RE: the the theme of your game: when ME: Andromeda was in teaser mode after 2012 I wished for the game I just knew a creatively controlled Triple A couldn't make. An actual open ended, but narrative driven, colony simulator. Multiple options for coexisting with or exterminating native populations, with intriguing consequences. ME3 was a letdown, too, because they did not make branching narratives based off of player choices of previous game; think Witcher 2.
My dream game for 2 decades has been filling in the short comings of Elder Scrolls (3 and 4, actual emergent RPG mechanics) and Total War, and mixing their scales together. It's infeasible for one person to tackle all of that, but I have been working towards glaring deficits in the Total War formula.
One is tangible logistics. There's a blogpost somewhere on the web about the poor economic fundamentals of the series. There's also a lacking model of supply lines and terrain on the campaign maps. At best there are tabletop game tier abstractions and handwaves. Real warfare is centered around access to resources, which classic base building RTS sadly do better. Real world nations tend to form borders around natural terrain such as mountains and rivers. In the case of empires, ability to rapidly travel and communicate across a distance. Grand Strategy genre should explore this phenomenon. Not complacent developers thinking "funny, inconsequentially formed lines on the map after 200 turns!"
2nd is a robust application of social science into the philosophy and composition of groups. In the free expansion Empire Divided, there is a desperate need for a full system deciding if you can convert enemy Roman soldiers and cities over to your control. How many decades their culture has diverged, proximity/isolation, and your personal power are relevant reasons that the player can expand or reclaim territory. Then we have political factions; what makes someone a Julii or Populeres? Are they a family member or household retainer, a leading politician or disgruntled peasant to be swayed? Do factions merge in face of a common problem, then split when the enemy is conquered and the population pushes capacity?
These questions needing real answers every step of the campaign map game, not disconnected gimmick mini games. The data structures are so poorly architected that in Atilla/Charlemagne (I think Med2, too) when you marry off a daughter, that daughter is deleted and another woman is generated. This primitiveness does not allow convincing political intrigue to occur.
Again like with logistics, politics is a pillar of real warfare. Not single entity legendary lord with absurd numbers face tanks 5000 Saurus warriors complete with jank animations. My goal is to work out the right maths that can satisfy 'this German confederation has centuries of West Roman and other influences, fled the Huns through a dissolved Roman Empire to form a uniquely identified kingdom in Spain', or 'this crusader kingdom is recognizably White Catholic with native Semetic civilians, distinct from the Nubians who just got bussed 1000 km to be next door.
Edit: Economic threads from Reddit. If there's another blogpost, it's buried deep in Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/em3l26/victoria_2s_flawed_economic_model_and_the_good/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4bmf7m/lets_talk_about_ingame_economies_and_why_they/
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/9qymie/why_do_many_games_with_an_economy_miss_with/
The whole AI safety narrative is so patently two-faced, designed to make cutting edge technology unrestricted only to select elites. If governments really cared, they'd realize security through obscurity is a dysfunctional waste of time, in addition to understanding how primitive modern AI is. They'd cut off the indefinite financial incentive by mandating all meaningful commercial datasets and code be published under an appropriate GPL and/or CC license within 5 or 10 years under threat of severe penalties. Would tackle the data center issue too.
Note: I'd rather copyright and patent law be scaled back to make employees leaking assets unpunishable by governments. I'm just stating that it'd be a better sign if governments were doing the opposite of what they're currently doing. Make an attempt to allow citizens access to "dangerous" technologies so we can fix and adapt.
With something abstract like wealth and finance, a 1:1 graph is contextually misleading. To make the point simpler, lets ignore the top comment about debt and liquid wealth; it does strengthen the point. Someone with 100$ in their bank account is further from a $1.00 million account holder, than the 2nd person is from a $2.1 million account holder.
The 1st person is living paycheck to paycheck, if he's lucky. He's 3 unlucky events from having no transportation, no roof, no competent lawyer, not enough health insurance. The 2nd person has a decent house, and can comfortably retire for 3 decades with inflation resistant investments. The 3rd person has a nicer house or three, and has those inflation resistant investments as long as he's being rich instead of looking and feeling rich.
The basic economic concept that comes to mind is marginal utility. That $100,000 means a lot less to the 2nd and 3rd person than it does to the 1st person, even person 3 is literally $100k further from 2 than person 2 from 1. Some form of exponential/logarithmic scaling makes sense, because a 50/300/1000 billionaire is still much more consequential to society than a 4 millionaire.
And really, comprehending scarcity, opportunity cost (shoemaker's fallacy), and marginal utility should be requirements to vote in any modern civilization. Wouldn't pass because educated retards are allergic to the concept of scarcity being a universal, such as.
