I wasn’t planning to get the game because of the 3 player thing but I already knew that… why are people buying it then getting mad about it? Is the steam store page just not clear enough about it? In which case, fair.

Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.

I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.

What… uh… I can’t imagine this movie being weird enough to feel like a movie based on a FROMSOFT game while still being accessible to the wide audience needed for a big budget fantasy movie to make money.

Why does it happen? Because the world is crazy and if nobody does anything about it then it starts to feel like you’re the crazy one. It also doesn’t help that there’s all this propaganda out there to make you feel that way.

But what do you do about it? Questioning your beliefs on a factual or analytical level is very useful. I don’t think I could have reached my current beliefs in the first place without that openness to new information and critical eye towards what I knew.

But I think the important thing is to separate that out from what you VALUE. What are the things which you care about independent of what the facts are? Do you value treating people kindly? Then it shouldn’t matter if it turned out that some other group was actually inferior. That shouldn’t change that core value. Now if you only value people based on how useful they are, then thinking that someone else was inferior would change how you treat them.

Thinking about my own beliefs and values, my political beliefs have changed a lot over the years, from vaguely American liberalism to some kind of communism, but my values haven’t changed. That’s because the values nominally espoused by the mythological American national identity are good ones. What’s not to like about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? Democracy sounds great!

But as I learned more about the world, it became more clear how America failed to live up to those values and more precisely, didn’t really hold those values, or at the very least had subtly different meanings of them that created wide gaps in how those values were acted on.

“Freedom” in America is something you can buy. The more money and power you have, the more free you are. And the freedom to use that power to exploit others consequently means you’re less free if you’re poor.

“Equality of opportunity” that is blind to historic inequality and power structures creates this illusion that everyone had a fair shot to succeed or fail and therefor “deserve” where they end up where in reality we never started on equal footing and where we end up is largely an accident of birth. Rich people aren’t necessarily better or harder working than poor people. People don’t actually get to keep the value of their work, it’s just not taken through taxes, but by capitalists in the form of profits. (Also, this is another values thing, but even if the assertions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity were true, I still don’t think a society with this level of poverty and inequality is an acceptable outcome even if people somehow ended up where they were through their own failures.)

Democracy in an unequal society where the rich can put their thumbs on the scale isn’t really democracy. Plus when you learn about the founding of that “democracy”, you learn how explicitly it was set up to favor those powerful few over the many. This is kind of one of the things that makes me feel crazy. I didn’t read about this on some obscure internet blog or commie book, literally everyone in the country learns about the founding in school and more or less learns its anti-democratic bend. It’s not hidden, it’s just that everyone kind of forgets it or doesn’t really internalize the way it relates to our experiences. Also, if we like democracy so much, why do we effectively suspend that democracy for half our waking lives when we go into work? Why shouldn’t people have a say in that? “Nobody’s forcing you to work” doesn’t really work when the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

I still want the ideal, I just recognize the ways I’ve been lied to by people who claim to share that ideal. And that’s where you have to be careful. Not everyone is honest about what they want. ( Sometimes even with themselves) There’s the saying on the left “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” because for some of these people, when you really confront their beliefs with evidence that contradicts it, instead of growing and changing, they just reveal their true colors. Some people who talk about equality while being racist aren’t just misinformed, they actually do believe in hierarchy and the concept of equality is merely a way to rationalize away the that hierarchy. Sometimes you show people how the US fails to be democratic and they reveal that they don’t even think democracy is good. That people are too stupid or evil to rule over themselves.

So yeah. Test your beliefs about the world, but the only way you have a metric to test them against is if you know what your values are in the first place.

Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.

Thanks for the detailed answer! It did turn out to be Lenovo’s software. Also I haven’t checked for killer Wi-Fi on this, but the gaming laptop I had 2 PCs ago did have that and we ended up having tons of Wi-Fi problems we were never able to fix. I guess that might be why.

I didn’t know windows doesn’t actually fully shut down. That’s confusing.

Thanks. I just tested this myself with another device and it seems to be working. I guess we’ll see if it’s fine with others later, but looks promising.

I couldn’t get through much of it either, but not because of the weird stuff, I like weird, the gameplay is just too… involved? Stressful? Exhausting? Like I’m ok with challenging games sometimes, but needing to spend a ton of time slowly trekking across fields and mountains while manually trying to keep your footing, managing a bunch of consumables, and occasionally needing to play walk through the ghost minefield with your baby detector while dealing with the rest of that is just not something I could keep up for as long as the game was going to go.

True to some extent, but I think there are limits to how enjoyable it can be to not even be able to find the puzzles in the first place. It also makes coming back to it super confusing.

I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.

It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.

I’m finding this funny/interesting. Because normally I think consumption boycotts don’t really work that well as a strategy since it takes a lot of people not buying the thing to affect big companies and big companies tend to have so many products people need that it can be hard for a lot of people to completely avoid them.

But Tesla is in a uniquely terrible position for withstanding such a boycott. They sell one big ticket product market substitutes and its success depends almost entirely on its brand. They’re status symbols. They’re virtue signals for climate consciousness. (without you know, actually supporting real solutions like mass transit) And before people noticed how much of a shitbag Musk was, they were associated with his cool Tony Stark tech persona.

Then Musk put himself into a position where anyone who was able to ignore his nonsense before definitely couldn’t now. So this company that was almost entirely dependent on people liking Musk enough to think the cars were cool now loses most of that market appeal.

I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.

If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.

Is this the work of the mysterious hacker 4 chan?

I hate that for a lot of these apps there’s no way to turn off these kinds of ad notifications without stopping the real notifications you want from the app.

I’ve been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don’t seem compatible.

Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you’re going out of your way to cheese things, you’re probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.

Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you’ve made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don’t get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you’re presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.

There’s no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that’s fundamentally different from PoE 1… they need to make THAT game. But that’s really far away from the game they’ve actually made and I don’t think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.

It’s almost like their support for these issues was never genuine to begin with.