GeckoChamber [he/him]

A case where the game not letting the player do everything they want would make it much better, even if “requiring multiple playthroughs to see all the content” sounds bad on paper

Personally I think taking a 30 % cut from games sold on Steam is the reason, but their corporate structure is pretty cool too I guess

not subsidised to reach lower price points, as is often the case with PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

Consoles have not been subsidized in a meaningful way since the Playstation 3 and that was almost 20 years ago.

Could be a Freddy Krueger but he plays basketball instead of murdering type scenario

China seems to be an actual good implementation of the kinds of systems they’ve been doing, now if they only fixed some of the old bugs

All three are worth playing, and I don’t think one is significantly better as an introduction than the others. They all have their strong points and some very obvious weaknesses.

3 has the best character writing and is the most thematically coherent. The dungeons and bosses are a little bad, and the social sim mechanics aren’t as refined as in the others. Reload is probably the best version, but Portable has some good stuff in it too.

4 has the best vibes and tells a competent overarching story. The little comedy bits it does to give you a break are not funny and are often pretty mean, and it has some pretty hard-to-ignore problematic elements, and good lord do the investigation parts suck. Golden is a pretty good version, but there is a new one coming out next year.

5 has amazing-feeling combat and the best dungeon design, and the social sim stuff is mechanically great. Most of the characters have no personality, which is not great in a game like this. Royal is technically the superior version that you should play (though it is strangely worse in some ways I won’t get into here.)

Some of the design decisions in Royal are genuinely bizarre, like the rewards you get from the dungeon bonus objectives. The one from the second dungeon gives you an accessory that removes all of your weaknesses, which is so strong it removes like half the depth from the fusion and battle systems. Almost all the other rewards are so weak they are useless by the time you get them.

What a mess of a title that article has, bizarrely referring to a studio as a creator (singular) makes this read like EA is considering murdering Swen

Finally a useful application for AI, removing the middleman from affiliate marketing scams

It might have the best sound design in any game, which is a pretty good thing to have in a game about going around hitting every wall with a sword.

I think the bosses should have like 20 % less HP and start doing their actually dangerous attacks sooner.

And the way they say that stuff always sounds like they just barely managed to self-censor the f-slur

He sucks ass and there is so much of him in that game

Good bit, but we all know it’s not coming out

They should mod Michigan out entirely

I am using a conception of class consciousness that includes the class in question understanding of what they objectively need to do to end their class conflicts permanently. This is impossible for the bourgeoisie, but it does not stop them from trying.

Currently, some of the beliefs that fulfill this role are ✨Progress✨ towards such abundance that the working class is permanently contented, or that systems other than liberal democracies are simply impossible now. These take considerable effort to believe in.

AI offers another solution where comparatively simple technological progress, through a “singularity” or in a more traditional way, can replace workers gradually but completely. There is no reason to believe this, but I claim the leap of faith required is qualitatively different.

One view of this is that AI is ideologically very attractive to the bourgeoisie, beyond just some potential superprofits, because it makes possible a false class consciousness that is superior to the old one. It moves the prospect of the bourgeoisie “winning the class war” from an abstract theoretical impossibility to a practical impossibility, which is way easier to handwave away. For this purpose, the actual reality of the software matters less than the idea of it.