Why is it always that leaders are the most stupid?
Category Archives: Clownshoes
WoW in 2024 (avoid)
If you really have to, play FF14. Between WoW and FF14 the first is the better game by a very wide margin. Even at a basic, technical level it is a whole tier above. But where WoW main problem has been a terrible mismanagement that made the game in its worst shape and hamstrung its potential, FF14 is at its best and all its content can be enjoyed fully (with a little effort required to the player to juggle some things counter intuitively, but still largely accessible and possible).
WoW is a game that has lost everything, that is the jumbled mess you expect from an old game, that was delivered to the hands of developers less and less inspired, less daring, and less competent. It’s on a constant, sheer downhill, and it’s simply unplayable even if you tried hard while gaslighting yourself in thinking it’s actually interesting and fun. All content is unbalanced, all systems are contradictory and overlapping. It’s like a tabletop sum of rules after an earthquake. No one ever cared to set them right and organize them orderly, they just kept tossing random shit in. (And as it happens in these cases, it’s enough knowing what’s wrong to easily fix. Fixing WoW would be REALLY easy in practice. Whereas pushing FF14 past its limit would be several magnitutes more complex.)
WoW is a fat, misshapen, rich slob that now can’t even move a step without opening an ulcer. It only wails in despair to please have mercy. FF14 is (was) a lean youth with few talents and nowhere to go, but that really tried hard, never stopping reaching, and only now starting to get a little tired.
The conclusion is that despite the significant potential within WoW, the resulting mess isn’t even comparable to FF14, that, despite its major restraints, still delivers a coherent game in all its parts.
What’s here below is just three separate comments (not me) from a forum, like old times.
But fun it is not.
Enjoy the short term cheap reward coming from easily exploited novelty, and the long term failure. Giants die slowly, but die nonetheless.
EDIT: I’m adding this a month+ after I wrote the above. There’s some actual good design, here and there. As long you accept “World of Warcraft” being solely the content of the last expansion, and everything before just an hard disk tax you have to pay. The small island of content that is the last expansion has some merits to it. We’ll see if it’s enough of a World (of Warcraft) to be sustainable. The playable surface of the game keeps shrinking in order to survive. At some point players will fall right off the edge.
The Reality of the Simple Minded
Here we are again, I swear this is the last.
Using Elon to prop up the argument, but he isn’t the target in this case.
Of course he’s using this as yet another political leverage. This time it’s slightly less questionable since it’s a topic worth of discussion. But as it happens with everything worth discussing, then the quality of the discussion matters.
This is about the case of Imane Khelif at the Olympics. Elon obviously “opposes this”, as most Republicans, the important part is to define what is exactly that is being opposed and why.
Here’s the argument is “men don’t belong in women’s sport.” That’s the slogan, let’s see what’s behind it. This image obviously depicts a woman. She’s not Imane, she’s instead the italian athlete who lost to her and rose the whole controversy. So, just to put things in a simpler way, the thesis is that Imane Khelif is a “man”, therefore she should be disqualified. We are at the level of pure analysis here, no opinions involved.
…Well. I agree? This is wrong. There must be something wrong, obviously, since that headline is quite absurd “Male boxer declared winner in women’s boxing match.”
In this case Elon is just grooming as always and only expressing disconcert, so he isn’t actually openly lying about some fact.
A quick trip in the comments of course lets you take a nice sniff of the cesspit:
And so on across all comments.
Dudes… She ISN’T trans. He isn’t trans, whatever. This simply isn’t a person who’s born in a way and transitioned A to B. It’s just plain false and it takes 10 seconds to verify. I don’t call Elon Musk out here because he didn’t directly make the false claim.
She’s just not trans, it’s not an opinion.
So what’s the matter? This is a born woman who produces high testosterone levels. Naturally. Do you want to make rules against this? Okay, but that’s what the discussion is about then. Do you want to “tweak” the definition of what a “woman” is? Okay, it’s just a word. But in the case of transgender issues it’s quite obvious that right-wing parties are adamant about what one is born with. Are you born with a dick? You’re a man. Are you born with a vagina? You’re a woman. This is what most Republicans would agree with. Ok?
This athlete who you are now criticizing, is born with a vagina.
