What better way to show how much you don't care about Reddit than to spend all your time talking about it?

Nah. That's what Local is for

I had been an advocate of getting just an ordinary person to do the first Lemmy ama but apparently we've got an absolute legend.

Have you ever had a favourite reference to your joke come up?

I saw, and smelled, things in my medical student days that are just best not explored too deeply online. There are holes, abscesses that form in dark places, abscesses that fill with things, and age, and rot. There are things that can make even experienced colorectal surgeons get a bit queasy. The details are best left unspoken.

I use Lemmy to talk to strangers, but I use discord to talk to specific people. Unless I can convince the vast majority of them to switch to matrix it doesn't matter how much I prefer the foss service, it's useless to me. I still have an account, sure, but I don't use discord out of laziness. I use it because matrix literally can't provide that service.

My issue with it in Starfield (and any game in its genre) is that the game seems to be confused about how it feels about encumbrance. Am I supposed to be looting everything I see? If not, then why is it the major income source, why are so many random objects worth selling and taking? If so, why do merchants have such low credit stores? Am I supposed to be collecting cool stuff to display? If not, then why all the display objects? If so, why have my companions constantly nag me about bringing junk? Why make ship storage so low? Or, am I supposed to be carefully considering what I want to bring as loot? If so, why is there so much of it and why isn't there some way to quickly see what's worth taking? Am I supposed to spend an hour after each combat carefully weighing what to take home?

It's entirely unclear what they want. If they want looting to be less of a game loop, junk items should have no sell value and missions should be more of a reward, and item value/kg should be easy to assess. We should be quickly able to discard valueless items from inventory. Otoh if they want looting to be a bigger part of the game, I should be able to readily carry and sell my loot and doing so shouldn't make me so rich it breaks the economy.

It's one of my main complaints, not so much about starfield, but pretty much anything in this genre. It feels like they can't tell if they want me to loot everything or not, the design is fundamentally at odds with itself.

The far right is seriously outnumbered. Encouraging people to apathy helps them, because most people who get involved are their enemies.

It's amazing how "righteous fury" people seem to get over folks protesting sporting events because the fucking planet is on fire.

"Oh but couldn't they be more calm and quiet about it, I want to watch the race!"

Speaking as someone who is plant based, it's a false dichotomy anyway. It's not "go vegan or eat lots of meat". People who don't share the vegan philosophy could just eat very little meat and make a huge difference to the planet, just like how I bike or walk to work but once in a while I drive.

True, but not new. It's been this since before "fight terror" in fact.

There's such a weird attitude around release of old material. Why can't Disney+ show the star wars theatrical release? Why won't Nintendo sell their old titles? The only possible outcome is that people get what they want and give the company cash. It's bizarre.

One Elon musk can feed a family for a year.

One farm fertilized with musk mulch can feed a city block!

It's weird particularly to see that praise for Skyrim when (imo obviously) morrowind in the same series had a substantially more interesting story and world, a decade prior

"our community continues to thrive" even though we'll have nothing to talk about.

Folks round here do need to understand though that there's really not likely to be all that big an influx of people on the first. Reddit has far, far more inertia than the Lemmy community likes to imagine. This is a great example.

We probably are but it's also very important to remember that were not past the point of no survival. The trend for oil propaganda has been to go from "climate change is fake" to "it's real but it's too late to do anything". It's too late to go back, but it's not too late to act. Don't forget that.

Jeez I want to go to your movie theatre that seems to have fresh pretzels

You're misunderstanding. At this point "Bethesda game" is its own subgenre, and many complaints about this game are complaints about the subgenre itself. If you don't like being the Big Special Hero, you won't like this game. If you want the game to have rich, detailed combat that stays challenging throughout, it probably won't be this one either

If you want a huge world with lots of curious little things to explore and more side quests than you can do in a lifetime, built on a backbone of a kind of flimsy story (imo not a terrible one this time) that you are mostly gonna skip out on to go do dungeon hops and loot accumulation, then you're probably golden with this. And by now, most of us should know what we're paying for, I think. As long as you expect and want what they consistently make, this game delivers very well

On top of that, the combat and general mechanics are just far better than the usual Bethesda offerings this time around. It's fun to fight in zero g. It's an absolute blast to disable an enemy ship and then board it. The side quests are legit quite fun and exciting, with NPCs I've found I really enjoy and want to see again.

