save_vs_death [they/them]

Yeah, we’re reaching the leveling off of moore’s law.

Games always pushed the envelope. The video brings up the original Deus Ex, the MINIMAL requirements were 16Mb of VRAM. Back in the day, in the 2000s, the top of the line Voodoo4 had 32Mb of VRAM. That meant that if you ran Deus Ex, a game that I love to bits and that is butt ugly, on a budget card with 16Mb of VRAM, it would run at minimum settings across the board and a hope and a prayer. What’s more, memory comes in powers of 2, so you either had a 16 or a 32 card, kiss it goodbye if you had less. 25 years ago we were complaining about the same things this video is complaining about now, but I digress.

Of course a couple of years later, cards with more VRAM were less of a luxury and so it was something of a guarantee that you could, like clockwork, play every game that came out up to a year ago with a budget computer you put together today. Because hardware would get better at an ever increasing rate. What I think we’re seeing now is, hardware is plateauing and as such budget cards aren’t really punching above their weight with the help of time anymore. If you got a really good card before covid chances are you’re able to play most of the slop coming out on medium settings and only now, 8-10 years later will you be flatout unable to run games for missing specific shader features. That card might outdo present budget cards, still.

This is exacerbated by the hits the GPU industry has taken, first bitcoin, then covid, now AI, and the tariffs. Making GPUs that are good at running games just isn’t a priority like it used to be. Companies can make more money catering to other use cases. In fact, that’s why I think games are making more use of generated frames. Because even gaming cards will have these AI cores and the engine makers have a choice. Ignore the AI cores and run poorly because the card has less horsepower than a pre-AI one OR make use of the hardware the user has and figure out how to draw blood out of a stone.

Yeah Civ7 will never “get fixed”; a skeleton crew is not going to ship 2 banger DLCs to bring it up to par, hell the previous team barely shipped Civ7 as it is, and now they don’t even have that.

The writing was on the wall since Midnight Suns bombed and Civ7 was supposed to save the studio. Except management forced dev to dig their own graves by following up the fucking XCOM series with a forgettable marvelslop tactics game they didn’t even market. Sure Firaxis is down but not out but execs have a bad habit of going “Oh, are the sure we want to make another Civ game? That last one didn’t sell so well.”

ZA/UM is a husk, they kicked out all the original creatives, if it’s ran by the same estonian moneyman fraudster then i would temper my expectations; not saying it’s going to be guaranteed dogshit, just, you know

(I mean even the title sounds like someone asked AI to generate a title in the vein of “no truce with the furies”)

new call of duty looking great

the first one was an unmitigated cumshow (and not the fun kind) ready to be dissapointed by more milquetoast corrections in this one

Gen Z might be playing more video games than the previous cohorts. But because money triumphs eternal over everything, the population of a group doesn’t matter all that matters is how many dollars they represent. Also, lol, lmao, etc. at companies trying to bump games over the old $60 price point to $70 or $80 as if any of them were worth $60 to begin with.

oooooh mother
i can feel
the soil falling
over my heeeeeeeeaaaaaad

i dumped so much money into stellaris DLCs after the 3 rework of the base game i just about had it, i paid more than enough and then some for a complete video game, i’m going to get a complete video game

that’s the comedy of it all, until they get abandoned for the next game in the series, paradox games are never done, they’re essentially in early access

i’m sorry paradox can’t scam $1 more out of me, i’m pirating their shit on principle

imagine it calling it the switch 2 and not the dom

i think you’re right on the money and that’s what, i think, all the “why don’t the coomers just watch porno” conceptions miss; it’s not about them not being able to jerk off to a game they’d never play anyway, it’s the realisation that culture can exist without appealing to their sensibilities at all, that game makers can ignore them and do fine after all

that’s why their battlecry is “go woke, go broke” right, “you need us, you can’t ignore us” and that’s why they lose their shit when games do just fine without them and they have to uncover the blackrock soros DEI sweet baby bogeyman

yeah, spire does seem like the wet dream of “the urban campaign”; as time went by i came to value more the games that don’t suddenly pause to play a kinda mid combat miniatures game “in-between all the roleplaying”

as for stress, systems will often have some way of weighing the players down, to kind of ask them what’s important enough to them that they’re willing to take a gutpunch for it

funnily enough, i am interested in “getting back into GMing” which i have done only under duress years and years ago but kind of wanna start doing again

i’ve played a bit of “the heart” made by the same people, using the same system and largely compatible (from what i’ve heard) with “the spire” but that game is naturally a lot shorter (it’s concerned with what your character wants and finding it so after like 10 sessions, pcs started either dying or leaving the adventuring life behind

i heard about the spire but sadly never got around to playing it; what do you like about it? how “deep” are you in the TTRPG rabbit hole?

deeply enjoyed it but the cyberspace sections tried my patience in places, i wish i knew so i could have turned their difficulty down before starting the game

they did my girl so dirty

You’re greedy.

Yeah, I expect the thing I paid $70 for to keep working despite it being marginally inconvenient for the people that sold me that product. How selfish of me.

We’ll see how well you handle being taken to court after burning through all your cash, I’m sure you’d regret signing that petition.

Limited liability corporations are called that because their liability is limited by how much money they have, lmao. The accusation would simply lose their money, the court cannot force blood out of a stone. What are you talking about.

Or you get what you want and all you’ll get is a protocol the game […]

Or you can make server.exe (or god forbid, server.elf) runnable locally, like literally every other multiplayer game under the sun that allows public servers.

You better brush up on […]

I’m sorry overpaid consultants set you up for a scam infrastructure setup. That sounds like a skill issue.

and that game’s name? armored core 7

yeah, fair enough, that’s true

We had one of those minmax guys at a call of Cthulhu table once and the keeper grinned widely every time he tried to shoot at the unspeakable horrors. If anything being the big musclehead with a revolver did save our asses in some hot chases against mermen and when i was busy turning half my body into tentacles. By the end of it he was having fun too, and being a minmaxing asshole actually meant he was roleplaying his character. Just because combat isn’t the be-all and-all and can only solve minor problems when you deal with the eldritch. So when shooting was the answer he would have us covered and when it wasn’t he would just get us into trouble just like any good himbo would.

Having the guy specifically at the table, after some bad experiences with DnD really opened my eyes that you CAN actually make lemonade out of lemons if the rules themselves allow for it.

the “meta” has thoroughly fucked people’s brains, they’re minmaxing single player games now too