Frank

Given all the shit going now with anti-trans state repression I figure this run might be worth doing a little electoralism for. Mere representation isn't worth much on it's own so I was hoping to get some info from folks about who Maebe is and whether she's worth throwing some money at.

I'll do some research too and share anything I come up with.

Also, is Maebe nb? The E-mail I got from her is a little unclear but she appears to be nb and use She/Her. If that's not right please let me know.

:finland-cool:

Since Finland is embracing it's ~~facsist~~ brave anti-communist history

:judge-kamala:

Volcel4lyfe

:yass-marx:

The point, however is to yassify it

:volcel-judy:

:hextank for the hextankies

:horrible-goose:

A friend is showing me all his cool starfield stuff and I kind of just feel bad for him. A lot of systems seem really stripped down even compared to Fallout 4. It doesn't seem like you can, for instance, lay down foundations and build whatever building you want in whatever shape you want like you could with Fallout's extremely janky settlement system. You have to plop down various NASA white habitat modules and you're limited by how those modules click together. I'm not clear on whether you can layout rooms and workstations within the hab modules and at this point I'm a little afraid to ask.

The armor system in fallout where you had a clothing layer and could then add customizable armor on top of the clothing layer seems to be gone. In FO4 you could have separate armor pieces for your chest, for each arm, for each leg, plus helmets and a few other things. All the pieces could be modded with different appearances and perks. No it looks like you're down to a set of clothing and a space suit with very limited customization options.

Combat just looks appalling bad. Beth has never had good combat, but it looks like for Starfield they tuned the combat AI down to the point where it reacts very, very slowly and doesn't do much beyond stand there and and wait to be shot. I assume this is to compensate for the removal of VATS, which is another inexplicably absent system. VATS was notable in FO3 and FO4 for making the game much more accessible to people who didn't play FPS games and I cannot fathom why it was removed.

The spaceship builder is okay, but it looks very limited in what it can do. Most of the ships end up looking very samey since they're snapped together out of modules. You're not getting anything with a single smooth external hull, nor do you have freedom to define the shape of the rooms inside the pressure vessel. There may be some large interior space modules I haven't run in to yet. Personally I think the "Nasapunk" clean-room aesthetic conflicts with the space opera story framework. It works in kerbal because the space ships behave like space ships, but it looks weird when the space ships operate on space opera rules. Like instead of having the ship vertically oriented for launch to orbit it takes off with VTOL thrusters and then flies away like a plane despite really not being a space plane. When star wars, which runs entirely on bullshit space opera, does it it doesn't bother me because it's consistent with the aesthetic. But having a ship that sorta-kinda is trying to look realistically doing star-wars stuff is a big jarring.

It also suffers from millennium falcon syndrome. You can only control one ship at a time, and "control" is doing a lot of work when all you can really do is point the nose around in a very limited space combat minigame, so your ship has to be able to do everything- cargo, combat, whatever. You can't deploy fighters or call for backup in a space fight, which has been frustrating a few people i know as they get in to space combat but their ship isn't built properly for it. Space combat also looks very basic. You're not going to be doing anything fancy with drone weapons, newtonian maneuvers, or turrets. You kind of just point your nose at the enemy and hold down the fire button until one of you explodes. It's like a stripped down version of X-wing vs Tie Fighter.

Apparently there no space walk/EVA. Which... Why? Why? Why wouldn't you make that a thing?

Bethesda's innability or unwillingness to learn, innovate or really do anything new in very frustrating. I doubt this will make sense to most people, but I've spent so many hundreds of hours under the hood of these games fixing problems, fleshing out anemic systems, and so forth, it feels very disappointing to see that Beth has yet again shipped a bunch of very shallow systems without much complexity or depth.

