Poggervania

Regarding your point on not being able to be matched up against blocked players:

This is not healthy for a game with matchmaking to allow players direct control over its matching system like this. In a PvP game this would especially be a problem, but it has problems in PvE games as well. In this situation, meta players would just block other non-meta players, effectively lowering the matching pool to two different queues in a single large pool. In this scenario, it would be more efficient for the matchmaking system to just have two separated queues, which brings me to the next point.

I would argue the opposite. Vermintide 2 employs this exact thing and it’s been working pretty well - it actually does punish people who get blocked a lot by other people, and if you’re being blocked by a ton of people, there’s probably more than just “skill issue” and “you’re not running meta” going on. You do get sweaty people who block non-sweaty people, yeah, but it’s not hampering the community of the game in the slightest - and that game is waaaaaay smaller in size than something like Helldivers where you can get blocked by a ton of people and still play with other people due to the sheer size of the playerbase.

Nah, DDG is arguably worse than Google now with their search results - I just ended up going back to Google after a couple of years of using DDG.

What did she say?

Picking my nose, then eating the booger.

I am in my 30s.

Don’t forget that the main protagonist will somehow be with a goddess of some sort who inevitably falls in love with him, alongside his totally not 12-year-old waifu and his waifu with big humongous honkers (that’s her entire personality).

I really wished we got more stuff like Andor, Rogue One, and Knights of The Old Republic II that explore more of the universe outside of “here’s a bunch of themed planets with wacky CGI aliens”.

Andor and Rogue One are really good at showing what it’s like to actually be a Rebel and live in a universe being dictated by an empire, while KOTOR 2 was a really cool look at the metanarrative of the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force as a whole.

I would say I started having to think about my age after I was 25 or so, so I would say that’s normal. The only ones I don’t think about are the decade ones since those are easy enough to calculate lol

iirc these are the guys working on the Knights of the Old Republic remake, right? Good news for that project if that’s the case, and good news for Saber in general!

the harm caused by this software was “manifest and irreparable.”

Except it’s arguably not, because it’s not like the 1 million copies of the game was stolen and could not be sold anymore. The game is still available for sale, and it is still making them money - all people did was pirate a single copy of the game 1 million times.

Also, if they sold 20.8 million units, and assuming every single instance of pirating was done by people who did not buy the game (read: lots of people bought a legal copy and “pirated” it anyways for better performance on Yuzu), they lost out on 5% revenue as of this time of writing.

Very sad Nintendo couldn’t sell another $60 million worth of games /s

Love how the courts are framing this. “ROMs are illegal software.” “Emulators are for playing pirated software.”

Ngl I kinda want them to use this logic and see what happens when they try to apply it to Nintendo’s own Virtual Console, which are emulators playing ROMs basically.

Hell, the games you can play in Animal Crossing are literal emulators with ROMs since they found iNES data in the headers.

I live in a VHCOL area, and I can tell you both the McChicken and the McDouble are around $3 where I live. Also, please tell me what kind of satisfying meal you can make with a lettuce and a potato that you can stretch for more than 5 meals, because I’d very much like to hear your idea of a meal based on those two ingredients alone. Hell, tell me any satisfying meal you can make for $5 that can stretch for 5 meals - and don’t just go “bUy ThE fIvE dOlLaR cHiCkEn”, because that requires a membership for either Sam’s Club or Costco, both of which are expensive to afford when you’re earning peanuts.

McDonald’s does sell sodas for $1, but there are actual food items that are on their $3/$2/$1 menu.

if you were eating Fast food regularly, you were better off financially than you thought

Wow, so being able to afford a McDouble or a McChicken on the regular means I’m well off? Despite the fact that it is absolutely more expensive to buy ingredients for dinner??

If we’re saying you’re buying $20+ meals every time you eat, then yeah, you are better off - but most of the time, people eat fast food because it is absolutely cheaper and easier to do than it is to buy ingredients to make meals with. If all you have is $5 to your name because you can barely afford rent and expenses, are you gonna go buy a head of lettuce and a potato for the whole $5, or are you gonna go to McDonalds and be able to eat 5 meals for $1 per meal?

Vermintide 2 and Tekken 8.

Both games have high skill ceilings, so I could probably spend years (and have) playing both and still finding ways to improve or optimize gameplay.

Last time I’ll respond to you since it seems you’re a Bethesda fanboy - or at least a very ardent defender.

I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.

Then why did Beth go out of their way to include mod support for consoles for Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as announce mod support for console versions of Starfield? Plus people were clamoring for mods on console versions of their games even going back as far as Morrowind - but their games back then were more complete, so you are correct in that more people were okay with not having mods because at least the games were decent enough.

Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.

During 2006? Yeah, you’re correct - but interesting you’re bringing up Oblivion instead of Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and even Starfield. Y’know, the games that have been pretty devoid of any worthwhile vanilla content.

Two things: 1) You’re making it sound like swapping engines is incredibly easy (it’s not, and you have to train staff on how to utilize it from the ground up and that can take a while), and 2) you’re probably right on why they keep using CE, and the sad reality is that Bethesda absolutely intentionally designs uncooked barebones games because they realized they can just have the fandom make actual interesting content, or QoL changes. They also know that Creation Gamebryo Engine does limit them a lot to what they can do, but rather than going through the cost and time of changing over engines, they just let the fandom create the script extenders that are available for literally every single game of theirs since Morrowind so modders can literally do things the base game can’t let them do.

So this is more of a case where the craftsman has shoddy tools, but they don’t care because they’ll churn out a piece-of-crap and have their audience improve it for them for free. And then the craftsman will have the gall to try and get a cut of the audience’s work somehow.

Funnily enough, what you said is pretty close to what happened in canon. The Emperor at the time (I forget who it was, probably Tiber Spetim) had a legitimate methaphysically-powered Gundam/EVA unit and used it to basically terraform the jungles of Cyrodill into what we see in Oblivion

So he basically modded Cyrodill with the power of Numidium.

Actually, you can argue that they are still limited by what the engine can do - which, in turn, means it affects game design due to the fact they might want to implement an idea, but either they would need a hacky way to do it (like trains in Fallout 3 being a fucking equippable hat with an NPC running underneath the map, which is probably why their Fallout games don’t have drivable vehicles) or simply cannot due to technical limitations of the engine.

This is like saying a good wood carver can still be good if they have shoddy tools, when the reality is that a good craftsman is only limited by the quality of tools they have. If I can’t fully realize my wood carving because my knife is too blunt and do the best I could with what I have for an inferior design, is that my fault or the tool’s fault?

Hot Take(?): Nintendo should stop making consoles and just allow their games on Steam since the Steam Deck is basically what the Switch wishes it could be

Bruh, TES games are button mashers if anything. Dark Souls and any other related games has got TES games beat by lightyears in that department.

TES lore, on the other hand, is just as interesting as Dark Souls lore for different reasons - mainly how wacky and weird the stuff Kirkbride wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion, like the fact gameplay mechanics like saving and loading, console commands, and even mods are legitimately canon thanks to CHIM, or the factoid that Pelinal Whitestrake might have been a time-travelling gay cyborg depending on how you interpret his descriptions. And who can forget that Vivec, a living god, has a spear that is implied to be the penis of Molag Bal after Vivec gave him a blowjob and bit his dick off. Then you got shit with Lorkhan, the Dreamsleeve, and of course Talos being 3 different people at the same time.

Also the Netherlands is still very much capitalistic while having much more protections for their citizens.

This isn’t a blanket “capitalism bad”, it’s the fact we allowed our country to be bought out by capitalism.