As a fan of Ms. Marvel, I enjoyed the main campaign well enough, but all the MMO stuff is obnoxious. Luckily you can mostly ignore it and go through the campaign missions single-player. I uninstalled it after getting to the end of the story.
I think this is a more subtle question than it appears on the surface, especially if you don’t think of it as a one-off.
Whether or not Scientology deserves to be called a “religion,” it’s a safe bet there will be new religions with varying levels of legitimacy popping up in the future. And chances are some of them will have core beliefs that are related to the technology of the day, because it would be weird if that weren’t the case. “Swords” and “plowshares” are technological artifacts, after all.
Leaving aside the specific case of Scientology, the question becomes, how do laws that apply to classes of technology interact with laws that treat religious practices as highly protected activities? We’ve seen this kind of question come up in the context of otherwise illegal drugs that are used in traditional rituals. But religious-tech questions seem like they could have a bunch of unique wrinkles.
I haven’t run into too many bugs in the game, but in combat it’s frequent for the game to have to sit there for several seconds thinking about what an enemy should do next. Hope that’s one of the performance improvements they’re working on.
Tunic, but that was kind of the point.
You’ll start to get hints of it later in Heavensward, but I’d say the second expansion (Stormblood) is where you start to really get a strong sense that the story has a destination in mind, and especially that the recurring villains have a more specific motivation than “serve the dark god.”
The next expansion (Shadowbringers) starts off feeling like an unrelated side story, but then you realize that it’s actually tying together some of the seemingly unrelated plot threads from earlier in the game by showing you a different perspective on the lore and some of the characters.
The last current expansion (Endwalker) is where you have to address the reason the villains have been doing what they’ve been doing, and it ties a lot of things together including the part of the story you’re on right now. Without spoiling any details, suffice to say that Ishgard isn’t the only nation that has a history with dragons.
There’s always going to be a certain amount of anime craziness, but the big picture does come together much more than is apparent from where you are in the story right now.
This is a pretty good analogy. You could start watching “Stranger Things” from season 3, and you’d figure everything out well enough to follow the story, but the character interactions would be much less meaningful and you’d miss out on a lot of background details that make the setting richer.
Playing the game, it was clear to me that they didn’t have the whole story mapped out in detail from day one. Minor plot threads get dropped and some of the lore isn’t 100% consistent. But that’s also true of a lot of TV shows with continuing storylines. On the whole, the game does an impressive job tying a decade’s worth of expansions together into a single coherent storyline where each part builds on what came before. It’s definitely too much of a slow burn in the beginning, but the setup eventually pays off and it’s one of my favorite stories in all of gaming. Skipping to the last chapter would rob it of a lot of its impact.
Their track record isn’t that bad, is it? Castlevania and Edgerunners were pretty good adaptations. Dragon Age was all right. And Arcane was amazing, though Netflix wasn’t involved in that one early on. So there’s reason to be at least cautiously optimistic, IMO.
The “developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity” condition is part of why people are up in arms about this. If I’m at work and I run into a bug and submit a patch, my patch was developed in the course of a commercial activity, and thus the project as a whole was partially developed in the course of a commercial activity.
How many major open-source projects have zero contributions from companies?
It also acts as a huge disincentive for companies to open their code at all. If I package up a useful library I wrote at work, and I release it, and some other person downloads it and exposes a vulnerability that is only exploitable if you use the library in a way that I wasn’t originally using it, boom, my company is penalized. My company’s lawyers would be insane to let me release any code given that risk.
Maybe they can redo FFXII and finish the story. That one pissed me off at the time: the story was just starting to build up steam and then nope, ignore all the plot threads we’ve been weaving, here’s a final boss battle out of the blue, end of game. Apparently it was having major schedule and budget overruns and the original director left for health reasons halfway through the project.
This post begs for a list of games whose stories avoid most or all of these traps.
I’ll start with an easy one: Disco Elysium.
I think this is about Waze, the mapping/navigation app.
ChatGPT is certainly no good at a lot of aspects of storytelling, but I wonder how much the author played with different prompts.
For example, if I go to GPT-4 and say, “Write a short fantasy story about a group of adventurers who challenge a dragon,” it gives me a bog standard trope-ridden fantasy story. Standard adventuring party goes into cave, fights dragon, kills it, returns with gold.
But then if I say, “Do it again, but avoid using fantasy tropes and cliches,” it generates a much more interesting story. Not sure about the etiquette of pasting big blocks of ChatGPT text into Lemmy comments, but the setting turned from generic medieval Europe into more of a weird steampunk-like environment, and the climax of the story was the characters convincing the dragon that it was hurting people and should stop.
This probably doesn’t bode well, but there is at least one example out there of an online game doing a really successful soft reboot: Final Fantasy XIV. The launch version of that game was pretty bad, but the rebooted version is still one of the most popular MMOs a decade later and is regarded by many players as one of the best entries in the Final Fantasy series.
Hopefully that’s the model the MultiVersus devs have in mind.
I don’t understand why people are saying this will reduce misinformation. The fringe sites peddling things like genocide denial aren’t news organizations to begin with, so users will still be able to share their content freely. It’ll become harder for other people to counter the misinformation by linking to legitimate news sources.
This seemed too low to me until I saw the diagram showing that the majority of single-platform people play on mobile. Makes sense that there are a lot of people out there who wouldn’t pay for a console or gaming PC but have some games on their smartphones.
It Takes Two is a good one to play with a significant other.
Wish people wouldn’t do this, though I do understand the motivation. IMO it ends up punishing other Internet users (who are the ones getting value from years-old comment threads) vastly more than it punishes the owners and employees of Reddit, Inc. (who get most of their value from people participating in active discussions and seeing ads along the way).
The end result is that you search for “how to fix a broken curtain rod” on Google and the search results are full of comment threads like
Reddit still gets the revenue from the ad at the top of the page, so the only person you’ve successfully stiffed is the person who was looking for an answer.
I was impressed by an earlier mod along similar lines, Portal Stories: Mel. Hope this one is as well-done.