So, if you now want to turn around the story into “this is a man”, then you at least need to provide a different definition of what a man is. Because apparently being born with a vagina isn’t sufficient anymore to be considered a woman.
Again, the problem with these idiots isn’t that they have different opinions, but that they are so stupid that they will eventually contradict themselves. The reality of the world will always smash against their ugly faces: you just need to be patient and wait. It’s never about two parties fighting, it’s not about opinions. It’s just about fighting reality because you are a dumb, arrogant idiot.
Do you want to change rules in sport? Okay, these rules need to be at least rational, so that it’s possible to apply them in practice. If your definition of what man and woman are is ambiguous and contradictory, then you aren’t going anywhere. Kamala notwithstanding.
So do you want to change rules? Ok, how?
Should have Michael Phelps been disqualified because his body was conformed in a way that gave him physical advantage? Should NBA players be disqualified when they go past a certain height, so to keep a more even field for everyone else?
Sports, in general, is the domain of the exceptional. We celebrate world records, not better averages. We celebrate exceptions, natural talents honed through hard work. We remember winners, not losers.
So, in a realm where exception and exceptionalism are celebrated, how do you define a “norm”? You can of course, it’s an open debate. There’s also the fact that these events exist to make money, so you want to enhance that exceptionalism.
I propose that we measure the testosterone of ALL women athletes, then configure a point system so that the performance is then multiplied by a factor set by those testosterone levels. It’s an actual proposal. It would probably create a more even playing field. But is it reasonable? Of course not. If you turn sport into accurate science you end up essentially with a mathematical equation. Even in the case this would be possible, it doesn’t make for interesting, fun spectacle to watch.
So what do you want, exactly?
That person is not trans. Definitely not a “man” either, unless gender is now solely determined by hormone levels. Hello, medication then allows you to switch genders, is this what you want? It’s an actually complex matter, can’t be solved with a convenient slogan.
I’ll just be here, observing. Laughing again when reality eventually comes and smashes all the teeth off your face.
Welcome to reality, loser.
Always funny when it becomes an infight. Enjoy your racism.
EDIT: There’s some actual complexity coming out of this. To be correct I’ll report everything known up to this point.
The discussion is moving from the false accusation of being transgender, to having XY chromosome. Yet another yardstick, I guess. But does this have some basis?
Yes and no. The fact that it is all unconfirmed and currently impossible to prove one way or the other. I’ll post the relevant excerpts:
Who’s Umar Kremlev? …Wellll
Another nice guy, although this isn’t a “proof”, especially if you share certain views. The actual public facts are these:
That was the russian-2023 case, the current one, though, is still somewhat ambiguous:
Whatever you opinion is, the facts here indicate that “having YX” chromosomes is an accusation that hasn’t been proven at this time. One way or another. It’s still up to debate if this can be yet another rule to use to determine whether someone can participate or not. As I said, it’s a legitimate debate, and a legitimate choice.
Summary: she is not transgender. She naturally producer higher testosterone levels. It’s currently unknown whether or not she has XY chromosomes due to the confidential nature of the tests.
EDIT 2: I started saying this wasn’t targeting Elon Musk specifically, since he didn’t directly share explicitly false claims… But wait long enough and he ends up openly endorsing even the blatant fake news part:
Zero integrity, if there ever was a doubt.
The Woke Mind Virus
I guess Elon Musk’s brainrot has now gone too far, beyond any hope of recovery.
Is defamation part of free speech, now?
We can start from something breezy, as he says:
Who could disagree with “what is FAIR and RIGHT”?
I guess it is fair and right to despise diversity you don’t like. And note that “blasphemous” is there for a reason. There’s a religious undercurrent to all of this. Isn’t it wonderful?
While feverishly shitposting, Elon Musk got to this. The Olympics are now a target of right-wing zealots, this is in the news. What I don’t expect to be in the news is the actual defamation:
Continuing right below:
Note again the undercurrent: “occult opening ceremony” in the first post, and “demonic” in the second. Why? Because of the rabbit hole of conspiracies that Elon Musk intends to groom.
If you check the timestamps of these posts you’ll see that they weren’t written during the ceremony, they only started to appear afterwards, after the machine of propaganda was set in motion. Elon Musk got the cues and jumped on board for the ride.
