Hollow Knight also felt like it was in dialogue with the Souls series, because the Souls series iterated on a ton of Metroid’s mechanics in a new space. So it took Souls’ “what if Metroid mapping, lonely mysterious vibes, backtracking and key/locks, but slower paced 3d combat and the keys aren’t weapons” and went “Ok but what if we used the lessons we learned from you to improve the Super Metroid formula that inspired you?”

Symphony of the Night is, in fact, the origin of the term Metroidvania but not in the way you might think. Castlevania pre SotN was a very different series with none of the elements associated with “metroidvania”, so people started calling SOTN a “metroid-vania” derogatorily, as a Castlevania that was trying to ape Metroid. The term had staying power for the genre because what the fuck else are you gonna call them, it was before slapping -like on everything was popular but after calling stuff “clones” had fallen out of favor. No, “search action” will never be a thing. And you’re not just gonna call them Metroids because that’s one specific series. So after future Castlevanias had Metroidy stuff in them, it became a genre name.

Unfortunately, “Elden-likes” will likely end up like 99% of “souls-likes” where all they do is copy the surface level stuff (“hard boss fights! Bonfires!”) instead of actually iterating on what made From’s games so well designed.

I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.

Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.

What a perfect analogy.

But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.

Ubisoft doesn’t get to earn “woke credits” for this game. Regardless of how they epic owned the racists and Elon on social media, they’re still Ubisoft.

God I hope all this backlash backlash about owning the people that are complaining about a black guy in japan doesn’t end up translating to “buying this Ubislop is praxis!”

Who am I kidding, of course it will.

It’s FOSS at least, but when a Discord replacement kinda needs all the users on the same server (one of the subtler evils of discord is using “server” to mean “chatroom”), you’re still in the hands of the master company’s decisions regarding their instance. The only theoretical protection from corporatization on Revolt is that when they do start shilling Revolt Ultra (and locking features behind it), someone else can fork their codebase but must still convince “the community” to migrate - including new accounts, reconnecting to all friends, communities moving to the new fork (likely without their history coming along for the ride)…

Matrix is feature-bare at the moment, but as a federated platform it is more tolerant of Matrix Dot Org going corpo. It’s the same situation as what’d happen if Lemmy.world or Mastodon.social started piping in ads and subscriptions - bad, but not platform-killing. Revolt is basically analogous to Bluesky, with Matrix as Mastodon. Bluesky obviously won the fight over Twitter refugees. I think Mastodon would have had a chance if they had polished up onboarding and focused on ease-of-transition a couple years before Twitter imploded. Hopefully Matrix devs do that push before Discord finally gets to the tipping point where people are willing to actually go somewhere else. It needs to have Discord-level convenience and quality on screenshare and group audio/video rooms on day one of Discord imploding to have any chance. To have a good chance, it needs to be as good as or better than Discord Nitro, for free, on that day.

I think one thing Matrix does better than Discord and Revolt is allowing p2p file sharing as an option, in addition to serverside hosting. File size limits in a chat client are a lot more tolerable when it’s “whoops, we don’t want you uploading a 2gb video file to our servers… But would you like to send it directly? Your contact will need to accept the download.” As a general rule, chat apps being more p2p means they’re more sustainable (because the servers don’t have ballooning storage requirements) and more private (because with p2p e2ee communications, nobody but one of the peers can share your data with anyone). P2P is notoriously hard to wrangle for group chat situations though, or validating 5 clients per user like how people use Discord. Also, resilient data is often considered a downside in social situations- people like being able to delete and edit their messages. Yes, someone could already be screenshotting/archiving their Discord chats but a p2p system would have everyone automatically doing it.

No, this is worth treating with just as much disgust as if it was what people think “mobile ads” means. It’s ads in the client, on mobile. Desktop discord “quests” and nitro upsells and flashing graphics on a “shop” button that shouldn’t exist in the first place are ads too.

$20 Walmart Onn 4k. Degoogle it if you want or just slap smarttube and jellyfin/plex on it.

If you’re leaving Plex because it’s subscribeware, Emby is also subscribeware.

And now, that feature costs $240. Suddenly, jumping through hoops to configure Jellyfin’s external SSO plugin becomes a lot more rewarding.

it’s Element/Matrix if we’re lucky. Revolt is just another Discord - surely this single company will last! With Element/Matrix being an open protocol, it won’t be a “platform” you have to leave when it goes corporate.

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On iOS your option is Safari and that’s what you’ve been using, even if the icon says Firefox or Chrome or Brave. It’s against Apple store TOS to have a web browser with an engine in it - they all have to be skins for Safari (Webkit). Different “iOS Browsers” will offer features on top of the Safari that actually does the browsing though, like account sync or built-in ad filtering.

The only platforms out there that are more hostile to open source software than iOS are like, game consoles.

Any downstream fork of Firefox. All the good of Firefox and Gecko (including addons), none of the Mozilla corporation. The most popular ones seem to be Waterfox and Floorp (for “most users”) and LibreWolf for privacy diehards.

You can copy your Firefox profile folder directly into a fork’s profile folder and have everything exactly as you left it (though doing this to Librewolf will likely overwrite some of Librewolf’s privacy-first default settings like purging history every time the browser closes)

On iOS you are already stuck with every browser being a Safari+Webkit skin. Even Chrome “Isn’t chromium” on iphones. But mobile iOS “Firefox” can still use Mozilla (or self-hosted) sync to desktop Waterfox (etc).

Okay but nobody in this thread criticized Ladybird for being incomplete. It was only mentioned by someone who dropped Firefox for Librewolf as something on their radar to maybe switch to in the future when it’s complete. If someone wants to swap browsers right now, Ladybird is not a reasonable consideration, but people are keeping it in the conversation as something to follow in the future.

The thing is, I don’t want Mozilla to be “really this shouldn’t be called selling” my info either. This was my call to jump ship to a fork that doesn’t give any data to Mozilla in the first place by adopting a downstream fork.

I probably already wasn’t giving Mozilla any data to “not sell” in the first place, since I’ve got telemetry disabled and used about:config to strip out all of their non-browsing functions. But why trust a “probably” that also inevitably needs more attention when they roll in some AI assistant nonsense I don’t want (or whatever) when I can just find a fork of their FOSS product that’s run by people that don’t want my data in the first place?

The frustration existed mostly as mockery from people that didn’t play Pokémon anyway, and didn’t suddenly start playing Pokémon when XY came out.