William @ wccrawford @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I've played it on PC Game Pass, and IMO, it's mostly shock and hype. After a short while, it becomes the same thing over and over. Capture or kill a lot of pals to level up and improve your strength. Then do it again on new pals for more strength. The base stuff changes a little, but it's still basically the same.

Initially I was into it, but then at about level 20 I realized it wasn't going anywhere. After a few levels, it's literally the same thing over and over again, but you upgrade the equipment. Nothing really makes a huge difference after you get them farming basic materials.

There's NO plot after you complete the tutorial. What it says about taking down the bad guys in the description? It's all in your head. You kill plenty of them. You make zero difference to the world that lasts more than a hour.

If you aren't sure, wait for a big sale. I quite enjoyed the game, but other than being a massively-popular IP, I'm not sure why it's getting so much acclaim. It's big, it's Harry Potter (with all the attention to detail that usually gets), and it's an RPG. If it wasn't HP, it'd be another good indie game, and that's it.

There's no way a company is going to attempt to release all that information and potentially fail to release all details and set themselves up for a lawsuit. I think it's more likely that these laws would kill server-based games if they were implemented as suggested.

Instead, I could see that there might be a minimum server support length after the last sale of the product. Even then, service would be spotty for that time and there'd be no uptime guarantee. Fixes for problems and hacks would be incredibly slow and the game would basically be unplayable in short order, unless that guaranteed time was short, like 1 year.

In addition to what TheYang said, I wanted to note that the spec for 3d printed parts for Voron printers is:

4 walls 5 top/bottom layers 40% infill

These are parts designed for 3d printers, so they have to be pretty good. They recommend ASA or ABS because of the temperatures that the printers get up to. Most plastic parts you're used to are ABS or something like it. Water bottles are PET which is similar to PETG, though of course they're really thin so they're super flimsy that way. Your part wouldn't be flimsy, but the plastic would feel like strong PET. That's not necessarily bad, just different.

Personally, I would recommend trying to find someone locally, and buying them a roll of a filament to print the parts for you. I'd budget $15-30 for each roll, and each roll will print 2.2 lbs of plastic parts, which should be more than enough for your stuff and some failures, and probably leave them some extra for their effort.

I think you can probably find someone who is also excited to see that keyboard come together and wants to be part of the build. And I think trying to print it online is going to be frustrating because there could be little mistakes that make the parts unusable that you won't know to predict because you haven't done it before. Or maybe not. It's a gamble, IMO.

As long as there are decent minimums, I think that sounds like the best contract that could be negotiated. Completely disallowing it was never going to happen. The concern was that they'd be paid once and they out of a job forever, also preventing others from getting jobs as well. Instead, there are ongoing fees that support them instead. I think that's perfectly reasonable, unless there's no minimum fees for those things, and then it's a race to the bottom, and virtually no different than not getting fees at all.

Saying they deserve to lose their work is too much, though.

That's only enough to "live on" if it's 2-3 devs or if their spouses have good jobs. I don't think many $100k/yr games have solo devs.

That said, I do think those are good numbers for most teams, and especially new teams on their first or second game.

I somewhat agree with you, but some innovation is necessary. There are very few games that are still fun after a dozen levels of the same thing, and most of those are either pure puzzle or pure mindless violence.

When people complain about "just more of the same", they often are overlooking that there was some innovation in the new levels. If it's really the same thing over and over, it'd pale pretty quickly for most people. New levels need to do something differently than the past to keep people really engaged.

There's a middle ground between massive innovation and stagnancy, and all games that get huge sales numbers are hitting that sweet spot, regardless of what people are screaming about.

I was already a premium subscriber to get rid of ads, and one day it asked me if I wanted to try this feature. I did, and I played (IIRC) an online version of Angry Birds 2 days in a row, and then promptly forgot about it and never looked back.

The games are pretty bad at the moment, and given Google's history with gaming (Stadia, I'm looking at your grave) I don't expect them to ever improve. And if they start to, I expect it to be shut down the week after, screwing over every dev that dared to hope they could monetize with that system.

I've seen that they understand players are leaving in droves, but I've seen no indication that they know why. Every single thing they've said an done since the last DLC has been exactly the opposite of what makes the game fun for me. I went from spending way, way, way too much time each week to spending virtually none in a single season... And I haven't even checked on the game since the second week of this season. It's really sad.

I think it depends on the device and how far you've gone to prevent energy use on it while it's idle. It sounds like you probably don't have any third-party apps installed, so that's a good start, but removing anything else you don't use would be good, too. Or at least disabling them as much as possible.

Depending on the actual usage, which will vary from device to device and especially OS to OS, I'd either choose to turn it off after work, or off after each time I'm done using it for an hour or more.

The other factors are how hard it is to charge, and how long it takes to boot when you need to use it. If it's easy to charge, I'd probably not worry about it much. If it's slow to boot, I'd lean towards not shutting it off during work.

Fullstack developer here. I only maintain the servers I need to do hobby stuff.

If companies can say they can respond to my concerns within 2 business days, then companies can also take 2 business days to take down reported content. It takes a human being to review that stuff and it's not instant. If it was, trolls would end up with everything being taken down. UFC's outrage that it can take "hours" to remove the content is ridiculous.

It is unsurprising to me that if you manage to have fun with a video game, you feel less depressed.

I suppose it might be slightly more surprising that it's more effective than treatments designed to treat depression directly, but we're talking about an industry that exists almost solely to make people feel happier, and it doesn't make money unless it succeeds. One could argue about addictive mechanics, but most people wouldn't even start on that path unless it brought them happiness in the beginning.

I thought that was a good idea, and I'm a huge fan of timeloops... But so much of the rest was poorly done that after a couple loops, you stop wanting to loop.

I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It'll just make it more tedious.

Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.

The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn't be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don't find them boring. And I'm not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They'd actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn't make a stupid mistake out of complacency.

That's an interesting way to start the estimation. My first thought was 'no way', but then I thought more about it and I agree more and more. I'd bet that you get a lot of push-back from people when you use that estimate, especially those who don't understand what goes on behind the scenes.

That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it triggers people into a negative reaction.

Nintendo Switch Lite...

Not: Nintendo Lite Switch ?

They both seem somewhat similar to the old Lunar Lander game. That might help you find more clones?