dreadgoat

On the flipside of this, I’ve been kicked from games because I know how to prefire, and a lot of players see that and just assume you’re wallhacking. Nobody pays attention to the 70% of the time that you prefire at air, but when you guess right and instakill someone holding an angle, it’s easier to say “cheater” than “i’ve been holding this same angle for the past 5 rounds, perhaps I’ve become predictable”

This comment will include a lot of spoilers for the yokoverse. Continue at your own peril.

Anyway, just to give you an idea of how little any of this matters to Yoko Taro, here’s how his stories have developed:

Drakengard: Ends with absolute apocalypse, total destruction of the world, no coming back.

Nier: Let’s go ahead and change the name and say that all the Drakengard stuff has now entered a new dimension. Our dimension! The story technically goes on, and THIS time we’ll have the absolute apocalypse of OUR world.

Drakengard 3: Where do we go to continue the Darkengard name? Make it a prequel! Ezpz. Also we already did interdimensional stuff so let’s add time travel why not.

Nier Automata: Okay the world basically ended for humans, but who cares? Just make it all about legacy of humans.

You know what, we can do even more already. Why not pepper in some mobile games, like Nier Reincarnation and SINoALICE (yes, this is still Nier universe). Why keep it to games? Let’s write light novels (YoRHa, Drakengard 1.3) and a stage play (YoRHa Boys). I am not even the biggest Yokostan so this list is probably incomplete.

My personal take is that this methodology is all very intentionally tied to the main theme of the Yokoverse, which is that no matter how dark and hopeless the situation may become, there is always a future; a new opportunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I got this bug on desktop, running chrome, with no VPN.

This was, as most things like this are, just a pure dumb fuck-up by some guy putting things on prod without properly testing and staging. No need to put on any more tin foil hats than we already have, the incompetence is plenty reason enough to point and laugh.

Homelander will definitely be a zoner, Omni-man is a bruiser.

It’s the same basic gamefeel NRS has been doing for a while now. If you’ve played MK11, Injustice 1 or 2, you can expect pretty much more of the same baseline experience with new characters, moves, fatalities.

Story is a solid new entry if that’s what you’re going for.

You’re missing the scale.

Everyone knew BG3 would “a success,” but it hasn’t just been a success, it’s been a nuclear bomb of a success.

Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the “hope we get there” number.

Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It’s that level of joyful shock.

It’s strange, people can’t seem to help themselves.

Even the Star Citizen community was full of people talking about how Starfield was finally going to deliver as the superior sandbox space sim.

Space Game is not a genre, it’s a setting. Bethesda RPGs are gonna Bethesda RPG, no matter how you flavor it.

I don’t think OP made the point clear, but I agree with the spirit.

Fundamentally it is this:
Sense of scale
Meaningful content at every turn
CHOOSE ONE

Examples
Daggerfall - infinite scale, but quests, dungeons, meaningful content have to be specifically targeted or else be lost in the gigantic procedurally generated world.
Elite Dangerous - spending 20 minutes supercrusing across a binary star system really makes you feel the size, but also that’s 20 minutes of not doing anything.
No Man’s Sky - The universe is effectively infinite, and there is something useful almost everywhere! But (almost) none of it is handcrafted, so the random content gets stale in the scale.
Star Citizen - Basically no content, but absolutely unmatched as an immersive space experience, as it doesn’t compromise on scale for QoL or filler content in the slightest. Worth noting that most people hate this.

Meanwhile Skyrim is impressive because the world is pretty big, but there’s also something interesting to do every 5 steps. Starfield tries to maintain this while also tossing in some NMS-style randomized infinite content, but ends up suffering the same feeling of staleness once you spend any time exploring it.

Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.

So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.

I’ve already said that I appreciate your efforts. I’m not going to block you, your work is valuable. I’m just explaining that you ARE going to be criticized for what you choose to post, and you shouldn’t act surprised. If you really don’t care about whether or not the stories you are propagating have merit, then just ignore anyone who pushes you on it. Consider attacks on “OP” to be the original author of the article, not you.

Or, be more selective about what you post, if the approval matters to you. Consider it constructive feedback.

You post a lot. I see your name come up non-stop. That is great! It is really appreciated. I’m certainly not doing that work.

You also post quite a bit of inflammatory clickbait without having any personal knowledge to back it up. That’s a bit confounding. At the bare minimum, you need to be prepared to accept criticism for that.

I can personally say this is the second time you’ve posted a FF16 ragebait article and gotten offended when prodded about the fact that you yourself haven’t even played it. Why are you spreading information that you don’t even have the ability to evaluate?

As a fan of souls games and mech games, I wouldn’t be TOO worried. OP is overstating the problem. I sympathize, because this is indeed a different Armored Core, but it’s nothing at all like a souls game. It’s still a mech game and a good one, but it’s not as technically deep as previous AC games while also being dramatically more difficult.

I would say in older AC games having a terrible build vs a great build meant the mission was either literally impossible or braindead easy. In AC6 a terrible build means the mission will be much harder, but still perfectly doable, and having a great build means the mission will run smoother but may still be quite challenging since threats are generally a lot more deadly than they were in previous titles.

I can totally understand how that can kill the vibe for someone who wants to seek victory in the build screen and enjoy the rewarding power fantasy during the mission, but it’s still a great mech game with a lot of meaningful variety.

Proof of this is that while, yes, AC purists are upset that this game is more action-y, there are just as many Souls fans who are mad that the mech building game they bought is - get this - actually a mech game and not just Robo Souls.

AC6 is both more and less accessible along the same lines. It’s a simpler game. The space given to customize your make is smaller, you can’t go into debt by making stupid builds, and in exchange bosses will wombo-combo you from full AP to dead even with a heavy build if you get stunned at the wrong time. There’s a person who experiences that wombo-combo, says, “this is bullshit” and puts the game down forever. But there is also a person who tries AC2, fails a mission with an expensive loadout, realizes they can’t afford to make the build that failure inspired them to make, and say “no THIS is bullshit” and put the game down forever.

Likewise, Elden Ring is both easy and hard because it gives you a ton of freedom. There are more solutions than just “git gud” which is refreshing for someone who can’t tolerate banging their head against Iudex Gundyr for a couple hours. But it’s obnoxious to someone who sees Tree Sentinel and doesn’t want to “have to explore” to find level appropriate content.

Because they’re kids, and probably poor too. When I was younger I played so much CS 1.6 that I seriously considered going pro. The setup I had then would probably literally kill me now, but when I was a teenager I didn’t feel it at all. I could work with anything so long as I had my trusty MX518.

Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.

It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.

Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).

If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into blockchain, transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”