RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody’s really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.

The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I’ll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.

To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It’s not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it’s going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).

I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.

On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S can’t will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.

Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply won’t be utilized.

There is no ethical consumption under this system, and there’s absolutely no hope for it.

The only thing we can do is set our own little moral lines so our hands feel a little cleaner, but it’s absolutely impossible to exist in this society while also caring about everything awful going on. There’s just too much of it. If I gave one dime to every cause that should be important to me (based on how I see myself), I would drain my bank account into the deep negatives. You absolutely must prioritize your time, money, and attention to a few specific things that you absolutely can’t sleep at night knowing you’ve supported.

For example, global warming is totally fucked. There’s literally no way to not fuck up and strip away most of the planet’s biosphere, even if everyone woke up tomorrow and said “Shit, we have to go 0 carbon right now!” and accomplished it before lunchtime. It’s too late. We’re just fucked. The best case is we’re fucked well after I die, but even that’s not looking particularly likely. So there’s no point in me moderating my purchases around so-called “environmentally friendly” companies, because there’s no such thing and, if there were one, it wouldn’t matter.

But LGBTQ people (like me) exist right now, and will continue to exist right up until we trigger the greenhouse gas cascade that turns Earth into Venus, and since I know we only have so much time left here, it’s very important to me to not support people who want to make sure LGBTQ people suffer as much as possible in the interim. Fortunately, the organizations that hate gay people are about as subtle as people who do CrossFit, so it’s easy to see them and not give them any money. Am I still giving money to crypto-facists who keep their mouths shut about it in public? Probably, but at least I’m kind of rewarding the behavior of “shutting the fuck up”.

Meanwhile, I financially oppose WotC’s bullfuckery only insofar as it affects me, personally. If One D&D weren’t a giant tire fire that grows with every UA playtest release, I’d probably suck it up and buy it. But since they’re also trying to shoehorn their virtual tabletop with AI DMs as the exclusive method by which people play their game, like some kind of half-assed MMO, I won’t. Not because I can be assed to care about AI or anti-consumer practices, but because it’s obnoxious to me and not fun to me and costs me money for shit I won’t enjoy as much. I simply don’t have the energy to care about WotC’s happy relationship with the Pinkertons, if for no other reason than literally every major company in the world also pays the Pinkertons to do fucky shit all over the globe, and if I care about one company doing it, I have to care about all the other companies openly doing the same thing, and then I’d have to, like, start making my own soap and stuff. Which I just don’t have the energy to do.

What it ultimately comes down to is this: honor is an expensive luxury that the vast majority of us simply cannot afford. Buy what you need to survive, spend the extra on whatever bread and circuses allow you to cope with the impending doom of society, and prioritize your moral focus on only a few things that loom the biggest in your mind, the ones that produce the largest amount of shame and guilt for supporting.

Everything is going to produce some amount of guilt, because it’s all fucked. You just have to learn to set a guilt-filter in your brain, so guilt below a certain threshold doesn’t register anymore. There’s literally nothing to be done about it: Even death can’t absolve us of supporting oppression and environmental destruction. After you die, someone’s going to give shady religious conmen money from your deceased wallet to dig up a big rock, scribble some words on it, put you in an unnecessary coffin, bury you with heavy diesel equipment, tell lies about a bigot-god over your corpse, and then hire someone for minimum wage (at best; more likely, they’ll exploit an ethnic minority from another country to do it for pennies) to mow the grass on top of you for the rest of society’s existence. Or the other option, which involves exactly as many shady religious conmen, but switches out the long-term grass-mowing for a short, massive burst of fuel and carbon to turn you into ashes, the button for which is probably also being pressed by an oppressed wage slave making a few nickles an hour.

BUT, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong, and that things aren’t eternally and irrevokably fucked forever. As a hedge against that, I do two things: I stay employed and budget my money (so I won’t be the guy standing naked in a cornfield waiting for whatever apocalypse or second-coming that doesn’t happen, thus making myself well and truly fucked), and I vote in every single election I ever hear about, from the Presidential election to the August special election to replace the town dogcatcher.

but D4 just doesn’t scratch that right itch for me at the moment.

Try Grim Dawn. The graphics are mildly dated, but it’s my favorite entry in the ARPG genre. Tons of replayability.

Because most of us consider the idea that Hillary Clinton is a world-class assassin who never leaves a shred of evidence behind to be a hilarious and absurd concept.

I want this to get ported to PC so bad.

Nobody mentioned the smell? Holy shit, that sounds like the setup to an awful prank.

The smell is an intense sensory experience. We had ferrets for a few years, and at no point did I ever go nose-blind to them. They are the stinkiest things anyone otherwise sane has ever willingly let into their home. Cleaning their litter boxes practically requires a respirator. And that’s after their musk glands have been removed (which, at the time, was standard practice; you couldn’t hardly get ferrets from anywhere with their musk glands intact).