As long as you expect a game that is like Bethesda makes, it's a very nice and fun one that delivers more than I had expected from them by a long shot. If you expected a deep, hardcore indie gem, you're going to be disappointed and also you're maybe kind of a silly person. It's a mass produced game for a large audience, that's the stick by which to measure it.

I always assumed that was a joke, because they're just kind of bland generic rock and roll that it seems like it would be comical to pretend to have any really strong negative reaction to it. Then I met a few real people who actually despise them, and realized it's not a joke.

There were people there prior to the Aztec empire conquering them. The Aztec empire is just a specific government that ruled the area at that specific time.

The Napoleonic empire, for comparison, only lasted 1804-1815 (with a hole in the middle).

"obvious" means, I think, that it says something like "last saved 5 seconds ago"

All matrix is to me is a classic late nineties action sci fi movie.

It's not really about Activision being bought though, it's about Microsoft buying them.

I posted a shorter version of this elsewhere in here but I've thought more and want to expand.

Disclaimer: I really like both no man's sky and starfield. Gonna be down on both of them but I've got hundreds of hours in NMS and I expect to have hundreds more in SF, they are both good games, I have no regrets about buying either of them.

That said, I've realized that starfield is actually making me low-key kind of angry at NMS, for all the potential it wasted. It's showing just how little extra depth NMS could have used (could still use) to be great. There are really only a couple fairly minor ways that starfield is better, and yet for me and I think a lot of people they spell the difference between "fun sandbox" and "awesome game". Starfield is so shallow on all of these that despite being the first game to really deliver on the promise of an open world space RPG sandbox, it's like a wish-dot-com version of what nms could be.

First, combat. Nms has all right space combat, nothing great but acceptable, but there's no excusing its ground combat. There's effectively one enemy, they're not really designed to be fought most of the time, and they're almost never involved in battles of any meaning. The combat overhaul added some mechanics but didn't solve the problem... in a way it's worse now because fighting seems like it could be interesting. How come when I find a trading post it's never a ruin overrun by pirates, with scattered notes from the lost inhabitants, written in their native language so that if I can speak it I can read their sad story? Why don't I ever find a detail of gek security bots defending the inner chambers of a crashed frigate? Why can't I have a shootout with the crew of a frigate on board its procedurally generated interior?

That leads into the issue that there's no story at all. People complain about the main quest of SF, but nms has one of the flimsiest, poorest written central plots of any game I've ever seen. That would be okay, but there are also no side quests. You can't stumble upon an abandoned mine, or have a spacer randomly ask you to help break a blockade of their home system. There are a tiny number of very shallow fetch quests, but nothing with even a hint of effort in the writing.

I get a bit annoyed at starfield for systems not interacting. Like, i have a house, but I can't build outpost buildings around it, eg. However, NMS takes that to extremes with how outpost building, village building, and frigate building all seem like they're actively hostile to each other, as if coming from different games. IIRC even some of the outpost components won't properly snap together if they're from different 'styles' of outpost, although I may be misremembering.

Add to that that there's also not a lot of gear collecting mechanics, minimal ways to display loot, minimal character customisation, and so on, and it's just... sigh. Everything nms does feels like it falls just short of being amazing, but they get bored right before completing the last step to bring it all home and then they go work on another system that they'll get 3/4 through and then abandon. I wish it had mods.

