well we better start eating then!

The issue with paradox’s game design philosophy is what makes their dlc heavy approach so much more problematic.

From a design point a mentality of “always more stuff and always room for more stuff” isn’t going to produce immediately compelling gameplay nor is it going to focus on stripping down fluff until that magic feeling of “the sum is greater than its parts” arises.

Paradox games are almost never more than a sum of their parts, and frequently customers are purposefully made to feel by paradox that their formerly complete game is lacking and needs the new dlc to actually be a coherent full experience.

From a design and profit standpoint, paradox is incapable of institutionally perceiving when a game design has justtt enough but not too much stuff for emergent and interesting gamestates to arise organically from the way stuff is put together (rather than from the mere presence of more stuff).

now that you mention it though wow an arcade read dead with a light gun and paddle for cover that replayed intense missions from the game would probably work really good actually…

lol are they trying get eaten for lunch by tools that generate static websites easily and without BS?

It isn’t that the gunplay is slow and clunky, I like all kinds of shooters from operation harsh doorstep to xonotic to cod mobile to easy red 2… I like shooters pretty much however they come, but I would barely quantify red dead as a shooter.

To say the gunplay is weak, shallow and poorly integrated with level design is an understatement and I think is a shame because otherwise red dead 1 and 2 are phenomenal games.

meh I could never get past the fact that the red dead games just have shit gunplay in my opinion, it is kind of shocking how little rockstar seems to care about putting fun rewarding gunplay into their games.

literally no one but your own marketing team is gonna read that google, we all already know why

I mean Dokuwiki is an awesome wiki that doesnt need a database so backing up, sharing and file management is about as easy as it can be to DIY unless you just want to just sync logseq folders directly between computers.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

I don’t understand why other much more unnecessarily complicted wiki softwares get recommended over dokuwiki, especially since there are some really nice plugins like the “farmer” plugin which allows you to make as many seperate subwikis each with potentially different associated accounts on a single dokuwiki.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:farmer?s[]=farmer

Inkscape recently also got decent multipage import and export for multipage pdfs and honestly it works great!

damn I have been using this damn program for… decades?

I have been yelling at it in frustration for equally as long… but seriously in terms of raw, no bullshit, consistent utility to people, GIMP deserves an immense amount of credit.

darktable kicks ass and I say that as someone who hates editing photos almost as much as I like taking them!

fyi at least in the US you are only legally allowed to make death threats (or carry them out for that matter) if you are actively driving a motor vehicle at the time, please for your own safety if you are going to murder someone or threaten to murder them, do it behind the wheel of a motor vehicle or you could end up in serious trouble with the law!

Sure… but that is what skillbased matchmaking is for, to set you up with a game with people precisely on your level.

99% of people playing a multiplayer game with good matchmaking are always going to have a winrate trending towards 50%, that is by definition the function of skillbased matchmaking!

Same, humans make virtual worlds so much more compelling to me over entirely scripted singleplayer experiences. Even when I dont directly interact with other humans around me, it still makes a virtual world feel so much more alive.

I love singleplayer games too tho and I would hate it if all games were multiplayer affairs, I just think it is worth pointing out that pleasure of sharing virtual spaces with other people is something deeper than just a desire to directly connect and interact. Sometimes it feels more like the pleasure of visiting a new place and enjoying being alone and anonymous while people watching at a cafe in a busy city square.

AI as far as big tech is concerned is simply a way to “fix” search engines so that they don’t do the awful crime of fundamentally segregating ads from search results.

it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…

I agree and I think a salient reframing of your statement is teenagers typically more than anything else want to be treated as adults, to be a teenager is to constantly be observing young adults and attempting to emulate their social behavior. So the question becomes why do we tolerate toxic adult conservative men setting such a cruel and hateful example that teenagers then copy and magnify?

What some teenager screams at you in an online match is just a shrill echo of the serious and dangerous ideologies modern (and not modern) conservatism is explicitly founded on and violently defends the “right” to spew everywhere in every context consequences be damned (the consequences being a feature not a bug).

Same lol

Yeah I mean so long as the playerbase is good your win rate is always going to trend towards 50/50 which as someone who really doesnt need to win to have fun is honestly ideal, it means every match I play is a compelling self contained narrative where every choice I make matters towards tipping the scales in my favor.

From my perspective the competitive part is just there to pull the strings taught on the core gameplay experience and make the game come together into a cohesive experience where every element matters and is genuinely in conversation with other elements.

Again I cant stand playing with toxic competitive players tho, and I understand people being turned off by that.

For me funnily enough it feels the opposite for me, multiplayer competitive games get right to the point in a similar way that sports do, the motivation, depth and deep mental stimulation are always right there on the surface, meeting me head on the moment I open up the game and jump in. Very few singleplayer games do that and almost none of them can come close to the dynamic and always evolving experience of playing against (and with) humans.

I hate overly competive toxic players, it really isnt needing to win that motivates me, it is the mental stimulation from competing with humans that stimulates my brain because nothing is there to simply entertain me, rather everything is there to create an emergent experience that always surprises and challenges me and doesnt waste my time trying to make me feel like a powerful hero.

I like how differently we see this and I can definitely see where you are coming from!

I dont mind teenagers, it is the absurd toxic masculinity culture I hate, which isnt really a teenager specific thing in my experience.

I think it is worse that, if you want to make serious money off of running a social network, and dont want to actually have real moderation (which paying for essentially erases any serious profit margin) instead of ai crap, this is always how it is going to turn out. Bluesky might claim to be different but is just a slight reframing of the “problem” that leverages the high cost of moderation to set the stage for rationalizing centralization down the road.

I mean yeah elon musk is a shithead toxic jerk, but it isnt like any other corporate social networks actually do any genuine moderation at scale that is legitimately effective at protecting people who are considered a target by rightwing trolls.

You can either create profit for shareholders off of running a social network or have it be a healthy place for people, pick one.