At this point one usually gives the benefit of the doubt. Some people might have seen those images and thought it was actually a dude with his balls out in front of kids, right? RIGHT?
Yet the video, if you go look it up, is so blurry that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t purposefully done so to create the illusion for something that could be otherwise debunked in two seconds. The other static images that are used as “proof” are even harder to take seriously, because you really do need to have a deranged mind to think the dude has “his junk out”, rather than a tear in his stockings.
But my point here is different. I jumped to conclusions without even opening the video, and without even looking the other images. For me, Occam’s Razor here was simply enough to reach a reasonable conclusion WITHOUT any other evidence, until proven otherwise. Just think about it. Do you think it PLAUSIBLE that an official performer at the Olympics took his dick out in front of some kids, and to be broadcasted across the whole world during the opening ceremony? Just like that?
And do you think any of these idiots retweeting this shit in outrage, a day after it happened, cared to verify? Verify for what? It was already evident, no need to spend 5 minutes to actually find a different angle that would easily debunk the whole thing. Do we REALLY need further proof to realize that this dude INDEED did not take out his dick in front of everyone?
But isn’t it funny? Aren’t you LAUGHING? Isn’t it all a meme, defamation and everything included?
Do we hand wave it away like another funny meme?
Of course this is actually illegal as it is serious defamation. But do you think anything will come out of this?
Obviously not. If you scroll back up, you’ll notice that Elon Musk wrote his message ending with a question mark. He often uses this strategy of leading questions so that the public he grooms will complete it, while leaving the door open to claim innocence for himself.
He just asked a question. It’s just the internet. It’s all a funny meme. Haha, have you no sense of humor?
Do you think anyone rectified the misinformation that was broadcasted all over the place? Do you think anyone apologized? Do you think it would even matter?
Mission accomplished. Reinforcing biases is always the goal of propaganda.
Have you seen season 4 of The Boys? Well, if you haven’t then you aren’t missing anything worthwhile. If you did, then you probably remember that little bit in episode 2 about “Truthcon.” What’s incredible for me isn’t that what we see in fiction is now an accurate description rather than an exaggeration. But that we have embraced it all. This is our world and we simply embraced it all without any reaction. We’ve all been brainwashed to accept the worst, and just answer with a fatalistic shrug.
It’s alright. There’s nothing to worry about.
Sources, if they continue to exist:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817273263761817710
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817159524505067860
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1816967522622587246
https://x.com/OCanonist/status/1816985039890157925
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817250700780335139
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817251824744751296
https://x.com/EvaFoxU/status/1817251337081434538
https://x.com/EvanAKilgore/status/1817200244104253708
Predictably, they are still grooming on one side, and turning it into an HILARIOUS meme on the other: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817299858962698379
Meanwhile, the grooming and mocking continues.
Meanwhile (2), he’s reposting this.
Quite the headline to make the intended impression, right? Maybe that timestamp in the article should give an hint, but of course most people see that and think it’s something new.
If you look up the actual article (at least it’s true), you realize it’s about the case of Helmut Kentler, who died 16 years ago, and referring to a fact “in the late 1960s.”
But let’s have some convenient outrage now.
Meanwhile (3), Elon Musk posted a deepfake “ad” of Kamala Harris. Without specifying it was indeed deepfake and parody. A look at the comments indicates lots of idiots fell for it, and obviously Elon Musk uses this conscientiously… Meaning that he knows and exploits these effects, like the opportunist he is.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1816974609637417112
Notice that “parody” isn’t shown anywhere. If you retweet this, the part at the bottom where it says “from Mr Reagan” also disappears.
When defending from this, Elon Musk didn’t link his own original message, but the original that was clearly marked as PARODY:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817775398047937009
That Elon Musk is an hypocrite and an opportunist shouldn’t shock anyone:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589390597798125568
When he was the target, he quickly reacted, of course. Do you think he’ll now permanently suspend himself?
It’s obvious here that it’s not the nature of that original post, the problem. Absolutely not. The problem is solely the absence of the flag as parody. As he himself said. Note that in his original post he didn’t simply retweet the post, otherwise he would have preserved the message stating it was parody. What he did, instead, was to EMBED the video, so that the original message would be completely hidden. The intent is obvious. The first message with “parody” hidden away, has 129 million views, the one correctly flagged as parody instead only 12.3 million views.
