Onemanarmyy

Third person RTS.

I'm talking about games like Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Dungeon Keeper (possession spell). Even Starcraft Ghost and C&C Renegade scratched a bit of that itch by existing in a world you know from it's RTS roots. Black & White was also somewhat adjacent to the genre eventhough you don't have direct control over the creature and that the RTS mechanics in B&W 1 are not all that fleshed out yet. Shoutout to Dark Cloud too.

I just like being able to build shit while being in the thick of it yourself and figured it was a solid enough hook that we'd see plenty of that in the future.

The difference is that Roald Dahl's antisemitism could be seen in a handful of interviews he did and that was pretty much the extent of learning about it. As far as i know, he wasn't actively pushing his views on a wide audience and he will be remembered as a writer of enjoyable children books.

Rowling seems to have defined her celeb-status from here on out as a very vocal anti-trans activist that wants to have a real impact on pushing her views through to society at this very moment. It would be one thing if she merely mentioned it once or twice in passing that she's not on board with the trans-community, but making it your main thing and putting the effort in to actually achieve something on that subject, at that point it becomes incredibly hard for me personally to seperate the art from the person that benefits from it and gets to use the boost in relevance to get a bigger megaphone on the marketplace.

@jacob3436:

the fact that the people choosing not to support it are trying to condemn anyone who disagrees with them

I've never been contacted by anyone about my game-choices as a random gamer. I could play Postal, Hatred, or those porn games on Steam without anyone targetting me. I'm undecided if i would ever buy Hogwarts (although i have wishlisted it at some point), but if i decide to do so, i'm 99,5% certain that i will not be condemned for it. Just like i'm not being condemned for still listening to Michael Jackson songs or The Smiths.

Yes, the internet always leads to side A vs side B, on pretty much every subject under the sun and you could probably dig up plenty of material of people being angry or mean or taking things too far. But there's not a real concern that buying Hogwarts will have a considerable negative impact on the player.

But for the love of god, the whole 'both sides are being mean on internet so you can not support either side!' in 2023 gives me a headache. It's not good to let your values be decided by random posters on twitter because every discussion has millions of people participate in it and that means that you'll always find some disagreeable posts.

At most, some people you might value might support you or be upset. Because there is a moral, personal quandry at the heart of this issue: Do you put quality entertainment you might have deep nostalgic feelings towards above the implicit support of an anti-trans activist? And that's a personal choice that everyone should make for themselves. But unlike Telltale games, in real life these decisions can be actually meaningful to the people around you. Just like the clothes you wear, the words you use and the activities you engage in will attract and repulse certain people.

@pudking: @pudking:

You have many concerns to voice.

The answer to both is: Perhaps, some will. Others won't.

Hopefully this has been illuminating.

@bigsocrates:

In the netherlands things are quite murky too.

Diablo Immortal didn't launch here and Dota2 shows you what the next lootbox will give you upfront.

But there's also the case of Fifa, which was deemed to pay €500,000 every week it continued to sell lootboxes in Ultimate Team, until they appealed it and the court decided that the lootboxes were not a game of chance, because the overall mode the lootboxes were a part of was a game of skill, and therefore it would not constitute gambling. Therefore the fine didn't have to be paid.

And with that ruling, there's a clear road for lootboxes to continue to exist in the Netherlands. Just make sure that the actual game it is tied to requires some sort of user input instead of it being a clash of numbers. I feel like Diablo Immortal could easily point to this ruling and be like 'our game requires skillful character building and enemy management. Better equipment will help out, but there's enough room for skillful play and plenty of healing to make it through encounters with worse equipment.'

@cikame: Yes i'm aware of that NOLF version. Especailly nolf2 is quite buggy and was quite hard to get working decently, but i did manage to complete both games and have a good time with it.

Whens NOLF?

As for Goldeneye, Timesplitters with all it's challenges would probably be a better play in 2023.

@thepanzini:

I guess i'm just surprised that

1. Whether this would be feasible wasn't studied by the company before sharing these lofty ambitions

2. If the company neglects this process, that no interview ever questioned whether Google would be able to directly steer their youtube audience towards their other service or if that was an unfair competitive advantage towards their competitors.

@thepanzini: But wasn't that something they themselves said they wanted to do?

Let's talk about YouTube integration.

Phil Harrison: Our platform engages deeply with the YouTube technology but actually, take a step back. Think of gaming today. There are really two discrete universes that co-exist. There are people who play games and there are people who watch games. There are 200m people watching games on YouTube every day. In 2018 there was 50bn hours of watch time of game content and you know, just unpack that mentally for a second in terms of what that means in years. It's insane in terms of time and population, and our vision for our platform is to converge those two worlds together so that you can be watching a game, click and be playing a game and vice-versa. It even goes down to what we call the platform.

......

So you could have a cascade of new users joining a particular instance just by sharing.

Phil Harrison: And then the YouTube creators, the people who create videos, VOD or livestream on YouTube are a central part of how we connect games with gamers. So you'll see how that works in practice, but at a fundamental level it's the future of multiplayer lobbies, where as a streamer, as a YouTube creator, I can bring people into my game in an instant from the fans and subscribers to my channel. And whether that's me and my 10 mates, or Matpat with millions and millions of subscribers, the technology is the same.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-google-stadia-phil-harrison-majd-bakar-interview

I'm surprised they never managed to get that youtube integration going. I expected them to at least have a bunch of games where every video of that game would come with a big button to instantly play the game on screen no matter what potato laptop you're using.

I've sat here without a competent GPU for a few years before, and Geforce Now was a good solution back then. I imagine a bunch of people around the globe would be amazed that they can play pretty-looking games on their 2012 laptop if only they had a completely barrier-less option to experience cloud-gaming instead of having to fully commit to a new streaming-only library. Getting a stadia button on the youtube pages could've been huge i reckon.