MudMan @ MudMan @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Who is playing Diablo 4? Especially this year.

I mean, I checked it out at launch, thought it was fine, didn't even finish the main campaign, moved on to the other million great games that came out the past few months. Is this game still relevant?

It was a PR mistake, I'd say.

The game could chug at launch depending on your settings, and to be clear, their defaults were fundamentally broken, some of the settings that made performance tank were engaged on ALL the default presets. But even at launch it could be made to be playable on most hardware... at the cost of looking basically the same as CS1. They've since patched some of the biggest offenders and it's now smoother than that, too.

But they came out with a preemptive warning, instead of delaying for a short time and fixing those basics and now it's a meme that the game doesn't work on any hardware, and the extremely debatable "can't even do 30fps on a 4090" thing became widespread as well.

FWIW, it's not rare for sequels to take a long time to replace the previous game under that business model. If you look at all the Sims games they probably overlap quite a bit for a while. I played CS2 for 25 hours and stepped away to start playing some other things. Honestly, the performance bugs annoyed me less than some of the weird design and balance things that were also either broken or counterintuitively designed, although they've fixed a bunch of those, too. But I did enjoy getting my first city to megalopolis status and I'll definitely come back to it.

And the base game has been several degrees of given-away-for-peanuts for long stretches over that period of time.

Those are even after my time. From the outside it looked like them starting to step away from "fantasy races in space", but it didn't intrigue me enough to pay attention and they never really became the core of the videogames because space marines everywhere, so...

I've been seeing this story do the rounds and I feel like we're burying the lede here.

Who the hell is watching porn over Plex? That is somehow simultaneously the most uninformed and the most complicated way to access porn.

Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and think everybody else is a dick. And they're right.

But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.

Hey, it's why it's so possible to make loving parodies of Trek, right? If it seems okay to Tony Shalhoub it's fine by me.

If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.

I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.

It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.

There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.

I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?

The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.

For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.

I thought the community had come around on it after some updates. I wouldn't know, I haven't been into TT Games Workshop stuff in ages.

In any case, the core of the tabletop game has nothing to do with whether a game adaptation is good or not.

It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.

I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.

Look, I know it sucks, but that's not how it works. No more Trump can absolutely be your rallying cry because Trump isn't just Trump, it's an entire structure of actual fascists with explicit plans to dismantle the democratic system. I don't know what people thought was gonna happen after Biden got elected but this is reality now for the foreseeable future.

I understand the exhaustion, I understand the frustration, but I'm genuinely sick and tired to see countries conflate being tired and frustrated with their current balance of liberal democracy and vote in fascists only to reel in horror after the fascists rule like fascists.

The US did it with Trump, bailed out after they realized what that meant. Bolsonaro in Brazil? Bring back literally the previous guy, please. Maybe Tusk wasn't so bad, says Poland now. The UK is about to bounce off of the mess left by Boris Johnson by bringing in the most milquetoast centrist.

Can we just skip the part where you let the fascists run the show to be remembered how much it sucks? Please? If you don't see any version of sustainable democracy you need to get involved in politics. Hands-on. Reform, revolt, protest, lobby and set the world on fire until it gets better.

But sitting at home thinking it's the centrists' fault for not being exciting while you let the actual nazis reach power is not a valid answer, no matter how tired and frustrated you are.

You're arguing against yourself a lot here. Somehow you have a working democracy, but simultaneously you have zero recourse to get the policy you want implemented. You can't possibly get the policy you want implemented, but somehow protest voting is a healthy democratic act that may be more useful than voting for a compromise candidate.

Which is it? Is the democratic system going to eventually get you where you want to go, and so you should push for your candidate in the primaries and then back whoever ends up winning them or is the system broken and fossilized and so you should be utilitarian in the election and then use non-electoral action to seek profound reform? Because you're munching on a lot of that cake and you can't still have it after.

For the record, I absolutely support endorsing whichever candidate is closest to your position and has the best chance of winning at all levels of administration. Engage in every single election, put forward the most leftist candidate, then vote for whoever is running against the Republican. If you do that consistently, then a) you'll vote for Biden in the next election, and b) we have zero disagreement.