And who am I to make these criticisms? The last version of a mod I contributed too long ago has had 400,000 downloads since 2016, is who I am. A very minor contribution, but I've been in the guts of these games almost as long as Todd has. And while the mod community has grown and done incredible things Beth keeps shipping stripped down, disappointing messes. I view Beth's games as a process where Beth releases a problem and then the modding community has to fix it, over and over again, and every so often Todd tries to destroy the whole relationship by monetizing modding. without the bullshit of IP and profit motive, if Beth's games could truly be a collaborative community process with open source code, Bethesda probably would have been forced out of the process a long time ago for causing more problems than they solve. The simple fact that the script extenders have to be re-built from scratch for each game and then arduously maintained when they're constantly broken by updates, even after all these years, is extremely frustrating. Beth could just... integrate the script extensions natively instead of making the community hack them back together every time, but they don't. It's rude.

Beth games are an excellent example of how art, creatively, and inventiveness are stifled by property laws and IP.

About an hour in to the mission I discovered that Nazis are actually kinda dumb and you don't really have to be very careful at medium difficulty.

Also, i don't understand why there are non-lethal options in this game, but I suspect there may be liberalism afoot.

I should note - If I did knock a Nazi out I specifically went back and shot them in the head. Those ten guys were accidents. Would have gotten them if I could.

Space games these days! Won't let you navigate interplanetary space. One let you make your own jump calculations for FTL. It's shameful!

Independence War is a space combat simulator first released in 1998. It was and remains almost unique in attempting a detailed simulation of open space combat that doesn't heavily rely on space opera tropes, WWII dogfighting, or simplified arcade combat. You've got Newtonian flight, two different FTL drives, ships that sustain damage to internal systems and can be repaired by repair crews in real time. It's extremely cool and extremely old. This play through is silent and uses a cleaned up version of the game played in HD resolutions. Worth a watch if you're in to that kind of thing.

Starfield's art direction is painfully boring. I've ben watching friends play. It looks like a totally soulless, characterless distillation of every forgettable science fiction movie in the last 30 years. It sure does look NASA, and NASA doesn't have an artistic vision, they just slap shit together in whatever way won't explode. The menus, the costumes, the weapons, even the planets, just look painfully generic. Like congrats, Todd, you successfully executed the NASA part alright. There's no way you could have made more intensely bland, vague, inoffensive rendition of space. There's no "punk" anywhere to be seen, though.

: p

I can't believe they made this shit instead of TES Six. It's like every 2010s space show that got cancelled half way through the first season.

So, in Darktide enemies all have fixed HP based on difficulty level. Which makes breakpoints extremely important. ie, does it take one shot, two shots, or three shots to kill this trash mob? How many charged plasgun shots does it take to drop this giant armored Ogryn? Weapons have a bunch of stats that determine their performance, and as you level a weapon up it'll get some perks and damage buffs. But the perks, at least, are semi-random. You can have a weapon with perfect stats and bad perks and buffs. You can change the perks and buffs, but only two out of four total. And you can only change the perks to other perks you've unlocked by sacrificing a weapon that has them.

So, you need to get blessed by RNJesus to get the perks that are good. Then you need to sacrifice the weapon so you can put it on another weapon with good stats. Then you need to actually get that weapon with good stats, and level it up, and hope that at least two perks/buffs are good so you can replace the other two.

And all this requires resources that you have to collect by playing the game.

The result is it takes ages to level up weapons assuming you get good rolls.

And it all sucks. I just want to play the higher level content, but that's contingent on getting weapons that can hit important breakpoints. When you're getting swarmed by a hundred unhinged covid deniers the difference between killing in one hit or killing in two or three is life and death. You can do it with less than perfect weapons if you have a good team, but I mostly play with randos so the team quality is in the hands of fate. And even with a good team and perfect weapons it's hard and it's easy to get wiped in seconds if you get hit by the wrong combination of enemies, or someone gets thrown off a ledge by an explosion, or two people get incapacitated at the same time, or you get flanked by flame throwers from two direction, or a billion other things.

If the game was just designed to be balanced so the weapons had predictable performance and you could choose what buffs you wanted from a list you could just... play the damn game. Instead everything has to have RNG and crafting and random loot drops and blah blah blah I yearn for the days when weapons had no attachments and the devs could actually balance the stupid things because no one had invented the idea of manipulating people to make the games addictive.