It’s funny because we don’t even need GPU’s. There’s tech that offloads the model’s “search” to an analog computer which is ~98% accurate for a fraction of the energy.

I imagine NVIDIA isn’t too excited about that side of AI, though.

I think it’s for people who are intentionally playing poorly, not navigating their way around the map and getting lost or being a poor shot

Like bullet hells?

I really like exceed 1-3.

Gundeadgnline is good.

Kinda can’t get away from Touhou.

I think there’s something to be said about completing some games on yard difficulties, and Fire Emblem falls in that category. The category is puzzle games that require insane tactical strategy.

A lot of unit based RPG’s function this way, and they do a really good job a lot of the time. But that is just one way to play the game, and quite frankly grinding through levels to “properly” beat a certain difficulty is certainly a better option for the majority of players.

There is something unique about finally completing a damning level, but it’s only something that is there if the player has the drive to get that fulfillment.

I wouldn’t say you have big dum, more likely you just value your time and the engagement of the game is more rewarding on lower difficulty, due to the element that is driving you to play the game. That is to say, it’s aspects of the gameplay and the story that keeps you coming back, not necessarily the insane strategic plays needed to beat a hard level.

Both are completely valid forms of gameplay, the hardest difficulty is often min-maxxed and tends to account for a small section of players, and is probably included partly for replayability.

You have to scroll up some, it goes that far over because of the word wormhole

Does it have to be equivalent? There are plenty of builds that will work just fine for gaming, they just aren’t 1440p or 4k, or 120hz.

There’s also that these computers can do a lot more than just game, so while you’re not getting “top of the line” graphical fidelity from your console, you can actually use it to browse the web, or run some software in your home.

Then there’s also the fact that if you want to play online it requires you pay a subscription. So even just the $10 a month for the subscription is $120 a year for every year you didn’t buy a PC instead.

So, are PC’s really more expensive, or is it the fallacy of needing the absolute best and then paying out the nose in after-ownership fees for the entire duration you own the console?

For days I thought this was saying “make X number more girlfriends”

Then I realized

Hey, that’s no fair! You didn’t mention that monthly fee GIVES you FREE games FOREVER!*

*Forever as long as you pay the subscription cost

We are a small circle. For every 1 of us that do not care, if you would simply go to Facebook or reddit you would see that there are more than 10 who do care.

This is the dynamic of the public sphere, where broadness to reach as many people as possible means allowing for a narrative that can be interpreted in such a way that each individual can be right in their perception of it.

While I saw the trailer for GTA6 as being a poor imitation of real life, in that the events of GTA4 and 5 were more creative in their situations because they were larger than life. These are things that are so crazy but they still could happen in real life. Instead of continuing that trend, the trailer is a 1:1 recreation of actual events that happened in real life… IMO, that is a drastic shift, as to me it would indicate that the creative direction is referencing, or recreating crazy events that have actually happened. Where previous installments tend to have commentary about the events.

Btw, doing my best to compare the actual trailers between the games, not what we know after the fact. Of course, GTA6 could completely go a different direction and those 3 instances of real life could be the only time something like that happens. I doubt it, but it could be. My whole point here is that you and I can analyze media and pick up on facets about the themes or the narrative, and in response in the public sphere the response you get in return are, “bro it’s not that deep it’s just GTA”, or “bro is literally writing an essay about a game”.

These are actual responses I got to a pretty heartfelt comment I made about the trailer. Media literacy, analysis, basically anything that isn’t the surface level just doesn’t matter to like 80-90% of people. Not one response I got even attempted to dig deeper into what I was trying to say, the closest it got was justifications about why R* did real life events for the trailer, and how the game won’t be a mishmash of memes.

So, I write all this to say, we are a small portion of the population. Also, I think R* is one of the last few companies to have “good grace” with its fan base from the era of when hype would last. A decade ago it wasn’t uncommon for a game to be announced at E3 and that game would be present in people’s minds for 4 to 6 years and each mention of it gets them more hype.

In the last 6 years, this has died in the majority of spaces. Metroid Prime 4 had hype, it still does but it’s drastically diminished. If the exact events right now were happening 1 or 2 decades ago, Prime 4 would still be extremely hype.

Cyberpunk was another example of this, at the end of the era where it has good grace, it had an extremely long hype, and then marketing brought that even further and then lost it all - likely a significant reason why hype overall isn’t as prevalent.

Finally, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the same situation as GTA 6, where it had a few years where everyone knew it was coming soon, then it was announced, and now the years are going by waiting for release. So with that said, hype still does exist for a lot of games as long as it’s within 2 years, but beyond that it’s basically forgotten about or could even be criticizing at this point for its extremely long development time, unless the studio has a large enough fan base for it to not matter, like Halo, CoD, Battlefield, whatever.

I feel like the main reason would be money laundering prevention. It’s slightly harder to create new accounts than it would be to have one account repeatedly buy, remove, and repeat for new licenses.

It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot about people’s acknowledgement of faults or shortcomings and choosing to ignore them, whether it’s because they agree, don’t care, or think it doesn’t matter. Or don’t agree and there’s no better alternative, or it’s the least bad alternative. I dunno.

