Mods are a different beast and not representative of the game, devs, or player base. Mods like this often get removed from big modding sites like Nexus, forcing them to be mostly in their own spaces. (There is/was a bg3 mod overhaul that makes every black npc white, some lesbian npcs into men so they are straight couples, the ability to change your gender and lock it to the body types. Etc and so on. But you can’t find it on Nexus. I remember the white Wyll mod but it got removed within 3 days)

It’s another matter entirely when a developer bakes this kind of shit into the game. Not every game has mod support and not everyone mods.

Final fansty isn’t that kind of ip. Different ones are set in different universes/planets, with different casts. There’s a billion different things you can explore. One game is basically medieval, another is basically cyberpunk. The things you explore are completely different and the only similarities are the name of the ip, the names of the gods, and maybe the names of some of the characters.

There aren’t many games you can make that argument with because of the way technology has advanced so much.

Elder scrolls v skyrim was easily the most successful, but your suggestion is stopping at morrowind which is an entirely different game. Tomb raider today is a different game from when it came out. Some ways for the best some ways for the worse. But there are always new things to explore. Even if it’s just mechanically.

Sure you can make that argument over something like the yearly sports games. But these games are not yearly releases.

They did cut a lot of the slog from ARR, it’s not necessarily better because they didn’t rewrite anything they just cut it so there is context missing. As an example, if you don’t start in Uldah, you never meet the real Thancred anymore.

The actual patch series is easier to swallow because most of the dungeons got reworked to be more interesting and you’re not going to the waking sands every 2 seconds to just go back to where you just where, over something you could have told me over link shell. There’s still a lot of travel, but it’s not so bad.

I replayed through ARR as an alt character after the changes, it was before they changed the dungeons but overall the experience is easier to swallow, but again the story is a little clunkier.

The bloody banquet is still amazing though.

This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback

They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”

Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.

The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.

The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)

When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.

Yeah, I still browse reddit from time to time (mostly when lemme feed is dried up or I’m at my computer. I don’t browse it for hours like I used to, though. And I haven’t made a comment that wasn’t on r/lfg for months.

Most of my feed is about Canada, makes sense, I live there. But a vast majority of it is right wing propaganda. Anti immigration, pro PeePee, anti Trudeau, etc. Every week a new right wing subreddit crops up.

It was more than just managers and redundant positions that were laid off. And it was mostly blizzard employees laid off specifically.

Also

/no please don’t attack this innocent multi trillion dollar company

Yeah, if I stopped using/buying a product just because the company behind it did something slightly shitty, I wouldn’t have any belongings, food, etc.

I use Firefox just as much as I use opera gx, I use them on each of my browsers. Opera gx is more primary but yeah…

I dont know what I would replace it with. Brave, I guess?

Gabe won’t live forever and usually someone new wants to put their vision up, and make their changes and feel special and then bam.

Mess.

Currently never, but that’s because i dont go out much. If I went out more, even just for jogging. I would be extremely frustrated that my current phone doesn’t have a jack. Currently I have to have to so everyone around me can hear my phone as I don’t have a converted or a wireless headphone.

Oh I suppose my diseased father’s small channel with a few of his live music performances will be deleted. Lovely.

Nintendo is famous for never going on sale. Used can be hit or miss, game may not work at all depending on how the store vets it.

Nintendo isnt the only company that never puts their games on sale, just the biggest one. They also don’t reduce the prices of the game after xx years. In fact, when they re-released older games, they priced them the same as newer ones. I really think Nintendo is sleazy and their games are mid-to-bad but everyone loves them so. /shrug

Then, there’s mmos. If you like mmos and care about them, you can’t wait for sales if they price hike. By the time it is on sale, the expansion is nearly over and it can be extremely difficult to nigh impossible to catch up. After all, there’s like 1-2 years of content you need to do. These sales are only to bring new and returning people in. Not to be viable options for anyone that actually plays the mmo endgame.

This is going to be the new price point eventually. Because most people can’t wait and most people aren’t paitent. It does make the game pass more valuable to me, I suppose. Because I can’t really afford $70+ games. Games haven’t really inflated like everything else has but we really just need to raise wages because we are being priced out of affording anything.

What if you like Nintendo games?

Most AAA games are being priced at this now. And since people are buying it, it is going to continue.

Honey, you don’t need to outright say something for the implications and subtext to be there.

You say that like they didnt legalize gay marriage, elect LGBTQ allies, strengthen and protect abortion laws in response to the roe vs wade overturner, and legalize pot. And that’s just to name a few.

Oh and you don’t lose your house if you have to go to the hospital without insurance.

Say what you will about Mexico, but in some aspects it’s more advanced than United States. At least when it comes to the red states.

I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.

Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)

The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.

So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.

I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Both sides have done wrong. Isreal has attacked ambulances unprovoked. Hamas attacked Isreal at a music fest. Isreal retaliated by attacking schools and hospitals (aka, people that had nothing to do with said attack) Isreal has been subjugating Gaza to sub-human conditions for 20+ years. The attack on the music fest isn’t justified but it is understandable.

Again. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

I think what they (poorly) meant was that there shouldn’t be individuals/entities that own multiple houses, to give everyone/more people the chance to own homes. There is a serious housing shortage because a lot of people and companies buy multiple homes. Some use it as basically a form of money (notably the Chinese) and others use it as a form of income (Individuals/entities that own 10 or more affordable/family homes and rent it out. Airbnb was/is a huge contributer to this issue)

As a rule, people today cannot buy homes and rent is a major reason why. In most places rent is over 60% of the average paycheck. How are you supposed to afford a house? You won’t even get accepted for a mortgage with the average paycheck. This issue has a lot of consequences, suchas the birthrate is falling at an exponential rate. It’s barely at the replacement level, and in some places, below. And the trend is continuing.

Pro-Israel bots and astroturfers always come out of the woodworks posting whatever they can to make them look in the right/innocent/etc whenever stuff like this happens. They want the world at large to be on their side. It largely works, the things supporters will say about these people is disgusting. They don’t see them as people.

In reality both sides have done horrible things and neither are fully in the right nor innocent. Israel will stop at nothing short of genocide and that has no place in the modern Era. Genocide should be condemned in all its forms. I dont support this war, but I also dknt blame them, they have been the subject to, again, genocide for decades. I can’t blame them for retaliation for years of torture and who knows what else that they successfully cover up. In the end, this is a long, and bloody conflict inherited from long before even before our grandparents’ era. It sadly won’t end in our generation, either.

Good luck getting Lauren Boebert’s etc gun’s away from her without her calling to action.