Cethin

This thread is about someone asking people to take dramatic action to get their government to listen, but I’m certain they aren’t doing anything either.

I have even sent useless letters to my representative and got boilerplate back.

This is exactly my point. People are saying Americans need to take risks they aren’t willing to take. Congratulations! You sent a letter! Those will never do anything, and yet that’s all you’ve done, and you’re asking Americans to fight back. We’re the ones actually living with this military that has the power to fight most of the rest of the world.

I don’t care why they joined, they’re part of a machine that isn’t wanted in our town

I don’t know if this is true. Honestly, I doubt it. Maybe you don’t want them where you are, but one thing I know about Australia right now is they’re worried about China. Guess why those bases are there. You have American taxpayers paying for your defence. Most people are NIMBYs —they want it, just not in their back yard.

I asked 6 marines who were walking around in full uniform in my town in Australia what they thought of trump last night. They said he’s their commander and chief and two stayed silent.

I don’t know how you handled it, but you just asked 6 guys to talk about their boss. Them saying he’s their commander-in-chief is saying “I’m not at liberty to speak freely.” If you were friendly and asked them I’m casual conversation over a beer, you might get actual opinions, but you’re asking for trouble if you just go around asking people to shit-talk their bosses.

I live in an area with a lot of military presence. A large number of people who join are just doing it for the benefits. I’m sure you’re aware, but normal citizens don’t get free college or Healthcare (in fact, it’s incredibly expensive), but if you sign up for the military they pay for college, you get socialized Healthcare, they cover housing, and a lot more. Most aren’t doing it because they love Trump, or even out of patriotic duty. They’re doing it because shit sucks, and it’s an option that gets them out of a hole. I’m generally anti-military (particularly in the US), but I don’t hold it against people. Most of them don’t like Trump, in my experience. He does not have the support of our military personnel, and I’ll welcome them if shit finally breaks down and they abandon the state.

I asked them kindly to fuck off put of our country because they’re not welcome

First, they literally are welcome there. Take that issue up with your government. You ask other people to stand up to their government, then you complain about other people’s government for what your government does. Second, they don’t have a choice. You sign up and you don’t really get to choose what you’ll do or where you’ll do it. See above for why they joined.

Where are you from?

There’s always the person pretending other people should do things and that their situation is perfectly fine and they don’t need to change anything. I agree, the situation is fucked. This isn’t just an American issue though. This is happening all over the world right now. The divisiveness between different nations when it’s a global class struggle is really frustrating. You aren’t helping change things by making your comment, and you’re only driving a wedge.

That’s what regulations are for. We’ve been asking for CO2 regulations for decades, but the argument is almost always “we can’t reduce dirty energy production until we have enough power to replace it all without downscaling.” Then they invent stuff like crypto to drain any excess power. That crashed, then AI suddenly appears to drain it. I’m convinced it’s all a conspiracy to keep dirty energy companies profitable. The timing is just too convenient.

I don’t know about your definition. The term comes from a two-wheeled chariot it seems (though the etymology of that seems to be a word meaning “to run”). It’s been used from everything from chariots, to train cars, to street cars, to automobiles. They all share two things in common. They’re an enclosed container meant to carry things, and they’ve got wheels.

I don’t think the wheel thing is fundamental to the definition anymore. Anything traveling on the ground is going to have wheels. The “flying” part let’s you know how it travels, the car part informs you about the utility. I think it’s perfectly clear what it means. What else should we call it that’d be more clear?

It’s not even just about the games being terrible. The ballooning costs is just unsustainable. It’s the reason we’ve seen so many layoffs, and it sucks. It’s just mismanagement. The executives are the ones telling the developers to make open world games, for the most part. They don’t understand how that effects the rest of the design, or how much it ends up costing. They just see a trend and tell the studios they need to follow it.

If it was just that we got some shitty games I wouldn’t care. However, it’s effecting people’s lives. We need a more sustainable industry of smaller budget games that know what they are and plays to its strengths. We’ve got too many games trying to be everything games. It’s the reason studios ramped up the price to $70, and then, quickly after, $80. Soon they’ll be Charing $90-$100 because they let costs get too high to maintain.

To be fair, lots of companies wanted to do business with the Nazis. Most businesses now don’t have an issue with Trump being a fascist, but that it’s unpredictable. That’s bad for business.

You aren’t out of touch. Even the worst games don’t get that poor of a review. When you job depends on being on their side, it turns out you can’t voice an honest opinion.

Yeah, it should at least try to get their name. If it could include their job, income, family members, etc. that’d be great. It’s pretty trivially possible. Maybe don’t include address, because they could turn out poorly, but they should show how easy it is to get data on people.

For sure, you can. However, every modern game is trying to be an open world game. It’s stupid. We get ballooning budgets and dev cycles for games that don’t really get anything from being open world. I’d rather get three great less open games than one open world game that is sacrificing things to make the open world work.

Sure. You can make those, but you have to spend a lot of money and time making the open world just to make places for the rooms to live. Is that worth it? Everything is opportunity cost. Did doubling the cost improve the game that much?

What? Some systems have worse performance, primarily if you don’t have enough VRAM, but artifacting and blur? What do you mean? Sure, there’s blur with TAA/FSR/DLSS, but that’s always true and cam be toggled.

I dont really understand your point. Devs still curate where you meet the enemies. Its not like its procedurally generated map where everything is random.

I haven’t played it, so maybe they’ve done something to control it. I doubt it though. If you can come from any direction, that makes encounters much harder to design. Think about older Borderlands games when entering a compound. You’d come through one main gate and enemies would be set up with cover and you’d have to fight your way through. With open world you could do something like fly into the middle of the compound, and that’s has to be accounted for.

Check out Roboquest, for example. It has some really impressive movement options, but it’s choice of rooms let’s them restrict how much you can abuse them. You’ll always be fighting through the enemies from an expected direction.

I cant remember single time in my 20 hours of gameplay where i have tought that i hate fighting here, or that these enemies dont fit here.

This isn’t what I meant. There’s nuance between liking something and it being the best possible thing. It can be good and still be possible to be better. My biggest issue with open worlds is, like you mentioned at the beginning, fast travel. It takes so much time and resources to make an open world, just for players to fast travel past most of it. Is it really worth the that? Did it add that much to the experience? We could have more cheaper games with tighter designed experiences instead of games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. (BL3 cost $140m, and for cost “more than twice” that, so minimum $280m.)

I don’t think people understand that everything is an opportunity cost. If you make an open world game, that’s at the expensive of so much more. At minimum, it’s going to be less game to play (or longer between games and more expensive). Is getting a lot of space that you hardly interact with worth it?

Yeah, I just have a bias against open world games at this point. Damn near every game thinks they need to be open world, and most of the time it just makes things more tedious and boring. It takes a ton of dev time to make just for players to run past 99% of it. There are some games it really works for, but most would be better off with a tighter design (and it’d also save time and money).

I really don’t understand the open world though. I don’t think that’s the direction they needed to go. I think the best looter-shooter I’ve played recently is Roboquest. It has all the movement you said (and more), but it’s in tight rooms, so the devs have more control of the design. Open worlds means the devs have essentially zero control of encounters and it becomes too easy. The only thing they can do is crank up health of enemies so they don’t die as quickly.

It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.

UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.

I mostly agree. I’d say they went uphill though, but so did every other game, but even faster. Each game improved some things, but the competition improved much more. They’ve been coasting off of name recognition ever since the first game.

I think it was a really good game originally. The writing has gotten really fucking bad though, and the gameplay hasn’t really evolved with the times. (I can’t speak on the new game.)

Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 2, and Sekiro?