I think the record still goes to Amazon’s Crucible, which was cancelled before release after a closed-beta that nobody played.

I mean, yeah duh? What, you think that conservative right-wing movement was fully homegrown? Some of them are flying the Confederate flag in Alberta! Hatred is America’s export now.

What e-sports have kernel level anti-cheat? Isn’t it just the crap published by Riot? I know both CS and Dota 2 work on Linux, I’m pretty sure you can get Overwatch 2 running. You can’t exactly play Smash on a Windows PC either, but I think the other major fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter work. Are there any other serious contenders for a major esport I’m just forgetting?

The problem is that to argue this point, you have to start going through all of the facts like case conversion rates, the domestic abuse rates, the rates of racist attacks by law enforcement, and the membership overlap between law enforcement and white supremacist groups. Once you start bringing up that many numbers, the idiots get confused and their eyes roll out of their skull, whereas the centrists get too scared realizing that basically no cop is actually trying to keep the U.S. safe and try to shutdown the conversation.

The Sims 2 Castaway is basically the proto survival crafting game. It’s kinda cool to see the classic Sim stats get used in such a different way. I sometimes wish EA would return to those days of selling spinoff Sim games like Castaway and the Urbz, rather than just dumping every single new idea they get into one game as DLC.

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

I think there’s a pretty massive world of difference between blocking access to a mass misinformation machine operated by a hostile power that has notoriously used apps it controls to locate and kidnap foreign dissidents and a 1984 surveillance state.

I don’t know how we got to this point where millions of Americans think China is their friend but hate their own government for being complicit in a genocide. I guess the Uyghurs just aren’t marketable enough for people to care? The brutal crackdown on Hong Kong has left people’s goldfish memory? Or maybe, just maybe, the mass misinformation machine is doing its job.

I mean, we have actual data this time proving that it’s limiting attention spans and is incredibly addictive. This isn’t the classic right-wingers fearmongering over smoke and air, there’s genuine psychological issues being caused by the app.

Look I love Dark Souls; it is an incredibly flawed game, and Demon’s Souls is even moreso. Dark Souls was so far ahead of it’s time that it still needed time to bake in the oven. Then with how claustrophobic DS2 and DS3’s worlds were by comparison, I don’t think FromSoft really surpassed Skyrim until Elden Ring.

Both games are some of the greatest of all time though, so a lot of it will just come to preference. I think a lotta Dark Souls players have been spoiled by the remaster though, the original release struggled hard under the weight of Miyazaki’s ambition.

People in the future will realize that Skyrim was made in a perfect sweet spot at Bethesda. It was made recently enough that the controls make sense and it feels good to play, but Skyrim was still so, so ahead of it’s time when it came to an open world RPG. Back then, Bethesda’s writers really had a knack for making incredibly interesting settings, and just seeing an entire digital world so wonderfully realized was considered ground-breaking.

A decade later, and the same model has become stale. The gameplay is still there, but the soul is not. Idk if most of those old writers have just left Bethesda or retired after so many years in the industry, but the magic has left the studio. I’m not even really looking forward to ES6 as much as I am the upcoming Avowed from Obsidian, because their games still have plenty of soul.

It’s not false, but it is exactly the same kinda bullshit that tobacco always uses. Science fundamentally cannot establish a causal relationship between social media usage and depression, because the experiment to do so would be unethical. You can’t knowingly force people to use social media in the hope that they gain depression, but academically speaking that is the only way to prove a causal relationship.

Yes, we have lots and lots of evidence indicating a strong correlation between the two, certainly enough to legislate and certainly enough to casually discuss it as a given, but the bar for something to be considered proven in science is a much higher bar. Slimy ratfuckers like the Zucker love abusing that higher bar.

It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.

Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.

It was, there was a ton of outcry because of their denial of such blatant AI art. One prominent MTG artist even ended their partnership with Wizards over the lie, which I think is ultimately what caused them to come out and admit it.

They also made a promise not to use AI art like two weeks ago, so now a lot of other artists are unsure if they want to continue their partnership with Wizards after being lied to. Make no mistake, if the artists weren’t willing to put their careers on the line to force this apology, Wizards would have just lied and moved on.

I totally apologize, you’ve unlocked a memory. It’s so good in KOTOR that my brain doesn’t remember it’s a cRPG. I’m really hoping that if it gets a remake, it keeps all the guts of the original combat system, and doesn’t get simplified to a toggle between real time and pause.

oh shit this game looks awesome, thanks for the suggestion.

To me, it fell into the same trap basically every cRPG falls into; late game combat is a chore. Once the number of enemies and skills you have to juggle gets high enough, you can’t realistically use real-time on the harder fights, but you can run into so many enemies that turn-based takes forever.

I don’t even really mean that as a criticism of Larian, since nobody else ever managed to fix that issue either. It’s a big reason why the genre died off for so long.

I mean, Larian isn’t even a AAA studio. They’re still technically an independent studio, though with the success and polish of Divinity I think most would have considered them AA even before BG:3. Also you’d need a lot of evidence to convince me that any cRPG isn’t a product of antiquated design, there’s a reason the genre completely died off. From my experience playing it, even Larian couldn’t figure out how to make combat with 20+ enemies feel fun, a problem nearly every cRPG has had for years.

No, not even remotely. The biggest game of the year was an antiquated cRPG, followed by a bunch of sequels and remakes. The industry as a whole has been rocked with scandal after scandal, with the most recent being the large, widespread Christmas layoffs. Innovative gameplay is now something that completely eludes AAA studios, who only seem to know how to regurgitate trends popularized by better games.

2023 was another shite year for gaming, and rewarding it with brain-dead articles like this is why 2024 probably won’t be any better.

I mean, Call of Duty: Another One is one of the best selling games of the year, despite even casuals lambasting it online. I think devs want to feel like they’re making something people want to play though, rather than feeling like they’re shovelling out garbage for the hogs.

but this is the news, and as much fun as it might be to point fingers, that could get the office in trouble. Better to just use the passive voice, avoid ruffling any feathers, and maintain neutrality. AP style guide says their headline is fine.