lazygecko

Putting this in a larger context. The idea of "economic rent" is something I've gained awareness about only fairly recently but has existed as a term among economists basically forever (And on a tangential note, history of economics stopped being an obligatory course for PhD programs in the US 40 years ago.).

Competitive metas always lead to real weird and off-putting attitudes from their communities, like people sincerely arguing against improving RTS pathfinding because that lowers the skill ceiling in micromanagement.

For all of its many faults, Amazing Spider-Man 2 remains the best visual adaptation of the comics into a live action. The action and general imagery, the way he moves, the characterization, etc. It's the most expensive one they made and it shows. The later MCU ones are clearly cheaping out as much as they can in comparison, but worst of all they have such milquetoast direction and seem more concerned with trying to be as inoffensive as possible. I'd rather rewatch ASM2 again than any of the Jon Watts directed ones, even if it's very easy to poke holes at.

I can see why Yuji Naka thought he'd get away with it given how much time he spent living in the US.

No surprise coming from a former EA CEO on record calling developers fucking idiots.

I'd hedge my bets on forums as a medium outlasting all these subsequent social media services intrinsically beholden to the whims of venture capital. Tangentially related article on how corporate interests have been reshaping the dynamics of online posting in the long term https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

World of Warcraft has/had a quest where you have to union bust some orc peons who decided to organize.

Personally I think that fries and chips lose their novelty as snacks rather easily, and they are also easily substituted by other root vegetables. Thinking more about it, I'd say that a really well prepared mashed potatoes with just the perfect texture is an experience that can't be beat.

Not that interested in it conceptually and Bethesda just aren't that good at game design and rarely seem to learn from their mistakes (apparently this game still has the same old UI shortcomings that have been there since Morrowind?), so I'm gonna pass just like I passed on Fallout 4. It seems that a lot of people's criticisms and disappointment with this game stems from it not being more like Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous. I don't really know where those kinds of expectations came from in the first place since I don't think any of the marketing has been explicitly framing it as that sort of experience. The seams and compromises they had to make in order to realize the scope within the confines of their engine become very apparent which is another sore point for people. I also just learned that they still don't have an FoV slider in the settings. And worse still, even the console commands are broken so you have to change it by fiddling in config files. I had problems with headaches for years playing Morrowind and Oblivion before finding out about changing the FoV with console commands. The fact that they still treat it as some arcane back end curiosity when it ought to be a basic accessibility feature is shameful.

I think it's primarily the lack of that creative spark from the likes of Romero and Petersen impacting the overall game design of Quake 2 which made it far less enticing for mappers over the past 25 years. Apart from the texture assets just being 100% tech base, I think the main issue is the enemy roster not being as interesting as Quake 1. Unimaginative designs with way too many hitscanners making encounters mostly feel like an annoying slog to get through (doesn't help that infighting is much less prevalent as well). I think it says a lot that the most fun maps for me in the Machinegames campaign were the ones primarily utilizing the expansion enemies that were just dumb melee monsters charging at you. Quake 1 on the other hand has a much more varied bestiary filling interesting niches which becomes a powerful toolkit to leverage for encounter design. I've casually followed the Q1 mapping community over the last decade or so and an interesting observation I made was that several of these high quality maps were made by people with senior design roles at major studios in the industry. There's something about Quake 1 level design that remains very enticing to them as a hobby.

I'd like to see the whole Raven catalogue remastered and not just the first person games. Give me Take No Prisoners and Mageslayer as well.

Everyone has been treating private platforms as though they were utilities and in turn these platforms have been complacent with a basically free never ending tap of investor money (on the expectation that one of these investments will turn out to be the new Facebook or something) propped up by favorable policy/interest conditions over the past decade and a half, and now that tap is running dry.

The game breaks a whole heap of condescending "conventional wisdoms" that you keep hearing from industry figureheads over the years about what supposedly won't appeal to the sensibilities of a modern market. Which has made me and many others revel in a kind of schadenfreude with how well the game is performing. It has passed 700,000 concurrent players on Steam making it one of the biggest releases in the history of the platform, and it has subsequently shot up to #2 in preorders for the PS5 version. Having played it for a while right now there's another aspect I've observed in that the game isn't really structured around constantly funneling you into repetitive mundane combat encounters at regular intervals. The game isn't really designed around the notion of having a "core gameplay loop". This in turn makes the combat encounters that do exist just feel a lot more bespoke and meaningful with real weight to them. This also avoids the whole gaming trope of slaughtering thousands of nameless bandits while somehow not being considered a mass murderer in the narrative.

I played the demo of this in the 90s. For some reason the publisher decided that the original UK-recorded voice acting was not good enough for the American market, so there are 2 completely different English dubs of this game. Corey Feldman voiced the protagonist for the American dub, and he actually hopped in and made a surprise appearance in a twitch stream chat for this game once he found out it was happening.

https://80.lv/articles/developers-believe-baldur-s-gate-3-shouldn-t-be-raised-standard-for-rpgs/ This is such a weird discourse that I don't think I've seen happen before prior to a high profile game coming out. I'm not even sure what prompted it, or even how to parse what's being said. TLDR a bunch of developers from the industry, in particular from the AAA RPG space, have weighed on the hype leading up to Baldur's Gate 3's release essentially telling people it's unfair to expect the same degree of quality for their own titles given the different circumstances of BG3's development (the game being developed by a massively scaled up independent studio over the years, with a very transparent dev cycle via early access). The optics of it read to me almost like some thinly veiled cry for help, given that it's coming from studios shackled to massive publishers knee-deep in venture capitalism, whereas Larian remains a completely independent studio who managed to earn a coveted IP license and are simply trying to make a great game that the fans want without any of the executive cynicism and ruthless profiteering that has saturated the space it's competing with.