and you either pass your turn and let her do it to you

OR WHAT?!

Noone will ever know, this is one of those choices you can’t afford to not make

Hey, if you’re into checking items off a list, Legacy of the Dragonborn might squeeze some more hours out of skyrim for you. It’s about creating a museum with everything in the game. You have to get pretty much everything, from a leather armor set to daedric weaponry, and store it in the museum. You can still keep the cool items by making replicas for the museum instead(and you can always take the item back from the museum also). It’s been a while since I played so maybe some things have changed in newer versions, but after finishing that mod I pretty much put down skyrim - nothing else to do at that point (other than mods with new quests, or skill/perk overhauls)

Oh yeah, I feel that. I got a nice beach towel with my company’s name on it some years ago, of course I couldn’t take it to the beach, I’d feel silly. But on the other hand - nobody sees it if I use it in the shower. Man, that company name has touched my dick&balls so many times I’m thinking I should marry it at this point.

I always try to make them put the branding in shitty places. For the umbrella I got them to print it on the classy wooden handle, instead of the fabric, exactly where you’d hold the thing. That way it’s still usable, you just need to hold your hand over the brand name. And on some other shit like wireless earbuds & smaller objects, the guys doing the printing can sometimes provide smaller velvety satchels to put the objects in, kind of like a gift bag, and I can usually print on those. Then you’re just left with the plain unbranded object when you inevitably throw away the satchel.

Aa someone who has misspent a budget before - you’re making it sound like a lot more people in the company care about the topic than what’s happening in real life.

I organize some events in our office every now and then. For example, one of them is a sort of competition/race/quiz/whatever - completely optional, but I get about 75% of the office to join, which in my experience - that’s huge, nobody joins any type of other events in such magnitude, usual rates are at 30-40%. The big bosses approve it because “morale” and “team building”. The people like it because it’s actually fun. So I get a budget to spend on this event, and we use it to buy “prizes” for literally everyone participating. Which means they’re shitty prizes, but hey, it’s not about winning first place, it’s about making some jokes at the bosses’ expense, on company time.

The way the process works is: all my bosses already know how this money is spent, and they approve. But because I need the money, it has to go through finance. And they involve marketing/PR guys. And these guys insist on having the fucking logo on everything. At the end of the day everyone is going home with several items (backpack, external battery, pen, umbrella, Swiss army knife etc) with the company logo on them, which is goddamn ridiculous. It’s actually one of the reasons I always refuse to receive items, even if the budget includes the organizers - because I really hate the branding aspect.

But all that aside - you see the aftermath of this event and you’ll draw the conclusion that we just spent the day in a corporate culture workshop, when in fact we were answering silly questions and getting imaginary points the entire day, but there’s ONE guy in ONE department who can’t let things slide. So… Idk man. Take it with a grain of salt next time. The agile dudes probably did it to get away from other things for a few hours, and they got the budget to also give something back to the coworkers. But not everyone really cares about agile, they’re just going through the motions.

It’s worse.

Playtest results inhibit you from disclosing things because they are subject to change. They take gamers’feedback, decide if they want to act on it, and at the end of the day the finished product may look different so it makes no sense for people to loudly state “they have feature X, and they don’t have feature Y” because by release it may be the other way around.

Whereas this type of contract says “idgaf what’s bad about the game, you can only sing its praises online”.

Silence > dishonesty.

Oh, you want only good reviews? It’d be a shame if people reviewed your game like “I apologize, I have nothing to say - I am under contract to say nothing bad about the game, and I have nothing good to say about it either.”

It’s a VERY good spiritual successor to titan quest. I’ll recommend last epoch too, if you like the genre and are interested also in multi-player (it has an offline mode as well)

What are you even talking about? I have all of those installed as well, and a few others on top. I’m incredibly wary of any of them though - I don’t know if GoG will be around in 10 years, I don’t trust epic as far as I can throw them, I don’t want to support ubisoft and EA, and Blizzard has made so many questionable choices that I’m at the point where I don’t want to support them AND I don’t believe they can make good games anymore.

It’s about trust. I trust valve to allow me access to my games more than I trust the others. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the others, where did I say that?

I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.

Sorry but I agree with the guy on this. It’s 2024, idgaf about valve IP anymore, they can ruin their games with microtransactions and I honestly won’t care. I use Valve like you and the rest of the world use it: buying and managing a collection of games. And right now, Steam has good practices in that regard. I can get refunds if I play a game for a couple of hours and I don’t like it. I can access any of the games I bought, they haven’t gone Sony on me and restricted my purchases. They’ve proven themselves to be good guys in this and I too fear the day GabeN is replaced by some fuck who just wants to get a quick few million, so he shits all over us and our collections of games.