Has he apologized for removing the flag? Of course not.
On the other hand, lets be clear. Gavin Newsom post is also all wrong. “Manipulating a voice in an “ad” like this one should be illegal.” No, you idiot. It only needs to be clearly marked as parody. Deliberate propaganda that is EASILY proven false should be illegal. Like the stuff I described here above. Stop wasting time on the useless while what matters is given a free pass.
The image itself is completely idiotic either:
“The origin of the video isn’t known yet.”
What?! It’s a repost from a different message. There’s a link right below. The origin doesn’t fucking matter, these things are everywhere. It’s the DELIBERATE USE of disinformation the problem. And here it’s all about Elon Musk HIDING the message indicating it was parody, not the existence of the video. That’s all.
Meanwhile (4), and I’m going to stop here because it gets boring, more actual defamation:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817946408126665049
But what gets my attention here is how Elon would expect to solve this. The latest outrage is all about California and schools hiding stuff about kids from their parents. As if this is a government taking kids away from the rightful authority of their families.
So lets assume here what Elon says, and that Megan Fox is abusing her children. So who’s going to prevent this crime? If the state can’t do anything because parents of these kids have the utmost priority, and Megan Fox is the legitimate parent of these kids, what is this “child abuse” based on? Who decides?
That’s the funny thing about Elon. He’s such an opportunist that you can just wait long enough (usually days, if not hours), that he ends up contradicting himself:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1813786437172748575
I guess Elon Musk has more authority over someone else’s kids, enough to defame Megan Fox calling her child abuser?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1813941222463217866
…So who’s in charge in the case of child abuse, if not the state? What happens when parents abuse their kids but the state can’t intervene to break the parent-child relationship?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1814049253502632185
So who are you to have a say on Megan Fox kids, huh?
The best the “left” can do for humanity, is to go extinct
I guess I have to start by saying that I’ve been a “leftist” all my life, and while I completely abandoned the position as an ideology, and only judge things in practice, my views haven’t changed at all. And they haven’t changed now. So that title there looks like a contradiction, yes, so I’ll explain why here.
I’m tired as an observer about this endless fight and division into two factions. I only see humanity, and it’s about time that we face the consequences of our choices. I usually see things from a much higher level, for me politics are just one layer of human culture and evolution, of a species as a whole. But lets leave all this part about grander statements and lets focus on the more practical. I think it’s obvious that, world-wide (and post-Covid) there has been a rising tide of right-wing political power. There are obviously exceptions (like the UK, but due to effects of post-Brexit), but I see these as local events that don’t have lasting effects on the greater tide. I see this kind of change as inevitable. And, to be honest, I also see a pattern being followed very similar to the rise of fascism in Europe.
It doesn’t matter if its true fascism, if it’s close, or if it’s just a rhetorical argument to demonize what’s happening, what matters is an undeniable, progressive cultural hegemony of the right, that has probably started its rise before Covid, but was greatly accelerated by it. As I said other times, Covid didn’t change anything, it wasn’t a turning point. It only accelerated patterns (in the economy, culture, and everything else) that were already being enacted. We see things happening sooner, but not different things happening.
For all these reasons, this isn’t a “war”. This isn’t a fight. This isn’t a struggle between left and right, or good versus evil. We are all together in this, we are all part of the same wave. No matter the internal struggles and little battles, the overall tide is unchanged. It can be delayed, but it can’t be averted. And at the point we’re at, I’m not even sure a delay helps anything.
I do believe, after what I’ve observed through the years, that what we consider the “left”, worldwide, is either an hollow hunk, or a sock-puppet moved by the right for its own agenda. A convenient, animated straw man. All the left does in practice these days is either aping the right, or provide alibi. All the Republican strength and rhetoric exists because they have an enemy. All the propaganda, fake news and all that shit is effective because there’s a left that provides a target. The function of the left is to either delay the inevitable, or just add confusion. It’s like riding a bike with training wheels: it’s time to either go or crash. Can’t keep dragging forever and getting sunk in the “lesser bad”.
