Picture him in his trophy room, basking in his own imagined glory, mentally masturbating himself over the senseless killing of a completely innocent creature.

Nah, I’m good.

I was actually thinking places like Humble, or often times I just go straight to the publisher or Dev, since they keep 100% of their profit that way and often offer a discount.

I have never used G2A, nor any site that redistributes keys in that manner.

But in the month it took you to respond, I already read up on this, and honestly you exaggerated your claims to the extent that I’m not really interested in asking your opinion anymore anyway. Your hate boner kinda showed through.

So I guess… uh… thanks for following up anyway and have a good one!

I’m sure there are folks who fall under that umbrella. But I was more responding in the context of this specific comment thread.

Per the article you posted (interesting read BTW!)

With digital hoarding, however, the act of saving the file becomes an uncontrollable urge.

“It means that they’ve lost the choice — they feel they have to save it. If they do not, they may feel uncomfortable and, more often than not, anxious that they may need to have access to the information and it’s not going to be there,” he says.

I’m not sure “picking up some games you might want to play when they are on an extremely good sale” qualifies as Digital Hoarding, per the definition.

I think they get a bad wrap due to how frequently they are used as a crutch to scale up content quantity without quality. Which isn’t an unfair opinion to have given the fact that this is the case more often than not.

But at the end of the day ProcGen is a design tool like any other that, when in the hands of a passionate team using it with intent and creativity, can be an effective way to bring elements of surprise/randomness/chaos and/or remove tedious work from development to allow for more time to handcraft content where it can best be utilized.

Some games that show off how it can be an effective tool (not all specifically ProcGen Dungeons), Dwarf Fortress, Noita, Caves of Qud, Minecraft, Elite Dangerous, Deep Rock Galactic, a lot of 4x games (Civ, HoMM3, etc), also a lot of indie rougelike/lites (Rougle Legacy, Splunky, FTL, etc)

The important part, imho, is that the developers are investing the time to make it “good”. Either by treating it like a core design mechanic with it’s own unique/engaging qualities, or by treating it like a “quick rough draft” and going back to curate and hand craft quality content on top of it.

I’ll take “broad questions that can only be answered in context” for $200 Alex.

Seriously, ask me this question on 10 different days in 10 different ways and I’ll never give the same answer.

Even in the context of your vanilla perfume hypothetical I don’t have enough information to answer. How severe a reaction, what percentage of the population is affected, where is the perfume wearer at the time, why hasn’t it been banned and/or what makes me an expert who’s opinion is worth a damn, etc etc etc?

From what little info I have on the hypothetical (either directly stated or assumed via omission), no, I wouldn’t be upset. I didn’t see anyone being harmed, the perfume wearer wasn’t doing anything illegal, I am personally unbothered by the perfume, and I’ve got my own shit to deal with.

Eta: To make this more clear, I am an ex smoker, who fully agrees that bans on smoking in public areas make sense, but am in no way personally bothered by cigarettes. I also think smoking is more apropos to the question than a mystery perfume, as the harm of smoking and 2nd hand smoke is well established.

If you are smoking on a crowded street, I’ll be upset. But in an alleyway to get away from the crowded street, good on ya, you did what you could.

Smoking near children, get fucked. Smoking while walking home from the pub when only other pub goers are around, you do you. Context is key.

“Your honor, I may have run over that family while I was driving very, very drunk. But as my gambling addiction shows, I am a child, and therefore can not be tried as an adult! I rest my case!”

Honestly, the washed up remains of GamerGate have been crying over nothing burgers involving the Nexus so often that I can’t take any of these fears seriously anymore.

The site has to comply with laws, oh the humanity!

It’s actually refreshing to see so many people supporting TotK—that’s not always the common opinion.

Honestly, both games have a lot to offer, and they’re both spectacular in their own right. But given your concerns about time, I’d actually recommend BotW. Both games are designed in a way that lets you “play at your own pace” and then wrap up the main quest whenever you feel like it—or not.

But TotK takes that concept to another level. There’s so much more to explore, the mechanics offer an incredible variety of possibilities and skill expression, and if you’re planning to dive into a game for months, TotK is definitely the one to go for. The game constantly encourages you to think, “What if I tried it this way?” or “Would this crazy idea even work?” And you can easily lose yourself for hours trying out different things, which is a ton of fun!