Humans are bad for the planet and horrible for the local ecosystem, but if they are already around I will have sex with them.

I didn’t. I never played the game. I wanted to play the first one but then saw how many DLCs it has. I don’t like this way of developing software, in bits and pieces, so I didn’t want to support it. This changes nothing about the rest of the discussion though.

You kinda have to think that though. You tried to argue that no other industry has the same problem, therefore this is unforgivable. So by following your own logic, it seems like because others do it as well it means it’s not unforgivable, it’s just the standard response. Very much a normal reaction to being fed shit by yet another corpo that expects you to compliment the taste.

Greed is inexcusable.

Toxicity is a consequence.

The ‘why not’ is not from the perspective of the industry - it’s from the perspective of the customer. Can you automate several tasks by using AI during game development? Sure. Will it translate into a better price or a better experience for the end-user? Let’s see.

Let’s say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency. Maybe you can make more games in a shorter time span. Will you be willing to sell the games for less than the standard $60? I find this unlikely. This impacts me as a consumer - why don’t I see a reduction in cost, if it now costs less? Why am I still paying the same price for something that your improved tools can make at a fraction of the cost? Didn’t my previous purchases already give you enough money to invest in AI? Where is my benefit?

Let’s say you give AI the big tasks - you make it write story, generate graphics or code. But AI’s current level doesn’t allow for originality, or even cohesive thought. You’ll be churning out garbage until your AI is actual intelligence. This again impacts me as a consumer - why am I sponsoring your experiments with my money? Why am I paying the same for garbage as I would for quality content? Will you share your end-game profit with me? If I buy your first games to support your endeavor, do I get the next versions for free? No. I don’t. I’m just wasting money on inferior products, and when they become superior - I will reap no benefits.

So - sure, let the companies throw themselves at this. But I’m not investing my own cash in their research.

I recently had a game I was waiting for released on steam and epic. The steam version (with some supporter pack stuff, because I like the dev) was $100, while the epic version was less than $50(with the same extras). I considered for a moment buying it on epic, but then I thought - “fuck, it’s epic games” and bought it on steam instead. I just couldn’t handle the thought of epic fucking games being in charge of my ability to play the game. I don’t trust them. Not even if all their shit is 50% off.

Idk much about business, but if you can’t be trusted to be reliable even when you’re offering massive discounts, maybe you don’t have a lasting business on your hands.

Similar, but without the buttplug

I’d say under 20%.

I play this game duo with a friend (where, like for d&d - it’s hard to match schedules) and solo with 2 characters (and a third to follow after). I obviously like playing it with my friend, but tbh I think I like playing it solo just as much, or more. Both my solo campaigns and my duo one are pretty much in sync, but in my solo stuff I get to do what I want, with no consequences. Imagine if your d&d table is good-aligned, but after the session you get to go home and play the same session again, with your chaotic party, who doesn’t take shit from town guards or uppity priests, who intimidates instead of persuading, who loots the dead king’s body instead of saving him. So yeah, you can have both types of fun :)

I was prompted to consent to some stuff, which I unchecked. Then there was a “vendor preferences” button, where they were basically saying “ok, even if you don’t consent, maybe you still wanna give them access if they have a legitimate interest”. So since I have also a legitimate interest in not giving my data to shady fucking companies, I spent the next 10 minutes removing ticks from boxes basically, because fuck giving me a choice to “uncheck all”, that would make it too easy to opt out.

Edit: and then to make it even more fun, I found a button somewhere in settings where I could remove my consent for gdpr-related reasons. So I clicked it. You wanna guess what it did? If you’re guessing it removed my consent, sorry - it actually removed my “lack of consent” - that is to say, it reset the settings and prompted me to uncheck everything again. Cool beans.

Aside from this, I just spent 10 minutes removing consent for advertising/cookies/tracking/whatever for about 100 different vendors. I really hope I don’t need to do that again, ever.

Add counters to progression:
20/180 quests completed
1805/9456 dialogue choices explored
567/568 npcs killed
95/102 areas explored
And whatever else you define as progress

Add this info into your save data. When quitting the game, open the most recent save, read the counters, compare to current values, display a nondescript “you’ve had a little/a lot of/no progress since you last saved, are you sure you want to quit without saving?” Shouldn’t take so long that it triggers a lag spike, I don’t think.