I am a pessimist, so I don’t believe there’s an happy way out. But I’m also a realist, and I’m perfectly conscious that I don’t have all the pieces, and I don’t know the outcome. When it comes to real threats like climate change, what the scientists don’t tell you is that we are already way, way, WAY too late. Sure, it’s not all the same, and a minuscule shift in the trajectory can save some millions of lives. But what Covid should have taught you, is that those who die are left behind and quickly forgotten. The world is made by who survives. Those lives lost cease to be perceived. What we are deep down: sugar-coating machines that constantly remove trauma from perception. We live in denial within self-serving artificial worlds.
This process we belong to as humanity can’t be faced as a struggle between two parties. It’s just one whole. And it’s about time that humanity, as a whole, faces the outcome. And takes responsibility.
The only way out of it, whether extinction or improvement, happens still from within. Those Republican idiots drunk on propaganda need to wake up. It’s not about control, it’s not about the supremacy of a group over another. They need to have the power to make their choices, so that the stage is clear of all the smoke. Once they stop having an enemy to blame their frustrations on they will see the reality of what’s around and what they’ve brought upon themselves. They need to crash into reality. And reality is blind and deaf to propaganda and rhetoric.
(though, of course, Republicans being as dumb as they are, would rather pray than fix anything, and in the end blame god as the cause of their woes)
Accelerate, go against the wall at full speed.
We all need to crash into reality, and hope to survive the process.
Yes. Let them win.
Destiny 2: minor lessons in game design
Old style posts! In 2021!
Today Bungie released a sort of manifesto detailing their ever moving plans for Destiny 2:
https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/50124
The main feature is the removal of “sunsetting”, a truly awful solution to a problem that the previous game director forcefully pushed, despite it was obvious from the very beginning that it would fail.
Since the explanation is terse and straightforward, why not commenting it.
Destiny is a loot-based game where weapons and armor you acquire can be leveled up to the current cap. Therefore every item is virtually always viable, as long you keep upgrading it.
This created a “power creep” because in order to make players chase new loot, devs had to make that loot more appealing by making it more powerful. Giving players incentive to leave their former stuff behind and adopt the newer stuff. Because new = better (more powerful).
The consequence of that is that something powerful arrived, and then had to be eventually nerfed, in order to fight that power creep and make the game once again balanced.
“Sunsetting” was meant to solve that situation and avoid the powercreep. It works by creating a smaller, curated loot pool, by giving all loot a fixed expiration date. It means that new loot that is added doesn’t need to directly compete with old loot, because old root is pulled out. New stuff in, old stuff out. Not being there, it doesn’t create competition with the newer stuff, so the newer stuff doesn’t need to be more powerful in order to be more appealing.
(This is what they want players to believe. The truth is that curating a small loot pool requires less work than a giant loot pool, and Bungie has serious production issues and is looking for ways to cut costs.)
Why did it fail, and it was obvious it would, without the need to test it?
Because it’s all smoke and mirrors without any substance. What the model DOES, instead of what bullshit story it tries to make you believe, is making players go through hamster wheels. Like all progression systems that aren’t built around content.
Look at this scheme:
– Before-sunsetting > the player goes through the hamster wheel because there’s a tasty reward at the end (a more powerful weapon).
– With sunsetting > the player is pushed through the hamster wheel, to PAY BACK A DEBT.
It is not surprising that the feedback loop where you pay a debt feels worse than the one where you are rewarded.
That’s really all there is.
Removing your current weapons, so that you are forced to obtain new ones, and so avoiding competition between old and new, doesn’t fix ANYTHING AT ALL. It’s a solution to the effect instead of the cause. It’s very clearly silly and misguided. A blind, partial point of view driven by convenience. Incomplete analysis leading to broken solutions. Trump’s way of being, to make an obvious example: saying things that are convenient, BELIEVING they are true. The true mark of an egomaniac (and that can always be verified, since they always lack motivation and proof, when you dig, like in this case).
As I said, all progression systems work like that. The difference is that they are usually a part of a bigger system. They are built around content. A progression system by itself is a pointless hamster wheel, even when it’s a well designed one. Destiny is a game with a severe lack of content, so the best solution is to maximize what is there, give it value. Bungie chose the opposite, employing the standard MMO technique of mudflation: removing the relevance of old content. Yet it works for MMOs when there’s content to offer, and it fails for Bungie because they cannot produce enough. In this scenario, “mudflating” the little content they have equals shooting themselves in the foot. Emphasizing hamster wheels, rather than content, and then pushing players through them by creating debts, only damages the ecosystem further. Until the game is left to bled out.
