I’ve gotten use out of it in minecraft as a numpad. Add 9 buttons, mapped to 1-9, and you can get to any item in your hotbar without shoulder button spam. It’s basically the only way I use it but most of my steam deck hours are in minecraft so it balances out.

For what it’s worth, Doom 2016 does a really good job of appealing to the goopy goblin gamer brain that hates story in away that other Doom games (perhaps with the exception of 1&2) just don’t. There’s only one sizeable chunk of low-gameplay story and there’s a clear acknowledgement that you clearly are going to run out the door as soon as it unlocks because you don’t give a shit. Doom Eternal completely dropped that pretense for some reason so I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much (I don’t dispise cutscenes like you do but I don’t play Doom for them).

For basically any chan board when you hover over a “>>#######” it shows the post it points to.

I could sympathize with your point if VGM was still the blips and blops of cheap midi synths like it was in Doom’s hayday. Heck, I still someshat sympathize with the idea that VGM just doesn’t work as well as albums for making a pure listening experience because the game inherently restricts it’s format (though I’d say it depends on the game). But VGM by [current year] has gotten so good I must ask what VGM you have heard. Would you make the same claim for film soundtracks?

https://old.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/7pcm3z/anon_suits_up/

or

https://web.archive.org/web/20180110134129/https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/7pcm3z/anon_suits_up/

Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.

Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.

Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.

Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.

You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.

Everything you just described is my experience too, minus the part about having a lot of interests already.

The thing that I was describing is that, for whatever reason, the things that I find interesting are niche enough to others that I won’t find people who already know/care about the same things organically. That’s not much of an issue if you have enough interests to balance that out, but I don’t really have that.

To put it another way, I’m not filtering for people who already have most of my interests, I’m filtering for people who share any of my interests, but that’s already filters most because I’m into few things with little popularity. So, “connected to [my] interests?” Yes. “Fully”? No.

That probably sounds really lonely, but I honestly don’t mind that much. Like you’ve described, most of the friends I’ve had for a while I can talk about whatever with. What I’m describing is mostly a mild inconvenience when meeting new people.

The part where he talks about video games definitely feels like my experience, at least when it comes to meeting people outside of the context of a specific game and its community.

When I’ve gotten into convos in these situations, usually it’ll be evident they mostly only play some set of the following games:

• Overwatch
• Rainbow Six
• Genshin Impact
• Stardew Valley
• Helldivers 2
• Last of us
• God of War
• GTA
• Red Dead 2

That’s not a complete list, but for the most part it will be a bunch of games like that with a sizeable, committed, “normie” following that I don’t play. I can’t bond with these people over games even though on a surface level we’re both “gamers”, because the only game we’ll have in common is Minecraft.

I think the gap here is that for someone like me or anon, we have interests and want to find people who are also interested in that thing, but from the sounds of your post you’re finding people and getting your interests from them. In the latter case, of course there’s no trouble connecting with people, because you’re more willing to mold yourself to do so.

I believe the AAA term actually originates from investing. In investing, a “AAA” investment is one where everyone is pretty confident that it’ll be a positive return. It got a bit of use in the games industry to mean games that were expected to sell well no matter the what. It eventually got warped into just meaning big games with big budgets, and people started using the “AA” term to mean “like AAA but not as much”

The wikipedia article does a better job of explaining it

A bunch of my friends from college kept telling me I’ve gotta play it, espectially because among them the only other game they all played was R6 Siege. I wasn’t too enthused considering all the discussion I can find of the game says it sucks now. When they eventually got me to play it I found it… ok.

Based on the demographics of those friends, I’d say it’s mostly popular among people who, if you asked them if they were really into games would say yes, but if you asked them for any “hidden gems” they’ve come across would give suggest highly recognizeable non-AAA games like Helldivers 2 or Balatro. Partly because their definition of “really into games” is that they play games that have an esports scene (even if their competitiveness goes only as far as playing in ranked matchmaking).

Sound pretentious for me to put it that way but I find that to be the pattern.

I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.

For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:

1. were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
2. did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
3. this game was their first sizeable project

For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.

This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.

Usually whan people make this argument with BG3 as evidence it comes with the implicit assumption that Larian is a AA developer, not a AAA one. I haven’t done enough research on what constitutes AAA vs AA and where Larian fits in that so I don’t know if that’s reasonable, but that’s the argument.

Damn you, Sonic the Hedgehog!

The thing that finally got businesses to finally get off IE wasn’t from the browser being worse than every other option. Heck, it wasn’t even because it was a decrepit piece of software that lost it’s former market dominance (and if anything businesses see that as a positive, not a negative).

What finally did that was microsoft saying there won’t be any security updates. That’s what finally got them off their ass; subtly threatening them with data breaches, exploits, etc. if they continue to use it. I don’t see google doing this anytime soon, at least not without a “sequel” like microsoft had with edge.