Hello, friend! Have some 🥜 🌰

“Nothing Is More Powerful Than an Idea Whose Time Has Come”

My ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt is raising question already answered by my ‘I’m No Fucking Predator Or Pedophile’ T-shirt.

Yes and no. Like in Stardew Valley, technically you can romance every NPC in your party, but in practice you have to meet certain criteria to do so and those differ from character to character. Of course, it is possible to “game” that system.

The most famous one ATM is probably “Baldur’s Gate 3” which offers a wide variety of mechanics and stats to measure if an NPC member of the player’s party is romantically interested in the player character. Two examples given in the talk I linked are the VNs “Monster Prom” or “First Bite”.

I love this game (500 hours played), but I have to bring up a point of criticism…

One aspect which has not aged well IMHO is the “kindness coin” mechanic: The exchange of goods for the NPCs’ friendship and/or affection. You give the NPCs stuff, then you give them more stuff, then some more on top, then you get a cut scene and then you get back to giving them stuff until you trigger the next one.

Yes, the requests on the blackboard and the occasional personal quest mix up things a little bit, but overall the mechanic remains the same and for me over the years this has cheapened the interaction with the NPCs for me somewhat: They are mostly transactional and predictable to the point where you can calculate their outcome.
You have to give character A so-and-so many objects X to romance them. It takes so-and-so many days to do that.

Sure, the “kindness coins” mechanic was industry standard at the time, but I wish there were more variety in regards to the interactions with the NPCs, because they are amazingly written and I wish there was more to do with them besides giving them stuff over and over again.

Visual agnosia?

They also leave out half of the story: The whole thing already started in October. After months of harassment one of the employees snapped and called their shit out. But they leave that part out, claim they got attacked out of nowhere and play the victims.

In 2016, there was also a new complete edition with a new cover. (ISBN 2344018972 for those interested)

This! This was the real perfection.

Now that you say it… Yes, strong College of Winterhold vibes.

Sure, the death of the live service hype plays a role, too, but in my view it is mostly due to the gravy train of cheap money coming to a halt: Lots of companies are scaling back because they had funded themselves with loans while laundering profits through tax havens. Gaming companies are not much different from tech companies and media companies in this regard. Those are also in hot water ATM and fire people in order to stabilize their cash flow.

At the end of the day, gaming companies are going to invest far less in the future. Games such as “Spider-Man 2” and other AAA titles with exorbitant budgets will become rare. This has been a trend for years.

Thus I am rather certain that 2023 was one of the last years where we have seen a strong line-up of high quality, high budget titles alongside indie success stories.

I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).

As far as I understand it, the studios are trying a different angle: They are not suing Reddit this time, but an ISP and want Reddit to provide the data of costumers of that ISP.

Thank you Ada and Supakaity for all the work you invested into Blåhaj Lemmy!

To me the point is this: Everything can be mismanaged. Whether something is administrated by private individuals, public companies, governments, communities, … does not prevent things from being mishandled or squandered. After all it can only take one mistake to destroy one asset or resource entirely.

And it’s that deliberate omission and the insistency that one approach will always fail, while another will always thrive that makes “The tragedy…” a piece of propaganda, rather than a serious argument.

Sidenote: “The tragedy of the commons” is wrong and has been debunked even before the book on it was published. Hardin, the man behind the “Tragedy…” paper was a rabid right-winger who provided a false solution to a non-existing problem, providing cover to all of those who wanted to wholesale reject solutions to known problems without doing any of the legwork themselves.

Yeah, me neither. I came across it when browsing Wikipedia, looking for freshwater seals which live in the lake adjacent to the castle.

Thank you for your work!

My sympathies. Keyboard producers are really dropping the ball for you guys.