I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.

All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.

Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.

The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.

Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.

Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.

And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.

And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.

And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.

I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.

(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)

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Wouldn’t it be awesome if people cared about research and facts.

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television. They have pushed many major media platforms into censorship already, and are just getting started.

But what if I just pirate and use VPN’s? You tech-savvy kiddos might ask, getting a small thrill from feeling like anti-establishment pirates.

Well never fear, they have plans for that too! Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

Except there are still 1.4 BILLION catholics in the world, and that’s just catholicism.

We may not like it, we may not get anything from it, but we should very much be concerned with what happens in the world of organized religion and what it’s representing because 3/4 of the world still believe in some kind of religion.

I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.

Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.

It’s always ever been an argument for themselves, white nationalists and fascists, to have the guns, and everyone who isn’t them to not have guns.

They only ever argued from a constitutional nature to bend liberals who value law and fairness and it’s worked incredibly well.

I taught self defense to families for many years, I always encouraged learning about and owning firearms as first-line items of defense because all the eye-gouging and groin-kicks in the world won’t help if someone enters your home with a gun.

I am not a gun-nut. I believe we need stricter laws and required training to own the things, but that isn’t going to happen so the least you can do is make sure you’re not the one without a force multiplier.

I have recently been telling trans people very bluntly and directly that they need to arm up. I get a lot of pushback, a lot of it is very “online” in nature and performative, and a lot of trans girls have a hard time reconciling it with their ideas of femininity, but I am telling you all now, they may come for you. You are literally in danger in the USA. Maybe not now, but very possibly in the near future.

The only thing that will keep a fascist administration from going door-to-door to black-bag undesirables is if every home visit is a potential stand-off and bloodbath. Yes, it may come to that. It’s sad and shitty that they have put you in this position, but you have to become part of the meat-grinder, not a name that disappears off lists and census surveys.

Told you all over and over to arm up before it’s too late, hope at least some of you listened and not everyone was reflexively, performatively aghast at the idea of owning a tool of death.

What a completely obtuse way to misread my comment.

I know insurance adjusters, they are under strict rules but whenever they get a chance they do try to approve benefits if it comes to a matter of personal decision making. It’s not that often, but it does happen in the loads and loads of cases that pass through every day.

Few people realize the scale of these operations.

An AI system can process all those claims in moments and not only follow guidelines to deny as many as possible, they will do it without feeling a twinge of conscience, and this seemingly small margin of extra denials will likely save the insurance company vast sums of wealth, and all it will cost us, the paying customers, is needless death and suffering.

That’s the best possible outcome.

The more likely outcome is a lot of people are going to die or suffer needlessly.

These don’t count because they’re just software and the designers can feign complete innocence because of the black-box nature of AI decision-making.

There are reasons they want AI in charge of so many things. It’s not because they think AI can do a better job.

And also, AI makes pictures of Trump riding tanks and fist-bumping Jesus so it has to be perfect and awesome, right?

No, it’s fine and makes total sense if your goal is to incentivize your company’s suppliers and affiliates to KILL PEOPLE.

Easy, enforce the porn ban via lethal force.

Also, everything is porn now.

Kind of like how my boycott of Target was a success, AND i got started much, much sooner than everyone else. (Because they’re overpriced and their selection sucks.)

Wait, you mean you weren’t boycotting and crying about the old logo and forcing the company to remove the image of the guy sitting by the barrel? I mean, I’m sure ONE of us leftists was outraged and screaming about it and forcing a good, hard-working American company to change its ways, if it wasn’t you, then who could it have been??

Well whoever did it, I sure feel “owned” by the right over all this. They sure scored a victory over wokeness on this round 🙄

At least Howard Hughes at the decency to lose his fucking mind in isolation. That and also contribute actual advancements to cinema and aerospace.

It’s tragic though that likely Musk will ensure his name is plastered on a thousand different agencies, institutions, foundations, statues and bidets all over the world and people growing up in several generations from now will largely assume he was some great inventor or hero along the lines of great pioneers of the past.

BRO STOP GOONING TO AI ANIME AND TAKE US TO MARS

“Take us to Mars”? Are there really people out there who think they personally are going to benefit from this groyper chud’s bottomless piggy bank and ketamine addiction?

Question of the day, are you a pedo if it’s anime?

Gosh, never seen this debate come up on the fucking worst parts of the internet before, totally new one. Can’t wait for all the fresh and original takes.

In before “Ephebophile” gets thrown around and used as some kind of moral high ground.

We would do well to remember that for every democracy that has fallen (and there have been a lot) they had a large segment of the population feverishly supporting the dictators as they burned down the centers of education and the constitutions that ran contrary to the regime’s plans.

They are attempting this kind of overreach because there are people are supporting it. We have to fight these people.

Not with violence or weapons just yet, but with community action and spending our money more wisely. Get involved in your neighborhoods and city management meetings, get social even if you hate people, suck it up and hold some yard sales and bake sales, whatever else gets you talking to people in your immediate area. Start getting to know who your elected officials are and mount organized pressure on them to resist this fascist takeover.

We kick the base out from under this thing and it falls out. Stop fighting stupid, get off the internet, get off Lemmy where you get all your satisfaction looking at memes or fighting with other leftists. Stop buying new games and drugs and alcohol and doordash, hoard your money so the liches don’t get it. Now IS the time.