I hear this will be a mechanic in the new ConcernedApe game.

Have you tried Swiss water process decaf?

If not it might be worth a shot.

I think just erasing the politics from Disco Elysium to replace it with alps witch is a stupid idea, but there have just been so so so many games where you play as a depressed middle age man. A dude who, plot twist, is destructive to himself and others, and who we try (and sometimes fail) to help become less destructive over the course of the plot.

Off the top of my head in no particular order:

• God of War
• Max Payne
• Allan Wake
• BioShock Infinite
• The Last of Us 1
• Silent Hill 2
• Red Dead Redemption

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that type of character or plot of course, there are some kickass games in that list, but I can understand wanting something else at this point.

I mean, the players can make imperialist characters if they want to, the same as how you can make an asshole character in a DnD campaign.

I say that its punk because the setting and rules don’t depict this as something that’s good or neutral. The sourcebooks give a description of how the colonial economy operates, and some of the monstrous things that are done to maintain it.

Space 1889 gets its steam from solar thermal generators which power its steampunk space ships (ether vessels).

It gets its punk from it being about colonialism.

Implemented like that it would probably be a step in the correct direction. I’m not trying to say you’re a monster who wants to turn the world into a capitalist hellscape. But let’s use an analogy:

• There’s a country with a public library system that’s been suffering from chronic underfunding and dysfunction. The buildings are falling apart, the catelogs are outdated, and many people don’t even have a library near them.

• Jeff Bezos proposes to eliminate public libraries, says it would be more efficient and effective for the government to give citizens a stipend to buy off of Amazon. Its called universal books.

• Years later someone says “leftists will infight about anything, someone would probably say universal books isn’t left enough.”

• Someone points out who came up with universal books and why they wanted it, then there’s a reply saying “the version of universal books that I support would still fund the public libraries but have the Amazon stipend in addition to that.”

Maybe adding the Amazon stipend to the existing public library system would be great. After all not every library can carry every book, and sometimes its not feasible to put a library in every tiny rural community.

I’m just trying to make the point that its not completely insane to get a little defensive about such an idea in a situation like that.

Kinda reminds me of this old proposal for “modernizing” Amsterdam:

Skyscrapers sticking up with a spaghetti of highways running between them.

It was cooked up by Milton Friedman, one of the grandfathers of American free market libertarianism.

The whole impetus of UBI was to eliminate traditional social services because, it is argued, there’s no way that a government institution could be as efficient or effective as a free market.

And make no mistake, even modern proponents of UBI such as Andrew Yang propose funding it by hollowing out existing social services.

Like, yeah, UBI is better than having literally no social support at all, but the fact that its seen as this ultra-leftist idea, to the point that we apparently can’t even conceive of how it could possibly “not be left enough”, is an indication of how far right mainstream politics has shifted.

Is this supposed to mean that I secretly liked it or else I wouldn’t have played it as long as I did? Would you rather I stopped after 10 minutes so you can say I didn’t give it a fair chance?

What’s good about it then? I don’t mean that as an insult to you or your taste, I am genuinely asking because I’m the sort of person that likes to think about games. I’ve spent hours listening to GDC talks on game design, hours looking at map viewers for some of my favorite games. When I play a new game I take screenshots and make notes about my thoughts while playing it.

From what I saw playing Skyrim there’s basically nothing there in terms of NPC dialogue, very little in terms of environmental storytelling, world design, and worldbuilding, and usually not very much atmosphere or sound design. And that’s on top of the completely vacuous gameplay. If the game did even a single one of these things well I would have considered it to be good, but for me there’s just nothing there.

I am aware that the Elder Scrolls series in general has interesting lore and metaphysics based on Hindu mythology. But it’s my understanding that the person who came up with most of that no longer works at Bethesda. And while I was playing Skyrim even googling some of the things I encountered (such as “why do the draugr attack you”) failed to elicit feelings of intrigue.

I did like the amount of verticality you experience ascending the main mountain though. That was cool map design IMO.

EDIT:

Skyrim isn’t good because it’s not your idea of a specific kind of rpg game

Most of the games that I listed are pretty vastly different from each other, but they all do at least one thing that’s interesting. Skyrim not being “a specific kind” of RPG has nothing to do with it.

Skyrim released in 2011.

New Vegas released in 2010.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines released in 2004

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura released in 2000

Plainscape: Torment released in 1999

Fallout 1 and 2 released in 97 and 98 respectively.

The concept of a good RPG wasn’t invented in the last few years.

The concept of good gameplay and encounter design wasn’t invented in the last few years either.

I played Skyrim a few months ago and felt like my soul was getting sucked out. I just kept asking myself “what am I doing? Why am I playing this?”, and stopped after a few hours.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I encountered a group of bandits that tried to attack me. I went into the cave they seemed to be operating out of and was greeted by a named NPC called “ulfric the blind” or something. He said something like “[name] is that you?”, and I thought “oh I wonder if I’ll be able to fool this guy into thinking I’m someone he knows. I wonder what could have driven this old man to banditry, or if he and his family have been in the game so long he’s now elderly. Or maybe instead of information about his life he’ll inadvertently reveal some secret that can help me. Regardless I’ll probably have to carefully choose what I say if I want to get the most out of this”.

Then the only dialogue choices were “yeah I’m him [end conversation]” and “he’s dead, you’re next [end conversation]”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ2QWsNG71s

I’ve had my current CPU for longer than the Confederacy existed.

I am about to replace it though.

Inaccurate, none of the options on the right involve trying to open an ancient sarcophagus to commit diablerie.

That’s not just food though, that’s literally everything.

A person whose spent thousands of hours making and consuming music is going to notice and value different things than someone who just listens to whatever is on the radio.

A person whose driven hundreds of cars probably has a way better idea about what they like and what they don’t like in a car than someone whose driven 3.

That’s what having a “developed taste” means. Yeah it’s all opinions, but you can’t even know what your opinion is of something unless you try it, and you can’t develop an in-depth opinion of something unless you’ve tried a whole bunch of similar somethings.

That doesn’t mean you need to do that with everything of course. Not everyone needs to cultivate an appreciation for everything, I don’t know or care what good beef Wellington is like for example, but I’m also not going to get pissy with people purely because they have different interests than me.

Bigotry is as old as time.

Bragging about how vintage your racism is isn’t impressive.

Large proteins begin passing through the nephrons en masse and damaging them because they’re too big.

Just in case this isn’t enough warning, note that this can permanently reduce your kidney function and harm your body in other ways as well.

I know it’s very unlikely for anyone here to do this, but if this happens you aren’t just having a “crazy workout” you are giving yourself an injury and possibly permanently affecting your future health. So please don’t exercise until you piss blood.

The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.

Remember all the hype about Euclideon “infinite detail” stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player’s point of view, seamlessly and in real time?

We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh’s coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there’s only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).

The foliage you see in that forest demo is Nanite geometry.

The Xbox 360 had 512 MB of RAM that it shared between its CPU and GPU. I have 128x that amount of RAM in my PC right now. That’s the same multiple as the difference between the 360 and the N64.

Imagine calling Crysis “retro”.

This is a video that came out back in 2007. He is using 2x of the highest end GPU you could buy at the time in SLI to run Crysis at 720p with an average of 27 FPS:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PSI9nvIXaF4

Meanwhile here is a demo using the highest end GPU you can buy right now to render a forest at 4K resolution and 60+ FPS (16x more pixels and more than 2x the fps, if we’re keeping track):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tp4eg0ax8

Most of the maps in Crysis were a few hundred feet across. The forest map in the video above is 4 square kilometers.

Crysis is retro my dude. It is as old now as Super Mario World was when it released.