DarkThoughts

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Should come without Denuvo, so that makes it immediately better in my book.

I was about to say that. Honestly looks better than anything released since the first games on the Mega Drive.

Removed by mod

Lost interest the moment I saw that archery is still just a different kind of spellcaster.

In before HL 1 & 2 remaster disappointments. Or just absolutely nothing happening, just like all the previous copium rumors. I think I stopped caring back with the recorded soundtrack rumors, which already feel like an eternity ago at this point.

I dropped out with Origins, which was kind of painful because I really hate not finishing a series (Mass Effect in this case). But that of course was just the last straw after all the bullshit EA pulled and all the studios & franchises they destroyed over the decades. I don’t even think they could ever redeem themselves at this point, not that they even make any effort to do so anyway. EA is just a rotten company and the epitome of all that is wrong within the gaming industry.

R34

Terranigma. Still my favorite RPG to this day and one of my favorite games to this day, but it’s hard to gush about this game without any spoilers and its written in a way that requires a bit of attention from the player. You do need to either have an EU / PAL SNES or emulate it though, because it never released in the Americas due to publisher drama.

Secret of Mana is great too, or if you already played that, Seiken Densetsu 3, which is the sequel title that never got released in the West, but got fan translated roms out there. Seiken Densetsu 2 being SoM, and the original Seiken Densetsu 1 was released as Final Fantasy Adventures and sort of a side story to the Final Fantasy franchise, which got dropped and became its own franchise with the second game. SD3 (or “Secret of Mana 2”) is a significant step up to the first game in many aspects and even has multiple characters & branching endings based on your character selections.

On the PC definitely the Command & Conquer’s Tiberian series, starting with the first game and a GDI campaign run, followed by a NOD campaign run. It got those cheesy but amazingly entertaining little clips between the missions that actually get you immersed into the story and it has a killer soundtrack too. It’s one of the many great franchises ruined by EA, but I heard the remastered version is actually decent (I still won’t buy because I still boycott them). The already suggested Red Alert is a spin-off series with some references to the Tiberian series, so I would not start with that one until you played the Tiberian one.

I always wonder how some big ass studio announcing a title that uses (high quality) 2D or 2.5D graphics would go. Like, pump it full of many hours of great gameplay and gut and / or heart wrenching story, with lovely & beautiful art, in 2025+. No online account requirements, no Denuvo, no micro or macro transactions, just a solid buy to play title that’s a blast to get immersed in. The problem is that suits would not dare to even try this, just like they don’t dare to try anything else that’s not your standard formula customer milking. And that’s how you get the 20iest iteration of generic graphic bliss with hundreds or even thousands of bucks to spend on macro transactions and other pain the ass bullshit. Innovation for the big companies is dead, which is why I focus so much on Indie studios and smaller developers now. At least there’s still some honest passion behind those games.

I could see it useful if you need the LLM to explain something maybe? If you’re reading something in a language not native to your own, or just something that’s using quite complex language & writing, then it may be useful to just have a paragraph or sentence explained to you. Or maybe the book references something you’re not familiar with and can get a quick explanation by the LLM.

I’m all in on shitting on that loser but the whole concept of Reddit is to outsource the bulk of moderation to the users. Same goes for Lemmy & variants btw, with all the problems it comes with.

God forbid there’s a left leaning instance that isn’t a Tankie infested cesspool.

And multiple cases of sabotage, assassinations & attempted assassinations on NATO soil, along with all the disinformation campaigns. Russia is making a fool out of the West, which cannot find a proper response to this form of hybrid warfare. Everyone’s too scared of their nukes, allowing Russia to move all the red lines further and further. They should turn the whole Baltic Sea into a NATO lake and blockade the couple Russian ports.

I think we landed in a situation where some people don’t understand the different between graphical style and graphical quality. You can have high quality graphics that are still very simplistic. The important part is that they serve their purpose for the title you’re making. Obviously some games benefit from more realistic graphics, like TLoU Part 2 depicted in the thumbnail & briefly mentioned. The graphics help convey a lot of what the game tries to tell you. You can see the brutality of the world they are forced to live in through the realistic depiction of gore. But you can also see the raw emotion, the trauma on the character’s faces, which tells you how the reality of this world truly looks like. But there’s plenty of games with VERY simplistic graphic styles that are still high quality. CrossCode was one of the surprise hits for me a couple years ago and became one of my favorite RPGs, probably only topped by the old SNES title Terranigma. They both have simple yet beautiful graphics that serve them just as well as the realistic graphics of TLoU. Especially the suits / publishers will make this mistake since they are very detached from the actual gaming community and just look at numbers instead, getting trapped in various fallacies and then wonder why things don’t go as well as they calculated.

It’s not that I don’t like realistic graphics. But I’m not gonna pay 100 bucks per game + micro transactions and / or live service shenanigans to get it. Nowadays it’s not even that hard to have good looking games, thanks to all the work that went into modern engines. Obviously cutting edge graphics still need talented artists who create all the textures and high poly models but at some point the graphical fidelity gained becomes minuscule, compared to the effort put into it (and the performance it eats, since this bleeds into the absurd GPU topic too).

There’s also plenty of creative stylization options that can be explored that aren’t your typical WoW cartoon look that everyone goes for nowadays. Hell, I still love pixel art games too and they’re often considered to be on the bottom end of the graphical quality (which I’d heavily disagree with, but that’s also another topic).

What gamers want are good games that don’t feel like they get constantly milked or prioritize graphics over gameplay or story.

Epic being garbage isn’t an edgy thought. But nice try at trolling.

You’d have to pay me to use Epic.

At this point I rather emulate. Cartridges batteries run out and the electronics in those consoles won’t survive forever either and you can get retro styled gamepads too, if you really want that for some reason.