Tashlan

You sound like a normal person who doesn't take shit personally -- some people really, really do take negative feedback on social media the way that you might someone keying your car, and I worry about the repercussions of downvoting the 'wrong" person who might seek reprisal. An anonymous downvote button feels like an "oh, fuck off" button, a public one feels like "fuck YOU for real" to me.

No great surprise, sadly--Bethesda has been on this road for a while. One of my angriest "gamer moments" was when I bought the Skyrim PC disc from the store and brought it to my PC and I was told I had to install Steam to play it. I wasn't a Steam-user at the time, and it felt very, very bad, especially since at that time (2013), the family home did not have high-speed Internet (they did not run cables to that neighborhood) and instead we shared a cellular modem plugged into a router a friend at an IP solutions start-up hooked us up with. I had just moved back to that house and was specifically trying to find something big I could do that would not require me to be online.

I am a huge proponent of digital media because, as an anime fan, I've seen firsthand that big, important properties like Evangelion can disappear from circulation for a decade at a time if something happens to the publisher, so I would rather own what I can than have to ask a company for permission to use something I've paid for. I am generally distraught that in order to deal with my other major beef with modern gaming (lack of backwards compatibility in consoles leading to having to repurchase the same shit over and over again) I have to use digital downloads and deal with DRM.

Yep -- I love that franchise for that reason! Instead of sprawling, they're just dense and full of life. I still got lost even after playing five of those games in the same neighborhood but like, I wish more people looked at that density vs sprawl

They usually have two cities!

I let my character be used as a hostage while I was catching up at work and came home midgame to find out they were stripped naked and whipped, which still gives me weird vibes to this day. I don't really want my shit "in play" when I'm not there.

I don't d20 anymore because my schedule doesn't really allow it, but my other regular DM would essentially work out canonical side-stories "once you're back" if the absence is prolonged, otherwise "generically separated."

I call them "man on horse" simulators. I think open worlds have generally gotten a bit bigger than they need to be -- I remember feeling like FFXV was actually very empty, despite being massive, and while Skyrim is beloved, so much of current replay has been slogging through massive amounts of nothing. I tend to wish open world games were somewhat smaller but denser, with more variety instead of huge, empty terrains of sort of bad-feeling, filler quests between the good ones.

Spez mistakes being cynical and greedy with "maturing," as is typical of the cynical and greedy.

Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet

Business, always business

Damn, ordinarily I'd follow this coverage at r/anime_titties

Jay Peters has been fantastic in his reporting on this, and generally stuck to observable facts. That Reddit is now being a bitch to him just further cements my impression of their leadership. They cannot even handle their own actions being described.

I assume the desired goal of the John Oliver thing is getting John Oliver's attention.