I thought the game was pretty okay. The romance with the detective lady was a little disappointing. The difficulty fell off a cliff pretty early on as a mage with life drain.

The arc with whatstheirface and their mother not accepting them seemed pretty plausible to me. I’ve got a friend going through something like that now. Seeing something like that in media is meaningful to people.

The loyalty mission prompt was kind of meh. I can see that they wanted loyalty missions, but it felt like they struggled to fit them in.

Overall it wasn’t quite the game I wanted, but it wasn’t bad.

I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.

Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”

Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.

I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.

I mean… right now I’m using windows on my desktop computer because when I installed mint I encountered a bunch of problems (no Ethernet, no wifi, no HDMI out, crashes on steam games…)

I really wanted to use Linux, but the out of the box support just isn’t always there. I’m not using windows because I like or prefer it.

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

…what do you mean by using dev containers? Are your people doing development on their host machine?

I feel like as games and technology get more complex, the question of “Are we a company that makes an engine or a company that makes a game? Because doing both is hard” becomes more relevant.

I guess they have microsoft money now so they could probably hire a whole team and build a really nice engine to rival unreal, but they probably won’t. They can shovel whatever garbage out the door with “The sequel to skyrim” on it, and it’ll sell.

Also they’re kind of competing with themselves by also making Avowed.

… we should be breaking up these big companies.

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via “well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not”

I mean there’s a wide range of possibilities between “diablo 1, but you can walk faster in town” and “Diablo 1, with battle pass”

On the one hand, I have no interest in this. I already played the game.

On the other, as someone else said, if it makes dudebro duds mad then that might be worthwhile.

If there’s going to be fantasies about murder, can his whole posse go out?

I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a battle pass and I don’t plan to. I think if a game I was interested in offered one, I’d consider just skipping it.

If no one bought the things they’d stop making them, but that is an impossible idea.

If we’re waving magic wands around, change the tax laws to limit how much you can inherit.

Changing the step up basis thing is actually pretty low hanging fruit.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp

https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes

Where would you lay the blame?

And how is that hypothetical response “intellectually dishonest”?

I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.

On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don’t think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.

I WANT SHORTER GAMES

Can I have my cake and eat it too? I want games with a short critical path, but satisfying ways to spend more time with it if it’s fun.

So like interesting NG+ stuff, boss rush modes, different builds, whatever.

They can be killed in their homes, too.

I don’t want to be a goat farmer but I do find people that work hard to make management richer are insufferable.

“”" A man is walking into the office when he sees his boss pull into the parking lot in a brand new sports car. “Wow! Nice car! How’d you afford that?” he says.

The boss smiles at him and says, “Listen. If you work hard, hit all your numbers this quarter, put in some overtime, then I can buy another one next quarter.” “”"

I had a shower thought the other day that if more CEOs were shot dead, there’d probably be less Return to Office.

People are sometimes like “oh but violence is bad!” but ignore all the casual harms inflicted on people by capitalism and friends.

I’m an outlier in that I buy music on Bandcamp. Renting music feels like a bad deal to me, but for some people it might work out.

I think I repeat listen to albums a lot more than I repeat watch stuff.

Still, I’d consider a service that was like “pay $10 for this movie and it’s yours, drm free, forever”. A quick search shows WandaVision on DVD is like $50, and you’d have to like rip and self host yourself to stream it.

I think the subscription model is often user hostile, but it’s very lucrative

People just want all their shit in one place for a reasonable fee.

One problem with this is that monopolies are bad.

I’m not sure what the ideal solution is. It’s not “12 different services each charging $12/month” though.

I don’t think regular capitalism can really solve this.