Holy shit. I had no idea.

Guy I know worked for a pretty big video game studio or two. (You’ve definitely heard of some games he worked on). Then he realized it sucked. Took a job in FinTech, made like double the money for half the work.

Fingers crossed for total conversions. Give me some non-5e rule systems. (Unlikely, I know. Double unlikely to get anything other than maybe Pathfinder, but I can hope)

but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.

Thinking about it, a lot of things that I flag as idiotic come from putting emotions first. We’re all emotional creatures, but idiots are ruled by them. It’s idiotic to blow your rent money on candy, but the short term emotional high for an idiot is too appealing. It’s stupid to blow up at someone instead of admitting fault, but admitting fault feels bad, so the idiot can’t take that. Reading an essay is informative, but that’s boring work and the idiot might feel bad if they don’t understand it, so they’d avoid the whole thing. If the essay doesn’t agree with their worldview, that’s going to feel terrible.

Snake case, usually. Some perhaps unfounded fear that something will blow up on a dash in a file name kicking around. Or I’ll do a weird typo/premature enter and part of the file name will be treated like a -flag of some sort.

That sounds pretty similar to how I like Guild Wars 2, except offline. That’s cool. I signed up for the beta thing.

You can either buy it once to gain access to the offline “ironman” mod

This sounds relevant to my interests. What updates come with this? Just security? Nothing?

I agree with your ideas on micro transactions here. They create a lot of temptations to make the base game worse. “Your inventory holds 12 items but for a very reasonable price you can hold 6 more!” may seem harmless but it also sucks. The game is objectively and arbitrarily worse without that transaction.

Purely cosmetic skins are a little better, but you end up taking advantage of people who buy more than they should.

Mildly interested. Concerned about monetization. I don’t do subscriptions or microtransactions, and “pay once and you’re good” is pretty rare, probably in part because there’s ongoing costs to running a server and in part because lol most people will charge as much as possible. But that’s why the only MMO I play is guild wars 2. You buy the game and you’re good. They sell expansions every couple of years.

Also you should mention lemmy on your site where you mention discord and reddit.

Oh yeah GW1 was harder at launch because you only had limited NPC support, but the later expansions really expanded that (no pun intended) by adding more robust npc Heroes that could join your party and be customized.

Though GW1 came out 19 years ago, so a good chunk of potential GW2 players were in diapers when it came out. Gosh, I’m so old.

GW2 is very “solo” friendly. I put solo in quotes because there will typically be other people around, but you don’t have to talk to them or wait on them for most stuff. Like, earlier I was flying around one of the maps doing a little quest thing, and I joined in several events to fight monsters with other people. Didn’t say a word. It’s all very seamless.

I still play guild wars 2. It’s the only MMO that doesn’t piss me off. No subscription fee. Never raised the level cap. Only added a new tier of gear once close to launch and said that’s it. Plays like a real video game.

Because the level cap and gear cap doesn’t change, you can take a break and come back just fine. My characters I made years ago are just as mechanically viable as anyone else. (Knowing how to play them is a separate question. I’m pretty bad at thief, but some people are little immortal jerks with it)

It also feels more like a real video game than some MMOs. You can dodge attacks. Like there’s a dodge button that moves you and gives you iframes. There’s a lot less of the old timey “your character moved away on the screen so the monster did its attack animation way over there, but you still get hit”.

They also solved a lot of the anti social problems of old MMOs. You don’t need to form a formal group for most content. There’s no kill stealing. You just go into the world and do stuff.

There’s no mandatory quest chains. There’s the main story you can follow, but there’s very little MMO filler. There are “hearts” you can do that are kind of MMO busywork, but you can also just not do them.

I know the game is old but it’s still very good. I haven’t been able to get a lot of friends to play it. I think they think it’s like a shitty MMO where you just grind for gear to grind for more gear, and level up so you can level up and grind for more gear. It’s not.

Oh my gosh I played that years ago. I even made a world for it that was exactly what you’d expect from a 13 year old.

I really liked Midnight Suns :(

I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.

The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.

The fact that there’s no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.

Can you share nerdy technical details about how you made it? Custom engine? Something like unity? Solo project or big team? Edit: probably Godot from the communities. I know nothing about Godot. How was it?

When I was a kid I thought a lot about making games, but now that I’ve worked in software and spent hours being like “why the fuck does the font get bigger when I open the date picker?” I have a greater appreciation for how hard it can be.

Free cloud backups of save files is really nice.

Free hosting of screenshots, too.

Free forums (though they tend to suck. I guess that’s like they only have basic yellow mustard or something, in this metaphor)

“looter shooter” is irrelevant to most (arguably all) of the complaints listed.

They all have kind of bad pacing. Takes too long to get to the good parts, spends too much time walking back and forth or driving around. The core gameplay is meh- it’s more about levels and gear stats than like strategy or execution. It takes too long to get enough skill points to do interesting things.

Unless they address that stuff, I’m going to wait for the game to be in the bargain bin.

This is good advice. I used to really push how late I’d stay up and then get jolted awake by my alarm. Felt like trash.

Now I go to bed like 9.5 hours before I have to get up (midnight -> 930) and usually wake up before the alarm. Feels great.

I set alarms for my bedtime to train myself into it. Like, alarm goes off at 11pm and I start winding down whatever I’m doing (video games, usually). Now I just do it naturally.

But as you said, how do you actually do the thing?

I’ve luckily never had problems with executive function, so I can’t really imagine clearly what it’s like to not be able to just make a decision and execute. One of my friends swears by medication, because they got diagnosed as an adult with ADHD.

If you leave your house regularly this has a number of disadvantages. I can fit my phone in my pocket but most laptops are too large. I can operate a phone with one hand (eg: on the subway). 911 services I think work better with an actual phone. Gps stuff may also work better.

That’s just stuff off the top of my head.