Also for the record, you guys keep misrepresenting Biden's term and that's already a pro-fascist take. I'm not saying you need to align with him or can't argue that he and the party should be further to the left, but if your take on things is to put forth misrepresentations while actively ignoring the views held by the opposition on those issues you're campaigning for Trump, as well as voting in his favor. It's a tired, boring playbook that has been deployed forever, because the average terminally online democrat is somewhat to the left of their leaders will not push back on the misrepresentations. It's not holding up any better than the disingenuous takes you get from the alt-right, frankly. Don't think I didn't notice the US cosplay left arguing that Biden was in favor of genocide in Gaza and against a ceasefire until he effectively pushed for a ceasefire, at which point it was crickets until he pushed for lifting restrictions on Israel military support, at which point it was a deluge again.

Man, I'm far to the left of the guy, but I swear sometimes it seems like US leftists actively hate when the government does what they ask.

I explicitly reference the student loans stuff elsewhere. That's not structural change.

Structural change at this point is changes to the governance and Constitution of the US. You don't have a functioning governance with the current Supreme Court, you don't have it with Citizens Utd in place, you don't have it with the current set of state level and federal level election rules.

That's step one. Minor tweaks to policy are not structural.

And until you get a functional democracy yes, advocating for not voting for the sole liberal democrat on the ballot is advocating for the rule of his fascist alternative. No ifs and buts. If you want that to no longer be true, see point one. That's the flowchart. You can't have a different flowchart until you take the steps required to change the current one.

So if you want to pretend that the US is a functional liberal democracy where you can use your vote as a form of self-expression that is a dangeroud delusion at this point. I do believe in representative democracy, but you no longer have one of those, so go get one so I don't have to keep having this dumb argument every couple of years with a bunch of delusional Americans threatening to set actual fascists at the helm of the most influential western superpower because they don't feel self-actualized enough.

Go set cars on fire until you get a funcioning system, France-style or go vote for an endless stream of Bidens until the heat death of the universe, but those are your two options.

I hear this so much from Americans. The utter inability to conceive that reform of any kind is possible.

Weirdly, I don't hear that as much from most comparable liberal democracies. That narrative I get much more frequently from Eastern European friends in post-soviet states that recognize themselves as a kleptocracy. Both have mostly access to a troubled but functional representative democracy, both capitulate to corruption (or in this case outright fascism) out of disbelief that either their vote is impactful or that any other political action is possible. Both are wrong, IMO.

Because it's a campaign and people campaign for things.

But also, voting for Bernie wasn't shamed. Voting for Bernie and saying you'd refuse to vote for the democrats unless he won the primary got shamed. Rightfully so.

You will give up the only bit of power you have if Trump is elected. Which is why you're arriving at this choice between three years and three hundred years too late.

But hey, if you think activist action in between elections is "crying in the streets so they can keep ignoring you" then you already have given up all the power you have. So the good news is you have zero agency and you can stop thinking about it and just go vote for whoever the democrats run every time forever.

Is this why Americans don't get stuff done? They literally think it all comes down to a performative vote in presidential elections and then they are cut out of the political loop entirely? No wonder they can't even get the most common sense reform with universal support done.

Well, then vote for the democrat forever, regardless of who it is.

I swear, Americans always fall back to this when pushed on their inaction during terms. If you think that's a lost cause, then it's all a lost cause. Live with the system you have.

If you don't think it's a lost cause (and it isn't, there is plenty of power at the state level, and a ridiculously unelectable GOP should grant much more power to leftists over time, plus honestly you should be pushing for a full Constitution rewrite anyway) then go out and protest and campaign to get the ball rolling on whatever level it's possible, on that and other issues.

But do that AFTER the actual fascists have been pushed out of power. Getting the fascists in power won't fix the problems you're too overwhelmed to tackle.

Well, I guess in this case it will, in that sham elections don't need electoral reform, so I guess a perpetual Trump presidency does reform the electoral system. But if that's what you want then why are we having this conversation?

That makes absolutely no sense.

But whatever, doesn't matter. Even if it did and was true. Still running against Trump. Still no contest. Still must get out and vote for him.

And then go out and protest and pressure them. Because you sure as hell aren't gonna pressure the GOP about anything.

I mean, in fairness their strategy for space exploration seems to be to point a starship in a random direction, hit "go" and beam down to every planet with a remotely breathable atmosphere in their PJ onesies.

The impressive part is they still seem to be the dominant superpower in half the galaxy, so... yay for them.