367664f08aa705

Hey I was that weirdo that down voted this, and I assure you it was by accident and I changed it now. I actually never got the chance to play Apocalypse and hot damn, I had no idea it was a whole sequel, I thought it was an expanded release in the same vein as a bunch of the Persona games have (P3->FES, P4->Golden, P5->Royal).

So, amending my statement, play SMTIV and then play Apoc.

Also, excuse me, I have some shopping I need to do.

They’ve been putting AI slop all over official white house correspondence all year, I promise they didn’t need me to give them this idea.

but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.

I for one am extremely surprised that we didn’t recieve some obviously bullshit, AI-written “files” that conveniently implicate all of Trump’s opponents while leaving him and his posse out.

Pleasantly surprised, don’t get me wrong, but I fully expected that out of this administration. They’ve already proven time and again that they have zero shame or accountability, this would be right up their alley.