Mods are a different beast and not representative of the game, devs, or player base. Mods like this often get removed from big modding sites like Nexus, forcing them to be mostly in their own spaces. (There is/was a bg3 mod overhaul that makes every black npc white, some lesbian npcs into men so they are straight couples, the ability to change your gender and lock it to the body types. Etc and so on. But you can’t find it on Nexus. I remember the white Wyll mod but it got removed within 3 days)

It’s another matter entirely when a developer bakes this kind of shit into the game. Not every game has mod support and not everyone mods.

This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback

They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”

Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.

The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.

The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)

When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.

Yeah, I still browse reddit from time to time (mostly when lemme feed is dried up or I’m at my computer. I don’t browse it for hours like I used to, though. And I haven’t made a comment that wasn’t on r/lfg for months.

Most of my feed is about Canada, makes sense, I live there. But a vast majority of it is right wing propaganda. Anti immigration, pro PeePee, anti Trudeau, etc. Every week a new right wing subreddit crops up.

It was more than just managers and redundant positions that were laid off. And it was mostly blizzard employees laid off specifically.

Also

/no please don’t attack this innocent multi trillion dollar company

Yeah, if I stopped using/buying a product just because the company behind it did something slightly shitty, I wouldn’t have any belongings, food, etc.

I use Firefox just as much as I use opera gx, I use them on each of my browsers. Opera gx is more primary but yeah…

I dont know what I would replace it with. Brave, I guess?

Gabe won’t live forever and usually someone new wants to put their vision up, and make their changes and feel special and then bam.

Mess.

I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.

Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)

The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.

So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.

I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.

When I first started messing with it, I was kind of neat and fun. I like making characters so I was using it for like story prompts and general outlines. Some were better than others, but it was neat for some inspiration and fleshing out. I never took it’s outputs 1:1.

But when I messed with it again recently. It was a lot worse. Like it ignored parts of my prompt. Like as an example a prompt was about a romance story, but the story was about character A and their family. The love interest character was barely a footnote and could have been removed entirely and nothing would have changed with the story outlines it was giving me.

I thought maybe it doesnt like romance prompts, so I tried less specific and more broad prompts from there, and it was the same thing of just… not outputting what I was asking it to. It got worse and worse and sometimes wouldn’t output anything at all.

Yup, classic case of realism not always making the game better.

I went to earth to check it out, I know the lore of why it is a giant sand ball but that also disappoints me. I walked around the approximate area of where I am from and found a small cave. But there was nothing in the cave except some abandoned drugs. I couldn’t interact with the glowing mushrooms, mine any minerals, etc. I was hoping for a sprawling cavern or something and just… nope. I might go back to earth to explore it some more but it’s so bland.

What do you think is behind that rock?

Another rock.

In your opinion what would be too scary? I tend to have higher thresholds and limits than most people to what I call appropriate so I am curious.

My first thought was Never Alone

It is a puzzle platform adventure and the main character is a little girl probably around your daughter’s age who befriends an arctic fox. It’s an educational game about the Iñupiat people and their culture.

I dont know if there’s any scary scenes but since the main character is a child and the main focus of the game is to be educational, I doubt there will be anything too inappropriate. There will probably be things that she won’t understand but just about everything will have things here and there she wont understand - she’s 5.

Wyll, the warlock.

The thing is, most of the accounts participating this year were bots made specifically for this. Yes it’s a burst of traffic, but it’s a burst of traffic that will drop off a cliff as soon as it’s over.

The botting was so bad this year that a small community or a single person couldn’t do anything, I tried to mess around with an 8 pixel space and as soon as I put a pixel down, it was undone.

The Germans had something like 50k or more bots set up for this. That’s why there were so many German flags everywhere.

Their little newsletter thing promises reflect support but it’s depressing that there’s a lot of games that just haven’t been converted. Neopets fan sites have managed to convert some, in fact Grundo’s cafe might have more working games than the official site at this point. =/