Game design isn’t politics. You cannot bullshit players through sleight of hand of a carefully worded a blog post. If your game design is full of rhetorical bullshit it just won’t pass the test of reality.
In the world we’re imagining, we’ll have space at the top end to create powerful Legendary weapons. Legendaries that are just better than other items in the classification. We’ll be able to do that, because the design space for weapons will expand and contract over time. Items will enter the ecosystem, be able to be infused for some number of Seasons and beyond that, their power won’t be able to be raised. Our hope is that instead of having to account for a weapon’s viability forever when we create one, it can be easier to let something powerful exist in the ecosystem. And those potent weapons entering the ecosystem mean there’s more fun items to pursue.
Legendaries that are just better than other items [because the other better items are gone].
Better not because they are better, but because there’s nothing to compare them to. Sleight of hand.
Rhetoric.
Bullshit.
The end of Black Desert Online
Black Desert Online was the only survivor of the classic, sandbox-y core concept of MMORPG. Even its existence was singular, and it’s curious that the game that got closer to that ideal was a Korean-made game, since that ideal was born and developed (and then killed) in the West. Now it is going to be corrected.
Pearl Abyss, the company that develops BDO in Korea, and that ironically bought Eve-Online recently, announced a sequel-inspired new MMO titled “Crimson Desert.” Players have already noticed that in the past year development on BDO slowed dramatically, an obvious sign that developers resources are being moved to new projects (PA announced more than one new game).
And it’s more than irony that Crimson Desert is built on the basis of what they learned from BDO, and they decided to develop Crimson Desert… as a single-player game shoved clumsily into a MMORPG.
Doing more things, all of them poorly (nothing in a single-player game benefits from a MMORPG, nothing in a MMORPG benefits from single-player, they are antithetic in pure game design).
—
So, the reason why these days the mmorpg genre is in the shape you all can see is that it FAILED. These days we can see that the most successful are those with a very conservative design, like Destiny and similar structured games, where only the general context is shared and there’s nothing “massive” going on.
The genre died because it faced significant technical and design problems, and the industry as a whole eventually embraced the path it always embraced historically: the one of least resistance.
The reason for this is that a mmorpg is the most complex game software you can make. It’s the culmination. And for these reasons making a mmorpg COSTS A LOT. Maximum costs are then matched with maximum risks, exactly because there are plenty of things that can go wrong and make you ambitious project (and invested money) collapse into nothing.
Maximum costs + maximum risks = lots of failures in so many years. Eventually all game companies decided to take the easy, safer road. The easy road was making copies of World of Warcraft, and for many, many years that’s all we got. Simply going for that recipe made by others that was proven successful. WoW that itself was rather conservative and very simple in its design. And yet none of those thousands of copycats even got half as good as WoW. Because they were just that, pale imitations without insight or competence. Even “copying” is an art that requires skill, diligence, study, at least a little bit of passion for what you are closely observing to steal its secrets. And those were instead just greedy attempts at stealing some golden eggs that WoW left unattended, since its hoard was so immense.
The mmorpg industry as a whole fed on WoW’s scraps. Like hyenas.
Crimson Desert comes from the same philosophy of trying to copy those paths of least resistance. In this case the lure of a simpler, more directed single-player experience whose recipe appears so much easier to get. It’s a mmorpg that goes to copy the proven recipe, the safe success. The path of least resistance.
That’s why it’s not a mmorpg, even if it will eventually use the genre to excuse its shortcomings. You don’t make mmorpg sequels because mmorpgs exist as if they are gardens, organic environments, alive, that need to be taken care of with dedication and devotion, and then slowly grow and improve. It’s a long journey of hard work and learning, that the developer has to do hand in hand with the player, and that is the very opposite from the ivory tower of superiority and privilege where most developers in leading positions prefer to live in. If you instead destroy everything every few years, you end up with nothing, because things take time and dedication to grow properly (and these games simply aren’t very suitable for an industry that devours and wastes).
We can go all the way back to Tolkien, who also tried to build a world, and still is today the most successful attempt. Tolkien spent all his life building and precisely refining his world. He never restarted from scratch every time he decided that he learned a valuable lesson.