This is the same caliber PEMDAS abuse social media posts people like to prove how smart/dumb they are. The actual point of the originating exercises, that math notation has ad-hoc warts, is apparent if they did independent thinking or consumed higher quality/propensity information sources. There might be a poignant case about wealth inequality, but most halfwits aren't interested or capable of doing a comprehensive analysis of when and where inequality is the problem. Such competence is a requirement of a democracy not being dysfunctional.
Was that the start of Left-establishment activism overrunning the grassroots technologist communities? If one believes in anti-trust, there was an actual an actual case that Microsoft was making anticompetitive deals with hardware assemblers to shut out OS competitors. But anyone giving credibility to the argument that Microsoft shouldn't bundle a web browser with Windows is a retard (or scam-artist), including the few that were proficient at quantitative trading or improving C compiler optimizations. I'm not aware of any prior activism relevant to hobbyist/retail computing being retarded.
To the original topic, people should be looking for what is hindering competition with the giant retail corporations. An hefty antitrust lawsuit wouldn't fix artificial govt. costs of small business, or low expertise consumers being allergic to due diligence.
Nah, if we're going panic over porn, let's go after the actual issue; pathetic males spending over $20/yr on onlyfans, or other porn. Should be ostracized straight out of law abiding cities. They're not victims, they're chronic participants and enablers of decaying civilization.
I'm not some EU loving Asmomslop bro, but what they tried is still leagues better than what various states recently passed. Handing data straight to corporations as mandated by state is really a continuation of 20th century pseudo fascism.
And I'll repeat, every right-winger here and elsewhere imploring the states that passed adult-website age-verification are part of the problem. Any principled conservative is in favor of reducing federal/state overreach to where such legislation is toothless.
It's astounding how the modern feminized cults gloss over the actual wisdom presented in the pagan/heterodox mythologies being revived. In the general Gnostic traditions, Sophia isn't a villain neither is she an exemplar of flawless virtue. It's an atrocious apropritaion when progressive Christian churches idolize the feminine aspects of Gnosticism and strip away any nuance from Christian orthodoxy or esoteric cynicism in the process.
I think the tangible, contemporary parallel isn't modern feminists, but deep knowledge unleashed without superhuman constraint. Nuclear science, or fiat currency. Sophia dangerously delved into the nature of what came before, and resulted in the material world. An admirable goal, compromised by imperfect execution.
I thought the spin on the American Psycho soundbyte was evident enough. I should have went further with an Orwellian template like "diversity is unity, corporate slavery is abundance). Really, anyone unironically downplaying the relevance of scarcity deserves to have a lifetime suspension of voting rights.
Just... cool it with the Malthusian remarks. Scarcity is a lie, abundance is law.
The dumbest, most persistent argument against the death penalty has been cost. All that means is that abolition shoves the lack of judicial fairness under the rug.
Enough normies were digging season 8 (Arya slay, Queen!) before the consensus told them not to. Regular film enjoyers saw the declining quality of writing season 5 onward. Actual fantasy diehards noticed the sudden absence of terrain and logistics, some inconsistent family loyalties, neglect of the magic and mystery of the show. And, Samwell's actor making the most LCD joke on late-night interview about him not losing weight North of the wall because dragons exist ROFL ecks dee! Normies accepting consequence free magic deserve a deportation to Haiti (resort enclave doesn't count).
It had justification when consoles had custom architectures, and pushing other innovations. The last innovations were the 360/ps3 and Switch. Consoles were actually different in capability from each other during the 80s and 90s. They also had a different capabilities than a PCs, which started converging when 3dfx and Nvidia came around.
Meh, brats just grow a huge sense of entitlement when doing anything considered noble, or working in the service industry. Character building is fake and gay.
When put that way, euthanasia isn't dignified. If one feels that they've been so wronged by society (or other reasons) that living isn't worth, needing society's validation or permission is the ultimate insult.
Industries wide standards of over hiring aside, they can fuck right off for taking Chinese investment and tainting the PC storefront with third-party exclusives. This is steeply contrasted with Valve's embrace of supporting open-source drivers/libraries/APIs. Sustainably, too.
Vanguard of mobile gaming? From a passionate, not business standpoint, why hasn't the Infinity Blade series been patched and ported? It's rare karma that this exploitative pivot is stalled. IIRC, Epic has published and funded some woke flops too, but I can't be assed right now to check.
Not as severe as Unity, Unreal Engine has still dropped dropped code quality and architecture standards in pursuit of premature feature release with UE5. I don't care that they swindled non-developer suits with their marketing of UE5, I care that they didn't strive to make John Carmack proud with keeping their code maintainable. An aside: I do think technologies like lumen and nanite have potential value in increasing productivity per artist. Both Epic and clients are responsible for misuse of that technology for unoptimized slop.
I'm still hopeful that UE5/6 Haskell inspired scripting language goes somewhere, but I haven't checked in years. I'm more interested in some open-source engine like Redot or Bevy reaching critical mass. Or some dream catalyst of a concurrent/parallel-first lisp Renaissance, including dev tools and next-gen game emgine.
