Tōkon deez nuts

There was an easy mode from the start, i think it’s called “Casual” difficulty. An early patch made that easy mode easier - the first version just made enemies do way less damage so that you didn’t need to parry/dodge, the patched version also made the dodge and parry timings much more forgiving.

Eh, e33 on easy mode is less challenging than TTYD was if you’re bad at dodging/parrying. And even the harder modes can be strategized around forehead blocking because a lot of the defensive picto/lumina are very powerful and your “consumables” (revives, heals, energy boosts) recharge automatically every combat.

Easy mode and defensive build is basically a Let’s Play (and that’s a good thing imo)

I mean, if it’s actually an MMO the kind of person that likes SAO won’t be able to have fun being the only overpowered god tier main character in the entire universe.

Right, now get it “generally doable” on a device with phone level specs and universality (plus a three cent cable) and watch online competitive gaming crash to the point where there’s genuinely no rational argument for installing spyware. Force every game that cares to solve the serverside anticheat “problem” instead of mitigating “most cheaters” by mandating insane levels of system monitoring.

This is why I hope that cheats end up being MITM attacks with ai slop in control. LLMs can easily do basic pattern recognition, so a device that can “look” at the screen for you and click on people’s heads would be trivial to produce with no software running on the actual game device. Get that popularized and the only excuse for rootkit anti-cheat evaporates. I’d rather live in the world where people cheat at video games than the world where the average gamer has 5 rootkits on their system just to protect “competitive integrity”.

Well, don’t forget the SSD as well. $500-600 sounds right without either of those components and adds up pretty well with current SSD and RAM prices to around $1.1k or $1.3k depending on SSD size.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Valve started offering this after the hype dies down to a point where they actually can “have stock” instead of “keeping up with pre-order demand”. Right now every box they’ve got is guaranteed to sell, so they may as well stick the expensive components in there and only get blasted by games media for “being expensive” instead of “selling a brick for the price of a Switch 2”

Either ban vibe coded projects entirely or ban vibe coded projects that have less than a year of history. If allowing “mature” vibe coded projects, require the tag.

Spaces like this become so much worse when “i made this last week look at the shiny ui 🎉🎉🎉🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀” projects that will never ever see any form of maintenance are allowed.

Ban 'em

That ten minute boot time is not normal. Something’s very wrong with your PC, especially if other games or programs have minutes-long launch times.

This looks like every other over the shoulder mass effect clone ever made. Why does “shooting the thing” have to be the primary verb for every space-era game again?

No point in watching the ad parade when 80% of the games are hat stores or GAAS slop and 90% of the remainder are remakes and remasters. The games worth your time and money are ones you’ll hear about when they’re released.

If any workers in the games industry have the power to disrupt, it’s the GTA6 guys. This game is industry-warpingly big, other multimillion dollar projects are being delayed or rushed just to “not have to compete” with GTA6 and GTA6 isn’t even launching on all platforms. Threatening to cause another delay if demands aren’t met could actually work if they stick to their guns.

People want to be in on the ground floor of the new hype thing. Then they leave. That’s what New World proved, its colossal dropoff in active players and revenue wasn’t entirely because Amazon killed some golden goose. Anyone trying to say “people want new MMOs” is probably coping about that surely the new MMO they want to not fail is going to survive.

New Thing Hype works for a couple years to be sure. And then you run into the content wall and learn that by playing a more established MMO like FF or WOW or ESO or GW2 you get decades of “new content” all at once.

Prowlarr isn’t an alternative to torrenting, is the main thing. It’s an indexer manager for the other arrs, which means it just does torrenting (or usenet) for you. You still want to be on high quality private trackers if using Prowlarr, it just means not needing to interface with 10 sites’ search bars to look for something.

Yeah that’s kind of the point with dark patterns. That’s not a term I made up either. Warframe isn’t as rife with them as other games but the “forever GAAS” platform is nearly always leveraging patterns like this in some way.

Dark patterns are dark patterns, even if “the community” is more or less happy. Just means that it’s working. Being owned by Tencent actually does give them the freedom to “just be profitable” instead of squeezing each player for more and more revenue YOY, but the game still uses every retention mechanic in the book and leverages fake value by putting the MTX currency on “really good sales! Look how good the limited time deal is!!!” to keep people shelling out.

Tencent is diversified enough that they’ll probably never feel the need to tighten the screws on the Warframe studio directly.

Both chicken and egg situations say the same thing: live service GAAS is unsustainable at best and garbage at worst

Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no “opt out”.

It is not “Krafton free”. Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn’t just “the publisher”. There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there’s some number of lifetime sales that, if they don’t ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they’d be legally required to pay out the “bonus” that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it’s still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.