• 0 Posts
  • 167 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

    For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

    I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.




  • This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

    If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

    But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.





  • I actually doubt it. 30% of all of Hasbro’s revenue comes from WotC (I’ve heard higher than 50% before, but a quick Google says 30%). Of that I’ve heard people say as high as 90% of WotC’s income comes from Magic: The Gathering.

    Artists are paid a set rate, not commission for their art, but thousands of cards are purchased at very little cost to WotC. It’s a golden goose that is literally keeping Hasbro afloat, they’d be fools to touch the operations of MtG with a 10ft pole, nevermind replace it’s core with AI.


  • The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.

    In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.


  • I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.

    I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.


  • I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.

    Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.


  • The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.

    I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.


  • I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.

    It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.


  • I’m just really hoping that whatever they intend to use AI for isn’t art. Ideally there is enough backlash to this that they backpedal again for a year or so, but failing that, I do not want to see it touch the art at all.

    In my opinion, WotC is an art company. I don’t really see anything better in 2024 D&D 5e to what is expected in Tales of the Valiant 5e or is in Level up Advanced 5e, or for that matter, any RPG really. The only thing they excel on is the money behind them to have an entirely different relationship with artists. And that’s not mentioning Magic the Gathering which needs the art even more.

    There aren’t that many avenues for AI in D&D. You can’t really replace the game design due to the fact that AI can’t really problem solve or innovate. It’s already likely used internally by the finance departments etc, hell it’s built into Microsoft programs, it course it is used. It can’t really be sued to make the writing more efficient because the writing of a D&D book is sacred, you can’t change the word prone to lying down for readability for example.

    So it’s likely coming for art or WotC are returning to the idea of AI DMs, which is silly and I have no interest in, and I can’t imagine it being anything but a totally adjacent product to D&D.

    I can’t wait to see what evil and terrible way I’m proved wrong.





  • I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.

    I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.



  • Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.

    For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.

    If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10-11*9*1013)/75².

    That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.

    My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.