Meanwhile, starfield doesn't do any individually thing particularly well either, but unlike NMS, it feels like I can do stuff with what I make. I can build a ship... and then take it smuggling! Or fight pirates! I can have NPCs on board and they'll chat with each other while I'm flying around, and help run the ship! They're not all well written, but they're actually written, and do more than just stand around saying one line back at me. It's frustrating, because honestly, taken on its own, starfield isn't particularly remarkable (see how bland space travel is eg) but there's nothing out there that's actually gone the very obvious extra mile of "okay we have beautiful worlds to explore, what if now we put some things to do on them"

There will be denial forever, but watch out now for the new propaganda trend, "it's too late to do anything". It feels woke and tends to be anticorporate in flavour, but it leads to the same end as denialism.

I think it's weird to pin this on the lack of central authority given that all the evidence is that any service with a central authority has been deeply and woefully inappropriate with their security. Absolutely, you should always treat any service like this as though it's untrustworthy.

The logical flaw here is the implicit assumption that Reddit, or any other corporate social medium, is safe for privacy just because they're corporate. At least with Lemmy I can set up a server with my friends and know where my info is being stored and who has the keys.

The ship builder is just tons of fun. I wish the controls were a little bit more obvious but once you get the hang of it, I think it's my favourite in genre. I love building something neat and then going to check out the interior walkthrough, particularly. I think I need a save where I just cheat in millions of credits so i can experiment for a while

I'd go back to around the time my daughter started sleeping through the night. Don't want to risk a reality where my kids don't exist. I'd tell my friend the cancer is coming back, when it's still early enough to do something.

Don't really know what else I'd do. Don't really care. Be nice to live through those years again without changing much else to be totally honest

Readingallkanafeelslikereadingenglishwiththespacesandpunctuationtakenoutyoucandoitbutitsweirdandmoredifficultbecauseitsnotwhatyoureusedtonorhowthelanguagehasevolved

Going home after living abroad was a way bigger shock to me than living abroad was too. You suddenly see your own culture from outside.

Generally true but I will say, there's a concerning amount of astroturfing going around on eg. sh.itjust.works about how iMporTanT it iS to let tHe hatErs sPeaK. The place seems to be going full 'nazi bar' very quickly. It doesn't matter how tankie the original devs are, we still need to be wary of our spaces. If there's one thing the alt right has proven effective at out of all their massive incompetences, it's turning social spaces online into shit holes.

Has anyone here ever thought “I would like this game more if it had encumbrance in it”?

Yes, I totally have. In fact even in starfield, I found pretty quickly that I was wishing the game would arbitrarily restrict my ammunition and medpack supplies, because the combat was more fun when I could run out of shots and healing in the early game. It's not even the kind of thing I can easily do as a challenge myself because it's so easy to pick them up and go "over". I legit think starfield's encumbrance system would be much better if it was more restrictive, so that I had to carefully choose my equipment and things, than the current "I can carry so much that gameplay is not meaningfully restricted, but not nearly enough to collect and sell all the loot I find".

I posted upstream about the problem with encumbrance in this style of game. It's not that encumbrance is inherently bad, but that most of the time in crpgs, it just seems to be 'there', it's not in the service of any part of the gameplay.

All I've got to offer are unionisation pamphlets and a brick.

I'm sick to death of Reddit/spez salt and this still made me snort. Well done.

I remember. It became a less reasonable structure with the advent of digital piracy though, and it's just nonsensical nowm

It might attract fruit flies but if it's like my compost it might be too hot for them. Compost shouldn't include a lot of the things that attract larger house flies.

My compost occasionally gets crowds of flying bugs but it's not a normal feature and usually means i need to tend to it some way or another.

To me the role of the "fake" stuff isn't to replace it as staples in my diet but to let me have some old comforts once in a while, or at least something to fill the gap. When you've been veg for a few years a fake chicken finger can do a decent job of scratching the itch for something like that, even if you know it's not the same

At least for me. Mileage varies depending on what you like about the original

It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.

Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.

For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.

Jerboa is really jank still but is headed in that direction.

This is one of the most six-year-old stories ever

This is what happens when you make companies and organizations afraid that you're just going to take away official communication channels from them. It's the only logical action for then