This category of game typically has a heap of cut content. The civil war/thalmor stuff would require the full team (when it was intact) for too long, instead of working on FO4 then Starfield, and almost definitely would break too much.
Maybe they could have back ported FO4 settlements (haven't played yet, I need to see if there's a SkyRe tier overhaul), but it would have to be a gimmicky DLC, or a rererelease of the game.
TESV getting as much post release support as it did for a finished triple-A single player is outside the norm. I wish more studios had substantial, no strings attached, post-launch support, but most corporations aren't set up that way. It would help if the mainstream retail software/games market understood the benefits of open-sourcing, or products being maintainable in general (inb4 right to repair and other compromised activism).
I do think all the Elder Scrolls should be remade by a passionate studio. This series (and other sci-fi/fantasy universes) is a perfect case for why copyright should last 10-25 years at publication. The Cyrodil and Skyrim provinces being ass butchered to chase accessibility, familiarity, and contemporary trends is a travesty we're effectively stuck with. Both had existing lore that if respected would have been as fresh and unique as Morrowind.
I noticed the same thing when some Google engineers "cleaned up" the YouTube comments section. The algo detects patterns matching those of previous safe, fun, simple comments and promotes similar on high traffic videos. Whole bunch of sterile, agreeable memes.
I never played the original trilogy, but a presume that art style morphed into Halo CE. If current Bungie wasn't hijacked, they'd apply the bright neon colors and shapes over an OG Halo base, and gameplay wise just make a single player game. Then, a Bungie-era Halo multiplayer suite, with a Reach level forge.
Nope. All these triple-A studios and publishers are copying venture capital math. 19 expensive failures to justify 1 big success. And that's the successful investment firms, a majority fail or will fail. 18 modest successes are not allowed, because c-suite blowhards care not for industry specifics, only chasing their cohort (upper middle-class finance types).
It's mostly normies, the ones that just upload albums of their kids to social media without instinctual caution. They just take their prescription of fluoride and high fructose corn syrup when the man urges them to.
Engines and game designs still need a ton of work, in terms of quality over quantity. A spiritual successor to daggerfall/morrowind with better AI, branching stories that surpass Witcher 2, and a realistically proportioned landscape and NPC count. Counting BC2 as it's own well executed spinoff, battlefields after bf2/2042 and classic battlefront 2 are streamlined embarrassments of superficial resemblance. Add Total War as a franchise that just didn't advance after 2007. I want newer games that push the limits of classic designs, and serious engine/tooling work that enables that.
I say that the underlying tech stack is a bigger issue. [1] provides a simple explanation that somehow eludes most settings of pedestrian computing discussions; reddit r computers is an example. The underlying architecture of hardware is inefficient for legacy reasons. This applies to any production OS in use today.
That we expect (unconsciously as most consumers have basic tech literacy) video card companies to bake 1000s of specialized patches into their drivers, corresponding to individual game releases, is an insane exercise of short term engineering hacks that complicate long term stability, compatibility, and portability. Dedicated gamers would rather throw millions at failed kickstarters than understand John Carmack's old push for open-sourceing games after a set timeframe.
How about a neo Greco-Roman federation instead? Take over the Sahara desert too, and bioengineer a place to humanely deport all manner of scum and leeches of the modern West.
Video games are about interactivity and constraint/challenge. New games and remakes rarely push innovative ways to interact with world objects, compelling symbolic AI advancements(i.e. what we used to call AI or NPCs in games, not machine learning, LLMs, etc relating to chatgpt), or sophisticated resource management. Sony slop is the opposite, quick time events, cutscenes, on rails experiences that have no replay value. Or live-service mental poison and exploitation of low intrinsic value. And remakes are targeting that new age crowd that buys millions in Sony and ubislop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Nazi_Germany
That page doesn't even attempt to hide it's non neutral POV.
I've said it enough times, the right wing libertarians need to rebrand and separate from the centrists(i.e. weakly principled) and leftists. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Heinlein, Ron Paul and some others were less retarded and came to libertarianism as a practical solution to the dangers of rabid authoritarianism.
Hoppe in particular stated the principle of estoppel, in which someone who does not respect and threatens freedom of X shall not reap the benefits of X. There's that Frank Herbert quote about subversive, destructive elements conveniently exploiting the other group's principled nature against them.
That and whether minarchist or anarcho-capitalist, only those that believe in many borders are resonant with private property. Maybe an interstate within a nation so people can reach their community without being extorted by a feudal lord along the way.
Reminds me of how Ayn Rand voted for FDR for his first term, before he turned out to be hostile to free enterprise.
Pulling up http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html and https://www.hoover.org/research/mr-market (Friedman still knew that central banking was bad in the first place), I conclude that Greenspan was marginally less bad than other elites would have been in Greenspan's held positions of office. Ron is still right, Greenspan should have resigned decades prior and acknowledged unresolvable conflicts of interest.