Max Nichols

The only reason we don't have a draft anymore is because conservative and neoliberal policies have intentionally created enough precarity that they can use a carrot instead of a stick to fill out the military

Oh I blocked the person I was quoting and forgot it would mess up my thread, hah.

It's fine, it was just garden variety "this stuff is bad but the troops, the troops are good" shit

And every time we order them to kill children we destroy their humanity further. Or they didn’t have it to begin with.

You don’t love the troops, you’re just bloodthirsty

Worshiping the troops erases their humanity and struggles, glorifies war, and only hurts them further.

It mythologizes them as people who fight good fights (they do not), people who are willing to accept death for their country (when they’re mostly children coerced into killing&dying for the rich)

A pretty significant chunk of the armed forces in the US join up from economically precarious backgrounds, because there is no social mobility or safety nets. We’ve coerced many into taking the only out they see

Anyone who _actually_ cares about the troops is fighting wealth inequality

It’s awful, yeah. Extremely fatphobic film

I don't know if I was ultimately right or not because I got laid off before we left alpha.

But I think I probably was.

When I was working on a MOBA, Infinite Crisis, the leads wanted us to add... I forget if it was achievements or daily quests.

I was staunchly against it because I thought that, in a game where randos rely on each other, it was a horrible idea to give individuals objectives other than winning

That guy has never heard of the concept of chemistry

People want a version that runs on PC, outside the Playstation ecosystem, and recent big 1st party Sony games have generally been releasing on PC. That's where the desire mostly comes from.

Is Oregon Trail an RPG?

This is very grognard system designer of me. Players are not usually thinking in these terms, or consciously aware of this kind of napkin math happening in the back of their mind. Finding hyper-optimized engines is something only a subset of players try to do. But this dynamic exists for them all!

And if your engine isn’t good enough to get you through a dungeon, are you really strong enough to move on, anyways? xD

Of course we SHOULD consider the ecosystem of purchased, and dropped, items or money to be part of our party’s engine! But that’s a leap players often don’t make.

Are there RPGs that aren’t about overcoming resource attrition? Probably, but I can’t think of any.

So. Though loss aversion may still be a bigger factor, I think this is a huge reason why so may players dislike using consumables in RPGs: they don’t feel like part of the resource engine.

In Trails of Cold Steel it looks like me equipping all the +CP regen items on Rean, giving him a x2 damage for the first attack per battle, and then having him use his super attack to simultaneously 1-shot every encounter and restore his CP from the kills.

See? An engine.

This often looks like, well, healing spells and “restore mana on kill” stuff.

In a game like Metaphor, which tried to make your MP a time limit, it looks like changing all your party members to the Mage class and grinding 80 battles to get +2 mp per kill (and feel like you beat the system)

Most RPGs, mechanically, have a strong resource attrition layer:
Can you get through the dungeon before your mana runs out. Can you keep health full long enough to get to, and beat, the boss.

As a result most players care a lot about building a self-sustaining resource engine for their parties

In North America at least that gets problematic fast.

Europe though should be going to town on that shit

In other words, it's not just a misunderstanding of the terms, but a illiteracy problem in the artistic medium.

Kinda the same genre of thing as people who think cropping 4:3 shows to be widescreen is just a cosmetic change

I think a lot of people don't get... intentionality.

Folks might look at some of these comparison images and say "yeah it's the same thing, they just made the graphics better"

And understanding otherwise sorta requires an appreciation of how those fine details can actually define experiences

Though you're certainly right that people are not on the same page about what these terms means for games.

I'm not sure that that strict definition—taking a hifi master version and then essentially reprinting it on a higher fidelity consumer medium—really applies to games?

Most games don't have shipping quality textures and VFX just sitting on dev PCs waiting to be re-exported for a remaster years later

Honestly it never bothered me. People made a big deal of it online, but I was just whatever about it. The most immersive game of all time for me was presented at 160x144 res with four shades of green, I'm pretty open to low-fidelity stuff xD

The sheer delta of this change is what makes it exciting

Truly though, I think it looks very good. I am excited to see how their world design has evolved since S/V. The apparent focus on natural environments is very exciting for me, and I audibly said 'whoa' when the trailer camera panned under the water. Being surprised by something exciting is great!

This new Pokemon trailer was the first time I felt really wowed by a game's graphical improvement in years

Which is hilarious

The most effective way to recapture those "new console leap forward" feels of the 80s/90s/00s is to let your franchise fall 10 years behind and then catch up all at once.

I wish I shared your optimism here, but hasn’t their project to shape culture by controlling the media been extremely successful? Fox has been enormously influential on American politics and culture

Interesting! I knew it wasn't a still from footage, but I did assume it was an intentional promotional thing.

It's too bad for the team if this was meant to be internal only and it leaked

I could not agree more. I just don't think it works well. The translation is difficult unless they change it so much that it's it's own thing, at which point

just make your own thing

More recently than The Black Company, hahah. 2000s vs the 80s

A screenshot from Sentenced to be A Hero. This one shows a woman with long purple hair in some sort of lightweight tabard, in profile, with her arms crossed. Further back is the main protagonist, sitting and looking up at her.

A screenshot from Sentenced to be A Hero. This one shows the main character, the woman, and another man with a spearlike weapon wrapped in cloth, all walking towards the camera at an angle.

A screenshot from Sentenced to be A Hero. This one shows a man in a white military jacket, holding a magic lantern and a sword. He’s surrounded by men in rough peasant garb. They’re all scared with their backs to each other in a circle.

A screenshot from Sentenced to be A Hero. It shows the main protagonist, kneeling, wearing his red cloak and armor. On his shoulder is perched a small girl with magical fiery hair. Her arms crossed is upraised and magical energy is coalescing around it.

I’m really digging the vaguely 80s anime character designs and the flat-color-with-lots-of-line-work moebius-like art style.