That said, this also means TotK can feel more “padded,” which is saying something since BotW already had its fair share of “filler content”. But frankly a lot of TotK’s content is just there to give you more opportunities to play around with the sandboxy elements.

And while these new mechanics give you fresh ways to approach the game, their freedom also opens the game up to repetitive strategies and exploits that can become tempting to use just to “get through” a puzzle anytime you get stuck for longer than you find fun. Which can start to happen more and more the longer you play.

Frankly, TotK is the kind of game I wish I had when I was 12 on summer break. But as an adult with limited time, it just makes me wish I had more time, much more. It’s kind of like Minecraft in that way.

BotW has similar issues, but to a much lesser extent. It’s a more focused game with fewer opportunities to “cheese” puzzles, and it doesn’t have as much content purely designed for messing around with mechanics. Most of BotW is made up of puzzles, events, or dungeons that you can complete in one go, giving you a satisfying sense of progress in a shorter time.

“Here at Zohran Grocers, we’re chopping prices down to size! Don’t lose your heads over these great deals!”

Was gonna say, I was playing Morrowind earlier today.

Hell, every time Bethesda releases a game, I know it wont be two weeks until Im going back to Morrowind.

Your point more or less comes up a lot in discussions around Lord of the Rings compared to modern fantasy novels. There are a lot of people who, while they can appreciate what it did for the genre, find the novels dated and feel like they have seen the ideas too many times and/or done better elsewhere.

Though on the flip side, I personally find sometimes it just takes a few hours to “see past the age”. For example, I was introduced to Fallout by 3. The show made me want to try the originals, and after a few hours of struggling through the ui and dated graphics, it started to “click”. Now the original only competes with NV in my list of favorite Fallout games. Have a friend who had basically the same experience with the original KOTOR.

As someone who loves FFX, the change in map layout from previous games was a huge hurdle to get past for me as well. The maps were so linear that I often wondered why they even included a minimap. It felt like a sick joke.

That mixed with the loss of roaming a world map really made the game feel less “like an adventure” to me.

Now it definitely made up for it in other ways, the presentation, characters, mechanics, and quantity of enjoyable side content really carried the game to be one of my favorites. But those damn maps…

Wait, not trying to be a “cultist” here, but if Valve requires devs/publishers to “offer Steam Keys on other stores at the same price that you offer the game on Steam”, then why do I keep finding Steam Keys much much cheaper elsewhere? Like, all the time…

Tim Sweeny! Is that you!?

Counterpoint: Evo Moment #37

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Micro$oft is more than happy to let companies pay to use their terrible OS for purposes they never built it for. But the question still stands as to why any of these companies continue to try and shove Windows into a use case that was never even a consideration when it was designed.

Like, if I had a really terrible hammer, and started trying to use it as a saw… I wouldn’t blame the hammer’s inherent terribleness at it’s intended job for why it failed.

Some folks don’t care about having the ‘‘unpradictability of human players’’. Or at the very least don’t think that benefit makes up for the downsides of an always online game, such as always having to have an internet connection, server downtime, lag, the pricing models that pay for those servers, game modes that require you to interact with other players, etc.

I like multiplayer games, and I like single player games, I like couch co-op, and pvp, mmo’s, and fighting games, but I think it’s about having the right tool for the job.

But online multiplayer games that are spin offs or sequels to single player games have a well deserved bad reputation. Due to the numerous instances where the motivation wasn’t to make the game better, but instead to force the more profitable monitary models that online multiplayer games allow for. Fallout 76 stands out as a prime example.

It’s not always a bad change mind you, sometimes it really adds a lot to the game… like… uhhhh… er… Ultima Online? Im sure there are other examples too.

So maybe you can take that stick out of your ass and let folks enjoy what they like? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Can speak to this slightly. I tried to get their app to run via Wine, and it did not work just “plug and play” at least. Tried to find a guide or some alternative option. After about 15 min of searching, I decided that “eh, it works great out of the box” and started using easy effects for an EQ instead.

I own a pair of these. Depending on the game, they add a lot of value to my Steamdeck. But for everyday computing, they are actually very impractical.