The mmorpg “industry” is dead because it failed. We now have a former, consolidated game industry that “adopts” some mmorpg-light concepts and integrates them into classic games. The carcass of mmorpg has been torn apart and scattered. It is unlikely it will show up whole again. It’s done. It’s dead.
Back to mmorpgs, we continue to see mmorpg-sequels solely because mmorpgs are still being built as linear games. And the industry still today prefers to copy the conservative recipes. Even BDO, as a clumsy attempt of trying a sandbox, is now being sacrificed to go back to the recipe of tacked on single player linear game. And that’s why, being greedy and jealous of what other companies do better, they’ll end up loosing what they had, and obtain nothing else either.
Maybe this time PA isn’t copying WoW, it’s copying The Witcher. The result is just the same. Wait and see.
Wow, that’s smart
I was scrolling through tweets and then couldn’t not notice this one comment below. I was there gawking because it’s truly amazing:
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/1103679009043464195
1st, logic:
if the top 10 “influencers” aren’t featuring your indie game because they are featuring Fortnite, then who are you ‘bye-ing’ to? They did that to you, that’s the problem the article is supposedly bringing up.
They DON’T WANT your game.
Influencers aren’t charities whose job is to help a struggling indie developer. They are caught in the same cynical machine where they need the money to justify their work. And they have to build and please their public, otherwise they’re done. But then, I (maybe wrongly) assume that the tweet is so full with spite that you probably don’t consider that a legitimate “job.” That would be curious, because you can then easily find other groups of people that likely won’t consider *yours* a serious “job.” So that would be at least hypocritical, but also presumptuous on my side, since it’s just an interpretation of what was written in that tweet.
But what I find irritating in that tweet is that implicit self-assigned role as a spokesperson. She’s inciting other developers to rebel from the tyranny of these influences. A call for independence from these pathetic kids who get paid for playing games, so speculating on work done by others, and then even betraying the indie hand that gave them their status. That’s of course the rhetoric.
It’s because it’s an emphatic “we” that the message is political in the WORST way. And that’s also why games in general are being flooded by politics. Not real, deep political meaning, that absolutely belongs to gaming as every other field, since politics is important and pervasive, but its worst part that already infects the main political field: shallow rhetoric, meant to be abrasive toward some out-group, while grooming for consensus.
That one message is filled with resentment and rhetoric. It tries to rile the public and find consensus from its side. It’s purely leverage, tactics, posture.
Because what are you gonna do?
Those top 10 influencers don’t care about your game. Buh-bye. Go cry somewhere else.
Let’s say instead there’s a top-80 one that actually asks you the game. He does want to feature your game, and he might still have some significant numbers to give your $10 game a not so irrelevant publicity. But nope. You said fuck them, right? Burn those bridges out of immature resentment.
Who cares, right? You aren’t the “we” who do make games and live or die by the success of that endeavor. You are the “you” who profits on riling the public through rhetoric and pretends to teach how it’s done. You are posturing. A (pretend) Pied Piper of the indie industry that drives them to drown, and then comes back to get paid.
We have on one side the big AAA publishers who administer their business so that only who’s obsequious is allowed review copies. Tending their garden through an elegant blackmailing practice. And how are indie developers instructed to behave? *Exactly the same*.
Oh, that will surely work so well.
It’s so disingenuous.
Bethesda’s game engine is, indeed, shit
With the release of the terrible Fallout 76 come the cyclical complaints about how terrible and ancient is the game engine Bethesda uses.
Some guy who thinks he has a better insight ended up writing this:
https://kotaku.com/the-controversy-over-bethesdas-game-engine-is-misguided-1830435351
This is what I wrote on a forum:
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This is funny because, very obviously, Jason Schreier doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he’s way too dumb to realize it.
A “game engine”, as used in discussions in forums and articles, IS NOT A PIECE OF TECH. Nor it is a “collection”, as he says.
A game engine is a heuristic. It’s a term in language that works like an umbrella and that encompasses the overall “look and feel” of playing a game. *Playing* it, not building it.
Of course the look of Morrowind or Oblivion doesn’t PRECISELY correspond to the look of Skyrim or Fallout, but the analogies and the general feel are absolutely there. You could make an experiment and let someone play a Bethesda game without knowing it’s Bethesda and he’ll know, if he’s competent, within minutes. And certainly not because that game would be very complex.
