One month after Satisfactory 1.0 releases. Oh god help us.

Death Stranding. One of my top games of all time. Atmosphere, gameplay, music, Kojima wackiness. It’s loosely in the “transportation” category of games, but it’s not quite a trucking sim, not quite a walking sim, it is story driven, it’s at least half survival-horror, there’s some stealth-action in there. It’s single player and also kinda multiplayer. We laughed at Kojima when he called it a “strand-type game” but it really is a wholly unique experience. The absolute closest you can come to another game like it is Snowrunner, but that isn’t story driven, you never leave your trucks, there are no enemies, etc.

No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.

For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.

This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.

I think that there’s a comfy middle ground between giving into every horrible trait you have to the detriment of everyone around you, and molding yourself into a character just to please everyone around you.

Learning how to “Be yourself” just means learning how to take your core personality and cultivate it into being your own person that also knows how to get along well with society at large.

As an avid grand strategy / 4x gamer, AI cheating is the biggest hurdle that no game ever gets right. When somebody finally figures it out our genre will reach nirvana.

The “mid-to-low range PC” already beats both consoles

But not for the money. The console manufacturers sell their systems at a loss, which is something PC part manufacturers can’t do.

Put me in the both camp. They’re fundamentally different experience and there are different games that I prefer to have on PS5 and other on PC

The thing about Borderlands 1 and 2 is that their humor fit in very well for their time. They existed through the peak “lol so random” phase of internet humor. That exact same humor, executed with less subtlety, in 2020’s just does not fit in.

I’m really glad they used that low effort development time on Starfield. Maybe that games piss poor reception will shock someone into putting a little more effort into the next fallout.

Yeah guy 2 wants “attention” support but he doesn’t want a problem so that he can get attention support. He already has the problem and simply wishes he had support from others. He also doesn’t want to be a victim. He already feels like a victim of his circumstance. The support from others would make him feel less like a victim and more like somebody who has overcome adversity.

No dude, the first guy wants an easy answer to how shit he feels, because an easy answer means an easy solution. Generally speaking, people don’t like having problems that are entirely outside of their own power to fix.

The second person doesn’t want the deficiency, they already have it and have been struggling with it for a long time and what they wish for is love and support from people, to have their struggle validated.

It’s like the difference between a successful day of back breaking work when you’re a slave, vs a day of back breaking work when you’re working for your own benefit. The validation of the self-work comes from the benefits you reap because of it. There is no validation for the exact same work if you’re a slave, because you didn’t choose to do the work and you don’t benefit either. A little empathy and respect from your fellow man for the good work you did that you were forced to endure for no benefit to yourself would be the only solace you can hope to receive and isn’t really a whole lot to ask for grand scheme of things.

Sorta but also as bad as insurance is, if you have any and go to the ER, an ambulance ride and an ER visit are generally flat rate and not an absurd amount of money. It all goes downhill once you’re fully hospitalized.

This was me except it was narcolepsy. Which isn’t as fun because it’s incurable and also largely untreatable. Most medications and aids are supportive, not corrective.

Bro what. A victim of vitamin deficiency? It might be high time for you take a break from being online and get some vitamin d

Yeah who’d have thought

I wish Empire of War had quicker AI turns. It’s my favorite one but you spend so much time waiting for AI turns to complete.

But he didn’t lose “paying hours”.

Truly astonished that literally anybody fell for that nonsense.

That’s in reference to Sony only recently porting many of their published games to PC.

It’s hard to imagine that at least half the player base isn’t on PS5 where they wouldn’t care about the requirement, but I’m sure it would still have been a significant hit.