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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Quick feedback on the experience of casually browsing to your steam page: the trailer that autoplays spends the first ~20s being mostly just black. First person view of running and then hiding in a closet, then black, then a very dimly lit room, with cuts to what looks like the player inspecting a doll. I can’t have sound on right now, so I don’t know if there is interesting audio happening.

    I highly recommend those first few seconds of the autoplay trailer showing something more compelling. IMO the best case outcome for someone in my shoes is, I see something in those first few seconds that makes me go “oooo, hell yeah, that looks interesting” and I click Add to Wishlist. Instead my first thought was “there’s no way this has just been black for 20s” and checked my brightness settings to see if I was missing something.


  • If it’s just for you, then you don’t need to tackle the hardest problem of content moderation.

    The second hardest problem is bandwidth. If you post something to a forum that suddenly gets a lot of traffic, without some kind of CDN intermediary, you’ll get a hug of death and/or a huge bill for all the bandwidth.

    The third hardest problem is uptime. My assumption is that you want the content to remain valid forever. No one likes seeing dead links in old forum threads. So as you use it over time, anything you’ve posted over the years could get a sudden unexpected viral hug, or you have to let it die (which may not necessarily stop the hug, since everyone would still be trying to ask your server for the content).

    Just making sure you appreciate how difficult solving this problem inevitably becomes. Note that discord and Lemmy Posts let you upload images, so you shouldn’t need such a service in those cases. But for random forums, it quickly becomes hard.


  • I was also intrigued by the introduction of the matter standard, but the reality is there are already a ton of low power, cheap ZigBee devices out there that can operate for years on a battery.

    I think I’ve run into one thread/matter compatible device that I was considering, but found a HA forum thread saying their experience with that protocol+device+HA wasn’t as stable. So I didn’t do it. I’m not even sure how cheap and low power thread/matter devices can get.




  • Doesn’t the law expect “Operating Systems” to do this? I feel like everyone should point fingers and lean on bureaucracy. Systemd should say “well don’t look at us, we’re not an operating system, we’re just an init and services system”, and Linux says “well we’re just a kernel, usermode does whatever it wants”, and Debian says “well we’re just a distro, we didn’t write any of the packages we just stick them together.”

    If the tech illiterate idiots who wrote the poorly thought out law can’t figure out who to ask, maybe they’ll do their due diligence next time.




  • Hah well luckily I’ve never seen anything close to a 60 gap squeeze. But if the game is half decent, then there is story being conveyed during that time, not just the shimmy. TLOU has a few sections where you’re squeezing through a cramped wall that most certainly hides loading, but at the same time your character is hiding from an enemy, or some emotion other than bordom is trying to be conveyed.

    Obviously I’m not arguing in favor of slow shimmies, I just think the better, well funded devs with the resources often come up with much more immersive excuses for hiding the loading. So at the end of the day, we’re just asking the overworked, under funded, possibly less skilled devs, who are often already crunching for a due date, to also think about how their game will run on hypothetical bandwidths of future hypothetical hardware. That’d be nice, but if they had that time, then they’d just spend it making the experience less boring on current hardware.


  • Good point about hardware upgrades, though it doesn’t work for consoles where the hardware will never change.

    It’s a difficult problem because it spans multiple domains: part of it is gameplay mechanics (players often get power ups that make them move faster, which could make the same corridor take 10s or 2s), part of it is level design (the layout of the building in the story is compact, but two adjacent rooms both need a lot of content or have complex set pieces), and part of it is artists intention (they want you to feel claustrophobic or like your character is taking an unintended route, which an arbitrarily long hallway wouldn’t convey).

    Something related that games used to do (more than they do now) that no one ever complained about were points of no return. Your character would drop down a ledge that they couldn’t climb back up, or they’d walk into a room and the door behind them would lock or debris would fall and block the path. This served a similar purpose: to bar the player from backtracking so they could unload unused assets. I guess it was just a more subtle method of misdirection, people never complained. The sideways slow shimmy is just so in-your-face without anything else to misdirect that it’s become a meme.







  • teawrecks@sopuli.xyztoGames@lemmy.worldis black myth wokong a good game?
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    9 days ago

    I played through Elden Ring, and while it’s not my personal favorite game, it is objectively an excellent game. I never finished any of the DS games, they were too linear for me.

    To say that all the wins are based on luck and no skill is objectively false. The most extreme ER enjoyers regularly clear the entire game, entirely naked, without ever once being hit. That means the mechanics are highly deterministic and thus completely learnable. And for the record, spam rolling or spam attacking is the quickest way to die in nearly every fight. If that’s the strat you went with, I could see it being quite the slog.

    I agree it doesn’t offer a “power fantasy”, it requires the player to observe, learn from failure, and develop a plan. If you don’t do that, I agree, it can be a very infuriating game loop. But I would argue that’s not the game’s fault.

    I agree that sometimes the camera is a total pain to deal with vs the scale of the enemy.

    Most games don’t market themselves as a “souls-like”, it’s typically a comparison the gaming community makes, but also it’s definitely over-used to just mean “hard game”. That’s not what I would say makes a souls like. THE “souls like” mechanic, I would say, is the notion of dropping “souls” on death, and having to retrieve them without dying again. Which means there are definitely turn based souls likes, and I would not consider the Megaman series “souls likes”.

    But IMO it’s experience vs simulation. If you want your game to inevitably shuffle you through an experience that you will inevitably get through, that’s totally fair and one aspect of gaming that I think closely mirrors film or literature. I would put excellent story experiences like TLOU in that camp. But if you want a game to put you through a simulated challenge which tests your resolve, subverts your expectations, and evokes emotional responses in a unique way that I believe only games can, then the souls games offer one slice of that experience.



  • What does “free pass” mean? None, I guess. I like the companies I do because they don’t cross certain lines, why would I then let them cross those lines without adjusting my view of them?

    People are saying Valve, and Valve is positioned as THE primary company gamers should never give a “free pass” to (again, whatever that means). I’m not going to allow valve to start running KLA on my machine, I love Proton but the best part are the community forks, I would much rather have an open alternative/competitor to the steam launcher and storefront. The more power valve has, the more I want to see checks on their power, not capitulation from their customer base.

    There is no such thing as a free pass to a corporation. All forms of competition are always welcome and encouraged.