Any playersof CoC willing to chime in on the key differences which push that game into a more investigative space than your typical DnD style dungeon crawl adventure? I mean, I assume there are things like a sanity mechanic, as well as an emphasis on player fragility, but I’m curious if there are other systems at play which separate the two RPGs even further.

A game which I have started numerous times, and then bounced off of due to the archaic control interface. One of these days I’m going to have to knuckle under and learn how to interact with it, as the concept is cool as hell, and I’m sure the controls become intuitive with practice.

Perhaps. But expanding ones borders through conquest also seems medieval, and guided missiles are poor tools for holding territory, so the classics still have a role to play.

I suppose I cling to the old adage that a bad game is bad forever, while a delayed game may some day be good. It’s less true today than when Miyamoto said it (No Man’s Sky being the commonly cited example of a game which was able to turn its radioactive launch into a fairly positive experience), but I still believe it’s more accurate than not. I’m picking on a straw man here, but I wonder how many of those “gamers” bemoaning Halo’s long absence also look down their noses at the yearly release mill of sports games. Far as I’m concerned, new games in a franchise should come when the creators feel they have something new to showcase. A new mechanic, new engine, a new plot, whatever. Obviously, the games industry at large is perfectly happy to ok boomer me, and I’m perfectly happy to keep mining through my backlog of games which manage to be fun without live updates.

This article, or corpo propaganda depending on your cynicism, asserts as fact that “gamers” are clamoring at the gates, screaming about the length of time between installments in franchises. That rings hollow to me. If anything, it seems like franchise fatigue is a much more common ailment. However, Lemmy is the entirety of my social media presence, so I am sure I’m not tuned in to the wider landscape.

I mean, that’s true, but correlation v causation and all that. The list of countries “owned or influenced by” the British Empire includes a lot more than just these 7, and yet the forced arbitration club is a small one, so I’m not 100% sure I agree with your police work there, Hal.

I need to lay off the Mount and Blade. Definitely saw Calradia as I was scrolling past.

100%. I know that the jury is out, academically speaking, on the actual effectiveness of the bombs, but it makes intuitive sense to me that they at least contributed to the Japanese decision to surrender unconditionally.

In fact, up until the bombs were dropped, Japan was working with the Soviet Union to act as mediators in peace talks, so Japan could get a better deal. Of course, while the USSR entertained the diplomatic overtures from Japan, they were actually planning on declaring war, as they had promised at Yalta. But, I think it still contributes to my point that a civilian population that has been targeted by a besieging force must believe their only options are unconditional surrender or utter destruction (which, incidentally, is exactly the verbiage the US presented Japan in the Potsdam Declaration 10 days before the first bomb was dropped). If there is a plausible third option available (or believed to be available), then that’s what will be pursued.

No, it was not my intention to suggest that. I’m sure the Germans threw everything they could afford into the Battle of Britain.

Though, I am most definitely not an expert in the field and should be treated as I am, a dude on the internet lol.

However, even Germany in early WW2 (arguably at the height of their power) was unable to throw enough explosives into London to make that switch flip in the civilian population from “we shall fight them on the beaches” to “okay, in light of recent events, we are reevaluating our ‘Never Surrender’ policy…”.

In fact, I might even suggest that the scale of bombing necessary to make it a viable tactic was impossible at that time, as the nuclear bomb hadn’t yet been invented. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can fact check this assertion, but I think the only time intentionally targeting civilians has successfully cowed a belligerent was when the US nuked Japan. And even then, it took two.

Also, to add to the other poster’s point, in a medieval siege, the defenders have every reason to believe the attackers will happily let every man, woman, and child behind the walls die gruesome deaths to starvatiom or disease. That’s why, when it came down to the wire, cities would submit.

In modern times, cultivating a believable military posture of, “Surrender, or we will personally execute every last motherfucking one of you” is politically dicey. Look at the news stories coming out of Gaza about supplies running low thanks to Israeli interference. Right, wrong , or indifferent, the international community (as well as your domestic community, if those that disagree with these sorts of tactics are allowed to make their voices heard) tends to look down their noses at targeting noncombatants populations. So, due to these complications (which were largely absent or less impactful from warfare in the time of Genghis Khan) wholesale slaughter of civilian life isn’t really openly used. In fact, guidelines like “proportionality” are invented which dictate the level of response you can give certain provocations and what not.

So, if you’re a modern day commander being tasked with taking an urban center, the closest way to approximate a medieval siege would be to absolutely carpet bomb everything. Make it known that you will happily let every single person in Moscow die, if not send them to the afterlife yourself. While you’re bombing the suburbs, you’ll also need to encirce the whole city to prevent supplies from being delivered, since you can’t guarantee every bomb will hit it’s target and need starvation to provide additional assurance to the population that, if they maintain their current course, they are doomed.

Unfortunately, the world isn’t going to allow that, and you know it, so you commit to the level of bombing deemed acceptable by the world at large. At best, you wind up in a situation like London during the Blitz. Your bombing runs are effective, in that they disrupt the daily life of citizenry, and cause some infrastructure damage and loss of life. However, you’re never going to be allowed to scale up to the point where your victims feel they have no way out but to submit. There’s enough plausible deniability that, even when a bomb hits close to home (literally or figuratively), the victim is more pissed at the bomber than their government.

I have it on good authority that that isn’t an issue in this instance. They’ve towed the boat outside of the environment.

Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.

It’s not even exclusive to cats. Some days, you just gotta sound your barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, y’know?

Are you running any mods, or rolling vanilla?

Can you be more specific with what you consider the “soul” of New Vegas? I would consider it to be its embrace of Fallout 1/2’s tone and canon, as opposed to the fairly clean break between the rest of the franchise and Bethesda’s offerings.

Good for Owlcat. Their Pathfinder CRPGs are excellent, and it’s always good to have more independent publishers out there supporting the genre.

I heard mixed things about The Outer Worlds. My recollection is that people were somewhat disappointed by it, but I can’t remember any real specific critiques (other than it’s scope being more limited than some people were expecting). Anyone have a take on the game they’d like to share?

Yes, I believe the figure they cited was that Google earns 73% of their revenue through ads. I imagine what they would have to do is bust up the ad services in addition to the various departments of Google. Each new entity formed gets to keep revenue from ads shown on their platform maybe? E.g. YouTube gets spun off into its own thing separate from Google proper. They get to keep ad revenue from what is shown on their platform, but they don’t get to touch any revenue from sponsored search listings, or from banner ads on other websites, etc.

That’s an approach that makes surface level sense to me, but I am neither a lawyer nor a business bro nor a tech bro. So, I don’t actually have the faintest idea if my idea bears any resemblance to reality.

I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.

While I agree with the spirit of your comment, I’m not sure I’m on board with Predator being outclassed by works influenced by it. Admittedly, I’ve not watched Prey, so grain of salt and all. I hear it’s quite good, but with it being put in a historical context rather than contemporary, I think it’s a bit of a different animal.

I am curious to hear examples of films you think improve upon the og Predator’s formula. If nothing else it will give me some new movies to watch.