If an engine is an engine, then it provides a structure. No matter how much you WRESTLE it, the structure is a structure and by being structure it imposes itself and will create limits.
No matter how many times Bethesda explains how they rewrote everything in their engine, PLAYING those games will always reveal the truth. And the truth is that they are too scared to abandon the pipeline they used until this point because they cannot afford to wipe everything clean and restart from zero. Because IT IS indeed an engine, and they don’t want to discard it.
For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot. The game uses a new renderer, a new lighting system and a new system for the landscape generation.
And yet it’s the same shit, as glaringly obvious to anyone who played even for 5 minutes. All Jason Schreier says falls apart right there because it is PROVEN by playing the game and realizing how the “””engine””” is still the same.
What Jason Schreier says is only vaguely correct in the sense that “engine” is not a word used precisely in this context. But it’s only a discussion on the specific use and meaning of that word, and it doesn’t even remotely touch the actual discussion that takes place when players criticize this “engine”.
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Ship of Theseus. It’s basically a new engine. I hate that word.
Ship of Theseus is how to nail the philosophical problem yet without understanding it.
The Ship of Theseus means you are different, not that you can become anything. Of course Bethesda’s games have greatly changed, since Morrowind. Yet they still cannot shake from those roots.
Even when you replaced all the parts, the way you have replaced them influences the outcome. It’s not freeform.
In the same way, the moment all your hair cells get entirely replaced doesn’t correspond to the moment you get blue or purple hair. The “engine” is still the same.
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EDIT: This slightly blew up on twitter. But who am I to NOT go down the rabbit hole?
– when people refer to Bethesda’s game engine in the discussions they refer to the feel that links all their games, and that has its root in the underlying tech. That’s why it’s a heuristic. I perfectly underlined it’s a semantic problem.
My car’s engine is a heuristic for the smell of petrol, the screeching of tires, the warm leather seats, the gamers in the back seat screaming ‘are we there yet’.
– more or less, yes. More accurately your words are heuristics, as is all human language and representations. Jason wanted to use technical language, I used neuroscience. It’s a semantic problem.
– in fact, your car’s engine isn’t a heuristic. But your “car’s engine” is. Metalinguistics are the sixth function of language according to Jakobson and reason why we can talk about language with language.
I appreciate this from an academic standpoint, but if you tell your mechanic that they didn’t fix your engine and you actually mean the seat warmers are still too hot, they’re going to say you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.
– yes, context. That’s why all this was spawned from an article that decontextualized the way the term “game engine” was used. Players don’t see code, they see output. So they blame a “game engine” because it’s their heuristic to link experience to tech.
– when someone “feels” Fallout 76 uses the same engine of Oblivion they are observing a heuristic of a link they cannot analyze in detail. Because they lack the precision of vision and information. Hence a heuristic is used.
– so when a player speaks or writes it can only be about the experience and not about the tech. Even if the center of the message is the existence of that link between experience and tech. Because they aren’t independent.
– Funnily, it’s not “academic”. It’s a dualistic problem like mind/body separation. Here it’s tech/feel, engine and experience. We see two things where there’s only one thing. They are one and the same. The tech is what generates experience. There’s no experience without tech the same as there’s no consciousness without a brain.
– It’s as if I say “my hand hurts”, and you, doctor, tell me, “Nope, your brain hurts. Pain can only be a mental construct.” That’s obviously true, but it’s also missing the point.
– RDR2, God of War and Skyrim are all sorta open worlds. Do you think their tools and engines are generic enough that you could perfectly recreate one in the other?
– That’s why people complain. Because the “scaffolding” that on one side allows Bethesda to produce relatively fast some huge games, on the other side ultimately feels archaic and clunky. With its advantages it also inherits its disadvantages, and players are demanding a more radical detachment from those old (but well known and convenient) roots.
– Btw, many times Bethesda has declared they completely renovated their engine.
Seeing lots of speculation about #tesv game engine. It's brand new… and it's spectacular!
— Bethesda (@bethesda) December 12, 2010
– Yet players know it “feels” the same. The heuristic proves the underlying tech hasn’t changed in meaningful ways. As someone wrote in the forum: the proof is in the pudding.