Steam is untouchable until Gaben dies. Then God help us all.

My introduction was the old Call to Power game. Still waiting for a Civ-like game that has a near-future age of gameplay. That was always the coolest part to me.

Feels like most of the similar games today are either historical/current or purely scifi. I like the transition point. To play out possible ways of advancing forward. How do we get from today to entering the stars? Those were fun scenarios to play out.

There’s a couple of mods for civ that covers this I know, but they’re all abandoned and somewhat buggy these days. Plus this sort of thing works best if the game is balanced around it to begin with.

Pretty sure since it’s a layoff they’ll argue it wasn’t specifically targeted as a form of discrimination. America is full of things that feel like they should be illegal, but aren’t.

Like how my state has absolutely zero laws enforcing access to bathroom or food breaks at work. Totally baffling.

That’s called Sims expansion game pack stuff pack kit #3452.

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

Same. I want more physics, more depth to character dialogue, more animations, etc. High res graphics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making games feel immersive. At this point a bunch of older games feel newer or more modern to me because they actually include this stuff.

I was responding in general to the concept, not specifically this implementation, which as you say is not the worst implementation for sure.

We’ll have agree to disagree on pay2win not being predatory. Again, this specific implementation may not be as bad, but the market as a whole absolutely has examples just as dangerous as slot machines. They’re built on the same psychology.

As for regulation, it doesn’t strictly have to come from the government. Both movies and games have rating boards specifically to avoid government intervention and I think they are failing consumers here. The threat of government intervention might see the ESRB and the various gaming marketplaces adopt more strict rules and warnings. Things like preventing the sale of games with specific, predatory mtx dark patterns and mechanics from sale to minors, stronger warning labels on games containing these sorts of practices and penalizing companies from adding MTX in a deceitful manner (such as after launch). A game would be heavily penalized for adding adult content this way and perhaps MTX should be treated in a similar manner.

Regulation. Bad behavior that can’t be policed by econ 101, gets regulation. Stuff like recognizing the predatory nature of these micro transactions and limiting their exposure to kids and warning labels like we slap on actual gambling. Even higher taxes on profits derived from these sorts games. Maybe they aren’t so profitable when we actually protect the vulnerable and they have to truly rely on just the ‘stupid whales’ and not kids.

Definitely agree. Innovation has slowed down. Time will tell if the 1900s was just a complete fluke or not, but personally I think at least part of the slow down is due to the slow collapse of capitalism and democracy. Feels like we’re just trudging along purely on inertia since the end of WW2. Like we’re an old beat up car that’s been patched and duct taped together so much. The whole system feels like it’s just ground to a halt and all ‘new’ progress is just marketing from grifters who’ve captured the system.

I wasn’t claiming the tech was similar. But VR has had several surges in hype over the years. It’ll come to the forefront for awhile, then fade to the background again, until something else happens to bring it back to people’s attention again.

I think AI hype will die down until someone comes up with some new way to hype it, probably through a novel approach that isn’t LLM.

Yep. IMO it’ll be kinda like VR. AI will sort of plateau for awhile until they find a new approach and then the hype will kick up again. But the current approach won’t scale into true AI. It’s just fundamentally flawed.

I had a legitimately enjoyable time playing through the story. The open world (at that point) was fun to explore. Then the entire game fell off a cliff as soon as I finished the main story content and tried to get into the ‘end game’. It’s clear they had no real plan for what to do with it and many of the decisions made the felt ok while leveling, did not scale at all with an end game loop.

Given how little I play AAA games, I’m not sure a strike would affect me at all

I’ve basically never seen a free to play title cost less than a paid one (for similar content). Typically free to play has some sort of completely uncapped money-sink as well. Given that Sims 4 already costs $500+ for all content, I can only surmise that Sims 5 will cost thousands for the same amount of content.

I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn’t have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.

Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.

I play almost exclusively on PC, and even there controls are pretty standardized. WASD movement, E typically to interact. R to reload (if relevant). Space to jump.

There’s no analogue to the steam controllers touchpad anywhere. What do I do with it? How do I use the back buttons effectively?

It’s all doable to learn of course, but it’s just a slightly too high barrier for most. I’ve got a steamdeck and honestly I never use the touchpads or the gyro, they just feel awkward so I stick with a mostly Xbox style setup.

It has a pretty significant learning curve and because you’re not at all familiar with the layout it’s hard to decide on a layout that works for you. That ‘more personal’ aspect is part of the problem, at least at first. It’s going to feel awkward no matter what, but without a consensus on how to use it, it gives me analysis paralysis trying to decide how to set it up.