https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Right up there with the ergonomic comfort and ease of use of the N64 tripod!

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Man, I remember I got Minecraft right after the Nether’d been introduced. Played pretty constantly until right around the oceans update, and then I got distracted and fell off.

Now looking at it there’s so much it seems almost unrecognizable.

Later in the article:

I’m writing about the Silent Hill 2 Remake in this scrambled, back-to-front, obnoxious way partly to piss off whoever edits this (to be 100% clear, Team Silent are the creators of the original Silent Hill 2, which Bloober are remaking), and partly to make a point about remakes: that they tacitly or openly position the original game as an “obsolete” museum piece in need of replacement, dismissing the old artistic choices as primitive and incomplete, re-defining the old creative parameters as constraints that need to be lifted. It’s all in the service of the market’s cannibalistic mania for the new, its structural need to ceaselessly bury “the past”, often by directly obstructing non-commercial preservation efforts, and sell you Progress that starts to wither and fade the second you peel away the cellophane.

Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.

Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.

Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.

See, I like RTS for the same comp-stomping enjoyment because I like the spectacle of it more.

Quoted in the article:

“i propose a new fortnite rule: if you see someone in a cybertruck, you are now in a truce with everyone else in the lobby until they’re taken out. this repeats as many times as necessary until everyone that bought this stupid thing is gone. normal gameplay proceeds.“

Digital media of any sort, really.

I really enjoyed The Last Days of the Third Age, a lord of the rings TC for Mount and Blade: Warband.

It takes Warband’s medieval lord sim and focuses hard on the warfare side of things with lots of huge battles on giant maps, but even tiny skirmishes can affect a faction’s strength. (And with so many factions on both sides of the War of the Ring, you need to pick what to focus on)

Oh, don’t get me wrong, minecraft’s art style is absolutely charming and a perfect fit for the “blocky” nature of the gameplay. See how many of its imitators try to look more realistic and end up looking genuinely ugly. But to speak to the top comment’s point, when fancy shaders are added minecraft’s simple style gets elevated so much and it goes to show how simple and effective design paired with good-looking lighting can make even the lowest-poly games look absolutely gorgeous.

Hell, minecraft’s vanilla textures look downright gorgeous with lighting mods.

Bioshock is most specifically about Randian objectivism, which promotes a version of extreme laissez-faire capitalism, not libertarianism in general.

And I think that’s the most economic philosophy buzzwords I’ve put in a sentence before.

Ross and the team have been very specific about not wanting to force companies to pay for server infrastructure forever.

They’ve said quite a few times that what they want is for game companies to at least patch their games so they can keep running without the online connection or provide players the tools to host their own servers so that the company can end support without the game becoming a brick.

Hopefully by requiring games to be playable after support ends and the servers shut down it will also change the way games are made so that they no longer require the constant connection.

I’ll take any opportunity I can to link the legendary RPG.net review of FATAL.

https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14567.phtml

I wish this post was twice as long and went way deeper into each category with examples and use cases.

The discussion around the “Fruitful Void” and Brennan’s initial comment made me think specifically of this story from Chocolate Hammer where a highly-random, highly-lethal small-scale cowboy wargame ended up being an extremely fertile ground for interesting stories despite having no narrative mechanics of any kind.

A system specifically focused entirely on combat gave the GM room to weave a vast web of intrigue and personality based on how everyone knowing the power of violence in the system and trying to avoid getting near it while using it to threaten everyone else.

I’d imagine it’s the OSR influence, especially with the more old-school notion that the random encounters are the story.

That is, instead of random encounters being an interruption of the narrative, they’re just as much a part of it as the time your PCs sat in a bar for two hours trying to convince the barmaid to go dungeon-crawling with them.

Especially if random encounters include variation in distance and attitude. Encountering a knight could involve stumbling into a questing hedge knight‘s campsite, or it could involve hiding from the Black Knight after spotting them from a nearby hillside.

And there is also a narrative purpose in having combat start from “just existing in the game world.” Parts of the world are dangerous and deadly to be in, and random encounters are a good way to portray that without elaborately plotting out a sequence of “dangerous events” on a travel timetable.

Angle the your nose down on a straightaway and you’ll see the speed indicator on the right get a red bar that’ll go up to a green light. When that light goes yellow, you can hit the boost key to go turbo.

(On keyboard, the defaults are the up arrow to angle down and shift to activate boost)

Any sort of character concept that depends on witholding information from the other players is extremely difficult to do in a satisfying way.

The other players can easily not care about your mystery at all, making your secret just you and the dm making eyebrows at each other. Or they’ll care more than you want, and any sort of long-term intrigue goes out the window as the party drills into your character. Or hell, maybe they’ll be annoyed that you’re being so coy about your character, maybe they’ll find it shifty or frustrating or any of a dozen other things. And even if there’s the perfect level of investment and buy-in from everyone else, it still runs the risk of being a spotlight hog of a character.

So generally it’ll either have absolutely no impact, or it’ll derail the party.

Oh, and all of this goes for double if your secret is that you’re working against the party.