In the public internet spaces like Facebook, discord, the others, I’ve been seeing a lot of this happening recently with Linkin Park’s new singer. Some are happy and ignorant, some know and don’t care, some know and are saddened. There is a lot of vitrol between the people who know and are saddened and the people who don’t know/don’t care. This is just one example from this week, but it happens every week to every story. It can be, probably, literally applied to anything. People’s level of information heavily biases them from their predisposed beliefs (as in, if they already have an opinion, chances are that the opinion will not change when presented with new information).

In our spaces I see it with Brave. I see it with Kagi. We all saw it with Unity en masse and something actually happened about that, but even so people are still using Unity today, albeit I would guess out of necessity, or now ignorance since time has passed (not saying ignorance here is a fault). Before then we saw it with Audacity. Can’t forget Reddit, where a significant chunk of users are now participating here instead. And… yet… Reddit still exists, nearly in full.

It’s such a crazy phenomena with how opinions are formed from emotional judgements based on the level of information they have, and due to our current state of informational sharing there are microcosms of willful ignorance. And some aren’t ignorant, it just doesn’t matter to them.

This makes me realize, is there a limit on read speeds of disk vs. NVMe?

Kids make the games.

It’s child labor in the same way Super Mario Maker is, except Roblox actually pays the account.

Just a bit I imagine, I grew up in the 90’s too but I was young in my graduating class

Sorry, I meant console wars of graphical fidelity from my memory. I don’t remember it mattering as much when I was young, but I could be wrong still.

Console fidelity wars, from my understanding when I was growing up the improvements in graphics were appreciated but not the sole aspect of whether a game was good, like the way 2005-2025 (and somewhat into 2025 but significantly less so) did

The console wars have always been between Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo does the innovation side of things

Consoles need to be more powerful because of the perceived importance that marketing has created for gamers desperate need for graphical fidelity over all else.

The gameplay of COD and FIFA doesn’t matter so long as it’s sharper/more crisp/more real. Granted, this mindset has somewhat faded, however it is still present and as a result corporations are still pushing it because while 60hz may be an old standard, Sony now has 120hz TV’s to sell you.

In addition to that, COD and FIFA don’t have to be nearly as well optimized if the consoles can just brute force through it. Also, without newer consoles that are more powerful, there then won’t be games that are too powerful to run on older consoles, meaning they won’t get to sell you new consoles because of the old games you want to play. Instead they can sell you the new games that only work on the new consoles.

I’m sure there are more reasons, but those seem to be the 3 core facets that make up the purpose of console gaming; sell the lie of the best graphical fidelity, make a game that requires a high powered console to play it, market it as “needing the best of the best” to be able to play it, and suddenly you have a brand loyal set of consumers who keep returning to the fishhook.

The platformer aspect is real, the deck reminds me of my years as a kid playing flash games on the laptop. Something about gaming on desktop PCs makes that feel different, but the Steam Deck is really close to it again.

In my friend group one is really into both ME and AC, he really didn’t like Andromeda but he did like Odyssey.

The other felt that Andromeda was okay/mid but that Odyssey was also a lot of fun.

I never got into ME and the last AC game I played was Black Flag, and that may have legitimately been after Odyssey was long released. So while I can’t speak on these games, from what I gather online and from my friends is that Andromeda was kind of a buggy mediocre game that didn’t do as good of a job for the ME universe as it could have, whereas Odyssey was a bit of a deviation, which the people who don’t like it tend to criticize and everybody else seems to enjoy the game for what it is, if not maybe a little Ubisoft standard fetch quest grindy.

In the case of Odyssey, I think it’s a good potential that is limited by the restraints of Ubisoft, in the same way that has just happened to Star Wars Outlaws. Because for all of the obvious faults we can give Ubisoft, I think it’s fair to give merit to the developers and designers who, for example, completely recreated France for AC: Unity. For all the faults that game had at launch, apparently they did eventually clean it up and my friend really enjoys it.

It sounds like Outlaws has a great world but just didn’t get the polish, like Ubisoft tends to do.

Also some unrelated design choices, I’ve seen in gameplay videos like the repetitive mini-games (which can be turned off - but why design something that players turn off because it gets tedious and annoying?) and the AI during non-stealth combat encounters being completely inept, firing in the complete wrong direction. The little things become cumulative and can easily turn a perfectly fine game into a mish-mash of features that we’re put together with any cohesion. The last thing that I remember in terms of criticisms are that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of impact on the system for reputation. Someone who hates you after an interaction can be completely on your side just by doing a few side missions for that character. Not sure if this continues on into the late game, but if it does it seems to be another instance of just not quite fleshed out design.

The minigame looks fun, but not 4 doors and 3 item crates in a row fun. The reputation system is typically a really engaging and fun thing, but forcing yourself under constraints by choosing to not do missions with someone isn’t as engaging as being put into a situation where you choose one merchant over another, and then that merchant is just done with you forever and may even send goons after you. From what it sounds like, in present state if an event like that happens, just do some odd jobs for the guy and it’s all forgotten?

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the game - I tend to like games and movies that people are criticizing, since at least lately most of the criticisms have been… severely biased… but sometimes there’s also truly legitimately terrible stuff, like Rebel Moon. There’s always a line of subjectivity of course, there are people out there who enjoyed it, but the other people see the nearly 21 minutes of the movie, legitimately nearly 30% of it, being in slowmo and say, “Hey, that’s pretty awful, why would you do that?” on top of having another mish-mash of ideas that are presented and subsequently dropped to never be heard from again. I don’t think Outlaws is comparable to Rebel Moon, I have a feeling it’s probably better than its reception but still worse than it should be.