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Me, a Gamer: "I demand perfect realism in my space simulation game! No ladies. Nobody darker than an Italian is allowed to be in charge. And we take all our measurements in imperial units."

Bioware Designer: "Okay, here you go. The inky void of space where it takes you six weeks to travel between large barren rocks, and you spend 90% of your day just trying to scavenge enough oxygen to keep from asphyxiating."

Me: "This game sucks! Bioware has gone WOKE!"

Ghina

The Second Derivative of Slaughter is Negative

Might need to be fairly varied with mmr to create added challenge and competition in this element of the game. The downside though is balancing this against what players probably want to be doing which is running dungeons...

I think part of the problem with modern gaming is that you've got two very different cohorts of people. One group wants to escape reality entirely and play the game as much as possible. They're going to be the ones doing all your high level content and maxing out all your builds as fast as possible. Also the ones who will be doing a bunch of online discourse and YouTube reviews, etc, which is essential for promotion. But then you've got the other group that wants to log on for an hour or two a week and do something exciting in the limited time they have.

MMOs are wildly biased towards the first group. But the second group is where folks with jobs and incomes and shit actually live.

I sort of think running dungeon dailies is a hyper repetitive task that people only "enjoy" because they're gaining progress points towards greater character strength.

Some of the most fun I had in WoW was in doing a dungeon for the first or second time. Because its new and the challenges are fresh and unexpected, it feels like I'm getting a new slice of content, even if the dungeon is five years old for everyone else. Grinding my level until I could do the next dungeon was a pain in the ass. But the allure of the next new adventure kept me going along... until my friends outpaced me and I had nobody except randoms to play with.

I think a game that takes advantage of transferable skills, rather than a discrete in-game numeric level, might be a good way to get around some of this. Something where you interact and play through adventures and learn about the Lore, then have to solve a Captcha tied to information in the game or solve a puzzle based on things you've already seen and done up till this point, could let people adventure at their own difficulty so to speak.

You see a bit of this in Counterstrike, where the hand-eye coordination you developed in other shooters transfers fairly neatly to this shooter. And playing this game refines your skills until you pick up the next shooter. Same with DOTA-style games, where the knowledge of the character class is the underpinning of the quality of the player more than the number of mobs you smashed over your career in the game.

For example let's say you go to the marketplace and you're there looking at the market boards, your character will indepently engage in conversation/actions while idle. Or just in passing out and about characters might greet one another, as you do in real life when you say good morning to a stranger in passing. These could affect social stats between characters, and could be influenced by the players in a roleplay kind of way. At the very least it could highly increase social interaction.

I like the idea of characters becoming active NPCs while players are logged out. Having a home in game and establishing some passively interactive activity creates a certain digital community without having people be online constantly. But I think it runs the risk of implementing features that keep drawing people back into the game, which some folks will find too obsessive and others too annoying.

Idk. I think there's a fundamental appeal to MMOs that's just not... great. Anything that's such a huge time sink, but whose benefits just kinda evaporate as soon as you log out, just feels fundamentally wrong to me now. Maybe its a silly feeling. All games are ultimately like that. But it just feels like a giant tease.

disgruntled Pokémon fans who are just happy for anything that isn’t the game freak formula

I gotta say, some of the most fun I've had with Pokemon has been with the Romhacks that Nintendo is constantly trying to quash and sue out of existence. Everything outside of that has been trash, practically since Red/Blue.

like virtually ever other ark/rust kind of game out there but idk maybe it’s kinda fun?

Its more cutesy, which I guess counts for something in a landscape full of "naked guy runs down a squirrel and guts it with his teeth for +1 food points" terminally gritty survival horror games.

people are saying

Sounds like a bunch of sales and marketing bots to me. I'm not in a rush to jump on this bandwagon, given the current state of gaming.

It has made me wonder recently what an mmo might look like if you removed the "gain exp from killing monsters in order to gain more power" mechanic.

A bit like a very population dense version of Journey, I imagine.

I think Ultima Online tried to do a system in which you gained ability through practice and it decayed over time. But because of the mechanics of gameplay, all this really amounted to was lots of bot-activity to boost abilities into the stratosphere.

Another approach I've seen is mini-games with variable difficulty based on the task you're attempting. So, opening a lock is a kind-of increasingly complex rubix cube exercise while casting a spell might require solving a Captcha or chemistry problem of varying difficulty. I like this better in theory, but I can see why it never got the traction of more traditional stat-based games in practice.

I think you do run into the fundamental problem of answering "What kind of game do you really want to play?" I've heard the Halo FPS combat system described as six-seconds-of-fun on a loop, for instance. Very engaging, lots of permutations on a theme as you change maps and available equipment. But not conducive to a particularly deep or story driven game.

On the flip side, you've got a very story-driven game like BG3 which still ultimately involves a lot of rat-smashing, but lets you advance at pace entirely by advancing the story. Bleed off even more of the combat and add more opportunities for social interaction, you might approach what's being described here. But there's also a certain "main character syndrome" in all of these animes that make them antithetical to an MMO. You can't have every player be Frieren, after all. They can't all be thousand-year-old mages on a 10 year pilgrimage with a big mystery origin story.

Frieren as an NPC set piece and guide stone could be very cool. But I think you can kinda get that already from Genshin Impact, if you just avoid the dungeons and stick to the plot.

I want to believe this is the case, but it's increasingly clear that the Israel government is trying for a genocide rather than any kind of military victory.

Like, haha, yes very cool that the IDF is constantly covering up its Ls on the front lines. But you've still got over 25k Palestinians dead combined with a hepatitis epidemic and rampant starvation in a population that's been forced into what amounts to an open air concentration camp. Small wonder they're resisting so fiercely. Small wonder we're seeing conflict break out all along the Israeli border, as sympathetic Arabs and insurgent Christians and Jews struggle to aid them.

But to say the Palestinians are "winning", you need to ignore the rapidly growing pile of bodies in Gaza. This continues to be a bloodbath, a nightmarish incineration of a primarily child-aged population, with the recognized end-game of fully eliminating the population in its entirety. Some mid-level anonymous official whining about how they can't dismantle an organization that's become a smear-label for any Palestinian alive and still resisting their extermination is just part and parcel with the genocidal rhetoric. When every living Gazan is counted as Hamas, these articles only exist to justify the role of Israeli storm troopers in butchering Palestinians wholesale.

Increasingly of the opinion that ground troops only exist to give enemy artillery something to shoot at

I can definitely see that. Although, there is a certain implication that some things have been lost over time.

Frieren's hobby of collecting niche spells and leveraging "village magic" to great effect, plus the commentary on declining numbers of wizards, and the brief call back to the Elven genocide of prior eras all allude to it.

The flowers episode describes something that is (almost) lost, while the episode at the port town looks at the quality of life being predicted on this steady maintenance without which the past is lost.

At some point, the focus of the story is around the mystery of what occurred in the prior age. And demons are necessarily a big part of that. So introducing them as minor antagonists in order to unspool the story works well.

The pace of the conflicts does drag though. The only thing worse than a Naruto-esque low stakes fight scene is one that feels like filler.

• Dropping out

'bout fucking time.

• Endorsing Trump

You coward. He'll never love you. He knows he's not your real dad.