They’re fuckin’ adorable, and playful, and fun, but man, the smell. All the other problems with them being only-just-barely-domesticated wild animals aside, the smell is probably the most important thing to know about them.

My ex had two sun conures.

The thing I would like people to know is that they make the kind of noise that will literally drive you insane if your brain doesn’t adapt to tune it out. It’s loud, high-pitched, and constant.

It’s not about just making phone calls difficult or making it hard to hear what your friends are saying (especially if the parrots decided they hate your friend, which is a whole 'nother parrot problem). It’s so pervasive that it actively changes how your senses perceive your environment.

Years after they both died (at about 20 years old, the female died from getting eggbound and the male died of a broken heart soon after), my brain was still putting parrot noises into the background sounds of my house. I’d be doing my normal daily thing, then stop and be like “Wait, why have I been listening to parrots screeching for the past two hours? They’ve been dead for three years” and my brain would go “Oops, sorry,” and I’d stop hearing it for a while.

Most literate tankie

Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

after around five generations or so God would have to appear and kill a bunch of people once again, because apperently your decendants don’t belive in him anymore.

Well, yeah. Dude vanishes for a thousand years, and I’m supposed to believe the stories of the people who did see his work (people who all died before my most distant tracable ancestor was even born) that were written down by obvious agenda-posters? Seriously?

The quickest way to get more believers is just to show up and do a party trick every once in a while, but for some reason, God hasn’t done anything public and indisputable since cameras were invented. Weird for a guy who wants the whole world to worship him. All he’d have to do is just have a booming voice, audible everywhere on the planet, say “By the way, I’m God, I exist, and [insert holy book] is the correct one, so ya’ll better get on that.” Only the hardcore contrarians would still be non-believers.

I hate how playing in peaceful locks you out of crafting a bunch of very useful items. Since bone chips and slime balls only come from monsters, I can’t make my plants grow big and pretty with bone meal or make a lead rope for my horse. I’m sure there are other examples, but those are the two I care about the most, lol.

Like Russia and Ukraine are working together, vatnik?

Dude, look, I’m sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.

Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.

Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.

I’m a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).

The jumping puzzles are amazing.

The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.

Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.

Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it’s still cool to have the option.

The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.

Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no “meta” skills for a specific role no matter what class you’re playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).

Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).

I’m not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it’s really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.

Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can’t get into it. Maybe it’s that it levels me up so fast that I don’t get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it’s because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it’s because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it’s how complicated the buff system is, that I can’t really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it’s not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.

I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I’ve tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just… isn’t the same.

Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn’t suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say “Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it’s silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once”??

Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?

Games are like an interactive movie and there’s a ratio of moviness to gaminess and this one leans heavier on the moviness side.

The last Final Fantasy game I played was 8, and it was exactly because of this. They stripped out almost all the “game” bits (although they did give us a really cool card game minigame) and turned it into basically a movie you could occasionally interact with. The battles were mindless (there was no reason not to use your strongest summon every round, because it was both more effective than anything else and because it was totally free to do so), the “equipment” system was entirely optional (which was good, because interacting with it required mega-grind), and overland travel was a total afterthought. It was more of a “game” than anything Tell Tale put out, but that’s a low bar, since Tell Tale only produces movies that sometimes throw in an attention check in the form of a quicktime event.

It was a real shame, because I had entirely switched system allegiance from Nintendo to Playstation just for FF7. Then the followed it up with 8, and it was obvious where they were taking the franchise. So I’m not surprised to see, all these years later, that the newest FF game is even more of that.

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I’m specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it’s a mistranslation… but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I’ll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up “Dolphins -football”, and use any version of “-” you’d like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

I hated the second half of Bioshock’s story.

The villain would have won, if he’d just had the good sense to NOT BE OBVIOUSLY EVIL FOR LIKE HALF AN HOUR. You could have just celebrated your victory over the first bad guy while you let the hero meander back to the surface and fuck off forever. But NO, you have to be like “HAHAHA I’M EVIL SO FUCK YOU!” and now the hero has literally no choice but to stay and kill you. It was so lazy, and so stupid. Up to that point, it was good, and I loved the twist, and then he had to go completely ruin it with a boneheaded move that made 0 sense except to show how evil he was.

Then Bioshock 2 fucking did the same thing again. Let these meddling interlopers get on the submarine and go away, and you’ve won, all your goals are complete, Rapture is yours. BUT NO, we have to show the reader how EVIL the bad guy is again.

Then Bioshock Infinite did it fucking again. Great, we’ve won, the revolution is a success, the good guys are triumphant, oh, shit, did we make these people too sympathetic? Better have them suddenly become bloodthirsty child-killers for no reason so you feel ok fighting them instead of fucking off back home! By that point, though, it was kind of a Dead Dove: Do Not Eat situation; I don’t know why I expected anything different after the previous two times.

I got a good deal on Assassin’s Creed II and finally figured out how to hook up an x-box controller to my PC (yes, I’m dumb). I never played any of the AC games other than the first one when it originally came out, so I’m excited to get done with work and give it a shot.