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Cake day: August 6th, 2024

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  • I haven’t played it yet, still unsure if I will, but everything I’ve seen of it is nudging me towards not playing it. The dialogues I’ve watched were poorly written, cutscenes were okay at best, and the new companions seemed all to be obnoxious teenagers.

    To me, Dragon Age Origins is the only game in the franchise that’s worth playing. The Warden is your character as the player, and that, to me, is the hallmark of a good rpg. None of the other Dragon Age games put as much effort into allowing you to choose and make your own character. The fact that DA:O had entirely different intros, that were both long, well written, and nuanced, based on your combination of class + race was the thing that sold me into that game. Hawke is not your character, but a character they wanted you to play for a reason, but I’ll give it a pass since the idea of Hawke’s story was fairly good, just not as well implemented (DA2 should have been a spin off and not part of the main series). The Inquisitor is even worse, it could have been your character, but it’s some weird generic character that’s there just to perform a function in the world. I’ve played most of DA2, but only a couple of hours of Inquisition, and it was enough to know that both those games fell short of Origins, and this one is looking even worse.

    An RPG needs excellent writing above all else. Good gameplay comes as a close second, but it should be mostly about allowing players to forge their own path and have their own interpretations of the world. RPGs need nuance and subtlety, you can’t just constantly regurgitate something to someone’s face and expect them not to be annoyed by it.








  • alphabethunter@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    14 days ago

    I think of this anytime I see some alleged leftist on Twitter talking about anything as if they were paragons of ethics and morality. It might be a bit of cynicism on my part, but I can’t take it seriously whenever someone can’t take a hint that maybe they shouldn’t be in a platform owned by a Billionaire that makes a point in basing his personality on the fact that he is an imperialist bigot. I wish Twitter had stayed banned in my country…



  • I’ll bother and explain why you’re being stupid and not understanding the thing you yourself posted.

    From the definition of factors of production on Wikipedia:

    "In economics, factors of production, resources, or inputs are what is used in the production process to produce output—that is, goods and services.

    Simply put, rent is paid at INPUT, for things like land, in order to produce OUTPUT, which are things like goods and services. What Steam provides is a SERVICE, an output. You don’t pay economic rent on outputs, you pay economic rent for inputs. Steam’s service being: marketing and distribution of games in place of others, plus integration with analytics and a bunch of other features.

    The comparison you’re making is the same as saying you’re paying rent to your team of marketers and accountants…

    You could make a point and argue that artists are paying economic rent for Adobe suite, and that game developers are paying rent for unreal engine fees. Without those things, which are inputs for production, neither artists or game developers would have a product at all. Steam only comes into play once the final product is already done. You don’t need Steam before the game is a product at all, which corroborates that Steam is not economic rent, for it’s not a payment made for an Input in order to produce an output.

    Also, in what way is the marketplace for games fixed? It’s not a finite resource. There’s no finite number of how many stores there are out there, anyone can go and make their own client and store. There are games and developers that up to this day make their own standalone launchers.

    Steams offers a service, the best one in the block. You don’t want it? You’re entirely free to go and figure it out yourself. No monopolistic behavior in sight.



  • They are in the same universe, and they are both FPS, and that seems as far as similarities go. But maybe it won’t be just that, maybe they’ll tie the plot of the new game to the old ones somehow, maybe the ship marathon crashed in the alien planet where the whole extraction thing happens, and maybe that’s the reason? I’ve never played the original games, but recently watched a youtube video about them and it seems that it was really loved by bungie, and they took many of the lessons from it to make Halo. My bet is that someone at Bungie has always kept those games in a corner of their memory, thinking about how they could revive them one day. Usually, when old franchises are revived, it’s because of some execs trying to make use of their popularity. But it doesn’t seem to be the case here, as Marathon was quite an obscure game.





  • There’s a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

    Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

    “We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

    It’s obviously a matter of “why not both?”, and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that’ll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.